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Smoking, a Short Story...

By Katherine Ailes

 

Smoking a short story

 

Chopin – An Egyptian Cigarette; Rhys – Mannequin; Mansfield – Bliss; Olive Schreiner – The Buddhist Priest’s Wife

 

1. the box of cigarettes and the short story as a form

2. the sublimity of cigarettes and how this ties to the form of the short story

3. the cigarette as a character

4. the cigarette and the woman in the short story

 

1.

The anthology or sequence of short stories is analogous to a box of cigarettes. Cigarettes as uniform, but each one promises a new experience according to setting, atmosphere, motivation etc. Yet each one is also a recapitulation of all the cigarettes smoked before, inviting cross-reference of personal experience. Similarly short stories in collection invite recollection of those read before and those promised in the future; some directly e.g. George Egerton’s ‘A Cross Line’ and Borgia Smudgiton’s ‘She-Notes’, parodying previous experience and inviting the return to that experience under a new situation. Some less obtrusively; Joyce’s Dubliners, bringing back old characters in new situations, Isherwood and Upward’s Mortmere Stories, reinventing the previous stories with each new one.

     

      In An Egyptian Cigarette we are told of the cigarette packet ‘the box was covered with glazed, yellow paper’, conjuring connotations of French novels bound in their yellow paper jackets to both reveal and conceal their lascivious or socially transgressive contents, just as the cigarette packet in the story conceals a more sensual narrative within its contents than the wrapper suggests, but a narrative simultaneously concealed because it is played out internally and privately in a dream. Also carries connotations of The Yellow Book in which Chopin and many of her contempories were being published.

Like the short story, cigarettes work against a culture of longevity as a central value. The cigarette experience in itself is brief, as is the short story. But in its brevity, the cigarette itself is a rescued moment in time, a hiatus against the continuation of time. It suspends the ongoing movement of time and instigates a more personal ellipsis, an inhalation of time as opposed to an extension. E.g. ‘An Egyptian Cigarette’ – we pass through fifteen minutes of time a propos the diegetic reality, but within this time the female protagonist passes through an eternity, the trajectory of which is penetrative rather than elongative; within herself there is an opening into a new realm of personal time where from the very outset of the internal digression the narrative is placed within a narratively impossible time-frame, immediately ‘I have lain here all day with my face in the sand’ and later ‘How slow the hours drag! It seems to me that I have lain here for days in the sand.’ This internal expansion of time is defined by the length of time taken to smoke one cigarette, from ‘I took one long inspiration of the Egyptian cigarette... I took another deep inhalation of the cigarette’ to ‘only the stub of the one I had smoked remained.’

     

      The fact that this cigarette is one in a packet defers definition of the narrative (another trope of the short story?); within the narrative are contained possibilities of more narratives: ‘As I looked at the cigarettes in their pale wrappers, I wondered what other visions they might hold for me; what might I not find in their mystic fumes? Perhaps a vision of celestial peace; a dream of hopes fulfilled; a taste of rapture, such as had not entered my mind to conceive.’ The end of the short story must perforce negate these potential narratives and the protagonist destroys the remaining cigarettes.

 

      Abruptness of ending short stores – ref. the preeminent condition of smoking being the belief that one can stop at any moment. But the short story often recapitulates and fails to reach a conclusion of narrative, just as the smoker fails to smoke one last cigarette (Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo).

The brevity of the short story form does not allow for excessive digressions yet cigarettes are given a hallowed space, especially in AEC. The cigarette, like the short story, is a hiatus. Smoking in a short story is thus a hiatus within a hiatus; a moment of temporal penetration rather than elongation. Cigarettes as an ellipsis?

 

2.

Richard Klein’s study of the cultural and historical role of cigarettes is entitled ‘Cigarettes are Sublime’, referring specifically to Kant’s definition of the sublime as ‘that aesthetic satisfaction which includes as one of its moments a negative experience, a shock, a blockage, an intimation of mortality.’

The short story often centres around just such a moment, e.g. Schreiner’s ABPW; the dislocating sensation at encapsulating a conversation between the female protagonist and a male friend within the book-ends of two descriptions of her in death. The aesthetic satisfaction that this coherence creates is tainted by the uneasy proximity of a character juxtaposed in life and death. The intervening conversation is punctuated with constant references to smoking. Like Kant’s definition of the sublime, and Klein’s interpretation of this to the cigarette as ’a darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity’, our reading of the conversation is similarly tainted with apprehensions of mortality; even within their diegetic conversation the conversationists are repeatedly drawn to issues of religion, philosophy and the correct way to expend the amount of life left to them, ‘the kind of vis intertiae that creeps over one as one grows older that sends one back to the old place’.

In AEC the cigarette forms the impetus and setting for the narrative, but smoking is also a frequent background action in short stories

 

3.

In ABPW the cigarettes smoked form an interaction between the two conversationists, the cigarettes themselves enter into the dialogue. Klein describes the cigarette’s role in story-telling as:

‘The cigarette is analogous to what linguists call a shifter, like the word I; this device for expressing the irreducible particularity of my innermost self is universally available to every speaker and is thus the least particular thing in the world. The smoker manipulates the cigarette, like the word I, to tell stories to herself about herself – or to an other.’

This can be applied to ABPW, where the cigarette introduces the dialogue on social gender conventions as well as prefiguring a more personal question as to the relationship between the two conversationists, ‘Won’t you take one yourself? I know you object to smoking with men, but you can make an exception in my case.’

‘You can light it from mine.’ The interaction over the cigarette prefigures the physical interaction that will conclude this central section of the narrative; the kiss.

 

      The dialogue enacted between cigarette and smoker. In An Egyptian Cigarette the body of the story is built around this dialogue, which also opens up other dialogues with the self and with other social groups and conventions.

 

4.

The cigarette is feminine, from the diminutive feminine of cigar (French).

In France women achieved the right to vote in April 1945, two weeks after they first received cigarette rations.

Gypsy Carmen as the first figure in literature to be identified with cigarettes. Originally in Prosper Mérimée’s novella Carmen (1845) then in Bizet’s libretto (1875). The novella opens with Don José’s description of the cigarette factory where Carmen works, and the first act of Bizet’s opera has the cigarières leaving work, ‘appear , smoking cigarettes, and come slowly into the square.’ The chorus then sings a love song of cigarettes.

Sherlock Holmes – the pipe becomes a part of his character; smoking and playing the violin are the tempestuous and irrational foils to his overtly rational mind.

 

      Women in short fiction (especially written by women) use cigarettes to assert an equality with their masculine counterparts and take on a masculine role e.g. in Victoria Cross’s Theodora, when Theodora dresses herself in the jacket and fez of a Turkish man and the narrator, Ray, states ‘I did offer her a cigarette, to enhance the effect’, and as she lights the cigarette, the completion of which embodies the socially assumed masculine dominance enacted by Theodora, Ray states that ‘I first said, or rather an involuntary, unrecognised voice within me said, “It is no good; whatever happens I must have you.”’ The cigarette has embodied that within Theodora that makes her desirable to Ray and initiated a new dialogue between the two characters.

 

      Equally in AEC in smoking the female protagonist enters the previously esoteric masculine circles, ‘if you will permit me to slip into your smoking den. Some of the women here detest the odour of cigarettes.’ However within this sentence there is a discreet complication of the gender-boundaries, as her actions are less bounded by proprieties of gender, and more by the taste of the individual. The woman wishes to smoke, a traditionally masculine role, but her entrance into the masculine space is not motivated by desire for gender contravention but out of consideration for the personal tastes of the other women; she subjugates social gender convention to propriety towards the individual.

 

Conclusion

Cigarettes proliferate throughout the modernist short story, in background and foreground, not just as a cultural pattern, but as a codified action. There is a cultural basis, particularly in regards to the cigarette and the feminine role, but equally the cigarette is a condensing of aspects too nebulous for the short story – either a transition or a penetration within the self, or the condensing of a dialogue of gender and social conventions.

 

© 2014 by POETRY CORNER PARIS . P.C.P

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