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A rhetoric of the short story: A study of the realistic narratives of Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon

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A rhetoric of the short story: A study of the realistic narratives of Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon

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Content A RHETORIC OF THE SHORT STORY: A STUDY OF THE REALISTIC NARRATIVES OF FLAUBERT, MAUPASSANT, JOYCE, AND HYON CHIN'G$N by Hwan Hee Yoon I i 1 i i I I t A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Comparative Literature) August 1991 Copyright 1991 Hwan Hee Yoon UMI Number: DP22557 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMT Dissertation PuMistwig UMI DP22557 Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code ProQuest* ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA Pi T) THE GRADUATE SCHOOL ' n ' ' UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90007 Co '91 y S3 This dissertation, written by ................. under the direction of h&r. Dissertation Committee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by The Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re quirements fo r the degree of D O C T O R O F P H ILO S O P H Y Dean of Graduate Studies D a te.. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairperson ii To My Parents And To My Husband I ( I iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I The writing of this dissertation was made possible by | the generous help of several warmhearted people and it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to them. I owe my greatest debt to Professor Dominic Cheung, chairman of my dissertation committee. He counseled and helped me through all the difficult stages of my graduate study from the very first to the very last. Without his en couragement, patience, and confidence in me, I could not have finished my dissertation. His scholarship, human ism, and guidance I will always treasure; he has been a true mentor. I would also like to thank Professor Arthur Babcock and Professor Paul Alkon for their thorough reading of my entire manuscript and their invaluable suggestions. Even when the demands on their time were great, they were immensely generous in helping me enhance the quality of my dissertation. I am also very grateful to Professor Albert Sonnenfeld, who helped me expand the scope of my study by introducing me to the theories of the German novelle and to the stories of E. T. A. I I I Hoffmann and Thomas Mann. Special thanks also go to I Professor Vincent Farenga and Professor Moshe Lazar who i served previously as members of my Ph.D. guidance commit- j tee. In particular, Professor Farenga's combination of rigorous criticism and warm support proved invaluable to iv my training, especially in the early stages of my grad uate study. There are other important debts as well. Heartfelt thanks go to my teachers in Korea, Professor Kim Ch'i-soo and Professor Chong Pyong-hi, who taught me that the pursuit of learning is a lifelong project. I would also like to express my gratitude to my parents for their high expectations, constant encouragement, and confidence in me. Most of all, I am indebted to my husband Yung Sup for his unselfish support and remarkable tolerance that made it possible for me to stay in my ivory tower and finish this project. Without his affection and patience, I could not have overcome the many difficulties I en countered during the long years of Ph.D. study. Finally, I want to thank my sister and brothers for their loving encouragement, and my little son Sunghyun for being a faithful companion to his far-from-perfect mother. V TABLE OF CONTENTS page DEDICATION.................................................. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................... iii CHAPTER I. Introduction: The Short Story and Realism in the West and Korea............................1 I II. From Recognition to Epiphany: A Study of ! P l o t .......................................... 50 III. Between Metaphor and Metonymy: Description As a Foil to P l o t...........................101 IV. The Symbolic Structure of the Realistic Short Story..................................161 V. Frame Story and Impersonal Narration .... 227 VI. Conclusion: The Crisis of the Short Story. . 324 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................ 346 APPENDIXES......................................... 362 1 CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION: THE SHORT STORY AND REALISM IN THE WEST AND KOREA The Short Story: A Genre in a Dilemma The short story is a problematic and complex genre i that has for long suffered from theoretical difficulties I j in definition and lack of consensus among theorists about I I its nature and origin, despite their persistent efforts to grasp its essential features. This dilemma of short story criticism can be clearly seen in the skeptical j views of H. E. Bates and Norman Friedman about the valid- j ity of the existing theoretical definitions. In 1941, in j his essay "The Modern Short Story: Retrospect," after making a long list of the existing definitions of the short story, H. E. Bates pointed out that "All of these definitions have one thing in common. None of them has a satisfactory finality: none defines the short story with I an indisputable epigrammatic accuracy which will fit all i . short stories." The only all-inclusive definition Bates could make is that "the short story can be anything the author describes it shall be" or that "the short story, whether short or long, poetical or reported, plotted or sketched, concrete or cobweb, has an insistent and eternal fluidity that slips through the hands" (73- 2 75). This is a dilemma that recent short story criti cism has not yet solved. In 1989, Norman Friedman gave us a careful outline of a variety of different defini tions of the short story by recent critics and came to the conclusion that "The evidence is made to fit the definition rather than the definition the evidence. . . . For my own part, I do not really believe there is any such thing as the short story more specific than "a short fictional narrative in prose."2 Accordingly, the only solution he could come up with is that "we can only begin with the fact of brevity and explore its possible causes." This ineffectuality of short story criticism in defining its nature, the variety and complexity of the short story resisting any epigrammatic definition, and the instability of its generic laws liable to be constantly transgressed by new forms, may easily lead us to agree with Maurice Blanchot's skeptical remarks on the notion of genres. In Le livre a venir. he insists: "The book is the only thing that matters, the book as it is, far from genres, outside of the categorical subdivisions- -prose, poetry, novel, document— in which it refuses to lodge and to which it denies the power of establishing its place and determining its form. A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book stems from literature 3 . t alone, as if literature held in advance, m their gen- l erality, the secrets and the formulas that alone make it 1 ! possible to give to what is written the reality of a book. "3 However, despite the lack of consensus about the generic nature of the short story and the theoretical 1 difficulties in identifying common features shared by its I constituents, the fact remains that the short story has been broadly acknowledged as a fairly legitimate indepen- j dent genre that differs from the tale of tradition and the novel. Furthermore, the notion of the short story as a distinct artistic genre has affected the reader's (or critic's) evaluation of a particular piece of short { . . . . . narrative and has led him to distinguish whether it is simply a story that is short, or a story that is artistic ; enough to merit the generic term "short story," or a mere truncated or condensed novel. In other words, it cannot ! be denied that the dominant conventions of the short I story in a particular period, such as single effect and lyricism, have exerted a great impact on the making and reading of the short story in that period, by functioning as a "horizon of expectation" and as a "model of writ ing."4 Though there has been no consensus about the I | nature and origin of the short story, the interesting i 1 fact is that, throughout short story criticism, the 4 majority of theorists have maintained that the short story is a new independent fictional genre that emerged somewhere between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rather than a mere modern variation of the tale or a short form of the novel5: The short story is a young art: as we now know it. it is the child of this century. Elizabeth Bowen (1936) At what date, then shall we begin an examination of its history? The paradoxical answer is that the history of the short story, as we know it. is not i vast but very brief... I shall only add an earlier judgement of my own that "the history of the English short story is very brief, for the simple reason ! that before the end of the nineteenth century it had no history." i H. E. Bates (1941) The short story form, as we know it. is very young, dating back to the middle years of the nineteenth century. Before that time, a short story was simply a story that was not long. Magalaner and Kain (1956) The short story, as we know it today, is the newest of literary genres. Something happened to the short tale early in the Nineteenth Century to cause Bran- der Matthews later in the century to proclaim the birth of a new genre characterized by brevity, a closely wrought texture, freedom from excrescence, and a unity of effect. The origins of the new form are to be found in the writings of Irving, Gogol, and Poe, and Hawthorne. Mary Rohrberger (1966) As we can realize in the frequent uses of the phrase "as we know it," without providing the valid foundation of their distinction between short story and tale of tradi tion, theorists have tended to make it self-evident that the short story is a new independent genre dating back to l __ j 5 the early last century or even to this century. Even H. E. Bates who claimed that "the short story can be any thing the author decides it shall be" maintained that the short story is different from the tale. This is rather paradoxical: How can we distinguish between these two genres, if we do not know exactly what the short story is like? How can we know that a given story is a mere story i | which is short or a true short story, if we are incapable j i of grasping its essential generic nature? j In pursuing these questions, first of all, it may be necessary to discuss whether the short story is a theo- I i retical genre or a historical genre. According to Tzvetan Todorov, genre can be basically divided into two kinds: historical genres and theoretical genres. He considers the former to "result from an observation of literary reality" and the latter to result "from the deduction of a theoretical order."6 I think these distinctions are very useful for our understanding of the complexity of 1 i the short story as a genre. If we consider the short story as a modern variation of the tale or as one of many historical stages in the long tradition of short narra tive, it can be said that we see the short story as a historical genre. On the other hand, if we think of the short story as a genre bounded by certain prescriptive rules or conventional laws, the short story may be refer- 6 red to as a theoretical genre. In short story criticism, i the short story has tended to be considered as a theo retical genre governed by its essential laws rather than a mere historical genre. Even Friedman's minimalist, "fixed definition of the short story as a short fictional narrative in prose" is based upon his conception of the short story as a theoretical genre: he sees no specific \ nature of the short story as a theoretical genre except j I J its shortness and hence he defines it as a "short fic- J tional narrative in prose." Indeed, most of theoretical difficulties in defining the short story are largely due to the prevailing preconception of it as a new theoreti cal genre whose essential qualities differ from the other j i fictional genres such as tale and novel. Understood in j l this way, the short story inevitably turns out to be an evanescent genre which existed only in a short period, or an illusory genre whose conventions and intrinsic laws are ambiguous and unstable. The origin of such a critical tendency to consider i the short story as a theoretical genre can be found in the very beginning of short story criticism, the theories of Poe and Brander Matthews. In his essay "The Philosophy of the Short-Story," Brander Matthews proclaimed: the difference between a Novel and a Short-story is a difference of kind. A true Short-story is someth ing other and something more than a mere story which is short. A true Short-story differs from the Novel chiefly in its essential unity of impression . . . The Short-story is a single effect, complete and self-contained, while the Novel is of necessity broken into a series of episodes. Thus the Short- story has, what the Novel cannot have, the effect of "totality," as Poe call it, the unity of impression. (May, Short Story Theories 52) This distinction between novel and short story clearly characterizes the short story as a theoretical genre whose essential prescriptive law is "unity of impression" or "single effect," in Poe's terms. This proclamation of the short story as an independent genre exerted a great impact on short story criticism. According to Fred L. Patee's survey, after the publication of this essay in 1885, the word "short story" was rapidly accepted as a new generic term by many theorists and writers.7 More over, the notion of the short story as a genre of single effect or unity of impression dominated over the early development of the short story and its criticism and operated as a substantial genre having its interpretive i and constitutive power, to borrow Todorov's terms, a genre functioning as "'a horizons of expectation' for ' I I l l readers and as 'model of writings' for authors" (Genre m j Discourse 18). According to Charles May, Matthews' prescriptive generic rules seem to have evidently per formed these two functions. Charles May states that "Matthews' formal rules for genre might not have had such a disastrous effect if 0. Henry had not had such great popular success with his formula at about the same time. 8, The writers rushed to imitate 0. Henry and the critics rushed to imitate Matthews, both with the same purpose in mind: popular financial success. Anyone could write short stories if he only knew the rules"(5). However, the notion of the short story as a theoretical genre governed by single effect seems to have lost its con stitutive and interpretive power, from the middle of this century. In the contemporary short story, the formulaic rules based upon Matthews' theory and 0. Henry's practice have been replaced by a new formula emphasizing lyricism, the artist's subjectivity, and tone. This lyric formula ! became a new model of writing. According to the observa tion of Herschel Brickell, the increase of the "psycho logical story moving toward the lyric" in the 1950s resulted from "the new surge of short-story writing courses at colleges and universities, not teaching the O. Henry formula as they did thirty years earlier, but j rather teaching the new psychological, poetic story" j i (May, Short Story Theories 7). The term "short story" that was initially proposed as a term for designating a theoretical genre governed by single effect is now used for designating a fairly com plex genre whose nature is very unstable and incomprehen sible, "something of the indefinite and infinitely vari able nature of a cloud," in Bates' terms. The short 9 story defined by Matthews tends to be treated as one of many historical genres or subgenres forming a part of the short story as a complex theoretical genre. As we can see in Austin M. Wright's observation, "Unity of effect is nebulous; it is hard to use as a measuring stick. And Matthews' insistence that 'Short-story' have a plot did not stand up well in the early twentieth century, when everybody— the short story writer especially— was trying to get rid of plot."8 The fact still remains, as Wright ] points out, that "the concept of the short story as some thing special has remained, without agreement as to what it is." Moreover, a further complication is that another J distinction between tale and short story has been added ] to the initial theoretical distinctions between a mere j j story that is short and a short story, between short story and novel. However, it should be noticed that, in literary history, until the end of last century there had been no clear generic distinction between tale and short story. In reality, Poe's now famous essay "Review of Twice-Told I Tales" that has been often considered as the first theo retical attempt to define the short story is not an an- I nouncement of the emergence of a new genre but simply a compositional theory of how to construct the "tale pro per," just as another of his essays "The Poetic Prin- 10 ciple" is a mere account of his own aesthetics as to how to construct the poem proper. Matthews, too, unlike Rohrberger, seems to have had no intention of proclaiming the short story as "the birth of a new genre," though he used the term "Short-story" instead of "tale." On the contrary, he maintained that "In the history of litera ture the Short-story was developed long before the Novel . . . From Chaucer and Boccaccio we must spring across the centuries until we come to Hawthorne and Poe almost without finding another name that insists upon enrol lment" (58). Thus, the main concerns of Poe and Matthews are with the essential difference between the well-con structed tale (or short story) and the novel, rather than with the generic difference between the short story and the tale. The view that Matthews proclaimed the short story as a new genre is somewhat a misconception due to his use of the new word "short story," which had been less acknowledged as a generic term than the "tale" until 1885. In this respect, the generic distinction between tale and short story can be said to be based upon an illusory foundation: a difference in name has resulted in an illusion of a difference in essence. At this point, it is worth remembering the lessons of Saussure and other semioticians about the arbitrary, conventional nature of 11 language as a signifying system. It may be true, as Eagleton writes, that "there is no harmonious one-to-one set of correspondences between the level of the signi- fiers and the signifieds in language."9 The precon ceived ideas about the correspondence between the signi- fier and the signified have affected the direction of short story theory. Anglo-American traditions that christened modern short fictional narrative with the new I generic name "short story" have excessively emphasized the newness of the short story as a genre and have shown an almost total indifference to the intrinsic, biological kinship between this genre and the tale of tradition. On the other hand, unlike Anglo-American criticism, the | * French and German tradxtxons that have used the same term j "nouvelle" or "novelle" for designating both the tales of i novella tradition and modern stories, have shown a great concern for the influence on the short story of the novella tradition, especially the tales of Boccaccio and I • 10 Marguerxte de Navarre. 1 All these theoretical problems that the notion of the short story as a new autonomous genre entails lead us to have doubts about the ontological status of the short story as an independent genre that has removed itself from the long tradition of short fictional narrative. In j my view, the excessive theoretical emphases on certain ! 12 particular properties of the short story as an indepen dent genre have not only misled us to confuse essential J qualities with transient features and conventional, arbitrary codes with inherited, homogeneous codes, but they have also prevented us from comprehending a biologi cal kinship between old and new stories as well as resem blances between the short story and other fictional genres. Accordingly, I would like to propose the short story simply as the short fictional narrative of the modern era, a historical genre forming a part of the complex theoretical genre of short fictional narrative. j Since the word "short story," regardless of whether the attribute "modern" is added or not, has gained wide currency as a term for designating the fictional genre of the modern era rather than as a mere synonym of short fictional narrative in prose, I will respect this conven tion and use the term "short story" as a generic termi nology for indicating the stories of a modern period, not of all ages, though I do not see any fundamental reason for cutting the short story off from the long tradition of tale. Therefore, in discussing the short story as a genre, I will not treat the short story as an independent genre having its own unique nature or any common denominator shared by all its members. Instead, I will consider the 13 short story as one of the important historical stages in the continuum of short fictional narrative and also as a complex system having many microscopic stages within itself. My present study of the rhetoric of the short story is an attempt to describe the concrete conventions or dominant codes of the short story and to comprehend the complex evolution of these codes (i.e. trans gressions, inheritances, and variations) as well as an I 1 intricate network of resemblances and differences between j its members. To grasp the dominant conventions of the short story, I will make the best use of a variety of different definitions that the existing short story theories have constantly provided for the apprehension of its elusive generic nature. Though I find that a good i i many theorists have erroneously treated one class of ; l short stories as if they constituted the whole body of the short story, I think their observations are very useful for understanding the dominant codes of a parti cular period and for charting a "complicated network of similarities overlapping criss-crossing" among a group of stories, that is, their "family resemblances," to use Wittgenstein's terms.11 I consider the existing theo retical definitions of the short story as the various observations of family resemblances among modern stories. I For example, I think that Frank O'Connor saw its generic 14 resemblances in characterization because in his view the short story is a genre dealing with "a submerged popula tion groupf" such as "Gogol's officials, Turgenev's serfs, Maupassant's prostitutes, Chekhov's doctors, and teachers, Sherwood Anderson's provincials" ("The Lonely Voice," May 86); Brander Matthews found family resem blances in single effect through the stories of Chaucer, Boccaccio, Hawthorne, Poe, Merimee, Turgenev, and Maupas sant (May 58); Eileen Baleshwiler saw in lyricism the resemblances among the stories of Turgenev, Chekhov, Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and John Updike; Mary Rohrberger in "symbolic substructures" (Lohafer and j Clarey 40); Charles May observed generic resemblances in j i a combination between "realistic motivation and romantic j i projection" (Lohafer and Clarey 67); Godenne and Pratt in the orality of language; and so on. In the present study, a great variety of different definitions will be organized or synthesized in terms of the four narrative elements: plot, description, symbolism, and narration. These elements will be respectively discussed in detail, in the beginnings of my four main chapters. The Short Story and Realism in the West and Korea In discussing the rhetoric of the short story, I I will chiefly concentrate on the evolution of the realis- 15 tic short story, instead of ranging over an extensive number of short stories from a bird's-eye view. By the term "realistic short story" I mean a group of stories whose artistic features or principles conspicuously correspond to those of realism as a specific artistic movement of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly of French realism (or naturalism)12: for example, contemporaneity of events, serious treatment of ! i the lower class and the lower elements (in Maupassant's ; terms, "les bas-fonds"13), a penchant for descriptive details, and the author's objectivity or impersonality towards events and characters, the natural causality of 1L. I events, and a scientific view of human life. I have chosen the realistic short story because I find that the realistic short story is one of the most important his torical genres or pivotal subgenres of the short story which enables us to comprehend the overall evolution of the short story and its characteristic features. There i are two main reasons for this: the first is that, along with the principle of single effect or unity of impres sion, realism is another important element that has led a variety of critics from different traditions to distin guish between short story and tale of tradition (nouvelle \ and conte, novelle and marchen. tanp'ydn sosdl and tan- j hvona s6sa munhak); the second is that the realistic 16 short story is a problematic literary type governed by the tension between the two basically antagonistic artis tic principles, the demands of the short story and those of realism. First of all, let us begin with the connection bet ween the origin of the short story and realism. Just as most English and American critics such as Ian Watt have maintained that the novel originated in the eighteenth century as a realistic genre that differs from romances,15 so a large number of short story theorists i have claimed that the short story arose m the early \ I nineteenth century as a realistic genre distinguishable from its predecessors.16 Indeed, the element of realism can convince us more effectively of the formal and thema tic differences between tale and short story than the principle of single effect. Though the principle of single effect has the merit of showing us effectively a difference between short story and novel, it is rather weak in persuading us of an essential difference between i tale and short story. For, as James Lawrence and Warren j Walker point out, the principle of single effect is perfectly applicable to a great variety of well- constructed traditional tales such as Gothic tales and folktales17: for example, the tales of Boccaccio and E. T. Hoffmann, or even the folktales of Brothers Grimm and I 17 Hans Anderson. In effect, Poe's stories can be closely related to the fantastic tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann, though he concealed "his own heavy debts to E. T. A. Hof fmann, Tiek, the anonymous authors of tales in Black- 40 wood's," according to Daniel Hoffman. Unlike the principle of single effect, the element of realism can more convincingly lead us to perceive a break between the short story and the tale of tradition, though it blurs a generic difference between short story and novel and instead stresses their similarities. In his article "From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850's" (1974), Robert F. Marler distin guishes the short story from the tale in terms of realis tic characterization, by using Northrop Frye's claim that the tale is analogous to the prose romance whereas the short story to the novel.19 In the tale there are no '"real people'"; charac ters, as "stylized figures which expand into psycho logical archetypes," account for the "subjective intensity" not found in the novel or short story and for the tendency toward allegory. "Idealized by revery," such characters are derived from the heroic mold and remain inscrutable and isolated from repre sentations of actual society. The short story, by contrast, deals with characters who have "per sonality" and wear "their personae or social masks"; accordingly, the author requires a stable society, and his fictive world tends to be an imitation of the actual world of men. According to this view, the short story emerged as an independent genre during the 1850s, along with the growth 18 of realism, and accordingly the stories of not only Haw thorne but also Edgar Allan Poe should be categorized into the tale instead of the short story. Hence, Frye argues that "one can isolate the tale form used by Poe, which bears the same relation to the full romance that the stories of Chekhov or Katherine Mansfield do to the novel" (305). Likewise, in France, Rene Godenne sees the fundamen tal differences between the conte (tale) and the nouvelle (short story) in the element of realism, while criti cizing the indiscriminate use of conte and nouvelle that has prevailed in French literary criticism. He defines the conte as an "histoire mettant en seine des incident supernaturels" and the nouvelle as an "histoire fondie sur des evenements veritables"; and he goes on to say that "tandis que le conteur recherche 11 extraordinaire, l'etrange, le bizarre, etc., le nouvelliste tend a ex primer plus simplement la realiti, je dirais mime dans I • • » * . 20 ! certains cas la banalite de la vie quotidienne." Ac cordingly, for Godenne, whether a given story is con cerned with the real world or the supernatural world is the most important canon of generic distinction between conte and nouvelle: "Le monde de la nouvelle n'est pas celui du conte; le nier, e'est nier la valeur generique I des deux mots" (155). 19 In German literature, a large number of novelle theorists have also claimed the realistic features of this genre as an essential difference from the tale. This is clearly seen in the fact that, as Rolf Schroder points out, 1 1 in the 1820s in Germany the element of 1 newness1 inherent in the term novelle was understood to mean 'real' or 'true to life.'"21. For instance, Goethe j thought that the novelle should deal with an "event which j , ! 22 is unheard of, but has taken place" ; and Wieland men tioned that "With a novelle one presupposes that the ! story takes place . . . not in any ideal or utopian land, but in our real world, where everything occurs naturally and comprehensibly, where the events— while they are not every day— could yet, in the same circumstances, have J occurred anywhere at any time."23 j However, overall, the German concept of realism in the novelle is somewhat different from Godenne's concept of realism in the French nouvelle. For, whereas Godenne draws a clear line between realistic and supernatural elements, German theorists have attempted to synthesize the extraordinary and the ordinary or the strange and the ! real. According to E. K. Bennett's summary of German * i distinction between tale and novelle. the fairy tale is characterized by "the very fact that it removes the events into a world of unreality, can dispense with 20 logical connection in their presentation and allows for that very reason more arbitrary rights to the imagina tion" and on the other hand the novelle is characterized by the fact that it requires "the strictest motivation and the most careful logical treatment in order to make the unbelievable convince as truth" because it has to "present the unusual,'das Unerhorte,' as having taken place in the world of reality" (10). In this respect, the world of the German novelle is not quite remote from the world of the fantastic described by Todorov: he says that "the world described . . . is indeed our own world, with its natural laws . . . but within that universe an event occurs for which we have difficulty finding a natural explanation" (Genre in Discourse 24).24 Just as the principle of single effect and the growth of realism played a decisive role in establishing the short story a new genre in the West, so these two elements exerted a great impact on the making of the j Korean short story (tanp'yon sosol). In Korea, it has been generally admitted that the Korean short story emerged as a new genre in the early 1920s, along with the naturalistic movement, and has thereafter developed as a dominant fictional genre, throughout the evolution of Korean literature. Before 192 0, of course, Korean liter- i ature had maintained the long tradition of short narra- i ' tive (e.g., tales in classical Chinese and folk tales) 21 and had also produced a transitional form of short narra tive (sin sosol) to bridge the gap between tale of tradi tion and short story, in the first two decades of this century. However, these short narratives were lacking in such artistic qualities as economy of language, well-con structed plot, unity of impression, and realism that the J Western short story has manifested. It was not until the 1920s that the Korean short story began to assimilate the generic conventions of the Western short story and ac- j tively experiment with a variety of new narrative tech niques . According to Lee Jae-Son, the Korean short story (tanp’yon sosol) of the 1920s is greatly different from the traditional short narrative in several aspects25: (1) j the technique of opening a story in medias res without a ! preamble; (2) the presentation of the character as an individual with personality and the dominance of scenic i l presentation over summary; (3) the principle of single effect or unity of impression; (4) the collapse of chronological order and linear plot (or the use of non- j j chronological order and dramatic plot); (5) the change in | i I point of view from omniscient to limited (first-person or ' third-person); (6) the presentation of slice of life < (tranche de vie) and its tragic element, along with the avoidance of the definite ending; (7) the dominance of 22 realistic Weltanschauung. Of all these techniques mostly borrowed from the West, Poe's theory of single effect and the conventions of the naturalistic movement (e.g. the objectivity or impersonality of the narrator, the prefer ence for showing over telling, the presentation of tranche de vie) exerted a strong influence on the making of the Korean short story. In the 192 0s, the majority of important writers, such as Kim Tongin, Hyon Chin'gon, Yom Sangsup, and Na Tohyang, manifested their artistic talent in the genre of the realistic short story, though some of their realistic stories can be described as a blend of realism and roman- I ticism. For example, Kim Tongin, who has been referred i to as one of the two originators of the Korean short story (the other is Hyon Chin'gon), maintained in his essay Sosdl chaknoo (1925) that the short story had originated with Poe as an independent genre in the early 19th century, developed along with Daudet, Maupassant, and Chekhov, and became a dominant fictional genre in contemporary world literature (Lee Jae-Son 6). In an other of his essays, Kim Tongin also emphasized the fundamental differences between these two genres in terms of single effect or unity of impression: "the novel is a rather discursive reflection of life and the short story I 1 is a 1 condensed expression of life controlled by single 23 effect . . . the short story produces a unique, striking, and pure impression on the reader's mind after his read ing but the novel produces a serious, discursive, and multiplex impression."26 These views of the short story can be said to be a combination between the principle of single effect and the naturalistic notion of a slice of life. In effect, when I look at the surprisingly small | . i body of Korean short story theories, it can be said that such a concept of the short story has dominated over Korean literary theory: In Korea, the short story has been basically understood as an condensed artistic form which represents a slice of life or a critical moment of J life.27 j I Thus far I have discussed how the view that the short story is distinguishable from its predecessors by virtue of its truth to reality has gained general accep tance on an international scale. The other side of the coin, however, is that a number of recent American and English critics— Charles May, Mary Rohrberger, Frank O'Connor, Ian Reid— have refused to regard the short story as a realistic genre and have instead proposed the short story as a romantic genre in essence and placed this genre into the tradition of romance as opposed to the tradition of the novel.28 These recent critics have ; I ! one thing in common: they are those who have firmly held 24 that the difference between the novel and the short story is a difference of essence and kind, not of degree or length. For them, the short story is a romantic genre whereas the novel is a genre of realism. Therefore, most of them hold that the short story originated with Haw thorne and Poe, the writers of romanticism. Of these theorists, Charles May's argument is the I I most coherent and systematic. In his essay "Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction," Charles May describes the j romantic features of the short story in the three ways: first, it has remained close to the "primal narrative that embodies and recapitulates mythic perception"; second, the style of the short story is "more apt to be Hebraic than Homeric because "Instead of presenting i details in fully externalized form, completely fixed both spatially and temporally, it makes use only of those details which are necessary for the purpose of the story, and its progress seems to be directed toward a single goal"29; last, the short story is "more closely related to the romance than to the realistic mode, and conse quently its characters are more apt to be stylized figures rather than 'real people.'"30 However, while maintaining that the short story derives directly from "the mythic-story and aesthetic-romance tradition," May does not deny the fact that the appearance of the short story in the early nineteenth century was "necessarily conditioned by two assumptions about art's relation to reality— the realistic and the Romantic— which combined in the short story in a particular way to create a new mode of discourse" (65). Therefore, according to May, the short story as a genre originating in the nineteenth century is characterized by "the process whereby both realistic motivation and romantic projection transform the old romance story into the new short story." Para doxically enough, this conclusion Charles May comes to after his long emphasis on the romantic feature of the short story is not quite different from the realistic conception of the short story in that the essential difference between the short story and its predecessors (or between the stories of old and new) consists in the element of realism, its truthfulness to reality. For me, it is difficult to share May's belief that the short i story derives directly from the tradition of romance or myth: in other word, if it is true, as May claims, that the short story that originated with Poe is a genre conditioned by both the realistic and romantic impulses, why should we confine the short story to the tradition of romance instead of the larger tradition of tale (inclu ding romances, fabliau, exemplum, fairy tales, parable, fable, myth, and legend)? 26 Nevertheless, I certainly agree with May that "the very form and tradition of short fiction militate strongly against the central conventions of realism."31 In my view, first of all, the most striking feature of the antagonism between the artistic demands of the short story and the conventions of realism is that, whereas the brevity of the short story demands an economy of lan guage, that is, the functionality or meaningfulness of every detail, the central convention of realism is char acterized by "description based upon unessential details1 1 or the significance of "details inutiles," as Roman Jakobson and Roland Barthes point out.32 This is the main topic that I will discuss in detail throughout the second and third chapters: the tension between plot as a compositional concept and description. Inasmuch as plot has been considered by early critics as a sine qua non of making the short story and yet the theoretical uses of the term "plot" are variously different and ambiguous, my study of the short story starts with a close examination of the way in which the term "plot" has been used in narrative theory as well as short story theory. By synthesizing a variety of different definitions of plot, I will propose to define plot as a compositional prin ciple of transforming seemingly separate narrative com ponents into a new artistic whole, rather than as a mere 27 synonym of events or story. Understood in this way, the notion of plot is seemingly very antagonistical to the realistic notion of description based upon useless de tails. What I am attempting to examine throughout the second and third chapters is how the realistic short story from Flaubert to Joyce has changed its way of structuring or arranging narrative events and how it has reconciled the centripetal force of plot and the centri fugal force of description. Another seeming tension between the convention of the short story and that of realism can be found in the element of symbolism. A large number of critics such as Rohrberger and Richard Kostelanetz claim that the essen- ! tial quality of the short story consists in symbolism or i s y m b o lic s u b s t r u c t u r e . H ow ever, t h e y te n d t o c o n f i n e sy m b o lism a s t h e p r o p e r ty o f t h e s h o r t s t o r y a s a new j genre dating back to Poe, and also tend to conceive of ; t symbolism and realism as two opposite concepts rather ! 33 1 than two complementary ones. For example, this tend ency is evident in Kostelanetz's statement: "In the great modern short stories, the techniques of presentation stem not from realism, which emulates reportage, but from sym bolism, which descends from poetry . . . short-story wri- i ! ters from the times of Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville to the present have always discarded realism j 28 for elliptical and symbolic representational styles” (214-215). For my own part, though I believe that sym bolism is one of the essential qualities of the short story, I do not consider symbolism to be solely confined to the short story of the modern era or to the lyrical short story: In other words, I think that all great short stories, including the tale of tradition and the reali stic short story, are symbolic in the sense that "what is shown" means "by virtue of association, something more or something else," to borrow Frye's definition.34 This is j i what I attempt to demonstrate in the fourth chapter in ! which I will examine the evolution of symbolism in the larger context of the short story from the tales of Boccaccio to the realistic short story. In the fifth chapter, the last main chapter, I will discuss another tension between the tradition of the I i i short story and the convention of realism: the rhetoric j i of storytelling and impersonal narration. If we con ceive of the short story as a historical genre of the modern era forming of a part of short fictional narrative or as one of many stages in the long continuum of the tradition of the tale, the disappearance of the authorial figure or storyteller in Flaubertian realistic fiction (governed by the principle of impersonality) is strongly j j i set against the tradition of tale in which the story- 29 teller played an important role not only as a transmitter of a tale, but also as a man of wisdom who has counsel for his audience or readers. Such realistic conventions as the rejection of didacticism and the continual self- effacement of the author hSve affected the narrative techniques of the modern novel as well as the modern short story. Nevertheless, the persistent use of frame structure and colloquial style in the realistic stories i ; of Balzac and Maupassant draws our attention to the legacy of the storytelling tradition in the short story. Flaubert. Maupassant. Joyce, and Hvon Chin’gon In discussing the realistic short story, I will focus most of my efforts on a group of realistic short stories by four writers— Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and i Hyon Chin’gon. This limitation is partly due to my belief that the works of these four writers would best represent the variety and complexity of the realistic short story, as well as of the short story, because of their exquisite craftsmanship and of their diverse cul- i tural backgrounds (Apart from Flaubert and Maupassant, | i they belong to different periods and different national i traditions). It is also partly due to the fact that they show not only a great deal of similarities in their assimilation of French realism or naturalism but also a 30 remarkable continuity in the context of the short story tradition, despite spatial and temporal differences between them. On the other hand, inasmuch as I think that the meaning of genre study consists in having a genuine understanding of the complex interrelationships between different works rather than in consolidating the theoretical foundations of a given genre, I will con centrate on the various stories of these four writers and try to have a comprehensive grasp of the complex network of differences and resemblances between them and thereby do justice to the particular quality of each writer, through a close textual examination of their works. In the rest of this introduction I will briefly describe the I ! i general features of each of these four realists as a short story writer and the possible interconnections among them. As for Flaubert, though he was not prolific as a short story writer, his technical innovation in narration and description has made much impact on the evolution of the short story, as in that of modern fiction. In writ ing short stories, Flaubert faithfully observed his artistic principles of impersonality and impassibility, j I presented events mostly through the character's pers- j pective and mind instead of the author's privileged point j ! of view, and tried to show or pictorialize the event 31 rather than to tell or recount it, in the same manner as he did in writing novels. These features of his narra tive technique, it seems to me, have much bearing on the artistic process of impersonalization or "depersonali zation" as well as the individualization of the short story form, in the subsequent development of the short story from Maupassant to the contemporary story.35 In discussing Flaubert's stories, I will not limit my atten tion to "Un coeur simple," strictly speaking, his only realistic short story (because one of the important canons of realism lies in the contemporaneity of the subject matter). The reason is that, though the other two stories in Trois contes. "La legende de saint Julien 1'hospitalier" and "H^rodias," do not deal with the contemporary social reality of Flaubert's time, these stories are mostly governed by the same compositional principles as "Un coeur simple." By examining these three stories, I will try to grasp Flaubert's composi tional method of structuring the short story. Maupassant is, unlike his mentor Flaubert, a born short story writer and one of the most important leading figures in this genre, not only because of his extraordi nary productivity and craftsmanship as a short story writer but also because of his great impact abroad. Maupassant is a writer of versatility and protean nature: 32 of his approximately three hundred stories, we can find a great variety of different short stories: for example, the realistic short story (such as "La ficelle," "La parure," "En famille," "La maison Tellier"); the fantas tic tale dealing with mesmerism, magnetism, fear, and madness (such as "Horla," "La nuit," and "Un fou?"); and the poetic short story (such as "Mademoiselle Perle," "Papa de Simon," "La clair de lune," and "Hautot pere and fils"). His narrative technique is also very varied: his persistent use of the frame story shows the legacy of Balzac or of their predecessors dating back to Boccaccio or even before; some of his stories are also very faith ful to the artistic principles of Flaubert and similar to Joycean stories. In short, Maupassant's short fiction can be described as the pivotal point of the realistic short story whereby we can also comprehend the develop ment of the short story from Balzac to Joyce. On the other hand, though his reputation as a short story writer par excellence seems to have conspicuously declined in the Western tradition, Maupassant has exerted a strong influence on the making of modern Japanese and Korean fictions, as well as on the rise of their natural istic movement. In both countries, naturalism or realism can be described as the most important artistic movement to the making of modern fiction, as the backbone of 33 modern literature. In Dawn to the West, Donald Keene points out that "If any movement in Japanese literature of the twentieth century can be described as central, it is doubtlessly Naturalism (shizen shugi). Naturalism was at its height in Japan only between 1906 and 1910, but for many years thereafter works stemming directly from its traditions dominated modern writing" (220). This is certainly true of Korean literature. One of leading Korean critics, Paek Ch'ol says that "Of all literary movements, it is naturalism that has exerted the greatest impact on modern Korean literary history. Naturalism is the literary movement of literary movements in modern \ Korean literature" (Han'quk sin munhak paldal-sa 112). Though in Korea naturalism or realism flourished in 1920's (one decade later than Japan), realism has con stantly played a crucial role in the subsequent develop ment of modern Korean literature.36 Maupassant's influence in the naturalist or realist movement in Korea and Japan was much greater than any other Western writer. Seen from a Western perspective, it is quite peculiar that Korean and Japanese writers mostly assimilated naturalist ideas and techniques from Maupassant's stories, not from the novels and theories of 1 Emile Zola and Flaubert. Korean and Japanese writers 4 early in this century learned the artistic principles of 34 impersonality, impassibility (or objectivity) mostly from Maupassant's stories and his famous comment on Flaubert's aesthetics in the preface of Pierre and Jean titled "Le roman," not directly from Flaubert's letters and novels.37 For example, Kunikita Doppo, praised as the best short-story writer of the Meiji period, has been generally considered to be much indebted to Maupassant's techniques (e.g. the use of dialogues and the realistic j manner of presenting a slice of life in the short story, according to Yoshima Seiichi).38 In particular, Maupas sant exerted a great impact on Tayama Katai, the repre sentative writer of Japanese naturalism: Katai says that "How to estimate the depth of the astonishment produced in my mind, my eyes, and my body as I read the twelve volumes of his stories? . . . I felt as if somebody had bashed a club against my head" (qtd. in Keene 243). Besides, Maupassant was also influential on Shimazaki Toson and Nagai Kafu. It is almost the same with the Korean naturalist or realist movement. Maupassant's influence over Korean writers seems to have much bearing on the fact that the Korean naturalist movement was mainly initiated and deve loped by such writers as Hyon Chin'gon and Kim Tongin who j I studied European literature in Japan or learned French naturalism indirectly through the Japanese reception of 35 it. In the 192 0s, more than a quarter of the Korean translations of Western fiction was Maupassant's works (his stories and Une vie), generally retranslated from English versions, as in Japan, or from the Japanese translations of Maupassant (Cho Chin'gi 137). A number of Korean critics have seen Maupassant’s influence in the realistic stories of Hyon Chin'gon, Kim Tongin, Na 39 Tohyang. Of these writers, it is Hyon Chin'gon who has been most often referred to as the writer who learned much from Maupassant and Flaubert in technique. For example, Paek Choi writes: "When we think that the naturalistic literature of Korea has imported its major character- i istics from Western literature, especially from the works of Flaubert or Maupassant, Hyon Chin'gon is the only writer who learned thoroughly Flaubert's realistic lesson such as 'even though you portray a mere stone or a tree, describe these objects as they are' and put successfully this lesson into practice. His composition based upon keen observation and thorough description can be said to be the model of realistic literature" (122). Besides, Sin Tong-uk sees Maupassant's influence on Hyon Chin'gon in technique, such as characterization and description, j though he emphasizes that Hyon Chin'gon's social con- . ------------j 36 sciousness "refused to be a follower of Maupassant and Flaubert. "40 However, in reality, Hyon chin'gon's reception of French realism and its conventions is a complex issue at which we must take a careful look. For the truth is that it is very difficult to tell specifically in what way Flaubert and Maupassant exerted a great impact on Hyon j Chin'gdn's short stories. There are several reasons for i this. First of all, as Cho Namhyon points out, most . Korean critics have been very general and more or less superficial in their statements about sources and recep tion (or influence and imitation), without supporting their views through visible evidence or the detailed comparative study (2 3 6-2 37).41 Second, it must be noticed that whereas Hyon Chin'gdn translated a number of J Russian and German fictions (e.g. the works by Tchirikov, l Zeromski, Artsibashev), he hardly participated in intro ducing French fiction to Korea, except his translation of Edmond Rostand's fiction (Cho Namhyon 2 35). Last, it is all the more difficult because Hyon Chin'gon himself seldom discussed his compositional principles, the gene sis of his stories, and his attitudes towards French realism or naturalism, unlike his contemporaries, Kim Tongin and Yom Sangsop. If there is any evidence, it might be his two brief comments on Maupassant: first, his 37 reading of "Idylle"; second, his advice to young writers on how to write fiction— "Literature is in effect spirit. Writing without spirit, no matter how beautiful it is, is nothing but ashes. For this reason, I recommend novices to follow the example of Dumas or Hugo instead of Maupas sant or Chekhov. This is also a belated wish for myself."42 Therefore, for a genuine understanding of the literary relationship such as influence and reception, literary affinities or parallels between Hyon Chin'gon and Maupassant or Flaubert, it is necessary to discuss in detail differences and resemblances in technique and theme between the Korean writer and his French counter parts, through a closer textual examination of their stories, rather than through a bird's eye view of their techniques and ideas. As for James Joyce, the impact of Flaubertian real ism and aesthetics on him has been observed by many earlier critics such as Edmund Wilson, Ezra Pound, and Valery Larbaud43; and it is evident in the artistic theory of impersonalization or dramatization expressed by Stephen's mouth in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I will discuss Joyce's theory of impersonality in detail in chapter five). For example, Edmund Wilson 1 maintains in his Axel's Castle: "James Joyce, like George j Moore, was working in the tradition, not of English, but 38 of French fiction. Dubliners was French in its objec tivity, its sobriety and its irony, at the same time that its paragraphs ran with a music and a grace quite dis- i tinct from the taut metallic quality of Maupassant and Flaubert" (191).44 Ezra Pound saw much similarity in style between Joyce's Dubliners and Flaubert's Madame Bovarv and considered Joyce as a "realist" who "gives the thing as it is" and who "writes a clear hard prose," dealing with "subjective things," but "with such clarity of outline that he might be dealing with locomotives or with builders' specifications" (qtd. in Walzl 166). Likewise, Louis Cazamian placed Dubliners in the tradi tion of Maupassant: "par le melange de realisme apre et d 'humour pitoyable, ces courts recits s1apparentent a la ’ tradition de Maupassant, que l'exemple russe attendris- sait et assouplissait alors.1,45 In contrast to such realistic readings of Dubliners which dominated over earlier Joyce criticism until the 1950s, the symbolic interpretations of this book have I thereafter prevailed in Joyce criticism. Dubliners seems to have, since the 1950s, been considered as highly symbolic or esoteric like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake rather than as belonging to the realistic tradition of Flaubert and Maupassant. While criticizing Edmund Wilson's treatment of Dubliners as "a straight work of I 39 Naturalistic fiction" as well as Harry Levin's realistic interpretation of it and his emphasis on the disparity between this book and Joyce's novels, Brewster Ghiselin argues, in his seminal essay "The Unity of Joyce's Dubli ners" (1956), that "So narrow an understanding of Dubli ners is no longer acceptable" and that "Recent and steadily increasing appreciation of the fact that there is much symbolism in the book has dispelled the notion that it is radically different in technique from Joyce's later fiction."46 These conflicts between the old and new critics of Dubliners are, it seems to me, largely due to their consideration of realism and symbolism as two opposite ! concepts rather than complementary ones. If we consider i these two terms to complement each other, Dubliners can be described as a work of intricate symbolism and at the same time as "a straight work of Naturalistic fiction." On the one hand, it must be acknowledged that Dubliners was, in the first place, motivated by Joyce's realistic desire to make a "nicely polished looking-glass" to represent his contemporary Irish reality and by his intention to write "a chapter of the moral history" of his country, as Joyce clearly remarked in his letters to Grant Richards.47 Besides, Joyce's inclination towards the naturalistic tradition of Flaubert and Maupassant can 40 be found in the extreme similarity between Stephen's theory of impersonality and Flaubert's as well as in Joyce's reading of "several volumes of Guy de Maupas sant's short stories" and his admiration for the French writer during his writing of Dubliners.48 On the other hand, it is also undeniably true that most his stories, such as "The Sisters" and "The Dead," abound in religious I allusions, metaphoric symbols, irony, and suggestive elliptic remarks, as a number of recent critics have shown. When considering all these aspects, it seems to be Scholes and Litz who offer the most convincing ex planation: "The snow in 'The Dead' takes on symbolic overtones, but it has its own commonplace reality; the I I gold coin in "Two Gallants" may be a symbol of various subtle 'betrayals,' but it is first and last a fact of economic life. Any symbolic reading of Dubliners that compromises the realistic integrity of the stories should fall under immediate suspicion" (300). The subtle blend of realism and symbolism in Joyce's stories merits closer examination, particularly in the generic context of the short story. Inasmuch as many short story theorists have maintained that the essential qualities of the short story consist in the symbolic l # j structure of narrative, the use of symbols, or its lyri cal quality, it would be necessary to know how Joyce's 41 symbolism can be properly situated in the tradition of the short story and to what extent the literary conven tions of realism have complemented or combined with those of the short story in the stories of Flaubert, Maupas sant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon. In particular, since many theorists in the Anglo-American tradition have considered Joyce and Maupassant as two opposite poles between symbolism and realism, between the lyric and the epic, Joyce's stories can be the perfect example of the understanding of the evolution of the realistic short story as well as of the short story. In addition to these writers, I will discuss in detail some of Balzac's stories inasmuch as Balzac ex erted, technically and thematically, a great impact on Maupassant and he played a important role as a teller in bridging a gap between the short story and the tale of tradition dating back to Boccaccio or even before. More over, Balzac is also important to the understanding of the revolutionary features of Flaubert's composition because Balzac's fiction is a fine example of the very fictional systems that Flaubert struggled to subvert or deconstruct. Notes 42 1 "The Modern Short Story: Retrospect," Short Story Theories. ed. Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio UP, 1976) 74. In my view, this book is the best collection of short story theories, with a useful annotated bibliography of the short story, that help us to comprehend the develop ment of American-English short story criticism from Edgar Allan Poe to such recent critics as Norman Friedman and Mary Rohrberger. Another useful collection of short story theories, written by current critics, is Short Story Theory at a CROSSROADS, ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University P, 1989). For the subsequent documentation of all the articles collected in these two books, the editors' last i name— May, Lohafer and Clarey— will be used. 2 "Recent Short Story Theories: Problems in Defini tion," Lohafer and Clarey 29. 3 Quoted by Tzvetan Todorov, "The Origin of Genres," Genres in Discourse, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 13. For the French text, see Les genres du discours (Paris: Seuil, 1978) 44-45: "Seul ' importe le livre, tel qu'il est, loin des genres, en j dehors des rubriques, prose, poesie, roman, t^moignage, i sous lesquelles il refuse de se ranger et auxquelles il denie le pouvoir de lui fixer sa place et de determiner sa forme. Un livre n'appartient plus a un genre, tout livre reldve de la seule litterature, comme si celle-ci detenait par avance, dans leur generality, les secrets et les formules qui permettent seuls de donner a ce qui s'ecrit realite de livre." 4 In Introduction to Poetics (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981), Todorov describes the way in which the genre operates as a system, as follows: "In every period, a certain number of literary types becomes so familiar to the public that the public uses them as keys (in the musical sense) for the interpretation of works; here the genre becomes, according to an expression of Hans Robert Jauss, a 'horizon of expectation.' The writer in his turn internalizes this expectation; the genre becomes for him a 'model of writing.' In other words, the genre is a type that has had a concrete historical exis tence, that has participated in the literary system of a j period" (62). 43 5 Short Story Theories, ed. May 152, 73, 80; Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain, Jovce: The Man. the Work, the Reputation (New York: New York UP, 1956) 57 6 The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to A Literary Genre. trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca: Cornell Up, 1975) 13-14. 7 Refer to Karl-Heinrich Barsh, "Theory and Prehis tory of the Short Story," Origin and Development of the Nineteenth Century Short Story in Germany. France. Russia, and the U.S.A.. diss., U of Colorado, 1977 (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1981) 3. 8 "On Defining the Short Story: The Genre Question," Lohafer and Clarey 46. 9 Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983) 127-128. 10 • Refer to Rene Godenne, La Nouvelle francaise (Paris: PUF, 1974); Martin Swales, The German Nouvelle (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977),; E. K. Bennett, A History of the German Novelle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961). 11 Quoted in Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cam bridge: Harvard UP, 1982). Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblances explains that a family is not neces sarily based upon certain common features shared by all its members, but rather based upon a different variety of resemblances among its members. Wittgenstein explains this phenomenon through the analogy between language games and games in general: These phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all— but they are related to one another in many different ways . . . We see a complicated network of similarities over lapping and criss-crossing . . . I think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than 'family resemblances'; for the various resem blances between members of a family: build, fea tures, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc., etc., overlap and criss-cross in the same way. And I shall say: 'games' form a family. (41) ’ This theory of family resemblance is certainly applicable ' to the genre of the short story. The short story can be j understood as a literary genre analogous to a family 44 whose individual members are closely connected with one another in various ways, without having a common denomi nator shared by all (except shortness). 12 Inasmuch as the word "realism" has gained general acceptance as an inclusive term for designating the real istic and naturalistic movements in the West and Korea and in effect there is no fundamental difference in doctrine between realism and naturalism except for Zola's scientific determinism, I have preferred to use the word "realism" as a broad term for both concepts, though some theorists have referred to the works of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hy6n Chin'gdn as "naturalistic" instead of "realistic." Besides, since Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon are much closer to Flaubert than to Emile Zola, I place them into the tradition of Flaubertian Realism. 13 Guy de Maupassant, "Les Bas-fonds," Chroniaues 2 (Paris: Union Generale D'editions, 1980) 101-104. This essay was originally published in Le Gaulois. 28 juillet 1882. 14 In his book Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986), Wallace Martin gives us a useful sum mary of the existing theoretical views of realism as a period concept: first, the "choice of ordinary or typical subjects"; second, "objectivity" in the sense that "the author should not let personal attitudes intervene in the representation of a narrative"; third, a "doctrine of natural causality, most easily defined through reference to its opposite— the chance, fate, and providence of J romantic fiction"; four, a "philosophical commitment to a i scientific view of man and society, one opposed to ideal- ' ism and traditional religious views" (59-63). In "The ] Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship," after his general survey of the contemporary uses of the term "realism," Rene Wellek comes to the conclusion that "realism ... means 'the objective representation of contemporary social reality.' It claims to be all-in clusive in subject matter and aims to be objective in method, even though this objectivity is hardly ever achieved in practice." Concepts of Criticism (New Haven; Yale UP, 1963) 253. 15 Martin 19. I 1 A ! See Robert Marler, "From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850's," American Liter- ture 46 (1974) 153-69; Engstrom, Alfred G. "The Formal 45 Short Story in France and Its Development before 1850," Studies in Philology (1945) 627-39; 17 Warren S. Walker, "From Raconteur to Writer: Oral Roots and Printed Leaves of Short Fiction," ed. Wendell M. Aycock, The Teller and The Tale: Aspects of The Short Story (Lubbock: Texas Tech P, 1982) 16-17; James Cooper Lawrence, "A Theory of the Short Story," May 60-71. For the subsequent documentation of the articles in The Teller and The Tale: Aspects of the Short Story. the editor's last name, Aycock, will be used. 18 Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. 1972 (New York: Paragon House, 1990) 97. I 19 American Literature 46 (May 1974) 154; Anatomy of , Criticism: Four Essays. 1957 (Princeton: Princeton UP, J 1971) 304-305. 20 La nouvelle francaise (Paris: PUF, 1974) 155. 21 Quoted by Martin Swales, The German Novelle (Pri nceton: Princeton UP, 1977) 30. 22 Quoted from E. K, Bennett, A History of the Ger man Novelle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1961) 9. 23 quoted by Swales 30. 24 Todorov defines the fantastic as a genre charac terized by "the hesitation that the reader is invited to experience with regard to the natural or supernatural ; explanation of the events presented" (Genre in Discourse j 24). Also refer to Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A j Structural Approach to A Literary Genre (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975) 25. 25 Han'quk tanp1von sosol von'cm. Humanities Mono graphs 13 (Seoul: Ilcho-gak, 1975) 5. 26 Quoted in Kang Insuk, Chavon chudi munhak-ron (Seoul: Koryo-won, 1987) 418. Throughout this disserta tion, all the translations of Korean texts are mine except "Fire" and "A Lucky Day." 27 Surprisingly enough, it is difficult to find com prehensive discussion about the short story in Korean criticism, despite the fact that the short story has been the most important literary genre in the evolution of ! modern Korean literature. The majority of literary theo 46 ries are about fiction (sosol) which indiscriminately denotes both the short story and the novel, rather than about the genre of the novel or the short story. For the definitions of the short story by Korean theorists, refer to Lee Jae-Son, 6-11; Cho Yonhyon, munhak kaeron. 1973 (Seoul: Chongum-sa, 1980) 96-7; Kwak Chongwon, "Han'guk kundae sosol ui t'ukchil," 1969, P'vonaron sonchip 2. sin han'guk munhak chonchip 49 (Seoul: Omun-gak, 1976) 9. 28 Let us consider several theoretical emphases on the short story as a romantic genre: The short story derives from the romantic tradition. The metaphyical view that there is more to the world than that which can be apprehended through the senses provides the rationale for the structure of the short story which is a vehicle for the author's probing of the real . . . there is greater similar ity between the short story and the prose romance than there is between the short story and the novel or the short story and the simple narrative. Mary Rohrberger, "The Short Story: A Proposed Definition," May 81-82 The novel can still adhere to the classical concept of civilized society, of man as an animal who lives in a community, as in Jane Austin and Trollope it obviously does; but the short story remains by its very nature remote from the community— romantic, individualistic, and intransigent. Frank O'Connor, May 88 Indeed, since the emergence of the short story as a fully fledged genre in Europe and America coincides, as already noted, with the burgeoning of that pro tean cultural phenomenon known as Romanticism, there would seem to be broad basis for the common remark that the short story is in essence a Romantic form: the Romantic prose form. In its normally limited scope and subjective orientation it corresponds to the lyric poem as the novel does to the epic. Ian Reid, The Short Storv (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1977) 27-28. 20 . , , His use of these terms is based upon, Erich Auer bach 's distinction between the Homeric style and the Hebraic style. Refer to "Odysseus' scar," Mimesis: the j I ] 47 Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974) 3-23. t 30 The way in which May uses Northrop Frye's concept of romance is somewhat in contradiction with the way in which Northrop Frye and Robert Marler uses this term, as I have above mentioned: Northrop Frye discovers that the tale is analogous to the romance whereas the short story to the novel, but May finds that the short story is close to the romance. 31 In the same essay "Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction," Charles May explains the tension between the demands of the short story and those of realism as fol lows: "In the short story, a fictional character may seem to act according to the conventions of verisimilitude and plausibility; however, since the shortness of the form prohibits the realistic presentation of character by extensive metonymic detail, and since the history of the short tale is one in which a character confronts a cru cial evernt or crisis rather than develops over time, the very form and tradition of short fiction militate ..." (66) . i 32 Roman Jakobson, "On Realism in Art," 1921, Lan guage in Literature (Cambridge: Havard UP, 1987) 25; Roland Barthes, "L'Effet de Reel," Communications 11 (1968): 84-89. 33 Charles May, "Introduction," Short Story Theories 8-9; Eileen Baldeshwiler, "The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of A History," May 203-204; Richard Kostelanetz, "Note on the American Short Story Today," 214-225. 34 "Symbol," Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965; Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974) 833. 35 It seems to me that T. S. Eliot’s principle of | "depersonalization"— "The progress of an artist is a : continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of per sonality"— almost entirely corresponds to Flaubert's principle of impersonality. Refer to "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Harzard Adams 783-787. 36 Munhak noniaeng-chip, ed. Im Honyong (Seoul: T'aeguk ch'ulp’an-sa, 1976. i i 48 37 in Dawn to the West. Donald Keene describes Mau passant's influence in Japan in these terms: "Only two or three works by Zola had been translated by the time Natu ralism became a force in Japanese literature and his novels exercised little direct influence on Japanese writers. By contrast, Maupassant's stories, generally retranslated from English versions, were widely known, and many stories, whether so acknowleged or not, were adapations from his works. Imitations not only of his themes but of his techniques contributed directly to the creation of a new Japanese literature. Even writers totally uninterested in Nauralism were attracted to Maupassant . . ." (224). 38 See Keene 224, Cho Chin'gi, Han'guk kundae real ism sosol vdngu (Seoul: Saemun-sa, 1989) 127-131; Kim ! Hakdong, Han'guk munhak fli Piavo munhakchok vonau (Seoul: i Ilchogak, 1982) 214-261. 39 Cho Chin'gi, 138-140; Kim Hakdong 80-81; Paek Choi, 122. 40 Sin Tong-uk, "Hyon Chin'gon and His Literature" Korea Journal (May 1976) 20. Even though the majority of critics see the influence of Maupassant and Flaubert in i Hyon Chin'gon's stories, some of critics such as Kim Hakdong, Na Tohyang, and Cho Chin'gi have observed the impact of Chekhov on Hyon Chin'gon. On the other hand, Kim Songhyon states that Hyon Chin'gon was influenced by Japanese naturalists such as Iwano Homei and Tayama Katai (Cho Namhyon 2 36-237). 41 Cho Namhyon, "Hyon Chin'gon di tanp'yonsosol, kd piui," Han'guk hvondae sosol von'gu (Seoul: Minum-sa, 1987) 232-249. 42 Cho, Namhyon 2 35; quoted by Cho Chin'gi 13 9. 43 Florence L. Walzl, "Dubliners," A Companion to Joyce Studies, ed. Zack Bowen and James F. Carens (West port: Greenwood P, 1984). 44 Axel's Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Litera ture of 1870-1930 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969). 45 Essais en deux langues (Paris: Henri Didier, 1938) 48. 49 46 See Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz, ed., James Joyce Dubliners Text. Criticism, and Notes (New York: Penguin, 1976) 317. The theoretical confrontations about the realism and symbolism of Dubliners can be clearly seen in a controversy over the validity of the symbolic interpretation of "Clay." In 1954, Stanislaus Joyce, Joyce's brother, attacked the prevailing symbolic read ings of Dubliners as "exaggerations," by taking an ex ample from Magalaner's interpretation of "Clay," who finds in the story "three levels of significance on which Maria is successively herself, a witch, and the Virgin Mary." Stanislaus states: "Though such critics are quite at sea, they can still have the immense satisfac tion of knowing that they have dived into deeper depths than the author they are criticising ever sounded. I am in a position to state definitely that my brother had no such subtleties in mind when he wrote the story" (qtd. in Marvin Magalaner and Richard M. Kain 90). For further j discussion about this controversy, refer to Magalaner and Kain 84-90; Scholes and Litz 300-301. 47 In his letter to Grant Richards written in May 5, 1906, Joyce clearly wrote that "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the center of paralysis. I have tried to present it to the j indifferent public under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and publice life" (Scholes and Litz 2 69). His realistic intention, his conception of Dubli ners as a reflection of his society is more evident in his another letter to Grant Ricards (June 23, 1906): "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously believe that you will retard the course of civilization in Ire land by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking glass" (Scholes and Litz 286). 48 Herbert Gorman, James Joyce (New York: Farrar & ! Rinehart, Inc., 1939) 181; Richard Ellmann, James Joyce 1 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982) 209-210 50 CHAPTER TWO FROM RECOGNITION TO EPIPHANY: A STUDY OF PLOT The Two Poles in the Modern Short Story In the earlier history of the modern short story, plot was considered as the most important element of this j genre. In 1884, Brander Matthews, the first theorist who 1 claimed the difference in essence between the short story | i and the novel and coined "short story" as a generic term, asserted that "The Short-story is nothing if there is no story to tell;— one might almost say that a Short-story is nothing if it has no plot . . . a Short-story in which nothing happens at all is an absolute impossibility" (55- 6). Similarly, in 1924, B. M. Ejxenbaum stated that " j i 'Short story' is a term referring exclusively to plot, one assuming a combination of two conditions: small size and the impact of plot on the ending. Conditions of this sort produce something totally distinct in aim and de vices from the novel."1 These views of Matthews and Ejxenbaum are based upon Edgar Allan Poe's single effect theory in "Review of Twice-Told Tales" and represent the j traditional theoretical view of the short story. In contrast to this earlier theoretical emphasis on plot, from the middle of this century onwards, the modern short story has been frequently charged with or charac- 51 terized as the absence of plot or story. The reader's impression of contemporary short stories in 1945 may be, as A. L. Bader observes, that "the modern short story is plotless, static, fragmentary, amorphous— frequently a mere character sketch or vignette, or a mere reporting of a transient moment, or the capturing of a mood or nuanee- -everything, in fact, except a story."2 In 1980, at the Comparative Literature Symposium on the aspects of the short story, Gordon Weaver summarized the contemporary anthologists' view of the modern short story as follows: "Modern short fiction is characterized as having freed itself from 'the tyranny of plot,' replacing formulaic ! pattern of introduction, precipitating action, rising action, climax, and denouement with 'epiphany.' The unity of short fiction of the modern era is announced as having been achieved by symbol, style, and tone."3 In t other words, the contemporary short story seems to be \ ! distinguished from the classic (or traditional) short story to the extent that it frees itself from plot and instead concentrates on the internal movement of an individual and poetic imagery or atmosphere.4 In this historical context of the modern short story from the plot story to the plotless story, Maupassant and j Joyce have been often considered by many critics as the ! 1 ; two central figures standing for opposite poles. Maupa- 52 ssant's stories have been usually known as the stories of narrative action whose primary concern is with the drama tic presentation of the incident or overt action with emphasis on the impact of plot on the denouement. On the other hand, the epiphanic stories of Joyce have been viewed as typical of the modern short story transgressing the traditional norms of the short story. Even some cri tics have appraised Joyce's technique of epiphany as a revolutionary method against the traditional device of denouement because it results in "the shifting of the focal point of the story from its end . . . to a spot i within the body of the text, usually near [but not at] the end."5 In Joyce: The Man. the Work, the Reputation. Marvin Magalaner and R. Kain describes the essential differences between Maupassant and Joyce as follows: Joyce and Maupassant are really quite different in their approach to the short story. In that genre, the Frenchman is usually the celebrator of violent emotion, passion, love, undying hate; of flamboyant, startling action . . . Joyce, on the other hand, seldom raises his voice as he examines the less overt manifestations of human behavior: the inhibi- ! tions, the frustrations, and the disappointments of the ordinary person. The conclusion of a story by the French Writer finds the lives of his characters sharply altered in a very obvious way . . . In just the opposite way, Joyce gains his effects. It is the shock of having nothing happen, overtly at least, that brings home sharply the emptiness of the lives that he reveals . . . To maintain the interest of his readers in story after story whose center is sensuous animal passion, Maupassant must supply an artificial device, the trick ending. This he does with great skill; yet artful contrivance does not entirely make up for the profusion of artificial jolts that he uses to give point and climax to his 53 tales. Joyce would never ask his readers to accept, as the Frenchman does, a series of extremely un likely actions leading up to a melodramatic denoue ment. (58-9) Thus, Magalaner and Kain not only see the differences between Maupassant and Joyce in their preference of sub ject matter, but also in their narrative techniques. Opposed to Joyce's stories, Maupassant's stories are criticized by them for "sensuous animal passion," "arti ficial device, the trick ending," "extremely unlikely actions," "melodramatic denouement." This unfairly harsh criticism of Maupassant, especially prevalent in the American and English critical tradition, may be due to a recurring association of Maupassant with such stories of trick (surprise) ending as "La parure" and "En famille." However, it should be noticed that of Maupassant's three hundred stories there are a large number of Joycean sto ries whose focus is on the capturing of subtle internal movement and the poetic power of style and tone rather j than on extraordinary events and the final effect of surprise denouement. The simultaneous existence of the stories of overt action and the seemingly plotless stories in Maupassant can be interpreted as resulting from his conflict as craftsman between his strong attach ment to the tale of tradition and his perception of modernity. As a member of the naturalist group Soirees I de Medan and the disciple of Flaubert, Maupassant was j 54 fully aware of the decline of plot and the importance of style and psychology in the future development of fic tion. Even though in the contemporary short story the condemnation of plot has been often in conjunction with the rejection of realism, historically, the artistic attempt to free short stories from the tyranny of plot and to concentrate on the inner power of style and lyric ism in prose can be said to start with Flaubertian real ism or naturalism. Acknowledged as the precursor of the anti-novel by such writers as Natalie Sarraute and A. Robbe-Grillet, Flaubert has been famous for his dream of a book about nothing: "un livre sur rien, un livre sans attache exterieure, qui se tiendrait de lui-meme par la force interne de son style, comme la terre sans etre soutenue se tient en l'air, un livre qui n'aurait presque i pas de sujet ou du moins ou le sujet serait presque ! invisible."6 Like Flaubert, a number of French writers around 188 0s, such as E. Goncourt and Zola, dreamed of a pure novel about nothing in which the incident or the narrative action, along with such traditional plot ele- | ments as climax and denouement, is of little importance j and whose qualities are too different from those of the traditional novel to be called "roman" (Vial 32). Andre Vial sees this literary trend as the novelistic change 55 from the novel of invention to the novel of imagination. Vial's view is based upon M. C. F. Ramuz1s following distinction between invention and imagination. L 1invention tend a l'acte et s1interesse a l'acte, elle s'entend a en prevoir et a en utiliser les consequences, les multipliant ainsi par elles-memes. L 1invention est evenement, elle se delecte a nouer une intrique, k en compliquer, k en diversifier les peripeties et a ne la denouer qu'apres les avoir epuisees. L 1invention est dvnamiaue. comme on dit: elle reside dans un mouvement constant, organise de maniere a susciter, maintenir ou renouveler 1' in- teret ou meme frequemment la simple curiosite du lecteur. L 1imagination au contraire est contemp- ! lative. Dans cette longue suite d'evenements dont i 11 invention se plait a combiner les peripeties, elle ! en choisit un qu'elle immobilise; la ou 1'invention accelere, elle, elle fixe et retient. Elle se nourrit du spectacle qu'elle s'offre a elle-meme. Elle tend a se confondre avec l'objet qu'elle evoque, c'est-a-dire que le sujet tend a se con fondre avec l'objet . . . L'imagination d'une chose sans realite fait une chose plus reelle que la realite meme. (30) In brief, Ramuz divides the mental faculties of the novelist into the two contradictory forces: invention as dynamic force and imagination as contemplative force. J . . I According to his definition, invention is the faculty of making an incident, a line of action, or a well con structed plot having climax and denouement. By contrast, imagination is the faculty of immobilising or concentrat ing on certain moment, with the help of memory, without minding greatly the temporal sequence or causality of the events. Vial claims that, from the generation of real ists and naturalists onwards, the novel has become the 1 56 product of imagination rather than of invention. In particular, according to Vial, "Avec Flaubert, avec les Goncourt, avec Zola, 1' 'invention' cesse en meme temps de presider a l'agencement des structures romanesques et de fournir la matiere du roman" (31). In this respect, it may be said that, since Flaubertian realism or natural ism, the great concern of modern fiction has been how to free itself from traditional plot or the line of narra tive action and how to find a new formal method of pre- j I senting artistic material or ideas of life. Maupassant himself was keenly aware of this techni cal change in modern fiction. In "Le Roman," he talks i about the differences between the novelist of yesterday and the novelist of today, with emphasis on the change of plot construction.7 He describes the arrangement of the incidents in the traditional novel as follows, Les incidents sont disposes et gradues vers le point j culminant et l'effet de la fin, qui est un evenement . capital et decisif, satisfaisant toutes les curiosi- j tes eveillees au debut, mettant une barriere a l'in- teret, et terminant se completement l'histoire racontee qu'on ne desire plus savoir ce que devien- dront, le lendemain, les personnages les plus at- tachants. (49) By contrast, the compositional method of the modern novel is seen by Maupassant as the rejection of the line of actions gravitating towards denouement: Au lieu de machiner une aventure et de la derouler de fagon a la rendre int^ressante jusqu'au denoue ment, il prendra son ou ses personnages a une cer- taine periode de leur existence et les conduira, par 57 des transitions naturelles, jusqu'd. la periode suivante . . . tous les fils si minces, si secrets, presque invisibles, employes par certains artiste modernes a la place de la ficelle unique qui avait nom: L 1intrigue. (50-1) Ironically enough, in spite of his keen awareness of the compositional method in modern fiction, many critics have frequently treated Maupassant as the novelist of yester day rather than the novelist of today, as the novelist of "invention" rather than the novelist of "imagination," i relying upon their partial reading of Maupassant's ! stories of overt action. On the other hand, Joyce's stories of epiphany have been somewhat overevaluated as the revolutionary work or the forerunner of the contem porary short story. With reference to this theoretical discussion about the shift of plot significance in the modern short story, the present chapter will examine the complexity and diversity of plot construction in the realistic narra tives of Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon. In so doing, I will try to trace the formal evolution of the modern short story, the essential qualities of the short story different from the novel, and also the impact of Flaubert and Maupassant on Joyce and Hyon Chin'gon. Prior to my examination of plot construction in the realistic short stories, I will outline how short story writers and theorists have defined and understood the term "plot," inasmuch as there has been no consensus about this term among scholars. Plot in Aristotle's Poetics and Short Storv Theories When we try to examine a given story in terms of plot, first of all, we become confronted with one fun damental question, that is, how to define and understand the term "plot" which will function as a heuristic tool: j What is plot? Is it a narrative or a compositional prin- ! J ciple? What is the difference between plot and story? Is plot a prescriptive rule or a descriptive tool? These questions are more complex and troublesome than they seem to be. For, despite the fact that plot has since Aristotle been considered as a very important element in the understanding and making of fiction and drama, there has been much critical disagreement about this term from Aristotle through E. M. Forster to Russian formalists. In Poetics. Aristotle states that "the plot is the imitation of the action— for by plot I here mean the arrangement of the incidents.8 According to this defini tion, plot is a descriptive term for designating the l j compositional principle of arranging and connecting the [ incidents in the work. However, the term "plot" has 1 I , , been frequently used as a prescriptive canon for the 59 evaluation of the work of art rather than as a descrip tive term for simply designating the arrangement of the incidents itself. This aspect is largely due to Aris totle's idea of the proper structure of a well-con structed plot. Aristotle's emphasis on causality, proba bility, unity of action and his high evaluation of action i and plot as opposed to character have greatly influenced i J the theoretical discussion of plot to the extent that the transgression of one of these rules has generally been [ considered as the absence of plot itself, except in Russian formalism. For example, E. M. Forster defines story as "a narrative of events arranged in their time- seauence" and plot as "a narrative of events, the em phasis falling on causality'': in brief, the narrative of "and then?" versus the narrative of "why?"9 This dis tinction between story and plot with respect to causality I ! is rather limited because causality is not a sine qua non of plot, but one of the important elements for a well constructed plot, according to Aristotle. To some ex tent, it may be argued that plot is a problem of "how?" rather than "why?" Whereas Forster's emphasis is on causal relationships between events, Scholes and Kel logg's definition of plot concentrates on the sequential narrative elements or action itself, as opposed to the ! concept of character. According to them, while story is 60 "a general term for character and action in narrative form, plot is defined as "a more specific term intended to refer to action alone, with the minimum possible reference to character" and as "the dynamic, sequential • . . 10 • ■ element m narrative literature." According to Russian Formalists, Forster's two different concepts of plot and story and Scholes and Kellogg's concept of plot seem to be closer to story (fabula) than to plot (sjuzet). Tomashevsky defines story as "the actual chronological and casual order of events" or "the action itself." For him, regardless of causality, plot seems to be the com positional principle of transforming the story (the narrative content) into an artistic work or "how the j reader learns of the action": "In the plot the events are j arranged and connected according to the orderly sequence ! in which they were presented in the work."11 This idea i i of plot is not remote from Aristotle's simple definition of plot or muthos as "the arrangement of the incidents". To both of them, plot is basically the fashioning or interweaving of the story or narrative actions. Just as Aristotle's idea of plot has been influen tial to modern theoretical conceptions of plot, so Aris totle's prescriptive rules for a well constructed plot have extensively served as the foundation of theories and practices of the modern short story: for example, Poe's 61 principle of single effect, the formulaic rules of the German novelle. Matthews' philosophy of the short story, O. Henry's formula, and even Joyce's theory of epiphany. Considered as the generic foundation of the short story, Poe's principle of single effect is to a large extent a variation of Aristotle's theory of plot or muthos.12 A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accom modate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents— he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design . . . Undue brevity is just as exceptionable here as in the poem; but undue ' length is yet more to be avoided. (48-9; emphasis added) Poe1s idea of one preestablished design corresponds to his concept of plot: Poe defines plot as "that from which no component atom can be removed, and in which none of the component atoms can be displaced, without ruin to the whole."13 This definition exactly reiterates Aristotle's idea of unity of plot that "the plot, being an imitation : of an action, must imitate one action and that a whole, j the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed" (Poetics ch.8). Besides his emphasis on the organic union of narrative components, 62 his condemnation of undue brevity and undue length seems to be influenced by Aristotle’s demand for Ma certain magnitude” or "a certain length which can be easily embraced by the memory" (ch.7). This structural resem blance between short story and drama with respect to plot even leads Brander Matthews to assert that "the Short- story fulfills the three false unities of the French classic drama: it shows one action, in one place, on one j i day" (52). While Poe and Matthews are chiefly concerned with the structural unity of narrative components or actions, German theorists of the novelle are more concrete and i j systematic in their application of Aristotle's principles of plot to the theoretical discussion of the novelle. Of the German theories of the novelle. Ludwig Tieck's I theory of turning-point (Wendepunk) is closely related to j I Aristotle's idea of the complex plot in which the hero's j r change of fortune involves reversal of situation (per- ■ peteia) or recognition (anagnorisis), or both (ch. 10). In 182 9, Tieck asserts that "it [a genuine novellei will always have that extraordinary and striking turning-point (Wendepunk) which distinguished it from every other narrative form" (qtd. in Bennett 11). Tieck's theory of turning-point has been influential to both the making of the novelle and the reading or understanding of this 63 genre. In A history of the German Novelle. Bennett men tions about the shrewdness of Tiek's perception: In fact a Novelle may be almost anything provided it have that turning-point in its development at which the action takes an unexpected turn and develops, to a conclusion which is unforeseen and yet logically convincing . . . It is indeed not difficult to find in most Novellen a turning-point, and many writers on the theory of the Novelle have insisted upon this as a characteristic feature of the genre . . . The particular point is sometimes alluded to as the Wen depunk, or the Pointe or the Spitz. It is often compared with the perpeteia, or change from good to bad fortune in tragedy, as indeed there is a defi nite resemblance between the Novelle and the Drama in construction, the Novelle bv its very succinct ness having a certain dramatic quality of tension and swiftness of catastrophe. (12) This observation is also certainly true of the majority of the classical short stories of Hawthorne, Poe, Balzac, and Maupassant. For example, in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," the temporary resurrection of Madeline Usher serves as a striking turning point to result in the fall of Roderick Usher and the eventual destruction of I i ! I the House of Usher; in Flaubert's "La legende de saint j l Julien 1'hospitalier," Julien's murder of his parents by i ! mistake dramatically changes his fortune from prosperity to adversity, from a powerful ruler to a beggar. Another important observation of the German theorist of the novelle is Spielhagen's stress on the revelation of the character's inner qualities: "It will always be the specific quality of the Novelle as distinguished from ! the novel . . . that it brings into contact characters 64 who are already fully developed, who merely reveal or as it were unfold themselves in the course of that contact" (qtd. in Bennett 16). In the novelle, the impact of the central event on the character has the effect of reveal ing his inner qualities which were inherent but not yet recognized before the event. This idea of revelation largely corresponds to Aristotle's idea of recognition as "a change from ignorance to knowledge" (ch. 11). Aris totle argues that "The best form of recognition is coin cident with a reversal of situation...the recognition i i which is most intimately connected with the plot and action is, as we have said, the recognition of persons" (ch. 11). Aristotle's notions of reversal (peripeteia) j and recognition (anagnorisis) as the two essential ele- I j ments of the complex plot are extensively applicable to a great number of well-written short stories from the tales of Decameron up to Borges' stories such as "The Shape of Sword" and "The Garden of Forking Paths." Joyce's theory of epiphany is not remote from Aris totle's notion of recognition and Spielhagen's idea of revelation. Even though it is uncertain whether Joyce conceived of the short story as the genre of epiphany, many theorists such as Theodore Spencer and Morris Beja | have considered Joyce's theory of epiphany as central to the understanding of Dubliners (Baker and Staley 10; Beja | 65 716). In short story criticism, the term "epiphany" has been frequently used for designating a new kind of story freed from the traditional plot.14 Indeed, Joyce's theory of epiphany is extensively applicable to most stories in Dubliners. In Stephen Hero. Joyce expresses his theory of aesthetic apprehension through Stephen15: Bv an epjphanv herStephen! meant a sudden spiri tual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. . . . The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. . . . First we recognize that the object is one integral thing, then we recognize that it is an organized composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is ex quisite. when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness. leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the com- j monest object, the structure of which is so ad- | justed, seems to us radiant. The object achieves j its epiphany. (289; emphasis added) Basically, Joyce's aesthetic theory of epiphany is not quite different from Aristotle's principle of the unity of plot and Poe's concept of plot in that all of them em phasize the structural union or wholeness of components gravitating towards the special point, whether this cen tripetal point is a moment of reversal, or a moment of recognition or epiphany. However, Joyce's concept of epiphany is more complex than the notion of recognition. For the theory of epiphany possibly involves several different narrative interactions between the character, the reader, and the text, whereas Aristotle’s notion of recognition mostly remains within the fictional (or diegetic) world, as an interaction between characters or between the character and the incident. In Joyce's theory of epiphany, as Don Gifford points out, "it is not clear whether the "soul" which is made manifest is in herent in the object itself, or in the artist's response to the object's potential as metaphor, or in the response ! of a character within a fiction, or in the response of the reader to a revelatory moment in the fiction."16 This uncertainty becomes clearer when epiphany is under stood in connection with his idea of epicleti (an error for epicleses or epicleseis). While comparing his pro cess of writing Dubliners as the ritual process of epi cleti in which the Holy Ghost is besought to transform the host into the body and the blood of Christ, Joyce metaphorically explained his artistic principle to his brother Stanislaus: "I am trying . . . to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent artistic life . . . for their men tal, moral, and spiritual lift."17 This concept of epi- j phany extends the Aristotelian notion of recognition so far as to encompass the recognitions of both the charac ter and the reader. As a result, the objects of recogni- 67 tion or revelation (or the epiphanised object) can be not only the characters or the incidents but also the meta phoric meanings of the whole narrative or the structural union of narrative parts. All these theories of plot and the short story lead us to one conclusion: the short story is a genre of plot, if we define the term "plot" as a compositional principle of transforming seemingly separate narrative components into a new artistic whole. In this context, the short story can be conceived of as a metaphoric genre. For, as Paul Ricoeur points out, plot as the synthesis of parts I I 1 is close to metaphor: "par la vertu de I1intrigue, des j i ! j buts, des causes, des hasards sont rassembles sous I1unite temporelle d'une action totale and complete. C'est cette synthese de 1'heterogene qui rapproche le | I recit de la m^taphore. Dans les deux cas, du nouveau--du non encore dit, de 11 inedit— surgit dans le language.1,18 ! To a great extent, the act of reading the short story is i a process of discovering the new meaning, the not yet told, the unwritten ("du nouveau— du non encore dit, de 1'inedit) beneath the surface narrative (This issue will be discussed in detail in chapter five concerning the symbolic structure of the realistic short story). 68 Flaubert versus Maupassant in Plot As I have earlier mentioned, Maupassant's stories have been generally considered the story of plot or the story of "invention" rather than the modern short story or the story of "imagination." Even though this criti cal view is too partial to be applied to all his stories, there are a large number of stories that conform to such conventional rules as Aristotelian complex plot, Poe's principle of single effect, and the formulaic theories of the German novelle. The most well-known or notorious example of such stories is "La parure," the one which most short story anthologists have almost without exception selected as very typical of Maupassant among his three hundred stories, whether they like it or not. The strong im pression this story makes on the reader's mind is largely due to the shocking final effect of the denouement, referred to as "trick ending" or "surprise ending." The plot structure of this story forms a striking contrast I with the stories of his mentor, Flaubert, in spite of the thematic similarities between "La parure" and Madame Bovary. The majority of Maupassant's stories are quite different from Flaubert's in respect of plot construc tion, though they are similar in other respects. As a writer of the short story, Maupassant deeply placed himself into the tradition of this genre, whereas Flau bert 1s stories are hardly in conformity with the conven tions of the tradition. "La parure" is a fine example of realistic fiction presenting the mediocre life of the petty bourgeois. Thematically, this story has much in common with Madame Bovarv to the extent of being a parody of the latter: for example, the romantic dreams and vanities of the heroines, their deep dissatisfaction with their petty bourgeois life and mediocre husband (especially at their dinnertime), the temporal fulfillment of their desire and dream through the invitation to a ball, the tragic conse quences of this event, and their disaster due to money. ; i The great difference between "La parure" and Madame Bovarv lies in the story development after the ball. Confronted with her misfortune and financial misery, Madame Loisel courageously decided to become a realist as frugal as Felicite of "Un coeur simple" rather than an extravagant, escapist Emma Bovary. However, "La parure" is more tragic than Madame Bovary because the revolution- j ary change of Mathilde Loisel from a vain Madame Bovary ! | to a sincere Felicite eventually turns out fruitless and 1 i i ends with a shocking recognition of the absurdity of her life, the irony of her fate. 70 All narrative components of this story form a visible, single line of action, gravitating towards the final point of recognition of the truth. The line of action develops in association with the necklace or parure19: (1) her initial feeling of lack of jewels; (2) her borrowing of the necklace from her rich friend for the ball; (3) her loss of that necklace; (4) her replace ment of her lost necklace by a similar one; (5) her debts due to that necklace; (6) her eventual recognition of the truth that the borrowed necklace was a fake. This single line of action corresponds to an Aristotelian structure of the complex plot or a complex action in which the change of fortune is accompanied by reversal of * * * 20 situation, or by recognition, or by both. Furthermore, the sequences of action are largely in conformity with Freytag's pyramidal dramatic pattern21: Mathilde's an guish due to the lack of jewels (complication or rising action), her borrowing of the necklace for the ball (climax), the loss of the necklace (crisis), her strug gles with financial misery (falling action), her dis- i covery of the truth (catastrophe). The catastrophic ending of this story evokes to the reader the feeling of surprise and pity or the effect of "punch," to borrow Sean O'Faolain's terms. 71 According to Andre Vial, the raison d'etre of the short story consists in this kind of shocking effect (or c o u p de fouet) of the ending on the reader and Maupas sant 1s technique aims at this final effect (444). In fact, like "La parure," a great number of Maupassant's stories depend upon the dramatic pattern of the complex plot in which the final moment provokes the effect of i i shock and surprise through the revelation of truth or reversal of situation: for example, "Sur l'eau," "En famille," "Les Tombales," "La ficelle," "Un ldche," "Chalie," "Histoire d'une fille de ferme," "Miss Har riet," "La dot," "L'inutile beaute," "Rencontre," "Aux champs," "Un parricide," "La confession," "Le petit," "Le diable." The plot construction in these stories leads us ! to agree with Exjenbaum's view of the fundamental dif ference between the novel and the short story. He writes, "It is only natural, then, that surprise endings should be a very rare occurrence in the novel(if encountered, then they most likely testify to the in fluence of the short story) . . . The short story, on the contrary, gravitates expressly toward the maximal unex pectedness of a finale concentrating around itself all i that has preceded it. The novel is a long walk through various localities, with a peaceful return trip assumed; the short story, a climb up a mountain, the aim of which 72 is a view from on high” (232). In fact, this technique has been employed as the most important device of story telling in the traditional tales and stories, for ex ample, the tales of Boccaccio, Balzac, Hawthorne, Merimee, Pushkin, Poe, and 0. Henry. This feature of Maupassant's technique sharply con trasts with his mentor Flaubert's technique. Flaubert's i stories hardly constitute any dramatic plot centering On the effect of the surprise denouement. In "Un coeur simple," there seems to be no certain culmination point which offers the reader "a view from on high." Instead ; of forming a pyramidal structure, Flaubert's narrative develops in a flat, static, repetitive way. This story concerning the life of a faithful servant is composed of a series of recurrent events such as loves, separations, deaths, pneumonia, and the processions of Corpus Christi. The main incidents of this story can be enumerated as follows: Felicite's love for Theodore (her lover) and his disappearance, the first Corpus Cristi, her love for Victor (her nephew) and his leaving and death, her love for Virginie (the daughter of her mistress) and their i separation and Virginie's death due to pneumonia, her care of Polish refugees and Pere Colmiche and his death, her love for Loulou (the parrot) and Loulou's temporary disappearance and death, the recurrent processions of 73 Corpus Cristi, her mistress Madame Aubain's death due to pneumonia, the last Corpus Cristi and Felicite's death due to pneumonia. Thus, "Un coeur simple" does not show any dramatic pattern based upon the complex plot: no reversal of situation, no revelation, no culmination point, and no surprise denouement. Instead of the drama tic, complex plot construction, this story presents the i mediocre life of a simple maidservant through repetition and cumulative impact of similar events. By so doing, it reveals the simple mind of Felicite and the gradual degradation of her objects of love from Theodore to the I ; stuffed parrot. Therefore, it is very difficult to ! summarize this story according to causal relationships between the incidents. If possible, the story can be summed up according to the order of "and then?" rather than "why?" To some extent, it may be said that the i * macrostructure of this story contains no plot, if we take E. M. Forster's definition of plot. Hence, Andre Vial observes that in the modern short story the true follower of Flaubert is Catherine Mansfield rather than Maupas sant: "C'est plutot en Catherine Mansfield, si attentive a emousser ses finales, qu'il convient de chercher la vraie descendance de Flaubert dans l'art du court recit" (444) . 74 Flaubert's penchant for repetition and cumulative impact of events can be also seen in "La legende de Saint Julien 1'Hospitalier.1 1 Julien's earlier life is composed of a series of killings: Killing a mouse, killing in the hunt, killing in battle, and killing his parents. The catastrophic moment (the killing of his parents) accom panied by a reversal of situation and the recognition of truth comes in the middle, not in the end. Even though Flaubert's handling of plot is quite different from such conventional short stories as "La parure" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," "La legende de saint Julien 1'hospitalier" and "Un coeur simple" does not radically deviate from the tradition of the short story in that these stories still constitute a certain thematic unity and the impression of totality through the cumulative impact of the recurrent events on the lives of the prota gonists until their deaths. i Of Flaubert's three tales, it is "Herodias" that I most radically subverts the traditional notion of plot, the principle of single effect, and unity of impression. This story based upon a biblical episode of John the Baptist's death constantly distracts the reader's atten tion from the main line of action and leads the reader into a verbal labyrinth of proliferating details. To i some extent, through "Herodias," Flaubert seems to strug- 75 gle to fulfil his desire to "create a book which requires only the writing of sentences."22 Despite several drama tic elements— the conflicts between Herodias and Herode, the seeming technical conformity to the three unities of the classical drama, and the decapitation of Iaokannan— "Herodias" strikes the reader as undramatic, fragmentary, and anticlimactic. In contrast to his lengthy descrip tion of the insignificant objects (such as citadel, armaments, and orgiastic cuisine), Flaubert does not fully inform the reader of the line of actions and events and treats some of important actions as if they were insignificant. A good example of this is the scene in which Salome requests Herode to give her the head of Iaokannan as a reward for her dancing (ch. 3)23: Elle (Salome) ne parlait pas. Ils (Herode and Salo me) se regardaient. Un claquement de doigts se fit dans la tribune. Elle y monta, reparut; et, en zezayant un peu, pro- nonga ces mots, d'un air enfantin: — Je veux que tu me donnes dans un plat, la tete.. Elle avait oublie le nom, mais reprit en souriant: — La tete de Iaokanann! In this passage, as Gerard Genette shrewdly points out, Flaubert treats "in a quite elliptical manner the essen- I tial link in the chain of events, the knowledge of the order given by Herodias to Salome to lay claim to the head of Jokanaan."24 From this passage, without the | knowledge of the biblical episode, the "hypotext" of "Herodias," the reader is hardly able to know clearly 76 whose snapping of fingers let Salome (who is very ig norant of Iaokanann so far as to barely know the name of her victim) request such a cruel reward. This effect of "demotivation1 1 in "Herodias" makes a striking contrast with the orthodox principle of single effect and prefi gures the decisive decline of traditional plot in the contemporary short story. Considering Maupassant's long apprenticeship with Flaubert, it is natural that among Maupassant's almost three hundred stories, even though the stories of the complex plot or overt action are well-known, there exist a large number of stories in which the line of action does not constitute a vertical, pyramidal pattern with a sharp point and in which the denouement hardly evokes any surprise or shock to the reader. For example, "Le papa de Simon," "Hautot pere et fils," "Par un soir de prin- temps," "Solitude," "Le vagabond," "Une partie de cam- pagne," "Clair de lune," "Au printemps," "Menuet," "La nuit," "Regret," and "Mon oncle Jules." Instead of dramatic, shocking effect, these stories evoke a feeling of sweetness, melancholy, or sadness: in short, "poetry" rather than "punch," to borrow Sean O'Faolain's term. In these stories plot is simple rather than complex: no reversal of situation, no recognition. The incidents unfold in a flat, calm, and contemplative manner; and the 77 | unity of impression mostly comes from poetic atmosphere, tone, and style. In Maupassant, the simultaneous exis tence of the two kinds of stories— stories of invention and stories of imagination (according to Ramuz1s defini tion)— reflects Maupassant's conflicts as craftsman between his strong attachment to the conventions of the short story and his perception of the future development of this genre. Maupassant seems to be keenly aware of the importance of tradition and the necessity of artistic innovation: he is a "Romancier d'aujourd'hui" greatly indebted to the "Romancier d'hier."25 i From Recognition to Epiphany: the Impact of Flaubert and Maupassant on Joyce Joyce's stories subtly employ the two different methods of arranging the events: one is Maupassantian, i I pyramidal, and dramatic plot construction and the other is Flaubertian, repetitive, cumulative arrangement of events. At first sight, his stories seem to be closer to Flaubert1s composition in "Un coeur simple" rather than to Maupassant's. For, thematically, Joyce's stories never present such extraordinary dramatic actions as parricide, brutal murder, execution, revenge, and betray al as we can often find in Maupassant' stories. Instead, like "Un coeur simple," Joyce's stories are composed of 78 I seemingly insignificant ordinary events without any striking moment of the c o u p de theatre. Furthermore, most stories in Dubliners hardly produce the final effect of surprise denouement, namely the effect of ''punch" or "coup de fouet." In place of the shocking effect of final moment, it achieves a certain effect through the cumulation or repetition of a series of similar events. For example, "Counterparts" consists of the chain of recurrent hapless events that happened to Farrington; "Encounter" and "Araby" lead the reader to anticipate the eventual failure or disillusionment of the protagonist through a series of disappointing events; "Clay" is j composed of a series of Maria's mistakes and a number of missing items. Thus, Joyce's stories seem at first sight to strike the reader as quite different from the conven tional stories of the nineteenth century because of the absence of dramatic incidents or overt actions and be- i cause of the juxtaposition or the repetition of seemingly insignificant events. Nevertheless, beneath this repetitive, cumulative construction of the events, we can perceive the internal, I subtle, yet dramatic arrangement of the incidents. Joyce's method of handling incidents is less visible than the traditional short story because his plot construction is more subtle and complex than such stories as "La 79 parure," inasmuch as the actions in Dubliners is almost completely internal and psychological. This modernity in Joyce1s plot construction corresponds to Maupassant!s perception of the technical differences between modernity and tradition. Maupassant observes that "On comprend qu'une semblable manidre de composer, si differente de l'ancien procede visible a tous les yeux, dSroute souvent les critiques, et qu'ils ne decouvrent pas tous les fils si minces, si secrets, presque invisibles, employes par certains artistes modernes a la place de la ficelle t I unique qui avait nom: l'Intrigue" ("Le roman" 50-1). In | other words, even though nothing seems to happen on the | surface because of the absence of the visible single line I of action, Joyce's stories are subtly composed of the fine, secret, almost invisible threads of actions. These threads constitute a dramatic, complex, well-constructed plot, even in Aristotelian perspective. One of the best example of such plot construction is "The Dead." The story is largely in conformity with the three unities of the classic drama: the unities of time, place, and action. The spatial setting of "The Dead" is limited to Dublin (the house of Gabriel's aunts' and Gresham Hotel); its temporal setting to the limit of | j several hours from late night till dawn (one of the days of Christmas season). As for the unity of action, it may 80 J I be argued that this story does not confirm to this rule since it is composed of multiple threads rather than of one single line of action. Yet, inasmuch as all the threads of narrative action contribute to the final epi- phanic moment of Gabriel's self-discovery and become properly unified in term of the death motif, "The Dead” can be considered as constituting a certain unity of action and plot as well as unity of impression. More over, the internal movement of actions in "The Dead" almost follows the dramatic pattern of the complex plot with reversal of situation and recognition of truth, though this movement is not so much visible as in the i ; traditional stories of Balzac, Poe, Maupassant, and O. Henry. The complex plot of "The Dead" is in conjunction with Flaubertian plot centering on the cumulative impact of the recurrent events. The line of actions contribut ing to the denouement can be summed up as follows: I (1) Gabriel's conflict with Lily, the caretaker's daughter, at the entrance. After his brief conver sation with Lily, he feels that "He was still dis composed by the girl's bitter and sudden retort" (179) . (2) Gretta's sarcastic remarks about Gabriel's solicitude for health, his wearing of goloshes, and his inclination to the continent. (3) Miss Ivors' insulting banter about Gabriel's j indifference to his own nation and his penchant for the Continent. She called him "West Briton." (4) Gabriel's self-justifying speech in praise of his native tradition and his regaining of his com posure and high spirits. (5) Gabriel's epiphanic discovery of Gretta's hidden enchanting beauty and his intense desire for his wife. 81 (6) Gabriel's frustration caused by his wife's shocking disclosure of her romantic, adolescent love with Michael Furey and his premature death due to his passionate love for Gretta. (7) The epiphanic moment of Gabriel's painful self-discovery and his pathetic recognition of human beings as the living-dead. Of these inner actions, the narrative sections of com plication from (1) to (3) are repetitively concerned with Gabriel's increasing conflicts with the female characters standing for Irish tradition and his desire to escape from the party to the outside, from Dublin to the Con tinent. The fourth and fifth sections present his strug gling efforts to self-justify his lack of patriotism through his praise of the tradition as well as his tem porary success in recovering his lost composure and spi rits. As the part of denouement, the sixth section pre- t ! sents the reversal of situation from his temporary rise to his eventual fall, from his illusory hopes of reviving their honeymoon to his painful disillusionment; the last section consists of a series of recognitions of truth: the cause of his wife's rapture at the song and of her sadness, his wife's strong attachment to her adolescent romance with Michael Fury, the reason for her desire to travel to Galway, his bitter self-awareness of his own vanity and ludicrousness, his recognition of human lives as on-going death, and the necessity to "set out on his journey westward [to his native tradition]." Thus, the | 82 i I almost invisible threads of inner actions centering t I around Gabriel1s mind are neatly interconnected and arranged so far as to contribute to the dramatic effect of the denouement and hence constitute a certain unity of impression. Of course, it cannot be said that all fifteen sto ries of Dubliners internalize the dramatic pattern of the complex plot as "The Dead" does. Some of stories do not reveal any reversal of situation or any moment of recog nition: for example, "After the Race," "A Mother," "Ivy Day in the Committee Room." However, a majority of his stories implicitly or explicitly center on a certain moment of recognition, revelation, or "epiphany," to borrow Joyce’s term, even though the moment of recogni tion hardly executes any impact to reverse a given situa- tion. The moment of revelation or epiphany can pos- I ; sibly occur on two different levels, the level of the I character and the level of the reader. Ian Reid observes i that "If a significant revelation does occur, it may involve a perceived moment of truth for a character, but frequently it will be for readers only" (56) . In "Araby" and "The Dead," the moment of epiphany occurs on i 1 the level of the character: the boy-narrator in "Araby" and Gabriel recognize their vanity and stupidity through the epiphanic moment of self-revelation, in the end. In 83 "Clay" the moment of epiphany seems to occur in the mind | of the reader and the focal character Joe rather than in the mind of the heroine Maria.27 In this story, the object of the epiphany or the object to be epiphanised is Maria and the subjects experiencing the moment of epi phany are Joe and the reader. It is Joe and the reader who recognize the significance of a series of Maria's mistakes, especially the symbolic meaning of "a soft wet substance" touched by Maria in Hallow Eve game as well as Maria's repetitive singing of the same verse by mistake. Through her mistakes, Joe and the reader come to realize pathetically the spinster Maria's loneliness as well as her lost dreams and hopes, namely the life of Maria as an "outcast from life's feast" like James Duffy in "A Pain ful Case." As in "Araby," the epiphanic moment of "Clay" • 2fi comes m the end : "his eyes filled up so much with tears that he could not find what he was looking for and in the end he had to ask his wife to tell him where the corkscrew was" (106). ' Thus, the impact of plot on the ending and the or ganic unity of narrative components are still central to the stories of epiphany, though these aspects are not so much visible as in the classical short story. In Joyce's stories, all the subtle threads of action— "tous les fils si minces, si secrets, presque invisibles"— are designed i ~ 84 1 to be adjusted to a certain special point whereby the reader comes to recognize the soul of a given story and the raison d'etre of the seemingly trivial, insig nificant, and fragmentary actions. On the whole, such a special point, the moment of epiphany, comes in the end, as in the classical short story whose narrative com ponents gravitate toward the final moment. Even though i there are many differences between Joyce and Maupassant 1 in narrative contents, types of events, and the writer's perception of reality, the impact of plot on the ending and the structural union between parts in Dubliners still lead us to consider Joyce's stories of epiphany as a variation of the classical short story rather than as a I revolutionary art form which cuts itself off from the long tradition of the short story dating back to the tales of Boccaccio, or even before. i Hvon Chin'gon's Stories in the Western Context of Plot Now, let us examine how the literary changes of plot j construction in the Western realistic short stories from Flaubert through Maupassant to James Joyce have been received or assimilated into the stories of Hy6n Chin'gon, a central figure in the realistic movement of Korea. Hyon Chin'gon's fiction chronologically and formally fall into three different types; his earlier autobio graphical stories such as those of The Degenerate (T’ara- kcha), his orthodox realistic stories collected in The Faces of Korea (Choson ui olaul). and his historical novels at his later literary stage.29 In the prime of j his literary life, Hyon Chin'gon devoted himself ex clusively to the genre of the short story and distin guished himself as a genuine craftsman of this genre, especially thanks to the stories collected in The Faces of Korea. In the context of plot construction, the evolution of Hyon Chin'gon's stories from The Degenerate to The Faces of Korea reveals a peculiar literary phenomenon when compared with the development of the Western short I • story. For the evolution of Hyon Chin'gon's stories can t i be characterized as progressing from the plotless short story to the plot-oriented short story, from the lyric form to the dramatic form (in the Joycean sense)30, j "The Indigent Wife" (Pinch'o) and "The Society I Making One Drink" (Sul kwonhanun sahoe) later collected in The Degenerate tell of a slice of ordinary marital life between a writer-husband and his traditional wife. 1 "The Indigent Wife" presents the inner consciousness of the intellectual husband who bitterly feels himself 86 ineffectual and incompetent, financially and socially, ! despite his high education; on the contrary, "The Society Making One Drink" tells of the inner world of the tradi tional wife who is not capable of understanding the motive of her husband's constant heavy drinking and his feelings of despair and disillusionment towards his contemporary society under Japanese colonization of Korea. In these stories nothing significant or thrilling happens and there are no such shocking moments of "punch" or coup de fouet. The threads of plot are concerned with the subtle internal movement of the character's con sciousness rather than the external movement of certain ! overt, dramatic action. In this context, structurally, the earlier stories of Hyon Chin'gon are much closer to Joyce's stories than to Maupassant's. Yet the seemingly plotless stories of Hyon Chin'gon are carefully designed to constitute a certain unity of impression or the or ganic union between narrative components, even though there are not such a sharp point as coup de theatre in plot development. "The Indigent Wife" is a good example of such stories. This story consists of four narrative sections. The first section tells of the conflict between the narrator-hero and his wife that results from the visit of his friend T, a successful bankman. This visit increases J both the narrator's inferiority complex about his social competence and his wife's dissatisfaction with his lack of concern for their financial misery (his wife used to pawn or sell her garments to prepare a meal). The second section presents the narrator's reminiscences of their past married life, such as his premature marriage at the age of sixteen, his study abroad, the reunion with his wife after their four-year separation, his unsuccessful social life, and their financial misery. This recollec tion leads the narrator to sympathize with his wife's implicit complaints about his lack of concern for their living and to search for reconciliation with his wife. The third section describes the contrast between their married life and his sister-in-law's, through their visit to his parents-in-law for congratulating his father-in- law's birthday: their married life is poverty-stricken, but full of deep affection and sweetness for each other, whereas his sister-in-law's life is rich but lacking in happiness and love. The last section tells of his sis ter-in-law's visit to the narrator's home, with her luxurious garments. Unlike the visit of his friend T in the first section, this visit hardly results in any conflict between the couple. In the end, the narrator overcomes his inferiority complex or self-consciousness about his financial incompetence and recognize the true 88" happiness of his conjugal life. Thus, this story hardly shows any dramatic or dynamic action and instead unfolds a slice of the narrator's daily life, in a flat, calm, contemplative fashion. However, all episodes— T's visit, their visit to the parents-in-law, the visit of his sister-in-law— are neatly interconnected and arranged to present the narrator's internal movement which can be described by conflicts, turning point, and resolution, though this line of internal actions is more invisible, anticlimactic, and open-ended than in the conventional stories of Poe and Maupassant. Unlike his earlier autobiographical stories, Hyon Chin'gon's mature stories collected in The Faces of Korea became more dramatic, dynamic, and catastrophic. He deals with such dramatic themes as violation, arson, murder, death, suicide, and madness. It may be partly due to such thematic preference that many critics have presumed the impact of Maupassant and Japanese natu ralists such as Tayama Katai and Iwano Homei on Hyon Chin'gon.31 However, Hyon Chin'gon's handling of plot is much closer to the Joycean method than the Maupassantian (By "Maupassantian" I mean his dramatic stories of sur prise denouement such as "La parure" and "En famille," "Le diable" and "La mere sauvage" that the majority of j theorists have generally conceived of as typical of Maupassant). The final effect of Hyon Chin'gon's stories results from the cumulative impact of similar narrative actions on the ending rather than the dramatic, shocking effect of surprise denouement: the final effect in Hyon Chin'gon's stories is mostly expected and pre pared by the reader from the beginning, unlike the clas sical stories of Poe, Maupassant, and O'Henry whose final I 1 effect is often enhanced by the maximal unexpectedness of denouement. The technical differences in plot construction bet ween Hyon Chin'gon and Maupassant may be best perceived j through his story "My Grandmother's Death," inasmuch as t this story is thematically very similar to Maupassant's "En famille" and "Le diable." To some extent, "The Death of My Grandmother" seems to be a synthesis of "Le diable" I i and "En famille." Like "Le diable" and "En famille," it deals with the insensitivity and matter-of-factness of a human being towards the death of his parents (or grand parents) and the stubborn attachment to life (or a strong resistance to death) of the moribund at her deathbed. Despite these seeming thematic resemblances, Hyon Chin'gon is considerably different from Maupassant in plot construction, attitudes towards the event, lyricism, and tone. 1 90~~ "En famille" and "Le diable" tell of the death of the protagonist's mother and his reaction to it, in a striking, brutal, cynical, muscular, and farcical way. "En famille" is a story of a petty bourgeois Parisian. One day, at dinner time, the protagonist Caravan, chief clerk in the Admiralty, suddenly experiences his mother's t collapse. Dr. Chenet announces to the Caravans the I 1 decease of their mother. While Mr. Caravan is exaggerat- ingly and hypocritically sentimental and melancholic about his mother's death, his wife is so matter-of-fact and insensitive that she could take the chest of drawers j and the clock of the deceased as their heirlooms. After all the fuss about the death, next evening, Caravan's mother surprisingly resuscitates from her long blackout (syncope) and claims her dinner, chest, and clock. This I resuscitation causes the Caravans to worry about the consequences of this incident. This story ends with Caravan's anxiety about his absence from the office: | i "Qu'est-ce que je vais dire a mon chef?" On the other hand, "Le diable" is a story of Norman peasant life. In summer, the peasant Honore becomes very anxious to sow the wheat, at the death-bed of his mother. The doctor, angry at Honore's avarice, recommends that he should employ La mere Rapet to watch by his dying mother, while he goes to the fields. Rapet who is supposed to be 91 paid the same contract price until the eventual death i tells the slowly dying woman a tale of the devil who always visits the dying, with a broom in his hand and a saucepan on his head. After that, she disguises herself as the devil of death and frightens the old woman into a quick death. This quick death leads Honore to realize that his contract with Rapet is disadvantageous to him self . Thus, both "En famille" and "Le diable" present the psychology of the character at the death-bed of his mother in a sarcastic, dramatic, and farcical way. The structural union of parts aiming at the final effect of surprise denouement shows us "an essential hardness— hardness of form," according to Henry James' expression. It also lead us to agree with Sean O'faolain's view that Maupassant's realism is "cleansed of all romantic im purities" (114)32. In presenting the avarice, hypocrisy, and insensitivity of his characters, Maupassant is merci less, uncompromising, and misanthropic, beneath his impersonal and impassive mask. By contrast, Hyon Chin'gon's story, "My Grand mother's Death," presents the psychology of the character watching by his dying grandmother, with a certain sweet ness and gentleness. This story lacks such a dramatic, muscular firmness as Maupassant's stories, but has a certain lyrical, feminine quality, instead. This story starts with the telegram "Your grandmother is critically ill" and ends with the telegram of obituary announcement. The main body of the story tells of the narrator's ex perience of sleepless vigils at the deathbed of his grandmother, with the other relatives. As their sleep less vigils took longer, most people became very insensi tive to the death of the grandmother and anxiously looked forward to the eventual death of the grandmother for their deliverance from the painful, inconvenient vigils. However, the grandmother who had been several times wandering between life and death finally resuscitated so | far as to have a meal by herself and hence everybody i returns to their own ordinary life. After that, the story abruptly ends with the following lyrical passage; "It was a beautiful spring day...It was such a beautiful i spring day that in the crystal-clear sky without any i patch of cloud there were shimmering gossamers weaving its fluffy threads into spring silks. I, dressed in my spring best, was about to go out with a couple of friends i to see cherry blossoms. At that very moment I unexpec tedly received a telegram: 'Your grandmother passed away at three in this morning.'"33 i Thus, the moments of resuscitation and death in this story are quite different from the resurrection of the 93 mother in "En famille" and the eventual death of the mother in "Le diable" in that there is no privileged point of c o u p de theatre and the ending hardly evokes any surprise or shock to the reader. Hyon Chin'gdn treats the resuscitation of the grandmother as an ordinary, anticlimactic, natural phenomenon and presents her death with a certain touch of irony, sweetness, and pathos. In a sense, whereas Maupassant's two stories are close to the fiction of "invention" and governed by the conven tions of the short story tradition, Hy6n Chin'gon' story can be referred to as the fiction of "imagination" and considered as influenced by the conventions of Flaubertian realism. In this regard, Hy6n Chin'gon's earlier stories are much closer to the realistic stories of Joyce and Flaubert or Russian short stories of Turgenev and Chekhov lacking in action, suspense, and a sharp point but abounding in lyricism than to the dyna mic, dramatic stories of Balzac, Hawthorne, Poe, and Maupassant. On the other hand, Hyon Chin'gon's mature stories that belong to the period of "objective realism" show more hardness of form, more dramatic quality than his earlier stories: for example, "Fire," "A Lucky Day," "The director of the Private Mental Hospital," and "B Matron and the Love Letter." In these stories, the line of all 94 I actions moves towards a certain central point so as to evoke the dramatic, ironic effect of denouement. This final effect mostly results from a reversal of situation, or recognition of truth, or both, though the reversal of situation is not so much striking and unexpected as the | c o u p de theatre in the stories of Poe and Maupassant or i the German novelle. On the whole, Hy6n Chin'gon's stories of the complex plot contain a series of sugges tive actions and remarks that implicitly leads the reader j to prefigure the reversal of situation or the ironic conclusion. Hence, the denouement in his stories does not severely afflict the reader's sensitivity as the stories of Poe and Maupassant usually do. These aspects of his technigue are similar to Joyce's technique in that the dramatic effect of denouement is obtained through the cumulative impact of recurrent events on the ending. Hyon Chin'gon's growing penchant for the dramatic con- j struction of plot coincides with his inclination towards impersonal narration, which is the most dramatic form of narrative voice, according to Joyce's theories. Overall, Hyon Chin'gon's stories are carefully de signed to constitute a certain unity of impression and the structural union of parts, including his earlier stories which seem to be lyrical, sketchlike, and lacking in dramatic action and suspense. Whether the given ■95 | I i action is dramatic or not, whether the plot is complex or i simple, the plot as an compositional principle of unify ing all narrative components into a coherent whole is still central to the making of Hyon Chin'gon's stories. Moreover, Hyon Chin'gon's increasing bent for the drama tic plot construction seen in his mature stories makes us realize that the theoretical view of the evolution of the short story from the epical or dramatic short story to the lyrical short story that has been dominant in Western short story theories is not quite persuasive in the Korean perspective. In the East-West perspective, the ! distinction between the lyric short story and the epical i short story in terms of plot is rather illusory because every short story simultaneously comprises lyrical, epical, and dramatic qualities, though they are blended in varying proportions according to the author's tempera- i ment. 96 Notes 1 "O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story,” Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. ed. Ladislav Matejeka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cam bridge: MIT P, 1971) 231-2. 2 "The Structure of the Modern Short Story," May 107. 3 "One Writer's Perception of the Short Fiction Tradition: How Would Edgar Allan Poe Make a Duck?" Aycock 126. 4 In "The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of A His tory, " Eileen Baldeshwiler claims that the epical short story and the lyric short story have simultaneously developed rather than subsequently. According to her view, the history of the lyric short story as opposed to the epical short story starts with Turgenev and Chekhov. 5 Richard Kostelanetz, "Notes on the American Short Story Today," May 218. 6 Quoted in Andre Vial, Guv de Maupassant et l'art du roman (Paris: Nizet, 1954) 33. 7 Pierre et Jean (Paris: Gallimard, 1982) 45-60. 8 Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971) 51. 9 Aspects of the Novel (London: Edward Arnold, 1927) 86. in The Nature of Narrative (1966; London: Oxford UP, 1968) 208. 11 "Thematics," Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 19 65) 67. For Gerard Genette, Russian formalist concepts of story and plot are divided into the three categories: story (histoire)— the signified or narrative content; narrative (recit)— the signifier, statement, discourse or narrative text itself; narrating (narration)— the producing narrative action and the whole 97 of the real or fictional situation in which the action takes place (Narrative Discourse 27). 12 "Review of Twice-Told Tales," May 52-9. i 13 Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., The Portable Poe (1945; New York: Penguin, 1987) 655-6. 14 Refers to the essays by Warren Walker, Gordon Weaver, and Richard Kostelanetz 15 This excerpt from Stephen Hero is cited from James Joyve A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manj. Text. Criticism, and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson (New York: Penguin, 1987). 16 Joyce Annotated: Notes for Dubliners and A ! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) 2-3. For example, in "The Dead" it is uncertain whether the moment of epiphany occurs when Gabriel finds the symbolic beauty of Gretta, or when Gabriel discovers the secret romance between Gretta and Michael Furey, or when Gabriel painfully recognizes his true self in front of the mirror, or when the reader finally perceives the structural union and metaphoric I function of narrative components or the raison d ’etre of 1 the seemingly insignificant details. | 1 -7 , Quoted m Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (1959; Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983) 163. Joyce's explained to his brother his compositional method of writing Dubliners in ■ another metaphoric way: "Do you see that man who has just skipped out of the way of the tram? Consider, if he had been run over, how significant every act of his would at once become. I don't mean for the police inspector. I mean for anybody who knew him. And his thoughts, for ' anybody that could know them. It is my idea of the significance of trivial things that I want to give the two or three unfortunate wretches who may eventually read me" (qtd. in Ellmann 163). 18 ■ • • Temps et recit. 3 vols. (Paris: Editions du I Seuil, 1983) 1: 11. 19 • * • The meaning of this French term is broader than the necklace because it includes finery, costume, and jewels. 98 1 20 • • • Aristotle differentiates the simple plot from the complex plot, according to whether its action is simple or complex. He calls an action "simple" in which "the change of fortune takes place without reversal of the situation and without recognition" ( X ) . 21 For the detailed discussion of this plot con struction, see M. H. Abrams, "plot," A Glossary of Literary Terms. 22 Quoted by Victor Brombert, "Flaubert and the Status of the Subject," Flaubert and Postmodernism, ed. Naomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1984) 100. j 23 Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes (1965; Paris: Bordas, 1985) 181. 24 "Demotivation in Herodias." Schor and Majewski 199. 25 In "Le roman," Maupassant defines the novelist of yesterday and the novelist of today as follows: En somme, si le Romancier d'hier choisissait et racontait les crises de la vie, les etats aigus de l'ame et du coeur, le Romancier d'aujourd'hui ecrit l'histoire du coeur, de l'ame et de 1'intelligence a l'£tat normal. Pour produire l'effet qu'il pour- suit, c'est-a-dire la revelation de ce qu'est veri- tablement l'homme contemporain devant ses yeux, il devra n'employer que des faits d'une verite irrecus able et constante. (51). t 1 26 The critical understanding of Joyce's term "epi phany" is still controversial as we can see in the recent essay "Epiphany and Epiphanies" by Morris Beja. A major ity of critics, especially earlier critics such as Theo dore Spencer, assert that epiphany is central to the understanding of Joyce's compositional principles. By contrast, some of critics such as Robert Scholes devalue the role of epiphany in Joyce's fiction. Scholes regrets that "how much of a cliche the term Epiphany has become in Joyce criticism. Far from aiding us in our reading, it has become an obstacle to understanding, an arid formula for cranking out unnecessary interpretations" (qtd. in Beja). However, as Beja observes, it can not be j denied that Dubliners is "sprinkled with sudden revela- ! tions for its protagonists or illuminating fragments of ; life for its readers." It may be true, as Beja goes on to say, that "In Joyce, it can be no mere coincidence 99 that after all the slices of life and evanescent moments of the sketches throughout the volume, the climatic revelations in the final story, "The Dead," all occur on Twelfth Night— the Feast of the Epiphany" (716). 2 7 My view of the epiphanic moment in "Clay" is somewhat different from the view of Ian Reid. Ian Reid observes that the significant revelation takes place on the level of the reader only. He writes that "Maria doesn't understand the practical joke that is played on her by the next-door girls while she is blindfolded; it is the reader who identifies the 'soft wet substance' she touches with the story's title image, and who recognizes that this represents Maria's portion in life. She her self remains uncomprehending" (The Short Story 57). ! 28 Scholes and Litz, ed., Dubliners. 29 This distinction is based upon Yun Pyongro's observation. See Hvon Chin'gon Yonau. ed. Sin Tong-uk and Kim Yolgu (Seoul: Saemun-sa, 1981) 11-30-39, 11-92. 30 In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Stephen divides the art in three forms: . . . art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and the others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others. (214) j 31 For the discussion of Japanese writer's influence I on Hyon Chin'gon, see Cho Namhyon, "Hyon Chin'gon ui tan- pyon sosol, ku piui," Hancmk hvdndae sosol Yonau. 236-37; Kim, Hakdong, Hanqunk munhak ui pjqyo munhakchok vonqu, 121-27. 32 In his article "Guy de Maupassant," Henry James states that "The most general quality of the author of La Maison Tellier and Bel-Ami. the impression that remains last, after the others have been accounted for, is an essential hardness— hardness of form, hardness of nature..."(231). I J Throughout my dissertation, the translations of Hyon Chin'gon's stories are mine, except "Fire" and "A Lucky day." Hyon Chin'gon's stories are quoted from the Korean text, Hanquk taep'vo tanp'vdn munhak choniip 4 100 (Seoul: Ch6nghan ch1ulp1an-sa, 1984). "Fire" (Pul) is translated by Peter H. Lee, Flowers of Fire (Honolulu: U of Hawaii P, 1974) 1-9; "A Lucky Day" (Unsu choun nal) is translated by Kevin O'Rourke, Ten Korean Short Stories (Seoul: the Korean Studies Institute, 1973) 237-253. 101 CHAPTER THREE BETWEEN METAPHOR AND METONYMY: DESCRIPTION AS A FOIL TO PLOT In his essay "Narrate or Describe?" Georg Lukacs criticizes the symptoms of decadence in modern fiction since Flaubertian realism or naturalism in terms of description1: With the loss of the art of narration, details cease to be transmitters of concrete aspects of the action and attain significance independent of the action and of the lives of the characters. Any artistic relationship to the composition as a whole is lost. The false contemporaneity in description brings a disintegration of the composition into disconnected and autonomous details. (132) This autonomy and independence of description in modern fiction is an important factor to Lukacs' differentiation between Balzacian realism before 1848 and Flaubertian realism after 1848 (or naturalism). According to Lukacs, description for Balzac is nothing but one stylistic mode among several (a subordinate mode supporting narration) and its major function is to provide the novel with a new dramatic element and contribute to plot development, whereas description for Flaubert and Zola is a principal mode having its own autonomous values and independent ontological status regardless of plot development.2 Lukacs' point of view has much in common with the viewpoints of such theorists as Jakobson, Barthes, and 102 Robbe-Grillet (though Lukacs' view is ideological and the others are mostly descriptive) in that these theorists perceive an antagonism between plot and description and recognize the importance of unessential, autonomous de tails to realistic fiction since Flaubert. For Jakobson, the major characteristic of late nineteenth century real ism lies in a "description based on unessential details" which can be defined as metonymic condensation, "the condensation of the narrative by means of images based on contiguity" ("On Realism in Art" 22). According to his observation, "This 'condensation' is realized either in spite of plot or by eliminating the plot entirely." Like Lukacs and Jakobson, Roland Barthes sees a break between the old vraisemblance and modern realism in the change of descriptive technigue. For Barthes one of the major fea- I tures of modern realism since Flaubert consists in the importance of insignificant, fragmented, and concrete details which negate any notion of function and meaning ; and resist being integrated into a narrative structure ("L'effet de reel"). These aspects of description in realistic fiction— the antagonism between plot and description and the j notion of unessential, useless details— becomes more l i ! 1 complex and problematic in the short story than in the novel. One of the reasons for this is that, as we have 103 examined in the previous chapter concerning plot, the short story can be basically conceived of as a genre of plot concentrating on the organic union between parts or the integration of all narrative components into a cen tral action. Another reason is that the notion of des cription based upon unessential details is very anta gonistic to the classical concept of the short story because in traditional perspective the essential qua lities of this genre can be said to consist in brevity, compression, and extreme economy of language (which can i be only achieved by eliminating unessential, redundant details). In this regard, the realistic short story can be conceived of as a genre in a dilemma which suffers from the conflict between the centrifugal force of description and the centripetal force of plot or structural union. This chapter will examine in what way the realistic short story, conditioned by these two different artistic prin ciples, has developed or transformed its generic formal qualities, by concentrating on the various aspects and functions of descriptions in the narratives of Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and Hy6n Chin'gon: in other words, this chapter will deal with the question of how the conventions of realism as a period concept and the conventions of the short story as a genre concept have ~ ~ ' ~ ToT- ! been combined and integrated into the realistic short story. Each description of these writers will be ex plored on the two different levels: first, on the micro- structural level, the aspects of a given description will be examined in terms of metaphor and metonymy; second, on the macrostructural level, the descriptive fragment will be discussed in connection with the whole context of the story or plot development. In doing so, I will also try to see the overall evolution of descriptive techniques in the realistic short story. The Metaphoric Pole and The Metonymic Pole in Descrip tion: Poe and Balzac versus Flaubert Description, as Genette and Philippe Hamon mention, can be basically understood as a suspension or a pause in the flow of narrative time, and thus a spreading out of the narrative in space.3 The more the narrator meticu lously tells the synecdochic details of certain things and settings, the more the reader's attention tends to be easily distracted from the overall temporal flow of ac tions and instead comes to focus on certain spatial narrative fragments. According to Jakobson, this aspect of realistic fiction due to the predominance of descrip tion over narration can be described as a process of 105 metonymy. He distinguishes realism from other literary movements in terms of metaphor and metonymy4: The primacy of the metaphoric process in the liter ary schools of Romanticism and Symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still insuffi ciently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies and actually predetermines the so-called Realist trend, which belongs to an intermediary stage between the decline of Roman ticism and the rise of Symbolism and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relation ships, the Realist author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the charac ters to the setting in space and in time. He is J fond of synecdochic details. Here, Jakobson claims that the mode of realism is meton ymy based upon the relation of contiguity, whereas the modes of romanticism and symbolism are metaphors based on the relation of similarity or resemblances. According to i Jakobson, metaphor and metonymy are the two poles of language representing a series of binary oppositions in literary relationships5: romanticism/symbolism vs. real ism; similarity vs. contiguity; poetry vs. prose; selec- I J tion vs. combination; paradigm vs. syntagm; essence or necessity vs. contingency; drama vs. film; surrealism vs. cubism; and so on. To these binary oppositions, I pro- i pose to add another set of opposition: description and plot. Though Jakobson does not explicitly articulate this opposition, his statement clearly shows that he sees , a fundamental antagonism between description and plot.6 Whereas realistic description can be basically conceived 106 of a metonymic process, plot can be basically seen as a metaphoric process inasmuch as it is a compositional principle of synthesizing seemingly heterogeneous narra tive components into a new artistic whole and thereby providing the narrative with new interpretive, semantic possibilities.7 Of these two axes of literary polari ties, according to Jakobson, metonymy is the dominant mode of realistic fiction. For realistic fiction abounds with synecdochic, metonymic details liable to distract the reader's attention from plot or the line of actions or to defy interpretation or signification, as in I Tolstoj's description of Anna Karenina's handbag (which has no bearing on the story) in the climactic scene con cerning her suicide.8 In the context of Jakobson's poles of metaphor and metonymy, the stories of Poe and Balzac, at first sight, appear to be problematic because in Jakobson's schemata i their stories can be both metaphoric and metonymic. On the one hand, their stories can be seen as metaphoric in that Poe's stories and the majority of Balzac's stories belong to romanticism and to an intermediary stage bet ween romanticism and realism, respectively. On the other I i hand, their stories are fundamentally metonymic because i they definitely belong to prose rather than to poetry. However, though we take it for granted that the short 107 story is basically metonymic because it is prose, it is possible for us to postulate the metaphoric pole and the metonymic pole in the metonymic spectrum of description in prose. In this spectrum, the descriptions in Poe's romantic stories as well as Balzac's realistic yet roman tic stories are closer to the metaphoric pole, whereas Flaubertian descriptions to the metonymic pole. Between these two poles, the descriptions of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon simultaneously show metaphoric and metonymic aspects, though they are blended in varying proportions according to the writer's temperament. In order to see the fundamental differences between metaphoric description and metonymic description in the realistic short story, it will be necessary to start with Poe's description rather than Balzacian description. The first reason for this is that Poe's description manifests more clearly a metaphoric process of romanticism than Balzacian description. The second reason is that Poe's descriptive technique, as a genuine master of the short story, shows how in the genre of the short story requir ing the extreme economy of language a lengthy description can successfully function, without losing its suggestive power and unity of impression, and without distracting the reader's attention from plot, in other words, without bringing about the suspension of narration or action (in 108 j I my view, these features of Poe's description have ex ecuted a noticeable impact on the making of the modern short story). The lengthy descriptions of environments and objects in the introductory passages, such as the l i house of Vauquer in Le pere Goriot or Charles Bovary ' s cap in Madame Bovarv. have been not only found in realis tic fiction but also in such gothic, supernatural stories as Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Oval Portrait." Poe's description of the house of Usher is much lengthier than Flaubert's description of Madame Aubain's house in "Un coeur simple." However, Poe's description is quite different from Flaubertian descrip tion in that his description is metaphorical and sugges tive, and of essential importance to plot. Consider the following passage from "The Fall of the House of Usher"9: . . . I look upon the scene before me— upon the mere house, and the simple landscape of the domain— upon the bleak walls— upon the vacant eye-like windows— upon a few rank sedges— and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees— with an utter depres sion of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium— the bitter lapse into everyday life— the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart . . . I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruf fled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down— but with a shudder even more thrilling than before— upon the remodelled and inverted images of the grey sedge. and the ghastly tree-stems. and the vacant and eve-like windows. (177-178) . . . I scanned more narrowly the real aspects of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration 109 I of ages had been great...Perhaps the eye of a scru tinising observer might have discovered a barely of the buildincr in front, made its wav down the wall in a ziazacr direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. (179; emphasis added) At first sight, this description seems to portray the external appearance of the house from its overall aspects up to its myopic details, according to the relation of contiguity between constituents: such as walls, windows, sedges, tarns, and a fissure on the wall. However, our careful reading of this passage makes us realize that Poe's seemingly metonymic description is actually based upon the metaphoric relationship. First, Poe's descrip tion centers on several selected aspects of the house which create an atmosphere of bleakness or the desola tion. The first-person narrator repeatedly talks about walls, windows, sedges, trunks of decayed trees, and tarn; and the attributives and nouns used for the descri ption of the environment are extremely synonymic and anaphoric. For example, the gloom or desolation of the house is described by a series of synonymic words: bleak, vacant, decayed, bitter, hideous, iciness, sickening, black and lurid, shudder, thrilling, grey, ghastly, sullen. Besides, such expressions as "depression," "bitter lapse," "dropping off," "sinking," "precipitous brink" can be connected with the imagery of fall or collapse. Thus, to great extent, Poe's descriptive 110 | I details are metaphoric, based upon semantic similarities j or resemblances. On the other hand, Poe’s description is also meta phoric, on the macrostructural level. The above narra tive fragment can be essentially connected with the entire context of the story or the central line of ac tions: the fall of the house and the fall of the family of Usher. Poe transforms a metonymic, synecdochic rela tionship between the house of Usher and the family of Usher into a metaphoric relationship by providing these two things with essential similarities or resemblances.10 There are a resemblance between the dilapidated aspects of the house and the gradual decline of the family Usher. Moreover, Poe's description is quite different from realistic description (in Jakobson's definition) in that it conspicuously supports the plot, far from being "real ized either in spite of the plot or by eliminating the plot entirely." It prefigures the future development of the events or the story. For example, the underlined phrases about the inverted images of the house in the black and lurid tarn and about the crack in the house are closely connected with the eventual fall of the family Usher and the demolition of the house into the tarn in the end. This similarity between the first scene and the I 111 last scene can be understood as a metaphoric aspect of narrat i ve structure.11 Thus, Poe's description is not a pure pause in the narrative or a suspension of the story or the action, but a highly functional description which contribute to the development of events or actions, as effectively as narration. In this respect, Poe's description is very close to Proustian description (in Genette's defini tion).12 Like Proustian description, Poe's description becomes absorbed into narration and performs the act of ' recounting or telling: it not only leads the reader to prefigure the future development of the story, but also constantly makes the reader aware of the dramatized narrator's activity of gaze, the impact of the perceived on the perceiver, and the inner qualities of the per- i ceiver. Like Poe's description of the house of Usher, Bal zac's description comes closer to the metaphoric pole than to the metonymic. Inasmuch as his realistic fiction came into being under the influence of romanticism, it is conspicuously metaphoric inspite of his realistic pen chant for metonymy, when compared with the descriptions of other realists. Consider his portrayal of the man- j sion Grande Breteche from "La grande Breteche"13: A une centaine de pas environ de Vendome, sur les bords du Loir, dit-il, il se trouve une vieille maison brune, surmontee de toits trds eleves, et si 112 1 completement isolee . . . Devant ce logis est un jardin donnant sur la riviere, et ou les buis, autrefois ras qui dessinaient les allees, croissent maintenant a leur fantaisie . . . Les arbres frui- tiers, negliges depuis dix ans, ne produisent plus de recolte . . . Les sentiers, sables jadis, sont remplis de pourpier; mais, a vrai dire, il n'y a plus trace de sentier . . . Les toits de cette maison horriblement degrades, les persiennes sont toujours closes, les balcons couverts de nids d'hirondelles, les portes restent constamment fer- mees . . . La lune, le soleil, l'hiver, l'ete, la neige ont creus§ les bois, gauchi les planches, ronge les peintures . . . Une invisible main a partout ecrit le mot: Mystere . . . Le meme desordre y regne . . . Quel feu tombe du ciel a passe par la? Quel tribunal a ordonne de semer du sel sur ce logis?— Y a t-on insulte Dieu? Y a-t-on trahi la France? Voila ce qu'on se demande. Les reptiles y rampent sans vous repondre. Cette maison, vide et deserte, est une immense 6nigme dont le mot n'est connu de personne . . . Pendant le temps de mon sejour a Vendome . . . la vue de ce singulier logis devint un de mes plaisirs les plus vifs . . . cette habitation encore debout, auoiaue lentement demolie par une main venqeresse. renfermait un secret, une pensee inconnue . . . J'y restais des heures en- tieres a contempler son desordre . . . C'etait tantot l'air de cloitre, moins les religieux; tantot la paix de cimetiere. sans les morts aui vous par- lent leur language epitaphiaue: auiourd'hui la maison du lepreux. demain celle des Astrides . . . J'y ai souvent pleure, je n'y ai jamais ri . . . en quelques instants vous sentez un manteau de glace qui se pose sur vos epaules, comme la main du Com- mandeur sur le cou de don Juan. (243-246) Balzac's description of the mansion Grande Breteche begins with the metonymic arrangement of synecdochic details. Following the contiguous relationships between objects, Balzac portays the mansion from the surrounding evironment of the house through the external features to the internal details, narrowing down the focus gradually: the old, brown house near the bank of the Loir, its isolated environment, the desolate images of garden and i i its path to the river, the bleakness of roofs, shutters, and balcony, dilapidated woodwork and paintings, and so on. However, beneath this metonymic arrangement, there exists a considerable amount of resemblances or contrasts between things which can be conceived of as metaphoric 1 relationships. First, there are a series of contrasts between the past and the present in the description of the garden, as we could notice in such expressions as "autrefois ras," "maintenant," "ne produisent plus de recolte," "sables jadis," and "il n'y a plus trace de I sentier." Second, there are a group of semantxcally similar words: "degrades," "closes," "couverts," "fermees," "gauchi," "ronge," "desordre," "tombe," "vide," "deserte," "demolie," etc. (the words of decay or desolation); "Mystere," "immense enigme," "secret," "pensee inconnue" (the words of mystery). Besides, the underlined sentences show Balzac's metaphoric penchant. He describes this house as an accursed place through a variety of metaphoric expressions: he compares the house to a place condemned by the fire of God or by a court of law, to an immense enigma, to a place demolished by an avenging hand, to a monastery without monks, to a ceme tery without the dead, to a leper house, to the house of Astrides, and so on. Thus, the seemingly metonymic 114 details based upon the contiguous relationships between things resemble each other in shape or in condition: all these are the features of disorder and decay, j On the macrostructural level, this passage is essen tially related to the plot or the dramatic development of the story. The rest of the narrative followed by this description is the narrator's search for the clue of such a "mystery," "enigma," and "secret" of the deserted man sion and a process of puzzling out the truth through the bits and pieces of narrative information: the tragic I truth of how the betrayed husband, the owner of the mansion, cruelly revenged himself on both his wife and her lover by walling him into a closet just after forcing her to swear by the crucifix that there was no one in that closet. There is an essential relationship between the metonymic details of river, garden, paths, and walls in the beginning and the way by which a Don Juan reached to his mistress's room where he committed adultery and had to pay the death penalty for his crime. The under lined words make the reader prefigure the future develop- j ment of the events: illicit love and its tragic ending. I As in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," there is an essential connection and a certain degree of resemblance between the chaotic ruins of the mansion in the first scene and the fatal imprisonment of the lover into the 115 wall. Thus, it seems to be true, as Lukacs observes, that "the description of the environment is never pure description but is almost always transformed into action" ("Narrate or Describe?" 118). Another fine example for the metaphoric aspects of Balzacian description is the portrait of Facino Cane in j his romantic short story "Facino Cane" collected in Scenes de la vie parisienne.14 "Facino Cane," a frame- story like "La grande Breteche," is a story of a blind Italian who has led a dramatic life of romance, adven- ! ture, and extravagance and has thoroughly experienced the i vicissitudes of life. Before retelling the story of Facino Cane and developing his dramatic life marked by his consumming passion for love and gold, the narrator describes us the strikingly impressive face of the blind I musician, by using a variety of metaphors: Figurez-vous le masque en platre de Dante, eclaire par la lueur roucre du auinquet. et surmont6 d'une foret de cheveux d'un blanc araente. L'ex pression amere et douleureuse de cette magnifique tete etait agrandie par la cecite, car les yeux morts revivaient par la pensee; il s'en echappait comme une lueur brulante, produite par un d^sir unique, incessant, energiquement inscrit sur un front bombe que traversaient des rides pareilles aux assises d'un vieux mur . . . Quelque chose de grand et de despotique se rencontrait dans ce vieil Homere qui qardait en lui-meme une Odvssee condamn^e a 11oubli . . . a ce visage noblement coupe, livide- ! ment italien, ombrage par des sourcils grisonnants qui projetaient leur ombre sur des cavites profondes ou l'on tremblait de voir reparaitre la lumiere de la pensee, comme on craint de voir venir a la bouche d'un caverne quelques brigands armes de torches et de poignards. II existait un lion dans cette cage 116 de chair, un lion dont la rage s'etait inutilement epuisee contre le fer de ses barreaux. (69-70). This portrait reveals Balzac's strong penchant for meta phors. Instead of describing the external features of the hero's face in concrete details (such as shape and | colour), he tells about the imaginary images and stories that his face conjures up in the perceiver's mind: the face described is the metaphoric imagery of the face rather than the face itself. He compares Facino Cane to Dante's death-mask, to old Homer who kept within himself an Odyssey condemned to oblivion, and to a lion in the ; cage of flesh, a fierce lion whose anger has been use- i i j lessly exhausted against iron bars. Furthermore, I ! Facino's deep eye-sockets which make the narrator afraid to see the light of thought reappear in them are meta phorically compared to the mouth of cave from which the robbers, armed with torches and daggers, are likely to appear. Besides, his extreme preference for metaphor can be seen in such descriptive details (which he could have described metonymically) as "une fordt de cheveux d'un blanc arqente." "la pensee . . . comme une lueur bru- lante," "des rides pareilles aux assises d'un vieux mur," and "la lumiere de la pensee." On the other hand, on the macrostructural level, it goes without saying that these external features of Facino's face or the metaphoric images of his face have - 117 much bearing on the story or the future development of actions and events. As the portrait of Facino's face prefigures, his life can be compared to a Dantean long journey from an inferno to a purgatory, to an adventurous odyssey in search for romance and treasures, and to a life of the imprisonment of body and soul, condemned to a tantalizing fatal desire for the impossible object, that i is, gold. These metaphoric descriptions are due to his metaphoric vision of the world, namely, his mystical, occultistic belief in the correspondences between body and soul, between appearance and essence, between reality and idea, and between the self and the other. The narrator in "Facino Cane" succinctly articulates such a metaphoric way of perceiving the essence of things and j people: Chez moi 11 observation 6tait deja devenue intuitive, elle penetrait l'ame sans n^gliger le corps; ou plutot elle saisissait si bien les details exte- rieurs, qu'elle allait sur-le-champ au dela; elle me donnait la faculte de vivre de la vie de l'individu sur laquelle elle s'exergait, en me permettant de me substituer a lui comme le derviche des Mille et une Nuits prenait le corps et l'&me des personnes sur lesquelles il pronongait certaines paroles. (66) As we have thus far examined through the stories of Poe and Balzac, their descriptions firmly stand at the metaphoric pole in the basically metonymic spectrum of narrative, both on the microstructural and macrostruc- tural narrative levels. Their descriptions have much 118 bearing on the story or plot development and produce certain new meanings or interpretive possibilities in relation to the larger context of the story. Their description is highly governed by such a "compositional motivation" that "Not a single property may remain unused in the telling, and no episode may be without influence on the situation.1,15 Like their stories, the majority of classical short stories have generally shown an essential relationship between narrative components to the extent that "if one speaks about a nail beaten into a wall at I ! the beginning of a narrative, then at the end the hero I must hang himself on that nail," to borrow Chekhov's expression (qtd. in Tomashevsky 79). In short, descrip tion and plot in the classical short story are comple mentary to one another, instead of being incompatible with each other. i On the other hand, in contrast to the metaphoric f } descriptions of Poe and Balzac, Flaubert's descriptions i are highly governed by a metonymic process. His descrip tion seems to satisfy perfectly Roman Jakobson's defini tion of realistic description: "Following the path of contiguous relationships, the Realist author metonymi- i ! cally digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from ^ the characters to the setting in space and in time" ("Two Aspects of language" 111). Let us take an example from 119 "Un coeur simple." In the beginning of this story, as in "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "La grande Breteche," Flaubert meticulously describes the house i where his main characters have lived: I Cette maison, revetue d'ardoises, se trouvait entre un passage et une ruelle aboutissant a la riviere. Elle avait int£rieurement des differences de niveau qui faisaient trebucher. Une vestibule etroite separait la cuisine de la salle ou M"1 6 Aubain se tenait tout le long du jour, assise pres de la croisee dans un fauteuil de paille. Contre le lamb- ris, peint en blanc, s'alignaient huit chaises d*acajou. Un vieux piano supportait, sous un baro- metre, un tas pyramidal de boites et de cartons. Deux bergeres de tapisserie flanquaient la cheminee en marbre jaune et de style Louis XV. La pendule, ! au milieu, representait un temple de Vesta;— et tout I 1'appartement sentait un peu le moisi, car le plan- | cher etait plus bas que le jardin. j Au premier £tage, il y avait d'abord la chambre de 'Madame', tres grande, tendue d'un papier a fleurs pales, et contenant le portrait de 'Monsieur' en costume de muscadin . . . Ensuite un corridor menait & un cabinet d'etude; des livres et des paperasses garnissaient les rayons d'une biblio- theque entourant de ses trois cdtes un large bureau de bois noir. Les deux panneaux en retour dis- paraissaient sous des dessins a la plume, des pay- sages a la gouache et des gravures d'Audran, sou- | venirs d'un temps meilleur et d'un luxe evanoui. i (47-48; ch.1) i This description is almost completely based upon the relationship of contiguity between narrative components which can be characterized as a metonymic process. Flaubert describes the concrete interior details of the house meticulously and geometrically, deliberately avoid- i ing any Balzacian, anthropomorphic, metaphoric descrip tions of house and furniture. He tells us such trivial details as the number of the chairs and the connection between the book shelves and the writing-table but he i I ! hardly informs us of the overall external appearances or atmosphere of the house. Unlike the portraits of the house in the stories of Poe and Balzac, Flaubert's meton ymic description defies the reader's imagination to infer certain implications or meanings from the details and picture the possible development of the story. Flaubert's description of Madame Aubain's house hardly ] contributes to plot development or characterization. As Barthes points out, it is difficult to find any specific . meaning or function except reality effect in such a de scription as "un vieux piano supportait, sous un baro- metre, un tas pyramidal de boites et de cartons ("L'effet de reel" 34). Besides this, the detailed description of the study— "des livres et des paperasses garnissaient les rayons d'une bibliothfeque entourant de ses trois cotes un i large bureau de bois noir"— is useless when related to the subject and the plot. Like these details, the rest of Flaubertian description in the quoted passage is very myopic, concrete, detailed but redundant, hardly relevant to the plot or characterization. If anything, it may be that it portrays us the upholstery of the petty bour geoisie in nineteenth century France and that the last phrase ("souvenirs d'un temps meilleur et d'un luxe evanoui") indicates us the decline of the family Aubain. Flaubert's attachment to the insignificant details of things in the first chapter is more manifest in the last chapter dealing with the procession of Corpus Chri- sti and the death of Felicite. Flaubertian description of the alter is filled with insignificant and decorative details: Des guirlandes vertes pendaient sur l'autel, orn£ d'un falba en point d'Angleterre. II y avait au milieu un petit cadre enfermant des reliques, deux orangers dans les angles, et tout le long, des flam beaux d'argent et des vases en porcelaine, d'oii s'elangaient des touresols, des lys, des pivoines, i des digitales, des touffes d 'hortensias. Ce monceau i de couleurs eclatantes descendait obliquement, du premier etage jusu'au tapis se prolongeant sur les paves; et des choses rares tiraient les yeux. Un sucrier de vermeil avait une couronne de violettes, des pendeloques en pierres d'Alengon brillaient sur de la mousse, deux ecrans chinois montraient leurs paysages. Loulou, cache sous des roses, ne laissait voir que son front bleu, pareil a une plaque de lapis. (87). This description portrays us the descriptive details of the altar of Corpus Christi and the inconspicuous appear ance of Loulou, the pet of Felicite, on the altar. Though Loulou's existence on the altar can be connected with Felicite's fantasy on her death-bed about the meta morphosis of the parrot into the Holy Ghost, the rest of the details are redundant and insignificant to be length ily enumerated in the final moment of the heroine's [ death. On the other hand, though we consider that the function of such a description consists in fostering 122 realistic illusion, the excessive arrangement of synec- dochic details (metonymically arranged) does not help the reader to grasp the whole picture of the alter. Flaubertian description reminds us of the similarity disorder of Uspensky who carried his particular penchant for metonymy or synecdoche so far that "the reader crushed by the multiplicity of detail unloaded on him in a limited verbal space, and is physically unable to grasp the whole, so that the portrait is often lost" (qtd. in Jakobson, "Two Aspects of language" 113). Flaubert's myopic attachments to the insignificant concrete details 1 I are found in his other short stories: for example, the i description of the castle in the first chapter of "La legende de saint Julien L'Hospitalier" and the descrip tions of the citadel of Machaerus in the introductory chapter and of armory and orgiastic cuisine in the second ! and the last chapters of "H§rodias.1,16 ! | Though Flaubertian concrete details appear to be irrelevant to the subject, it seems that Flaubert neither intended to free his description from the tyranny of narration nor provided his description with autonomous l j values or empty thematics. In his letter to Saint-Beuve, ! Flaubert himself makes a comment on the close connection between his description and the action: "II n'y a point dans mon livre une description isolee, gratuite; toutes L __ 32 3 servent a mes personnages et ont une influence lointaine ou immediate sur 1'action."17 Flaubert's ambivalent desire to write a book about nothing ("un livre sur rien") and to fill a description with functional details lead the critics to have different views on Flaubert's i | fiction. Refuting Roland Barthes's view, Victor Brombert argues that "If Flaubert is so pleased to have what he I calls a 'myopic vision' . . . it is because he is con vinced that all great works depend upon the abundance of functional details ('details intrinseques au sujet')" 18 (110). However, though we presume that Flaubert wanted I ; his descriptions to contribute to plot development and J characterization, it is difficult to say that Flaubert j succeeded in such an attempt. Flaubertian description leads us to agree with Philippe Hamon's view that "The major problem of the realist author is thus to turn this empty thematics into a full one, to bring it about that this tangential proliferation of looks, of transparent media, etc., actually has a role to play in the story, does not remain simple filler material, and to bring it about that the anaphoric redundancy of content becomes a dialectic of content. This is not always easy" (170). These aspects of Flaubertian description are very anta gonistic or alien to the conventions of the short story requiring the extreme economy of language and the organic j ' “ ” 124 I j union between narrative constituents. That might explain i why Flaubert was not a prolific short story writer and he preferred the form of the long short story or novella to the form of the short story and why his stories, unlike Maupassant's, have hardly exerted a great impact on the making of the modern short story. Between Metaphor and Metonymy: Maupassant and Joyce It is Maupassant who synthesized the traditional literary conventions of the tale and the modern techni- i I ques of Flaubertian realism into the genre of the short i i • story. Though Maupassant, the well-known disciple of ' Flaubert, has been generally recognized as one of Flau bertian realists or naturalists, his art is also deeply indebted to Balzacian literary tradition and his vision du monde. His admiration for Balzac's art and vision recognizes the images of a god or a creator in Balzac: "Balzac a l'energie f^condante, debordante, immoderee, stupefiante d'un dieu, mais avec les hates, les vio lences, les imprudences, les conceptions incompldtes, les I disproportions d'un createur qui n'a pas le temps de i i i s'arreter pour chercher la perfection . . . Son admirable fiction modifia le monde, envahit la societe, imposa et passa du reve dans la realite" (qtd. in Vial 101). 125 Furthermore, Maupassant praises Balzac as the only French writer who could comprehend the imponderable, indefinite essence immanent in nature, and as a scientific genius and visionary and evaluates Balzac as a monumental figure in literature.19 According to Maupassant, Balzac's fiction can be metaphorically compared to the pyramids of Egypt, whereas Flaubert's fiction to the Parthenon, the symbol of artistic beauty and perfection ("la plus par- faite expression de la beaute artistique) (qtd. in Vial 102). Maupassant's stories reflect his simultaneous admiration for Balzac's spiritual power and Flaubert's artistic perfection, and the great impact of these two | writers on his art. Though Maupassant inherited Flaubert's metonymic penchant for synecdochic, concrete details, of his almost three hundred stories, it is quite rare to find Flauber tian lengthy descriptions such as the details of Madame Aubain's house and the altar of Corpus Cristi which seem to be autonomous and non-functional in relation to plot development or characterization. There are a large number of Maupassant's stories in which we could not find any lengthy description suspending or delaying the tem poral flow of actions and events, and in which the whole body of the story exclusively employs the mode of narra tion emphasizing the temporal and dramatic aspects of the , story: for example, "La parure," "Les Tombales," "Le papa l de Simon," "Un parricide," "Regret," "Le parapluie," and so on. Besides, if Maupassant’s descriptions are based upon the metonymic relationships between the synecdochic parts of objects, those descriptions are mostly very readable, comprehensible, and functional, rather than autonomous and independent. Unlike such realist authors as Flaubert or Uspensky, he hardly carries it to such a l l ' extent that "the reader is crushed by the multiplicity of i . . . . detail unloaded on him m a limited verbal space, and is physically unable to grasp the whole, so that the por trait is often lost" (qtd in Jakobson, "Two Aspects of language" 113). Far from showing similarity disorder, the majority of Maupassant's descriptions are a subtle combination of metaphor and metonymy. A fine example of J this is the portrait of the heroine in "Boule de suif." I j La femme, une de celles appel^es galantes, etait ! celebre par son embonpoint precoce qui lui avait valu le surnom de Boule de suif. Petite, ronde de partout, grasse a lard, avec des doights bouffis, etrangles aux phalanges, pareils a des chapelets de courtes saucisses. avec une peau luisante et tendue, une gorge enorme qui saillait sous sa robe, elle restait cependant appetissante et courue, tant sa fraicheur faisait plaisir a voir. Sa figure etait une pomme rouge, un bouton de pivoine pret a fleurir, et la-dedans s'ouvraient, en haut, des yeux noirs magnifiques, ombrages de grands cils epais qui mettaient une ombre dedans; en bas, une bouche char- mante, etroite, humide pour le baiser, meublee de j quenottes luisantes et microscopiques. (1: 60-61; I emphasis added) This description portrays the heroine's premature cor- I pulence and her attractive external apperances, con centrating on his fingers, skin, bosom, face, eyes, eye lashes, mouth, and teeth. This metonymic description seemingly based upon the relation of contiguity between parts chiefly focuses on the two selected parts of her body: her fingers and face. These synecdochic details are described not only metonymically but also metaphori cally. In the underlined passages, the narrator meta- I phorically compares her puffy fingers constricted at the joints to strings of short sausage and her face to a red I I [ apple and to a peony bud about to blossom. On the ! whole, these metonymic and metaphoric expressions in the 1 quoted passage have close similarities with one another i because they chiefly emphasize the four selected qual ities of the heroine's external appearance: plumpness, freshness, radiance, and sensuality. On the macrostruc- tural level, the metaphoric comparison of the heroine to food by means of such culinary expressions as "boule de suif," "grasse & lard," "des chapelets de courtes saucisses," "une pomme rouge," "appetissante" is not accidental but very essential in relation to the future i development of the events and actions. For example, i ; these descriptions have much bearing on the two different ; situations of food exchange in the coach and the two j 128 ! different attitudes of the heroine and her fellow-travel— ] ers in terms of food and hunger. Above all, such exter nal details of the heroine's appearance are of essential importance to the overall theme of the story because they reinforce the image of the heroine as a sacrificial offering, a hopeless scapegoat of the Franco-Prussian war to be offered to the Prussian officer for the sake of her bourgeois fellow-travelers. Maupassant's ability to transform his metonymic passage based upon contiguity into a metaphoric expres sion is manifest in his description of the house in "La Maison Tellier." His description of the house is not so much metaphoric, subjective, and atmospheric as Poe's description of the house of Usher or Balzac's description of the mansion Grande Breteche and at the same time not so much metonymic, geometrical, insignificant, and incom- prehensively meticulous as Flaubert's description. At first sight, his description seems close to Flaubertian description because the objective, impersonal tone of the narrative voice. La maison etait familiale, tout petite, peinte en jaune, a l'encoignure d'une rue derriere 1'eolise Saint-Etienne; et, par les fenetres, on apercevait le bassin plein de navires qu'on dechargeait, le grand marais salant appele <<La Retenue» et, ! derriere, la cote de la Vieroe avec sa vieille chapelle tout grise. (137). La maison avait deux entrees. A l'encoignure, une sorte de cafe borgne s'ouvrait, le soir, aux gens du peuple et aux matelots . . . 129 Le salon de Jupiter, ou se reunissaient les bourgeois de l'endroit, etait tapiss6 de papier bleu et agremente d'un grand dessin reoresentant Leda etendue sous un cvane. On parvenait dans ce lieu au moyen d'un escalier tournant termine par une porte etroite, humble d'apparence, donnant sur la rue, et au-dessus de laquelle brillait toute la nuit, der riere un treillage, une petite lanterne come celles gu'on allume encore en certaines villes aux pieds des madones encastrees dans les murs. Le batiment, humide et vieux, sentait legerement le moisi. Par moments, un souffle d'eau de Cologne passait dans les couloirs, ou bien une porte entr- ouverte en bas faisait eclater dans toute la de- meure, comme une exploison de tonnerre, les cris populaciers des hommes attables au rez-de-chaussee, et mettait sur la figure des messieurs du premier ! une moue inquiete et degoutee. (2: 139; emphasis j added) These two excerpts are the descriptions of the exterior and interior features of the Maison Tellier. The first excerpt appears as purely metonymic because all the ! things described seem to be largely based upon the ac cidental connection of contiguity rather than the essen tial association due to their resemblances. However, in ! the course of reading the story, the reader comes to i realize that the seemingly accidental contiguity of the Maison Tellier (the brothel) with the church, with the hill named after the Virgin Mary, and with the chapel has much bearing on the story because Maupassant sees much resemblances between the brothel and the church, between the prostitute and the Virgin Mary. This view is more | manifest in the second example in which Maupassant com- i pares the little lantern of the brothel to the lamp 130 lighted at the feet of madonnas. The analogy between the Maison Tellier and the church is due to the fact that the function of both places is similar: both of them brings a feeling of solace, comfort, and pleasure to the people from various classes who are tired of everyday life or in want of some temporary shelters from the hardness of life. Besides, the details of Jupiter room such as a large drawing representing Leda stretched out under the swan and the analogy between the coarse shouts of the men in the cafe and the explosion of the thunder are closely connected to the image of Jupiter, the god of amorous affairs, the representative philanderer of anti quity. The association of religion with prostitution, the mingling of religious images with secular ones, and the motif of philandering frequently reappears throughout the whole story. Thus, in Maupassant's stories, the explicitly metonymic descriptions are implicitly based upon metaphoric resemblances between things and an essen tial connection with the overall theme and plot develop ment. Beneath the surface narrative that seems to be Flaubertian, metonymic, we could perceive the subtle internalization of Balzacian penchant for metaphors and correspondences between appearance and essence. This close relationship of description to the thematic and dramatic development of the story can be considered to be 131 firmly founded on Maupassant's classical view of art as the product of artistic necessity and selectivity: "1'artiste, ayant choisi son theme, ne prendra dans cette vie encombree de hasards et de futilites que les details caracteristiques utiles a son sujet, et il rejettera tout le reste, tout l'a-cdt6" ("Le roman" 52). On the whole, the majority of his stories are very faithful to such an artistic principle, though some of his stories such as "La femme de Paul" contain insignificant descriptive details. As Maupassant's descriptions can be seen as a subtle combination of metaphor and metonymy, the majority of Joyce's descriptions in his stories are a synthesis of metaphor and metonymy. As in Maupassant, Joyce's artis tic attention on the concrete, synecdochic details of I things and people, and his deliberate avoidance of Bal- f I zacian, inflated metaphors, reveal the great impact of i Flaubertian realism on this Irish writer. However, t t Joyce's metonymic description is closer to Maupassant's J than to Flaubert's in that it is not purely descriptive, autonomous, and self-contained, but highly functional, l suggestive, and capable of being neatly integrated into the larger context of the story. On the other hand, in Dubliners, the majority of descriptions hardly bring about a pause in the temporal flow of the narrative or a 132 suspension of the action. His lengthy descriptions are descriptive scenes (in which there are the equality of time between story and narrative) rather than descriptive pauses (in which story-time stops). Overall, his des criptions are concerned with certain temporal and spatial settings (certain particular moment and place in which the character is now situated) rather than with certain immobilized objects or settings which are exclusively spatial or "extratemporalM as in Flaubert's description of Madame Aubain's house or typically Balzacian descrip- • • • , 20 tions like the Maison Vauauer in Le pere Gon o t . Consider the following examples: The grey warm evening of August had descended upon the city and a mild warm air, a memory of summer, circulated in the streets. The streets, shuttered for the repose of Sunday, swarmed with a gaily coloured crowd. Like illumined pearls the lamps shone from the summits of their tall poles upon the living texture below which, changing shape and hue unceasingly. sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur. Two young men came down the hill of Rutland Square. One of them was just bringing a long monolo gue to a close. ("Two Gallants" 49; emphasis added) He turned often from his tiresome writing to gaze out of the office window. The glow of a late autumn sunset covered the grass plots and walks. It cast a shower of kindly golden dust on the untidy nurses and decrepit old men who drowsed on the benches; it flickered upon all the moving figures-— on the child ren who ran screaming along the gravel paths and on everyone who passed through the gardens. He watched the scene and thought of life; and (as always hap pened when he thought of life) he became sad. ("A Little Cloud" 71; emphasis added) 133 As in these examples, Joyce's description usually deals with a spatial setting in a certain particular moment, i ! rather than an extratemporal, spatial setting. As we ! have seen in the underlined words, his descriptions i i j constantly indicate a certain temporal movement and i action in the moment of contemplation, instead of being a I J pause in narrative or a suspension of action as in the j traditional description. As the second example shows, I j the character's contemplation of a certain scene has executed a certain impact on his mind: his contemplation of the "glow of a late autumn sunset," "decrepit old men," and the "children who ran screaming" makes Little Chandler thoughtful of life and melancholic. This feel ing of sadness the scene and thought of life evokes is closely connected with the thematic and dramatic develop ment of the story. On the other hand, these two descrip tions show Joyce's strong inclination to transform the seemingly metonymic narrative into a metaphoric one. Apart from the metaphoric resemblances between "illumined pearls" and "lamps" and between "swarmed" and "the crowd," the first example is phonetically metaphoric because of the frequent repetitions of the same or simi lar words: for example, "the grey warm evening . . . and a mild warm air," "the warm grey evening air"; "the living texture below which, changing shape and hue un- 134 ceasincrly. sent up into the warm grey evening air an unchanging unceasing murmur." The second description of a sunset scene is implicitly yet essentially metaphoric. The "glow of a late autumn sunset" which "flickered upon all the moving figures" appears to Little Chandler as a j metaphor of the evanescence of life in which all "the children who ran screaming along the gravel paths" soon inevitably turn into a "decrepit old man who drowsed on : the benches." This sunset scenery represents the whole theme of this story and Dubliners: our life as a on-going | dying process, human being as a living dead. Throughout Dubliners. such temporal settings as sunset, night, and seasons frequently function as a metaphor of life and death. Like these descriptive scenes, Joyce's portraits of objects and people are never purely descriptive, ex tratemporal, autonomous, and metonymic, but are very connotative, time-bounded, and metaphoric. In Joyce' stories, these connotative, metaphoric aspects of descri ption are complementary to his Flaubertian, realistic observation of the synecdochic or metonymic details. This can be clearly observed in Joyce's portraits of the three women: Farrington's eyes wandered at every moment in the direction of one of the young woman. There was something striking in her appearance. An immense scarf of peacock-blue muslin was wound round her hat and knotted in a great bow under her chin; and she 135 wore bright yellow gloves, reaching to the elbow. Farrington gazed admiringly at the plump arm which she moved very often and with much grace; and when, after a little time, she answered his gaze he ad mired still more her large dark brown eyes. The oblique staring expression in them fascinated him . . . she brushed against his chair and said O . pardon! in a London accent. He watched her leave the room in the hope that she would look back at him, but he was disappointed ("Counterparts" 95) . While they talked he tried to fix her permanently in his memory . . . Her face, which must have been hand some, had remained intelligent. It was an oval face with strongly marked features. The eyes were very dark blue and steady. Their gaze began with a defiant note but was confused by what seemed a deli berate swoon of the pupil into the iris, revealing for an instant a temperament of great sensibility. The pupil reasserted itself quickly, this half-dis closed nature fell again under the reign of pru dence, and her astrakhan jacket, moulding a bosom of a certain fullness, struck the note of defiance more definitely. ("A Painful Case" 109) . He was in a dark part of the hall gazing up the staircase. A woman was standing near the top of the first flight, in the shadow also. He could not see her face but he could see the terracotta and salmon- pink panels of her skirt which the shadow made appear black and white. It was his wife. She was leaning on the banisters, listening to something. Gabriel was surprised at her stillness and strained his ear to listen also . . . He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of some thing. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. ("The Dead" 209-210) These three portraits are described from the point of view of the character, instead of being depicted by the 13 6 undramatized narrator or the implied author. Hence, ; each description shows the features of the woman or the heroine observed by the protagonist, the impact of her appearance on his mind, and the perceiver1s intellectual or emotional sensitivity. Farrington's description focussed on such synecdochic details as scarf, gloves, arms, eyes, movements, and accent shows his sensitivity to the color seen in such details as "peacock-blue mus lin," "bright yellow gloves," and "large dark brown eyes." All these details inform the reader of how Farrington becomes gradually fascinated by her striking, | i exotic, and sexually attractive features, in the course I of his observation. In the second passage, James Duffy's | observation of Mrs. Sinico chiefly concentrates on such details of her eyes as the color, gaze, pupil, and iris and by doing so tries to grasp her intellectuality and personality hidden beneath these external features. In "The Dead," Gabriel Conroy's description of his wife is a portrait of his inner consciousness fascinated by the mysterious, symbolic beauty of her wife in raptures over j the music, rather than a portrait of Gretta Conroy her- i l i self. Gretta appears to her husband as a "symbol of ( something," a painting to be named "Distant Music," and a beauty of grace and mystery standing in the shadow. Thus, Joycean portraits of the female characters are 137 I i 1 metaphoric in the sense that the external features of the j women appear to the focal characters as the manifesta- I tions of certain internal qualities or hidden meanings j rather than the external features per se. In this res- I i pect, Joyce's description is very close to Proustian description in Genette's definition: "Proustian 'descrip tion' is less a description of the object contemplated than it is a narrative and analysis of the perceptual activity of the character contemplation: of his impres sions, progressive discoveries, shifts in distance and i j perspective, errors and corrections, enthusiasms or j disappointments, etc. A contemplation highly active in truth and containing 'a whole story'" (Narrative Dis course 102) . On the macroscopical level, the internal qualities of the heroines whose external features reflect are of essential importance to the future development of the events. For example, in the second excerpt from "A Painful Case," the "note of defiance" latent in Mrs. Sinico's appearance not only forms a striking contrast to Mr. Duffy's ineffectual, stoical, and cowardly attitudes J towards life, but also can be closely related to a series of events: her defiant behavior towards Mr. Duffy bring about the end of their relationship ("one night during which she had shown every sign of unusual excitement, ; 138 Mrs. Sinico caught up his hand passionately and pressed it to her cheek" [111]); her gradual self-destruction by her intemperate drinking after their break-up: and her eventual suicide on the railway. Similarly, in "The i Dead," Gabriel's perception of Gretta Conroy as a "symbol I ; of something" and as an imaginary painting to be named "Distant Music" has much bearing on the denouement in which Gabriel comes to know the truth of Gretta's adoles cent romance with Michael Furey who sang the same song to j her before his death of consumption. Thus, Joyce's descriptions composed of vivid and suggestive details are mostly designed to be neatly integrated into the larger context of the story and in doing so provide the story with new interpretive possibilities. In this respect, if j it is true, as Edmund Wilson observes, that "James Joyce, like George Moore, was working in the tradition, not of English, but of French fiction," Joyce can be considered to be much closer to Maupassant than to Flaubert in descriptive technique.21 Like Maupassant, Joyce hardly | carried his Flaubertian metonymic penchant for the con crete details to such a post-modernistic extent that the multiplicity of details appear to the reader as if they were intended to destroy things, to blur their outlines, and to render them incomprehensible, as in the descrip tions of Flaubert and Robbe-Grillet,22 Description in Hyon Chin’aon and French realism 139 Hyon Chin'gon's reputation as a leading figure of Korean realism (or naturalism, according to Paek Ch'ol) is largely due to his mastery of descriptive technique. His craftsmanship in description has since his time brought about the pros and cons of his realism among critics. One of his contemporary critics, Pak Chonghwa sees the excellence of Hyon Chin'gdn's realism in his descriptive technique: ' ’His style [or his fiction] is thorough, meticulous, delicate, smooth, and exquisite. His feature as a realist becomes manifest in the life like vividness of things described. Hyon Chin'gdn makes such vivid and bright pictures as to dazzle the reader's eyes" (qtd. in Paek Ch'ol 122). Whereas Pak Chonghwa considers Hyon Chin'gon's descriptive technique as the manifestation of his realism, Kim Tongin, another major writer and critic of his time, sees the limitations of Hyon Chin'gon as a realist in his exquisite artistry in description23: We could consider Hyon Chin'gon as a genius of ex traordinary craftsmanship. Our impression of Hyon Chin'gon's entire fiction can be compared to the viewer's feeling before a very beautiful landscape (in an ethical sense). The perfection of harmony, the exquisiteness of description— indeed, the acme of craftsmanship. However, why could we remember hardly any specific figure after reading his works? He is a painter of still lives, if the expression "the photographer of life" is inappropriate. He saw a 'person' and an 'event' but didn't see 'life' and 'human existence.' He tried to portray a still 140 life, an event, and an inactive person . . . His character is merely an individual, not a participant in life: he never becomes an organic part of life . . . This is the failure of Hyon Chin'gon. The emptiness of his craftsmanship is due to the fact j that he tried to photograph or sketch out an in active person instead of presenting an active life. This view is very similar to Lukacs's criticism of Flaubertian, naturalistic description. In his essay "Narrate or Describe?" Lukacs argues that "In Flaubert j and Zola the characters are merely spectators, more or t less interested in the events. As a result, the events themselves become only a tableau for the reader, or, at best, a series of tableaux. We are merely observers" (116). According to Lukacs, this literary phenomenon, j the degradation of the characters from participants to I observers, is mostly due to the emergence of description as the dominant technique. Later on, in the same essay, he points out that "When men are portrayed through the descriptive method, they become mere still lives . . . And it is no accident that at the same time descriptive naturalism in literature was degrading human beings to components of still lives, painting was losing its capa city for intensified perceptual expression" (135). As Lukacs sees the lack of close relationship between the i character and the world (or life) in Flaubertian descrip tion, Kim Tongin and other Korean critics who stand against Hyon Chin'gon's realism have frequently pointed ; i4i j out that Hyon Chin'gdn portrayed his characters as mere j individuals or passive observers isolated from life or j j social reality. In fact, a number of scholars, such as Sin Tong-uk and Pak Ch'ol, have recognized or presumed j the influence of Flaubertian realism on Hyon Chin'gon in ! techniques such as character delineation and handling of descriptive scenes, though there has hardly been any noticeable comparative study based upon the textual examination of their fictions in Korea.24 Sin Tong-uk, one of Hyon Chin'gon's stalwart supporters in recent 5c | criticism, observes : Hyon Chin-gon, who was greatly influenced by Maupas sant in design and character delineation, was mature enough to succeed in making what he received from the French writer his own in order to present the domestic problems of his own society . . . We find the change of realism in the example of Maupassant's j realistic description of facts which have no rela- i tion with social context . . . although Hyon Chin- j gon may appear to be a disciple of Maupassant in his j form and technique, actually his consciousness j refused to be a follower of Flaubert or Maupassant. That is, Maupassant's realism may only be discussed in terms of technique; there is perhaps not much to be seen in the light of overall social development. Here, whereas he perceives the essential differences in social consciousness between Hyon Chin'gon and the French writers, Sin Tong-uk admits that the techniques of Flaubert and Maupassant have exerted a great impact on Hyon Chin'gon, especially, his portrayal of characters. Though Sin Tong-uk's view has several problematic aspects (for example, the devaluation of Flaubert and Maupassant I 142 I as realists, the overestimation of their technical influ ences on Hyon Chin'gon, a clear-cut demarcation between technique and content, and the impressionistic comparison between them), it is certainly true that Hyon Chin'gdn was more deeply obsessed by his contemporary social reality and its problems than Flaubert and Maupassant and I i hence tried to make his stories as the genuine represen tations of Korean social situations under the Japanese colonialism.26 Such a social consciousness is manifest in his compositional principles, including description. Though it may be certain that he assimilated his descrip tive technique from Western traditions (especially French I ! and Russian), Hyon Chin'gon's descriptions reveal dif- i ferent aspects, when compared with those of Flaubert and Maupassant. To comprehend the characteristics of Hy6n Chin'gon's description and the literary relations between him and his Western counterparts, it will be useful to I discuss his descriptions in connection with the Western context. Of Hyon Chin'gon's stories, those which consist of the lengthy descriptive details of things and people mostly belong to the second stage of his literary life in which he tried to represent objectively his contemporary social reality by overcoming the limitations of his ear- i lier autobiographical fictions: to borrow the terms of 143 Yun Pyongro, the stage of purely objective realism.27 The majority of his descriptions which such Korean critics as Paek Ch'ol, Sin Tong-uk and Song Hach'un have frequently referred to as "descriptions," strictly speak ing, are descriptive scenes or dramatic representations (such as dialogues) rather than descriptions as a pause or a suspension of action in the narrative.28 In fact, | I as in Joyce's stories, most of Hyon Chin'gon's descrip- I j tions are closer to descriptive scenes (which realize the equality of time between narrative and story) than to descriptive pauses, as in Joyce's stories. In his des criptions, the reader could perceive the interaction between the perceiver and the perceived and the temporal i flow at the moment of contemplation. Consider the fol lowing passage from "Fire," the story of a farm girl of fourteen who set fire to her husband's house after suf- ! fering from hard labor and premature marriage29: After a while she was able to open her eyes, heavy with nightmare, then she saw her husband's face, like the lid of a rice kettle [Sot'ttukkong], above her own. His dark face, large as a big scooped wooden bowl [Hamjibak], matched the surrounding darkness, but the glaring whites of his eyes, the half-open lips coated with a string of saliva, the yellowish teeth exposed by the crooked grin— these she could discern frightfully clearly. Then his large face kept on growing, along with the dark | brown shoulders scorched in the color of a jujube rice cake [Chuak], which appeared as large as a i bunch of bean stalks [KKachidong] and then as the house itself. Overwhelmed by the terror rising from her navel and the pain twisting her bowels, Suni now trembled, now floundered, fighting the persistent slumber that seized her by the nape of her neck, and j 144 i finally realized what had happened . . . The gigan tic frame of the man moved around in the room and then left. (2) This portrait of the husband perceived by the heroine during their sexual intercourse is not an objective, realistic description of her husband's face but a dis- ! torted, hyperbolic version of it. This portrait which seems to be largely based upon the contiguous, metonymic relationships between the parts of the face such as its outline, eyes, lips, and teeth is in fact composed of a series of metaphoric expressions: "like the lid of a rice i | kettle," "large as a big scooped wooden bowl," "scorched in the color- of a jujube rice cake" and "as large as a bunch of bean stalks and then as the house itself." These metaphoric expressions are coherent in that the four items— "sot'ttukkong," "Hamjibak," "Chuak," and "KKachidong"— are in close connection with the tradi- i tional housework of a peasant's wife. The face of her husband appears as the sum of her chores rather than as a human being, to the heroine who had been fast asleep after exhausting herself by daily hard labour as a farm housewife and woke up reluctantly because of her hus- j band's sexual intercourse like a rape. On the other hand, the descriptions of the fragmented parts of his face— "the glaring whites of his eyes," "the half-open lips coated with a string of saliva," "the yellowish 145 teeth exposed by the crooked grin"— create the images of a hungry beast or a haunting ghost rather than a human being. His face, enlarged by a kind of close-up techni que, at first appears to her like a hungry beast from the surrounding darkness and disappears like a haunting ghost of the gigantic frame at dawn. Hence, the husband of the heroine comes closer to a symbol of the phallocentric values of a traditional patriachical society than to a mere male. Thus, Hyon Chin'gon's description of the character is metaphoric, hyperbolic, distorted, expres- sionistic, and conceptual, instead of being objective, realistic, and concrete, though it focuses on the synec- dochic details of the object. His portrait tries to convey some hidden meanings to the reader rather than to defy interpretation. In this respect, Hyon Chin'gon's description seems to be quite different from Flaubertian descriptions or some of Maupassant's realistic descrip tions whose sole function seems to consist in the crea tion of referential illusion or reality effect. At the same time, in contrast to the metaphoric portrait of the husband in "Fire" and those of the main characters in "The Blind Man's Buff" ("Kkamakchapki"), Hyon Chin'gon's descriptions of people, in such stories as "B Matron and the Love Letter," "The Old Home," and "The Blind," simultaneously show his Flaubertian realis- 146 ! j tic penchant for the metonymic, synecdochic, concrete details of objects and his deliberate avoidance of Bal- zacian metaphoric expressions. However, in these stories, Hy6n Chin'gdn's seemingly metonymic description tends to be easily transformed into a metaphoric, sym- i bolic one, in connection with the larger narrative struc ture, which represents the typical faces of various social classes in his contemporary social reality. In those stories, the move from a metonymic process to a metaphoric one is so internalized that we could hardly ; perceive it clearly on the surface narrative, without ! considering a given description in the larger context. A | ! fine example of such a description is the portrait of the l protagonist in "The Old Home": It is an episode that happened in a train from Taegu to Seoul. With keen interest, I gazed persistently at the man who was sitting face to face with me. He was clad in a Kimono in the manner of wearing a Trumagi [traditional Korean overcoat] and I could also see his Korean calico vest sticking out from under the Kimono and a pair of his Chinese- j style trousers below. His trousers were made of dark brown fabric, as glossy as oiled paper, which was very popular with the Chinese. As for his feet, he was wearing leggings and straw sandals [Korean style]; by contrast, no hat on his close- cropped head in Gobugari [Japanese hair style for men]. Strangely enough, it was quite a coincidence that the fellow-travellers in my compartment came from the three different countries: a Chinese on my side, a Japanese on his side. Thanks to his gar ments from the three different Asian countries, he was pretty fluent in Japanese and not very poor in speaking Chinese, either. ("Kohyang" 197) ! i ' 147 I This portrait in the initial paragraph of "The Old Home" seems to be completely metonymic in that the narrator describes the external features of the protagonist ac cording to the contiguous relationship between them, without using any metaphoric expression based upon simi larity or analogy. However, in connection with the larger context of the story, the reader comes to realize the correspondence or essential relationship between his external features and his life history: his external appearance which shows a ludicrous combination of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese styles represents the miserable j life of a Korean farmer under Japanese colonialism, i Later on, the protagonist, the focalized object by the narrator in the above passage, becomes in turn a nar rator. He tells the first-person narrator his own miser able life as a tramp: the story of how wretchedly, after J being deprived of his farmland by Japanese colonization j company, he lived a vagabond life, wandering from his homeland through the northern provinces of China to the southern provinces of Japan such as Kyushu and Osaka. His outlandish appearance is the outcome of such a vaga bond life and the manifestation of the wretched condi- i ' tions of Korean working class in Japanese colonialism. I His external appearance caricaturistically described is a conceptual, typified form of Korean social reality rather 148 than a mere realistic description of the concrete de tails . Another fine example of such typification or concep tualization is the very beginning passage of "B matron and the Love Letter" which have been frequently quoted in the theoretical discussions about Hy6n Chin'gon's des criptive technique30. I ! Miss B, the teacher and dormitory matron of C girl's school, was most famous for her stubbornness, celibacy, and rigorous devotion to Jesus Christ. She was a spinster of about forty and had a freckled face without any maidenly quality; her face was withered, coarse, dry, yellowish, like a mouldy dried corvina fish. Her forehead, layered with many wrinkles and almost bald, and her chignon like a lump of goat dung which she had clumsily done with her thin hair, were the signs of aging she couldn't conceal. When she firmly closed her sharp lips and gazed fiercely | at boarding students, with her chilly eyes behind the long-distance glasses, she was so severe and relentless as to make her students shiver and tremble with fear. ("B Sagam kwa Love Letter" 173) This passage is the very initial paragraphs of "B Matron and the Love Letter" which tells of the hypocritical life of a dormitory matron, a Dr. Jekyll of dual personality, who has disguised her fantasy and desire for passionate love beneath her puritanical mask. This portrait shows the features of B matron according to contiguous rela tionships between parts: from her personality to her i external appearance and then from the overall impression of her face to the meticulous details of the parts of her face (such as forehead, chignon, thin hair, her sharp 149 lips, glasses, and eyes). The overall aspect of this portrait seems to be much more metonymic than the por trait of the husband in "Fire,” though Hyon Chin'gon uses the two metaphoric expressions: her face "like a mouldy dried corvina fish" and her chignon "like a lump of goat dung." However, the latter is an idiomatic Korean ex pression which signifies the extreme smallness of size, rather than a purely metaphoric expression. In this aspect, Hyon Chin'gon's descriptive technique reflected in this portrait seems to be closer to Flaubert and Maupassant than to Balzac and Poe. However, his meton ymic descriptive details are readable, comprehensible, and functional, unlike lenghty Flaubertian descriptions which are luxurious in details but devoid of meaning. Like Maupassant, in spite of his realist penchant for metonymic, synecdochic details, Hyon Chin'gon is, par excellence, a short story writer who is keenly aware of the importance of economy of language to the short story and satisfies the classical demand of this genre for structural union between narrative components.31 This portrait in the beginning of the story can be closely connected with the entire theme or the whole context of the story: the hypocrisy and bigotry of the superficially Westernized teacher equipped with such Western ideas as celibacy and puritanism, the antagonism between B matron 150 and her students, and the unveiling of the real nature of B matron. The portrait of B matron is closer to a cari cature than to a purely objective description because of its hyperbolic images, as such critics as Chong Hansuk i j 70 , i and Kim Chungha point out. The hyperbolic images of B matron emphasizes farcically a disparity between her outward appearance and her real nature, as well as the contrast between the unmaidenly, unattractive features of middle-aged B matron and the maidenly, lovable images of her adolescent students. In particular, in connection with the larger context, the metaphoric comparison of her face to "a mouldy dried corvina fish” (which will be | repeated later in the climactic scene concerning the I j revelation by the students of B matron's dual per- i sonality) forms a sharp contrast to the metaphoric com parison of the girls' toes to rice weevil whose qualities are soft, white, light, fragile, and mobile, as Kim Inhwan points out (1-111). In this connection, B matron can be seen as a symbol or a type representing a large number of Korean modern intellectual women who assimi- i I J lated undiscriminatingly new ideas and customs from the ; West and led an unauthentic, hypocritical life, without l adjusting herself properly to the modern Korean era of upheaval characterized by the collapse of the traditional 151 values and morals and the revolutionary introduction of Western ideas and culture. As we have examined, Hy6n Chin'gon's stories show us that his descriptions of people, whether the dominant | mode of a given narrative fragment is metaphor as in I "Fire" or metonymy as in "The Old Home," are mostly designed to be integrated into the whole narrative struc ture and then into the social context of his contemporary reality. In order to represent effectively the tragic lives of his contemporary people under the dark situation i of Japanese colonialism through the limited genre of the i I short story, Hyon Chin'gon seems to have intentionally emphasized certain selected essential, typical features of people so as to present them as a type of a certain social class rather than as a particular individual isolated from the social context. Hyon Chin'gon's inten tion of typifying his characters can be clearly seen in j the title of the collection of his short stories: "The Faces of Korea." What he tries to present through his stories is the faces of Koreans whose external features are able to reflect or symbolize his contemporary social ! reality. As a result, most his portraits appear to be I closer to the conceptual, caricaturistic images of people i than to the illusionist, naturalistic, true-to-life representation of them. In this respect, though it is 152 possible for us to recognize some similarities between Hyon Chin'gon and Maupassant and Joyce (such as the move from a metonymic process to a metaphoric process on the macrostructural level of the narrative, the interpretive possibilities of seemingly concrete details, and the overall structural union between narrative components), his description is quite different from Flaubertian realistic description whose extreme artistic attention to the metonymic, synecdochic details of objects seems to defy interpretation or signification. Concluding remarks The descriptions of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon j Chin'gon can be basically understood as a synthesis of i ' metaphor and metonymy. Though their metonymic descrip- ! i tions focused on the concrete details of objects or i ! people and their deliberate avoidance of Balzacian, inflated, overtly metaphoric expressions show the great influence of Flaubertian realism on those writers, the highly interpretive possibilities and connotative values ! of a given description in the context of the whole narra-j I I tive show us that Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon i can be still placed into the tradition of the short story i centering on the structural union of narrative con stituents, that is, plot and the symbolic power and 153 complexity of the neatly interwoven narrative structure. Their realistic stories cast strong doubt on the recent l critical views of realistic description as an attempt to "reproduce with signs a non-semiological reality" which we can clearly see in the following remarks of Philippe Hamon: "The realist attitude is based on a linguistic illusion, the belief in the possibility of a language which is monopolized exclusively by its referential function, a language in which signs would be the adequate analogues of things, a kind of codebook reproducing I faithfully the discontinuity of reality" ("What is a ! description?" 170). Even if we presume that, as Robbe- Grillet observes, starting with Flaubert, everything began to vacillate in modern fiction ("des Flaubert, tout commence a vaciller") and the disintegration of the plot has been getting more and more obvious, the realistic short stories of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon still appear as "rearguards" of the long tradition of epic forms centering on the plot and the coherent struc ture of narrative.33 154 Notes 1 Writer & Critic and Other Essays, trans. Arthur D. Khan (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970) 110-148. 2 In "Narrate or Describe?," Lukacs argues that "But apart from the fact that the description of the environ ment is never "pure" description but is almost always transformed into action..., description for Balzac pro vides nothing more than a base for the new, decisive element in the composition of the novel: the dramatic element...In Flaubert and Zola description has an en tirely different function" (118). j 3 Refer to Gerard Genette, "Frontieres du recit," j Communications 8 (1966): 152-163; Philippe Hamon, "What is a description?" French Literary Theory Today, ed. i Tzvetan Todorov (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982) 147-178. 1 Genette mentions that "la description au contraire, parce I qu'elle s'attarde sur des objets et des etres consideres dans leur simultaneity, et qu'elle envisage les proces eux-memes comme des spectacles, semble suspendre le cours du temps et contribue B l etaler le recit dans l'espace..." (158). Hamon defines description as an "interruption in the syntagmatics of the narration due to a paradigm" and as an "idle period" in narrative activity, a "breather," a "pause." (150) 4 "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances," Language in Literature 111. 5 For discussion about metaphor and metonymy, refer to "Linguistics and Poetics," "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" by Roman Jakobson; Jonathan Culler, "The Turns of MetaphorThe Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics. Literature. Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) 188-209; Gerard Genette, ; "La rhetorique restreinte," "Metonymie chez Proust," | Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972) 21-63. 6 See "On Realism in Art," 25, and "Two Aspects of language," 111. 7 For further discussion about the resemblances between metaphor and plot, refer to Paul Ricoeur, "Avant- propos," in Temps et recit: Tome I (Tr. Paul Ricoeur, "Preface," Time and Narrative: Vol.l). Ricoeur's concept of plot as a "new congruence in the organization of the events" or as a "synthesis of the heterogenous" is very close to Shelly's concept of metaphorical language:"Their language [the language of the poets] is vitally meta phorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things and perpetuates their apprehen sion..." ("A Defense of Poetry," Critical Theory since Plato. 500). 8 Jakobson gives us several examples of metonymic and synecdochic description as a typical device of the realistic school in his two essays, "On realism in Art" and "Two Aspects of Language": for example, Tolstoj's artistic attention on such an essential detail as Anna's handbag in the scene of her suicide and Uspenskij's description showing a similarity disorder (25). 9 "The Fall of the House of Usher," Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Doubleday, n.d.) 177-191. { 10 On the one hand, the relationship between the ! house of Usher and the family Usher can be understood as metonymic in that there is a relation of contiguity bet ween the house and its inhabitant. On the other hand, it can be seen as synecdochic whether the house of Usher is understood as a term for designating a mere part (or a property) of the Usher or as an inclusive term used for encompassing both the family Usher and its property. For the basic understanding of such major tropes as metaphor, metonymy, and synecdochic, refer to Jonathan Culler's definitions of them, based upon Kenneth Burke's catego ries: "Metaphor, a comparison or substitution based on likeness, can be thought of, Burke says, as the use of X as a perspective on Y. Metonymy moves from one thing to another on the basis of contiguity and thus produces meaning and order by positing spatial or temporal series. Synecdochic, in contrast, is a totalizing figure, the common operation whereby a discourse infers qualities of the whole from the qualities of a part or extracts an essence from an example. Finally, irony produces meaning by the dialectical juxtaposition of opposites" ("Literary Theory in the Graduate Program" 216). Though Jakobson uses the term "synecdochic" without clearly defining it, his use of this term seems to be in conformity with Cul ler's definition. 11 The resemblance or essential connection between the first scene and the last scene can be seen as the metaphoric aspect of narrative, though narrative is primarily metonymic. Refer to Gerald Prince's following remarks about the metaphoric aspect of metonymic narra tive: "Following and expanding Jakobson, who emphasized 156 the importance of the metonymical process in realistic fiction, narratologists have tended to treat NARRATIVE as primarily metonymic: they have argued that MOTIFS and FUNCTIONS are integrated into SEQUENCES mainly through relations of contiguity. Yet it can also be argued that narrative is— in an important way— a function of the metaphoric process: in a narrative sequence, the last situation or event constitutes a partial repetition of the first; in other words, there is a relation of simi larity between the two." See Gerald Prince, "Metaphor," Dictionary of Narratoloay (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987) . 12 Genette defines: "la 'description1 proustienne est moins une description de 1'object contemple qu'un j recit et une analysis de 1'activite perceptive du person- | nage contemplant, de ses impressions, decouvertes pro gressives, changements de distance et de perspective, erreurs et corrections, enthousiasmes ou deceptions, etc. Contemplation fort active en verite, et qui contient i 'toute une histoire'. C'est cette histoire que raconte la description proustienne" (Figures III 136). 1 13 "La grande Breteche" was later incorporated by 1 Balzac as a part of "Autre etude de femme." See La comedie humaine. Bibliotheaue de la pleiade, 11 vols. ; (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) vol. 3. 1L. See La comedie humaine. Bibliotheque de la plei ade . 11 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1950) vol. 6. I In "Thematics," Tomashevsky defines motivation as the "network of devices justifying the introduction of individual motifs or of groups of motifs." Tomashevsky divides motivation into three types: "compositional moti vation" serving characterization and plot development, "realistic motivation" fostering the illusion of reality, and "artistic motivation" such as defamilarization (78- 87) . 16 Nevertheless, although Flaubertian descriptive details show a metonymic process based upon the relation of contiguity without contributing to the plot develop ment, it is difficult for us to conclude that the overall structure of Flaubert's stories is metonymic and prosaic rather than metaphoric and poetic. For the important episodes in "Un coeur simple" and "La legende de saint Julien" are conspicuously interconnected according to the metaphoric relationship between episodes, based upon resemblances or similarities: for example, as we have 157 I j seen in the previous chapter concerning plot, a series of events in "Un coeur simple" and those in "La legende de saint Julien" obsessively deal with the theme of death and the theme of killing respectively. 17 Quoted in Charles Carlut ed., La correspondence de Flaubert; 6tude et repertoire critique (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968) 406. 18 Victor Brombert goes on to say that "This reaf firmation of the subject's centrality and of the detail's specific role in the larger economy of the work suffices to cast strong doubt on Roland Barthes's somewhat hasty affirmation that the concrete detail in Flaubert, serving only the illusion of reality ('l'effet de reel'), remains resistant to any structure or meaning" ("Flaubert and the Status of the Subject" 110) . 10 • • Maupassant states that "Je crois bien que Balzac est le seul ecrivain frangais qui ait su saisir dans la nature 1'imponderable et l'indefini, ou plongent parfois les racines de nos actions. Et cela, parce que Balzac avait le g£nie scientific en m£me temps qu'il etait un visionnaire" (qtd. in Vial 102) 20 For the detailed definition of the extratemporal description, see Figures III 134; or Narrative Discourse | 100. 21 Throughout Dubliners, we could find a few of Flaubertian descriptions which almost completely consist of concrete details and whose sole function seems to create referential illusion. The most conspicuous ex ample of Flaubertian descriptions in Joyce is his por trayal of the dinner table in "The Dead": A fat brown goose lay at one end of the table and at the other end, on a bed of creased paper strewn with sprigs of parsley, lay a great ham, stripped of its outer skin and peppered over with crust crumbs, a neat paper frill round its shin and beside this was a round of spiced beef. Between these rival ends ran parallel lines of side-dishes: two little minsters of jelly, red and yellow; a shallow dish full of blocks of blancmange and red jam, a large green leaf-shaped dish with a stalk-shaped handle, on which lay bunches of purple raisins and peeled almonds, a companion dish on....behind it were three squads of bottles of stout and ale and minerals, drawn up according to the colours of their uniforms, 158 ■ the first two black, with brown and red labels, the third and smallest squad white, with transverse green sashes. (196-197). Joyce’s description of the table which amounts to one whole page carries it so far as to remind of similarity disorder, as in the metonymic descriptions of Flaubert, Uspensky, and Robbe-Grillet. This description completely reject our attempt to infer certain hidden meanings from its details and integrate them into the narrative struc ture. However, in contrast to Flaubert, Joyce deliber ately restrains his metonymic impulse and never inserts such an insignificant description into the initial, the climatic, or the concluding passages, which are of essen tial importance to the development of the story. Be sides, the quoted passage is the only one that Joyce carries his metonymic penchant to the extreme degree. In his essay "Temps et descriptions dans le i recit d'aujourd'hui," (Pour un nouveau roman. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963) Robbe-Grillet describes the difference between traditional description and modern j description as follows: La description servait a situer les grandes lignes d'un decor, puis a en eclairer quelques elements particulierement revelateurs; elle ne parle plus que d'objets insignifiants, ou qu'elle s'attache a rendre tels. Elle pretendait reproduire une realite preexistante; elle affirme a present sa fonction creatrice. Enfin, elle faisait voir les choses et voila qu’elle semble maintenant les detruire, comme si son acharnement a en discourir ne visait qu'£ en brouiller les lignes, a les rendre incom- prehensibles, a les faire disparaitre totalement. (127) Flaubertian description perfectly corresponds to Robbe- Grillet 's concept of modern description, though it is uncertain whether Flaubert intentionally aimed at such a post-modernistic effect of description in order to free his description from the tyranny of narration and signi- j fication, or whether the post-modernistic aspects of his : description are the accidental by-products of his realist attempt to reproduce the things as they are. 23 "Han'guk kundae sosolgo," Han'quk hvondae munhak pip'yonq-sa: charvo III, ed. Kwon Ydngmin (Seoul: Tanguk ch'ulp'an-bu, n.d.) 132. 159 24 The question of whether Hyon Chin'gon is a genu ine realist or a painter of still life has since 1920s been a central issue to the theoretical discussions about his realism which tend to be evaluative rather than descriptive. For the different theoretical views about Hyon Chin'gon's realism, refer to Cho, Yonhyon, "Hyon Chin'gon munhak tii t'uksong kwa munhwasajuk wich'i," Sin Tong-uk and Kim Yolgu 11-91-98; Li, Chuhyong, "Hyon Chin'gon munhak tii y6n'gu-sajuk pip'an," Sin Tong-uk and Kim Yolgu 11-61-78. 25 "Hyon Chin-gon and His Literature," Korea Journal May 197 6: 20. 26 Hyon Chin'gon's social consciousness can be clearly seen in his following remarks: "Nothing can exist without space and time. Cease to stroll on the moon. Cease to amuse yourself on the sea of clouds. Since our literature is Korean, it should set foot firmly on Korean soil. Since our literature is modern, it should breathe deeply the spirit of the modern time." Quoted in Chong i Hansuk, Hvondae han'quk chakka-ron (1976; Seoul: Koryo | UP, 1986) 96-97. I | 27 See the writings of Yun Pyongro and Li Chuhyong; Yun Hongro, Han'quk kundae sosdl von'au: 20 vondae Rea lism sosol ui hvonqs6nq ul chunqsim tiro (Seoul: Iljo-gak, 1980). 28 In "Discours du recit" fFiqure III 128-38), Genette distinguishes between scenes and pauses (descrip tions can be basically seen as pauses in the narrative). O Q * , • Peter Lee's translation of "Fire" is slightly modified by me because the metaphoric expression "scorched in the color of a jujube rice cake" was omitted from his translation and the Korean word "Hamjibak" is closer to "a big scooped wooden bowl" (used for dipping water out of a well or for mixing grains and vegetables) rather than "a big round wooden tray." 30 For the detailed discussion, refer to Kim Inhwan, "ui Kujo Haemyong>," 107-115. ; 31 The majority of realistic stories by Maupassant and Hyon Chin'gon satisfy such a generic demand (arti culated by Poe) that "If his very initial sentence tend not to be the outbringing of this effect [preconceived 160 j effect], then he has failed in this first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design" ("Review of Twice-Told Tales" 47- 48) . Kim Inhwan, " ui Kujo haemyong," Sin Tong-uk and Kim Yolgu 1-108. 33 Refer to Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Sur quelques no tions p^rimees," Pour un noveau roman 31-32; Lukacs, Georg, "Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Deniso vich," Solzhenitsyn (1969; Cambridge: MIT P, 1970) 7-32. In this essay, Lukacs states that "the novella frequently appears either as a precursor to a conquest of reality by the great epic and dramatic forms, or as a rearguard, a termination at the end of a period; that is, it appears either in the phase of a Not-Yet (Nochnicht) in the artistically universal mastery of the given social world, or in the phase of the No-Longer (Nichtmehr)" (7). 161 CHAPTER FOUR THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF THE REALISTIC SHORT STORY Realism. Symbolism, and the Short Storv In "The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship," Rene Wellek argues that "The theory of realism is ulti mately bad aesthetics because all art is 'making' and is a world in itself of illusion and symbolic forms."1 This devaluation of realism forms a sharp contrast to his conception of symbolism as a term "which prepares for synthesis, draws our minds away from the mere accumula tion of observations and facts, and paves the way for a future history of literature as a fine art."2 Wellek's view of realism and symbolism seems to represent a domi nant critical tendency of the modern Western tradition towards these two artistic principles: symbolism and realism are opposite rather than complementary concepts, and symbolism is higher aesthetics than realism. This tendency is clearly present in the critical views of Maupassant and Joyce. The realistic features of Dubliners as a "nicely polished looking-glass" (which reflects Joyce's contemporary Irish reality) seem to have been not properly appraised by recent critics because of their excessive symbolic interpretations of it.3 As Robert Scholes and Walton Litz point out, this critical 162 emphasis on symbolic motifs in Dubliners leads us to "find ourselves troubled from time to time by the uneasy feeling that the stories are being 'over-read'" (299). In contrast to Joyce's stories, in American and English criticism, Maupassant's stories have been frequently considered to be entirely the works of "photographic realism" lacking in lyricism or symbolism. One of the earlier major critics on Joyce, Herbert Gorman, harshly criticizes Maupassant's realistic stories as follows4: Guy de Maupassant, with a dry venom that was often complete, painstakingly removed practically all of the elements of poetry and idealism from the major ity of his short stories, fashioning them into a photographic realism that was as pared down to essentials as the problems of Euclid. Joyce, too, furnishes his readers with a photographic realism in "Dubliners," but, at the same time, they comprehend a richer individuality behind his work. De Maupas sant's mind, in its most notorious phases, was a vicious camera and it is difficult to conceive of anything mysterious existing beyond the power of the lens. This hostility to Maupassant's realistic stories or the devaluation of Maupassant's symbolism tends to persist in the comparative studies between Joyce and Maupassant. The views of Magalaner and Kain are not different from Gorman’s. According to these critics, whereas Dubliners is a subtle combination of symbolism and lyricism, Mau passant's stories are entirely the works of realism and prose: "Maupassant is not especially interested in sym bolic presentation. He usually tells his story in a flat, clean, clear, brittle, and totally admirable way, presenting his account on the realistic level only."5 This devaluation of Maupassant's symbolism is also pre valent in the American and English theories of the short story. For example, in "The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories," while referring to Maupassant as "the first- rate unliterarv writer," Elizabeth Bowen argues that "His work shows unhuman fire, like an animal's eye; his uncom plexity is not sympathetic. His finish appeared to have a touch of the shop about it, a faded smartness not yet fully 'period.' He had not been taught impersonality for nothing: the artist without tricks very seldom starts a school" (May 154). In contrast to such unsympathetic views of Maupas sant as an unliterary realist in American and English criticism, in his native tradition, a large number of French critics recently tend to emphasize the symbolic features of Maupassant's art rather than the realistic ones. Maupassant, who has been long regarded as an exemplary realist, begins to appear as a writer of obses sion, metaphysical anguish, and complexity, to such recent critics as Pierre Cogny, Besnard-Coursodon, and J. Greimas.6 For example, in his Maupassant: 1'homme sans dieu, Pierre Cogny states that "Sous son apparente lim- pidite se cache une complexite aux multiples arcanes et 164 il retient plus par ce qu'il sous-entend que par ce qu'il dit. II raconte des histoires, mais, derriere l'ano- nymat tout classique de ses personnages, il se raconte lui-meme et tente une explication du monde" ("Avant- propos"). These complex features of Maupassant beneath his surface limpidity, and the deeper, multiple meanings of his seemingly translucent, realistic narratives, tend to appear as the main subjects of the recent readings of Maupassant's stories. This recent critical trend towards the symbolic reinterpretation of Maupassant's stories in the French tradition seems to have parallels with the evolution of Dubliners criticism since Brewster Chi- selin's study of Joyce's symbolism in that the stories of both writers, which formerly struck traditional critics as realistic, have recently impressed the new critics of their native tradition with such artistic qualities as symbolism and complexity. However, though in literary criticism realism and symbolism tend to be conceived of as opposite concepts rather than complementary ones and the latter seems to acquire higher credit than the former, it can be argued that symbolism and realism have been two sides of the same coin rather than two separate entities, at least in the context of the realistic short story. Maupassant seems to have clearly recognized the inseparability bet- 165 ween realism and symbolism in a work of art: "Une oeuvre d'art n'est superieure que si elle est en meme temps un symbole et l'expression exacte d'une realite" (qtd. in Vial 75). Similarly, though in Dubliners Joyce employs conspicuously such artistic devices as symbolic imagery, implications, and allusions, his realistic intention or project is evident in his letters to Grant Richards, the London publisher: "My intention was to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis" (Scholes and Litz 2 69).7 Thus, both Maupas sant and Joyce seem to have conceived of symbolism and realism as inseparable and equally important aesthetics. The synthesis of symbolism and realism in fiction can be more easily materialized in the short story than in the novel because the genre of the short story, condi tioned to limited narrative space, demands an extreme economy of language in order to achieve an optimal artis tic effect. Though the symbolic structures of the short story have recently been emphasized as its fundamental generic quality by such scholars as Mary Rohrberger, the symbolic conception of the short story has hardly been dominant in American criticism, until this decade. This forms a sharp contrast to German criticism's persistent emphasis on the symbolic character of the novelle since 166 Heyse's theory of the Falcon.8 According to Heyse, the majority of novellas or stories have contained a concrete symbol such as the falcon in the ninth story of the fifth day in Boccaccio's Decameron, which creates a striking impression on the reader's mind.9 Though in Heyse's falcon theory the primary function of the con crete symbol is to serve as a "sort of label to identify the particular Novelle," Bennett observes that "in many Novellen a concrete symbol is used to express some inner meaning, often the real essence and significance of the Novelle" (15-16). Another earlier theorist, Friedrich Schlegel, argues that the novelle is "well suited to the indirect and, as it were, symbolic depiction of a subjec tive mood and intention— indeed of the deepest and most individual of such moods" (qtd. in Swales 36). These earlier views have much bearing on the contemporary theo retical conception of the novelle. This is evident in Manfred Schunicht's statement: "On the one hand, stric test objectivity, the distance of the reporter, a pers pective that, with every means at its disposal, objec tifies; on the other, concealed behind the fiction, a structured reality informed by a subjective teleology, through whose artistic concealment the subjective reality is passed off as the seemingly given reality" (qtd. in Swales 36). 167 These German conceptions of the short story (or the novelle) as a synthesis of objectivity and subjectivity, as a symbolic presentation of prosaic reality, are more manifest in Georg Lukacs1 description of the short story as a lyrical epic form10: The subject's form-giving, structuring, delimiting act, his sovereign dominance over the created ob ject, is the lyricism of those epic forms which are without totality. Such lyricism is here the last epic unity; it is not the swallowing of a solitary 'I' in the object-free contemplation of its own self, nor is it the dissolving of the object into sensations and moods; it is born out of form, it creates form, and it sustains everything that has been given form in such a work . . . In the short story, the narrative form which pin-points the strangeness and ambiguity of life, such lyricism . must entirely conceal itself behind the hard out lines of the event; here, lyricism is still pure selection; the utter arbitrariness of chance, which may bring happiness or destruction but whose work ings are always without reason, can only be balanced by clear, uncommented, purely objective depiction. Here, Lukacs refers to the short story (or the novelle) as lyrical because of artistic selectivity, concentra tion, and the hardness of form, and because of the aes thetic sublimation of subjectivity into a highly objec tified form. Lukacs' conception of the short story as a lyrical epic form is noticeably different from the Ameri can and English views of the short story as a lyrical genre in that it breaks a set of seeming binary opposi tions between the lyrical and the epic, between the symbolic and the realistic, and between the objective and the subjective, which can be easily seen in the American 168 and English theories of the short story.11 In par ticular, Lukcas's view contrasts with the view of Eileen Baldeshwiler, one of the important American critics who have systematically discussed the lyricism of the short story. Baldeshwiler1s view is mainly based upon the dichotomy between the lyric short story and the epic short story. While postulating the lyric and the epic as the two related parallel developments in the history of the modern short story, Baldeshwiler describes the two subgenres of the short story as follows12: The larger group of narratives [the epic short story] is marked by external action developed "syl- logistically" through characters fabricated mainly to forward plot, culminating in a decisive ending that sometimes affords a universal insight, and expressed in the serviceably inconspicuous language of prose realism. The other segment of stories [the lyric short story] concentrates on internal changes, moods, and feelings, utilizing a variety of struc tural patterns depending on the shape of the emotion itself, relies for the most part on the open ending, and is expressed in the condensed, evocative, often figured language of the poem. This theoretical distinction is largely based upon a set of binary oppositions— between the epic and the lyric, between the external action (or plot) and the internal movement (or emotion), between the closed ending and the open ending, between the language of prose realism and the figurative language of the poem. In my view, Bal- deshwiler's generic distinction is not useful for our comprehensive understanding of the short story, inasmuch 169 as it not only excludes a large number of stories which resist being categorized into one of these two sub genres, but also prevents us from perceiving the latent lyrical, poetic qualities of the epic short story beneath its plot-oriented, realistic surface narrative. In recent American short story criticism, it is Mary Rohrberger who has persistently and convincingly empha sized the poetic, symbolic aspects of the short story as its essential generic quality, transcending the limita tions of Baldeshwiler1s theory. While pointing out Bal- deshwiler's limitations, Rohrberger describes her notion of the lyric short story as follows13: If Poe’s stories and Hawthorne's and Melville's aren't lyric, then I don't know what a lyric story is. My canon of lyric stories would encompass every major writer of short fiction whose stories are characterized bv symbolic structures, where pattern ing is defined by a principle of organization and where degrees of tensions or expectations and grati fications involve us in a steady rhythmic process toward a particular ending necessitated bv the pat tern involved. The existence in a fiction of a linear plot line does not exclude that fiction from partaking of the qualities of lyricism. Plot is simply one of many elements of narrative. The deci sive point is how meaning is derived— whether from plot or from patterning, which includes plot. (40; emphasis added) This notion of the lyric short story seems to include all well-constructed short stories rather than to describe one of the sub-genres of the short story. Indeed, in another writing "The Short Story: A Proposed Definition," Rohrberger confines her use of the term "short story" 170 entirely to the lyric stories having symbolic structures while using another term "simple narrative" for those which "do not have the depth or complexity provided by a symbolic structure" (May 81). Her concept of the lyric short story or "the short story proper" is not quite different from Poe's theory of the tale proper, stated in "Review of Twice-Told Tales," which emphasizes the struc tural union of narrative components based upon the writer's "preestablished design." Rohrberger herself is keenly aware of Poe's persistent influences on contem porary short story theory: "So, where are we? . . . we are still circling around what Poe said. I do not, however, find this possibility at all bothersome when I consider how long we have been circling around Aristotle" (Lohafer and Clarey 45). In my view, these theoretical conceptions of the short story as a symbolic genre, made by German critics and Rohrberger, have certain validity because most great short stories, including realistic stories, have in effect a great degree of symbolic qualities which invite the reader to a "hermeneutic gamble," or an "interpre tative gamble," to borrow Martin Swales' terms. In this hermeneutic gamble, as Rohrberger states, "the short story makes of readers cocreators, active participants in the revelation of meaning."14 For example, a great num 171 ber of recent reinterpretations of such traditional short stories as those of Balzac and Poe (e.g. Barthes' reading of "Sarrasine" and the different readings of "The Pur loined Letter" by Jacques Lacan and Norman N. Holland) seem to substantiate the pertinence of the symbolic conception of the short story, the idea that the short story, though it appears to be based upon a single ef fect, consists of complex substructures and indeterminate elements which are capable of producing multiple meanings according to the reader's response and sensitivity.15 This symbolic character of the short story is certainly true of most great realistic stories. This may be evi dent in the fact that the stories of Maupassant and Joyce, formerly seen by earlier critics as unequivocal and realistic (or naturalistic) par excellence, have been recently reread and reinterpreted by the critics of their native tradition as highly symbolic, complex stories. In effect, by using such symbolic devices as concrete sym bols and ellipsis, the realistic stories of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gdn seem to create different inter pretative possibilities and the "gaps of indeterminacy" to be filled in by the reader.16 If we compare meta phorically the short story to the symbolon. the "half- coin carried away by each of the two parties of an agree ment as a pledge" (the term "symbol" derives from svm- 172 bolon),17 the symbolic character of their stories seems to invite the reader to search for a missing half carried away by the author and to put together the two halves into a complete whole. Of many possible methods of presenting a given the matic material in a symbolic form, the most worthwhile device, in a generic perspective, may be the use of a concrete symbol as the label or the center of composition, because of its persistent existence in the tradition of the short story from the tales of Boccaccio to modern stories. With special emphasis on the device of concrete symbols, the rest of the present chapter will discuss how this conventional device has been per sistently and diversely employed in a great number of realistic stories from Balzac to Hyon Chin'gdn and to what extent it contributes to the representation of the writer's contemporary social reality, especially of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon. The Use of Symbols in the Tradition of the Short Storv: Balzac and Flaubert The critical recognition of the importance of the use of symbols in such short fictional genres as novella, short story, and tale can be said to begin with Paul Heyse's theory of the Falcon. The theory of the Falcon 173 is based upon one of the tales of Decameron which can be summarized as follows: In courting a lady who does not return his love, Federigo degli Alberighi spends the whole of his substance, being left with nothing but a falcon, which, since his larder is bare, he offers to his lady to eat when she calls to see him at his house. On discovering the truth of the matter, she has a change of heart, accepts him as her husband, and makes a rich man of him.18 Through this tale, Heyse observes the importance of a striking subject matter to the genre of the novelle dating back to Decameron. Heyse writes: [In the Novelle] one must ask oneself, whether the story to be related has a strongly marked sil houette, the outlines of which expressed in a few words, would make a characteristic impression, in the manner in which the contents of that story of the Falcon in the Decamerone. narrated in five lines, impress themselves profoundly upon the me mory. (gtd. in Bennett 13) Thus, originally, the theory of the Falcon, as Bennett states, is "in reality only a label or pigeon-hole theory, requiring that every Novelle should have so definite and striking an element in its subject matter that it can easily be recognized by this label, and pigeon-holed in the memory" (15). Though Heyse1s main emphasis is in effect on the importance of a definite subject matter to the novelle rather than on the neces sity of a concrete symbol, his perception of the Falcon as the specific thing characterizing a given story has significantly influenced German novelle criticism. This 174 impact is largely due to the fact that a great many novellen. do in effect contain such a concrete symbol as the Falcon to distinguish a given story from the others19; and furthermore in the fact that "in many Nove llen a concrete symbol is used to express some inner meaning, often the real essence and significance of the Novelle" (Bennett 15). This German novelle theory of a concrete symbol is certainly applicable to the genre of the short story, though American and English theorists have hardly ob served the importance of a concrete symbol to the short story and its persistent existence in a great many stories from the tales of Boccaccio to the modernist stories of Faulkner, Nabokov, and Borges (for example, Emily's long strand of iron-grey hair in "A Rose for Emily," the birthday gift in Nabokov's "Signs and Sym bols," the scar on the face of the hero in Borges' "The Shape of the Sword" and the labyrinth in his "Garden of the Forking Paths"). It goes without saying that a great number of such classical short stories as those of Haw thorne, Balzac, Gogol and Poe do in fact contain a con crete symbol which impresses itself upon the reader's mind and invites the reader to an interpretative gamble. Sometimes, the author explicitly emphasizes such a con crete symbol by using it as the title of his story: for 175 example, "The Hollow of the Three Hills," "The Minister's Black Veil," and "The Birthmark" by Nathaniel Hawthorne; "Overcoat," "Nose" by Nikolai Gogol; "Le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu," "La bourse" by Balzac; Poe's stories such as "The Black Cat," "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Oval Portrait," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Gold-Bug." Like Poe, Maupassant tends to use the concrete symbol of a given story as its title: for example, "La parure," "La ficelle," "L'epingle," "Les epingles,' "Le lit," "Le masque," "Le Horla," "Le parapluie," "Le gateau," "Les bijoux," "La main," "Le loup," "La moustache," "La reli- que," "L'armoire," "La fenetre," "La chevelure," and "Les sabots." Balzac's stories are good examples that enable us to see how a concrete symbol operates as the center of plot development and invites the reader to a hermeneutic gamble: for example, the purse in "La bourse," the incom prehensible, incomplete painting of a female beauty in "le chef-d'oeuvre inconnu," the panther in "Une passion dans le desert," the crucifix in "La Grande Breteche," and the gold in "Facino Cane." Of these stories, "La grande Breteche" is one of the ideal examples of how a concrete symbol operates effectively as a center of the narrative in the classical story. In this story, though 176 the mansion which we have discussed in the previous chapter symbolizes the tragic ending of a triangular love-affair, the concrete symbol which operates as the center of narrative movement is the crucifix of ebony and silver which was first possessed by the Spanish lover, and then by the heroine, and finally buried with her by her own wish. The crucifix is the key to the mystery of the story, which helps the reader to connect the pieces of narrative information given by several "intradiegetic" • 20 • narrators into a coherent whole. The primary (or ex- tradiegetic) narrator's investigation into the mystery of the dilapidated mansion and its proprietors' lives deve lops, revolving around the crucifix. The first intra diegetic narrator, M. Regnault, the lawyer who takes care of the mansion for the late proprietor, Madame de Merret, tells of the crucifix which the heroine cherished at her deathbed: "elle saisit un crucifix qui etait sur son lit, il porta rapidement a ses levres, et mourut. L'expres sion de ses yeux fixes me fait encore frissonner quand j'y songe" (250). The second intradiegetic narrator, Madame Lepas, the landlady of the hotel where the primary narrator boards, tells of some possible connection bet ween the crucifix of the aristocratic Spanish prisoner, one of her previous boarders, and the one which Madame de Merret wanted to be buried with: "je crois plutot qu'il 177 est pour quelque chose dans 1'affaire de madame de Merret, vu que Rosalie m*a dit que le crucifix auquel sa maitresse tenait tant qu'elle s'est fait ensevelir avec, etait d'ebene et d'argent; or, dans les premiers temps de son sejour, monsieur Feredia en avait un d'ebene et d'argent que je ne lui ai plus revu" (255). The third intradiegetic narrator, Rosalie, the maid of Madame de Merret, informs the narrator of the crucifix in the catastrophic denouement concerning Madame de Merret's false swearing by the crucifix, M. Merret's recognition of the crucifix as a novelty, his subsequent investiga tion into that crucifix, and his merciless revenge. The primary narrator retells of such information in his own voice, not Rosalie's: "Madame de Merret prit le crucifix et dit:— Je le jure— . . . et r§pete: Je jure devant Dieu qu'il n'y a personne dans ce cabinet . . . Apres un moment de silence:— Vous avez une bien belle chose que je ne connaissais pas, dit-il examinant ce crucifix en ebene incruste d'argent, et tres artistement sculpte" (261). The story ends with the husband's sarcastic remarks on the heroine's false swearing by the crucifix: "Vous avez jure sur la croix qu'il n'y avait 1& personne" (262). Thus, in "La grande Breteche" the crucifix as a concrete symbol functions as an identifying label of the story, as a central device of contributing to plot development, and 178 as a metaphoric symbol of expressing such inner meanings of the story as sacrificial rite, scapegoat, penitence, punishment, death, and cruel execution. However, the primary function of the crucifix seems to contribute the development of events, in other words, to integrate narrative fragments into a whole, like a clue in the mystery novel, rather than to convey certain abstract hidden meanings. Similarly, in "La bourse," the story which deals with the delicate mental processes of a suc cessful young painter who falls in love with a beautiful but poverty-stricken girl, the purse functions as a cen tral device to arrange the events and reveal the char acter or personality of the protagonist. One day, the rich protagonist who had been naively and passionately in love with an impoverished but decent girl happened to lose his purse containing a large amount of money in her apartment and became tortured by his growing suspicion of her theft of his purse as well as of the falsity of her nature and love. However, when, after his long inner battles, as the Chevalier des Grieux blindly loves Manon Lescaut, he decided to be faithful to his beloved regard less of her true nature and hidden motif, he happily discovered the truth that his old purse had been properly replaced by a beautiful new purse which was exquisitely embroidered by his lover, as a token for her gratitude 179 for his repainting of her late father's picture. While the crucifix and the purse function chiefly as an essen tial key or trick to the development of plot or action, the panther in "Une passion dans le desert" and the painting in "Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu" are not only the centripetal point of narrative movement but also the complex, metaphoric symbols whose connotations are liable to be diversely changed according to the reader's inter pretation. "Une passion dans le desert" is a story of the bizzare relationship between a brave soldier captured alope in the Sahara and a solitary female panther which appears to be a symbol of perfect feminine beauty. The nature of their relationship and the meaning of the story can be diversely interpreted according to the way in which the reader conceives of the panther. The nar rator 's indeterminate description of the panther invites the reader to an interpretative game: Is the panther the symbol of the mysterious quality of ideal feminine beauty? Or a mere female animal tamed by a brave man? Or a reflection of Balzac's latent sexual perversion? Or an allegorical figure of a vulnerable maiden victimized by her tragic passion for the selfish man? These inter pretative possibilities are clearly present in the story. Hence, it can be also argued, as Herbert J. Hunt points out, that "It is a disconcerting story in which some 180 critics have discerned the study of a monstrous sexual aberration; but its real intention seems to have been a humorous one— a comparison between the felinity of women and the feminity of panthers."21 These complex, in determinate features of the concrete symbol is certainly true of the incomprehensible painting of a mysterious courtesan in "Le chef d'oeuvre inconnu," which was burnt by the artist when he died. The fact that the painting is totally incomprehensible except for the tip of a bare foot leads the reader to be an active participant in reading and to play with interpretative possibilities: Is the painting a real masterpiece which can not be properly j I appraised by the artist's contemporaries but prefigures j the future development of a fine art? (To some extent, j the painting reminds us of Picasso's cubist painting which is deconstructive, incomprehensible, except for certain tips of a synecdochic part of the object) Or the result of an artistic fiasco? Or the reflection of the artist's strong aversion to real women and the manifesta tion of his repressed sexual desire? As for Flaubert, though he is quite different from Balzac in many aspects (e.g. descriptive technique, point of view, plot construction, taste for subject matter), he also shows a strong penchant for concrete symbols in Trois contes: the parrot in "Un coeur simple," the 181 stained-glass window in "La legende de Saint Julien 1'Hospitalier," and the head of Iaokanann on a dish in "Herodias." Though, as we have seen in the third and the fourth chapters, Flaubert's plot construction appears as anti-climatic, repetitive, and subversive in a tradi tional perspective and a great many descriptive details of objects tend to distract the reader's attention from the central line of action to a particular narrative fragment, Flaubert still can be placed into the tradition of tale or short story by virtue of his use of a concrete symbol as the label of each story and sometimes as a centripetal point on which most heterogeneous elements converge. Of the three stories, it is "Un coeur simple" which best reveals to us Flaubert's effective use of a concrete symbol as a center of narrative movement and as a metaphoric vehicle of expressing some inner meaning. In "Un coeur simple," the parrot Loulou is not merely the label of this story which impresses itself upon the reader's memory, but also as a central device of integrating different episodes into a whole. As we have discussed in chapter three, this story is composed of a series of recurrent events such as love, separation, death, pneumonia, and Corpus Christi. These events form a cyclical pattern of love and death (or love and separa tion) : Felicite's love for Theodore and their separation, 182 her love for her nephew and their separation and his death, her love for Paul and Virginie and their separa tion and Virginie's death, her attachment to the moribund old beggar and his death, her love for Loulou and Loulou's disappearance and death, etc. This cyclical pattern which shows a series of degrading substitutions of Felicite's beloved objects culminates in her fetishism towards the stuffed parrot. Her melancholic reminiscence of the past, on her way to Honfleur along with the dead parrot to be stuffed, well represents the culminating effect of such recurrent tragic separations and bereave ments: "Alors une faiblesse l'arreta; et la misere de son enfance, la deception du premier amour, le depart de son neveu, la mort de Virginie, comme les flots d'une mar^e, revinrent a la fois, et, lui montant a la gorge, l'etouf- faient" (80; ch. 4). In this way, the parrot as a con crete symbol becomes the center of compositional motiva tion. On the other hand, the parrot functions as a metaphoric symbol which the author conveys the inner meaning of the story to the reader in a highly condensed, indirect way. Felicite, who has suffered from a succes sion of the losses of her beloveds, decides to have her dead parrot stuffed and continuously cherishes the stuf fed parrot as if it were alive. Her fetishism towards 183 the parrot goes as far as to make her room as a semi sanctuary,22 to perceive an essential resemblance between the image of the Holy Ghost and the parrot, and to have a firm belief that "Le Pdre, pour s'enoncer, n'avait pu choisir une colombe, puisque ces bStes-la n'ont pas de voix, mais plutot un des ancgtres de Loulou" (82; ch. 4) .23 Her association of Loulou with the Holy Ghost becomes climactic at her deathbed: "et, quand elle exhala son dernier souffle, elle crut voir, dans les cieux entrouverts, un perroquet gigantesque, planant au-dessus de sa tete" (87). A series of Felicite's actions after her loss of Loulou— her decision to have the dead parrot stuffed, her act of offering to God the stuffed parrot, i.e. the only treasure that she possesses, and her hal lucination of the parrot as the Holy Ghost— are highly symbolic and ritual in that they reflect her desperate resistance to the cyclical recurrences of separations and deaths and her unconscious wish to resurrect Loulou from death and transcend their eternal separation by death.24 In Flaubert's two other stories, the concrete sym bols— the stained-glass window and the decapitated head— do not preside over the story so conspicuously and persistently as the parrot in "Un coeur simple" does. However, they clearly function as the "specific things that intimate the particular concerns of a given story," 184 in Paul Heyse's terms (qtd. in Swales 40). In par ticular, the decapitated head of Iaokanann in the denoue ment of "H^rodias" serves as a concrete object which strikingly impresses itself on the reader's mind, like the falcon and the heart in Boccaccio's tales above mentioned. On the other hand, it functions as an impor tant dramatic element contributing to plot development. The important narrative components of the story— for example, the conflicts between Herodias and Herode, Herodias's hidden scheme and Herode's anguish, and the mysterious recurring appearance of Salome— are subtly designed to gravitate towards the problem of decapita tion. Whereas the function of the decapitated head seems to be traditional in that it chiefly operates as the label of the story and the center of narrative movement rather than as a metaphoric symbol which stands for certain essential meanings of the story, the function of the stained-glass window in "La legende de saint Julien 1 'hospitalier," at first sight, appears to be very mar ginal and almost invisible in the story which abounds with descriptive details. The importance to the story of the stained-glass window seems to be recognized by the reader only when in the very closing sentence the nar- . rator frames his whole narrative as a verbal reproduction 185 of the non-verbal story of an stained-glass window: "Et voila l'histoire de saint Julien 1'Hospitalier, telle £ peu prSs qu'on la trouve, sur un vitrail d'eolise. dans mon pays" (130). These closing remarks effectively attract the reader's attention to stained-glass window in the framed story and invite him to recognize the symbolic function and value of the window whose features are so subtle and implicit as to easily escape the reader's notice. In the framed story (or the main body of the story), the stained-glass window appears in the climatic scene concerning Julien's tragic murder of his parents in the second chapter. In that chapter, the stained-glass window (vitrail) of Julien's chamber is thrice mentioned: first, in the scene of the last sleep of Julien's parents in their son's bed, during his absence for hunting ("La femme de Julien les engagea a ne pas l'attendre. Elle les coucha elle-meme dans son lit, puis ferma la croisee; ils s 1endormirent. Le jour allait paraitre, et, derriere le vitrail. les petits oiseaux commengaient & chanter" [117]); second, in the scene of Julien's entering into the darkness of his chamber obscured by the stained-glass window ("Les vitraux qarnis de plomb obscurcissaient la paleur de l'aube . . . il avangait vers lit, perdu dans les tenebres au fond de la chambre" [121]); third, in the 186 catastrophic scene concerning Julien*s recognition of the truth of his murder ("Le reflet ecarlate du vitrail. alors frappe oar le soleil. eclairait ces taches rouges, et en jetait de plus nombreuses dans tout 1'appartement" [122]). Here, the function of the stained-glass window is highly symbolic and ironic. First, it appears as a threshold between inside and outside, between darkness and light. As Shoshana Felman astutely points out,25 the stained-glass window can be here seen as an embodiment of "the very ambiguity of day and night: the ambiguous borderline that at the same time separates and links sleeping and waking, death and life, without our being able to know for sure which is inside, which is outside— what, exactly, lies behind the window" (66). At the second appearance, the window functions as a shutter of light: it increases the darkness of the room, misleads Julien as to the true identities of the couple sleeping in his bed, and leads him into parricide. Last, con versely, the window turns into a transmitter of light: it is suddenly struck by the sun, reflects its crimson light, shockingly reveals him the gruesome scene after the murder and its Oedipal truth. These two paradoxical functions of the stained-glass window— mystification and revelation— invite the reader into a hermeneutic gamble: what is the symbolic meaning 187 of the window? The answer can be different depending upon the reader's response or reconstruction. Inasmuch as the symbolic features of the stained-glass window in chapter two are somewhat unstable and ambiguous, it may be necessary to connect these features to the stained- glass window mentioned in the very last sentence of the story: "Et voila l'histoire de saint Julien 1'Hospi- talier, telle a peu pres qu'on la trouve, sur un vitrail d * ecflise. dans mon pays" (130). Because of this showing off of the act of telling, one of the possible functions of the window can be seen as self-reflexive, as Felman observes. Felman argues that "At its last appearance within the legend, the stained-glass window— hit by light— becomes itself a rhetorical figure of writing: a figure of the optical prism of language as what deter mines, motivates, compels, the performance of the 'pen man' . . . it is the window that is writing: it is func tion of the window which, multiplying stains of red throughout the room, brings back the motif of color contrast— the textual inscription of the stain, the mark" (67) .26 However, in my view, the function of the stained- glass is more theological than self-reflexive. For Flaubert, as in the closing sentence ("vitrail d'eglise"), the stained-glass window is mostly associated 188 with the church and appears as its significant synec- dochic symbol: for example, the stained-glass window in the cathedral of Rouen in Madame Bovarv (pt. 3, ch. 1) and the one in "Un coeur simple" (ch. 3). In "Un coeur simple," the stained-glass window consists of the images of the Holy Ghost, the Virgin, and the infant Jesus, in other words, the father, the mother, and the child: "sur un vitrail de l'abside, le Saint-Esprit dominait la Vierge; un autre la montrait & genoux devant l'Enfant- Jesus. . ." (60). In "La legende de saint Julien," the stained-glass window shows the reader another religious triangular relationship between father, mother, and son. Son pere et sa mere etaient devant lui, etendus sur le dos avec un trou dans la poitrine; et leurs visages, d'une majestueuse douceur, avaient l1air de garder comme un secret eternel. Des eclaboussures et des flaques de sang s'etalaient au milieu de leur peau blanche, sur les draps du lit, par terre, le long d'un Christ d'ivoire suspendu dans l'aclove. Le reflet ecarlate du vitrail. alors frappe par le soleil. eclairait ces taches rouges, et en jetait de plus nombreuses dans tout 1'appartement" [122] Here, this scene is composed of the imagery of death, blood, and crucifixion. The similarity in color between the complexion of Julien1s parents and the ivory crucifix reinforces the parents' image of scapegoat, as a sacrifi- i cial offering to God for the salvation or redemption of J Julien. The majestic sweetness of their faces and their ; appearances of keeping an eternal secret seem to express their compassion and forgiveness towards Julien's acci- 189 dental murder by misunderstanding, and to prefigure the eventual redemption of Julien in the denouement. The irony that Julien's plunge into deeper inner darkness simultaneously occurs along with the gradual illumination of the window at sunrise can be interpreted as a theolo gical message of the author: the true salvation of our soul can be achieved only through our sufferings and painful experiences of the extreme darkness of life. The tragedy of parricide which occurs at the zenith of Julien’s mundane life serves as a dramatic turning point of his life. His sudden fall from an emperor’s family to a beggar appears as the first step on the road to spiritual elevation, to ultimate redemption. My close examination of the diverse uses of the concrete symbol in the stories of Boccaccio, Balzac, and Flaubert enables me to postulate the three different functions of this device: first, a concrete symbol oper ates as the label or mark which distinguishes a given story from thousands of others; second, it serves as a centripetal point of narrative movement or plot develop ment; third, it stands for certain hidden inner meanings (or something abstract). Of these functions, the third function may be conceived of as genuinely symbolic be cause by definition the term "symbol” is used for desig nating a "manner of representation in which what is shown 190 (normally referring to something material) means, by virtue of association, something more or something else (normally referring to something immaterial)," to use Northrop Frye's terms. Of course, these three functions can overlap one another or operate simultaneously in a given story. In effect, in most stories, concrete sym bols manifest these functional aspects simultaneously. However, it is possible for us to perceive the differ ences of emphasis or dominance when we compare the func tional aspects of the concrete symbols in the tales of Boccaccio, Balzac, and Flaubert. In Boccaccio's tales, the dominant function of such symbols as falcon and heart seems to be the first one, that is, to identify or label a given story, though there exist some interpretative possibilities.27 One the other hand, the crucifix in "La Grand Breteche" and the purse in "La bourse" function chiefly as a centripetal point of narrative movement or plot development: in other words, the crucifix is the essential key to puzzle out bits and pieces of narrative information, integrate them into a complete whole. The panther in "Une passion dans le desert," the painting in "Un chef d 1 oeuvre inconnu," the parrot in "Un coeur sim ple," seem to fulfill all three functions of the concrete symbol: as an impressive label of a given story, as a center of narrative movement, as a metaphorical symbol to 191 convey some essential inner meanings in an indirect way. However, in the case of the stained-glass window in "La legende de saint Julien," though it appears to serve as the mark of the story and as a metaphoric symbol which stands for its real essence, it can hardly be conceived of as a center of narrative movement or as a decisive element for dramatic action (in other words, the con tribution to the plot of the stained-glass window is so indeterminate and unstable as to highly depend upon the reader's point of view). Symbols and Reality: Maupassant. Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon Like the stories of Balzac and Flaubert, a great many realistic stories of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon contain a concrete symbol which operates as the label, as the center of composition, or as a dominant metaphor of the story. However, in a realistic perspec tive, the interesting point is that the three writers' uses of symbols seem to manifest their personal vision of reality and human life (Weltanschauung^ and to represent accurately their particular contemporary social situa tion. Their use of symbols makes us aware that their realistic works are a metaphoric, conceptual representa tion of reality rather than a photographic reproduction of it. 192 Though Maupassant tends to be criticized by English scholars such as Herbert Gorman and Magalaner for his photographic realism, Maupassant's realism is firmly based upon his belief that "Le realiste, s'il est un artiste, cherchera, non pas & nous montrer la photo- graphie banale de la vie, mais a nous en donner la vision plus complete, plus saisissante, plus probante que la realite meme" ("Le roman" 51). In his literary essays, Maupassant repeatedly emphasizes the symbolic character of fiction and the poetic elements of literary lan- pa # # , guage. For instance, like his mentor Flaubert, he believes in the mysterious, evocative, autonomous power of language beyond its function as a vehicle of signi fication: "Les mots ont une ame. La plupart des lecteurs ne leur demandent qu'un sens. II faut trouver cette ame qui apparait au contact d'autres mots, qui eclate et §claire certains livres d'une lumiere inconnue, bien • 50 difficile a faire jaillir." In effect, there are a good many stories which enable us to perceive such poetic features of Maupassant: for example, the poetic scenery of spring atmosphere in "Au printemps," the scenery of the night river in "Sur l'eau," the enchanting pavsages in the moonlight in his two stories entitled "Clair de lune," and the scenery of an evening for the young lovers in "Par un soir de printemps." However, in a generic A 193 perspective, the interesting aspect of Maupassant's symbolism can be seen in the macrostructural level of narrative rather than in mere descriptive fragments composed of poetic imagery. Maupassant's predominant use of such devices as symbols, ellipsis (cutting technique), irony, and chias mus creates the gaps of indeterminacy or blanks in the narrative which can be filled in only by the reader's active participation.30 Sometimes, Maupassant offers the reader certain clues as to how to reconstruct or complete a given story and invites the reader to decipher an untold text or a "second story," to use Armine K. Mor timer's terms, which is deliberately hidden or encoded in the surface text.31 In the majority of Maupassant's stories, without understanding this undercurrent of suggestion beneath the surface narrative, we are not capable of appreciating properly the artistic values of a given story. These symbolic features of Maupassant's stories are evident in his handling of concrete symbols. The major ity of Maupassant' stories contain a certain concrete symbol or object which distinguishes a given story from others: for example, the female corpse in "Sur l'eau," the red ribbon of the Legion d'honneur in "Decore," the heroine's pair of wooden shoes in "Les sabots," the 194 hairpins exchanged by the two mistresses of the prota gonist in "Les 6pingles," the box decorated with shells in "Chali," the obituary letter in "La mere sauvage," the umbrella in "Le parapluie," the mutilated hand in "La main" and "La main d'#corche," the stuffed dummy in "Une vendetta," the cake in "Le gateau," the mask of the old man in "Le masque," the house of Madame Tellier in "La maison Tellier," and the old photograph of the hero in "Le champ d'oliviers." The list is no doubt incomplete. In .these stories, like the crucifix and the purse in Balzac's stories, the concrete symbol not only functions as the label of a given story but also as a central device of plot construction. Of those which use a con crete symbol as a center of narrative movement, "La parure," "La ficelle," and "Les bijoux" are good examples which reflect Maupassant's personal views of life and his aesthetics as a synthesis between symbolism and realism: "Une oeuvre d'art n'est superieure que si elle est en meme temps un symbole et 1'expression exacte d'une realite" (qtd. in Vial 75). "La parure" has been considered as typical of Maupassant's stories and at the same time as revealing the negative values of Maupassant's aesthetics (e.g., the trick or surprise ending and the factitiousness of plot or events). Hence, Roger Colet, one of Maupassant's ad 195 mirers, omits "La parure" from his recent anthology of Maupassant's stories with the statement that "I make no apology for the omission of The Necklace, with its noto rious trick ending so often regarded— quite unjustly— as typical of its author."32 However, in my view, "La parure" can be still regarded as one of Maupassant's masterpieces which represents his artistic principles at his best, in spite of its surprise ending and some un natural aspects of the action. i In "La parure," the line of actions develops, cen tering on the necklace (parure)33: Madame Loisel's ac cumulated conflicts between her constant desire for all delicacies, luxuries, and jewels (i.e., the "parure") and ! her mediocre married life, the letter of invitation to a i i ball and her accelerated anguish due to the lack of j parure, her borrowing of the necklace from Madame Fores- tier, her success at the ball and the loss of the neck lace, the replacement of the lost necklace by another one, Mathilde's metamorphosis from a Madame Bovary to a Felicite because of her debts for the necklace, and her encounter with Madame Forestier at the street and her recognition that the lost necklace was a fake. Thus, the necklace is the label of this story and the center of narrative movement. However, the value of the necklace as a central symbol consists in the fact that it conveys 196 to the reader a certain inner meaning of the story, the author's view of life. The necklace can be understood as a symbolic embodiment of the inauthenticity of human life in capitalist society in which true value seems to be replaced or dominated by false value, just as the value of usage is dominated by the value of exchange in the market economy.34 From the outset, the tragedy of Madame Loisel seems to result from a gap between true value and false value, between essence and appearance. Her dissatisfaction with her life comes from her aware ness that without having certain means of embellishing her appearance she could not show off the genuine fea tures and values of her own self: "Elle n'avait pas de dot, pas d 1esperances, aucun moyen d'etre connue, com- I prise, aimee, £pousee par un homme riche et distingue; et elle se laissa marier avec un petit commis du Ministere de 11 instruction publique" (2: 186). Thus, her marriage to a mediocre clerk seems to be a kind of resignation to the fact that in her contemporary capitalist society the value of commodity depends upon the value of exchange rather than that of usage. When she was given an oppor tunity to fulfill, though temporarily, her dream to show off her true value, she thought of the necklace as a valuable means of mediation which fills in the gap bet ween the true value of the self and its surface value. 197 However, no sooner had she succeeded in filling in such a gap, than she came to fall into another trap of mysti fication: she took the fake necklace (the commodity of false value) for the genuine (the commodity of true value), substituted the genuine for the lost fake, and sacrificed her whole youth in order to reimburse the debts due to the loss of the fake, without knowing the truth that the necklace she thought of as a genuine was in effect a fake. It is the tragedy of capitalism that Madame Loisel1s hard labor of ten years is worthless as a fake. Thus, "La parure" symbolizes the inauthenticity of the author's social reality and the incompetence of his contemporaries in the apprehension of true reality. The gap between deeper reality and surface reality, between essence and appearance, and the inversion between true value and false value, are the recurrent themes of Maupassant's stories. Another of his stories, "Les bijoux" is the inverted double of "La parure." In "Les bijoux," Maupassant deals with the disillusionment of the man who has led his married life without realizing the real features of his wife beneath her angelic mask of perfection, decency, and virtue. In the story, Maupas sant deliberately omits important pieces of narrative information: What is the true nature of the protagonist's wife? How could she afford to buy real jewels instead of 198 fakes? Why was the protagonist totally ignorant of his wife's actions (for example, her expenditure on all the delicacies and luxurious things, and her frequent going out in the evening)? Though the story suggests the prostitution of the hero's wife and his subconscious acceptance of her prostitution for his own comfort, there is no clear evidence to prove these facts, except the fake jewels which turn out genuine. The jewels of the wife serve as a metaphoric symbol which suggests the inauthenticity of things and people, the discrepancy between essence and appearance, between true value and surface value. His bitter recognition of the falsity of his wife beneath her angelic mask ironically results from his discovery of the fact that her fake jewels were in effect genuine ones. In Maupassant's fictional world, the characters are no longer able to distinguish properly between true value and false value, between deeper real ity and surface reality: they are the victims of the dualistic, unauthentic world in which there is a remark able gap between essence and appearance. It is "La ficelle" which reveals most clearly a close connection between such a gap and the market eco nomy. "La ficelle" is a story of a thrifty Norman farmer who was falsely accused of the theft of a lost purse because of his mere act of picking up a piece of string 199 on the street and eventually died of anguish and despair when he realized the failure of his persistent attempt to prove himself to be innocent. This story is a symbolic representation of the social evils of capitalist society governed by market production. At the outset, when Maitre Hauchecorne accidentally finds a piece of string on the street of the market and decides to pick it up in spite of his suffering from rheumatism, he merely thinks of the string’s value of usage because "Maitre Hauche corne, econome en vrai Norman, pensa que tout etait bon a ramasser qui peu servir" (1: 939). However, when he realizes that his lifelong enemy is watching his picking a mere piece of string up out of the muck, the protago nist feels ashamed of himself, tries to conceal his find and pretends to continue to looking for something on the street. This trivial act turns into a fatal event which results in a false accusation of theft against him and his eventual death, when people presume that the real find of Maitre Hauchecorne should have had a great value of exchange rather than such a trivial value of usage as a bit of string. While realizing an insurmountable gap between the real value of the find and the surface value of the find, between reality and appearance, the prota gonist desperately struggles to inform people of the real k value of the find by persistently repeating his story to 200 others. However, the more earnestly he tells of his innocence, the more firmly people believe in his guilt. In such a world, language no longer functions as a trans mitter of truth, as a vehicle of communication and the protagonist fails in breaking the others1 preconceived ideas about his find. Maitre Hauchecorne's failure in convincing others of his innocence is partly due to his naive belief in the referential and communicative func tion of language, and his ignorance of the fact that the others are in effect reading between the lines. Such symbolic presentation of reality seems to manifest Maupassant's belief that the only possible way to convey to the reader his real meaning by means of the limited signifying system of language is to rely upon the symbolic, evocative power of language rather than its referential function. This may be the reason why he argues that the aim of the writer who attempts an exact image of life is not to "nous raconter une histoire, de nous amuser ou de nous attendrir, mais de nous forcer a penser, a comprendre le sens profond et cache des evene- ments" ("Le roman" 49). On the other hand, Joyce handles symbols more subtly and implicitly than Maupassant's. However, though there are some differences in the degree of complexity or intensity between Joyce's and his predecessors' sym 201 bolism, the close examination of his stories reveals the fact that Joyce's symbolic stories did not come into being ex nihilo but can be closely linked to the tradi tional context of the short story. Like his predeces sors, Joyce also uses the device of a concrete symbol that distinguishes a given story from others: for ins tance, the broken chalice in "The Sisters," the Pigeon House in "An encounter," the bazaar in "Araby," the photograph of Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque in "Eveline," the gold coin in "Two Gallants," the plumcake and the clay in "Clay," the evening paper in "A Painful Case," and snow in "The Dead." However, as Joyce's stories internalize the traditional pattern of dramatic plot, the contribution to the plot of his most concrete symbols is so subtle and implicit as to easily escape from the reader's attention. In other words, they do not explicitly function as a central device of plot construction in the same way that the crucifix in "La grande Breteche" and the necklace in "La parure" operate. As Maupassant's stories manifest his skeptical, dualistic views of life and the world, Joyce's handling of symbols reveals his desire (and his surrogate charac ters' desires) to escape from Dublin, the "center of paralysis," and their sense of disillusionment and frus tration due to their incompetence in materializing such 202 an attempt. For example, the stories of childhood con tain a concrete symbol which reveals the corruption and ineffectuality of Irish Roman Catholicism and its nega tive influence on people. The broken chalice in "The Sisters," the story which presents the death from paraly sis of an elderly former priest through a young boy's point of view, serves as a central symbol of this story, perhaps of Dubliners. The character's loss of faith and the spiritual death or paralysis of the Irish Catholic Community are symbolized by the breakage of the chalice, that is, the traditional "symbol of the Christian faith, more particularly of the Redemption."35 In the beginn ing of the story, the boy-narrator tells of the impact of the word "paralysis" on his mind: Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. (9) The narrator's association of the word paralysis with such words of negative meaning as gnomon and simony, and with the "name of some maleficent and sinful being" can be closely connected with Father Flynn's dropping of a chalice, the fatal past event resulting in his nervous breakdown and paralysis. Though the narrator tells of paralysis' connection with gnomon and simony in his mind 203 as if it were accidental, the semantic meanings of these three words seem to reinforce the symbolic meaning of the broken chalice. For the word "paralysis" can be under stood as "'general paralysis of the insane,' i.e., paresis, syphilis of the central nervous system”; the word "Gnomon" in Euclid as an imperfect or broken form of parallelogram; the word "simony" as "the prostitution of any spiritual value."36 These three meanings have much bearing on the breaking of the chalice, the traditional symbol of "the Christian faith, more particularly of the Redemption." The fatal impact of this accidental event on Father Flynn may be largely due to Father Flynn's symbolic and somewhat superstitious apprehension of the broken chalice as a manifestation of the loss of his faith and as a revelation from God of the impossibility of his salvation or redemption. The importance of the chalice as the central symbol of the story can be clearly seen in the hero's repeated remarks on Father Flynn's chalice. The first remarks on the chalice appear in the scene concerning the hero's first encounter with Father Flynn’s corpse in the coffin: "There he lay, solemn and copious, vested as for the altar, his large hands loosely retaining a chalice. His face was a very truculent, grey and massive, with black cavernous nostrils and circled by a scanty white fur" 204 (14; emphasis added). Father Flynn's loose retaining of l a chalice and the aggressiveness of his face can be con nected to the future account by his sister of Father Flynn's past event: "It was that chalice he broke . . . . That was the beginning of it. Of course, they say it was all right, that it contained nothing, I mean. But still .... They say it was the boy's fault. But poor James was so nervous, God be merciful to him!" (17). For j the hero who has discovered the fact that Father Flynn's j paralysis is in effect the catastrophic aftermath of his breaking of the empty chalice, the chalice of Father Flynn in the coffin appears as "an idle chalice" which is worthless for the redemption of the soul. Like the broken chalice in "The Sisters," the Pigeon House in "An Encounter" serves not only as the label which distinguishes this story from the others, but also j as a metaphoric symbol which can be connected with the i inner meaning or the real essence of the story, though it is difficult to say that it operates as a central device of plot construction, like the crucifix in "La grande Breteche" and the necklace in "La parure." "An En counter" is a boy's account of the day of playing truant with his friend and of their strange encounter with an old perverted man. Like most protagonists in Dubliners. the boy hero is eager to escape from the repression of __ _ 205 his given society (for the boy, the daily routine of his Catholic school) and to have real adventures: "The mimic warfare of the evening became at last wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adven tures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad" (21). The aim of their real adventures is to see the Pigeon House whose historical functions were "successively a fort, a light house, and a power station," according to W. Y. Tin dall.37 The Pigeon House as a central symbol of the story can be understood in the two different ways. On the one hand, because of its function as a light house located on a breakwater at the southeast of Doublin harbour (which can be considered the nearest point to London and the Continent) and because of the interpretive possibility of the name "pigeon" as a symbol of flight or escape, the Pigeon House can be understood as the sym bolic place of spiritual deliverance from Dublin as the center of paralysis and from the repression of Irish Catholicism.38 On the other hand, inasmuch as "Pigeon" or dove can be theologically considered as "The Christian symbol of the Holy Ghost," the Pigeon House has been interpreted by many critics as "the temple of the Holy Ghost" (Hall 109; Magalaner and Kain 77). Magalaner and 206 Kain argue that "The Pigeonhouse, then, is identified in Joyce's mind with the ' father1 of Christ and with fathers in general. In its towerlike proportions, it may also be a rather trite phallic symbol of fatherhood" (77). Whether the boys' expedition to the Pigeon House is a spiritual quest for the Holy Ghost or a symbolic journey eastward to the Continent in order to escape from Dublin and Irish Catholicism, their apparent failure to mate rialize the objective of their adventure represents how deeply Joyce's compatriots were spiritually repressed and paralyzed. The young boys' awareness of belatedness and their feeling of exhaustion— "It was too late and we were too tired to carry out our project of visiting the Pigeon House"— implicitly tells us that in the times of Joyce the incompetence or ineffectuality of the Irish people were so contagious as to affect even their children. As in "The Sisters" and "An Encounter," "Eveline" uses a religious concrete symbol: the "coloured print of the promises made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque." Whereas the Pigeon House hardly operates as the center of narrative movement, the coloured print of Margaret Mary seems to function as a key symbol to the thematic and dramatic development of the story. For it not only pre figures the eventual failure of Eveline's attempt to escape from her life of a monotonous drudgery and from 207 her tyrannical father, but also explains the psychologi cal motives of her strong feelings of anguish, panic, and hopelessness in the denouement, which prevent her from starting a new life abroad with her lover. These close relationships between the print of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and Eveline's action can be revealed when the reader comes to apprehend the symbolic implications of such a religious allusion. According to Martin Dolch, Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque was a "French nun (1647- 169 0) who became paralyzed because of the tortures which she inflicted upon herself, but was miraculously cured 39 when she vowed to consecrate herself to a holy life." As Dolch perceptivly points out, there are some signifi cant resemblances between Margaret Mary1s fate and Eveline's in that the latter is also "paralyzed by her suffering, renounces her happiness and puts up with a 'life of commonplace sacrifices' and with a celibacy which is implicitly condemned by Joyce" (101). Moreover, Joyce's use of the image of Margaret Mary as a presiding symbol of the story is more specific and concrete because there is a conspicuous parallel between the Sacred Heart's promises made through St. Margaret Mary to the faithful and Eveline's promises to her dying mother. Structurally, it is not accidental that, when Eveline hears the same melancholy air of a street organ 208 as she did at her mother's deathbed, she comes to con ceive of the coincidence of the air as a kind of revela tion to remind her of the promise to her mother at the deathbed, "her promise to keep the home together as long as she could" (40). Eveline was incapable of breaking her promises with her dying mother, not only because of her filial duty but also because of her religious fear of the fatal consequences of her selfish elopement: "She trembled as she heard again her mother's voice saying constantly with foolish insistence:— Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun! [which means "The end of pleasure is pain!]."40 In other words, her eventual failure to es cape from a life of drudgery might result from her co wardly fear that by breaking her promises to her mother, she might consequently jeopardize all the graces and blessings guaranteed by the Sacred Heart's promises made through St, Margaret Mary to its devotees. As I have shown in my examination of the three sym bols (the chalice, the Pigeon House, and the print of St. Margaret Mary), Joyce's stories represent his contem porary Irish social reality as deeply corrupted, re pressed, and paralyzed by the unauthentic belief of the Irish Catholic community: in this world, religious belief does not properly function as the spiritual source of salvation; on the contrary, it operates as a negative, ! 209 oppressive force which results in the stagnation and paralysis of the human spirit. The degeneration of Irish Catholicism and its negative impact on Joyce's com patriots are recurrently presented throughout Dubliners as the most characteristic features of his contemporary society, along with the capitalistic problems of money and the political issues such as the intellectual's conflicts between patriotism and cosmopolitanism under British colonialism.41 In addition, of his stories whose main focus lies on the social evils of capitalistic society, "Two Gallants" is the story which most effec tively employs a concrete symbol as a central device for illuminating the meaning of whole narrative movement in a new perspective. The narrator's elliptic remarks on the small gold coin shining in the character's palm in the very last sentence of "Two Gallants" is an impressive concrete symbol which strikingly shows the reader the spiritual prostitution and degeneration of young people under capitalism, and which illuminates the essential inner meaning of the story and dramatically unveils the hidden motives of the characters' actions, with special emphasis on the ending. Like Maupassant and Joyce, Hyon Chin'gon employs the device of concrete symbols in a large number of his stories. The concrete symbols in such stories as "The 210 Blind,1 1 "The Piano," "B Matron and the Love Letter," "My Beloved's Glaring Eyes" not only serve as the title of a particular story and function as a central device of in tegrating narrative components into a whole, and as a metaphoric symbol which stands for the inner meaning of the story. Besides these stories which explicitly employ a concrete symbol as the label and the center of composi tion, such stories as "Fire," "Charity," and "A Lucky Day" contain a concrete symbol which impresses itself upon the reader's mind and illuminates the inner meaning of the story: to illustrate, the room in "Fire," the rickshaw in "Charity," and the beef soup (sollongttang) in "A Lucky Day." The examination of these concrete symbols reveals the social situation of Hyon Chin'gon's contemporary Korea: the intellectual's conflicts between the collapse of traditional values and the assimilation of Western ideas and culture, and the extreme poverty of the lower class and the ineffectuality of the repressed intellectual under Japanese Colonialism. The concrete symbols of "The Piano" and "B Matron and the Love Letter" are the embodiments of the hypocrisy and inauthenticity of the intellectuals in the beginning period of modernization or Westernization in Korea. The story "The Piano" is a satire on the Korean intellec tual's indiscriminate assimilation of Western culture. 211 The protagonist, a graduate of some Japanese university, is a happy newlywed who is married to a young modern girl of higher education, after the death of his first tradi tional wife. He becomes so satisfied with his newlywed life as to think of it as the ideal of perfect marriage. His second wife is always trying to make their home ideal and modern in a Western style (e.g., bed, couch, dining room, cards, etc). One day, his wife realizes that one of the most important requisites for an ideal home is missing from their home: a piano. The husband buys it immediately in the expectation that he would watch in fascination his wife playing the piano beautifully. However, the couple eventually find out that both of them are in effect incapable of playing the piano. Hence, the piano serves a symbol of the Western ideas and customs which Korean intellectuals are eager to assimilate but not prepared to digest properly as their own. The function of the love letter in "B Matron and the Love Letter" is similar to that of the piano in "The Piano." The love letters which male students send to B matron1s dormitory girl students serve as a concrete symbol through which the author tries to reveal the ambivalence and inauthenticity of the modern Westernized female intellectual. The exchange of love letters is a new custom borrowed from Western culture, which was 212 hardly permissible for decent people in the traditional Korean society governed by the Confucian rule that "Man and woman at the age of over seven are not allowed to sit side by side together." B matron's ambivalent attitude towards love letters— her extreme aversion to them in the daytime and her ludicrous indulgence in the role-playing of lovers by means of their letters in the night time— reflects the simultaneous existence of two contradictory desires in her inner world: her yearning for self-eman cipation from the patriarchal society and her desperate desire for passionate free love condemned by the tradi tional society of Confucian values. Both desires are hardly generated by her own self but stimulated and mediated by Western ideas and customs. The life of celibacy which she chose in order to emancipate herself from the shackles of the patriarchal society is not firmly based upon her authentic philosophy of life. She chose that Western lifestyle, just as she chose to sleep on a bed instead of a traditional quilted mattress (in Korean, Yo). B matron's ambivalent attitude towards a love letter reveals that the subconsciousness of B matron is still considerably manipulated by the traditional values and norms: she could neither accept free love nor have the capability to lead her celibate life con tentedly. 213 While the concrete symbols in "The Piano" and "B Matron and the Love Letter" stand for a certain explicit, stable meaning which can be easily grasped by the reader of cultural competence, the symbols in "Fire" and "A Lucky Day" are more complex, implicit, and hence it is difficult to comprehend their symbolic qualities and inner meanings properly. The room in "Fire" which the heroine comes to set on fire is a central symbol which integrates all narrative componenents into a whole and at the same time a highly complex symbol which not only reflects the social reality of the heroine but also the inner world of the author. The narrative structure of "Fire" can be described in terms of the room: in the beginning, the narrator describes the room as a hell where the heroine is tormented by her painful sexual intercourse with her robust husband; the main body of the story deals with the heroine's daytime hard labor, her complete exhaustion, the loss of her consciousness, the recovery of it in the room, and her rejection of repose in the room; the denouement presents the heroine's recog nition of the room as the cause of her torments and her setting fire to the room. The last scene concerning the heroine's revelation of truth leading up to the fatal act is worth examining in detail because it tends to be considered by critics as an exemplary passage which 214 enables us to measure the caliber and authenticity of Hyon Chin'gon as a realist: Upon seeing her husband, Suni felt even more frustrated. The boulder that pressed down on her chest, the iron club that tore her entire body to pieces— these thoughts dried the well of her tears; she racked her brains to devise a way to escape the night. No, night was not to blame. It was rather the room of her enemy. Were it not for that room, the husband would have simply disappeared after wiping her tears. Were it not for that room, he would have no place to torment her. Was there any way to get rid of that heinous room? She had so far been unsuccessful in avoiding the room, but she had to find a way . . . A strange idea flashed through her mind. She seized the box, her hands trembling visibly, and, not looking around, hid it in her bosom. Was it not strange that such an idea had never occurred to her before? She smiled. That night, fire broke out in the eaves at the back of the room. Fanned by the winds, the fire spread in an instant all over the thatched roof. Just outside the hedge of the next house, Suni stood, her face never more radiant than now. Her heart bursting with delight, she stamped and jumped with joy. (8-9) This recognition of the room as the real cause of her torment can be considered as a false revelation in that the identity of her enemy or the cause of her torments is not the room, but her contemporary phallocentric society. This false revelation of the heroine has been criticized by such critics as Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyon on the ground that the establishment of the room as a cause of her torment is a kind of trick existing only for the con struction of the plot but incapable of disclosing to the reader the genuine features of reality between individual ikO and society. On the surface level of the narrative, 215 their criticism of the falsity of Suni's revelation is certainly true because it seems clear enough to any sen sible reader that her real enemy is not the room but the chronic social evils of the patriarchal society treating women as a slave of men or as a vehicle for their lineage and housekeeping. However, it may be wrong that these critics identify the character's false revelation with the manifestation of the limitations of the author's social consciousness because the author almost completely conceals his intention and presents the scene strictly from Suni's naive point of view. On the other hand, when we conceive of the short story as a conceptual art form which presents its meaning in an indirect and metaphoric way, it is possible for us to interpret the room as a synecdochic symbol of the pallocentric society and Suni's setting fire to the room as an symbolic act of self- emancipation and a dramatic resistance to the repression of her society. In fact, the object of her hatred is not her husband but the metonymic parts of his body which seem to symbolize the pallocentric values of the tradi tional Korean society: "The boulder that pressed down on her chest, the iron club that tore her entire body to pieces. ..." For Hyon Chin'gon, the room functions as an impor tant spatial setting in the majority of his stories: for 216 example, "The Indigent Wife," "Chastity and the Price of Medicine," "A Lucky Day," "The Society Making One Drink," "My Beloved's Glaring Eyes," "The Piano," "Violation," "My Grandmother's Death," and "The Director of the Pri vate Mental Hospital." By limiting the spatial settings of his stories within the confines of the room, Hyon Chin'gon seems to focus on the internal wounds and trau matic experiences of his contemporary Koreans under Japanese colonialism. As in "Fire," in a number of his stories, the room functions as a stage which presents various kinds of matrimonial problems. The room of "The Indigent Wife" shows the conflicts between a traditional wife and an intellectual husband and the process of their recovery of matrimonial harmony, whereas the room of "The Society Making One Drink" presents the loneliness of a traditional wife waiting for the return of her intellec tual, heavy-drinking husband frustrated by his society. While these earlier stories deal with the matrimonial problems between the intellectual husband and the tradi tional wife, the stories of his second literary period center on the tragic situations of lower class' couples, as in "Fire": the room of "A Lucky Day" shows us the solitary deathbed of the wife of a rickshaw-man who can not afford a single day off for his ailing wife; the room of "Chastity and the Price of Medicine" dramatizes a 217 bizarre triangular relationship between an ailing farmer, his herb doctor, and the patient's naive wife who posses ses nothing else than her chastity to pay the doctor for his medical treatment. What these various rooms have in common is that they present intensively to the reader the tragic features of the wounded wife who is neglected and exploited by her husband (and her patriarchal society) who, himself, too, struggles against the painful living conditions under Japanese colonialism. The room is a symbolic place which contains within itself the charac teristic social wounds of Hyon Chin'gon's times. Concluding remarks In one of his letters, Joseph Conrad emphasizes the symbolic character of literature as a genuine artistic quality immanent in all great creations of literature: "a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive mean ing and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character . . . All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty."43 This symbolic character of fiction is certainly true of the majority of well-written realistic short stories, too. The stories of Flaubert, Maupassant, 218 Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon clearly manifest us that sym bolism and realism can effectively complement each other in the genre of the short story and that their use of symbols was deeply rooted in the tradition of the short story (or the tale), though the conventional device of a concrete symbol seems to have turned more and more mar ginal, implicit, complex, and unstable, in contemporary stories. 219 Notes 1 Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1963) 255. 2 "The Term and Concept of Symbolism in Literary History," Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970) 121. 3 See Scholes and Litz, "Editors' Introduction To Criticism Section"; Feshbach and Herman, "The History of Joyce Criticism and Scholarship." The problem of valid ity in the symbolic interpretation of Dubliners is well discussed by Scholes and Litz in terms of a controversy over the symbolic reading of "Clay": Magalaner and Rain's symbolic reading of "Clay" and Stanislaus's attacks on such readings as "exaggerations" (300-301). 4 James Joyce: His First Forty Years (192 4; London: Richard West, 1977) 39-40. 5 Magalaner and Rain go on to say: "Joyce was not content to stop at this point. Edmund Wilson puts em phasis on another difference— the difference between poetry and prose. It is unfair, of course, to speak of the sound and the rythm of Maupassant's writing in trans lation, but even in its French original, his prose is only prose, simple and lucid. Joyce's short stories carry a rhythm and cadence, however, rarely found in short stories. It is unnecessary to quote the melodious final paragraph of "The Dead" to indicate Joyce's superi ority in writing musical prose. In short, Joyce may have learned a great deal about fictional technique from reading Maupassant, but there is little evidence in Dubliners to show that he made use of it in his work. We know from Gorman that Joyce devoured "several volumes" of Maupassant, but differences in temperament, habits of life, and approach to art would not have been conducive to Joyce's finding the influence he needed in this pupil of Flaubert" (59-60). For an overview of the change of Maupassant criticism, see Michel Crouzet, "Une rhetorique de Maupas sant." In this essay, Crouzet describes the recent trend in Maupassant criticism as follows: Si par exemple Maupassant, apres avoir passe pour le realiste exemplaire, est l'objet d'une explication a 220 partir des archetetypes, des hantises, si son texte devient un simple moyen d 'exterioriser des obses sions, un 'passage a l'acte,1 en somme d'un 'com- plexe1 qui se traduit en themes ou objets thematiques, d'une imagination cristallisee autour d'un phantasme et sensibilisee aux grandes situa tions archetypales, alors on devra etre trds inquiet devant cette toute-puissance attribuee a un 'parce que* involontaire et inconscient, dont la localisa tion scientifique est totalement incertaine, et releve a la fois de toutes les psychanalyses, de toutes les anthropologies, et mythologies, mises pele-mele et douees de productivity des textes (235). 7 Refer to another letter to Grant Richards: "It is not my fault that the odour of ashpits and old weeds and offal hangs round my stories. I seriously belive that you will retard the course of civilization in Ireland by preventing the Irish people from having one good look at themselves in my nicely polished looking-glass" (Scholes and Litz 286). 8 See E. K. Bennett, A History of the German Novelle. 13-16; Martin Swales, The German Novelle, 39-44. 9 Heyse argues that "the Falcon is, that is to say the specific thing which distinguishes this story form thousands of others" (qtd. in Bennett 13). 10 . . . . The Theory of the Novel: A Histonco-philosophi- cal Esssav on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MIT P, 1971) 50-51. 11 Refer to Susan Lohafer, Coming to Terms with the Short Story (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983) 18- 24; Charles May, "Introduction," Short Storv Theories; Gordon Weaver, "One Writer's Perception of the Short Fiction Tradition," Aycock 119-132. 12 "The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of A History," May 2 02. 13 "Between Shadow and Act: Where Do We Go from Here?" Lohafer and Clarey 3 2-45. 14 Martin Swales's consideration of the novelle as a hermeneutic gamble is very similar to Mary Rohrberger's theory of the short story (or sometimes she refers to the symbolic, lyric short story as the "short story proper): 221 "The short story, on the other hand, leaves readers with a set of emotions that cannot be easily sorted; readers are often confused as to meanings and find it almost impossible to state them. In this way the short story makes readers cocreators, active participants in the revelation of meaning, and it is in this interaction that satisfaction ultimately rests" ("Between Shadow and Act," 43) . 15 To see an increasing critical tendancy towards the reinterpretations of Poe's stories, refer to Jacque Lacan, "Le seminaire sur 'La lettre volee,1" Ecrits I (Paris: Seuil, 1966) 19-75; Norman N. Holland, "Re-cover ing 'The Purloined Letter': Reading as a Personal Trans action," Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis (New York: Longman, 1986) 363-375; Roland Barthes, "Analyse textuelle d'un conte d'Edgar Poe," Semiotique narrative et textuelle. ed. Claude Chabrol (Paris: Lib- rairie Larousse) 29-54. Besides, Todorov's "Les limites d'Edgar Poe" offers us a good overview of the diversity of the rereadings of Poe's stories from Baudelaire to Jean Ricardou: "Et la liste n'est pas close! Est-ce bien du memes oeuvres deviennent l'exemple— qui plus est: privilegie— de tendances critiques aussi eloignees les unes des autres?" (162). One the other hand, for the symbolic complexity of Balzac's stories, see Roland Barthes, S/Z: an Essay, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974); Barbara Johnson, "The Critical Difference: BartheS/BalZac [sic]," The Critical Dif ference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980) 3-12; Janet L. Beizer's Family Plots: Balzac's Narrative Generations (New Haven: Yale UP, 1986). 16 The term "gaps of indeterminacy" (Unbesti- mmtheitsstellen) is Roman Ingarden's. For discussion about this term, see Wolfgan Iser, "Indeterminacy and the reader's response," Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia UP, 1971) 13-14. In my view, the impact of contemporary reception theory (or reader-response theory) on short story criticism is manifest in such theorists as Martin Swales and Mary Rohrberger and this impact is beneficial to the development of short story criticism. 17 See Northrop Frye, "symbol," Princeton En cyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 222 18 This is the summary of the ninth story of the fifth day in Decameron. See Boccaccio, The Decameron. trans. G. H. McWilliam (New York: Penguin, 1972) 4 63. 19 Two other examples are taken by Bennett from the Decameron: the first and the fifth tales of the fourth day. The summaries of these two tales are as follows: Tancredi, Prince of Salerno, kills his daughter's lover and sends her his heart in a golden chalice; she besprinkles the heart with a poisonous liquid, which she then drinks, and so dies. Lisabetta's brothers murder her lover. He appears to her in a dream and shows her where he is buried. She secretly disinters the head and places it in a pot of basil, over which she weeps for a long time every day. In the end her brothers take it away from her, and shortly thereafter she dies of grief. Like the falcon, the heart and the pot of basil in these two stories respectively serve as a concrete symbol for each story, the "specific thing which distinguishes this story from thousands of others," to borrow Heyse's ex pression (Benett 13-15). 20 The term "intradiegetic" is Genette's. Genette divides narrative levels into three: extradiegetic, in tradiegetic, metadiegetic. The narrator of the primary narrative is extradiegetic. The character who, in place of the primary narrator, recounts a secondary narrative within the fictional (diegetic) world can be seen as an intradiegetic narrator (Narrative Discourse 228-231; Figures III 238-241). 21 See Balzac's Comedie Humaine (London: U of Lon don, 1959) 36. 22 "Cet endroit, oil elle admettait peu de monde, avait l'air tout a la fois d'une chapelle et d'un bazar, tant il contenait d'objets religieux et de choses hete- roclites" (81; ch. 4). 23 "A l'eglise, elle contemplait toujours le Saint- Esprit, et observa qu'il avait quelque chose du perro- quet. Sa ressemblance lui parut encore plus manifeste sur une image d'Epinal, representant le bapteme de Notre- Seigneur. Avec ses ailes de pourpre et son corps d'emer- aude, c'etait vraiment le portrait de Loulou. L'ayant achete, elle le suspendit a la place du comte d 1Artois,— 223 de sorte que, du meme coup d'oeil, elle les voyait en semble. IIs s'associerent dans sa pensee, le perroquet se trouvant sanctifie par ce rapport avec le Saint-Es- prit, qui devenait plus vivant a ses yeux et intel ligible. Le Pere, pour s'enoncer, n'avait pu choisir une colombe, puisque ces betes-la n'ont pas de voix, mais plutot un des ancetres de Loulou. Et F^licite priait en regardant 1'image, mais de temps & autre se tournait un peu vers l'oiseau" (82). 24 As the very ending of the story (the phrase "elle crut voir") subtly suggests, it seems to me that Felicite's wishful thinking is rather incomplete and her dream remains still unfulfilled because she "thought she saw (or could see)" the parrot in the heavens instead of actually seeing the parrot. That may be why Flaubert says that the ending is "not at all ironic, but on the contrary very serious and very sad." Quoted in Culler, Flaubert: The Uses of Uncertainty (1974; Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985) 210. 25 See Shosha Felman, "Flaubert's Signature: The Legend of Saint Julian the Hospitable," Flaubert ad Postmodernism. ed. Naomi Schor and Henry F. Majewski (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P) 46-75. 26 Though my observation of the symbolic quality of the stained-glass window is much indebted to Felman's perceptive essay, I think that Felman's reading of "La legende de Saint Julien" as a self-reflexive writing is sometimes too far-fetched because the redness of the light and its stains can hardly be equated with the blackness of the ink. 27 For example, we can perceive the falcon as a symbol standing for self-sacrifice, or as a vehicle for successful hunting in a metaphoric sense. In effect, Federigo succeeded in hunting the woman he had long chased, by means of the falcon, a bird of prey for hunt ing. 28 See Vial, 74-75. 29 • • • • See "La finesse," Chroniques 2 (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1980). This article was first published in Gil Bias. 25 decembre 1883. This article clearly manifests Maupassant's features as a poet: La profonde et delicieuse jouissance qui vous monte au coeur devant certaines pages, devant certaines 224 phrases, ne vient pas seulement de ce qu'elles disent.; elle vient d'une accordance absolue de l1 ex pression avec l'idee, d'une sensation d'harmonie, de beaute secrete echappant la plupart du temps au jugement des foules. . . . le fremissement, presque l'extase que nous peuvent donner certaines pieces de Baudelaire, de Victor Hugo, de Leconte de Lisle. Les mots ont une ame. La plupart des lecteurs ne leur demandent qu'un sens. II faut trouver cette dme qui apparait au contact d 1autre mots, qui eclate et eclaire certains livres d'une lumiere inconnue, bien difficile a faire jaillir. II y a dans les rapprochements et les combi- naisons de la langue ecrite par certains hommes toute 1'evocation d'un monde poetique, que le peuple des mondains ne sait plus apercevoir ni deviner. (304) However, these poetic aspects of Maupassant's art seem to have been surprisingly devaluated by American and English critics of Joyce and the short story, to such an extent that Magalaner and Kain (whose interpretation of Joyce is extremely symbolic) argue, without hesitation, that "even in its French original, his prose is only prose, simple and lucid" (59). 30 For discussion about the structural resemblance between Maupassant's narrative and the figure of chias mus, see Jean Paris, "Maupassant et le contre-recit," Le point aveuqle (Paris: Seuil, 1975) 135-222. 31 In her recent essay "second stories," Mortimer argues that there are a particular class of stories having an "undercurrent of suggested meaning," in which "the reader is actively solicited to recognize that undercurrent, encoded in diverse ways, and in so doing to create a second storv that is not told outright" (276). According to Mortimer, Maupassant's stories are good examples of the second-story construction: for example, "La chambre II," "Un million," "La serre," "Decore," and "Bombard." If we combine Jean Paris' theory of the contre-recit with Mortimer's, it can be said that Maupas sant 's second story is mostly a contre-recit which sub verts the meaning of the surface narrative. Mortimer's essay is collected in Short Storv Theory at a CROSSROADS edited by Lohafer and Clarey. 225 32 See "Translator's Note," Maupassant: Selected Short Stories (New York: Penguin, 1971). Artine Artinian's view of "La parure" is similar to R. Colet's. In his introduction for The Complete Short Stories of Guv De Maupassant. Artinian states that "Another legend which I trust this volume will dispel concerns the recurring association of Maupassant with the "trick ending. I sup pose that one can be traced to the nauseating frequency with which "The Necklace" is anthologized, as if it represented Maupassant at his best" (xvii). 33 The meaning of "parure" is broader than the neck lace: it includes costume, finery, and jewels, that is, all things for embellishment. 34 For the difference between the value of usage and the value of exchange in the market economy, see Lucien Goldmann, Pour une socioloqie du roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 36-37: "La relation naturelle, saine, des hommes, et des biens est en effet celle ou la production est consciemment regie par la consommation a venir, par les qualites concretes des objets, par leur valeur d 1usage. Or ce qui caracterise la production pour le marche, c'est au contraire 1 * elimination de cette relation de la con science des hommes, sa reduction a l'implicite gr£ce ^ la mediation de la nouvelle realite economique cree par cette forme de production: le valeur d'echange." 35 See James Hall, "Chalice," Dictionary of Subjects & Symbols in Art (1974; New York: Harper, 1979). 36 According to Joyce Annotated by Don Gifford, "in 19 04 the term paralysis was frequently used in medical parlance (and by Joyce) to mean 'general paralysis of teh insane," i.e., paresis, syphilis of the central nervous system and the term "gnomon" was defined by Euclid as "what is left of a parallelogram when a similar paral lelogram containing one of its corners is removed" (29). On the other hand, "Simony is the deliberate buying or selling of ecclesiastical offices, pardons, or emolu ments. In the medieval Church this literal definition was transformed figuratively so that simony meant the pros titution of any spiritual value, any of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost...for material comfort or gain" (30). 37 Quoted by Julian B. Kaye, "The Wings of Dae dalus," James Jovce's Dubliners: A Critical Handbook, ed. James R. Baker and Thamas F. Staley (Belmont: Wadsworth Pub. Co., 1969) 90. 226 38 Against the excessive symbolic interpretation of the Pigeon House, Senn Fritz argues that "the pigeon may more simply suggest the bird itself and thus flight and, once more, escape." See "An Encounter," James Joyce's Dubliners: Critical Essays, ed. Clive Hart (New York: Viking, 1969) 39 Martin Dolch, "Eveline," Baker and Staley 100. 40 According to Gifford's Joyce Annotated (49-50), "the 'coloured print' would illustrate the Sacred Heart and would list the promises made through St. Margaret- Mary to those faithful who display in their homes a representation of the Sacred Heart and who receive the Eucharist on the first Friday of each month: (1) I will give them all the graces necessary in their state in life. (2) I will establish peace in their homes. (3) I will comfort them in all their afflictions. (4) I will be their secure refuge during life, and above all in death. (5) I will bestow abundant blessings on all their undertakings ... etc. On the other hand, the ejaculation "Derevaun Seraunl Derevaun Seraun!" can be interpreted in the two ways: first, "the end of pleasure is pain"; second, "the end of song is raving madness" (Gifford 51-52). These two mean ings help us to understand her fear of the consequences of her elopement. 41 For example, Joyce chiefly deals with the social evils of the capitalist society and the degeneration of moral values in such stories as "Two Gallants," "The Boading House," and "A Mother," and the political con flicts and ineffectuality of the intellectual under Bri tish colonialism in such stories as "Ivy Day in the Com mittee Room" and "The Dead." 42 Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyon, Han'cruk munhaksa (1973; Seoul: Minum-sa, 1984) 165. 43 quoted in Robert Kimbrough, 3rd ed., Heart of Darkness (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1988) 231. 227 CHAPTER FIVE FRAME STORY AND IMPERSONAL NARRATION Storytelling Tradition and Modernity in the Rhetoric of the Short storv In his essay "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin argues that "What distinguishes the novel from the story (and from the epic in the narrower sense) is its essen tial dependence on the book" (87). According to Ben jamin, the gradual decline of storytelling in narrative literature began with the rise of the novel which ex clusively depends upon the book as a vehicle of dissemi nation since the invention of printing and this depen dence has resulted in its divorce from oral tradition and from all other fictional genres. What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature— the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella— is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience— his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to this tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. (87) Here, Benjamin distinguishes between the novella and the novel because of the difference of their narrative situa tion. In other words, whereas the novella which has its 228 root in oral tradition and still maintains the context of storytelling is capable of creating a certain sense of community between the storyteller and the audience, the novel is an individualistic artistic construct devoid of such a sense of community between the teller and the reader. Later on in the same essay, Benjamin's argument tends to become somewhat ambiguous. For, without distin guishing clearly between the novella and the short story, on the one hand, he states that the decline of storytell ing is evident in the "evolution of the 'short story,' which has removed itself from oral tradition" (109); on the other, he places such short story writers as Leskov, Poe, Nodier, and Stevenson into the tradition of the storyteller.1 The problem of orality or storytelling tradition in the short story and the novella has been also discussed by several theorists such as Pratt, Walker, and Godenne, though this has not yet been raised as a central issue in short story criticism in general. For example, B. M. Ejxenbaum sees one of the essential differences between the novel and the short story in the origins of these two genres: "The novel derives from history, from travels; the story, from fairy tale, anecdote."2 Similarly, a recent critic, Mary Louise Pratt emphasizes orality in the short story as an "consistent trend in the short 229 story, ranging from the incorporation of oral-colloquial speech forms in the language of narration (e.g. James "The Beldonal Holbein" and others), through instances where an oral narrative is embedded in the story (e.g. Chekhov's "Gooseberries"), to instances where the whole text takes the form of represented speech, often first person narration in an oral setting (e.g. Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart").3 For Pratt, the orality of the short story not only manifests its linkage to the oral tradi tion of tale, but also an essential difference between the short story and the novel. She argues that "orality is not a conspicuous and consistent tendency in the novel as it is in the short story. The conspicuous tradition in the novel has always been toward writing and bookish ness" (189). Though Pratt's view appears to be close to Benjamin's, her view is different from the latter's in that she emphasizes the persistent importance of orality in the modern short story, whereas Benjamin sees its decline in the evolution of the story. On the other hand, in France, a recent theorist, Rene Godenne, pro poses orality as one of the four major qualities of the short story or nouvelle. He states that "La nouvelle est souvent un recit conte, soit qu'elle implique la presence d'un 'je' qui s'adresse ei un ou des auditeurs, voire plus simplement au lecteur, soit qu'elle temoigne de la pr6- 230 sence constante de 1'auteur qui confere a son recit un cachet oral" (La nouvelle frangaise 151). According to Godonne, the indiscriminate use of the term conte for designating the stories which belong to the novelle in French literary theory is largely due to the persistent existence of conteur in the nouvelle (155). These emphases on the orality of the short story and on its preservation of the raconteur tradition seems to be rather polemical. For it goes against the major trend of American and English-Irish short story criticism which tends to regard the short story as a new genre of our time rather than as a variation of the tale of tradition. For instance, Frank O'Connor who conceives of the short story as a modern art form dating back to Gogol's "Over coat" insists that "Almost from its beginnings the short story, like the novel, abandoned the devices of a public art in which the storyteller assumed the mass assent of an audience to his wildest improvisations . . . It began, and continues to function, as a private art intended to satisfy the standards of the individual, solitary, criti cal reader" ("The Lonely Voice" 83-84). Accordingly, the short story is characterized by its lonely voice ap propriate to the presentation of the lives of the "sub merged population group" and of "something we do not often find in the novel— an intense awareness of human 231 loneliness" (87). Similarly, Nadine Gordimer argues that the short story is an "art form solitary in communica tion; yet another sign of the increasing loneliness and isolation of the individual in a competitive society" ("The Flash of Fireflies" 181). The views of O ' C o n n o r and Gordimer are not quite different from Elizabeth Bowen's (chronologically Bowen's essay comes earlier than O'Connor's). While considering the short story as "the child of this century," Bowen argues in her "The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories" that "The short story, within its short span than the novel's, with its freedom from forced complexity, its possible lucidness, is able, like the poetic drama, to measure man by his aspirations and dreads and place him alone on that stage which, inwardly, every man is conspicuous of occupying alone" (158). For such theorists, the short story is a new artistic genre which has cut itself off from the tradi tion of tale or storytelling in that its voice or narra tive mode is solitary, private, and directed to the individual reader rather than the public audience. Furthermore, for them, the voice of the short story is much lonelier and more private than that of the novel, though both of them are solitary art forms. These conflicting views towards the narrative voices of the short story reveal us the vulnerability of generic 232 definition and its danger of oversixnplication. The dif ficulty of genre theory may be that, metaphorically speaking, "no matter how many instances of white swans we have observed, this does not justified the conclusion that all swans are white," to borrow Karl Popper's terms.4 Pratt's argument can be easily refuted by a number of modern stories governed by narrative perspec tive (such as the device of camera eye) rather than by the storyteller's voice, and by such a fact that, as Thomas M. Leitch observes, "The tendency toward orality appears in a great many of Twain's and Faulkner's novels, in Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, in all of Kurt Von- negut's novels (indeed, Salinger and Vonnegut are far more conspicuously oral in their long fiction than in their short)" (143).5 Likewise, we can easily dispute O'Connor's argument, inasmuch as there are a good many stories (e.g. "Autre etude de femme" and "L'auberge rouge" by Balzac, such frame stories of Maupassant as "Le fermier," "Le testament," "Clochette," and "Au prin- temps") in which the narrator's desire to exchange his experience with others and his curiosity to learn about the secret of others' lives are sufficiently material ized. Moreover, there are many novels whose narrative voices and atmosphere are lonelier than some other stories: for example, Samuel Beckett's novels such as 233 Mollov and Malone Dies, and Conrad's The Secret Agent. Indeed, the narrative voices in such stories of Conrad as "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer" are less lonely than the voice in The Secret Agent. For there exists a certain amount of communicability between Kurtz, Marlow, and the first-person narrator (one of Marlow's narratees) in "Heart of Darkness," and between the Cap tain and Leggatt in "The Secret Sharer," whereas Mrs. Verloc and Mr. Verloc are devastatingly solitary figures incapable of sharing their feelings and experiences with others. Thus, any theoretical attempt to define epigram- matically the dominant narrative voice of the short story is vulnerable to criticism. However, this theoretical vulnerability or limita tions which results from the complexity and the variety of the narrative modes of the short story can be con siderably decreased, when its modes are examined from a historical point of view. The heritage of oral tradition or storytelling tradition is unmistakably present in the fantastic and realistic stories of the nineteenth cen tury. For example, this is evident in the French short story of the nineteenth century. According to Godenne's observation: La majorite des nouvelles du XIXe siecle sont des textes contes, c'est-a-dire que les auteurs laissent une place importante a la parole d'un narrateur, conservant et restituant le ton de ce qui est parle ______(ilen est ainsi, par exemple, pour cent cinquante 234 histoires de Maupassant, soit la moitie de sa pro duction) . L'intention est presque toujours annoncee dans les premieres pages des recits par la presence des verbes 'conter1 ou 'raconter1 (il se lisent cinquante et une fois chez Maupassant) (55) The majority of stories of Balzac and M^rimee (e.g. "Autre etude de femme," "La messe de l'athee," "Facino Cane" by Balzac; "Mateo Falcone," "L'enlevement de la redoute," "Tamango" by Merim^e), and more than the half of Maupassant's stories (e.g. "Le fermier," "La clo- chette," "Miss Harriet," "Conte de Noel,") appear to be told rather than written, whether the narrator of a given story is a character or the implied author. Furthermore, the short story's resistance to the decline of the story telling or orality is still evident in a number of frame (or semi-frame) stories of the twentieth century, though there are many differences in the degree of reliability, communicability, and complexity between the method of traditional storytelling and that of modern storytelling: for instance, Conrad's stories such as "Youth," "Heart of Darkness," "The Secret Sharer," and "Amy Forster," Bor ges' stories such as "the Garden of Forking Paths," "The Shape of Sword," and "The Death and the Compass." In particular, Marlow, Conrad's surrogate narrator of se veral stories and novels, can be considered as a modern storyteller because of his "propensity to spin yarns," because of his seeking for certain companionship with his 235 audience to tell the stories which derive from his own experience as a seaman, from the experience of others, and from what he knows from hearsay.6 On the other hand, in the Asian tradition, the rhetoric of storytelling has been persistently used in a good many stories of the early twentieth century: for example, Lu Xun's stories such as "A New Year's Sacrifice," "In the Wine Shop," and "The Story of A Q" (in China), Kim Tongin's stories such as "Paettaragi Song," "The Sonata of Frantic Fire," "The Mad Painter," (in Korea), and Akutagawa Ryunosuke1s "Yam Gruel," "Rashomon," "The Nose" (in Japan). However, it cannot be denied that, as Benjamin observes, the character of oral tradition or the art of storytelling is obviously perishing in the short story of this century. Though Pratt's emphasis on the orality of the short story as its characteristic generic features is certainly true of the majority of the nineteenth century stories, it is not applicable to a large number of modern stories in which the reader can hardly hear the nar- ratorial or authorial voices and instead feels himself thrown "into the midst of a universe where there are no witnesses," to borrow Sartre's terms.7 Moreover, even if modern short stories appear to be "told" rather than "written," the orality of the contemporary stories which consist of the interior monologue and the free indirect 236 discourse (style indirect libre) is quite remote from the oral tradition because of the absence of the dynamic interaction between teller and audience, which the story- telling context entails. In this respect, for the stories of the twentieth century, the views of O'Connor and Bowen are more valid in that they describe the in dividualistic features of the modern (or contemporary) short story which can be characterized by incom- municability, alienation, or the loss of a sense of com munity. These two different stages in the evolution of the modern short story— the short story's resistance to the decline of storytelling or its nostalgia for storytelling tradition in the nineteenth century and its deliberate divorce from that tradition in the twentieth century— can be effectively comprehended through our examination of the development of the realistic short story from Balzac, through Flaubert and Maupassant, to Joyce and Hyon Chin'gon. Their stories help us to perceive the com plexity and the diversity of the narrative voices in the short story, and grasp the evolution of the rhetoric of storytelling: for instance, Balzac's penchant for the frame story and his rhetoric of storytelling, Flaubert's device of impersonal narration, Maupassant's simultaneous inclination towards the Balzacian art of storytelling and 237 Flaubertian impersonal narration, Joyce's exclusive use of impersonal narration, and Hy6n Chin'gon's experimenta tion of various narrative techniques from first-person narration through Flaubertian narration to the frame story. Balzac's Frame Storv as an archetypal narrative Versus Flaubert's Impersonal Narration The heritage of oral or storytelling tradition in the short story can be evidently perceived in the frame structure, one of the important archetypal devices of storytelling. In the Western tradition, this device has been persistently used in short fictional narratives, j ranging from such tales as Arabian Nights, Decameron. Heptameron. The Canterbury Tales. through the German novelien of Goethe and Keller, and the tales of Balzac, Merimee, and Maupassant, up to the stories of Conrad and Borges. Likewise, in China and Korea, the frame struc ture is pervasive from the traditional tales of Chuan Chi or Chon'ai to the modern stories of Lu Xun and Kim Ton- gin. The frame structure has been predominantly used in short fiction rather than in long fiction, though the frame structure is perfectly possible in such novels as Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut. Wutherinq Heights. L 'immoraliste. and Lord Jim. 238 This seems to be evident in the works of Balzac and Maupassant. For these two writers who were prolific in both the novel and the short story, the device of the frame structure can be mostly seen in the short story or the novella rather than the novel (though it can be seen in a few of Balzac's novels such as Le Lvs dans la vallee and Louis Lamberts. Balzac persistently uses the method of framing in a great number of his stories: for example, "Autre etude de femme," "El Verdugo," "Une passion dans le desert," "La messe de l'athee," "Adieu," "Gobsek," "Honorine," "L'auberge rouge," "Facino Cane," "Sar- rasine," and "Un Prince de la boheme." As for Maupas sant, more than one hundred fifty stories have the frame structure, in contrast to its absence in his novels. Hence, such French critics as Godenne consider this device as one of the essential characteristics of the short story (nouvelle^ which distinguishes itself from the the novel (roman): Le cachet oral provient en grande partie de l1habi tude prise par les nouvellistes d 1inserer leurs recits dans un contexte narratif ou cadre, ce qui amene 11 idee d'une histoire parlee. II s'agit Id. d'une caracteristique essentielle: le romancier ne recourt pas, a notre connaissance, A ce subterfuge pour introduire son recit. (La nouvelle francaise 151-152) Though all frame stories do not necessarily require an oral form (there are many frame stories in a written form which chiefly consists of documents, letters, and 239 diaries), most of them appear to be told by the narrator or narrators whose appearances and voices are concrete, personal, and easily perceptible to the reader. Even if the framing narrative, on rare occasions, happens to be told in third-person by the anonymous extradiegetic nar rator, the intradiegetic narrator of the framed tale is almost always dramatized, personal, and perceptible. Balzac's stories are fine examples of the frame structure which shows us its classical narrative situa tion found in such tales as Decameron and the close linkage between the storytelling tradition and the nineteenth century short story. For instance, the narra tive situation of "Autre etude de femme" into which "La grande Breteche" was incorporated in 1845 is very similar to those of Decameron and Heptameron. As in these tales, "Autre etude de femme" contains a cyclical frame which consists of a sequence of thematically similar stories recounted by several narrators. This story is composed of three tales concerning the male vengeance upon female infidelity and one verbal portrait of the perfect lady ('la femme comme il faut'): the prime mini- nster Henri de Marsay's account of his first passionate love and its bitter ending due to his painful revelation of feminine deceitfulness, Emile Blondet's sketch of the "femme comme il faut," General de Montriveau's story of 240 how cruelly an Italian captain of the Grande Armee reven ged himself on the adultery of his wife and his superior officer, and finally Doctor Bianchon's account of another terrible vengeance taken by the husband on his guilty wife and her Spanish lover (i.e. "La grande Bretdche" which we have discussed in the previous chapters). Bianchon serves as the extradiegetic narrator of the framing story and at the same time as the intradiegetic narrator of one of the framed stories; De Marsay, Emile Brondet, and General de Montriveau in turns function as intradiegetic narrators. Like the extradiegetic nar rators of Decameron and Heptameron. in the beginning of the story, Bianchon provides the reader with the preamble about the given frame situation in which the intra diegetic narrators share a certain companionship with their audience whose constituents are "Jolies femmes, dandies politiques, artistes, vieillards," that is, their intimate friends. The narrative situation described by Bianchon shows an almost archetypal frame situation which involves the notion of threat: "narration under pressure, where our narrator is concerned not simply to amuse or intrigue his readers, but where he is ultimately using the process of narration for a purpose" (Swales 46) . As the Decameron and the Heptameron begin with such catastrophes as plague and flood, "Autre etude de femme" starts with a descrip- tion of the social pressures felt by the French Aristo cracy under the reign of Louis-Philippe.8 Under the July Monarchy which can be characterized by the perishing of the genuine aristocracy and the rise of the grand bour geoisie, the salon of mademoiselle Des Touches functions as the last sanctuary for the old French esprit, in the same way that the palace on the hills in Decameron serves as a shelter from the pestilence rampant in Florence: "le dernier asile oil se soit r§fugie 1'esprit frangais d 1autrefois, avec sa profondeur cachee, ses milie detours et sa politesse exquise"(208). The function of Mile. Des Touches' salon as a shel ter from social pressures is fulfilled in the second soiree which follows the tedious, hypocritical, official raout. Her second soiree creates a perfect communion between tellers and listeners: "Tout les yeux ecoutent, les gestes interrogent et la phyionomie repond. Enfin, la tout est, en un mot, esprit et pens^e. Jamais le pheno- mene oral qui, bien etudie, bien manie, fait la puissance de l'acteur et du conteur, ne m'avait si compldtement ensorcele" (209). This companionship between the teller and his audience goes to such an extent that each par ticipant could forget his own social self, his preten sions and self-conceits: "la familiarite la plus douce fait oublier a chacun ses inter^ts, son amour-propre special, ou, si vous voulez, ses pretensions" (209). This restoration of a sense of community between teller and listeners, and their deliverance from the pressures of public life, are not entirely spontaneous. For the optimum effect of "narrative transaction," to use Peter Brooks' terms,9 each participant is tacitly boun ded by a certain social contract or narrative contract . . » • . 10 demanding the immobility and equality of the members. The submission of the participants to these tacit res traints reinforces not only their desire to tell but also their desire to listen: "Non seulement alors tout le monde aime a parler, mais encore a ecouter"(210). However, whereas the cohesion within the group (re gardless of the differences of gender, age, occupation, and social status) is established in the framing situa tion, there exists a noticeable tension between the fram ing world and the framed world. In particular, the com munion of male and female characters within the story telling context (or the situation of the framing narra tive) forms a sharp contrast to the gender conflicts between the male and the female characters within the world of the framed tales: all three tales deal with the male vengeance on the deceitfulness and adultery of the female characters. This aspect is very close to the 243 archetypal framing structure found in Decameron in which "the interaction between Rahmen and Binnenerzahlung« between frame and enclosed narration, between the world within which and to which the stories are told and the world of which the stories tell sets up a tension within the work as a whole" (Swales 48). In order to illuminate this tension, let us take an example from one of the framed tales, de Marsay's account of his first love affair. The prime minister de Marsay, known as a shrewd statesman and a philanderer, tells his audience of how he acquired the most essential quality a genuine statesman needs, thanks to a woman, that is, the power of self-mastery: "savoir etre toujours maitre de soi, faire a tout propos le decompte de chaque evenement, quelque fortuit qu'il puisse §tre" (211). At the age of seventeen, he passionately fell in love with a beautiful widow, his senior by six years. However, six months later, one day, he happened to find out that his seem ingly angelical, perfect lady had subtly deceived him by secretly receiving another man in her house. As a way of vengeance, he decided to eliminate such a naive revenge as that of Othello and instead to fling himself into an secret affair with another woman. Six months later, when his first mistress passionately confessed to him that she could not live without him and that he was a god 244 for her, de Marsay cynically revealed his past discovery of her deceitful conduct as well as his secret affair with another woman, and cynically suggested her to marry the other man. This revelation of the truth was a severe punishment, a fatal blow to the mistress: after her remarriage to the other man, the heartbroken heroine died of consumption, presumably the illness aggravated by her grief and bitterness. The conflicts, deceit, destructive passion between man and woman within the framed world are in contrast to the sense of community, order, and harmony between male and female characters (as teller and listeners) within the framing world. The tension or contrast between the frame and enclosed narration, between the world of the framing narrative and the world of the framed narrative, invites the reader into a interpretative game: if it may true, as Roland Barthes argues,11 that all storytelling is not gratuitous but contractual, motivated by certain desire to exchange, then what are the purposes of de Marsay's telling of his affair and of Bianchon's retell ing of it? In other words, by what kind of desire is their act of storytelling motivated? In my view, De Marsay's telling of his own story and Bianchon's retelling of De Marsay's story seem to be motivated by two different desires. As for de Marsay, 245 his telling is motivated by his desire to convince the audience of his excellent caliber as a statesman, his solid power of self-mastery, that is, his ability to "avoir, dans son moi interieur, un etre froid et desin- teresse qui assiste en spectateur a tous les movements de notre vie" (211).12 De Marsay's cynical account of his mastery of destructive passion and of his shrewdly calcu lated revenge on feminine deceitfulness is controlled by his desire to prove his quality as an exceptional states man. This is evident in his concluding statement that "je ne crois pas que ni le marechal de Richelieu, ni Lauzun, ni Louis de Valois aient jamais fait, pour la premiere fois, une si savante retraite" (22 2) . Whereas the framed narrative by de Marsay appears to be largely governed by his inner desire as a statesman, Bianchon’s retelling of de Marsay's story can be as sociated with his vocation as a doctor: it seems to be motivated by his didactic desire to cure social evils and corrupted moral values. Bianchon's narrative simul taneously juxtaposes the two different worlds: the framed world which abounds in cruel vengeance, struggles, dis ruptive desires and passions, and falsehood, on the one hand, and the framing world which can be characterized by such qualities as mutual understanding, order, harmony and companionship, on the other. This contrast between the framed world and the framing world becomes more suggestive when we take into consideration certain paral lels between these two worlds. For instance, de Marsay's intradiegetic narrative shows a triangular relationship between himself, his first mistress, and her another lover; at the same time, Bianchon's extradiegetic narra tive presents us another triangular relationship between de Marsay, his second mistress (Delphine de Nucingen), and her husband (le baron de Nucingen). However, these two relationships are quite different: whereas the former is chaotic and destructive, the latter still harmonious and ordered. De Marsay's account of his tactful ven geance on female deceitfulness is not capable of disrupt ing a certain sense of community within the group: "La naivete du celebre banguier [le baron de Nucingen] eut un tel succes que sa femme, qui fut cette seconde de de Marsay, ne put s'empecher de rire comme tout le monde" (222) . By juxtaposing these two different potentials which simultaneously exist within human mind, Bianchon seems to attempt to exorcise or cure destructive forces which threaten the social, moral order of the world, through the very process of storytelling. "L'auberge rouge" is another interesting frame story which makes us perceive the important features of Balzac as storyteller. Though "L'auberge rouge" encloses just 247 one framed story, it is more complex and suggestive than "Autre etude de femme." Seemingly, the multi-layered frame structure of "Autre etude de femme" which consists of the four framed narratives told in turn by different tellers appears difficult and complex, particularly when we take into account the frame structure within the framed tale of "La grande Breteche" (as we have seen in the previous chapters, this framed tale itself consists of several different narrative fragments told by four different narrators). However, the dynamic interaction between frame and framed narration in "L'auberge rouge" invites the reader to a more complex interpretative game than that of "Autre etude de femme." The story of the framed tale can be summed up as follow: In 1799, A young medical student named Prosper Mag- nan, together with his bosom friend Frederic— both of them came from Beauvais in France— was on his way to the French Army near the Rhine, in order to do military service as assisant-doctors (because of the conscription law). During their travel, they hap pened to spend a night in a German inn (L'auberge rouge), with a German businessman who carried a travel case packed with gold and diamond jewels. At night, Prosper became tormented by his desire to kill the businessman and steal his gold and dia monds, but he overcame such temptation by walking outside along the Rhine until he became exhausted. However, when somebody woke him up in the morning, he found out that the businessman was brutally murdered by his surgical instrument, the dead man's suitcase was missing, and his friend ran away. Though he had not committed the crime in reality, Propser could not prove himself to be innocent because of his guilty consciousness, his suspicious behaviors in the night, and the absence of his friend. Finally, he faced death by firing sguad for 248 a murder that he had committed in imagination but not in fact. This story dealing with the problem of morality or con science invites the reader to participate in a discussion about conscience and morality through the dynamic inter action between frame and framed narration, instead of preaching certain lessons to the reader through the authority of the omniscient narrator. The framed story of Prosper1s tragic life is anachronistically transmitted i to the reader through the form of traditional oral trans- J mission, the layers of the retellings by different nar- | ! rators. In the story, there are three different nar rators and narrative levels: on the first level, the first-person extradiegetic narrator-character tells the reader the whole story of "L'auberge rouge": on the * second, the intradiegetic narrator Hermann tells the framed story of Prosper1s absurd death to the ex tradiegetic narrator and other listeners: on the third level, the metadiegetic narrator Prosper, in prison, tells his own story to Hermann before his execution. Accordingly, the listener and character on one level come to function as a teller of the story on the other level. LEVEL NARRATOR(TELLER) NARRATEE(LISTENERS) I. I the reader II. Hermann I, Frederic, and others III. Prosper Hermann 249 This layering of the story does not exist for the mere imitation of the rhetoric of traditional storytelling, but for the significant development of the central theme, through the interaction between the levels. The process of narrating and listening creates a great impact on the characters. Prosper's telling of his own story leads his listener Hermann to make a pilgrimage to Beauvais in order to console Prosper's mother by saying that he was innocent: "A la paix d'Amiens, je vins en France pour ap- porter a la mere cette belle parole:— II etait innocent. J'avais religieusement entrepris ce pelerinage" (978) . Hermann's telling of Prosper's death— it is uncertain whether Hermann knows one of his narratees is the crimi nal Frederic— tortures Frederic's mind until he dies; on the other hand, it puts the first-person narrator to the test of conscience. The "I," who has passionately fallen in love with the daughter of Frederic Taillefer, without knowing it, is tormented by his discovery of the fact that the woman of his dream is the daughter of the criminal. Torn between his conscience and love, the "I" assembles his friends with pure consciences, tells them the story, and seeks for their counsels about the plan of his marriage. Disappointed by their unanimity against his marriage, two days later, he retells the whole story 250 to the reader, presumably to seek for another counsel, the reader's counsel. Thus, the interaction between frame and enclosed narration is almost inseparable. The framed story concerning Prosper's tragic life, which is rather anachronistically transmitted to the reader, is frequently interrupted by frame narration. In other words, the framed narrative of Prosper's death told by Hermann (in fact, Hermann's speech is not exactly his speech, but the copy of his speech reproduced by the "I") is frequently interrupted and fragmented by the ex- tradiegetic narrator's comments on Taillefer's peculiar reaction as a narratee. There is no clear-cut boundary between the framed world and the frame world, partly because of the simultaneous importance of Taillefer as a character in both worlds. There are certain parallels between the frame and the framed. First, Prosper (the protagonist of the framed tale) and the first-person narrator (the protagonist of the frame) seem to be almost doubles in that both of them stand at the important crossroad of their life between salvation and the loss of spiritual virginity, and are equally tormented by their conscience and worldly desires for money and love, j Second, Prosper's death in the framed tale and Frederic ! Taillefer's death in the frame are the consequences of | the same criminal act: Prosper's death penalty is the 251 consequence of his imaginary murder, and Taillefer's fatal illness and eventual death is that of the actual murder. Third, there are two murders: in the framed a French (Taillefer) kills a German ‘and in the frame a German (Hermann) kills the French (Taillefer) by narra tion. Last, both the frame and the framed show the illusion of friendship: Prosper and the first-person narrator lose their belief in friendship, because of mammonism. Thus, these two narratives reflect and inter connect each other. Through the layers of retellings, Balzac invites the reader to a hermeneutic gamble in which everything impor tant is uncertain, indeterminate. Is it true that Her- j mann did not really know, as he pretended, that one of | his narratees was the criminal? What is the real motives of his telling? Merely to instruct or transmit to others I I the wisdom he learned from Prosper*s death? Or to punish the criminal for the murder of his compatriot or the absurd death of the innocent? What are the real facts i of the murder? A murder by Frederic or murder by Pros- j per's sleepwalking? If Frederic, what was go on his mind j during that night? Is he a truly evil immoralist or the victim of circumstance like Prosper? In what way will i the first-person narrator decide on his marriage? Why were his friends against that marriage? Because of their 252 pure consciences and friendship? Or because of their covetous ambitions to give themselves a chance to marry that extremely wealthy girl by getting rid of his friend? By creating these gaps of indeterminacy, by passing the incomplete story on to the reader, Balzac seems to ask the reader to be a cocreator of his story and to make the reader's own decision about such moral problems: If the reader, as a narratee listening to the story of a young man at the crossroad of life, has counsel for him, what will it be? Does he have to follow his love and worldly dream or his conscience? These aspects of "L'auberge rouge" explicitly illustrate the condition of all narrative: to borrow Peter Brooks' expression, "shape j and meaning are the product of the listening as of the j telling" (Reading for the Plot 236). This can be 1 i closely linked to the tradition of oral narratives which "appear always contain a moment of 'evaluation,' a moment where the speaker calls attention to and reflects on the •point' of his story, and explicitly or implicitly calls the listener to attention, asking him to judge the story as important."13 Flaubert's Trois contes is almost completely devoid of such layers of retellings which Balzacian frame stories present. Flaubert's impersonal (or self-effac- ing) narrator can be referred to as "Presenter" or "Show er" rather than to "Tell-er," to borrow Seymour Chat- i man's terminology (Coming to Terms 113). Flaubert's stories seem to substantiate Walter Benjamin's view that "We have witnessed the evolution of the 'short story,' which has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most j appropriate picture of the way in which the perfect i narrative is reveal through the layers of a variety of retellings" (93). In spite of his thematic preference for ancient episodes (legend and biblical anecdote), Flaubert's narrative technique hardly shows the "layers of a variety of retellings," or the simulacrum of oral i transmission. In his stories, the narrator is always a single person whose impersonal, impassible voice makes his presence disembodied and invisible but whose aes thetic penchant for certain styles is perceptible every where. Moreover, this impersonal narrator unfolding his narrative in the third-person appears to ignore the solitary reader himself, because of its deliberate absti nence of all direct addresses to the reader. Hence, j within the fictional world, there is no direct interac- I I tion between the teller and the listener, unlike Bal- i zacian stories. 254 This aspect of Flaubert’s narration seems to result from his artistic principles. Whereas Balzac was a soci able person fond of parties and conversations with others, Flaubert was an obstinate hermit who spent his lifetime in his ivory tower for "faire de l'Art pour soi tout seul."14 In one of his letters to his mistress- writer Louise Colet, Flaubert states that "Between the i crowd and ourselves, no bond exists. Alas for the crowd; alas for us, especially. But since there is a reason for everything, and since the fancy of one individual seems to me just as valid as the appetite of a million men, and can occupy an equal place in the world, we must (. . .) live for our vocation, climb up our ivory tower, and there, like a bayadere with her perfumes, dwell alone i I f 1 5 . . . . . j with our dreams." This artistic philosophy of ivory i tower, his conception of fiction as an individual art i I form, and his sense of superiority over his contemporary 1 readers are the foundation of his compositional principle ! of impersonality. Flaubert's impersonal narrator (or I author) is nor a storyteller which passes the tale told by others on to the reader neither a Balzacian omniscient author whose presence, personality, emotion, world view, and voice are easily perceptible to the reader. While praising the virtue of "eliminating the author" in the dramatic form (especially Shakespeare's The Merchant of j I ) 255 Venice) and complaining of Balzac's lack of such a vir tue, Flaubert insists: An author in his book must be like God in the uni verse, present everywhere and visible nowhere. Art being a second Nature, the creator of that Nature must behave similarly. In all its atoms, in all its aspects, let there be sensed a hidden, infinite impassivity. The effect for the spectator must be a kind of amazement. "How is all that done?" one must ask; and one must feel overwhelmed without knowing why.16 Thus, Flaubert's authorial narrator is an invisible but omni-present god who looks down his world and reader from the ivory tower; and the reader is no longer a listener sharing companionship with the teller, but a spectator who amazes at the exquisite creation of the hidden god. This artistic principle can be found not only in such long fictions as Madame Bovarv and L 'Education senti- mentale but also in the stories of Trois contes. Though "La legende de saint Julien 1'hospitalier" reveals the presence of the author and the trace of traditional storytelling in the very last sentence ("Et voila l'his- toire de saint Julien 1'Hospitalier, telle a peu pres qu'on la trouve, sur un vitrail d'eglise, dans mon pays"), it is almost completely devoid of the storytell ing context involving the teller and the listener and the dynamic interaction between the frame to the framed as in Balzacian stories. Except for that sentence, all narra tive of Trois contes is very faithful to Flaubert's 256 compositional principle of impersonality: the author or the narrator prevents himself from speaking in the first- person and from commenting explicitly on the events and the characters. Flaubert's fictional world is quite different from Balzac's. In his world, people are solitary figures who have lost their ability to communicate with each other, the ability to exchange their experiences through lan guage. In Flaubert's stories, the reader can find those features of the short story which O'Connor suggests as its essential qualities: an "intense awareness of human loneliness," an atmosphere "akin to the mood of Pascal's saying: 'le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie'" ("The Lonely Voice" 87). Though the implied j j author or the extradiegetic narrator present the story to j i ! the reader, he appears to be silent or does not seem to | speak to the reader, because of its impersonality and impassibility. Like the narrator, all the protagonists are very taciturn: Felicite and Julien are almost mute and Antipas also does not speak much. All the direct utterances of Felicite are ejaculated words, short questions, elliptic sentences, and truncated conversations: "Ah!" "Vous en avez, M. de Gremanville! A une autre fois!" "Ne craignez rien!" "Non! non! moins | i vite!" "Depechez-vous! depechez-vous!" "Victor!" "Moi, I 257 Madame, voila six mois que je n'en ai regu! ..." "Mais . . . de mon neveu!" "Pauvre petit garsl pauvre petit gars!" "ga ne leur fait rien, a eux!" "C'est Madame qui serait heureuse de 1'avoir," "Vous n'auriez pas vu, quelquefois, par hasard, mon perroquet?" "Oui, Madame," "Ah! comme Madame," "Pardonnez-moi, je croyais que c'etait vous qui l'aviez tue!" and "Est-il bien?" --- these sixteen interventions are all the utterances of Felicite in the story. Madame Aubain appears as reticent as Felicity. Despite many differences between the two characters (e.g. intellectuality, education, social status, personality), Madame Aubain's speech is almost identical with Felicite's in that the speech of both persons consists of short ejaculations or elliptic phrases: all the utterances of Madame Aubain (we can hear in the work) are "Soit, Je vous accepte!," "Mais jouez done," "Allons! du courage! du courage!" "De qui done?" "Ah! votre neveu!" "C'est un malheur . . . qu'on vous an- nonce. Votre neveu ..." "Donnez-moi ma chaufferette, ma bourse, mes gants; plus vite done!" "Elle? Ah! oui! . . . oui! . . . vous ne l'oubliz pas!" "Prenez done garde! vous etes folle!" "Mon Dieu! comme vous etes betel" "Eh bien! faites-le empailler!" These features of their speech reflect their incommunicability, or their in ability to exchange experiences. Hence, throughout this 258 long short story, the reader can not find any conversa tion or dialogue between characters. If there is one, it is merely a frustrated act of communication which leads the character into a keener awareness of loneliness and alienation than before. The only conversation is found in the scene in which Felicite tries to console her mistress anxiously looking forward to a letter from her daughter in the convent: Pour qu'elle se consolat par son exemple, Felicite lui dit: — Moi, Madame, voilA six mois que je n ’en ai regul . . . — De qui done? . . . La servante repliqua doucement: — Mais . . . de mon neveui — Ah! votre neveu! Et, haussant les epaules, Madame Aubain reprit sa promenade, ce qui voulait dire: 'Je n'y pensais pas! . . . Au surplus, je m'en moque! un mousse, un queux, belle affaire! . . . tandis que ma fille . . . songez done! . . .' Felicite, bien que nourrie dans la rudesse, fut indignee contre Madame, puis oublia. (66) This short conversation composed of elliptic phrases worsens their inability to exchange experiences or feel ings. Loulou, the pet parrot of Felicite, is the only interlocutor with whom she was able to communicate her thoughts and feelings through dialogue. However, it is { difficult to say that their conversation is an act of j communication through language. The only words Loulou j j can speak is the three elliptic phrases of exclamation j I ' t , f taught by Felicite, that is, "Charmant gargon! Ser- ! 259 viteur, monsieur! Je vous salue, Marie!" and the mimicry of Madame Aubain's speech, "Felicite! la porte! la porte!" Felicite's linguistic talent is not much better than Loulou's: "IIs avaient des dialogues, lui, debitant a satiete les trois phrases de son repertoire, et elle, y repondant par des mots sans plus de suite, mais ou son coeur s'epanchait" (78). F^licite's in ability to communicate with others in reality can not be i interpreted merely as the problem of such limitations of her intelligence that she could not even understand the gradation of the atlas (ch. 3). For incommunicability is the thing that most Flaubertian characters have in com mon, regardless of their personality and intelligence. The loss of communicability or the silence of the j characters is more evident in La leqende in saint Julien 1 1hospitalier. All the direct discourse we can hear from Julien are nothing but five (two utterances and three inner speech): "Non! non! je ne peux pas les tuer!" "Si je le voulais, pourtant? . . ." (ch. 1), "C'est pour t'obeir! dit-il, au lever du soleil, je serai revenu," "Sans doute, elle aura mange" (ch. 2), "Ah! pauvre pere! pauvre mere! pauvre mere!" (ch. 3). Of these five, only one speech is addressed to the other (his wife) and the rest of them to Julien himself. Julien's speech is elliptic and ejaculated, like those of Felicite and 260 Madame Aubain. Throughout the whole story, the charac ters seem to have lost their ability to exchange ex periences and their belief in the communicative function of language. Flaubert's characters— Felicite, Madame Aubain, Julien, Julien's parents, and Antipas— seem to be more or less autistic in that they are living in their j own world and dream, they prefer to talk to themselves instead of seeking for communication with other people, i and they feel an insurmountable gap between the self and the world (or the crowd). These characteristics of Flaubert's fiction are unmistakably present in La leaende de saint Julien. For example, several days after Julien was born, Julien's parents happened to encounter with a symbolic figure or messenger respectively. An old man who looked like a hermit suddenly appeared to Julien's mother in bed and says that "Rejouis-toi, o mere! ton fils sera un saint!" (ch.l: 99). However, she did not tell this significant event to her husband because she was afraid of being accused of pride: "cela devrait etre une communication du ciel; mais elle eut soin de n'en rien dire, ayant peur qu'on ne 1'accusat d'orgueil" (100). Likewise, Julien's father encountered with a i I prophetic beggar, "un Boheme a barbe tresse, avec des j anneaux d'argent aux deux bras et les prunelles flam- j boyantes." He stammered out some proleptic and discon- 261 nected words: "Ah! ah! ton fils! . . . beaucoup de sang! . . . beaucoup de gloire! . . . toujours heureux! la famille d'un empereur" (100). Julien's father kept this encounter secret because he is afraid of making a laugh ingstock of himself: "*Si j'en parle, on se moquera de moi,' se dit-il" (100). Hence, he and his wife kept their secrets from each other. Like their parents, I j Julien is very reticent about his feelings and thoughts. I However, one day, he decides to break his silence and to attempt to communicate with his wife about his terrible J fear of parricide and the reason for restraining himself i from hunting. This act of communication ironically functions as the very cause of that catastrophe instead i . . . . . | of solving the problem. The impossibility of communica- I } tion or companionship is more evident in chapter three. I i j After his tragic act of parricide, he left his castle and wife, led a life of beggar, and kept telling people the story of his accursed life. His act of storytelling aggravates his tragic situation and increases a great gap between the self and the world. Par esprit d'humilite, il racontait son histoire; alors tous s'enfuyaient, en faisant des signes de croix. Dans les villages oil il avait deja passe, sitot qu'il etait reconnu, on fermait les portes, on lui criait des menaces, on lui jetait des pierres. Les plus charitables posaient une ecuelle sur le bord de leur fen^tre, puis fermaient l'auvent pour ne pas 1'apercevoir. (ch. 3; 124) 262 Thus, Julien is a failure as storyteller because he failed in transmitting properly his innermost sufferings and torments to others or in maintaining a companionship with his audience. These features of Julien as story teller remind us the image of his creator Flaubert. Flaubert states in one of his letters to Louise Colet ! that "je n'ai jamais eprouve, pour vivre, la necessite de la compagnie de personne" and in another letter to his friend that "II y a un si grand intervalle entre moi et le reste du monde" (Carlut 218-219). In this respect, Flaubert is "like God in the universe" not only because he is "present everywhere and visible nowhere," but also because he creates his character according to the image of himself. Despite the fact that La legende de saint Julien 1hospitalier is a retelling of the legend of Saint Julian and occasionally imitates the tone of traditional storytelling (e.g. "Notre-Seigneur Jesus," "Et voila l'histoire de saint Julien . . ."), Flaubert's impersonal narration and the atmosphere of the legend is strikingly modern and anti-traditional. This becomes more evident when we compare Flaubert's text with the medieval telling of Saint Julian's life in the Lectenda aurea. Let us examine how differently the two texts present Julien's tragic discovery of his crime and his sufferings: 263 Et quand il sortit de sa maison, il vit sa femme qui venait de l'eglise; et, tout plein de surprise, il lui demanda quels etaient ceux qui dtaient dans son lit. Et elle dit: 'Ce sont votre pere et votre mere, qui vous ont cherche si longtemps et je les ai mis en votre chambre.' Et quand il entendit cela, il resta comme demi-mort, et il commenga a pleurer tres amerement et a dire: 'Helas! malheureux, que ferais-je? car j'ai tu6 mon cher pere et ma bonne mere! et ainsi la parole du cerf se trouve ac- complie, et ce que je cherchais a eviter, par le plus grand des malheurs, je l'ai consomme! Adieu, ma soeur bien-aimee, car je n'aurai dorenavant aucun repos avant que je sache que Notre-Seigner Jesus- Christ a agree ma penitence.' Et elle repondit: 'Cher frere, je ne peux consentir a ce tu me delais- ses et que tu t'en ailles sans moi; car je prendrai ma part de ta douleur.'17 Thus, in the traditional text, the climactic scene is largely composed of the dramatic dialogue between Julien and his wife. The voice of the storyteller is less domi nant than that of the characters. The discovery of the parricide, their sufferings and thoughts are presented through their own direct speech. They possess the abil ity to communicate with each other through language and share a strong sense of companionship. In the quoted passage, though the storyteller speaks less than the characters, his description of Julien's agony— "il resta comme demi-mort, et il commenga a pleurer tres amere ment"— makes the reader perceive the storyteller's com- passion towards Julien. These features are almost absent in Flaubert's legend. Flaubert's legend is pre sented in an entirely different manner: Le tapage du meurtre l'avait attiree. D'un large coup d'oeil, elle comprit tout, et s'enfuyant 264 d'horreur laissa tomber son flambeau. Il le ramassa. Son pere et sa mere etaient devant lui, etendus sur le dos avec un trou dans la poitrine . . . Julien marcha vers les deux morts en se disant. en voulant croire. que cela n fetait pas possible, au'il s 1etait trompe. au'il v a parfois des ressemblances inex- plicables. Enfin, il se baissa legerement pour voir de tout pres le vieillard; il apergut, entre ses paupieres mal fermees, une prunelle eteinte qui le brdla comme du feu . . . il la regardait, en la tenant au bout de son bras roidi pendant que de 1'autre main il s'eclairait avec le flambeau. Des gouttes, suintant du matelas, tombaient une a une sur le plancher. A la fin du jour, il se presenta devant sa femme; j et, d'une voix differente de la sienne, il lui com- { manda premierement de ne pas lui repondre. de ne pas [ l'approcher. de ne plus meme le reqarder. et au'elle eut a suivre. sous peine de damnation, tous ses ordres aui etaient irr^vocables . . . il lui aban- donnait son palais, ses vassaux, tous ses biens, sans meme retenir les vdtements de son corps, et ses sandales, que l'on trouvait au haut de l'escalier. (ch. 2; 121-122; emphasis added). This passage manifests the characteristic features of | Flaubert's impersonal narration. In contrast to the tale J collected in Leqenda aurea. Flaubert's legend thoroughly | excludes any sympathetic conversation between the couple from the scene and instead presents an solitary stage governed by an almost unbreakable and pathetic silence which seems to devour even Julien's utterances and cries. The entire scene is presented through the disembodied voices and perspectives of the narrator, instead of the character's voice. The impersonal narrator watches the entire scene of the crime, penetrates into Julien's mind, and translates Julien's thoughts and speech into his own language. Unlike the storyteller in the traditional tale 265 of Saint Julien's life, the Flaubertian narrator does not express his emotions or his opinions about Julien's tragedy to such an extent that the reader can feel the personality of the presenter. In other words, Flaubert's artistic principles of impersonality and impassibility effectively dominate the whole scene, though Flaubert's self-controlled presentation evokes more pity and fear in 1 the reader's mind than the compassionate voice of the storyteller in the traditional tale. Flaubert's compositional principle of impersonality is more complex than it seems to be. In his letters, Flaubert repeatedly defines his principle of imper sonality as follows: "L'artiste doit etre dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la creation, invisible et tout-puissant: qu'on le sente partout, mais qu'on ne le voie pas"(Carlut 313).18 To some extent, this analogy between God and the author is paradoxical: how can the reader feel the i i j presence of the invisible author everywhere in his work? ! ! Or how can the reader not see the author present every- | where? These ambivalent features of Flaubert's narra- tion are liable to result in critical misinterpretation. For example, according to Jonathan Culler's interpreta tion of Flaubert's theory of impersonality: a text in which no one speaks; a text which is simply written; a series of sentences which pass before the reader and which, if he tries to deter mine who speaks in each, baffle him by the variety of answers he finds . . . Impersonality depends not 266 on what is said but on the fact that no identifiable narrator speaks . . . What is rejected is a consis tency in point of view which could lead to the identification of a knowledgeable Balzacian narrator or a series of narrators limited in their points of view and characterizable by those very limitations. The result is a strange and complex amalgam. (Flau bert: The Uses of Uncertainty HO) . In my view, this interpretation is rather problematic than helpful because of Culler’s confusion between narra tive voice and perspective. It seems to me that the distinction between narrative perspective and voice— in Genette's terms, mode and voix— is crucial to our under standing of Flaubert's narrative. Whereas for Balzac narrative voice is more important and complex than pers pective because of the multiplication or stratification of narrators, for Flaubert the problem of narrative perspective is more essential than that of voice. For Flaubert, the problem of the narrative voice is less complicated because the person who speaks is almost always the disembodied, impersonal narrator (or authorial figure). Even in the free indirect discourse (one of Flaubert's favorite devices), the reader can perceive the traces of the narrator's speech: "the character speaks through the voice of the narrator" rather than entirely . .19 . . . . through his own voice. For instance, m his saint Julien. except for several short elliptic, ejaculated phrases, the impersonal narrator hardly confers the narrative voice on the character. As we can notice in 267 the underlined phrases in the quoted passage, Flaubert obstinately prefers to use the 'narratized' discourse or the 'transposed" discourse taken on by the narrator rather than the 'imitative' discourse uttered by Julien, even when Julien's utterances can be normally used (as in 20 the traditional version of Saint Julian's life). In short, the language of Flaubert's stories is almost completely stylized according to the aesthetics of the impersonal narrator (or Flaubert), instead of being objectified or dramatized according to the character's personality and linguistic talent as in Balzac's stories. In this manner, Flaubert reigns over his book like God whose presence can be perceptible everywhere, though he hardly reveals his personal opinions and emotions. Ac cordingly, though he tends to be considered as a mimetic writer rather than diegetic because of his vivid descrip tion of the scenery and objects and because of his with drawal of personal comments, it seems to me that Flau bert's narrative is closer to dieaesis (the pure narra tive spoken by the author) than mimesis (the imitative narrative spoken by the character), according to Plato's typology.21 As for the mimetic effect of Flaubert's narrative, it comes from a different direction. While the tradi tional tale of Saint Julian's life and Balzac's stories 268 achieve their mimetic or dramatic effects through dia logues, Flaubert’s stories produce the dramatic or cine matic effect through stage directions and narrative focus. To a great extent, in his fiction, the mimetic effect derives from narrative perspective rather than from narrative voice. Though he can hardly hear the character's direct utterances, the reader can easily have the illusion that he is seeing the scene through the character's perspective and mind. For example, the reader feels as if he sees the ghastly details of the corpses of Julien's parents through the parricidal son's eyes rather than through the narrator's, because of the constant remarks on Julien's vision: "il se baissa legerement pour voir de tout pres le vieillard, il aper- cut. entre ses paupieres mal fermees, une prunelle eteinte qui le brula comme du feu . . . il la reaardait. en la tenant au bout de son bras roidi pendant que de 1'autre main il s'eclairait avec le flambeau" (emphasis added). On the other hand, the entire scene of the parricide is vividly presented through a subtle combina tion of the narrator's and Julien's perspectives, through the gradual shift in narrative focus from the overall aspects of the scene to its myopic details, from the narrator's perspective to Julien's: the narrator (or the implied author) sees the overall scene of the crime and 269 Julien's every movements and actions, and Julien sees his parents's brutally murdered corpses. The subtle grada tions of narrative perspective gives the reader an real istic, visual illusion as if he were watching the scene of the crime as it actually happens. In this way, Flaubert's meticulously designed stage and its atmosphere of impeccable silence make the reader feel his retelling of the legend strikingly modernistic rather than belong ing to the tradition of tale. The Legacy of Storytelling and Impersonal Narration in Maupassant and Joyce: "Mademoiselle Perle" and "The Dead'1 Maupassant is a versatile writer of protean nature. On the one hand, he appears to have much in common with Flaubert in his aesthetics, his pessimistic vision du monde, and neurotic temperament. On the other hand, Maupassant shows quite different features from his men tor: he is hardly a stoic artist of the ivory tower but a sociable writer, as prolific, active, masculine, and adventurous as Balzac. These ambivalent features of Maupassant are unmistakably present in his aesthetics and fictional world. Whereas most of his novels and his stories such as "La ficelle," "En famille," and "Boule de suif" appear to be considerably influenced by Flaubert's principles of impersonality (or impassibility), a great 270 number of his stories manifest his penchant for the rhe toric of traditional storytelling (in which the presence and personality of the storyteller is visible) and his admiration for such predecessors as Abbe Prevost and Balzac. In a perspective of genre study, the interesting aspect of Maupassant's narrative technique is that this prolific writer in both the novel and the short story seems to have approached these two genres in two quite different manners: his novels are almost entirely pre sented (or shown) by Flaubertian impersonal narrator, whereas more than the half of his stories (about 160 stories) appear to be told through the personal voices of characters or narrators. According to Andre Vial, "Plus de cent soixante contes de Maupassant se donnent pour la transcription d'un recit oral ou parfois ecrit dont le charactere est fortement indiqu£. Le conteur, qu'il soit heros, temoin ou depositaire, est prie, ou se propose spontanement, de 'dire,' de 'conter,1 de 'raconter' une 'histoire'" (461). On the other hand, Maupassant ap proaches the novel from the opposite direction. Vial describes the technical features of Maupassant's novel as follows: "La presence du romancier est refusee. II n'y a plus ici de conteur, de parleur, de beau parleur, sinon parmi les personnages. La main du createur est la sans 271 doute, sous la defroque de ces personnages, mais on ne voit qu'eux et 11 agitation qu'elle leur communique; la main, on ne la voit pas, non plus que la tete, qui se derobe sous la tablette du theatre" (481). In other words, in constructing the novel, Maupassant was very faithful to Flaubertian principles of impersonality and impassibility, while avoiding the traces of orality and the manifestation of the narrator's personality that can be found in his stories. These two different approaches to the novel and the short story in Maupassant seem to substantiate Benjamin's view that "What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature— the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella— is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular" ("Storyteller" 87). In his stories, Maupassant's persistent use of storytelling rhetoric, especially the method of framing, manifests his attachment to the tradition of tale or novellas, and his nostalgia for the vanishing beauty and virtues of the art of storytelling. This can be clearly found in his essay titled "Les causeurs": Causeur avec esprit? Qu'est-ce que cela? Causer c'etait jadis l'art d'etre homme ou femme du monde, l'art de ne paraitre jamais ennuyeux, de savoir tout dire avec interet, de plaire avec n'importe quoi, de seduire avec rien du tout . . . Aujourd'hui on parle, on raconte, on bavarde, on potine, on can- cane: on ne cause plus, on ne cause jamais. Comment 272 definir ce vif effleurement des choses par les mots, ce jeu de raquettes avec des paroles souples, cette esp^ce de sourire leger des idees que doit etre la causerie spirituelle? (302-303)22 In this praise for the art of conversation or chat, we can perceive the features of Maupassant as storyteller and his nostalgia for a sense of community or companion ship between the listener and the teller that is vanish ing in modern times. In fact, a large number of his stories show his effort to restore the perishing beauty and virtues of the art of storytelling or conversation: for example, "Le fermier," "Clochette," "La rempail- leuse," "Madame Parisse," "En voyage," "Le bonheur," "Miss Harriet," "Mouche," "Au printemps," "Gargon, un bock! ..." "Le Masque," "Menuet," "Mon oncle Jules," "Mademoiselle Perle," and so on. In these stories, by establishing the frame situation, Maupassant tries to restore a sense of community between the narrator, the listener, and the character who seems to belong to the "submerged population group," to borrow Frank O'Connor’s expression.23 In these stories, the narrator tells his narratee(s) of the life of a solitary individual who has been for long alienated from the society and suffered from their wretched, unfortunate life. By the process of storytelling, the narrator who remains affectionate rather than impassive towards the character also makes the narratee's mind (and the reader's mind) full of 273 compassion, sadness, and pathos. These stories tend to be disregarded by many critics, particularly such critics as Elizabeth Bowen and M. Magalaner from the English tradition, partly because of their partial reading of Maupassant's stories (usually their reading of his stories of overt action, violence, and sarcasm) and partly because of the critical overemphasis on Maupassant as the disciple of Flaubert, i.e. the artist of imper sonality and impassibility. One the other hand, unlike Flaubert who seems to have had a distaste for dialogues,24 Maupassant's stories show his strong penchant for the living speech of the characters. Of his stories in which the narrator remains impersonalized, invisible, and impassive, a number of stories— such as "Joseph," "Au bord du lit", "Au bois," and "Le signe"— achieve the effect of imper sonality through the dramatic reproduction of the dia logues between the characters rather than through Flau- bertian substitution of the (free)indirect discourse for their living speech. In particular, this can be clearly found in the story "Au bord du lit" that is almost en tirely composed of the farcical dialogues between the married couple to such an extent that it comes closer to a piece of drama than to a story. This dramatization of narrative can be conceived of as a synthetic process 274 of combining Balzac's narration with Flaubertian's narra tion in that the living speech of the character and the impersonality of the narrator effectively complement each other. Whereas Maupassant shows an ambivalent attitude between Balzac and Flaubert (or between the storytelling tradition and impersonal narration), Joyce seems to have clearly subscribed to Flaubert's aesthetics. In his ear lier novel "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," his protagonist Stephen talks about the ideal artistic form and the problem of the artist's personality as follows; The personality of the artist, at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalises itself, so to speak. The aesthetic image in the dramatic form is life purified in and reprojected from the human imagination . . . The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invi sible. refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails. (215; emphasis added) Stephen's conception of the dramatic art form clearly echoes Flaubert's principle of impersonality: "L1artiste doit etre dans son oeuvre comme Dieu dans la creation, invisible et tout-puissante . . ."(Carlut 313). In effect, the evolution of Dubliners from "The Sisters" to "The Dead" which begins in the first person and ends in the third person appears to manifest an artistic process of progressing, by passing through the stages of the lyrical and epical forms, towards the dramatic, imper- 275 sonal form wherein the artist "presents his image in immediate relation to others."25 To some extent, even his three stories told in the first person (i.e., "The Sisters," "An Encounter," "Araby") are more or less impersonal because of a temporal gap between the boy "I" as a hero and the grown-up "I" as an artist (or a nar rator) and because of the absence of the personality of the grown-up "I" in the diegetic world of the boy "I." In other words, in the first-person stories, the narrator "I" hardly shows any personal emotion or opinion towards his past experiences and instead presents his boyhood ex clusively through the perspective of himself as a boy and thereby gives the reader an illusion of the contem poraneity between the moment of narrating and the moment of experiencing. For instance, in the initial paragraph of "The Sisters," the past develops as if it were the present, by using the repeated word "Now" with the past tense for designating the particular time in the past instead of indicating the present moment of narrating: "He had often said to me: I am not long for this world, and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly myself the world paralysis . . . But now it soun ded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be 276 nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work" ("The Sisters" 9). One the other hand, Joyce's inclination towards the dramatic form and the impersonality of the artist are rather Maupassantian than Flaubertian. Whereas Flauber- tian impersonal narrator almost entirely deprives his characters of their living speech and substitutes the indirect discourse (the free indirect speech) for their utterances, Joyce's impersonal narrator gives his charac ters the opportunity of speaking in their own voices and introduces many dramatic dialogues into the story. In particular, such stories as "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" is mainly composed of the trivial dialogues between the characters and achieves the narrator's impersonality and the dramatic effect of the story through the repro duction of the character's living speech. The drama tization of almost the entire narrative by the repro duction of dialogues is closer to the Maupassantian method than to the Flaubertian. For Flaubert's Trois contes almost completely excludes substantial dialogues (though "Herodias" contains many utterances of the chara cters, most important utterances are Iakonnan's maledic tory monologues; other characters' speech in the banquet form cacophonies instead of dialogues). However, on the whole, the mood of Joyce's stories is very similar to 277 that of Flaubert's in that in Dubliners most individuals are solitary figures who are incapable of sharing properly their experiences and emotions with others and tormented by their feeling of alienation and loneliness, regardless of their act of communication: for example, the boy-hero "I" in "The Sisters" and "The Araby," Eveline in "Eveline," Little Chandler in "A Little Cloud," Farrington in "Counterparts," James Duffy and Mrs. Sinico in "A Painful Case," and Gabriel Conroy in "The Dead." This can be interpreted as a symptom of the modern short story of this century that has gradually removed itself from the tradition of storytelling and transformed from a public art into a private art. Joyce's "The Dead" and Maupassant's "Mademoiselle Perle" are two fine examples of the evolution of modern narrative technique— the nineteenth century short story's resistance to the decline of storytelling tradition and the twentieth century short story's process of removing itself from that tradition. The comparison between "Mademoiselle perle" and "The Dead" is not only based upon the technical differences between Maupassant and Joyce, but also upon the striking thematic resemblances between these two stories.26 Though many Joycean critics, such as Magalaner and Kain, and Gorman, tend to emphasize the contrast between Joyce and Maupassant, 278 "Mademoiselle Perle" and "The Dead" have many things in common, even to the extent of making us think of a pos sible connection between the creation of "The Dead" and Joyce 1s devouring of several volumes of Maupassant's stories.27 To sum up the common aspects between the two stories: the feast of Epiphany as a temporal and spatial setting; the powerful, symbolic imagery of snow; the manifestation of the before unapprehended female beauty; the motif of death; the images of the characters as an living dead or a stranger; the revelation of the hidden truth of love; the dominance of religious allusions; and a succession of epiphanic moments. However, their technical approaches to the similar subject matter are quite different: Maupassant's method of storytelling can be clearly linked to the tradition of the tale, whereas Joyce's telling is almost alien to the tradition of the tale before Flaubert. Maupassant's frame story "Mademoiselle Perle" has two major narrators: Gaston, the first person (extra- diegetic) narrator who tells the reader of the pathetic love story of M. Chantal and Mile. Perle; M. Chantal, the intradiegetic narrator who recollects the life of Mile Perle, at Gaston's personal request. Both the frame narrative told by Gaston and the framed told by M. Chan tal are the descriptions of the two different feasts of 279 Epiphany (the interval between them is forty one years). "Mademoiselle Perle" consists of four narrative sections: in spite of the equality in length between the frame and the framed, the frame narrative is divided into three sections (one of three is the closing frame), whereas the framed has just one section. In the first framing section, Gaston informs the reader of the general backgrounds of the story: his customary Twelfth Night visit to the house of the Chantals (the family of his father's most intimate friend), their strange lifestyle which seems to be alienated from the real world, and the personality of M. Chantal. Gaston describes the Chan tals as if they were the people who belong to the fairy land rather than the real world Paris: "IIs possedent, aupres de 1'Observatoire, une maison dans un petit jar- din. IIs sont chez eux, la, comme en province. De Paris, du vrai Paris, ils ne connaissent rien, ils ne soupgonnent rien; ils sont si loin! si loin! Parfois, cependant, ils y font un voyage, un long voyage. Mme Chantal va aux grandes provisions, comme on dit dans la famille. Voici comment on va aux grandes provisions" (794-5). The rhythmical repetition of the same word and the use of such expressions as "maison dans un petit jardin," "ils ne connaissnet rien, ils ne soupgonnent rien," "si loin!" "long voyage," and "provisions" are the 280 almost perfect simulation of the storytelling of the fairy tale which is quite remote from the realistic impersonal narration. The location of their house near the observatory, their living at the nearest place to the sky and the stars, symbolizes the unearthly serenity and purity of the life of the Chantals which seem to be alienated from the real world. The central figure of such a fairyland-like world is M. Chantal: Quant au pdre, c'est un charmant homme, tres ins- truit, tres ouvert, tres cordial, mais qui aime avant tout le repos, le calme, la tranquilite, et qui a fortement contribue a momifier ainsi sa famille pour vivre £ son ore, dans un staanante immobilite. II lit beaucoup, cause volontiers, et s'attendrit facilement. L 1 absence de contacts, de coudoiements et de heurts a rendu tres sensible et delicat son epiderme, son epiderme moral. La moindre chose l'emeut. l'aqite et le fait souffrir. (795; emphasis added). Gaston's portrait of M. Chantal is very connotative, psychological, subjective, and rhythmical (because of the constant ternary structuring of phrases and sentence). M. Chantal1s immobility and tranquility, and his image as a living dead are very significant because it can be closely connected with several actions in the closing frame, for example, Gaston's tenacious desire to unveil the secret of M. Chantal, and M. Chantal's sudden emo tional collapse. In effect, the opening frame is an explanation of M. Chantal's life as a living dead and the closing frame is an account of how Gaston, the only 281 outsider of the feast, resurrected M. Chantal from his state of spiritual paralysis, as Jesus Christ saved Lazarus from death.28 On the other hand, the framing situation in the second section parallels and mirrors the framed situation in the third section. In the frame, Gaston tells the reader of his special experience that he had during the Twelfth Night dinner in the given year; in the framed narrative, M. Chantal recollects another special feast of Epiphany he had forty-one years ago. Between these two dinners of Twelfth Night, there exist two significant parallels: first, the revelation of Mile. Perle's beauty to Gaston in the frame parallels with the sudden manifes tation of the infant Mile. Perle to M. Chantal in the framed; second, in both feast, Mile. Perle was coinciden tally chosen as the queen of Epiphany by Gaston in the frame and by M. Chantal in the framed. The feast of Epiphany and the revelation of Mile. Perle's beauty or existence to Gaston and M. Chantal can be closely as sociated with the Biblical episode of the revelation or epiphany of Christ's divinity to the Magi on Twelfth Night. As the infant Christ manifested himself to the Magi, Mile. Perle reveals her hidden self to Gaston and M. Chantal; and as the Magi offered their Messiah a gift of adoration, Gaston and M. Chantal give their queen a 282 tiny symbolic doll of the feast of Epiphany. Maupas sant's presentation of the revelations or epiphanies deserves a close examination because of the dynamic interaction between the frame and the framed and because of its correspondence to Joyce's theory of epiphany and its affinity with the epiphanies in "The Dead." The revelation of Mile. Perle's beauty to Gaston almost completely corresponds to Joyce's theory of epi phany. Gaston who found a tiny symbolic doll in his piece of the Twelfth Night cake became the king of the feast, and chose Mile. Perle as his queen, for con venience's sake. Proclaimed by Gaston as the queen of Epiphany, Mile. Perle was embarrassed because of his unexpected decision and stammered out a negative answer: "Quant it elle, la pauvre vieille fille, elle avait perdu toute contenance; elle tremblait, effaree, balbutiait: "Mais non . . . mais non . . . mais non . . . pas moi . . . je vous en prie . . . pas moi . . . je vous en prie ..." (797). From these trivial disconnected words, Gaston receives "an impression keen enough to afflict his sensitiveness," a prerequisite for Joycean » 29 • Epiphany and comes to see Mile. Perle m a new perspec tive: "Alors, pour la premiere fois de ma vie, je re- gardai Mile. Perle, et je me demandai ce qu'elle etait." Gaston's sudden recognition of the before unapprehended 283 beauty of Mile. Perle is metaphorically compared to the mind of the person who suddenly realizes the admirable exquisiteness of the old tapestried armchair (he has been sitting since his childhood) because of a ray of sunlight falling over the seat.30 In this manner, Gaston suddenly recognizes her hidden maidenly qualities such as beauty, grace, innocence, modesty, and sorrow, behind her exter nal appearances which are awkwardly and self-effacingly attired.31 The sudden recognition of the beauty of the woman he had known since his childhood provokes Gaston's intense curiosity about her life and invites another storytelling. The main body of M. Chantal's tale is an account of how Mile. Perle became a member of the family Chantals on the day of Epiphany, when she was about six weeks old. The framed story is presented through the point of view of M. Chantal at the age of fifteen. During their Twelfth Night dinner, they heard a dog howling out in the fields and the garden bell ringing. The persistent howling out of the dog and the repeated ringing of the bell in the snowy night terrified everybody in the feast. When a servant and M. Chantal's uncle went outside twice to find out the person who rang the bell, they could not see any body except the dog constantly howling outside. However, the bell rang again and all the men at the 284 feast, including the boy M. Chantal, went outside to find out the truth of the strange happening. The heavy snow fall obstructed their view, blocked their way to the dog, and made their expedition extremely difficult and fear ful: "on apercevait a peine, a travers le rideau gris des flocons menus et presses, les arbustes plus legers, tout pales dans 1'ombre. Elle tombait si epaisse, la neige, qu'on y voyait tout juste d. dix pas . . . on ne voyait qu'un voile de neige sans fin, en haut, en bas, en face . . . partout" (800-801). Finally, they succeeded in coming close to the strange dog in spite of the heavy snow and their fear, they surprisingly found beside the dog a sleeping baby girl abandoned by somebody in a stroller, with ten thousand francs in gold. M. Chantal, who was the king of that feast, chose the baby Mile. Perle for queen. In contrast to the detailed account of the Twelfth Night, M. Chantal1s recollection of Mile. Perle's life becomes an rather elliptic summary of how she has grown as an adorable maiden so angelic and grace ful as to be called "Mile. Perle." Maupassant's genuine features as storyteller can be found in the closing frame, the fourth narrative section. In Maupassant's act of storytelling, there still exists a sense of community and a dynamic interaction between the teller and the listener, like Balzac's storytelling. 285 About Balzac’s storytelling, Peter Brooks states that "Fictions count; they act on life, they change it . . . there is in Balzac's tale-telling a consciousness of action on listener, of a life affected" (Melodramatic Imagination 151). As in Balzac's storytelling, the dynamic interaction between the teller and the listener sometimes goes beyond the boundary of the narrative and becomes powerful enough to affect the life of teller or listener, or both. As Hermann's storytelling severely affect the life of their listeners (the "I" narrator and Frederic Taillefer) in Balzac's "L'auberge rouge," M. Chantal's telling of Mile. Perle's life creates an im mediate impact on his listener Gaston and on his own life. The dynamic interaction between teller and lis tener results in a succession of epiphanies. The first epiphany in the closing frame occurs in the mind of the listener Gaston. Through M. Chantal's vivid, poetic, and elaborate account of the delightful revelation of the infant Mile. Perle to the Chantals, his consequent lapse into the silence of reminiscence, and his elliptic re marks on the perfect beauty and charm of Mile. Perle at the age of eighteen, his interlocutor Gaston comes to read the teller's mind and penetrate into "dans un de ces humbles et cruels drames des coeurs honn^tes, des coeurs droits, des coeurs sans reproches, dans un de ces drames 286 inavoues, inexplore, que personne n'a connu, pas m§me ceux qui en sont les muettes et resignees victims1 1 (804) . The second epiphany occurs in the mind of the teller M= Chantal. Gaston's recognition of M. Chantal's blindness to his deeply buried love for Mile. Perle creates in his mind an intense desire to agitate or afflict M. Chantal's sensitiveness so as to realize his blindness to his own mind, and to resurrect him from his spiritual paralysis or immobility. The final epiphany takes place in the mind of Mile. Perle. By revealing her the truth of M. Chantal's pathetic, hidden love, Gaston attempts to penetrate into her mind, too. This sudden revelation severely afflicts her sensitiveness and leads her into collapse. Thus, in "Mademoiselle Perle," the act of storytelling helps the characters to escape from their own blindness and to rediscover their own hidden self and the hidden nature of the other, in a different light. In a sense, the temporary blindness due to the heavy snow fall and the unexpected revelation of the delightful truth in the framed tale can be interpreted as an sym bolic embodiment of such a process. In this respect, Gaston, the persona of Maupassant, is a storyteller, a "man who has counsel for his readers" or has "wisdom" for others, to use Benjamin's expression (8 6-87). Gaston, who has counsel for others, in his turn 287 seeks another counsel for himself. He asks himself and his reader whether what he has done for M. Chantal and Mile. Perle was right or wrong: "Je me demandais: 1 Ai-je eu tort? Ai-ju eu raison?' Ils avaient cela dans l'ame comme on garde du plomb dans une plaie fermee. Maintenant ne seront-ils pas plus heureux? II etait trop tard pour que recommengSt leur torture et assez tot pour qu'ils s'en souvinssent avec attendrissement" (806). Thus, Maupassant's counsel in "Mademoiselle Perle" is very close to the traditional form of the counsel described by Benjamin: it is "less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding" (86). The sense of community and communicability between teller and listener which can be found in the frame stories of Balzac and Maupassant is almost absent in Joyce's stories. "The Dead" appears to be very faithful to Flaubertian principle of impersonality described through Stephen's mouth: "The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indif ferent, paring his fingernails" (215). Joyce erases all direct authorial (or narratorial) addresses to the reader and gets rid of all commentary in the author's (or the narrator's) own name. Accordingly, such writers as 288 Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate argue that "In fact, from the beginning to the end of the story we are never told anything; we are shown everything . . . All this we see dramatized; it is all made active. Nothing is given us from the externally omniscient point of view."32 The image of the silent artist who remains "refined out of existence" is closer to the novelist, "the solitary in dividual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is him self uncounseled, and cannot counsel others" than to the storyteller, "a man who has counsel for his readers," to borrow Benjamin's terms (87). The narrators in "L'au- berge rouge" and "Mademoiselle Perle" have some counsel and wisdom for his readers and in turn they appear to need the reader's response and counsel about unsolved moral problems. In Joyce's fictional world, such a dynamic interaction between teller and listener is vani shing, along with the diminishing existence of the teller or the artist. Instead, the interplay between the nar rator and the reader develops in a somewhat regressive manner: since the narrator hardly speaks to the reader in his own personality, the reader's effort to share or understand the teller's views and feelings of events as well as of characters becomes merely an unilateral act of speculation rather than an dynamic act of communication. Moreover, Joycean impersonal narration appears to sub stitute a "secret communion of the author and reader behind the narrator's back," to borrow Wayne Booth's expression, for the tangible companionship between the teller and the listener found in the traditional story telling context (Rhetoric 300); and, ironically enough, a modern sense of community between the author, the reader, and the character can be said to derive mostly from their kinship as a solitary individual who is incapable of sharing their experiences and feelings with others. Gabriel Conroy is very typical of such solitary individuals. Gabriel's feelings of alienation and lone liness within his own society and his ineffectuality of conveying his thoughts and feelings to others, even to his wife, can be perceived as more intense than those of Flaubertian characters. In spite of his act of com munication and his intellectual ability, his apparent failure to exchange experiences are more hopeless than the loneliness of Julien or Felicite. Unlike Julien and Felicite, Gabriel is neither uncommunicative nor reti cent. On the contrary, he is not only a talented writer who writes a "literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express" but also an eloquent speaker who used to make a speech regularly at the annual feast of Epiphany.33 Nevertheless, he is incompetent in trans- 290 mitting his feelings and thoughts to others. This is unmistakably present in the story from the outset. Even from his entrance to the house, he failed in having a friendly conversation with the caretaker's daughter Lily. When he says to her that "I suppose we'll be going to your wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?" her reply to this greeting is that "The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you" (178). This "sudden and bitter retort" makes him discom posed, self-conscious about speaking to the audience intellectually inferior to himself, and afraid of being a failure as a speaker: "He would only make himself ridi culous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure" (179). Gabriel's incom- municability and his feeling of alienation become worse when conversing with Molly Ivors, one of his colleagues, who devotes herself to the ideals of Irish nationalism and the Gaelic League. Gabriel, branded as "West Briton" by Molly Ivors after their unpleasant conversation, dreams of his escape from his own society: "How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to walk out 291 alone, first along by the river and then through the park! The snow would be lying on the branches of the trees and forming a bright cap on the top of the Wel lington Monument. How much more pleasant it would be there than at the supper-tablei" (192). His incom- municability and his keen awareness of human loneliness ' culminate in his unsuccessful conversation with his wife in the last part of the story. Without perceiving Gab riel's impetuous desire and expectations and the subtle and ironic tones of his questions about her romance with Michael Furey, Gretta's sentimental and somewhat self- complacent recollection of her past romance intensifies Gabriel's feelings of loneliness and despair: "He felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evoca tion of this figure [Michael Furey] from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another" (219). The loss of communicability or sense of community between the self and the other which can be perceived through Gabriel's relationships with others seems to be counterbalanced by a secret communion between the implied author (or narrator), the character, and the reader, which develops in a regressive manner: the subtle com- 292 bination between the narrator's voice and Gabriel's inner consciousness implicitly invites the reader to share the author's (or the narrator's) sympathetic feelings towards Gabriel, beneath his self-effacing mask. This is evident in Joyce's handling of the epiphanic moments: He stood still in the gloom of the hall, trying to catch the air that the voice was singing and gazing up at his wife. There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinc tively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead. (219-220). These two epiphanic moments which occur in Gabriel's mind are presented exclusively through Gabriel's perspective and mind. The sudden revelation of Gretta's hidden beauty to Gabriel and his bitter self-awareness of his own stupidity and vanity are presented as if the agent of narrative voice were Gabriel rather than the impersonal narrator. The subtle combination between the narrator's voice and Gabriel's perspective (or mind) makes the reader identify or confuse between the narrator and the 293 focal character to the extent that such a critic as Wayne Booth considers Gabriel as one^of "the most important unacknowledged narrators in modern fiction" (Rhetoric 153),34 The identification of the narrator with Gabriel in narrative perspectives subtly invites the reader to share Gabriel's enchantment as well as his feelings of frustration and loneliness, and thereby provokes the reader's compassion for Gabriel, in spite of the prin ciple of impersonality.35 The ironic gap between the narrator's perspective and Gabriel's which can be seen in the earlier parts of the story (e.g. the descriptions of Gabriel's external appearance, his awkwardness in the relationships with others, and his banality and medio crity) gradually diminishes in the course of the story. The sympathetic identification of the narrator with Gabriel culminates in the closure of the story which presents Gabriel's melancholic reflection upon life and death before the snow scenery. As Lionel Trilling points out, "As the story approaches its conclusion, it becomes impossible for us to know whose language we are hearing, Conroy's or the author's, or to whose tone of desperate sorrow we are responding" (158-9),36 This secret com munion between the narrator (or the author), the focal character, and the reader develops in an unilateral, passive, and regressive manner, unlike the dynamic inter- ____________________________________________________________________________ 294 action between the teller and the listener within the storytelling context; and it seems to have gradually replaced the vanishing sense of companionship between the teller and the listener(s) which can be found in the tradition of storytelling. Hvon Chin'gon's Techniques of Modernity and Tradition: Restoring A Lost Sense of Community Hyon Chin'gon's narrative techniques manifest his experimental spirit and versatility. His approximately twenty-five stories— the exact number of his stories is still uncertain— are constructed by various kinds of narrative modes and voices, like the realistic stories of Maupassant and his contemporary Chinese writer Lu Xun. For example, his first-person narration can be divided into the three categories: (1) the autobiographical nar rator tells his own story (e.g. "The Indigent Wife," "The Degenerate,"), as in Japanese Watakushi shosetsu (the "I novel); (2) the autobiographical narrator tells the story into which he has participated as an observer or a lis tener (e.g. "The Director of the Private Mental Hospi tal," "My Grandmother's Death,"); (3) the non-autobiogra- phical, dramatized narrator (the female narrator-heroine) tells her own story (e.g. "My Beloved's Glaring Eyes). Likewise, his third-person narration is diverse, accord- 295 ing to the degree of impersonality and the role of the focal character: (1) the omniscient but almost invisible narrator (or the impersonal narrator) tells the focal character's stories through the perspectives of the hero or the heroine (e.g. "The Society making one drink," "Fire," "Violation,"); (2) the omniscient but visible narrator tells the story of the main characters, mostly through the perspective of the minor character (e.g. "Chastity and the Price of Medicine"); (3) the omniscient narrator (or storyteller) tells the story of the prota gonist, without borrowing the perspectives of the focal character (e.g. "The Blind," "B Matron and the Love Letter"). Thus, in his stories, Hyon Chin'gon seems to have tried to experiment with new narrative techniques, without confining himself exclusively to the Flaubertian realistic principle of impersonality. Because of such diversity of his narrative methods and the simultaneous existence of traditional and modern techniques in his stories, Hyon Chin'gon can be considered as a writer who is much closer to Maupassant than to Flaubert, though a number of the stories of Maupassant and Hyon Chin'gon can be closely associated with Flaubertian principles of impersonality and impassibility. In the East-West perspective, the peculiarity of Hyon Chin'gon's narrative technique consists in the fact 296 that his interest in the rhetoric of traditional story telling came after his mastery of impersonal narration in the evolution of his narrative modes. The evolution of his narrative techniques can be divided into the three stages: first, the lyrical stage, second, the dramatic stage, and last the epical stage, to borrow Joyce's classification of artistic forms expressed through the mouth of Stephen Dedalus. This change deviates from Joyce's (or Stephen's) view of artistic evolution as progressing from the lyrical form through the epical to the dramatic fA Portrait of the Artist 214). At the earlier stage of his literary life, Hyon Chin'gon was chiefly concerned with his own personal problems. His trilogy titled "The Degenerate" (The Indigent Wife," "The society Making one drink," and "The Degenerate) is auto biographical and full of self-criticism or self-pity towards his own ineffectuality, frustration, and hypo crisy as an intellectual: the images of the wife and the husband are almost identical with those of Hyon Chin'gdn and his wife, and the first-person narrator's extra marital affair with a Kisaeng (a Korean courtesan) in "The Degenerate" was in effect taken from his real ex periences. These stories are lyrical in the sense that "the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself," to borrow Joyce's (or Stephen's) definition. j I ____________________________________________________________________________ i 297 After this period, His main concern as a realist is the problems of others rather than those of Hyon Chin'gon himself: his stories comes close to the dramatic form, "the form wherein he [the artist] presents his image in immediate relation to others" (A Portrait of the Artist 214). For example, in such stories as "Fire," "A Lucky Day," and "My Beloved's Glaring Eyes," it can be said that the personality of the artist "finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalise itself," to use Joyce's expression (215): the disembodied, self-effacing artist unfolds the story mainly through the perspectives of the character rather than through the artist himself. The technique of impersonalization or dramatization culminates in "My Beloved's Glaring Eyes" which takes the t form of a long monologue by a retired courtesan recol lecting her cowardice and betrayal before an attempted double suicide with her lover, and the furious anger and death agony of the betrayed. This impersonal stage is followed by the epical stage in which the artist presents his image "in mediate relation to himself and to others" (A Portrait of the Artist 214). In such stories as "The Blind" and "Chastity and the Price of Medicine," the narrator's image (or the artist's image) is neither personal nor impersonal: the artist's presence (or the presence of the omniscient narrator) is visible because 298 of his commentary on the event and of his direct ad dresses to the reader. However, this image of the artist is different from his image at the first stage in that it conjures up the collective, public image of the tradi tional storyteller instead of the personal, autobio graphical image of Hyon Chin'gon himself. This peculiar technical evolution which seems to deviate from the general evolution of narrative technique reveals the complexity of Hyon Chin'gon social conscious ness as an intellectual under the Japanese colonialism and the influences of Western culture. The development of his stories shows a change in the relationships bet ween the narrator, the characters, and the reader. Most of his characters can be divided into two groups: the victim and the victimizer or the oppressed and the op pressor.37 The role of the narrator between these two groups is variable. In his earlier stories, the first- person narrator stands between the victim and the vic timizer. Though he sympathizes with the female character victimized by the phallocentric values and Confucian ideas of the traditional society, the narrator appears to be incapable of defying such traditional values and order, and even an accomplice of such victimization. In "The Sacrificial Flower," the narrator-observer feels sympathy and pity for his elder sister whose innocent 299 love ends with her tragic death because of the norms of traditional society and because of the cowardice or irresolution of the male character, but he remains as an mere outsider or passive witness of that tragedy. In "The Degenerate" and "The Indigent Wife," the narrator appears as a victim of his time and society and at the same time as a victimizer of his wife. In "The Indigent Wife," the narrator-husband's social incompetence and irresponsibility, in spite of his high education, is the main cause for her miserable living condition. Simi larly, in "The Degenerate" the narrator victimizes his wife through an extramarital affair with a Kisaeng, by taking advantage of the patriarchal values of his tradi tional society, and even transmits to his wife the vene real disease taken from his mistress. However, the tone of the narrator as a victimizer is filled with compassion and sympathy for his wife's suffering, but with cynicism and remorse for his debauchery and selfishness. The narrator struggles to bridge the intellectual and com municative gap between himself as a highly educated modern man and his traditional wife, by appreciating her such traditional virtues as devotion, self-sacrifice, and humility and by realizing his social failure and intel lectual shallowness. In spite of such an effort, in the 300 earlier period, the communicative gap between the nar- rator-hero and the wife remains unsolved or suspended. "The Society Making One Drink" (Sul Kwonhanu Sahoe) is a good example of such incommunicability between the couple. Of Hyon Chin'gon's trilogy collected in Degenerate. "The Society Making one Drink" is the only story told in the third person. Accordingly, in this story, the dual relationship between the husband-narrator and the wife turns into a triangular relationship between the husband, the wife, and the impersonal narrator (to some extent, it can be said that the husband, the sur rogate or persona of the author, splits into the hero and the narrator). The marital problems between the modern husband and the traditional wife are almost entirely presented through the naive perspective of the wife, whereas "The Indigent Wife" and "The Degenerate" are constructed through the intellectual husband's voice and perspective. The extreme naivety of the heroine's pers pective and the impersonality of the authorial figure create an ironic gap between the husband's image in the limited mind of the focal character and the one in the mind of the competent reader. For example, the heroine's intellectuality is so limited that she cannot share her husband's experiences nor understand his feelings of despair and failure which drives him to take to drink: 301 For the wife, his words were too difficult. She became speechless. She felt as if there were some invisible wall between herself and her husband. Whenever he spoke long, the wife used to have had such a bitter experience. This was not the first time. At last, the husband, in blank dismay, laughed at her. "You don't understand me, again. It's not your fault. I was wrong to ask you such a question . . . It is neither my anger nor a swell lady that invites me to take to drink. It is the so-called society who invites me to take to drink. It is this Korean society. Can you understand me? What good fortune it is to be born in Korea! Were I born in else where, who would offer me a drink . . . What is the "Society"? The wife could not grasp it again. Anyway, it must be the name of a restaurant which exists only in Korea but nowhere else. "Even if it is in Korea, everything will be fine if you don't go there." (68) This extreme naivety of the focal character, her failure in grasping the ironic tone of his language, and the incommunicability of the couple, implicitly invite the reader to sympathize with the heroine and the husband as well. The husband's disillusionment with Korean Society and his contemporary intellectuals, his excessive drink ing habit as a way of escape from social reality, and the frustration of marital incommunicability, and the angelic naivety of his traditional wife, are the autobiographical themes that Hyon Chin'gon repeatedly dealt with in his earlier work. The identification of the impersonal narrator with the heroine in point of view instead of the husband makes the reader feel the author's effort to understand his wife's thoughts and feelings from her standpoint and to take an objective view of himself. 302 This presentation of the event from the inferior focal character and his desire to transcend his self- centered view of life are more fully materialized in his period of objective realism. "Fire” and "A Lucky Day" are good examples of impersonal narration with the in ferior focal character. The personal, autobiographical features of the author are almost completely absent in these works. Here, the role of the author as an intellec tual is not to convey to the reader his own thoughts and feelings but to transmit the thoughts and feelings of inferior people who are incapable of communicating with others or expressing their innermost feelings properly. Hyon Chin'gon's despair of the incommunicability between the self and the other turns into a desire to penetrate into the mind of others and to have a secret communion with them. Kim Chom-ji felt his legs strangely light when he got the student on board. He went at a run; it was almost as if he were flying. And the wheels were turning so fast, like skates sliding on the ice. Actually the rain falling on the frozen ground had made it slippery. The driver's legs soon grew heavy. For he was coming near his own house. Renewed anxiety weighed on his chest. "Please don't go to work to-day! I feel such pain!" Her whimpering cry was ringing in his ears. And the deep-sunken eyes of the sick woman seemed to glare at him as if in reproach. He could almost hear the wailing of the child. And there seemed to be a gasping sound, the struggle to draw breath. "What's the matter, we'll miss the train." The impatient cry of the passenger barely got through to him. (242; translation modified) 303 This passage shows the bitter consciousness of the rick shaw man whose extreme poverty could not afford the humble wish of his dying wife. The complex mental pro cesses of the hero— his desire to take advantage of his rare lucky day and to buy his ailing wife a Sollnat1anq. his apprehension about the impending death of his wife, and his unconscious wish to escape from it— are presented mainly through his own point of view, without any visible authorial commentary on the character's consciousness. In effect, the author (or the impersonal narrator) does not tell directly the reader of such important features as the real motives for the hero's delay in going home, his apprehension about the future, and his love for the ailing wife: instead, he simply shows the way the rick shaw man thinks, acts, and feels and thereby leads the reader to empathize with his dilemma and grasp his hidden motives and innermost feelings beneath his coarse speech and action. After his mastery of impersonal narration, Hyon Chin'gdn seems to have taken an great interest in the rhetoric of traditional storytelling, particularly since 192 6. In my view, this inclination towards traditional techniques results from his conflicts between tradition and modernity, between Korean and Western cultures. In his essay "Understanding Korean Soul and the Modern 304 spirit" (192 6), Hyon Chin'gon emphasizes that "Nothing can exist without space and time . . . Since our litera ture is Korean, it should set foot firmly on Korean soil. Since our literature is modern, it should breathe deeply the Modern spirit."38 Thus, in this period, his main concern as a writer seems to have consisted in synthesiz ing the legacy of Korean tradition with modern ideas and methods borrowed from the West. This is evident in such stories as "The Blind" "The Director of the Private Mental Hospital," "The Old Home," and "Chastity and the Price of Medicine." In "The Blind," the author does not conceal his presence and instead directly addresses to the reader without restrains. The image of the author-narrator is close to the traditional storyteller. For example, in the beginning, he tells the reader: "If you have a good memory, you cannot fail to remember that incident of last summer at the night market, a policeman's murder by as sault of a bamboo blind peddler . . . But, if you know about the truth of that incident, you could not com pletely detest this extremely malicious criminal. Some sentimental readers could shed a teardrop generously. For he is also a pathetic victim of unrequited love" (186). This personal and ironic tone of the omniscient narrator (or authorial figure) in the preamble is unmis 305 takably present throughout the story: the narrator ex plicitly addresses the protagonist as "our miserable hero" and constantly comments on the actions and thoughts of the characters. By doing so, the omniscient narrator simulates the traditional storytelling context between the teller and the audience, and attempts to restore a dynamic interaction or a sense of companionship between the teller and the audience, rather than a secret com munion between the invisible narrator and the solitary reader which develops in a repressed manner. Hyon Chin'gon's penchant for the traditional rhe toric of storytelling can be also seen in his use of framing method in such stories as "The Old Home" and "The Director of the Private Mental Hospital." According to Lee Jae-Son, the Korean frame stories of 1920s is a new technique which resulted from "the conflicts and harmony between native and receptive elements."39 In Korea, the method of framing has been persistently used in the traditional tales ranging from Kim Sisup's Kumo shinhwa through Pak Chiwon1s Okkap vahwa to An Kukson's Konq- chinhoe. However, there are some differences between these traditional frame stories and such modern frame stories as Kim Tongin's "Paettaragi" and Yom Sangsup1s "The Blue Frog in the Specimen Room." Whereas modern frame stories show the individual frame told by the 306 first-person narrator-witness, most traditional Korean frame stories have the cyclical frame like Araban Nights. Decameron. and "Autre etude de femme," and the story teller in the introductory frame tends to be an omnis cient narrator speaking mostly in the third-person.40 The presentation of the frame story through the point of view of the first-person narrator-observer can be con sidered as influenced by Western Literature, particularly by Maupassant's stories in which the primary narrator reveals himself as a personal, empirical individual rather than an anonymous omniscient narrator. Like the frame stories of Kim Tongin and Yom Sang- sup, Hyon Chin'gon's frame and semi-frame stories employ the point of view of the first-person narrator dramatized in the story as a minor character. In "The Old Home" and "The Director of the Private Mental Hospital," the func tion of the first-person narrator has much bearing on the role of the traditional storyteller: the main function of the narrator is to transmit or retell the story of others to another person, though he combines the tales told by others with his direct experiences as a witness. In "The Director of the private Mental Hospital" (which can be considered as a semi-frame story), the narrator tells the pathetic life of his old friend who killed an insane man whom he has taken care of as a guard. The account of 307 this tragic murder is composed of several pieces of narrative information told by different characters such as the narrator-observer, the hero, his another friend. Here, the function of the narrator is to collect all the narrative fragments that he has learned directly or indirectly and to make a mosaic yet comprehensive picture out of these pieces. On the other hand, "The Old Home" has a more sub stantial frame structure which shows a dynamic inter action between the extradiegetic narrator and the intra- diegetic narrator, like Maupassant's "Mademoiselle Perle" or Balzac's "L'auberge rouge." In this story, the act of storytelling is powerful enough to bridge a social and intellectual gap between the teller and the listener and restore a certain sense of community between them. As we have examined in chapter four, in the beginning, the first-person narrator is extremely antipathetic to the hero because of his ludicrous external appearance and linguistic talent which show a coarse blend of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese styles. However, the narrator's first impression of the hero is altered by the act of storytelling or listening. The hero (as intradiegetic narrator) tells the narrator of his miserable vagabond life wandering from Korea through China to Japan and the pathetic life of a Korean woman who grew up with the hero 308 in the same village and was once betrothed to him but sold by her father to a bordel. The narrator's prejudice against the hero and the intellectual and social gap between them are eliminated by the process of telling and listening: instead, a new sense of community is con stituted between them. In the end, the first-person narrator finds through his face the image of Korea under the dark period of Japanese colonialism: "I thought I saw clearly the dismal and tragic face of Korea in his tears" (200). "Chastity and The Price of Medicine" published three years later than The Face of Korea is another good ex ample of the synthesis of tradition and modernity, and of native and receptive elements. On the one hand, the voice of the narrator in the preamble and his tone is similar to that of the storyteller in the tale of tradi tion: Choe Chubu is such a. celebrated doctor that a tiny village like D can never thank him enough for his residing at it. It was a wonder that he resus citated the grand daughter-in-law of Kim Ch'amp'an, by only three packages of prepared herbs, who had been nearly dying of serious heartburn after giving birth to her child, and it was also a miracle to talk about that . . . he used to be called away from this village to that village such as to have no time to put his hips down on the floor and even it was a run-of-the mill occurrence for him to make a visit as far as Seoul. No sooner had he touched patients than he could heal their illness effectively as if he were accompanied by a ghost, no matter what it was, child sickness, adult sickness, internal sick ness, skin disease, and so on . . . But only for youthful and comely female patients, his olden 309 kindness has not yet perished . . . Nowadays, there is nobody who dares to speak ill of him in public because, for this D village as small as a cat's face, he is not only an eminent doctor, but also a respectable landowner and wealthy man. (2 02-2 03). This farcical and hyperbolic description of Ch'oe Chubu as a celebrated doctor, a philanderer, and a man of importance in D village, full of colloquial and idiomatic expressions, is presented through the collective voice of the traditional storyteller, rather than through the individual voice of the modern narrator. Hence, such a critic as Ch'oe Ch'angrok observes that this story can be associated with the traditional tales of Pak Chiwon / 4 (Yonam), for example, Yancban-chon or Hoiil. The col loquial narrative tone's sarcasm towards Ch'oe Chubu and its familiarity towards the reader seem to establish an ironic distance between the narrator and the character on the one hand and a certain companionship between the narrator and the reader on the other. This initial establishment of an ironic and emotional gap between the narrator and the character prevents the reader from confusing the view of the narrator with that of the character, in the subsequent development of the event and makes the reader his accomplice in criticizing the chara cter's immorality and hypocrisy. However, these traditional features of narration in the preamble are not the dominant mode of the entire 310 story. The main body of the story that follows this preamble reveals the influences of Flaubertian impersonal narration on Hyon Chin'gon. The presence of the omnis-*- cient narrator is almost invisible and the events are presented mostly through the perspective and inner speech of Ch'oe Chubu as a focal character. There is a certain change of the narrative perspective from non-focalization (or zero-focalization) to internal focalization, to borrow Genette's terms, between the preamble about the reputation of Ch'oe Chubu and the main body concerning his strange and painful experience of being imprisoned by a poor woman eager to cure her ailing husband. Though there is no change of the agent of narrating and no visible frame distinguishing between the opening narra tive and the central narrative, such a change of narra tive perspective seems to produce the same effect as the method of framing does. In the opening narrative, the omniscient narrator tells the reader of the features of Ch'oe Chubu as a doctor who will function as the focal character of the central narrative; in the central narra tive, Ch'oe Chubu presents the story of the poor couple from his own distorted and personal perspective and thereby creates the disparity of point of view or "narra tive irony" between himself and the narrator or the i reader. This can be clearly seen in the inner con 311 sciousness of Ch'oe Chubu shocked by the heroine's such a naivety or indiscretion as to tell her ailing husband of her extramarital affair with Ch'oe Chubu on her way home, and by her husband's extremely generous reaction to her confession as well. He could hardly believe in his ears and eyes. Noth ing in the world could be more outrageous than this. Since she had lost her chastity, she should have buried the secret deep in her mind, but she was such a slut as to tell the truth to the husband without mincing her words. And the husband, too, was such a bastard as to console that impudent wench who had spilt the beans and shamelessly brought her ac complice to their home. At last, the couple freed themselves from their embrace and the woman turned her radiant face to the doctor as if nothing had happened or as if she had done what she had to do. (210). This sarcastic and distorted perspective of the couple, along with the vulgarism of colloquial language, is the reproduction of Ch'oe Chubu's inner speech and thoughts, rather than that of the narrator or the authorial figure. This presentation of the event through the perspective of Ch'oe Chubu instead of the heroine increases the reader's compassion for the couple as victims and his antipathy against Ch'oe Chubu as a victimizer, inasmuch as the narrator informs the reader of the debauchery of Ch'oe Chubu and his hypocrisy in the preamble. The narrative irony or distance between the focal character and the narrator, and a sense of community between the narrator and the reader are the result of a synthesis of tradition 312 and modernity. This dynamic play with the disparities in point of view cannot be found in Hy6n Chin'gon's previous other stories of internal focalization, such as "Fire," "Violation," and "A Lucky Day," in which the self-effac ing narrator almost identifies himself with the focal character, emotionally and perspectively, and by doing so leads the reader to have a secret communion with the focal character, as in the stories of Flaubert and Joyce. Concluding Remarks Thus far, I have examined the variety and complexity of narrative techniques in the realistic short story from Balzac to Joyce and Hyon Chin'gon. Though the short story has been considered by many critics (particularly of the American and English tradition) as the newest fictional genre dating back to the middle of last cen tury, its evolution in narrative technique clearly re veals its indebtedness to the past. The heritage of such traditional tales as Decameron and Heotameron is evident in the archetypal features of Balzac's frame stories such as "Autre etude de femme" and "L'auberge rouge": for example, presentation of disruptive passions and desires within the ordered frame situation, the dynamic inter action and companionship between tellers and listeners, the function of storytelling as a vehicle for restoring 313 moral values and social order at stake and as a means of exorcising social threat or tension, and the simulation of oral transmission. As Peter Brooks observes, "Balzac is intuitively close to the traditional role and function of the storyteller described by Benjamin" (Melodramatic Imagination 151). The dynamic interaction between the teller and the listener and a sense of community or familiarity between them which Balzacian frame stories show seem to have noticeably diminished since Flaubert. This is evident in the stories of Flaubert and Joyce in which the narrator (or the author) remains "invisible, refined out of exis tence, indifferent, paring fingernails" and the reader seems to be not an acknowledged listener but a secret viewer who sees the world from the character's pers pective and admires the invisible god-like artist for his craftsmanship (A Portrait of the Artist 215). Here, the short story can be referred to as an individualistic art form and as a solitary stage which "inwardly, every man is conscious of occupying alone" (Bowen 158). Moreover, their protagonists— Felicity, Saint Julian, Antipas, Eveline, Gabriel, Mr Duffy— are solitary figures who cannot be understood by others and cannot exchange their experiences with others properly. 314 Nevertheless, it may be wrong if we define the short story since Flaubert as an individualistic modern art form which cut itself from the tradition of tale. In effect, since Flaubert and James Joyce are not prolific writers of short fiction, it may be difficult to say that their stories represent the major trend of the short story. As for Maupassant, his attitudes between modern ity and tradition are more complex than Flaubert and Joyce. Maupassant's stories of impersonal narration in which narrative perspective is more important than narra tive voice, can be closely connected with the stories of Flaubert and Joyce. Such stories as "La ficelle," "La parure," "La femme de Paul," "Le parapluie," and "His- toire d'une fille de ferme" are as individualistic and impersonal as those of Flaubert and Joyce: in a sense, more metallic and impassible than the latter. On the other hand, his other stories also show his nostalgia for the storytelling tradition and his admiration for Balzac as a genuine storyteller. Maupassant's frame stories which simulate the form of oral transmission and maintain the dynamic interaction between tellers and listeners are fine examples of the continuum between tradition and modernity. In a number of his stories, as I have shown in my examination of "Mademoiselle Perle," the act of storytelling is powerful enough to alter human relation 315 ships and life and enhance a mutual understanding between teller and listener (s). These features reveal the impact of Balzac or the storytelling tradition on Maupas sant. In my view, Maupassant's preservation of orality and frame structure in his stories and his exclusive use of impersonal narration in his novels, along with Bal zac's dominant use of frame structure in his stories and novellas rather than in the novels, seem to suggest that the short story is more deeply rooted in the storytelling (or oral) tradition than the novel. However, it should be also noticed that Maupassant's frame stories have developed in a more individualistic and private way than Balzacian stories. Maupassant does not employ such a cyclical frame as "Autre etude de femme" and his story teller usually speaks to an individual, such as one of his intimate friends, rather than to an audience. In this Western context, Hyon Chin'gon's stories are closer to Maupassant than any other realists. Like Mau^- passant, Hyon Chin'gon seems to have wavered between tradition and modernity, between Flaubertian impersonal narration and the traditional rhetoric of storytelling. To some extent, the peculiar evolution of his rhetoric from personal narration through impersonal to traditional narration can be considered as a manifestation of the storyteller's archetypal desire to captivate the audi- 316 ence's (or the reader's) attention and to establish a companionship between himself and the listener(s). While taking advantage of Flaubertian vivid description of things and people through the character's perspective, Hyon Chin'gon, like Maupassant, seems to have tried to restore a vanishing sense of community between the teller and listener, and the perishing power of storytelling on life and people. 317 Notes 1 However, his remarks can be interpreted that the American style short story of this century (not the short story in a broader sense which encompasses the stories and novellas of the nineteenth century) cuts itself from oral tradition, when we take into consider the fact that in Germany the term "short story" (or Kurzqeschichte) was hardly acknowledged as a literary term until around 1920 and that the short story tends to be considered as a newer type of short narrative of this century, largely indebted to American short story. Refer to E. K. Ben nett, "Novelle and Short Story," A History of the German Novelle. 241-246. 2 "O. Henry and the Theory of the Short Story," 231. 3 See "The Short Story: the Long and the Short of it," Poetics 10 (1981) 175-194. Oral style and formate are common not just in regi- nal or "folk" trends in the short story, such as the Leskovian skaz, but also at the cosmopolitan end of the scale, in the work of Poe, Woolf, Kafka, Cor- tazar and Borges, for example. They are perfectly possible in the novel too, of course, as is amply demonstrated by Conrad and Faulkner... But orality is not a conspicuous and consistent tendency in the novel as it is in the short story. The conspicuous tradition in the novel has always been toward writ ing and bookishness. As is so often observed, the novel was born affirming its own writtenness, and many of the early specimens have an explicitly written framework...In a simultaneous celebration and interrogation of literarcy and the written word, the early novel redeploys the authoritative voices of writing, of documents...The lesser authority of speech is redeployed in the "lesser" genre, sup ported by the literary antecedents of Chaucer, Boccaccio, the Arabian nights. And supported, in many cases, by living (or dying) oral narrative traditions. (189). 4 Quoted by Todorov in The Fantastic (Ithaca: Cor nell UP, 1975) 4. 318 5 "The Debunking Rhythm of The American Short Story," Short Storv Theory at a CROSSROADS edited by Lohafer and Clarey 13 0-147. 6 Conrad, Heart of Darkness 9. 7 Quoted by Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 17. 8 "Tout le monde court vers quelque but, ou trotte apres la fortune. Le temps est devenu la plus chdre denree, personne ne peut done se livrer a cette prodi- gieuse prodigalite de rentrer chez soi le lendemain pour se r^veiller tard. On ne retrouve done plus de seconde soiree que chez les femmes assez riches pour ouvrir leur maison; et depuis juillet 1830, ces femmes se comptent dans Paris" (208). 9 Peter Brooks, "Narrative Transaction and Trans ference," Reading for the Plot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984) 216-237. 10 • « "Par une convention tacite et bien observee, au souper chacun renongait a son importance. Une egalite absolue y donnait le ton. II n'y avait d'ailleurs alors personne qui ne fut tres fier d'etre lui-meme. Made moiselle Des Touches oblige ses convives a rester a table jusqu'au depart, apres avoir mainte fois remarque le changement total qui s'opere dans les esprits par le deplacement" (210). 11 See Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970) 95- 97. Barthes argues that "le recit est determine non par un desir de raconter mais par un desir d'echanger: e'est un valant-pour. un representant, une monnaie, un pesant d'or" (97). 12 From the outset, de Marsay's telling is stimu lated by the desire of the other who envies the prime minister's success, admires his exceptional talents and aptitudes as a statesman, and is eager to know the secret of his political caliber and success: "Y a-t-il eu, dans votre vie anterieure, un fait, une pensee, un desir qui vous ait appris votre vocation? . . . nous avons tous, comme Newton, notre pomme qui tombe et qui nous amene sur le terrain ou nos facultes se deploient" (211). This question implicitly invites the teller to show his audi ence whether "il se savait etre un grand politique, ou il s'etait developpe dans le feu des circonstances" (210). 319 13 This quotation is Peter Brooks’ summary of Wil liam Labov and Joshua Waletsky's study of oral narratives (Reading for the Plot 236). 14 Quoted from Flaubert’s letter to Louise Colet, written in 1852. See La correspondance de Flaubert, ed. Charles Carlut (columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968) 472. 15 Francis Steegmuller, ed. and trans., The Letters of Gustave Flaubert (1830-1857) (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980) 159. 16 The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 173. 17 This excerpt derives from the French translation of the Legenda aurea by G. Brunet (Paris: Gosslin, 1843). I cite this passage from the appendix of The Legendary Sources of Flaubert’s Saint Julien by Benjamin F. Bart and Robert Francis cook (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1977). 1 s • • • ^ Similarly, m another letter, he states that ”1’auteur, dans son oeuvre, doit etre corame Dieu dans l'univers, present partout et visible null part" (Carlut 312) . 19 See Genette, Narrative Discourse 174. 20 In Narrative Discourse. Genette distinguishes narrative speech into three kinds according to narrative distance: first, 'narratized' speech (e.g. "I informed my mother of my decision to marry Albertine"); second, ’transposed’ speech, in indirect style (e.g. "I told my mother that I absolutely had to marry Albertine"); third, 'mimetic' speech which can take the form of the reported speech (e.g. "I said to my mother: it is absolutely necessary that I marry mother") or the form of the im mediate speech (e.g. "it is absolutely necessary that I marry Albertine") (171-173). 21 See Plato's Republic (ch. 3. 392e-394d) or The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton adn Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961) 637- 639. In Republic. Plato distinguishes narration into two kinds, "pure narration" (diegesis) and "a narrative that is effected through imitation" (mimesis). In Republic III. by taking examples from the beginning chapter of Homer's Illiad, Plato defines diegesis as the narration in which "the poet himself is the speaker and does not even attempt to suggest to us that anyone but himself is speaking" and mimesis as the narration in which the poet 320 "delivers as if he were himself Chryses [the character] and tries as far as may be to make us feel that not Homer is the speaker." In the theories of narrative, the distinction between diegesis and mimesis has often con fused with the distinction between showing and telling. For instance, according to Gerald Prince's Dictionary of Narratoloav (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987), Prince identifies diegesis with the technique of telling and mimesis with technique of showing. However, as Gerard Genette points out in his Nouveau discours du recit. the equivalence for the opposition between diegesis and mimesis can not be identified with that between telling and showing: "la seule equivalence presentable de diegesis/mimesis est recit/dialogue (mode narratif/mode dramatique), ce qui interdit absolument de le traduire par raconter/montrer. car ce dernier verbe ne peut guere legitimement s'appliquer a une citation de paroles" (31). Genette1s suggestion of the equivalence for diegesis/mimesis as recit/dialogue is not completely perfect because the discouse of mimesis can be monologue instead of dialogue (e.g. the interior monologue of Molly Bloom in Ulysses) and because the dramatic mode not necessarily requires mimesis (the speech of the charac ter) as in Samuel Beckett's "Act Without Words: a Mime for One Player." In my view, the only equivalence for diegesis/mimesis is the speech of the authorial figure/ the speech of the character, as Plato initially defines. For further discussion about diegesis and mimesis. see David Lodge, "Mimesis and Diegesis in Modern Fiction," After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London: Routledge, 199 0) 2 5-44. In my view, Lodge's interpreta tion of the opposition diegesis/mimesis is most faithful to Plato's intentions. 22 This essay was first published in Le Gaulois 2 0 Jan. 1882. My quotation is taken from Chroniaues 1 (Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1980). 23 See "The Lonely Voice" 86-89. 24 Flaubert's distaste for dialogues and penchant for the indirect discourse can be easily found in his correspondances: je n'ai jamais rien ecrit de plus difficile . . . du dialogue trivial. Quelle difficulty que le dialogue, quand on veut surtout que le dialogue ait du caraterel Peindre par le dialogue et qu'il n'en soit pas moins vif, 321 precis et toujours distingue en restant meme banal, cela est monstrueux et je ne sache personne qui l1ait fait dans un livre. vous abuser parfois du dialogue, quand trois lignes de tournure indirecte pourraient remplacer toute une page de conversation. (Carlut 408-409). 25 In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," Stephen distinguishes the artistic form into the three kinds: "If you bear this in memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three forms progressing form one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form, the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to others" (214). 26 In my view, "Mademoiselle perle" is one of many stories which reveal the lyricism and sensitivity of Maupassant and prove the superficiality of such a view (dominant in English criticism) that "Maupassant was the born popular writer, battered by Flaubert into austerity. His theme were simple: lust, cruelty, money and that sort of rose-pink fancy that has such as charnel underneath. He transcribed passions in the only terms possible— dis passionate understatement" (Bowen 154). 27 See Herbert Gorman, James Jovce (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 19 39) 181. 28 In fact, the story is full of religious allusions to the episode of the resurrection of Lazarus. The triangular relationship between M. Chantal, Mme. Chantal, and Mile. Perle is close to the relationship of sibling between Lazarus, Martha, and Maria: Madame Chantal is the cousin of M. Chantal and Mile Perle is the adopted sister of M. Chantal. Mile Perle and Madame Chantal take care of household affairs together, like Maria and Martha: "Mile Perle, qui a les clefs des armoires de cuisine (car les armoires au linge sont administrees par la maltress elle-m§me), Mile Perle previent que le sucre touche a sa fin, que les conserves sont epuisees, qu'il ne reste plus grand-chose au fond du sac a cafe . . . Mme Chantal et Mile Perle font ce voyage ensemble, mystdrieusement, et reviennent a l'heure du diner, extenuees, bien qu'emues encore, et cahotees dans le coupe, dont le toit es cou- 322 vert de paquets et de sacs, comme une voiture de dem6- nagement" (795). 29 Quoted from "Epiphanies and Epicleti," Dubliners, ed. Scholes and Litz 253. 30 "J'etais habitue a la voir dans cette maison, comme on voit les vieux fauteuils de tapisserie sur les- quels on s'assied depuis son enfance sans y avoir jamais pris garde. Un jour, on ne sait pourquoi, parce qu'un rayon de soleil tombe sur le sidge, on se dit tout a coup: 'Tiens, mais il est fort curieux, ce meuble'; et on decouvre que le bois a et6 travaille par un artiste, et que l'etoffe est remarquable. Jamais je n'avais pris garde a Mile Perle" (2: 797). 31 Gaston's portrait of Mile Perle is as follows: "Je me mis a la regarder.— Quel age avait-elle? Oui, quarante ans.— Elle n'etait pas vieille, cette fille, elle se vieillissait. Je fus soudain frappe par cette remarque. Elle se coiffait, s'habillait, se parait ridiculement, et, malgre tout, elle n'etait point ridi cule, tant elle portait en elle de grace simple, natu- relle, de grace voilee, cachee avec soin. Quelle drole de creature, vraiment! Comment ne l'avais-je jamais mieux observ^e? . . . sous cette chevelure a la Vierge conservee, on voyait un grand front calme, coupe par deux rides profondes, deux rides de longue tristesses, puis deux yeux bleux, larges et doux, si timides, si crain- tifs, si humbles, deux beaux yeux restes si naifs, pleins d'etonnement de fillette, de sensations jeunes et aussi de chagrins qui avaient passe dedans, en les attendris- sant, sans les troubler" (2: 797-8) 32 Quoted in The Rhetoric of Fiction 27. 33 Though in the story there is no comment on the specific date of the feast, we can infer that the party is a feast of Epiphany, by the fact that the Misses Morkan1s party is held after New Year's Eve but still during Christmas time (Gifford, Joyce Annotated 110). 34 Booth's confusion between the agent of narrative voice and that of narrative perspective is succintly pointed out by Gerard Genette in his Narrative Discourse (188). Though Booth's consideration of Gabriel or Strether in The Ambassadors as a narrator is, rigorously speaking, faulty, his confusion is understandable because the self-effacing voice of the narrator in modern fiction gives the reader an illusion as if the agent of narrating 323 were the agent of seeing. See Booth, The Rethoric of Fiction 153, 164; and "Distance and Point of View," Essays in Criticism. 11 (1961) 60-79. 35 Wayne Booth points out one of "the two extremes of subjectivisim that have marred some impersonal narra tion" as follows: "Indiscriminate sympathy or compas sion.— By giving the impression that judgement is with held, an author can hide from himself that he is senti mentally involved with his characters, and that he is asking for his reader1s sympathies without providing adequate reasons" (Rhetoric 84). 36 "Characterization in 'The Dead,1" Baker and Staley 155-159. 37 In his essay "Hyon Chin'gon ui tanp'yon sos6l, kti pitii," Cho Namhyon divides Hyon Chin'gon's short stories into two kinds: the stories of love and the stories of poverty (243-4). According to his view, most characters in Hyon Chin'gon's love stories can be categorized into the two types: victim (pharmakos) and imposter (alazons). In my view, this pattern in characterization is exten sively applicable to not only his love stories but also his stories of poverty and its persistent recurrence in his fiction is one of important aspects which enable to us perceive the characteristics of Hyon Chin'gon's real ism. 70 , Quoted by Chong Hansuk 96-97. This essay was originally published in Kaebvok 65 (1926): 134. 39 "Aekcha Sosol-ron," Han'auk munhak ui haesok (Seoul: Saemun-sa, 1981) 77. 40 For further information about the characteris tics of traditional Korean frame stories, see Lee Jae- son, Han'auk tanp'von sosol von'qu. Humanities Monographs 13 (Seoul: Iljo-gak, 1975) 95-151; "Aekcha Sosol-ron." 41 "P'yohyon ono wa sosulcha ui chonjae," Hvon Chin'aon yonau edited by Sin Tong-uk and Kim Yolgu 11-28. I 324 CHAPTER SIX CONCLUSION: THE CRISIS OF THE SHORT STORY In the beginning of this work, I proposed to con sider the short story as simply the short fictional narrative of the modern era, as one of the important historical genres or stages in the long continuum of short fictional narrative. If we consider the short story as a theoretical genre conditioned by its own generic properties or prescriptive laws, the inescapable conclusion we come to would be identical with Norman Friedman’s minimalist definition that "I do not really believe there is any such thing as the short story more specific than 'a short fictional narrative in prose'" (Lohafer and Clarey 29). For, apart from brevity, the short story as a theoretical genre does not possess any distinctive generic law shared by all its members, rang ing from the fantastic yet verisimilar tales of Hawthorne and Poe, through the realistic stories of Maupassant and Chekhov, up to the self-reflexive contemporary stories of Julio Cortdzar, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Barth. Though by the end of last century the short story was proposed by Matthews and his followers as a theoreti cal genre governed by the principle of single effect and plot, this classical notion of the short story seems to 325 be no longer pertinent to recent short stories, such as those of Robbe-Grillet, Donald Barthelme, and John Up dike. The principle of single effect or unity of im pression is now seen as an outdated, nebulous canon, as Austin M. Wright points out: "from the point of view of mainstream criticism, unity— organic wholeness, the integrated work— is a backwater, an eddy; it is regres sive, reactionary, imprisoning, or downright mystify ing."1 Likewise, realism, another important theoretical foundation of the distinction between the short story and its predecessors, now becomes the very target that recent short stories have desperately tried to subvert or decon struct. In his Anti-Storv: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction, Stevick describes recent writers's efforts as an attempt to "cut loose from the conventions of realism, recapture, on their own terms, the narrative wonder of earlier romance, to make their preposterous and often quite scary worlds, and to devise new uses for fantasy" (xvii).2 Similarly, in another anthology of recent short stories, Joe D. Bellamy, while christening the contem porary short story "superfiction," characterizes its dominant modes by such words as "fantasy/fabulation /irrealism, neo-gothic, myth/parable, metafiction, and parody/put-on."3 This recent tendency to experiment with the older forms of short fiction shows the crisis of the 326 short story as an autonomous genre, distinguishable from its predecessors. It is very suggestive that, in desig nating a group of recent short stories, Stevick and Bellamy discarded the generic term "short story" and instead preferred to use the term "anti-story" and the all-inclusive term "fiction" which blurs the lines among a variety of different fictional genres (e.g. short story, novel, tale, and romance). The radical change in the short story and the ex treme instability of its generic laws make us aware of the complexity of literary evolution. As Scholes and Kellogg succinctly point out, "Literary evolution is in some ways more complex than biological evolution: It is a kind of cross between a biological and a dialectical process, in which different species sometimes combine to produce new hybrids, which can be in turn combine with other old or new forms; and in which one type will beget its antitype, which in turn may combine with other forms or synthesize with its antitypical originator" (Nature of Narrative 11). In order to grasp and describe a part of such complex processes in the evolution of the short story and an intricate network of interactions between various stories, I have reduced the scope of my study to a manageable size of realistic short stories that can be ranked among the great accomplishments of the short story 327 and tried to offer more detailed analysis of each given literary work as a concrete historical fact and as a dynamic participant in such complex evolution. Through my close examination of a part of the short story, I think I have learned much about the whole of this genre and the same subtle intertextuality of narrative art as that of visual art poetically described by Gombrich: "that strange precinct we call 'art' is like a hall of mirrors or a whispering gallery. Each form conjures up a thousand memories and after-images. No sooner is an image presented as art than, by this very act, a new frame of reference is created which it cannot escape. It becomes part of an institution as surely as does the toy in the nursery."4 Like such an art form, the realistic short story has within itself its past and its future as a dynamic sys tem: it also "conjures up a thousand memories and after images." The realistic short story is a pivotal genre of the short story that enables us to capture the overall evolution of the short story from the tale of tradition to the contemporary short story or "anti-story." My investigation into the realistic short story leads me to recognize several major characteristics of the short story and its evolution: (1) the short story from Poe to Barthelme has been mostly conditioned by not only the 328 romantic impulse but also the realistic impulse; (2) the short story from Poe through Maupassant to Joyce was basically a genre of plot governed by a compositional principle of transforming separate narrative components into a new artistic whole, in other words, it is a meta phoric genre that aims at the creation of a new meaning ("du noveau— du non encore dit, de 1*inedit") through the "synthese de 1'het^rogene," to borrow Paul Ricoeur1s term (Temps et recit I 11); (3) the short story, including the realistic short story and the tale of tradition, is essentially a symbolic genre in the sense that it relies upon the evocative or suggestive power of language in stead of its referential function; (4) the central con ventions of Flaubertian realism— the disintegration of the plot, the autonomy of description, and the elimina tion of the storyteller— have exerted a great impact on the subsequent development of the short story, but the realistic short story itself (esp. the stories of Maupas sant and Hyon Chin'gon) substantiates the view that, as Charles May rightly points out, "the very form and tradi tion of short fiction militate strongly against the central conventions of realism."5 In the rest of this concluding chapter, I will briefly discuss these features of the short story, by making the best use of the preced ing examination of the realistic short story, but at the 329 same time by expanding the scope of my discussion further than the realistic short story. Let me start with the first point. In my view, like the novel, the short story is still distinguishable from its predecessors, because of realism or its faithfulness to reality. From the beginning of the nineteenth century to the middle of the present century, the evolution of the short story, like the novel, had manifested a growing concern for the art of verisimilitude until such writers as Henry James and James Joyce achieved the maximum mimetic effect or the maximum intensity of realistic illusion. It can be said that the exigencies of verisi militude were more compelling for Hoffmann and Poe than for Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, more compelling for Flaubert and Maupassant than for Hoffmann and Poe, for Chekhov and Joyce than for Flaubert and Maupassant. The writer's effort to reduce or remove the distance between the fictional world and the real world, I think, has been getting more and more intense until recently, including the so-called "anti-story." To illustrate, the fantastic tales of E. T. Hoffmann and Poe (e.g."The Golden Flower Pot," "The Sandman," "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher") are more verisimilar or vraisemblable than the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm: the spatial and temporal settings in the 330 tales of Hoffmann, Poe, and Hawthorne belong to the real world rather than to the imaginary world; the narrator or the hero is driven or annoyed by a realistic impulse to naturalize a gap between the supernatural and the natu^- ral, between fantasy and reality. This realistic motiva tion can be clearly seen in even such a fantastic tale of Hoffmann as "The Golden Flower Pot" abounding with witch craft, mystery, and wonder. In this story, one of the characters tells to the others an esoteric fairy tale of the sublime love between the youth Phosphorus and Fire- lily and his heroic battle against the dark power of a black-winged dragon. After telling this mysterious mise- en-abvme story (which seems to be a small replica of the whole story), the teller emphasizes its literal truth: "To you this matter, which I have related, certainly in the most brief and meager way, may seem senseless and mad; yet, notwithstanding this, it is meant for anything but incoherent, or even allegorical, and it is, in one word, literally true."6 This realistic motivation to make the unbelievable truthful and plausible character izes the fantastic stories of Hoffmann, Poe, Balzac, and Maupassant. Such a supernatural tale as Poe's "Ligeia" dealing with the resurrection of a dead wife impresses the reader as plausible or vraisemblable because of the highly unreliable narration by the opium addict and of 331 his continual ratiocination before his hallucinatory vision of things. Thus, the fantastic tales of Hoffmann and Poe manifest the newness of nineteenth century real ism described by Erich Heller, that is, "the passion for understanding, the desire for rational appropriation, the driving force toward the expropriation of the mystery."7 In this connection, it is worth noting Poe's statement that "Truth is often, and in very great degree, the aim of the tale. Some of the finest tales are tales of ratiocination" ("Review of Twice-Told Tales" 48). In the subsequent development of the short story, the writer's desire to achieve the maximum intensity of realistic illusion seems to have been more and more in tense. The stories of Chekhov, Mansfield, and Joyce, in my view, are much more realistic than those of Flaubert and Maupassant because in the worlds of Chekhov and Joyce nothing extraordinary and unnatural happens and the char acters appear as if they were living in the same con crete, everyday world as that of the reader. Though contemporary short stories seem to subvert the realistic conception of fiction as the representation of a slice of life and to have recourse to the older forms of fiction before the short story, I do not think that they are totally free from their mimetic impulse, and their real istic vision of the world. Fantasy, irrealism, and 332 horror in the contemporary short story can never be the same as those in the fairy tales or the gothic and fan tastic tales of Hoffmann, Hawthorne, and Poe. Fantasy and irrealism in the contemporary short story are deeply distorted by the writers' ideological vision of their own social reality as a chaotic, disintegrated world, their consciousness of their act of writing, and their aware ness of fiction as an artifact. Hence, in contrast to older fictional genres, such recent stories as those of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Updike, Barth, and Barthelme constantly prevent the reader from immersing himself into the fictional world and instead drag the reader to the real facts, his act of reading an artifact and his living in the chaotic, absurd world; for example, Barthelme's "The Glass Mountain," a deconstructive parody of the fairy tale and Julio CortAzar's "Continuity of Parks," a self-conscious Gothic tale in which fiction and reality are inseparable. In this respect, I think that Paul Ricoeur made an extremely perspicacious remark about the concealed realistic impulse in contemporary fiction8: Today it is said that only a novel without a plot or characters or any discernible temporal organization is more genuinely faithful to experience, which is itself fragmented and inconsistent, than was the traditional novel of the nineteenth century. But this plea for a fragmented, inconsistent fiction is not justified any differently than was the plea for naturalistic literature. The argument for veri similitude has merely been displaced. Formerly, it was social complexity that called for abandoning the classical paradigm; today, it is the presumed in 333 coherence of reality that requires abandoning every paradigm. But then literature, by reduplicating the chaos of reality by that of fiction, returns mimesis to its weakest function— that of replicating what is real by copying it. Fortunately, the paradox remains that in multiplying its artifices fiction seals its capitulation. This modern literary symptom— the disintegration of the plot or the fragmentation of narrative, the loss of order and coherence— may be one of the most conspicuous fea tures that distinguishes such experimental fiction as the nouveau roman and the anti-story from its predecessors. However, the paradoxical fact is that Flaubert, the in itiator of the naturalistic tradition, also appears the initiator of the modern tradition, as we can see in Robbe-Grillet1s statement that "des Flaubert, tout com mence a vaciller."9 As Flaubert's novels set against the traditional conventions of the novel, so his stories also radically subvert the central conventions of the short story, such as the organic unity of narrative components and the functionality of language as a signifying system. An abundance of discursive descriptions in Trois contes (e.g. the altar of Corpus Christi in "Un coeur simple," the orgiastic cuisine in "Herodias") recurrently frus trate the reader's desire to "recuperate" a certain meaning or effect from metonymic details and instead invite the reader to recognize the immediate qualities of 334 10 • words, devoid of meaning and depth. Flaubert's stories subvert or deconstruct the classical notion of the short story as an artistic form highly governed by such "com positional motivation" that "Not a single property may remained unused in the telling, and no episode may be without influence on the situation."11 However, though we can see the continuity of Flau bert's tradition in the post-modernistic stories of Robbe-Grillet and John Updike (e.g."Trois visions refl^chies," "Dans les couloirs du metropolitain," and "Under the Microscope"), Flaubert's metonymic descrip tions that appear to deny the metaphysical implications and instead to present a world of neutral surfaces devoid of meaning, it seems to me, hardly exerted a great impact on the realistic short stories of Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon. Of course, it cannot be denied that the realistic descriptions of these three writers reveal the impact of Flaubertian techniques. For their descriptions are concrete, objective, and metonymic, whereas those of Poe and Balzac are hyperbolic, anthropomorphic, and meta phoric. However, despite their assimilation of Flau bert's descriptive technique, their seemingly metonymic descriptions are recuperative, functional, and cohesive so as to contribute to the organic unity of the story and its certain effects and meanings. This functionality of 335 their realistic description reveals that the aesthetic demands of the short story exerted a greater impact on the realistic short story than the central conventions of realism. In this respect, one could say that the short story from Poe through Maupassant to Joyce was basically a genre of plot, if we conceive of plot as a compositional principle of transforming separate narrative components into a new artistic whole, rather than a mere synonym of 1 ? events. To put it another way, most well-constructed short stories, including the realistic short story, show the same process of epiphany as Joyce's mouthpiece, Stephen, describes: "When the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognize that it is the thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.1,13 Though I have limited my analysis to the realistic stories of the four writers, I think that such a concept of plot can be extensively applied to the majority of short stories: the stories of Boccaccio, Hoffmann, Hawthorne, Balzac, Gogol, Kafka, Nabokov, and Borges, and even the well-written folk and fairy tales of the brothers Grimm and of Hans Anderson (e.g. "Rapunzel," "Faithful Johannes," "All Fur," "The Goose Girl at the Spring," "The Little Mermaid," "The Ugly Duckling"). In 336 all these stories, we can perceive "a strong undercurrent of suggestion1 1 that "runs continuously beneath the upper stream of the tranquil thesis," to borrow Poe's expres sion (Review of Twice-Told Tales 46). These dual or multiple layers of meaning beneath the surface narrative lead us to conceive of the short story as a fundamentally symbolic genre, whether it is realistic or fantastic or marvelous, or whether it deals with everyday reality or extraordinary events. Inasmuch as the short story from Poe to Joyce has been a metaphoric genre aiming at the creation of new semantic possibility through the synthesis of the heterogeneous elements, the devices of metaphoric or concrete symbols have also been dominant in the tradition of the short story. The realistic short story, including Flaubert, was in conformity with this convention. For the short story, an artistic form conditioned by brevity, economy of language has been a sine qua non of its composition; accordingly, the device of the concrete symbol has persistently been used as one of the most effective ways in which the writer or teller can achieve the maximum effect by using the minimum amount of words { and as a means of impressing his individual story upon the reader's memory. Therefore, a great variety of different stories, such as the folktale, the novella, the 337 German novelle, and the short story, have persistently used the concrete symbol that operates as a label of distinction, a central device of integrating narrative components into a complete whole, and as a metaphoric vehicle for conveying the inner meaning of the story. One of the perfect examples of the use of such a concrete symbol in the short story may be the overcoat in Gogol's "Overcoat," the story that has been very often considered as the prototype of the short story as a new genre, thanks to Turgenev's familiar saying that "We all came out from under Gogol's 'Overcoat. 11,14 As I have examined in chapter four, in a great variety of realistic stories of Balzac, Maupassant, Joyce, Hyon Chin'gon, these writers tried to convey their views of human life and society indirectly through the subtle use of symbols, rather than through the meticulous details of contem porary social situation: Maupassant expresses his dualis- tic vision du monde and his pessimism toward capitalist society by persistently using concrete symbols whose false values are mistaken for true values; Joyce presents the corruption and stagnation of Irish Catholic society through such religious symbols as the broken chalice and pigeonhouse; Hyon Chin'gon's stories reflect the darkness and social wounds of his contemporary Korea under Japanese colonialism by concentrating on the tragic 338 situation of the room full of the imagery of violation, death, and destruction. Flaubert's stories are no exception to this tradi tion, though his metonymic descriptions based upon unes sential, concrete details constantly distract the reader's attention from the development of the story. Each of his three stories contains a concrete central symbol: parrot, stained-glass window, and the head of Jokanann. These concrete symbols function as a label of a given story, operate as a central device of integrating separate episodes into a whole or as a metaphoric symbol expressing some inner meanings of the story. Flaubert's penchant for such concrete symbols enables us to situate him into the tradition of the novella and the short story, though his stories deviate from the conventional norms of the short story in many ways (e.g. anti-climac- tic plot, unessential details, and the persistent repeti tion of the same motif). Despite such a conformity with the tradition of the short story, Flaubert can be considered as a true in novator whose fictional technique has brought a revolu tionary change to the tradition of the short story, as in the tradition of the novel. In the modern short story, the disappearance of the storyteller and the change of the narrator from the "teller" to the "presenter" or 339 "shower" reflect the influence of Flaubert's impersonal narration. In such modern stories as those of Joyce, Hemingway, Sartre, and Robbe-Grillet, we can clearly observe a Flaubertian desire to make the narrative form equal to the dramatic or cinematic form by eliminating the author or all his direct addresses to the reader. The writer's desire to achieve the maximum intensity of realistic illusion by means of impersonal narration has led a large number of modern stories, like modern novels, to "exist in the manner of things, of plants, of events, i and not at first like products of man," to borrow i Sartre's terms.15 If we no longer refer to modern stories as "tale," one of the main reasons for this may be the disappearance of the storyteller, the death of an authorial or narratorial figure who has played an impor tant role not only in transmitting or recounting the story but also in conveying its meanings or messages. Such short stories of Hemingway as "The Killers" and "Hills like White Elephants" in which the story develops as if unmediated by the teller may be one of the fine ex amples of a radical break between the rhetoric of modern short fiction and that of storytelling. However, it should be acknowledged that the legacy of storytelling tradition in the short story was greater than it seems to be. As I argued in chapter five, many 340 realistic stories of Maupassant and Hyon Chin’gon appear to simulate the rhetoric of storytelling and resuscitate a sense of community between the teller and the reader. In particular, Maupassant's frame stories are an attempt to reconcile the technique of oral tradition and that of modernity. Though the majority of Maupassant's story tellers are dramatized as a character or as an eye-wit ness unlike the omniscient storyteller in the tale of tradition, the simulation of storytelling context and the preservation of living speech patterns in his frame stories (approximately 150 stories) reveal the legacy of the tradition of tale and novella. When we take into consideration the fact that a surprisingly large number of nineteenth-century short stories, ranging from E. T. Hoffmann through Balzac, Merimee, and Poe up to Maupas sant, maintained the frame structure or the oral form, it would be necessary to recognize the inadequacy of the generic distinction between the tale and the short story. Even such a story of Gogol as "The Overcoat," considered by O'Connor as the originator of the short story (chara cterized by its lonely voice), distinctly reveals the inheritance of oral tradition and implicitly simulates the storytelling context between teller and his lis teners, as Boris Eichenbaum demonstrates in his percep tive essay "How Gogol's 'Greatcoat' Was Made": Eichenbaum 341 emphasizes that "Gogol's text 'was made up living speech patterns and vocalized emotions,' that words and sen tences are selected and joined by Gogol as they are in the oral skaz. in which articulation, mimicry, sound gestures, and so on, play a special role."16 This tradition, in my view, has not yet perished in this century: for example, a number of frame stories by Conrad and Borges are a subtle blend of tradition and modernity. Though such a modern storyteller as Marlow, the surrogate-narrator of Conrad, is unreliable, per sonal, and subjective unlike the reliable traditional storyteller, Marlow shows a deep kinship with the tradi tional storyteller in many aspects: his desire to ex change experiences and to transmit to the listeners the wisdom of life that he has learned from his own experi ences or from those of others, his seeking for counsel and companionship, his image as a traveling journeyman, and so on.17 In particular, the legacy of the storytell ing tradition has been much more obvious in the East than in the West: for example, a large number of short stories, such as those of Lu Xun, Runosuke Akutagawa, Kim Tongin and Kim Tongni, conspicuously show the inheritance of oral tradition in their uses of the collective narra tive voice and the frame structure. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the majority of contemporary short 342 stories substantiate Walter Benjamn’s statement that "The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out" ("The Storyteller" 87). As he says, one could argue that we lost our abil ity to exchange experiences with others and to retell stories properly to others, and we no longer find any genuine storyteller who has counsel for his readers. Indeed, we have witnessed the death of storytelling in the narratives of Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, and Barthelme: Robbe-Grillet says that "Raconter est devenu proprement impossible" (31). However, in spite of the disintegration of the plot and the death of the storyteller in modern fiction, it is difficult for me to believe that such a modern symptom represents the irrevocable decline of the storytelling tradition, the end of narrative art. I am of the same 18 opinion as Ricoeur : And yet . . . and yet. Perhaps, in spite of every thing, it is necessary to have confidence in the call for concordance that today still structures the expectations of readers and to believe that new narrative forms, which we do not yet know how to name, are already being born, which will bear wit ness to the fact that the narrative function can still be metamorphosed, but not so as to die. For we have no idea of what a culture would be where no one any longer knew what it meant to narrate things. The power of storytelling and the function of the plot can never die completely as long as the human desire for meaning, order, and companionship lasts. 343 Notes 1 "Recalcitrance in the Short story," Lohafer and Clarey 115. 2 "Introduction," Anti-Storv: An Anthology of Ex perimental Fiction (New York: The Free Press, 1971) ix- xxiii. In his introduction, Stevick describes a series of strong reactions against the existing conventions of the short story in recent experimental fiction, as fol lows: against mimesis, against "reality," against event, against subject, against the middle range of experience, against analysis, against meaning, against scale. 3 Joe David Bellamy, ed., "Introduction," Super fiction or the American Storv Transformed (New York: Vintage, 1975) 3-20. 4 Meditation on a Hobby Horse (1963; London: Phai- don, 1978) 11. 5 "Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction" 66. 6 The Best Tales of Hoffmann, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover Publications, 1967) 14. 7 Quoted in May, "Metaphoric Motivation in Short Fiction" 71. 8 Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985) 2: 14. For the French Text, see Temps et recit II 2 6- 27: On entend dire aujourd'hui que seul un roman sans intrigue, ni personnage, ni organisation temporelle discernable, est plus authentiquement fidele a une experience elle-meme fragmentee et inconsistante que le roman traditionnel du XIXe sidcle. Mais alors, le plaidoyer pour une fiction fragmentee et incon sistante ne se justifie pas autrement que jadis le paidoyer pour la litterature naturaliste. L'argue- ment vraisemblance a ete simplement deplace: autre fois, c'etait la complexity social qui demandait 1'abandon du paradigme classique; aujourd'hui c 1est 1'incoherence presumee de la realite qui requiert 1'abandon de tout paradigme. Des lors, la littera ture, redoublant le chaos de la realite par celui de 344 la fiction, ramene la mimdsis a sa fonction la plus faible, celle de repliquer au reel en le copiant. Par chance, le paradox demeure que c'est en multi- pliant les artifices que la fiction scelle sa capi tulation. 9 Pour un nouveau roman 31. 10 • • Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics 13 7. 11 Tomashevsky 79. 12 My definition is based upon Ricoeur1s conception of plot: he describes plot as a principle that "'prend ensemble' et intdgre dans une histoire entiere et com plete les evenements multiples et disperses et ainsi schematise la signification intelligible qui s'attache au recit pris comme un tout" (Temps et recit I 12). 13 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: Text. Criticism and Notes, ed. Chester G. Anderson 289. 14 Quoted in Frank O'Connor, "The Lonely Voice," May 84. 15 Quoted in Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. (1961; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983) 19. 16 "The Theory of the 'Formal Method,'" Russian For malist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965) 122; "Comment est fait 'Le Manteau' de Gogol," Theorie de la litterature. ed. and trans. Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Seuil, 1965) 212-233. 17 Walter Benjamin, "Storyteller"; Peter Brooks, "An Unreadable Report: Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Reading for the Plot 238-263. 18 Time and Narrative II 28. For the French text, see Temps et recit II 48: Et pourtant . . . Et pourtant. Peut-etre faut-il, malare tout, faire confiance a la demande de concor dance qui structure aujourd'hui encore 1'attente des lecteurs et croire que de nouvelles formes narra tives, que nous ne savons pas encore nommer, sont deja en train de naitre, qui attesteront que la fonction narrative peut se metamorphoser, mais non pas mourir. Car nous n'avons aucune idee de ce que 345 serait une culture ou l'on ne saurait plus ce que signifie raconter. 346 BIBLIOGRAPHY I. Selected References on Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon. A. Balzac, Flaubert, and Guy de Maupassant: Artinian, Artine. "Introduction." The Complete Short Stories of Guv De Maupassant. Garden City: Hanover House, 1955. Besnard-Coursodon, Micheline. Etude thematiaue et structurale de l1oeuvre de Maupassant: le pi&qe. Paris: Nizet, 1973. Beizer, Janet, L. Family Plots: Balzac's Narrative Generations. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac. Henry James. Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. 1976. New York: Columbia UP, 1985. • Readincr for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. Brombert, Victor. "Flaubert and the Status of the Subject." Schor and Majewski 100-15. Cali', Andrea. Figures narratoloqiaues dans La maison tellier. Lecce: Adriatica editrice salentina, 1981. Carlut, Charles, ed. La correspondance de Flaubert: etude et repertoire critique. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1968. Cogny, Pierre. Maupassant l ’homme sans Dieu. Bruxelles: La Renaissance du Livre, 1968. 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Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Garrett, George. "Plain and/or Fancy: Where the Short Story Is and May Be Going." Aycock 133-44. Godenne, Rene. La nouvelle francaise. Paris: PUF, 1974. Gordimer, Nadine. "The Flash of Fireflies." May 178- 181. Han, Yonghwan. Han-Chung-Il sosol ui pjgyo vongu. Seoul: Chongum-sa, 1985. Hsia, C. T. A History of Modern Chines Fiction (1917- 19571. New Haven: Yale UP, 19 61. Jarrell, Randall. "Stories." May 32-4. Kang, Yongju. "1930 nyondae p'yongdan ui sosol-ron." Han'guk kundae munhaksa-ron. Ed. Im Hyongtaek and Ch'oe Wonsik. Seoul: Han'gilsa, 1982. 481-516. Keene, Donald. Dawn to the West: Japanese Literature of the Modern Era: Fiction. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984. Kim, U-chang. "Han'guk hyondae sos61 ui hyongsong." Kungp1 ip han sidae ui siin. 1977. Seoul: Minum-sa, 1985. 72-125. Kim, Yunsik. "II. Sosol ui genre chok songkyok pip'an." "III. 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Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983. Lohafer, Susan and Jo Ellyn Clarey. Short Storv Theory at a CROSSROADS. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State UP, 1989. Lu Xun. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Peking: Foreign Language P, 1959. Lukacs, Georg. The Theory of the Novel: A Historico- philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Trans. Anna Bostock. Cambridge: MIT P, 1971. . "Solzhenitsyn: One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich." Solzhenitsyn. 1969. Cambridge: MIT P, 1970. 7-32. Marler, Robert F. "From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in 1850's." American Literature 46 (1974): 153-69. 355 Matthews, Brander. "The Philosophy of the Short Story." May 45-51. May, Charles E., ed. Short Storv Theories. Athens: Ohio UP, 1976. Moravia, Alberto. "The Short Story and the Novel." May 147-51. Morris, Ivan. Introduction. Modern Japanese Stories: An An Anthology. Ed. Ivan Morris. 1962. Ruthland: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 198 3. Plaks, Andrew H. "Full-length Hsiao-shuo and the Western Novel: A Generic Reappraisal." China and the West: Comparative Literature Studies. Hong Kong: The Chinese U of Hong Kong, 1980. 163-76. Poe, Edgar A. "Review of Twice-Told Tales." May 52-9. Pratt, Maris Louis. "The Short Story: the long and the Short of It." Poetics 10 (1981): 175-94. O'Connor, Frank. "The Lonely Voice." May 83-93. O'Faolain, Sean. The Short Story. New York: Devin-Adair co., 1951. Reid, Ian. The Short Storv. London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1977. Rohrberger, Mary. "The Short Story: A Proposed Definition." May 80-82. . "Between Shadow and Act: Where Do We Go from Here?" Lohafer and Clarey 32-45. Rosmarin, Adena. Power of Genre. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1985. Shaw, Valerie. The Short Storv: A Critical Introduction. London: Longman, 1983. Shklovsky, Victor. "La construction de la nouvelle et du roman." Theorie de la littferature. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. Paris: Le Seuil, 1965. 170-96. Sin, Sangsong. "Han'guk hyondae chungp'yon sosol ui hyongt'ae chok t'ukchil." Han'quk sosol von'qu. 356 Ed. Tongguk taehakkyo Pusol han'guk munhak yon'guso. Vol. 1. Seoul: T'aehak-sa, 1983. 327-78. Stevick, Philip, ed. Anti-Storv: An Anthology of Experimental Fiction edited by Philip Stevick. New York: The Free P, 1971. . The American Short Story 1990-1945: A Critical History. Boston: Twayne Pub, 1984. Swales, Martin. The German Novelle. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. Todorov, Tzvetan. Ou'est-ce cue le structuralisme?: 2. Poetique. Paris: Seuil, 1968. (Tr. Introductions to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981.) Introduction & la litterature fantastiaue. Paris: Seuil, 1970. (Tr. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975.) . Poetique de la prose. Paris: Seuil, 1971. (Tr. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.) . Les genres du discours. Paris: Seuil, 1978. (Tr. Genres in Discourse. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.) Walker, Warren S. "From Raconteur to Writer: Oral Roots and Printed Leaves of Short Fiction." Aycock 13-26. Weaver, Gordon. "One Writer's Perception of the Short Fiction Tradition: How Would Edgar Allan Poe Make a Duck?" Aycock 119-132. Wilson, Leslie A. "Constancy and Variation: The Short Story in Germany." Aycock 87-102. Yun, Hongno. Han'quk kdndae sosol vdn'qu. Seoul: Iljo- gak, 1981. 357 III. Theories of Realism and Naturalism Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. 1953. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974. Barthes, Roland. "L'effet de reel." Communications. 11 (1968): 84-89. Chang, Sas6n. Han'guk realism munhak-ron. Seoul: Saemun-sa, 1988. Chevrel, Yves. Le naturalisme. Paris: PUF, 1982. Cho, Chin'gi. Han'guk kundae realism sosol vongu. Seoul: Saemun-sa, 1989. Cogny, Pierre. Le naturalisme. Paris: PUF, 1968. Dumesnil, Rene. Le realisme. Historie de la litterature francaise IX. J. Calvet. Paris: J. De Gigord, 1936. Gombrich, E. H. "From Representation to Expression." Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Rev. ed. 1961. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. 359-89. . Mediations on a Hobby Horse: And Other Essays on the Theory of Art. 3rd. ed. London: Phaidon, 1978. Han'guk sahoe Kwahak yongu-so, ed. Yesul kwa sahoe. Seoul: Mindm-sa, 1979. Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art 4: Naturalism. Impressionism. The Film Age. 1958. New York: Vintage, 1985. Jakobson, Roman. "On Realism in Art." "Linguistics and Poetics," "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances." Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge: Belknap P of Havard UP, 1987. 19-27. 62-94. 95-114. Kang, Insuk. Chayon chuui munhak-ron. Seoul: Koryo-won, 1987. Kim, Hakdong. Han'guk munhak Ui pigyo munhakchok vongu. 1972. Seoul: Iljo-gak, 1982. 358 Kim, Ukdong. Realism kwa kd pulman. Seoul: Ch'ungha, 1989. Lukacs, Georg. "Art and Objective Truth." "Narrate or Describe?" Writer and Critic and Other Essays. Trans. Arthur D. Kahn. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1970. 25-60, 110-48. . Studies in European Realism. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964. Martino, P. Le naturalisme francais: (1870-1895). Paris: Colin, 1930. Nochlin, Linda. Realism. London: Pelican, 1971. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. "Du realisme a la realite." Pour un nouveau roman. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1963. 135-44. Yu, Chongho ed. Munhak yesul kwa sahoe sanqhwanq. Seoul: Mindm-sa, 1979. Wellek, Rene. "The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship." Concepts of Criticism. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. 222-55. 359 IV. Narrative Theories Adams, Hazard, ed. Critical Theory Since Plato. San Diego: Harcourt, 1971. Bal, Mieke. Narratoloqv: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 1980. Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. . "Narration et focalisation: pour une theorie des instances du recit; a propos de La chatte de Colette." Narratolodie: Essais sur la signification narrative dans auatre romans modernes. Utrecht: Hes Publishers, 1984. 19-58. . "The Laughing Mice; or, On Focalization." Poetics Today 2: 202-10. Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. . "Distance and Point of view." Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 60-79. Bourneuf, Roland and Real Ouellet. L'univers du roman. Paris: PUF, 1975. Brooks, Cleanth, and Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Fiction. New York: Crofts, 194 3. Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: the Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990. Culler, Jonathan. "The Turns of Metaphor." "Literary Theory in the Graduate Program." The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics. Literature. Deconstruction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. 188-209. 210-226. Dolzel, Lubomir. "The Typology of the Narrator: Point of View in Fiction." 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Kim, Ch'i-soo. Munhak sahoehak ul wihavo. 1979. Seoul: Munhak kwa chisong-sa, 1984 , ed. Kuio chufti wa muhak pip'vong. Seoul: Hongsong- sa, 1980. Kim, Hyon, ed. Susahak. Seoul: Munhak kwa chisong-sa, 1985. Kim, Yongjik, ed. Sangiing. Seoul: Munhak kwa chisong- sa , 1988. Lanser, Susan Sniader. The Narrative Act: Point of View in Fiction. New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1981. Lejeune, Philippe. "Le pacte autobiographique." Le pacte autobiographigue. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Lemon, T. Lee, and Marion J. Reis, trans. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1965. Martin, Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Itaca: Cornell UP, 1986. 361 Prince, Gerald. "Introduction to the Study of the Narratee." Reader-Response Criticism. Ed. Jane Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980. 7-25. . Dictionary of Narratoloav. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 1987. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et recit. Paris: Edition du Seuil, 1983. 3 vols. (Tr. Time and Narrative. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1985. 3 vols. ) Rimmon-Kennan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics. London: Methuen, 1983. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "M. Francois Mauriac et la liberte." 193 9. Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Scholes, Robert and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. 1966. London: Oxford UP, 1978. Todorov, Tzvetan. "Les categories du recit litteraire." Communication 8 (1966): 125-51. . Ou'est-ce que le structuralisme?: 2. Poetique. Paris: Seuil, 1968. (Tr. Introductions to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981.) Tomashevsky, Boris. "Thematics." Lemon and Reis 61-98. 362 APPENDIX I A Biographical Note on Hyon Chin'gon (September 2, 1900— April 25, 1943) In 1900, Hyon Chin'gon (his pen name, Pingho) was born to Hy6n Kyongun, the postmaster general of the city Taegu located in the southern provinces of Korea. The family Hyon had produced for generations a large number of diplomats, high-ranking public officials, and trans lators. Hyon Chin'gon was the fourth of Hyon Kyongun's five sons: the eldest, a graduate of the Russian Military Acamedy, led an active life abroad and then worked as an interpreter for the Russian Embassy in Korea; the second, i a lawyer who had graduated from the law school of Meiji University in Tokyo; the third, a fervent patriot who had fought against Japanese colonialism, as a member of the Korean provisional government in Shanghai. These various educational backgrounds of his elder brothers exerted a great impact on Hy6n Chin'g6n's academic career: he finished his middle and high school courses in Tokyo (1912-1917) and then studied German language and litera ture at Hu Chiang University in Shanghai (1917-1919). In the course of his study, at the age of 15, Hyon Chin'gon married the daughter of a wealthy Taegu man, a tradition al yet comely girl, two years his senior (In spite of their intellectual gap, the couple led a happy married life). After returning to Korea from Shanghai in 1919, Hyon Chin'gon made his living chiefly as a journalist. He worked for several newspaper companies: The Chosun Ilbo (1921-1922), Tongmvong and Sidae Ilbo (1920-26), The Dong-A Ilbo (1926-1938). His career as a journalist paralleled his literary career as a short story writer and novelist. In 192 0 Hyon Chin'gon made his literary debut by publishing his first short story "Hisaenghwa" (The Sacrificial Flower) in the magazine Kaebvok (The Beginning of the World). Though his first story was unsuccessful, his second story "Pincho" (The Indigent Wife, 1921) met with warm critical acclaim. Through Kaebvok. he published his translations of Russian short stories and a large number of his stories, such as "Sul kwonhanun sahoe" (The Society Making One Drink, 1921), "T'arakcha" (The Degenerate, 1921), "Piano" (1922), "KKamak chapki" (The Blindman's Buff, 1924), "Kuriun hulginun nun" (My Beloved's Glaring Eyes, 1924), "Sarip chongsin pyongwon chang" (The Director of the Private Mental Hospital, 1926). In 1922, Hyon Chin'gon brought 363 out his first short story collection T 1arakcha, composed of his early three stories, "Pincho," "Sul kwonhanun sahoe," and "T1arakcha." These stories are autobiograhi- cal in many ways: for example, his excessive drinking habit, his sympathetic love for his naive traditional wife, his passing extramarital affair with a Kisaeng, and his feelings of disillusionment and frustration as an intellectual. In the same year, Hyon Chin'gon became a member of the literary circle Paek cho (The White Tides), along with Yi Kwangsu, Pak Chonghwa, Na Tohyang et al. Through their coterie magazine, Hyon Chin'gdn published "Yurin" (Violation, 1922) and "Halmoni ui Chugum" (My Grandmother's Death, 1923). In 192 6, Hyon Chin'gon published his second short story collection titled Choson ui olcrul (The Faces of Korea), composed of his eleven short stories, which can be ranked among the major achievements of the Korean realistic movement. Unlike the first collection, this book are concerned with the lives of others, especially the miserable living conditions of the lower class: for example, "Pul" (Fire), "Unsu choun nal" (A Lucky Day), and "Kohyang" (The Old Home). In the same year, he experienced the two tragic events: his third brother's premature death in prison and the subsequent suicide of his sister-in-law. Afterwards, his writing of short i fiction became less prolific, though he wrote such stories as "Sinmunji wa ch'olch'ang" (A Newspaper and the Iron Bar, 1929) and "Chongjo wa Yakka" (Chastity and the Price of Medicine, 1929. Instead, he turned his atten tion to the genre of the novel, especially the historical novel. His major novels are Chokto (The Equator, 1933) and Muvongtap (The Shadowless Tower, 193 9-40). ; In 1936, Hyon Chin'gon was imprisoned for one year because of the incident of the obliteration of the Japan ese flag and the next year he resigned from his newspaper office. Afterwards he abandoned all social activities and led a life of silence and reclusion in the suburbs of Seoul, while making his living by raising poultry. 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S I p pj tr 3 * 75" T u p 7 ' o * t ® rl J p 7 7 7 J P 7 N _ l\ o p V t o 7 ft u ^ J L . 0 7 0 p w o T T P to u p o’ u s 7 7 0 7 u h uK Op Jp o ® s 5 ? £ 0 < - > - • 7 . o’ o \ tfj ^t— p | M ft ? 5 ^ °, 7 o m u| 7 - { i l l *1° rJ * f 5 K A £ ,, 7 ^ o | J 7 ri o * •f J j J H j o V / — . 0 u | 7 7 K j r| J P T tr 7 7 u p 7 7 7 7 > | 0 7 i\ p ^ - j * m o p 7 - T J o n ) ^ 4 5 i ♦ > o ^ 7P . a ) o ® A * < n l ft # 5 ft jo A offl I ? f J. w i c P I I o ^ * 7 > 1 0 1 0 w T 7 Z o • ( I r a V ^ tr & * § O * T 7 tr 7 N • ( I - P 7 1 o T V K j T 7 o| ra i 0 O' T n 7 u h m J 7 oo c o K_ o n J r | TP 7 7 7 7 7 U j < H 7 J p ^ ^-1 T J 4 K 1 O G = u p 7 7 o w | b o K * 1 ( M O oo K u K > K 7 0| ® . t° o h F j r 7 n or o J p m , j - u > k > • H r 7 2 u j K < 3 - 7 Jt P a 2 7 - J 1 * n| 7 op U K ^ 4 o | ® J 5 0 * —T — 7 7 7 K r| ^r u W 7 7 P U K 7 il w 4 7 J iL H U D 2 o J P 7 7 1 0 O v t H H i 0 7 K l 4 r s 7 N 7 P P K P 7 7 7 o H K > i= r\ 0 7 . n r O r| ft ft JN $ o® <jF 4 7 N 7 an j u 7 u K J 7 Uj r| 3 N > 1 0 7 7 r i 4 7 ^ , 1 o 7 o p 7 U P 7 U K J P 0 p 0 E t Jp - io o C O n > S P c d e u 0 u K p 7 - ) o 7 7 p 0 0 ] ® 7 P rl 7 i H P 7 7 7 P ® ® P <- r ] r K ° 1 ® * ( 3 0 r j r 7 A 7 V P A ’P r| 7 P 7 7 7 ® | n 7 7 7 o | ® 7 7 O j 7 D p r| o j . - rf* j 7 o ’ rl r m 7 A - L t N r u r u 7 T K h t H r u 7 « l P > K K H o | ® 7 P P « l t r a 7 P 7 2 u i r u 7 * 1 7 > ^ t> S ) ^x } o ] 7 ] unb ol t } " ( 1 8 6 ) . fll u % f r l r& H a 4 r i i t o t r r n i p * r i > < £ > o o £ J L ifi it & ri r|r d a A > 1 C o t JE _ fi - j i t€ r|r ft > r i w E ■ * " r l J L i > t -1 | 0 o t ^ ( o > 1 ^ A « H J r* % d o U A j f l d ° 1 « o * Ha 5 r l o ! $ £ - H . ^ - 1 H i o t A f t J, $ d to o ft ifi & & r l ■ « j l ft > 1 X S 15 n ' t i f r ? $ a — r ~ “ X r | r ft c ^ r l ^ ft r ( n r l f t 0 I i r ifi i - o ™ r l ^ r l ~ - l > 4 > 5 i f i JL f t b m r l ^ fe * 1 1 -n - i rr A dr J l i L d > §2, X d a O j. (6 n £ i U | o 0 | | _£ » 4 o X L M a | r _ o ^ 0 -r' J l 4; l a je £ I t ! n & _ o ^ ft nC _ 0 _ * ft >1 f l l j o f t nl S % ( D W J i r l ifi H i fi ft dr r u i n ifi _ 0 d S i * i d . ft dr d i t * 8 d to - A d a A l a J U i f ft ft _ o, JE j C Jl 11 SL _ > j x i f _ v 0 ™ . r | o 0 I t ot J l * ot 0 0 • = = r i r l r l o a *a 1 . Jc dr rf g r l o E is n £ fa n 0 2 X L J l >i r l j i d* n C , 0 r l ft A rl JL >4 y j A X rl > £ n l r l (l i t _ 0 i t I Si *r l ! l | o d s _ o d U JE £ If i i | r n l k > r ft _ o , f d r s x r ( o j a 3 i ± r l Jl _ d , U d r >1 jl oE r i o j f l t rl ft Jt Ho i » d . U H j; a i U H i o t j i V. t t t 1 - o l d , r l fi d . o i X fa oE o j n _ 0 H a ? £ B f i d d ^ i u | m n l 9 ± j f i 0 . ~' H a U X is H ri r l _ 0 0 -rr' y f i n d . r ^ I s M 0 “ T T * nl H u r l j£ i t a - n£ il . 1 Jl X - £ 1 r l d ° i ‘ o j > J 0 f l l Jl 1 L d J W- X - 1 Hi JL J i n n l 4J -1 j! - i : up d n l i i t r a t | y ^ | e d ° J o , ol n e r & d a i u | o A r l J l j o » i r p d i - A v j , ^ H a rifl r l > 1 > 1 H i H i T J St v < 8 a 00 r r § • V ! k ,J s r l a _ £ f a i, H i fi 2 r|r ( o n l nl r l o p d » oE r l J E A d , n j o ol a t r l U ) 0 \ < 1 368 APPENDIX III Korean Bibliography A. Cho Namhyon: 2^*!, ZL «1 pt>^ ^-Tm . ^l-fr4, 1987. Cho Yonhyon: *1*1," ^ 4 , 1981. Ch’oe Changrok: " M & ” < 1 ^ - &, 4-&AK 1981. Ch’oe Wonsik: 3^*], -gr*^ 7f*|,” *!-§-% ®l, p*l*I:?i<£Piz -j, 1981. Chong Hansuk: ^tNr, ^ 1976, Zl^tflSjZL #-*>-¥-, 1986. Hyon Kilon: 4 ^ W j, 1988. Kim Chungha: ^ * } f 1981. Kim Inhwan: "rB love letter^ ^-3l Sfl*g -g^," a^ a}, 1981. Kim Tongin: ^ ? ] , ‘ ‘ t R M,fc*}ZL, ” T g y S f -fl-Spf. Kim U-jong: p^tfl 4i^<q o}^£i o]°-a.*Uj., 1980. Kim Yunsik and Kim Hyon: 7} r^T^^r^iAha, 1 ?l-§-Ah 1973. Kwon Sunjong: xl^i 1 c!;^l6i ] i24d7| ^IZT, ” ^ ?L fn m n^r, 1986. Li Chuhyong: ®l, r^l; 5!?i< ^': i Lj, 4-E-4, 1981. PaekCh’61: «Hg, Ff]^ilir; ^ l lM4.i, 1974. Sin Tong-uk and Kim Yolgu, eds: il-§Mr 7f 'a'S-rf- -?i, r^ ; 5l; ?l< ^-?-j, /H'SrAK 1981. Song Hach’un: r20’ dcfl 1985. Yun Hongno: *$-3., f 1980. 369 Yung Pyongro: &^5-, “^ * 1 3 *\J§^ *4, ^fi-g-A}, 1981. B. tfls } *P2.-g:»i Cho Yonhyon: ” r^ 7 f l # J( 1973, ^-g-Af, 1980. Chon Kwangyong: ^l^-g-. °1*Uji, ^ tH-a }, 1983. Han Yonghwan: ptl.^.< y ^ 4 ° ) H|^2. ^-g-A)-, 1985. Kang Y o n g j u : “ 1930^^ ‘ ‘ < y^ : 4 3g , si^A]-, 1982. Kim U-chang: £-f^\ r^gs> Ajcfl^ A]*lJt 1977, ?]#A f , 1985. Kim Yunsik: ^-^A], H)^, <yA|A}., 1981. Ku Inhwan: <S^, ^ a } , 1977. Kwak Chongwon: ^#^4, 2Jt 49j, 1976. Lee Jae-Son: o|AflA|t 1975. : “a ] ^ 2 } r^7|l^-7l (1900-1917)j, °4^A, 1972. : “ < $ x } ± ^ , ’’ ^ A}> 1981> Sin Sangsong: W ” ^ J; 6 4 ^ £, *fil^, eH ^ a K 1983. Yung Hongno: TarlrSL, ^3:21, 1981. C. A H J ^ y , ^ o | ^ l 3Lt> ChangeSason-' ^AfAi, b|<|}b]# -g-^j. 4£r-4, 1988. Cho Chin’gi: 2l^_7], rt R ^cf B ^ B l # £■?■.,, ^ a } , 1989. Han’guk sahoe Kwahak yongu-so ed.: ^L^-a1 - 5 - | ^4 ), Fo4|^-^f Aj-Jj j , . «1-§-a} . 1979. Kang Insuk: Ajo]^, f ^ ^ A ) 1987. Kim Ch’i-soo: 1 9 7 9, -g-sq-^ xlA!/.}, 1 9 8 4 : ^A]-, 1980. : S-0_3.b]^1, ^ x } t 1981, ----- : ^A]o\ tgAj^A]^ o]^A]-cl|^ja. Kim Hakdong: 1972, 6 J3 ^ , 1982. Kim Hyon: 1981. -------: - g * ^ xl^A]-, 1985. -------: ^ (Jg), ^>H6j 0|^.Jf x)^A}t 1987 --------and Kim Chuyon: r^r^-l'0]^i: gtji}- 1976. Kim Hwayong: ^4f<8(^), ol«BJt ^ 4 , 1984. : 1986, 1989. Kim Ukdong: ZL -g-*b, %*}, 1989. Kim Yongjik ed. : ^-g-^(^l). PaoV^ j, W 7|^ a}, 1988. Yu, Chongho ed. : r- g * W ‘ #2l 4 * ^ % . ! . 1979.

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Creator Yoon, Hwan Hee (author)

Core Title A rhetoric of the short story: A study of the realistic narratives of Flaubert, Maupassant, Joyce, and Hyon Chin'gon

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,literature, Asian,literature, English,literature, romance,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Cheung, Dominic (committee chair), Alkon, Paul (committee member), Babcock, Arthur (committee member), Sonnenfeld, Albert (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-60135

Unique identifier UC11347794

Identifier DP22557.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-60135 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier DP22557.pdf

Dmrecord 60135

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Yoon, Hwan Hee

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA