The Bazaar and Other Stories Read Free

English
short story writers whom she considers exemplary: D. H. Lawrence,
Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, William
Plomer, and Katherine Mansfield (41). She refers also to James
Joyce, Frank O’Connor, Liam O’Flaherty, and Seán O’Faoláin as the
best Irish contributors to the genre. Plomer and O’Faoláin figured in
Bowen’s circle of intimate friends, which accounts for their flatter
ing, if not entirely justified, inclusion on these lists. Kipling’s name,
too, comes as something of a surprise, but Bowen insists that
“Kipling the artist tended to be obscured by Kipling the national
institution,” which caused a delayed appreciation of his craftsman
ship (“Short Story in England” 39). In “Flavia,” Bernard and Flavia
receive a set of Kipling’s works as a wedding present, a detail partly
explained by Bowen’s reverence for Kipling’s mastery of the short
story.
    According to Bowen, the dimensions of the short story impose
constraints, and these constraints create the inevitability of a single
mood and a compression of effect, even to the point of “emotional
narrowness” (
Collected Impressions 154). In a review of Gorky’s tales
translated into English, Bowen incidentally provides a concise
definition of the short story:
    Short story writers form a sort of democracy: when a man en
gages himself in this special field his stories stand to be judged
first of all on their merits
as stories, only later in their relation to
the rest of his work. The more imposing the signature, the more
this applies. The craft (it may be no more) of the short story has
special criteria; its limitations are narrow and definite. It is in the
building-up of the short story that the craftsman side of the artist
has to appear. Very close demands on the writer’s judgement are
made; the short story is not a mere case for the passing fancy; it
offers no place for the unobjectified sentiment, for the impulsive
start that could not be followed through. It must have impli
cations which will continue when the story is done. ( Collected
Impressions 153)
    Short story writers comprise a democracy insofar as no single author
towers above another; the genre exacts submission from all writers,
converting them into equals before the onerous obligations of art.
Even if the limits of the story cause “a necessary over-simplification
of characters, and a rather theatrical tensing-up of the dialogue”
(
Collected Impressions 154), the same limits contribute to unity of
action. For this reason, the story requires craft – a knowledge of how
to sustain pace and how to find the exact objective equivalent for
sentiments. Bowen further specifies that the short story, unlike the
novel, does not aim at comprehensiveness or verisimilitude. A
certain trickery, out of step with mimesis, brings a short story to its
conclusion, a conclusion that may seem brusque because of the a
priori terseness of the form.
    Yet the short story appeals to Bowen because of its brevity.
Shortness borders on incompleteness and enhances the atmospheric
unseizableness of situations and characters. Character, in Bowen’s
estimation, always takes second place to action in narrative. In
“Notes on Writing a Novel,” she denies the commonplace idea “that
the function of action is to
express the characters”; in her opinion,
“characters are there to provide the action” ( Collected Impressions 249).
This novelistic principle holds true also for the short story, in which
character is elaborated in very few scenes. The form of the short
story prevents prolonged analysis of individual characters in terms of
their motives, pasts, or feelings. In the preface to Stories by Elizabeth
Bowen , she comments, “I do not feel that the short story can be, or
should be, used for the analysis or development of character. The
full, full-length portrait is fitter work for the novelist; in the short
story, treatment must be dramatic – we are dealing with man,