The Short Stories

Abstract

It was perhaps Faulkner’s need to complicate the unbearable facts of life, as Eudora Welty suggests, which made him uneasy with the short story form, and inspired him to transform so many of his shorter pieces into the novels or into short story composites like Go Down, Moses. Although he published over seventy short stories (one of the first and most famous being ‘A Rose for Emily’ in 1930), he did not really explore the genre as he did the novel. Joanne Creighton concludes that he ‘works against the autonomous structure and meaning of the short story when he incorporates it into a larger aesthetic whole’,¹⁵⁷ and a considerable scholarship is now devoted to the evolution of Faulkner’s stories into novels and into short story collections.

Faulkner’s veracity and accuracy about the world around keeps the comic thread from ever being lost or fouled, but that’s a simple part of the matter. The complicated and intricate thing is that his stories aren’t decked out in humour, but the humour is born in them, as much their blood and bones as the passion and poetry. Put one of his stories into a single factual statement and it’s pure outrage — so would life be — too terrifying, too probable, and too symbolic too, too funny to bear. There has to be the story, to bear it — wherein that statement, conjured up and implied and demonstrated, not said or the sky would fall on our heads, is yet the living source of his comedy — and a good part of that comedy’s adjoining terror, of course.¹⁵⁶