The influence of Modernist structure on the short fiction of Thomas Wolfe

The most famous attack on the fiction of Thomas Wolfe is Bernard DeVoto's 1936 essay "Genius is Not Enough." In it DeVoto identifies three points of weakness in Wolfe's fiction that critics have returned to repeatedly over the years. The first criticism is Wolfe's lack of artistic control and looseness of form. DeVoto blasts Look Homeward, Angel for "long whirling discharges of words, unabsorbed in the novel, unrelated to the proper business of fiction, badly if not altogether unacceptably written, raw gobs of emotion, aimless and quite meaningless jabber, claptrap, belches, grunts, and Tarzanlike screams" (132). The other two familiar criticisms in DeVoto's essay are that Wolfe's editors ("the assembly line at Scribner's") made too many of the artistic decisions that should have been made by the novelist, and that Wolfe misused and overused autobiographical material. Not all critics have been as hostile as DeVoto, and certainly Wolfe has had his defenders, but the issues DeVoto raised have set the agenda for much of the debate about Wolfe for the past 50 years.

Most of the critical focus over the years has centered on Wolfe's sprawling novels, but with the publication in 1987 of The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, this other body of his work has begun to receive attention. Wolfe wrote 58 short stories, but until the complete collection was published, 35 of these stories had never been published in book form, and one had never been published anywhere (Skipp xvii). The overemphasis on Wolfe's seemingly loosely structured novels has obscured his experimentation in the short story. While the structure of his novels owes a greater debt to nineteenth-century fiction than to the modernist fiction of the 1920s and '30s, the structure of many of Wolfe's short stories was heavily influenced by modernism.

Modernist short-story writers rejected traditional attitudes toward from in the short story. Richard Kostelanetz, an historian of the American short story, describes some key features of modernist short-story structure:

In the short story of the 1920's . . . the action is greatly pruned until the story appears rather plotless. Yet every detail serves an artistic function; nothing seems unconsidered or accidental. The short stories in the Twenties exhibit greater emotional complexity and ambiguity, as well as a more discriminating sense of emphasis and an increased brevity of representation (in short, a modified, more selective, realism). . . . Instead of concentrating on plot development, the authors resort to rhetorical strategies and parallelism and repetition; the narrator often speaks in the first person and may be a major participant in the action rather than just an observer of it; and the story's end comes as an anticlimax after the earlier epiphany. (220)

Modernists rejected traditional form in the short story because they believed that form presents a misleading picture of the nature of reality. As Clare Hanson explains, "Modernist short fiction writers distrusted the well-wrought tale for a variety of reasons. Most importantly they argued that the pleasing shape and coherence of the traditional short story represented a falsification of the discrete and heterogeneous nature of experience" (55). She adds that the "rounded finality of the tale" was rejected, "for story in this sense seemed to convey the misleading notion of something finished, absolute, and wholly understood" (55).

Scholars have generally understood and accepted the modernist approach in the fiction of Wolfe's contemporaries, but Wolfe's experiments in modernism have often faced hostility. When Wolfe rejects a traditional plot story for a more experimental approach, his work is called "formless"; when his contemporaries such as Sherwood Anderson engage in similar experiments, it is called "modernism." A brief look at the critical response to Anderson will illuminate some of the points I wish to make about Wolfe.

Arthur Voss, in his history of the short story in America, credits Anderson with the "liberation" of the short story (183). Anderson, as he puts it, "revolted against the stereotyped and conventional fiction of his time" (183). Anderson's novel Winesburg, Ohio, like many of Wolfe's stories, does not have a plot in the traditional sense of the term. The "plot story," as A. L. Bader defines it, is any story

(1) which derives its structure form plot based on a conflict and issuing in action; (2) whose action is sequential, progressive, that is, offers something for the reader to watch unfold and develop, usually by means of a series of complications, thus evoking suspense; and (3) whose action finally resolves the conflict, thus giving the story "point." (108)

Waldo Frank describes the form of Anderson's stories, in contrast, with a term that has often been applied to aspects of Wolfe's writing. He says, "The form is lyrical" (84). He compares the form, for instance, to the "lyrical art of the Old Testament psalmists and prophets in whom the literary medium was so allied to music that their texts have always been sung in synagogues" (Frank 85). He describes the design of individual stories as "a theme-statement of a character with his mood, followed by a recounting of actions that are merely variations on the theme" (85). The few stories in which Anderson attempts a straight narrative, Frank argues, are the least successful. Frank is not the only scholar to describe the structure of Winesburg, Ohio in terms of its lyrical nature. Irving Howe says the stories' impact depends "less on dramatic action than on a climatic lyrical insight" (103).