The "feminine" short story: recuperating the moment - The Short Story: Theory and Practice

Style, Fall, 1993 by Mary Burgan

Under the light of recent theorizing, especially the theorizing based upon the Continental break with phenomenology, the dimension of time implicit in narrative tends to be hypostatized into spatial figures in a way that emphasizes conceptual structure over the dynamics of chronicity. Working as figures themselves in a diagram in which the text provides but one of the points of reference, critics "situate" themselves, "locate" the text within some context, identify "margins" and "centers," and "colonize" this or that "sphere." Locutions like "site" and "scene" may help to describe the rhetorical architecture of stories, but they also obscure the temporal preoccupations of narrative.(1) Thus, in a critical environment that is suspicious of formalism, the vocabulary of spatial ordering seems as insistent now as it was in the heyday of New Criticism.(2)

Such spatial terminology may point to the wariness that poststructuralist theory harbors about the metaphysical danger of becoming preoccupied with the representation of time at all. J. Hillis Miller's attack on Paul Ricoeur's exhaustive study of time and narrative may suggest why: the phenomenological heritage of temporal preoccupation has a tendency eventually to engage conceptions of causality through the emphasis on the sequentiality of memory and expectation, and such matters may move the critic to celebrations of myth, symbol, transcendence, presence.(3) Paul de Man's essay on the rhetoric of Romantic temporality is perhaps the locus classicus for this theoretical suspicion of the "cult of the moment" (204). De Man's critique of Romantic symbolism defends against its temptation to make the ontologically bad-faith identification of the subject with nature through an assertion of the "factitiousness of human existence as a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self" (226); a more "authentic" representation signals temporality's relation to its subjective construction through "distance and difference" (222).

If some current theorizing suspects the representation of the moment for its nostalgic invocation of phenomenological metaphysics, some feminist theoretical positions embrace temporality as a gendered modality of the feminine imagination. I am thinking here of Helene Cixous's evocation of a flowing, "feminine" writing that counters the static forms of masculine inscription with an ongoingness that resists the interruption of symbolic abstraction: "her writing also can only go on and on, without ever inscribing or distinguishing contours, daring these dizzying passages in other, fleeting and passionate dwellings within him, within the hims and hers whom she inhabits just long enough to watch them, as close as possible to the unconscious from the moment they arise. . ." (88). I want to suggest a connection between the notion of an ecriture feminine as inflected by an atunement to the moment and the concerns of women who have chosen the short story as a form that permits the representation of time passing without making rhetorical gestures toward universal meaning. I want to suggest here, indeed, that the dialectic between the "temporal" writing of women and the "spatial" writing of men can be seen to recapitulate major issues in the evolution of the twentieth-century epiphanic short story as a woman's tradition that is intent upon the intimation of a signification that punctuates rather than halts the density of flowing sensation. Although the designation of this instant as an epiphany originates with James Joyce's discussion in Stephen Hero, its evolution in the short story owes greatly to the narrative experiments of writers like Virginia Woolf, even as these would be critiqued by an alternate feminist tradition that was suspicious of Woolf's brand of narrative impressionism as both philosophically naive and politically powerless.

Woolf understood the presiding motive of the modernist experiment in prose as an attempt to represent slight markers of implication within the structure of an intensively managed fictional form like the short story (or the "lyrical" novel). The very titles of such stories as her own "The Moment," Katherine Mansfield's "Prelude," and, later, Eudora Welty's "A Still Moment" suggest the generative power of a conception of the short story as a form organizing the flow of time into a narrative configuration that can then be held by the atemporal fixity of the writer's (and reader's) attention, while honoring the essential resistance of the flow of consciousness to the confinement of language.

In suggesting a woman's tradition in the short story, I do not want to replicate the theoretical discussions of the nature of the genre that have marked much of the recent thinking about short stories; the best of such discussions work empirically, in any case.(4) What I want to point to is the fact that women writers have actually defined their generic tradition by acknowledging early practitioners in the epiphanic short story among themselves. Thus Woolf and Mansfield traded comments with one another about having "the same job" as writers (McLaughlin 369), and just as Woolf reviewed Mansfield's collected work in terms of its taking hold of the moment in a web of words, so Willa Cather and Katherine Anne Porter used their reviews of Mansfield's writing to think about the short story as a form. And then later, when writers like Eudora Welty, Elizabeth Bowen, and Nadine Gordimer comment upon their own practice, they look back to the short fiction of their foremothers in the genre, referring to Woolf, Mansfield, and Porter and their notion that "short-story writers see by the light of the flash; theirs is the art of the only thing one can be sure of--the present moment" (Gordimer 180).