The Poe Challenge
Shelly Lowenkopf -- February 13, 2006
Shelly Lowenkopf explains why if you write short stories (or read them) you should care about a book review written 164 year ago by Edgar Allen Poe. After considering Shelly's perspective, you can read Poe's original: we provide a link to the online text.
When was the last time you heard someone brace a colleague, friend, or complete stranger with the edgy question, "What's your story?"
Not too long ago, I'll wager. Wanting to know some person's agenda, particularly in the face of aggressive or belligerent behavior, is as common to our daily life as it is to our reading life. And so the question is asked of those we rub shoulders with and--in some cases--share beds with. The question is also asked of the characters of whose exploits we read in magazines, journals, and books.
Few were as acute to this inquiry as Edgar Allen Poe, that gloomy, conflicted writer-critic who was drawing his last, tortured breaths around the time gold was being discovered in Sutter's Mill, outside Sacramento.
For all his preoccupations with the eerie, the dysfunctional, and the gloomy, Poe was, as many writers before and after him, afflicted with a talent for discovery. From his own copious readings and writings, but also from the constant prodding of his drug- and alcohol-driven needs, Poe not only discovered the DNA of story resident within him, he understood what story means to the rest of us, those who read for the pleasure and those who write from the need of it.
Fifty years after Poe's death, a collection of short stories was published that would with serious momentum inform the so-called modern short story, even before those who wrote the so-called modern short story were aware of the influence. That epic collection, published in 1902, was Dubliners, written by James Joyce.
Although Dubliners opened new vistas for story--any story--Joyce was indebted to Poe, whether he knew it or not. Indeed, short stories in The New Yorker and other cutting-edge literary journals notwithstanding, the rest of us--readers and writers--are still indebted to Poe, whether we recognize the debt or not.
How do we know this?
We have only to consult one document. Poe's review of Twice-Told (sic) Tales, a collection of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, first published in book form in 1837. In his generous review, Poe formulated what has become the literary equivalent of The Ten Commandments. In particular, Poe drew our attention to a set of ideals related to the short story. Uppermost among these ideals was the belief that a short story should be a read-at-one-sitting venture. Another ideal held for what Poe called unity of focus, by which he meant that although a story could have a number of resident emotions, say a desire for revenge, or intense aversion, or intense desire, it should pay off on one specific effect. A splendid illustration to illustrate the point is the conclusion to Poe's own short story, "A Cask of Amontillado." Almost any short story by William Sydney Porter, a.k.a. O. Henry, not only stresses the point, it steals the scene from Poe. Any short story from the nearly forgotten master, W. Somerset Maugham, also serves to remind us how focused and emotionally charged an ending can be.
Novels can have a multifarious payoff, related to change, growth, mutability. Novels can end the way many divorce settlements do--negotiated and acrimonious. But a short story ends on one, deliberate effect.
One of the problems we have with the twenty-first-century short story, whether we read it in a magazine such as The New Yorker, or in a bound book, is the ending. We frequently have to turn the page to see if the story keeps going, or we have to look for a printer's symbol conveying the Porky Pig equivalent of "Th-th-that's all, folks." Only then does the other shoe drop. The ending is ambiguous, uncertain, maybe even as unsatisfying as life is to us now.
Like it--or him--or not, Poe is still very much with us in his identification of elements that make a story not only effective but memorable.
As readers, we have the right to avoid those writers whose "take" on story bores us, offends us, or fails to move us.
As writers, we have no such luxury. We must read everything we can get our hands on if only to identify those very elements that bore us, offend us, or fail to move us. From this lofty high ground, we can work at our own craft to make sure these infractions do not appear.
Poe asks us to consider what story is. As the writers we hope to become, we are faced with the challenge of going up to the mountain top and doing whatever it takes to allow us to come down with the answers engraved on our own personal stone tablet. These answers will work for some-but-not-all readers, and they become the tools for us to write our stories.
Editor's Note: If you perform an Internet search on "Poe's review Twice-Told Tales", you'll find hundreds of references. Be aware that the original was published in two parts. Many Internet sites only have the first, introductory part. Two sites that have the complete text are here and here. Good luck with your next short story. -- The Inkbyte Editors