FRAGMENTS AND FOLLIES

by James Lincoln Warren

While casting my net this week hoping to catch a topic for today’s column, I took at look at what is generally considered the first American short story, Charles Brockden Brown’s Gothic story of murder and insanity, “Somnambulism: A Fragment”.

And that word struck a chord: Fragment. My first published short story, “The Purvess Incident”, was internally described as “the surviving fragment of a larger work.” The conceit was that the story was the only surviving part of the narrator’s memoirs. I think I had it in mind that I was going to write a series of stories, each one recently “discovered” before publication. I do remember being inspired by George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books, which were claimed to have been discovered in several packets in a South African steamer trunk.

Fragments. A coincidence, surely. But then I thought of Horace Walpole.

You’ve read about him here more than once. Both Steve and I have mentioned him, the most magnificent gossip of the 18th century, and inventor of the Gothic novel and the “Gothic revival” in architecture. Now this second point is especially important, because it lead to a very curious development in landscaping, i.e., the erection of fake ruins to add mystery and romance to an estate. These ruins were nearly always in the form of collapsed masonry, and were meant to have the appearance of a ruined church or a forgotten manor.

England, of course, is full of ancient structures in ruins, some ruined more recently than others, from the megaliths of Stonehenge, to the walls and baths left by the Romans, to the time that William the Conqueror razed Saxon forts, to when Henry VIII dispossessed the Roman Catholic Church and expelled all the monks—even to the rain of bombs in World War II. The most interesting ruins are mysterious, like Stonehenge: the remnants of a lost world, as it were. But the fake ruins were remnants of a world that never was. They were parts of stories never told. They were put there to stimulate the imaginations of the folks wandering over the grounds.

And that made me think that maybe writing a fragment is not such a bad thing. Maybe all short stories are a little like fake ruins. The writer doesn’t build the entire structure, just enough to engage the reader’s imagination, to remove him from the here and now. The short story is not there to be lived in, like a great novel, but to be visited for a special fleeting moment.

The modern short story, after all, was an invention of the same Romantic aesthetic that gave us the fake ruins. It is practically unavoidable that they should share some of the same characteristics. This is especially true when you consider that the first short stories were Gothic tales of terror or sensation stories, exactly the sort of story that might feature a crumbling castle. That sensation stories are the direct ancestors of crime fiction is an increasingly accepted thesis these days. And it goes without saying that the plots of mysteries usually hinge on events hidden in the past.

This line of thought, of course, is nothing more than a fragment itself, a way to get some kind of parallax on what short stories are and what they do. Maybe it’s nothing more than a fantasy itself, no more real than the ruins that inspired it. But it never hurts to give imagination its head once in a while.