Friday May 25: Bandersnatches
A SHORT AND INCOMPLETE HISTORY OF SHORT STORIES
by Steven Steinbock
The beauty of participating in a project like Criminal Brief is the serendipity of ideas that happens when like minds come together. Since writing to you about Poe (Bandersnatches May 18), I’d been doing a lot of thinking about the history of short stories. And when James Lincoln Warren wrote about the subcategories of short stories (The Scribbler May 21), it was like manna from heaven. This isn’t a continuation of Jim’s article. In fact, if you watch the comment section, below, you’ll probably find a bunch of corrections and disputations by our diction-detective, JLW.
Poe didn’t write “short stories.†He called what he wrote “tales.†The “novel†was around, and had been for a good century. But the literary world was still sorting out the distinction between “novels†and “romances.†Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is considered by some to be the first novel in the English language. But when published in 1719, no one would have labeled it so. Until around 1740, the term “novel†was only applied to short fictions, what we would today call “short stories.†Confused?
Washington Irving’s Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820) illustrates how definitions were still in flux. Sketch Book is not a novel by any stretch. It’s a mishmash of essays, vignettes, and stories that for the most part, celebrate early New York. Buried within the Sketch Book are two little tales that took on lives of their own: “Rip Van Winkle†and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.†(For those who haven’t read the original “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,†it’s worth a look. The ending doesn’t go quite the way it’s popularly retold in storybooks and film. Plus, like One Thousand and One Nights, it contains numerous stories within the story as the citizens of Sleepy Hollow try to scare each other with spooky tales).
Like the rules of spelling and grammar, tight definitions of short stories, novelettes, novellas, and novels are relatively new. Look how many ways Shakespeare spelt his own name; and nobody gave a rat’s tail where you dangled your modifier or split your infinitives. You can even hang your prepositions if you know what I’m talking about. But I’m going to stretch a little, and loosely apply these modern labels to earlier fictions.
The ancient world had a number of mega-fictions. We call them “epics.†For the most part, they weren’t “novels†in the modern sense because they didn’t tend to have a single plot-line. The Indian Mahabharata, the Persian Shahnameh (my new favorite epic), the Iliad and the Odyssey all are composed of multiple stories. The two Homeric epics come close. It’s possible to summarize their plots in a sentence or two.
The ancient Sumerian poem Gilgamesh could be called a novel. It is a story of a single man’s journey to understand mortality, companionship, and loss. It’s not as long as any of the epics or mega-fictions I’ve mentioned. But interestingly, it does have within it’s cuneiform verses a short story or two. While searching for the secret of immortality, Gilgamesh meets a fisherman named Utnapishtim who tells him the story of how he survived a primordial flood and was granted immortality. His story, sometimes called the “Babylonian Noah†story, can function on its own as a short piece of fiction, in much the same way that the “Flitcraft†story works within The Maltese Falcon.
The Bible contains quite a few “short stories†and a few “novels.†If written today, the narratives about Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, and David defeating Goliath would probably be classified as short stories.
The story of Jacob is a novella. Depending on how you cut it, the story (you can find it in Genesis 25:20-35:29) falls into five acts, and it even has some elements of a mystery. In the first act, we meet Jacob the con-man, who has been pulling cons since before he was born. At the end of the act, his life is in peril. In the second act, Jacob goes on the lam, and has a dream of a ladder that he isn’t climbing. Act three is the big turnaround in which Jacob meets his match in Uncle Laban, and the con-man gets conned. Having learned his lesson and been transformed, Jacob returns home in act four, which climaxes with the weirdest fight scene until Luke Skywalker met Darth Vader. Act five is a denouement in which Jacob and his brother reconcile and together bury their father.
The first “novel†in the Bible is the story of Joseph. Thousands of years later, Thomas Mann novelized it. But all the parts are there in the original Hebrew. Its fourteen chapters (beginning with Genesis 37) that starts with a crime, an apparent homicide during which the victim survives. The story has seduction, betrayal, and prison. The book ends with an emotional and dramatic denouement that even Nero Wolfe and Hercule Poirot can’t match in which the apparent murder victim himself confronts his would-be killers, who believe that their murder attempt was successful, and justice takes on a beautifully merciful face. (Anyone who refers to the “Old Testament†as one of vengeful theology obviously hasn’t read it).
Slipped into the Joseph story is my favorite short mystery in the Bible. Genesis 38, in fewer than 800 words, tells the story of Tamar, a woman cheated by her own father-in-law, who disguises herself as a prostitute in order to find justice. There’s even a climactic courtroom scene.
They just don’t teach this stuff in Sunday School.
I’m not sure where I’m going from here. I may explore “flash†stories, or discuss “episodic†novels. I may tell you about my favorite anthologies or my favorite short story authors. Come back in a week and find out.
Fun stuff, thanks. Of course, you can argue that the first detective is Daniel. In the apocrypha there are several books about him in which he solves a rape and a con game (involving priests of a phony god). He even demonstrates a technique that police interrogators still use every day: separate the witnesses and compare their stories.
This group amazes me. I am loving the history of the short story — what tales!
I know nobody’s going to believe this, but my bedtime reading lately has been the Epic of Gilgamesh in the 1999 Andrew George translation, the most complete extant, at the time, although George did a critical edition in 2003.
Uta-napishti ( the name is in Akkadian and means “I found life”) was not a fisherman, but the King of the ancient city Shuruppak in Sumeria (modern Fara in Iraq). Anyhow, he tells Gilgamesh of how, warned by the gods of the flood, he hires a boat-builder to create his ark, and just before the rains hit rather pointlessly rewards the boat-builder:
“The weather to look at was full of foreboding,
I went to the boat and sealed my hatch.
To the one who sealed the boat, Puzur-Enlil the boatman,
I gave my palace with all its goods.”
Thanks, dude! Prime bottom land. Bottom of the friggin’ ocean!
And as long as I’m being a raving pedant, the name “Gilgamesh” is actually accented on the second syllable: Gil-GA-mesh, not GIL-ga-mesh.
But Steve’s point is well taken.
The entire book of Judges is a collection of short stories, including the story of Samson and Delilah. Herodotus reads like a collection of short stories until you get to the Persian Wars, when the novel takes over, and even includes a caper concerning an Egyptian tomb robbery.
Okay, I blew it on Utnapishtim/Uta-napishti’s occupation. It’s been a few centuries since I’ve read it. I’ve not read the Andrew George translation. The Stephen Mitchell one is beautiful, but I’m skeptical as to how much of it is Gilgamesh and how much is Stephen Mitchell. The first one I read is the Alexander Heidel translation, in which all the dirty parts are rendered into Latin instead of English.
Rob, I hadn’t thought about the book of Daniel or it’s apocryphal chapters. But come to think of it, Dorothy Sayers included an apocryphal Daniel story as the very first entry in her OMNIBUS OF CRIME.
Steve, I don’t think you DID blow it with regard to Uta-whatever’s occupation–I first studied Gilgamesh in college shortly after it was actually written, and as I recall, at that time the consensus was that Uta-the-pisher was of the piscatorial persuasion. The George translation had the benefit of more recently discovered source material.
The old Max Müller translation of the Upanishads left all the erotic bits in Sanskrit, transliterated into the Roman alphabet. Thanks a lot, Max. Very helpful. And I’ve always been a little pissed off that Gibbon left all his footnotes in THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE in Latin and Greek, even when they weren’t salacious.
The Canadian critic Northrup Frye believed that a liberal education should consist of Biblical stories and Greek myths, which he regarded as the fons et origo of Western lit. I agree with him. Thanks for calling our attention to an important topic.
This is fascinating. Of course, I’m still trying to wear my leopard shoes, avoid the Hummer, and do yoga.
Wasn’t there a woman, her name escapes me, who was supposed to have written the first novel? I think her intilias are AB. It’s killing me. I can’t remember her name. Great work.
Melodie, I’m trying to think of an ancient female novelist with the initials A.B.
Murasaki Shikibu was a woman, and wrote Tale of the Genji, which is considered by many to be the world’s first novel. It was written a thousand years ago. Beyond that, I don’t know much. I haven’t read it.
But I did watch a fun movie last night: “Coogan’s Bluff.” It was sort of the basis for McCloud, but with Clint Eastwood instead of Dennis Weaver. And two minutes or so into the film, Eastwood is given a bath by a knockout blonde named Melodie Johnson. That’s a first something, isn’t it?
There is always a first.
The writer I am thinking of is Aphra or Afra B… something…. pardon my spelling, but I graduated from Universal Studios. And they used Tide in that bath.
Aphra Behn, English 17th century playwrite.
Aphra Behn (1640-1689) was perhaps the first Western romance novelist. I believed the word ChickLit was then coined in 1670.