Short Story Writers :: Writers Literature Fusco Essays

Short Story WritersAnd then I woke up.Thus goes the kind of trick ending that every first grade writing student is told to avoid, a mark of cheap theatrics and poor craftsmanship.Historic anyy, this kind of ending is often associated with Guy de Maupassant, the prolific French writer of the 19th century, or his 20th century American heir apparent, O. Henry (William S. Porter).In this well researched and at moments insightful book, Richard Fusco argues that Maupassants bad rap as first and foremost the inventor and disseminator of the trick ending is undeserved.What Fusco feels Maupassant does deserve is recognition as perhaps the single most important influence on American short story writers of the belated 19th and early 20th century, particularly Ambrose Bierce, Kate Chopin, Henry James, and of course O. Henry.However, even as Fuscos readings of these writers are laudable in their thoroughness (with the exception of his treatment of O. Henry), his overall disputation seems fina lly too strung-out on an understanding of trick ending which does not make necessary distinctions, and is therefore superficial enough to accommodate almost any writer one cares to name. Not that Fusco doesnt differentiate between types of trick endings.In fact, he develops his own seven categories of stories--from the simplest (linear) to most complex (sinusoidal)--based on their varying positioning and number of discovery points for the reader.The first two chapters, where Fusco limits himself to a thorough and interesting analysis of narrative structure in Maupassant, are the best of the book.However, in alter his terms from trick endings to discovery points, Fusco deprives his argument of its specificity and thus its power. To cite one example Fusco argues that Maupassant and Bierce were similar in that they favored fictive structures that depended on last-second, ironic reversals in the readers perception.He then uses this theorized similarity to compare Maupassants much-an thologized The Necklace to the that of Bierces equally popular Occurrence at schnoz Creek Bridge.In analyzing these (and other) stories by the two writers, Fusco uses Poes unity of heart and soul as a synonym for discovery point (which is in itself too reductionist a reading of what Poe meant).However, unity of effect for Maupassant in The Necklace is utterly dependent on information unavailable to the reader, i.e., that the necklace is paste, and thus the readers discovery depends entirely on an absence, a trick of concealment, as in a bad murder mystery.In Owl Creek, on the other hand, one need only read closely in the section where Peyton first falls from the bridge (and, in reality, dies) to obtain all the information necessary to correctly interpret the rest of the story as an hallucination.