The Short Story as Quintessence: Some Stories of Rabindranath Tagore

                                                            Sreemati Mukherjee

                                              

The short story as a genre made a belated entry into the world of European genres. In its earlier avatars it existed as the fabliau, the animal fables, the Panchatantra stories, the stories of the Arabian nights, as numerous contes, nouvelles and novellas.  It is from the term novella or novelle that the word novel is derived. Having had a career in Boccaccio’s Decameron and Margaret de Navarre’s Heptameron, it surfaced as a full fledged genre in the nineteenth century in the writings of Chekov and Maupassant. Overseas, in America, the short story made an appearance in Edgar Allan Poe, Melville and Hawthorne.

The short story in India and in Bengal in particular, has had a pretty prolific career. Bankim Chandra authored some short fiction, but it is Rabindranath Tagore who took it to a level of thematic and formal fulfillment. The three stories that I have chosen for discussion in this essay are Kabuliwala, Hungry Stone and Subha, which are quite disparate in their focus and approach, attesting thereby to the multifarious reach of Tagore’s art and imagination. Of these, Kabuliwala and Subha are written in what we call the realist mode, while Hungry Stone is conceived within a supernatural or fantastic mode.

In his short but succinct introduction to the short story Ian Reid informs us that the short story is characterized by three formal features, which are “unity of impression,” “moment of crisis” and “symmetry of design.”¹ Symmetry of design refers to an Aristotelian “beginning” “middle” and “end” favored by short story critics like Edgar Allan Poe, who stressed a  tight knit structure and also emphasized the need for closure or a proper ending.  In The Modernist Short Story Dominic Head posits that the short story is a modernist genre, corresponding to the fragmented quality of modern existence, that the span of the story’s events is usually a day as it is in modernist novels like Mrs. Dalloway and Ulysses,² and that in keeping with the experimental and innovative aesthetics of the modern project in Art,  it is also extremely self reflexive or self conscious in its artistry.³ Head also points out that Chekov claimed that his stories did not have any “end” but were all “middle” instead.³ Head also points out that in order to work within economical means the short story might use “ellipsis” ⁴ and “resonance”⁵ as artistic strategies.