JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #80
December 9, 2021
Edgar Allan Poe’s "Single Effect" theory for storytelling came up at the workshop recently, and I found a blog post by the author Aatif Rashid on the Kenyon Review site making a weird case against the idea. Poe famously outlined the purpose of a short story is to elicit a specific and pre-planned effect in the reader, and every aspect of the story should help build toward that effect. Rashid argues against this idea, explaining how Roland Barthes, in his disquisition on Honoré de Balzac’s "Sarrasine" in his critical work S/Z, exploded the idea that any work of fiction can ever have a single effect. Consequent of Rashid’s reading of Barthes, fiction writers should embrace "that each word we use carries multiple significations" and "revel in the multiple possible interpretations of our own work."
While there is some merit to noticing that readers will not respond uniformly to fictive depictions, I think Rashid is confounding a story’s effect with its interpretation or meaning. Roland Barthes was very specifically working within a tradition of critical interpretation, where the critic’s task is to uncover the literary meaning of a work of literature. Barthes was also leading the shift from structuralist approaches for this endeavor to post-structuralist approaches (which continue to dominate literary criticism today), wherein critics decided that interpretation was too complicated a task to ground in any kind of philosophical underpinning and instead chose to open up the activity of meaning-making to all and sundry. Hence the domination of the reader (that is, the critic--sweet job security!) as the ultimate generator of interpretation and meaning for literary criticism in the latter half of the twentieth century.
However, a story’s effect is not its meaning. A tale of horror might frighten readers, but it would be incoherent to claim that the meaning of the story is the emotion of fear. According to Poe, it should be toward a culminating emotional impact that every part of the story be directed, but this says nothing about the meaning or interpretation any of it might have. Although Poe was a critic as well as a writer, and in fact the idea of the single effect came about in a work of criticism, his purpose was not interpretation, as is the purpose of the modern critic, but aesthetic appreciation. His essay does not expound the meaning of Hawthorne’s stories, but the manner by which their construction achieves an aesthetic purpose. In other words, how they achieve their effects.
There may be a good argument to complicate Poe’s theory of the single effect, but I don’t think Rashid’s argument is it. Poe’s theory has dominated our conception of the short story over the past century and a half or more, and we can see how it even informs the way we think about flash and micro fiction. There’s a world of difference between writers and critics in what they should care about, and maybe someday my own inchoate school of criticism might gain some purchase within the temple of Academe and put an end to the regnancy of interpretive criticism.
Links:
Aatif Rashid’s blog post, "Against the Single Effect"
Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Importance of the Single Effect in the Prose Tale"
Poe’s "Angry Johnny"