The New Century of South African Short Stories, by Michael Chapman

The New Century of South African Short Stories, by Michael Chapman. Ad Donker Publishers / Jonathan Ball Publishers. Cape Town, South Africa 2010. ISBN 9780868522272 / ISBN 978-0-86852-227-2

The New Century of South African Short Stories by Michael Chapman. An introduction:

Michael Chapman  

The New Century of South African Short Stories suggests that the imaginative and intellectual climate after apartheid, after the ideological divisions of the Cold War, is conducive to a renewed interest in shorter forms of fiction. If apartheid in South Africa provided writers with a big theme, then the big narrative of the novel perhaps was the most appropriate response to the national question. With the novel we enter a big world; characters develop in interchange with society; there is a beginning, middle and end to the plot. With the story beginnings, middles and ends are not as decisive. We encounter instead the fragment, the irresolute moment; lyrical intensity intrudes upon prosaic matter; tone predominates over plot; action shifts almost imperceptibly from the social to the psychological realm; and value is granted not so much to character as to the storyable incident. Whereas the novel is equated with big ideas, big events, the story favours flexibility, ellipses, surprise, emotion, implication. With large, singular plots (the narrative of nationalism or socialism) discredited, the story permits us smaller, various, often unconventional insights. These find consonance in a country in the complexity of its transition from an authoritarian order to a civil imaginary. The multiplicity of voices in a collection of stories suggests the range and diversity of our possibilities. My shorthand attempt to distinguish between the story and the novel could strike readers as rudimentary. The fact that criticism has not formulated any unique theory of the short-story genre according to which we might understand its unique kind of experience or the unique way it imitates and creates its experience, alerts us to the difficulties of defining the form. The qualification 'short' further complicates the issue. The term, 'short story', has come to be associated with the written, realist styles of late nineteenth-century Europe and America. But storytelling returns us to ancient times. The short story, with its usual focus on a single event or single effect, has remained close to the primacy of myth according to which myth expresses the inner meaning of things by telling a story. If the novel is a syncretic form, the story is an elemental form: its origins are myths, fables, parables, folk tales, or the genre of the romance. In fact, the story of the early nineteenth-century united folk-tale material with the voice of the individual perceiver. As in the Romantic revival, the spiritual impulse yielded to secular concerns. It is Charles E May's contention that the modern short story has never quite lost touch with its romantic origins and that 'story' may be defined by a paradox:'the reality of artifice'. Paradox is the one constant factor in discussion of the genre: a paradox that is germane, too, to story in South Africa. Ancient tales - it is said -enacted, illustrated, and dramatised the moral lessons of communities (e.g. the African oral tale). At the same time, the story - it is said - captures the temper of insecure societies, outcasts, submerged population groups, or as Elizabeth Bowen phrases it,'the disorientated romanticism of the age'. The latter is a fair description of the jazzy, gangster stories of Sophiatown in the 1950s, in which black writers such as Can Themba and Casey Motsisi reflected desperate affirmations amid desperate urban dislocations. [...]

This is an excerpt from The New Century of South African Short Stories, by Michael Chapman.

Title: The New Century of South African Short Stories
Editor: Michael Chapman
Type: Fiktion
Imprint: Ad Donker Publishers
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Cape Town, South Africa 2010
ISBN 9780868522272 / ISBN 978-0-86852-227-2
Softcover, 16 x 22 cm, 353 pages