The original sense of the word “entertainment” is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads. I can’t think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful exchange, of reciprocal sustenance, of welcome offered, of grasp and interrelationship, of a slender span of bilateral attention along which things are given and received, still animate the word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests, ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.
At some point, inevitably, as generations of hosts entertained generations of guests with banquets and feasts and displays of artifice, the idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word. And along with pleasure (just as inevitably, I suppose) came disapproval, a sense of hollowness and hangover, the saturnine doubtfulness that attaches to delight and artifice and show: to pleasure, that ambiguous gift. It’s partly the doubtfulness of pleasure that taints the name of entertainment. Pleasure is unreliable and transient. Pleasure is Lucy with the football. Pleasure is easily synthesized, mass-produced, individually wrapped. Its benefits do not endure, and so we come to mistrust them, or our taste for them.
The other taint is that of passivity. At some point in its history, the idea of entertainment lost its sense of mutuality, of exchange. One either entertains or is entertained, is the actor or the fan. As with all one-way relationships, grave imbalances accrue. The entertainer balloons with a dangerous need for approval, validation, love, and box office; while the one entertained sinks into a passive spectatorship, vacantly munching great big salty handfuls right from the foil bag. We can’t take pleasure in a work of art, not in good conscience, without accepting the implicit intention of the artist to please us. But somewhere along the course of the past century or so, as the great machinery of pleasure came online, turning out products that, however pleasurable, suffer increasingly from the ills of mass manufacture—spurious innovation, inferior materials, alienated labor, and an excess of market research—that intention came to seem suspect, unworthy, and somehow cold and hungry at its core, like the eyes of a brilliant comedian. Lunch counters, muffler shops, dinner theaters, they aim to please; but writers? No self-respecting literary genius, even an occasional maker of avowed entertainments like Graham Greene, would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an “entertainer.” An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing “She’s a Lady” to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underpants up onto the stage.
Yet entertainment—as I define it, pleasure and all—remains the only sure means we have of bridging, or at least of feeling as if we have bridged, the gulf of consciousness that separates each of us from everybody else. The best response to those who would cheapen and exploit it is not to disparage or repudiate but to reclaim entertainment as a job fit for artists and for audiences, a two-way exchange of attention, experience, and the universal hunger for connection.
Of all the means writers of fiction have devised for spanning the chasm between two human skulls, the short story maps the most efficient path. Cartographers employ different types of maps—political, topographic, dot—to emphasize different kinds of information. These different types are complementary; taken together they increase our understanding. I would like to argue for the common-sense proposition that, in constructing our fictional maps as short-story writers, we are foolish to restrict ourselves to one type or category.
Imagine that, sometime about 1950, it had been decided, collectively, informally, a little at a time, but with finality, to proscribe every kind of novel but the nurse romance from the canon of the future. Not merely from the critical canon, but from the store racks and library shelves as well. Nobody could be paid, published, lionized, or cherished among the gods of literature for writing any kind of fiction other than nurse romances. Now, because of my faith and pride in the diverse and rigorous brilliance of American writers of the last half century, I do believe that from this bizarre decision, in this theoretical America, a dozen or more authentic masterpieces would have emerged. Thomas Pynchon’s Blitz Nurse, for example, and Cynthia Ozick’s Ruth Puttermesser, R.N. One imagines, however, that this particular genre—that any genre, even one far less circumscribed in its elements and possibilities than the nurse romance—would have paled somewhat by now. In that oddly diminished world, somebody, somewhere, is laying down his copy of Dr. Kavalier & Nurse Clay with a weary sigh.
Instead of “the novel” and “the nurse romance”, try this little thought experiment with “jazz” and “the bossanova”, or with “cinema” and “fish-out-of-water comedies”. Now go ahead and try it with “short fiction” and “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story”.
Suddenly you find yourself sitting right back in your very own universe.
Okay, I confess. I am that bored reader, in that circumscribed world, laying aside his book with a sigh; and the book is my own, and it is filled with my own short stories, plotless and sparkling with epiphanic dew. It was in large part a result of a crisis in my own attitude toward my work in the short-story form that sent me back into the stream of alternate time, back to the world as it was before we all made that fateful and perverse decision.
As late as about 1950, if you referred to “short fiction”, you might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, science fiction, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war, or historical story; the romance story. All these genres and others have rich traditions in America, reaching straight back to Poe and Hawthorne, our first great practitioners of the form. A glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales turns up important genre work by Balzac, Wharton, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain, Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of modernism, the very source of the moment-of-truth story that, like Homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out all its rivals. One of the pioneers of the modern “psychological” short story as we now generally understand it, Henry James (famously derided by critic Maxwell Geismar as merely “a major entertainer”), wrote so many out-and-out ghost stories that they fill an entire book. “Genre” short stories were published not only by the unabashedly entertaining pulps, which gave us Hammett, Chandler, and Lovecraft among a very few other writers now enshrined more or less safely in the canon, but also in the great “slick” magazines of the time: the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Collier’s, Liberty, and even the New Yorker, that proud bastion of the moment-of-truth story that has only recently, and not without controversy, made room in its august confines for the likes of Stephen King.
Over the course of the twentieth century the desire of writers and critics alike to strip away the sticky compound of Orange Crush and Raisinets that encrusts the idea of entertainment, and thus of literature as entertainment, radically reduced our understanding of the kinds of short stories that belong in prestigious magazines or yearly anthologies of the best American short stories. Thanks to the heavy reliance of the new mass media (film, then radio and TV) on adapting and exploiting the more plot-centered literary genres—from Star Wars to Pirates of the Caribbean, every blockbuster summer film of the past twenty years, almost without exception, fits safely into one or another of the old standby categories—“genre” absorbed the fatal stain of entertainment. Writers—among them some of our finest—kept turning out short stories of post-apocalypse America or Arizona gunmen or hard-boiled detection. But they could no longer hope to see their work published in top-drawer literary magazines, and in the meantime the pulps and the slicks alike dried up, blew away, or stopped publishing short fiction entirely.
And so as with our idea of entertainment, our idea of genre—one of those French words, like crêpe, that no one can pronounce both correctly and without sounding pretentious—is of a thing fundamentally, perhaps inherently debased, infantile, commercialized, unworthy of the serious person’s attention. The undoubted