Falling short of reading: intention and innovation in the short story

Abstract

Julio Cortázar defines the short story as a genre that creates unpredictable effects on the reader through its poetical dynamics. While this definition foregrounds the unforeseeable elements of the genre, Cortázar also emphasizes that the short story operates in fore-seen parameters. He draws our attention to the role of the reader in a particular form enabled by the brevity of the genre. In Cortázar’s formulation, the spherity of the short story posits the shortness as the basic fore-seen parameter of the genre in which the same spherity creates a possibility of the unforeseen by forcing its parameters. In 2004, thirty five years after the publication of Cortázar’s article, The Oxford Literary Review published a special issue on The Blind Short Story. The issue aimed to open a new discussion on the notions of enlightenment and epiphany in the short story, questioning the theoretical discussions that center on the visual images. Since the brevity of the short story has been conceived as a device to open gaps starting with the first theoretical attempts to define the genre in the nineteenth century, the reader of the genre has been expected to reach a totality from its episodic structure. Thus the reader’s success has often been considered to depend on his/her visual abilities of foreseeing the plot. Departing from the tendency to look for truth and inspired by Cortázar’s conceptualization of the unforeseen effects along with the discussions on „the blind short story”, this article attempts to understand the experience of reading the genre as ignorance and its readers as short-sighted detectives.