Modern Lyric story (An Analysis of the story “The Cloud is to Rain” based on Eileen Baldeshwiler’s theory)

Focusing on mentality, mental processes, mental conflicts, the reflection of characters as inner voices, and inner monologues are among the most significant elements in the modern fiction. The lyric or poetic short story is a subdivision of the modernist fiction. Based on Eileen Baldeshwiler’s theory, in “The Lyric Short Story”, the characters’ minds and their inner worlds are highlighted and the author’s goal is to directly depict the main character’s thoughts and feelings as well as his/her mental states and emotional ups and downs as regards a specific issue in a lyric language. In the stories authored by Shamim-e Bahar, readers usually confront modern mental narrations of unfulfilled loves as well as loving, but disappointed and lonely heroes. The story “The Cloud Feels like Raining” is a poetic self-narration of the narrator’s mental and emotional flux, and is also the epitome of a modern lyric short story. In the present study, this question was answered: What elements and factors have characterized the short story “The Cloud Feels like Raining” as a modern lyric story?

This is a library and descriptive research which was conducted by using the content analysis method after the data had been collected and classified. The statistical sample was the short story “The Cloud Feels like Raining” authored by Shamim-e Bahar. The purpose of the study was to analyze this story from the viewpoint of Eileen Baldeshwiler’s theory of “The Lyric Short Story”. Finding numerous similarities between the narrative structure and the modernist techniques in the short story “The Cloud Feels like Raining” and what Baldeshwiler has explained in her theory of “The Lyric Short Story”, persuaded us to analyze the aforementioned story from the viewpoint of this theory.

The term “The Lyric Short Story” was first coined in 1921 by Conrad Aiken, the American author and critic, and was used in a critique of a story collection authored by Katherine Mansfield, the well-known New Zealand author. In 1969, a critic named Eileen Baldeshwiler expanded the relevant theory in the paper “The Lyric Short Story: The Sketch of a History”. Baldeshwiler generally classifies narratives into epic and lyric narratives. Based on her viewpoints, novels are compatible with the epic narrative and short stories are compatible with the lyric narrative in which, the characters’ mental states and emotional flux are highlighted. In the lyric short story, the author’s goal is to directly depict the main character’s thoughts and his/her knowledge of them, not the external actions and events. Furthermore, in such stories the narration of the events is mostly destined to reveal and depict the character’s inner feelings and emotions. (Payandeh, 2012, p. 64)Modernism in the short story is mainly synonymous with poeticizing and lyricizing. Shamim-e Bahar is among the modernist fiction authors of the 1960s in Iran. He has authored seven stories which are mostly innovative and have a lyric mode and a poetic tone. According to Mir-Abedini (2017, p. 714), “Being committed to applying the ideas of the modern literary criticism to the analysis of Persian fiction, Bahar shows in his love stories that he has learned authoring techniques from Hemingway, Salinger, and Nabokov.” Depicting man’s loneliness, the lyric tone, focusing on mentality, and expressing the main character’s thoughts, feelings, and emotional flux are among the elements which have marked the story “The Cloud Feels like Raining” as a modernist story. Using the first-person narrator, the profound and complicated characterization, disrupting the linear time, using the narration technique of inner monologue, the discontinuity of the narrative, symbolism, and changing the common plot are among the modernist techniques used in this story. The lyric and poetic tone, the succinct and sometimes metaphorical prose, and the narration of an unfulfilled love are other features which further characterize this story as a lyric short story. According to Payandeh (2012, p. 35), “The most significant and the most fundamental difference between modernist and realist stories is the tendency of modernist short stories towards poeticizing, hence their being called ‘poetic/lyric stories’.”

Shamim-e Bahar is among the modernist authors of the 1960s and 1970s in Iran who has created modern stories by using modernist techniques such as subjectivism, ambiguity and complicatedness in narration. In the modernist story “The Cloud Feels like Raining”, he explores and depicts the inner world and the mental states of a lonely and sorrowful person who suffers from an unfulfilled love. Involved in an inner struggle with himself and unable to interact with others, he finally finds a different perspective to his love and in Baldeshwiler’s words he travels along an emotional curve. The main character’s emotional agitation and inner world are highlighted through narrating the external events and frequent associations. The discontinuous narration of events, the uncommon plot, the inner monologues, the narrator’s emotional flux, the symbolism, the lyric, poetic and succinct prose, and highlighting the narrator’s emotional loneliness through depicting specific images and places, are among the techniques used in the story “The Cloud Feels like Raining” to turn it into a lyric narrative and what Eileen Baldeshwiler describes as a lyric or poetic short story.