Short Story Writers :: Writers Literature Fusco Essays

sententious Story WritersAnd then I woke up.Thus goes the kind of trick endpoint that every first year writing student is told to avoid, a discipline of cheap theatrics and poor craftsmanship.Historically, this kind of final stage is often associated with Guy de Maupassant, the fecund French writer of the nineteenth century, or his 20th century American heir app bent, O. Henry (William S. Porter).In this well researched and at moments insightful book, Richard Fusco argues that Maupassants bad tap as first and foremost the inventor and disseminator of the trick finis is undeserved.What Fusco feels Maupassant does deserve is recognition as perhaps the single most fundamental influence on American short written report writers of the late 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), h is overall aim seems finally too dependent on an understanding of trick ending which does not make necessary distinctions, and is therefore superficial enough to reserve nearly any writer one cares to name. Not that Fusco doesnt differentiate among 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 placement 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 shifting his terms from trick endings to discovery points, Fusco deprives his bloodline of its specificity and thus its power. To cite one example Fusco argues that Maupassant and Bierce were similar in that they lucky fictive structures that depended on last-second, ironic reversals in the readers perception.He then uses this theorized affinity to compare M aupassants much-anthologized The Necklace to the that of Bierces equally popular Occurrence at automobile horn creek Bridge.In analyzing these (and other) stories by the two writers, Fusco uses Poes unity of effect 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 virtually in the section where Peyton first falls from the bridge (and, in reality, dies) to commence all the information necessary to correctly interpret the rest of the story as an hallucination.