The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles

Abstract

Q'VER THE PAST HUNDRED years the short story cycle has become something of a sub-genre within the Canadian short story. This is not to argue that the story cycle has been ignored by American and British writers ( or by French, Australian, and Russian writers, or, for that matter, by the writers of any other national literature) — it hasn't — only that the form has held a special attraction for Canadian writers. Doubtless there are shared reasons for the story cycle's current popularity internationally and in Canada, even such commercial reasons as its attraction for publishers who assume that readers are more comfortable with the linkages of the cycle than with the discontinuities of a miscellany. But such matters are not within this paper's literary-historical and theoretical scope. The present study sketches the history of the story cycle in Canada, gives an idea of its diversity and continuing popularity, considers some of the fundamental questions about this comparatively new form, and concludes with an illustrative analysis of the function of one important aspect of story cycles, their concluding stories. Although the short story is the youngest of genres, beginning only in the early nineteenth century, literary historians and theorists often begin their discussions by casting back to the Story of Job, even to pre-literate oral history, so that the epic poems of various cultures are made to seem proto short story cycles. Thus academics dress their new subject in the respectable robes of a literary history. Those interested in the English-Canadian short story cycle can hesitantly claim predecessors in the works of early writers of epistolary novels, collections of letters, and books of loosely linked sketches : Frances Brooke's A History of Emily Montague (1769), Thomas McCulloch's Letters of Mephibosheth Stepsure (serialized 1821-23), Thomas Chandler Haliburton's The Clockmaker (1836), and the writings of Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. Such writings may indeed anticipate the story cycle, but only to the extent that the political speeches of Joseph Howe to Mechanics' Institutes in eastern Canada in the mid-nineteenth century and, a little later, those of Sir John A. Macdonald on the necessity of Confederation can be said to constitute the beginnings of the essay in Canada. Moreover, much of the serially published and sequentially organized writings of the nineteenth and early-twen-

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