Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  There is a general impression that the sentence "it was a dark and stormy night" is a laughably bad way to start a novel. This impression is advanced by the Edward Bulwer-Lytton award for the best/worst deliberately bad sentence and by our collective memory of Snoopy, with his typewriter on top of the doghouse, typing exactly those words.  The novel that starts that way (sort of) is Bulwer-Lytton's PAUL CLIFFORD (1830).  I saw "sort of" because there is no period at the end of the word "night." Snoopy puts a period there. People quote THAT as if it were a laughably bad sentence. It isn't. That alone would be a fine terse mood-setting sentence. Edgar Allen Poe used exactly those words, with a period at the end, in a story he wrote one year later.  The actual sentence Bulwer-Lytton wrote, though, was:   "It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents -- except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind wh...

Certainly it is easy to create a literary aesthetics of brevity. The haiku and the aphorism have their admirers. Ernest Hemingway is widely thought to have invented a perfect short story in the form of a classified ad: "For sale, baby shoes, never used." Edgar Allen Poe famously developed a theory for why short stories are superior to novels. His explanation of that theory was, IMHO, longer winded than it had to be. The point, though, was that a story should have a unitary impact and this could be achieved best with a work that could be read in a single sitting. Yet one shouldn't let the aesthetics of the short haul have the last word. The world has room for Melville's and Tolstoy's and Victor Hugo's novels, and creating a Reader's Digest version thereof will never be the same. As for Hemingway's six word story? He didn't really write it. It is the work of a playwright named  John deGroot who created a one-actor play about "Papa...