Swords and Dark Magic: C.J. Cherryh's "A Wizard of Wiscezan" and the Narrative Capacities of Short Fiction

Today I'm continuing my extended review of the anthology, Swords and Dark Magic, edited by Jonathan Strahan and Lou Anders. I realize my posts on the individual stories have been less reviews and more "seed reflections" on each story from which spring this or that writing related train of thought. And so, as my final post in this series, I plan on doing a general review of the entire anthology. Here is a link to all the posts I've written on this anthology thus far: An Extended Review of Swords and Dark Magic

If you're coming to this series just now, you might want to check out this overall review: Review of Swords and Dark Magic on SFFWorld. Here's another on on SF Site: Review of Swords and Dark Magic on SF Site

The story I'm discussing today is C.J. Cherryh's, "A Wizard of Wiscezan." 

Some summary: In the city of Wiscezan-on-Eld the Duchess has died. Her rule has been replaced by a Duke who happens to be influenced by an evil wizard. The story is the "coming into maturity tale" of an apprentice wizard who helps a stranger confront the Duke and the evil wizard.

This story seemed slightly "bloated," if you will. It felt as if the core narrative was weighed down by non-essentials. There were characters who, though interesting, didn't to serve any specific narrative function. I know what you're going to say: do characters need to serve a narrative function? Are all characters mere tools? Can't characters just be dropped into a narrative for the hell of it? 

In a novel, I think, minor and incidental characters are just fine, but not in short stories. Let me explain through a brief jaunt into the history of the novel. 

The first narratives that began resembling our modern novels were long affairs, episodic in nature, more akin to what we would consider a short story collection than a novel. They were the Latin novels of writers like Petronius and Apuleius. These were long narratives that were structured like this. This happened. And then, this happened. And next, this happened. And after that, this happened, and so on. In these "Latin novels," events just poured forth. Thus, the main characters had strange encounters that sometimes cohered together and other times did not.

Most of genre fiction, in terms of style, follows the lead of the 19th century novel, what we would call "realism." Unlike in Latin novels, in "realistic" novels events don't just happen or pile up. Misfortunes and fortunes don't just continually happen to characters. 

In the 19th century novel and the "realistic" style derived from it, the prime aesthetic aspiration is to represent the world as it is experienced in lived life, shaded by such things as agency, lack of agency, causality, and time; accordingly, it includes characters ranging from every social level. 

Characters make decisions and have decisions made for them; they are in control and sometimes unforeseen circumstances take control away from them.  And due to its aspirations to represent the world accurately, "realistic" novels tends to include main characters, minor characters, and incidental characters in our lives and societies.

O.k.. Enough history of the novel. What does this have to do with C.J. Cherryh's short story, "A Wizard in Wiscezan"? Why is the short story bloated? 

Well, I think this short story is trying to be a novel. How so? In order to explain, let me consider all of the characters this short story tries to include: a dead Duchess, a distant King, a usurping Duke, an adviser to the usurping duke who has possessed him with a demon spirit, a demon spirit, a good wizard, a bunch of street urchins who serve the good wizard, a boy the good wizard is training, the nephew of the dead Duchess, and so forth. 

Anything notable about this list of characters? You have here, pretty much, every level of society: the King down to the street urchins.

It's not a hard and fast rule, but short stories cannot effectively dramatize all these characters; short fictions struggle to represent full societies. Sure, elements from every facet of a society are bound to infiltrate the narrative space of a short story; however, the writer has to be selective, to cordon off a "slice" of society capable of being fully explored within the narrative limits of the short fiction genre.

I'm not going to take the space here to outline what I think a short story can do better than a novel. Another post, another time. 

But here is where I think "A Wizard of Wiscezan" goes wrong: it tries to immerse us in an entire world, a fully formed world. Fantasists love to do this. The novel is the perfect technology for doing this. And yet--and yet the short story isn't. With a short story, the aesthetic effect is less the "full picture" of a world, or a society, and more a fleeting glimpse--a glimpse through a keyhole rather a panoramic vista our eyes drink up. 

In this story Cherryh tries to get us to see the whole world through "the keyhole of the short story genre." The result is a lot of squinting.