Frank O'Connor "The Lonely Voice" (Two introductions and lecture on "Quixote and Hamlet")

"The Lonely Voice" by Frank O'Connor

I'm commenting on the Russell Bank's introduction, the author's introduction, and the first essay, "Hamlet and Quixote".

Banks's introduction was useful - it helped me avoid getting fixated on whether what O'Connor was saying was consistent or "true". Banks describes how these lectures happened and the great anticipation with which they were greeted, people crowding in to what were normally half-filled lecture halls to see them, a generation of gifted writers in attendance as students. He notes that O'Connor's approach was intuitive, and that these lectures must also be read intuitively. For me, reading the book in this light, it becomes a thoroughly enjoyable ramble through the subject with O'Connor. Banks places O'Connor's book in the company of two acknowledged masterpieces of criticism, E.M. Forster's "Aspects of the Novel", and Ezra Pound's "ABC's of Reading".

O'Connor's voice to me has the same easy authority that Forster's does in his great, great lectures (listening to these lectures in an audio book years ago might be one of the reasons I decided to write) but - not to detract from O'Connor's achievement here - he doesn't approach these with Forster's sardonic humor, or with Forster's great gift for the telling image.  Yet, if anything, these lectures may be even more useful.

O'Connor offers a telling epigram to this book, a quote translated from Blaise Pascal: "The eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me".

For O'Connor, the short story directs our attention to our fundamental loneliness, and offers characters so particular in their loneliness that readers will not be able to draw comforting generalizations from them. The novel, which he asserts is "ideologically" different from the short story, instead does comfort us, it implicitly posits a "normal" society which, over time, a more generalized protagonist must either "gain mastery of or be mastered by".

This need of the novel to operate on the protagonist over time is what finally leads to its different form and length. It stands to reason that, in O'Connor's view, some short stories can be longer in length than novels (he cites the example of "The Duel" by Chekov being longer than several novels by Turgenev). But in the short story, O'Connor would say that - ordinarily - we will not see a protagonist over time, but at one particular time. What particular time to illuminate is the most crucial choice the short story writer must make in writing it. O'Connor writes, "since a whole lifetime must be crowded into a few minutes, those minutes must be carefully chosen indeed and lit by an unearthly glow, one that enables us to distinguish past, present, and future as though they were all contemporaneous."

This quote brings to mind an essay in the New York Times by Milhauser on the ambitions of the short story - to hold the world in a grain of sand. Although Milhauser's emphasis is different from O'Connor's, in this one crucial aspect, both writers agree: in a single moment, one can find all of the essential truths of a character's past, present, and future. And this focus gives us greater clarity and insight than the sprawling, throw-everything-in approach of the novel.

Another point, made by Rust Hill in his own book on the short story, is that what is of the essence in a short story is that we illuminate a particular time when a character either changes, or a great opportunity for change presents itself and is lost. The particular moment chosen is thus given an additional focus, and again, O'Connor raises the same point. O'Connor, writing about "The Overcoat", says, "If one wanted an alternative explanation for what the short story means, one could hardly find better than that single half-sentence, 'and from that day forth, everything was at it were changed and appeared in a different light to him.'" (For me, this seems somewhat orthogonal to his first essential truth of the short story, but it is O'Connor's style to move fluidly into the different facets of his subject.)

O'Connor suggests that readers could not bear the intensity of the dramatic writing of short stories if carried over the length of a novel. For O'Connor, an "inferior writer" may be a great novelist, and he even suggests that this inferior writing is an advantage for the novelist, but he can only think of only one great writer of short stories, Sherwood Anderson, whom he would consider an "inferior writer". (O'Connor does not elaborate on this in the intro. But neither did he fully explain "conte" and "nouvelle" until the first chapter, so I assume he'll get back to this in later essays.)

O'Connor, in discussing the superior writing needed to pull off short stories, then discusses how this becomes a problem. He writes, "...it is only too easy for the short story writer to become too much of an artist." By way of illustration, he offers us Hemingway's "The Hills Have White Elephants". O'Connor acknowledges the brilliance of the story and then turns that adjective into a metaphor: it is so brilliant that the light it shines can cast no shadows. Hemingway, anxious to avoid giving us too much exposition, winds up giving us too little. "Our moral judgment has been stimulated, but our moral imagination has not been stirred..." O'Connor's analyses of other stories, and reader responses to them, suggests where, in other cases, authors have not given the readers enough to allow them to fully inhabit the stories.

For me as a writer, all of this suggests that perhaps my method of approaching short stories has been wrong-headed. I've tended to follow the trope of inventing characters and then seeing what they do - this might, in face, be more novelistic. I'm thinking instead to create characters, then look for that essential moment in their lives and write about that moment. I may sketch out who they are and what they do, but in the end the task seems to be to find the essential moment.


Some important terms from O'Connor (so far - more will follow):

"submerged population group" - generally speaking, that group of characters that short stories tend to find, those for whom society can never be normal, those who are somehow forever on the fringes.

"essential (vs) organic form" - the novel has an essential form, the examination of a protagonist over time, but the short story offers its would-be writers no form, just what "organically might spring from a single detail".

"conte/nouvelle" - these terms are important to O'Connor. From the introduction, I could not make out their meaning, but having read the first chapter, largely focused on Turgenev, it would seem the "conte" boils the piece down to a moment. O'Connor refers to the "nouvelle" as a "novellette" - it is something which may have a more linear development, but still be too short to be a novel.

"physical body" - by this, O'Connor refers to what a story, given too much to art, might lack. He cites a little known Russian author, Leskov, as being a writer whose stories do not lack a physical body. Since O'Connor is writing intuitively at this point, he doesn't offer more in the way of explanation, although he does offer an interesting discussion on how Leskov would handle a flogging scene and how his handling would differ from that of Chekov or Turgenev. Leskov would be interested in the complex reactions of both the person doing the flogging and the person receiving it. O'Connor writes that Leskov's "floggee" would derive some satisfaction from this brutal incident, and Leskov helps more to put us in the mind of that character than would Chekov and Turgenev, who would simply find the social fact of the flogging itself so repellent they would only be able to write from their own political sensibilities.

The chapter "Hamlet and Quixote" explores the psychological pattern O'Connor feels Turgenev most often wrote in: the ineffectual but exquisitely sensitive poet, portrayed with some self-loathing and some self-regard by Turgenev (the "Hamlet" in this case) and the man of action, often illiterate (the Quixote).

I haven't read the Turgenev itself. It seems very modern and vital as O'Connor describes him (so much unlike the printings I've seen which almost entomb Turgenev in their presentation of his work) and O'Connor is very convincing in describing how Turgenev's subtle and brilliant sensibilities have been a great influence on writing up to this day.

I was surprised to see such a modern technique as the telescoping O'Connor describes in "Yamolai and the Miller's Wife". The wife has had a lover whom she has lost to exile and has had to marry a man she doesn't love. Yet, since the story is boiled down to one moment, Turgenev never gives us the exposition, except when the exile is mentioned in passing by other characters. The miller's wife reacts, and in that reaction an astute and alert reader knows what has happened. And other readers may know it subconsciously (maybe even more powerful, though).

It's not news that a writer reveals far less about the facts of his characters' lives to the readers than he or she knows. But I would never have guessed that a writer could get away with revealing so little, and O'Connor discusses how Turgenev makes this work, but also what it costs him. It is a matter of what the author wants to focus on, it seems. The choice to write this as a "conte" is a choice that puts the focus on the forces operating internally in the characters rather than the external episodes. We see only the results of the episodes, or the momentary responses that reveal character and tendency, with the facts that might have been revealed in a more episodic form instead telescoped into brief comments or flashbacks. But I'd have to read the Turgenev to make more sense of this chapter than I have. Still, O'Connor makes Turgenev's writing seem transcendant, ecstatic. I can't wait to read it, but, alas, it's not on my reading list this term!