3

'Things out of Words':

Towards a Poetics of
Short Fiction1
CLARE HANSON
I would like to begin with two descriptions of the act of writing
short stories, or fictions. 2 First, Katherine Mansfield, writing, rather
incongruously, to Hugh Walpole:
You know that strange sense of insecurity at the last, the feeling
'I know all this. I know more. I know down to the minutest
detail and perhaps more still, but shall I dare to trust myself to tell
all?' It is really why we write, as I see it, that we may arrive at
this moment and yet - it is stepping into the air to yield to it - a
kind of anguish and rapture. 3
And Eudora Welty, in 1955:
The simplest-appearing work may have been brought off (when
it does not fail) on the sharp edge of experiment, and it was for
this its writer was happy to leave behind him all he knew before,
and the safety of that, when he began the new story. 4
Both writers stress the attraction of the unknown and are
complicit with the doubleness this embodies as an image of that
which is desired but continually displaced - it is an extreme image
of desire which violates the 'natural' relationship of antithesis
between absence and presence. Note, too, that Katherine Mansfield
writes of 'stepping into the air'- again a kind of underscoring of
absence/death- 'anguish' before (and causing?) 'rapture'.
I want in this paper to try to isolate some of the specific qualities
and effects of the short story. I would argue strongly that the short
22

A Poetics of Short Fiction

23

story provides or makes for a kind of experience for the reader

which is quite different from that which she or he gains from the
novel. I think that the difference, too, is one of kind, not of degree.
The novel, of course, is the form with which the short story is
most often compared - the story is defined 'against' the novel,
which is considered to be the major form and the norm in fiction.
The short story is often seen as the 'little sister' of the novel - and
because it is defined in terms of the novel, it is bound to fail in
many respects when it comes up for judgement. The short story
is often not so much condemned as bracketed off, because it is
considered that it lacks the 'breadth', scope, universality and
representative qualities of the novel. Because it is short, the
material must be fragmentary, subjective, partial: if the material is
fragmentary, subjective, partial and so on, the form must be shortit is a circular argument.
In attempting to pin down some of the general qualities of the
short story, I would like first to make an observation. To generalise,
is it not the case that in the novel, detail which is stressed and
selected for attention will normally lead us back into the text, while
detail which is stressed and foregrounded in the short story will
tend to lead us out of the text - and part of its meaning then lies
in its anomalous nature, its tangentiality? To take an example:
perhaps the most vivid (visual) image which remains with us after
reading Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady is that of Madame
Merle and Gilbert Osmond arrested in a moment of at first
incompletely understood informality in Chapter 40. I would argue
that we cannot seek for the meaning of that image outside the
context of the originating text. In James's story 'The Jolly Corner',
however, the repeated 'dose encounters' of the central figure invite
an interpretation which almost by definition must come from
outside the immediate context of the text. This 'open' quality of
the short story is not simply a condition of the literal brevity of the
form. It does not occur, that is, because in a short story there is no
space for cross-reference or repetition of the kind we are familiar
with in the novel. It is rather the result of what Roman Jakobson
would call a fundamental difference in the 'set' of the two forms
of the short story and novel. Within the novel, images function
metonymically, though the novel is not itself metonymic in relation
to 'reality'. Each image as it appears resumes something of what
has preceded it in the text. In the short story foregrounded details
or 'images' tend to resist such interpenetration and integration -

24

Re-reading the Short Story

which is why they disturb us in a peculiar, a distinctive and

distinctly non-novelistic way.
I would like to take further the idea of a difference in the 'set' or
orientation of the forms of the novel and short story. It has been
argued by Formalist, Structuralist and Post-structuralist critics alike
that any given 'element' - word, detail or image - turns into
something else, becomes a 'token of something else', in Borges's
suggestive phrase, as it enters into the articulation and organisation
of a literary work as a whole. Post-structuralist critics have argued
too that any literary work may be characterised as a structure of
representation and selection founded on the primary impulse to
dream/desire: the greater the orientation towards desire, the
further, they argue, language is removed from its functional and
restricted meaning. Eudora Welty seems to describe exactly such
a process of re-orientation and transformation in a discussion of
'literary' language in The Eye of the Story: she describes too the
unsettling effect for the author of a state of mind in which words
are allowed to move freely, following, to use a rather clumsy
figure, their own desire:
We start from scratch, and words don't; which is the thing that
matters - matters over and over again, for though we grow up
in the language, when we begin using words to make a piece of
fiction, that is of course as different from using even the same
words to say hello on the telephone as putting paint on canvas
is. This very leap in the dark is exactly what writers write fiction
in order to try. 5
I am working towards the suggestion that the short story is a
more 'literary' form than the novel in this sense - in its orientation
towards the power words hold, or release and create, over and
above their mimetic or explicatory function. Words, as Lacan has
argued, may be chosen in any given work of literature for reasons
which have as much to do with the movement of unconscious
desire as with the production of literal meaning. Lacan argues that
desire is continually playing over language, deeply informing its
structure. I would suggest that the short story writer in particular
courts such a play of language: this is a part of what she or he is
seeking in the 'unknown', with its 'anguish' and 'rapture'.
In this connection let us return to that 'limited' quality of the
story which is often adversely compared with the inclusive,

A Poetics of Short Fiction

25

universal power of the novel. The term limited may be interpreted

in an unpejorative as well as a pejorative sense, as meaning not
only something 'restricted', to stick to the Oxford English Dictionary
terms, but also something around which 'bounds' have been
drawn. If we take the second sense, the word limited may suggest
simply the concept of framing, as in a picture. Could one suggest
that the tight structure and strict requirements of the short story
form act in the widest sense as a frame, or limit, which allows a
narrative to remain in a more fragmented but also in a more
suggestive state than is possible in the novel? (This is a point
which, as we will see, relates to the concept of 'literary' language
discussed above, and to the idea of the importance of desire in the
short story). The frame acts as an aesthetic device, permitting
ellipses (gaps and absences) to remain in a story, which retains a
necessary air of completeness and order because of the very
existence of the frame. We thus accept a degree of mystery, ellision,
uncertainty in the short story as we would not in the novel.
This formal property of the short story may facilitate two things.
First, and perhaps most importantly, it can allow images from the
unconscious mind to fuel a short story and to present themselves
in the text in a relatively untranslated state. Such images retain an
air of mystery and impenetrability, an air of dream. They exist as
much as figures of unconscious desire as consciously representational images. In this respect we should bear in mind the function
of the image in relation to the unconscious. In Lacanian thought
the image, as a mental/visual manifestation, acts as a metaphor
for- a substitute for- a repressed signifier. The subject, that is,
cannot admit a given meaning to consciousness, cannot admit it
to the conscious world of the Symbolic. The meaning can be
expressed, however, through the non-verbal image-token in the
world - precisely - of the Imaginary.
The second point about ellision in the short story relates to the
movement of desire on the part of the reader. The imagination of
the reader is stirred in a particular way by the elliptical structure
of many short stories. Ellisions and gaps within a text offer a
special space for the workings of the reader's imagination, offer
space for the work of that image-making faculty which would
otherwise lie dormant: the reader's desire is thus allowed, or rather
invited, to enter the text. In this connection, we may link desire
with fantasy and 'what cannot be, but is'. 6 It is not enough in this
context to define fantasy simply in terms of a negative or antithetical

26

Re-reading the Short Story

relation to the real. Fantasy points to things which do/may exist

beyond the known real - the fantastic is not just an inversion of
reality, that is, but works on the margins of reality, on the 'dangerous
edge' of the unknown. We might put it another way by saying
that fantasy is sited at a crossing point of desire and absence/death:
in entering into fantasy we fear for the (known) self which
must 'die' and be reconstituted via fantasy and an extension of
imaginative/imaginary possibility.
Having looked very briefly at general characteristics of the short
story/short fiction, I would like now to focus on the 'form' which
seems to offer the most obvious model or correlate for the short
story. The dream draws together many of the characteristics of the
short story outlined above- it may indeed be said to consist of the
expression of repressed desire via, often, the fantastic. Could one
argue that the short story is the narrative art form most closely
associated with dream? Eudora Welty writes, referring to an early
fantasy story:
I never wrote another such story as that, but other sorts of
vision, dream, illusion, hallucination, obsession and that most
wonderful interior vision which is memory, have all gone to
make up my stories, to form and to project them, to impel them. 7
Short story writers as diverse as Kipling and Katherine Mansfield,
Hemingway and Elizabeth Bowen, Frank O'Connor and Flannery
O'Connor, have written of the importance of dream in fuelling
their work, 'forming, projecting and impelling [it]', as Welty puts
it. Again, it is not just that short stories may literally have their
origin in dreams (as, for example, did Katherine Mansfield's story
'Sun and Moon')- it is more that they may be structured like dreams.
The short story would seem to be closer in its organisation to
dream than to reality in the sense in which we usually employ
the term 'reality' in (antithetical?) relation to literature. Could
it be that the structure of a short story (or dream) is significantly unlike the grammar of a novel narrative, which depends
on order, incidence and sequence in a way that the short story
does not? The temporality of the short story- its extensive physical
nature (namely, time taken over reading), its dependence on pacing
and conventional 'time-keeping' - is heavily qualified by the fact

A Poetics of Short Fiction

27

that 'events' in a good many short stories are not seen primarily
as the fruits of time or as the culmination of long processes. They
tend to have a random and arbitrary nature, and the relationship
which we would expect to find between them is frequently
disturbed or violated. One could then argue that events/images in
stories/fictions are related rather as they are related in dreams,
'impelled', to use Welty's term again, by unconscious forces, rather
than being related in the more 'normal' terms of order and sequence
by which we attempt to organise our conscious lives.
If we accept this suggestion for the moment, we may profit from
a closer look at the ways in which dreams are structured. The work
ofJean-Francois Lyotard, who has revised extensively the Freudian
model of the dream, is particularly revealing in connection with
the short story and its effects. Lyotard has argued forcibly against
Freud's analysis of the structure of dreams - and of the structure
of the work of art which Lyotard sees as analogous (he writes 'the
"language" of the dream seems to be nothing more nor less than
the language of art. It is its primarj cause, perhaps its model').
Lyotard takes issue with Freud's assumption that the dream
consists of latent thoughts which are transformed into the manifest
dream content through the agency of an active censoring power
(that is, through some form of the super-ego). He suggests instead
that it is desire itself which reworks the dream thoughts to create
the dream's manifest content. The crucial point is that this would
indicate that we should not attempt to 'read' the dream in a
Freudian sense, looking for a significance which lies 'behind' it.
Rather we should say that it is the dream itself which is latent
desire expressed. Hence its extraordinary power, its combination
of the elements of familiarity and strangeness, and hence too the
need to 'read' the dream not 'symptomatically' but literally.
Lyotard's argument for the way in which a dream should be
viewed offers an interesting prototype for the way in which we
might read short stories. I have been trying throughout this paper
to express something of the mysterious but also obdurate nature
of the short story, its strangeness and its familiarity. Does this
combination of strangeness and familiarity derive from the fact
that the short story is, more readily and more frequently than the
novel, a channel for the expression of repressed or unconscious
desire? If this were true, the story would be (for both author and
reader) strange in that it is the expression or embodiment of
previously unknown and repressed desire and familiar precisely

28

Re-reading the Short Story

because desire hollows out and is the obverse image of that which
is already known, that which already exists.
To summarise the argument so far: we might say in this context
that short stories often do not 'tell' us things, despite the semantic
proximity of the words story and tale - they 'are' things. To
elaborate a little, we might consider the role of the image in the
short story. It is a commonplace to say that the visual and spatial
image is of central importance in the structure of many short stories
and fictions. In classical psychoanalytic theory, as in Lacanian
theory, the image is identified with desire (the imaginary). Again,
Lyotard extends the classical Freudian model in this context,
arguing that the dream (text) may consist of warring forces of the
figural and the discursive. He sees desire, embodied in the image,
as existing in an adversarial relationship to discourse (narrative)desire murders, condenses, freezes narrative:
Now this mobility which manufactures things out of words, is it
not desire itself, pursuing its usual course, producing the
imaginary? If this is the case, then we should not say that
condensation is an exercise by means of which desire disguises
itself, but rather that it is desire working over the text of the dreamthoughts. In the first of these interpretations, the force is located
behind the manifest content, itself assumed to be a disguised text;
in the second, and apparently correct one, the force, on the
contrary, compresses the primary text, crumpling it up, folding
it, squabbling the signs it bears on its surface, fabricating new
units which are not linguistic signs or graphic entities. The
manifest content is the old text 'forced' in this manner; it is not
a text. Force occupies the very scenario of the dream as Van
Gogh's brush-stroke remains recorded in his suns. 8
This distinction between narrative - associated with the superego and the conscious mind - and image - associated with the id
and the unconscious - may clearly have profound implications for
psychoanalysis, literary theory and aesthetic theory in general.
Lyotard posits a violent hierarchy in which the poised (not static)
image has primacy over narrative, discourse, text. While it would
be meaningless to suggest that any and all 'images' are expressive
of unconscious desire, and while it is clear too that Lyotard is in
Derrida' s thrall in his mistrust of 'linguistic signs', I think there is
an important point here, or a suggestive analogy for our consider-

A Poetics of Short Fiction

29

ation of the particular power of the image-dominated short story

form. For Lyotard text is associated with 'old', unregenerate
meanings, 'image' with new meaning. Could one suggest that the
short story is often committed to the discovery of new meaning in
much the way Lyotard indicates, through a strategy of revising
and 'condensing' old texts and known meanings? This would
account for what I would like to call its 'supra-graphic' quality, in
which it would seem to be cognate with the secondary dream
manifestation described by Lyotard in the passage quoted above.
I would like if I may briefly to take an example at this point,
from the story 'The Blue Hotel' by Stephen Crane. The core
meaning of this story seems to lie in the image (in the double,
literal and figural senses of the word) of the blue hotel itself. This
arises as in a dream, as an object perceived in the mind's eye,
coming out of darkness and absence, related to nothing before or
since. The image looms over the story, its meaning signally
unaffected by the encounters which constitute the apparent 'story'and this 'unaffected', obdurate quality is what remains with us,
fascinating yet baffling, thwarting normal hermeneutic strategies:
The Palace Hotel at Fort Romper was painted a light blue, a
shade that is on the legs of a kind of heron, causing the bird to
declare its position against any background. The Palace Hotel,
then, was always screaming and howling in a way that made
the dazzling winter landscape of Nebraska seem only a grey
swampish hush. It stood alone on the prairie, and when the
Snow was falling the town two hundred yards away was not
visible. But when the traveller alighted at the railway station he
was obliged to pass the Palace Hotel before he could come upon
the company of low clapboard houses which composed Fort
Romper, and it was not to be thought that any traveller could
pass the Palace Hotel without looking at it. Pat Scully, the
proprietor, had proved himself a master of strategy when he
chose his paints. It is true that on clear days, when the great
transcontinental expresses, long lines of swaying Pullmans,
swept through Fort Romper, passengers were overcome at
the sight, and the cult that knows the brown-reds and the
subdivisions of the dark greens of the East expressed shame,
pity, horror, in a laugh. But to the citizens of this prairie town
and to the people who would naturally stop there, Pat Scully
had performed a feat. With this opulence and splendour, these

30

Re-reading the Short Story

creeds, classes, egotisms, that streamed through Romper on the

rails day after day, they had no colour in common. 9 [My italics]
(It is not for nothing of course that colour, a visual key, sets the
note and gives the tone for other of Crane's stories - 'The Red
Badge of Courage', 'The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky').

To return to our opening point: the short story is a form which

hugs the unknown to itself. It is a form committed to the unknown,
precisely to the obscure object of desire. The unknown cannot
become known in the expected sense, for that would be to reduce
or deny it. If the short story is the narrative form most closely
implicated with desire, its content will always remain to an extent
in a latent, potential state. And in being so implicated with desire,
the short story will also be a very 'literary' form in the sense in
which the term is used by Tzvetan Todorov in The Poetics of Prose
(a text concerned very largely, it may be noted, with the tales of
Henry James). Todorov writes that
By speaking of desire it (literature) continues to speak ... itself. 10
[Todorov's ellipsis]
In this sense the short story is, we might suggest, a more selfreferential, more 'literary' form than the novel. This is a feeling,
surely, which many short story writers have had, though they may
not have analysed it precisely as Todorov has done. Nonetheless, in
testifying to the importance of 'language' in the short story,
practitioners of the form have pointed to its 'literary' quality, that
is, to its self-referential, free-standing linguistic quality which is
connected with an orientation towards desire. This 'literary' quality
may be felt, ultimately, I think, as some kind of disjunction between
reader and text: in contradistinction to the reader of a novel, the
reader of a short story cannot easily lapse into the assumption that
what she or he is reading about is 'life' (by which she or he means
her/himself). Todorov makes this point bluntly:
The public prefers novels to tales, long books to short texts, not
because length is taken as a criterion of value, but because there
is no time, in reading a short work, to forget it is only 'literature'
and not 'life' Y
Another satisfaction is denied us in the short story/short fiction:

A Poetics of Short Fiction

31

if the short work is structured like a dream, its constituent parts

being related in ways obscure to reader and writer, then it might
be argued that the short work refuses to give us a world of law
and order. We are refused a point of entry into and identification
with the text and are denied the v(ic)arious satisfactions which we
derive from seeing the characters of a novel take action, thus
appearing to control the fearful endlessness of reality. The question
of sequence and relation in the short story is difficult, however.
To what extent can relation be equated with narration in the short
story? I have suggested that the short story may often refuse a
certain level of narrative, that it is not as it were 'stitched together',
as narrative, by the operations of the conscious mind. In the
relation of its parts there is a dream quality which refers us back
to the operations of the unconscious.
One further point arises. We have argued that in its connection
with the unknown and with fantasy the short story is a form which
is close to the unconscious. Here lies, perhaps, the source both of
its power and its powerlessness- and this may be why it is a form
which will, always, remain on the margins of literature.

I would like to finish by referring to a story by Eudora Welty from

The Curtain of Green and Other Stories. Having quoted the opening
of Crane's 'The Blue Hotel' I would like now to consider the
conclusion of Welty's story 'Clytie'. I have stressed throughout
this paper the 'difference of view' between the short story and the
novel: no novel could, I contend, end in quite this way, on such a
note of (literally) suspended animation. It is appropriate to conclude
perhaps that if, as Todorov suggests, the 'first law' of literature is
that 'it remains its own essential object', then it is only the text
'Clytie' (not the character Clytie) which can here locate itself as the
legitimate object of its own desire:
Clytie swayed a little and looked into the slightly moving
water. She thought she saw a face there.
Of course. It was the face she had been looking for, and from
which she had been separated. As if to give a sign, the index
finger of a hand lifted to touch the dark cheek.
Clytie leaned closer, as she had leaned down to touch the face
of the barber.
It was a wavering, inscrutable face. The brows were drawn
together as if in pain. The eyes were large, intent, almost avid,

32

Re-reading the Short Story

the nose ugly and discolored as if from weeping, the mouth old
and closed from any speech. On either side of the head dark
hair hung down in a disreputable and wild fashion. Everything
about the face frightened and shocked her with its signs of
waiting, of suffering.
For the second time that morning Clytie recoiled, and as she
did so, the other recoiled in the same way.
Too late, she recognised the face. She stood there completely
sick at heart, as though the poor, half-remembered vision had
finally betrayed her.
'Clytie! Clytie! The water! The water!' came Octavia's monumental voice.
Clytie did the only thing she could think of to do. She bent
her angular body further, and thrust her head into the barrel,
under the water, through its glittering surface into the kind,
featureless depth, and held it there.
When Old Lethy found her, she had fallen forward into the
barrel, with her poor ladylike black-stockinged legs up-ended
and hung apart like a pair of tongs. 12

Notes
1. Some of the ideas for this paper first found expression in 'Limits and

2.

3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

8.

Renewals: the meaning of form in the stories of Rudyard Kipling', an

essay for Kipling Considered, Phillip Mallett (ed.) (London: Macmillan,
1988). I am particularly grateful to colleagues at the Symposium on
the Short Story who pointed me towards areas which needed further
work.
For the distinction between short stories and short fictions see my
Short Stories and Short Fictions, 1880-1980 (London: Macmillan, 1985).
There I suggest that the term 'story' should be reserved for those
short narratives in which the major emphasis is on plot: the term
'fiction' might denote those short narratives - usually more recent
ones - in which plot is subordinate to psychology and mood.
C. K. Stead (ed.) The Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 189.
Eudora Welty, The Eye of the Story (New York: Vintage Books, 1979),
p. 110.
Ibid., p. 134.
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy (London: Methuen, 1981) p. 23.
Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (Cambridge, Mass. and London:
Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 89.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, from Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksiek, 1971);

A Poetics of Short Fiction

9.
10.

11.
12.

33

this translation by Mary Lydon, Oxford Literary Review, val. 6, 1983,

no. 1, p. 8.
Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage and Other Stories, ed. with an
Introduction by V. S. Pritchett, (Oxford University Press, 1976),
pp. 304-5.
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford:
Basil Blackwell, 1977), p. 107.
Ibid., p. 143.
The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983),
p. 90.