Collecting his thoughts ... James Joyce. Photograph: Josef Breitenbach/PA
A few months ago Alyssa McDonald wrote an interesting article arguing that short stories should be left to stand alone and that "trussing stories up into collections is required by the economies of publishing, but it diminishes the pleasure of the fiction itself". I couldn't disagree with this any more if I tried.
There are any number of collections I could draw on to counter this trenchant claim but, lacking the space to do so, I'll rely on just one example: the blueprint for all modern short story collections in my opinion. James Joyce's Dubliners was first published in 1914. Written in Trieste in 1905, it was turned down by numerous publishers before finally finding a home with Grant Richards. It was a collection unlike anything that had been published before: a collection of stories about paralysis and inertia in Edwardian Dublin. Joyce's aim was to tell the "shocking truth", but his truth was unlike anything readers had encountered.
The truth that Joyce wanted to show the reader was that there was nothing to show. There was no scandal, no upset, nothing. Before Dubliners the short story was a didactic affair full of twists and turns, moral lessons, a safe milieu where readers were told exactly what to think about this character and that life. Joyce simply did away with such tiresome constructs, inventing a colder, arbitrary narrative style that eschewed omniscient manoeuvring of characters and plot. At the time of publication it must have made for an unsettling read.
Joyce depicted the paralysis of Dublin life in a series of trademark epiphanies. It is these epiphanies that are integral to the strength of his collection - and a fine example of why short story collections are an important genre. In Dubliners we are inundated with a series of epiphanies: the conduit that unites both our and Joyce's awareness. These awakenings, the revelations and truths his characters experience, serve as a wider awakening for the reader: through the characters' narrow lives we see the city of Dublin reveal itself. The epiphany we receive is that Joyce's Dublin is the 20th century mapped out before us. It is a formidable feat that cannot unfold within a few turns of the page. A single short story, the type that stands out on its own as a brilliant piece of writing, could never achieve this - no matter who composed it. The strength of Dubliners is that it is a collection of fragments that serve to make up a tangible whole.
This Joycean blueprint is fundamental to the potency of any collection of short stories and why, in fact, they work better marshalled together, each individual story gelling with the next to form a whole. The sheer joy of reading any short story collection in its entirety is seeking out what lies beneath each unifying narrative. This is why I believe a collection must never be taken apart, its segments published in magazines here and there or in newspapers where they can stand out.
Take Joyce's final story in Dubliners. The Dead is a wonderful story about life that, admittedly, stands out in its own right as his best. You can publish this story anywhere on its own and it will delight the reader. But I could never take it away from the whole. Never. Dubliners has to end with this story. In The Dead Joyce brings the collection full circle; from beginning to end, the living and the dead are bound together beneath the symbolic snow falling "all over Ireland". The thread Joyce runs through the collection, binding each fragment to each other, ends right there in The Dead's final paragraph. As part of a collection, the whole, even this perfect story is transformed.
