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Taking the Novella out of the Canadian Closet

John Calabro

If you check your bookshelves at home, or go to a bookstore or even recall classic literary works you studied in school, you are bound to have come across literary novellas.

That Canadian writers have distinguished themselves quite well in prose is not a question, and thanks to writers like Morley Callaghan, Mordecai Richler, Alice Monroe, Alistair Macleod and many, many others, Canada has developed an international reputation of great writing in the short story format, but when it comes to Canadian novellas published as stand-alone books, the form is still an enigma, few people accept the genre or its authors.

Why should they, when their own authors see the genre as a dirty little secret and deride the form? Stephen King calls it, “… an ill-defined and disreputable literary Banana Republic.” Dan Rhodes, a champion of the novella says that he “… loathes the word novella… [because it is]… so frilly …” He continues, “Call it anything, slim volume, short novel, anything but novella.” George Fetherling recalls that literary tough guy Hugh Garner would not call his short books novellas because the term was “artsy-fartsy, namby-pamby.”

The novella has been described as “Un-publishable in nature, too long for a magazine and too short for book publishing.” Novella authors, more often than not, are either rejected outright or told to lengthen their work to a more marketable ‘novel’ size. Sympathetic Canadian and American publishers, who do accept the genre, will often bundle the novella with other short pieces in order to add commercial bulk. As such the novella find itself banished to niche and genre markets such as Science Fiction, Romance, or Mystery, while the literary genre languishes in obscurity, hidden in a Canadian literary closet of its own making.

Unfortunately this antipathy is not only reserved for Canada, the Americans have the same prejudices and presently only Melville press, a small independent NY based publisher focuses on classic and contemporary novellas as stand-alone works. The UK is the same. The Guardian Books Blog from that country notices that “[m]ost publishers’ upcoming catalogues continue to be dominated by books that adhere to the traditional long form. A lack of affection towards the novella endures.” Yet the literary novella has been a long accepted tradition in many other parts of the world. There, it is a unique literary form worthy of respect and more importantly, worthy of being published and seriously studied as a standalone piece of literature.  This lack of recognition and literary paranoia about a genre that although fairly new, has solid roots in the world of literature is a bit of a mystery. Let’s look at this enigmatic form

The term novella began as a Latin adjective, ‘novellas’ meaning young or new, as applied to farming. From there it became an accepted term to denote anything that was new or young. It became a noun in the 6^th century and as such a “novella” was a newly planted tree.  The bridge to a more modern definition is found with Justinian who in the 12^th Century used the word novella to denote new laws. It enters the Middle Ages in Italy to mean “the news.” The term becomes part of the literary world with Boccacio who uses the word in different ways such as, “a piece of news, a recently acquired story, or an unusual story.” At that point we first hear the term “novellar” to tell a story. The early written short stories, and precursors of the novella as we know it, are found in the frame tales of Renaissance Literature where the oral form of reciting stories begins to merge with the written one.

Renaissance Novellas were a collection of short prosaic tales held together within a larger story called ‘the frame.’  We have many examples of that genre. Although it first came to prominence with The Arabian Nights, Giovanni Boccacio’s The Decameron (1351) made this type of writing famous. The frame in Decameron has seven women and three men, escaping the Black Death of 1348, and making their way to Florence, where they settle in a villa. Each person tells one story (the novella) for each of the ten days the group will be together, creating 100 short stories, most of them quite short of 4 or 5 pages. The tales are divided around themes and like most of the oral stories of the day, tales of misfortunes with a twist, tales of great happiness, of achievement, of loss, of desire, of love with happy endings and those without, of treachery between husbands and wives (scandalous). Nevertheless he advances the art of public storytelling in Italian, a fairly new and unsophisticated language at that point. That novella format was later copied throughout Europe where it flourished for quite a while. All of them retain the frame and the stories within a story concept in an attempt to duplicate Bocaccio’s success.

The development of the novella really takes flight about 250 years later with Miguel de Cervantes the author of Don Quixote who also wrote a book of novellas called Exemplary Novellas (1612).  There are 12 novellas in the collection but the frame is now gone, the stories stand on their own and they are much longer, some at 70 pages are closer in length to the modern novella, the stories become less about nobility and more about the common man and woman, relying less on the retelling of past stories and more in the creating of new narratives and capturing the personalities and dialogues that surrounded the author. Cervantes boasts:

I am the first who has written novels in the Spanish language, though many have appeared among us, all of them translated from foreign authors. But these are my own, neither imitated nor stolen from anyone; my genius has engendered them, my pen has brought them forth.

To be fair some of them were still very much influenced by Renaissance Novellas, and dealt more with the idealized world that was part of the heroic, chivalric literature of the 16^th century. But some of the stories have a more contemporary, more realistic plot and characters, as well as current and local dialogue. He uses irony to a greater extent. He, like Boccacio, was a true literary innovator.

A hundred and fifty years later we find Voltaire’s Candide written in 1759. That one and other French “conte”, short story/novella hybrids of that time continue to bridge the gap between the short story and the novella. By structuring Candide as a novella, Voltaire avoided the strict format of the classical literature of the day. The story in that book is of a journey where Candide, the main character, goes from a world of innocence to a world of experience, leading him to a final epiphany that happiness is arrived at through hard-work, honesty and practicality. The themes revolve around the fact that life on earth can be hell and that is up to the individual to deal with it. Thematically this book gets closer to the modern novella.

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