Toward an Object-Oriented Poetics of Mystery in Short Narrative Fiction

ABSTRACT It is widely accepted that the short story is a genre best suited to reveal the mystery or reality of life by presenting its critical moments. However, few critics have made substantial attempts to find out what and how “mystery” or “reality” could be represented in the genre. To solve the problem, we can draw on “Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO),” a newly emerging philosophical school that emphasizes the mystery and reality of objects. More specifically, the version of OOO proposed by Graham Harman distinguishes four dimensions of objects, that is, the real object, the real qualities, the sensual object, and the sensual qualities, and insists that there always exist tensions between any two of the four dimensions and that literature can allude to the reality of a thing by showing these tensions. We distinguish two ways of dealing with the mysteries of reality in the short story: Positive Mystery (PM) and Negative Mystery (NM). Both PM and NM have two variations, namely PM I / PM II and NM I / NM II. The four ways of representing mysteries in short fiction can be employed in various ways to account for the complexity of our reading experiences.