The Synchronic Series as the Origin of the Modernist Short Story (1996)

Story collections by James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield, and D. H. Lawrence, and across the Atlantic by William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson, and Ernest Hemingway, all helped define a new style of short fiction. A key to this stylistic and thematic is that short fiction of the modernist era is often clearly a collection: much of the cumulative power and effect of Dubliners or In Our Time comes from the fact that we read the individual stories in relation to each other. Sometimes continuing characters or recurring settings work toward this relationship. A good deal of the complexity and innovation of modernist short fiction derives from this interconnectedness. What many do not realize, however, is that there was a non-modernist model for precisely this kind of short story collection. This was a popular and common story structure that looked just like a modernist short story cycle except that it did not share the lofty artistic goals. I call the non-modernist analog a Despite many approaches and styles, the basic criteria for the synchronic series are always the same: each story is simultaneously both independent from (synchronic) and interdependent with (a series) all the other stories. This format became ubiquitous at the turn of the century because of shifts in the production and consumption of periodicals. Though the synchronic series looks like very non-modernist, old-fashioned texts, when examined carefully, it reveals radical possibilities, which will be discussed at length. Many favorite stories--Genesis, The Odyssey, 1,001 Arabian Nights, and Don Quixote, to name a few--resemble the above definition of the synchronic series. However, none of them grew out of the specific historical circumstances that produced the publishing boom at the turn of the century. This boom, in turn, led to some unique properties. Thus, the term synchronic series is not applicable to any story that is connected but still somewhat separate; it applies only to fiction shaped by unique cultural and economic influences, as I will explain below. The synchronic series format took hold with the success of Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories, beginning in July of 1891. The format was no accident. Conan Doyle took credit for inventing it and made no bones about exploiting the independent/interdependent paradox. In a 1900 interview cited in Richard Lancelyn Green's introduction to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle explained that, it had occurred to him that serial stories in magazines were a mistake because if the first number was missed the readers were debarred from the story, and he therefore thought of writing a serial without appearing to do so, with each instalment complete in itself and capable of being read on its own while each retained a connecting link with the one before and the one that was to come by means of its leading characters. (xiv) The popularity of Conan Doyle's proposed format was truly unprecedented. Ostensibly, most of the high modernists were quite different from their more popular anti-modernist contemporaries. According to their own description, modernism sought a break from traditional forms and a move toward a more experimental, self-reflexive, deliberate aesthetic. The urbane, ultra-literary modernists--Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Lawrence, and others--did not cater to the uneducated masses. Nevertheless, the immensely popular synchronic series looks identical to the modernist short story collection, and this prominent model tells us that reports of a modern stylistic are greatly exaggerated. That the revolution was actually an adaptation is not so surprising. Some modernists freely admitted influence from other artistic movements. For example, James Joyce was extremely fond of co-opting popular media forms for his own ends. …