The Sentence That Refuses to Name Itself

There is a moment, near the end of any great short story, when the writer could name the thing and does not. The scene arrives at its climax. The reader understands. And then the sentence turns aside, refuses the noun, and gives you a curtain, a window, a train ticket, a shoe. Chekhov taught modern short fiction this move. Every writer who has written a serious short story since has been trying, one way or another, to earn it.

In “The Lady with the Dog,” the moment arrives when Gurov, at last conscious of loving Anna, catches sight of himself in a hotel mirror. Chekhov does not tell us he is in love. He gives us gray hair. It has become fashionable in workshops to call this restraint, but the word is thin. The correct word is ethics. Chekhov refuses to name the thing because to name it would flatter both the character and the reader — would give Gurov the consolation of self-knowledge before he has done anything to deserve it, and give the reader the pleasure of the moral summary they came for. Chekhov denies both. What we get instead is gray hair in a mirror. The story is over. Nothing has been solved. Everything has changed.

Alice Munro carries this inheritance across the Atlantic and updates it, in story after story, for the household register of small-town Ontario. Read the ending of “Friend of My Youth” and count the nouns Munro does not use. She refuses forgiveness. She refuses reconciliation. She refuses peace. Instead she gives us a dream, an old woman named Flora walking down a road, a possibility that the dreamer’s mother might, at last, have been the one who did not deserve the story her daughter had been telling about her all her life. The reader is left with a debt they can never pay and a story they cannot forget. That is not restraint. That is the exact opposite of restraint. It is a maximum act, achieved by declining to say the maximum word.

We call this, in workshops we teach and in books we recommend, the moral technology of the unspoken. It is difficult to teach. It cannot be taught by rule. It can only be taught by long attention to the writers who have done it — and by the writer’s slow, painful realization that the sentence they have just written explains too much, and by the willingness to strike it out.

What Chekhov and Munro share — across a century, across two continents, across every difference of milieu that ought to separate them — is the conviction that the reader is capable of arriving at meaning without being led there by the elbow. That is the deepest form of respect a story can offer a reader. It is also, we think, the deepest form of love a writer can offer a character: to decline to summarize them.

The story that says everything says less than the story that says almost everything and then, at the last possible moment, turns its face to the window.

— The Editors