Short Story Writers and Short Stories

Harold Bloom, 2005, Chelsea House There are just some things that a writer can only achieve through the long span of a novel. Take "Love in the Time of Cholera" as an example. It is difficult to imagine how Gabriel Garcia Marquez could have made his readers empathize with Florentino Ariza's longsuffering patience and abiding love for Fermina Daza through the fifty years of pain, courtship, and seemingly endless anxiety, by telling that tale in a short story. The same can be said of Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain". Mann tells us that Hans Castorp wanted to spend a few short weeks in the mountain sanitarium but ended up staying for seven years. The surreal and absorbing account of his stay cannot have been achieved even in a book just half its length. Reverting to "Love in the Time of Cholera", the novel's length also permitted GGM to weave his magical realism; the interposing of episodes of sheer reality with episodes of incredible fantasy, and to have done so seamlessly. There are, on the other hand, some things that are best kept short. The short story is the form that best conveys intensity and force if the author wants a quick knock-out. A good short story stuns its reader when he reaches the end, often leaving him unaware that the story had ended. Kafka's "Metamorphosis" is an excellent example. In This book, "Short Story Writers and Short Stories", Bloom's approach was to focus on selected short stories and weave them into an analysis some specific aspects of the author under study. This book is thus a study of the deep psychology of the writers than a commentary or evaluation of their short stories. Bloom tended to treat novellas such as Joyce's "The Dubliners", and Kafka's "The Castle", as short stories. Some of the writers occupied no more than a page and a half. This book is not the one for those who are looking for an analysis of the short story, or a comprehensive account of the short stories of the writers. The strength of this book lies in its deeply perceptive account of just an aspect or two of the writers; accounts that might otherwise be lost in a more detailed study of any of the individual writers. One might say this was Bloom's "short story" of writers.