The very choice of the pen name Saki for the writer whose parents had named him Hector Hugh Munro provides some insight and illumination into the type of story a reader is more often than not going to be presented with for purposes of education and instruction. The average person coming to a story by a writer named Saki is likely going to expect—if only with a somewhat dim consciousness—to find stories perhaps about samurai warriors or complicated tea ceremonies. Certainly, something having to do with Japan or the Orient or—as it is now more politically correctly identified: Asia.
But no. Saki’s stories are almost entirely located within a certain level of upper crust British society; the one dominated by governesses, children who rarely see their parents and manor estates. This is not exclusively true, of course: the feud at the center of the “The Interlopers” takes place entirely within—and over—rugged real estate in the Carpathian Mountains. But for every story located outside the more comfortable environs representative of the lifestyle in which young Hector was raised there are twenty stories exclusively about Oscar Wilde-like wits making their way through Edwardian society with a fierce intent to bring the most ridiculous aspects of that society crashing down around the twits supporting it. In fact, during his lifetime Saki—as well as most contemporary critics—assumed that his series of stories about these types of British gentlemen with names like Reginald and Clovis would be the foundation upon which the author’s legacy as a writer of short fiction would rest.
Just as a Saki seemed to make a concerted effort to undermine reader expectations about his content with his choice of pseudonym, so have his expectations been undermined: today, those stories are rarely read and almost never by anyone outside of England.
Instead, the stories which have made Saki a legendary name among specialists in the difficult form of the short story are those which more accurately reflect his somewhat dark-humored taste for irony. Read any serious analysis of Saki’s literary output and you will quickly come across one of the variations of the word irony. If you have trekked more than 1,000 words into an analysis of Saki’s writing without coming across the word “irony” or “ironic” then you are advised to quit reading immediately and seek information elsewhere.
Saki was ironic before irony was cool. What has now become the defining mode of emotional expression of the 21st century was a century before so out of the ordinary as a standard operating procedure that Saki became famous after his tragically early death at the age of 45 almost not as trenchant inheritor of the mantle of the Oscar Wilde, but rather as a precursor of things to come. Without the bitterly corrosive ironic humor in “The Storyteller” to act as a guide and influence, it is possible that postmodernism would have been delayed by a decade or two. Without the slap upside the head demonstration of almost unbearably perverse irony with which “Sredni Vashtar" concludes, one is tempted to wonder whether Roald Dahl would ever have become successful enough to give us everything that came after Charlie’s little visit to that chocolate factory. And, of course, it almost goes without saying that had Saki lived long enough to turn his attention away from the rebellious and potentially commercially precarious exhibition of sardonic awareness of the ever-present danger of reality taking a big ironic bite out of our…backsides…there would be some other contender for the all-time undefeated and retired holder of the title of Single Most Grotesquely Ironic One Word Conclusion to a Story in the English Language. The story is “The Interlopers.” And the word? “Wolves.”
