A matter of taste

 A friend and I have been talking about stories. He suspects that I don’t really like stories and would rather read an essay than a novel.

His suggestion made me realize that we like different kinds of stories and that we might not even be talking about the same thing when we talk about a “story.”

In my mind, one of the great American short story writers has to be Guy Davenport. I mentioned his story “John Charles Tapner” in these notes on Sept. 23, 2021. Tapner was the last man hanged on the isle of Guernsey. Victor Hugo, the great French novelist who was a ferocious opponent of capital punishment, came to investigate.

Hugo’s visit to Guernsey is a fact. And the meeting of a scandalous, flamboyant, wealthy world-famous French author, then in exile, with an insular, conservative, English-speaking community had to have been interesting.

But what exactly was that encounter like?

Davenport’s story provides an answer. It is hard to distinguish, in Davenport’s telling of it, what is fact and what is imagined. 

Fact and fiction are seamless. To me, that’s artistry. To be able to give an imaginative account of a particular event that is suggestive of the way things are is something that I’d call “art.”

To my friend, that seamless blend of fact and fiction is an incidental feature of the story. He values other things.

Is that just a matter of taste?