The Short Story According to Charles May, Essay Example

The literary world can be characterized by diversity, spontaneity and fantasy of narration. It may seem to readers that the literary world is aimed to reveal the truth about real life that the reality cannot state. On the other hand, the world of literature requires guidance to its understanding and analyzing. It is not enough to only read a story; the reader needs to be able to understand it and appreciate its literary value outside the context or the author’s bibliography. At least it is the opinion of the subject of this essay. The aim of this narration is to outline the literary philosophy of Charles E. May and his perception of the short story.

The author is famous not only for the number of literary critical materials on various classic and contemporary short stories or teaching the techniques of understudying short stories’ narrative to his students, he is a representative of a formalist school of literary thought, which makes his philosophic approach particularly relevant nowadays. May calls himself “an unrepentant old formalist” (“New Formalism”). In this regard, this confession suggests that he perceives a short story as a unique form of narration, paying attention to the structural elements of the short story reflection upon the reader.  Like T.S. Eliot and I.A. Richards, the traditional old formalists, Charles May emphasizes the difference of purpose in each literary form conditioned by complexity and diversity of structural elements, techniques and functionality characteristic to each form (“New Formalism”).  To prove this point Charles May uses his most highly acknowledged short story writer   Edgar Allan Poe, who “argued strongly that both poems and short tales depended on a highly unified structure to communicate their singular effect” (“New Formalism”).

Consequently, May’s literary philosophy is based on attributing unique functionality to the form of the short story and emphasizing the necessity of unique techniques for its understanding. According to him it is not enough to simply read a short story; it has to be read with attention and in terms of analytical perspective of the devices used by the author. To a certain extent, May’s orientation on literary devices and structural element of literary work can categorize his approach as instrumentalist and constructivist, although May himself would argue that there is more to it than just the number of elements and the author’s intention (“Do You Have”).  On the other hand, May is convinced that in order to understand a short story the reader needs to know certain techniques in order to analyze the story and find his own answer to the question. In this regard, he argues: “In my opinion, you cannot answer the question “What does it mean?” unless you have an answer to the question “How does it mean?”” (“Do You Have”). Although it main seem that such an instrumentalist approach deprives the short story of its allure and the audience of its unique personal impression, it gives the reader an opportunity to make his own analysis of the narration and give an answer to the posed question. In order to illustrate his argument, May uses in the reply to Daniyal Mueenuddin the author of the collection of short stories “In other Rooms, Other Wonders” (“Do You Have”). In this regard, May suggests that “vexing endings” of short stories are conditioned by the very nature of the form, intended to make the audience think and from various perspectives, that is why the ending with symbolical metaphor or ambiguity of the future events make the short story unique in its effect on the audience (“Do You Have”).

In his philosophical findings on the nature and functionality of the short story, May suggests that the meaning and the purpose of each short story can be found within that story. This statement suggests a few considerations. First of all, the analysis and understanding of each short story are case-sensitive. Secondly, short story can be analyzed and understood based on readers’ perspective outside the external context of the story. Consequently, May is far from being a protagonist of the contemporary trend of contextualization of the studied literary work and its analysis in terms of social, political, psychological and biographical frameworks (“Text, Context”). May argues that the external context is secondary to understanding of the short story. This statement is well illustrated by May’s analysis of symbiosis between the text, context and author’s intention on the example of Ron Carlson’s book “Ron Carlson Writes a Story”, where he outlines writing process of the story “The Governor’s Ball”. Using the author comments as supporting arguments, May demonstrates how context   and author intention matter little in the understanding of the story, because often the author himself does not know how the story will end and what it means until it is actually written:

“he certainly begins to get some idea of what meaning he is creating (or discovering) as he continues to write and allows the context of the story to compel him to create characters, events, and dialogue that begin to “come together” in some meaning”

(“Text, Context”).

In this regard, it needs to be emphasized, and May’s essay would also benefit from this distinction, is that he suggests that the essence of creating a meaning is the internal context of the short story and its text. In this regard, he argued that the totality of interconnected elements of the story dictate the consequent outcome (ending) and the consequent meaning of the short story that the author might not have intended yet managed to create (“Text, Context”). Therefore, the external context of writing of a short story is not fundamentally meaningful in its understanding. This conclusion of May can be logically justified for the writers who create intuitively meaning that they do not know how the story will end and which aspects will be added in the process of writing. On the other hand, for more purposeful authors who write their works for an exact purpose, the external context affecting their motives would remain relevant.

May’s literary philosophy of the short story is also curious in how the connection between fantasy and real life is explained. Charles May is not a protagonist of the perspective that art imitates life, instead he argues in favor of artificiality of literature in general and the short story in particular: “why, when discussing an aesthetic object, should we take “artificiality” to be a bad word, especially the artificiality of unity and ending – two of the most important conventions of the short story form?” (“Artifice and Artificiality”). In this regard, he argues that artificiality of the ending in the short story is a part of the formalist and highly sophisticated structuring of a literary work aimed at reflection of the aesthetic reality. Thus, he argued that the short story is not aimed fundamentally at demonstrating the reality since it is simply not its natural function. The artificiality is, in fact, a characteristic feature of the short story as a literary form. In this regard, May remains faithful to his formalist convictions. He remains convinced that since artificiality is a primary feature of art, and the short story is highly artificial in its nature, it is also the most artistic of al literary forms (“Artifice and Artificiality”). Although May’s way of thinking an argumentation is logical and well-balanced, still since every literary form has different characteristics and purposes, their general comparison in terms of which form is more artistic seems to be a bit limiting and subjective. In other words, a novelist would argued that a novel is the most artistic form of literary work because it is systematic and detailed in its narration and can be considered more sophisticated in the use of literary devices than the short story.

Furthermore, Charles May outlines that one of the features of the short story is the dominance of spatial rather than temporal form of narration. On the example of Tamar Yellin’s “Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes”, May explains that the main feature of short story is in its spatial narration which is conditioned by the size and structure of the short story, while novel is characterized by temporal perspective of narration (“A Word from”). The main reason May makes this distinction is because he considers that because of this difference, the totality of the short stories cannot be combined into a novel, even in what is called a “mosaic novel” (“A Word from”).  In this regard, he argues that “the short story as an individual artistic unit is more apt to depend on spatial organization than temporal organization” (“A Word from”).  From May’s perspective, this distinction and uniqueness of each literary form makes the attempt to combine two into one dysfunctional since it deprives each form of its functionality. From the critical perspective, Charles May remains loyal to traditionalist approach to literary genres and strict distinction of their purposefulness in terms of aesthetic experience of the reader.

When analyzing Charlotte Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Charles May outlined that except for discussing various aspects of socially-constructed position of women in nineteenth century, this short story has also demonstrated the use of first-person point of view technique in “in the relationship between writing and reality – especially the difference between traditional male and female texts” (“Gilman’s “Yellow Paper”). Thus, May suggests that irrespective of the irrelevance of the external context of the short story, the gender of the author is of significant importance in the feminist discourse of the narration. On the other hand, the main rationale for gender distinction of the author is in tracing the elements of feminist narration rather than in the difference in purposes or its structure of the short story. Thus, irrespective of the gender of the author, the essence of the short story remains the same. Moreover, when Charles May  analyzes works of Flannery O’Connor, he argues that she knew exactly the difference between the novel and the short story in terms of two modes of experience in prose fiction. The novel stimulated everyday perception of the demonstrated phenomenon in logical manner. On the other hand, May argues “the other that involves an experience that challenge the acceptance of the real world as simply sensate and reasonable – an experience that had dominated the short story since its beginnings” (“Flannery O’Connor”). Consequently, another crucial feature of the short story according to May is challenging the routine of ordinary life and making the audience thinks in terms of alternatives. It can be argued that this might have been the main reason the form of the short story was popular among feminist authors.

Overall, from all mentioned above it can be concluded that Charles May is devoted representative of the old formalist critical thought. According to his literary philosophy, the short story is a unique literary form characterized by spatial narrative, dominance of the internal context,   challenging of rationale perception of reality and artificiality. It differs from the novel not only by its structural characteristics but also by the relation to the reality. From the critical perspective, Charles May demonstrates to be systematic in his arguments and open to discussions of the new tendencies in the literary world both in terms of novels and the short story. However, he does not compromise his belonging to the formalist critical school of thought.

Works Cited

Charles E. May. “Artifice and Artificiality in the Short Story: A Defense” Reading the Short Story, 26 Feb. 2010. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.

——————– “A Word from Tamar Yellin, and a Word about Spatial vs. Temporal Form in the Short Story” Reading the Short Story, 7 Sep. 2009. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

——————– “Do You Have to Learn to Read a Short Story?” Reading the Short Story, 3 Feb. 2009. Web. 11 Mar. 2015.

——————– “Gilman’s “Yellow Paper” and Poe’s “Berenice”: Tow American Fantastic Tales” Reading the Short Story, 3 Jun. 2013. Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

——————– “Flannery O’Connor: Critical Insight” Reading the Short Story, 18 Oct. 2011 Web. 10 Mar. 2015.

——————– “New Formalism and the Short Story: Part I: The Modernist Background” Reading the Short Story, 17 Jul. 2012. Web. 8 Mar. 2015.

——————– “Text, Context, and the Author’s Intention: The Example of Ron Carlson Writes a Story ” Reading the Short Story, 25 Jun. 2011. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.