In his compelling introduction to this collection of translated Bengali short fiction, Arunava Sinha tells us that "the Bengali short story did not evolve slowly from a primordial swamp, but sprang up, more or less fully formed, around the same time as its counterparts in other languages around the globe". This is one of the more remarkable features of international modernism, a phenomenon which included the modern short story: around the end of the nineteenth century, all over the world, in France, in Russia, in England, in North America, in Turkey, and in the Indian subcontinent, similar literary developments were taking place at roughly the same time. But in order to understand both the modernity and the historical specificity of the short story, we need to recognise its kinship with – but also its difference from – a much older form, the tale, present from the earliest antiquity in every literary culture, and transmitted through both oral and written traditions.
In India, collections of tales are at least as ancient as the 11th century compendium entitled Kathasaritsagara (The Ocean of the Streams of Stories), which draws upon earlier anthologies made up of even older individual units. The tale is a narrative form driven primarily by plot, and therefore constitutes a fictional repertoire that can be endlessly drawn upon by the storyteller. Many oral cultures attach great importance to the storyteller as a repository of traditional narratives, passing them on to her successors. By contrast, the modern short story subordinates plot to the apparently arbitrary and unformed materials of the realist fragment, or 'slice of life'. Walter Benjamin, in his classic essay 'The Storyteller', emphasises the capacity of the tale to achieve perfection through repetition: to this he contrasts the short story, which, as he puts it, "has removed itself from oral tradition and no longer permits that slow piling one on top of the other of thin, transparent layers… in which the perfect narrative is revealed through… a variety of retellings." In effect, the tale can be told many times, the short story can only be told once.
For this reason, as we see in Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Storyteller, the obvious analogy to the form of the modern short story is the photograph. In its capacity, miraculously to preserve the static, unplotted, there-ness of the event itself, the photograph simultaneously inhabits, contains and resists narrative. As Henri Cartier-Bresson, greatest of modern masters, described it: "a photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It's a trace." The instant of time captured by the photographer Malfatti in Vargas Llosa's novel, like a thief with his camera (that phrase too is Cartier-Bresson's), defeats narrative in its mimetic plenitude, and draws us into the logic of the moment, of the presence of the figures themselves. This analogy is important for another reason. In A Short History of Photography, Walter Benjamin spoke of the capacity of the photograph to catch what we might describe as 'unintended' objects: to record what exists in the materiality of our present, but remains unnoticed by us. This he calls the 'optical unconscious', a level of reality available only to the camera:
It is a different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye: so different that in place of a space consciously woven together by a man on the spot there enters a space held together unconsciously. While it is possible to give an account of how people walk, if only in the most inexact way, all the same we know nothing definite of the positions involved in the fraction of a second when the step is taken. Photography, however, with its time lapses, enlargements, etc. makes such knowledge possible. Through these methods one first learns of this optical unconscious, just as one learns of the drives of the unconscious through psychoanalysis.