Page 119 - Student: dazed And Confused

Analyse the extent to which two of the contemporary stories
introduced on the course treats the idea that the traditional short
story should be plausible, have exposition, development, drama,
be romantic and be individualistic. Choose two of the above to explore.

In his book, The Lonely Voice, Frank O'Connor describes the traditional short story as having
the above qualities as well as be intransigent and often concerning outlawed figures living
on the fringes of society. To this, we can probably add that short stories are not as short as

many people believe. It is true that the stories referred to here are relatively short, though
O'Connor observes quite accurately that short stories are not always that short - a fact we
see evidenced in short fiction of recent times which seem to be just short of a novel. The
general idea of the short story is to give the readers an insight to a world largely idealised
and romanticised - an idea we will come back to later - and based upon supposition.
Although quite far apart in terms of when they were written, both Kew Gardens by Virginia
Woolf and The Girl I Left Behind Me by Muriel Spark are rather similar in the respect that
they are romanticising certain events, but incredibly different in that the stories are at
entirely opposite ends of the plausibility spectrum.

Kew Gardens was written in 1917 following a visit with Katherine Mansfield who
foreshadowed the story by days when she asked:-
'who is going to write about the flower garden ... There
would be people walking in the garden - several pairs
of people — their conversation their slow pacing —

She also offers a short critique of the first draft. The story concerns itself with glimpses of
the characters and snatches of their conversation as they cross a particular section of the
park. QA convention of writing at the time was to describe everything in deeply physical
detail and to paint a picture by colouring everything. In fact, the very first line begins 'FROM

THE OVAL-SHAPED flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart­
shaped or tongue-shaped leaves' and launches us straight into a world of gently curved
shapes and, later on, bright and vivid colours.
The Girl I Left Behind Me was written 50 years later by an author well documented
for writing ghost stories. As a post-war story, there was some controversy over the idea of
death and of the afterlife. It is a heavily plotted story and their are clues throughout; clues
that are easy to miss on the first read. Post-war fiction was also concerned with making
people feel happier about the prospect of a sudden death - something many writers now
try to build into fiction and has previously been approached in stories such as The Signalman

by Charles Dickens.