A Geography of Reading

"It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the world in which we live." -Orhan Pamuk

The Absurdity of Obstacles: Gogol’s Russia

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Nikolai Gogol portrays the rigid social and governmental institutions in Diary of a Madman and Other Stories. By setting characters up to functioning inside the system to the point of absurdity or to function in opposition to the system, the reader can see the societal norms that may otherwise be invisible.

In the story “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” Gogol presents two landowner friends. They quarrel over the sale of a gun and ultimately Ivan N. calls Ivan I. a goose. The dispute seems silly to the reader, but Ivan I. takes it to such heart that the action of the story unfolds from this slight insult. Because Ivan N. asks, “‘What’s so slanderous about it and why are you waving your arms about?’” the reader can feel justified in the assumption that Ivan I. is overreacting and even laugh at the image of this “goose” flapping his arms. The two Ivans bring complaints against each other in court and eventually in a deliciously funny scene Ivan I.’s pig eats Ivan N.’s paperwork. Ivan I. is declared guilty of stealing the document (a capital offense) because he owns the pig. At first it seems as though the mayor who is delivering this news is quite serious, he later settles for the idea that the pig be killed and asks for a share in any sausages that might result which makes the punishment seem arbitrary and highlights the relationship the characters have with the rigid mores around them. The characters live within strict societal rules and are willing to enforce them, but they also circumvent them when necessary. This brings about an “us against them” mentality even when the characters (mayors, judges) ostensibly would be a part of the institution and therefore a part of “them.”

Gogol also pokes fun at the rigid expectations of his society in “The Madman.” In this story, the humor in the rigidity lies in how internalized the social norms are. It rapidly becomes obvious that the protagonist Axenty is insane but he never strays from the accepted social manners of his day. Axenty is in love with the boss’s daughter and becomes convinced that a dog is interfering with his prospects, so he knocks on the door of the house and demands of the maid that he be admitted to talk with the dog. If he were to chase the dog down the street or abuse it or even call the humane society, Axenty would be living in a different society. But in his society, propriety demands that one present themselves to the maid and request an audience in order to settle a dispute. Axenty’s madness also seeks redress in the reading the dog’s letters. The humor lies in the fact that this man has so internalized his culture, he is attempting to use proper etiquette when dealing with a dog.

In “The Overcoat,” Akaky is a poor government worker who is content in the rote mediocrity of his life as a copyist. He scrapes together enough cash to have a new overcoat made. The new overcoat is an object of great pride for him and his coworkers throw a party and invite him and his overcoat to the party. On the way home, the overcoat is stolen and Akaky’s quest for redress begins. At first he works within the system as he meekly asks for audiences to explain his situation but the bureaucracy shuffles him along without satisfactory result. Eventually Akaky stands up for himself at the urging of his fellow clerks and demands to see the Superintendent, but he is thwarted because the man turns the questioning around on Akaky. The clerks in his office give him advice on how to work around the systemic constraints and Akaky is eventually persuaded to seek the help of an Important Person who again abuses Akaky because he has not followed proper procedure. Akaky dies of an illness brought on by not having a proper coat and he begins haunting the area where his coat was stolen. Only when freed from his earthly constraints is Akaky able to sift through the rigidity of social and bureaucratic norms and he steals the Important Person’s overcoat.

Gogol portrays a world where both internal and external constraints are very rigid. There are some characters (like the clerks in Akaky’s office) who are able to work around the system, but the protagonists aren’t. Watching these characters unable to break free from their norms can be frustrating, but by portraying both the humor and tragedy of these characters, Gogol is able to speak to the condition of the society he was writing about. Writing about existing normative constraints can be difficult because readers not of the society may not understand the norms of that society and readers from within that society do not always recognize those norms as something worth talking about. Every society has norms and every character must act within them or thwart them. By writing about characters who are prisoners to their norms to the point of absurdity, Gogol is able to create a commentary on his society that speaks both to his countrymen and to outsiders.

In my own writing I am very interested in the way societies function and how that affects individual behavior. What I can see from Gogol is that without commenting on the norms the reader may not understand them. Gogol either sets up some opposition force to the norms (Akaky trying to talk to the Important Person) or has a character follow the norms to the letter (Axenty seeking proper introductions to a dog or holding a pig accountable for a crime).

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Diary of a Madman and Other Stories from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Characterizing Chekhov’s “The Darling”

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In Anton Chekhov’s “The Darling” from the collection Stories, Olenka is a caregiver to the point that she subsumes her identity to mimic that of the one she cares for. By approaching the topic through description and explanatory sentences, Chekhov fully immerses the reader in the story.

stories anton chekhovChekhov names the nature of Olenka’s character early in the story in the following passage: “She was always fond of some one [sic], and could not exist without loving.” He then mentions some of the family members she has loved. But prior to this, her husband, Ivan Petrovitch Kukin, (aka Vanitchka) has had a large blowup about the vulgarity of the patrons of the story. I was drawn into the drama of Kukin and didn’t see this first clue, the subtle unfurling of Olenka’s personality. When she first parrots his opinion, “‘But do you suppose the public understands that?’” I thought we were seeing an action she would habitually take, but I didn’t yet realize this was the key to her nature. It isn’t until Chekhov revealed that the actors referred to her as “Vanitchka and I” that I got the point.

All of the details of the story point to the revelation about Olenka that she becomes a mirror of the one she loves; and Chekhov says it plainly several times. But because he says it plainly and also demonstrates through the action of the characters (I would argue that he never goes into full-blown scenes), the reader is enveloped by Olenka and her nature, rather than being assaulted from one direction. If, for example, Chekhov had simply told the reader over and over what Olenka was like, it would have felt hollow. If he had shown us her nature through action only, we might not have gotten the point. It is precisely this marriage of exposition and explanation that makes the story so rich. And because his explanatory sentences are so simple and direct, they don’t feel like an assault to the reader’s understanding of the story. They feel like an insight not a direction.

Regarding Olenka’s second husband, Chekhov shows her consumed by his lumber business as she “dreamed of perfect mountains of planks and boards, and long strings of wagons, carting timber far away.” He then goes on the say, “Her husband’s ideas were hers.” The entire story is woven with the warp of exposition and the weft of explanation. When Olenka is alone and she fails to muster opinions, Chekhov gives a beautiful description of her wasting away. He also tells us, “she had no opinions of any sort.”

When she begins caring for the veterinarian’s son, Chekhov writes, “Now she had opinions of her own.” What is interesting is the opinions are still not on matters that pertain to her daily life, but rather to the boy’s schooling. Her devotion continues, even when the object is less willing.

It is a short story, eleven pages in the collection I read, but it is a full story. Because Chekhov focuses on this one aspect of Olenka’s character and because he approaches it from more than one angle, the reader is enveloped in a world that is all about Olenka’s assumption of her loved ones’ worries and opinions.

I often worry that I am over-explaining things, but this story showed me that it is possible to go into minute detail about something as long as it is fully explored and done through more than one method. Olenka’s nature was evidently important to express, Chekhov based an entire story on it. It will be important for me to selective about the things I highlight in this way (although I can choose to highlight more because I am working on a novel and not a short story), but if I don’t explain them and expose them, they may not be in the story in the way I want them to. Storytelling is seduction.

A note on the [sic]: obviously I am reading a work in translation, but the use of “some one” versus “someone” more than once in the story made me want to know if this would be as peculiar in Russian or if the translation was somewhat outdated. I couldn’t help but think that the translator was trying to convey the nuance of Chekhov’s phraseology by stressing the individual “one.”  Of course, I have no evidence either direction, but it certainly enhanced my understanding of the story.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Chekhov’s Short Stories from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Babel: Setting a Scene in Red Cavalry

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Red Cavalry Isaac Babel

Isaac Babel has a way with atmospheric detail. In several of his short stories in Red Cavalry, he uses descriptions of the setting to shape the reader’s experience and understanding of the tone of the story.

Crossing the Zbrucz

Perhaps the best example of this is the story we discussed in our advising group, “Crossing the Zbrucz.”  In this story a soldier rooms with a woman and her father and it turns out that the father (with whom he is to share a bed) was brutally slain earlier. The details Babel provides early on in the story presage the eerie scene. After describing the flow of the river, he writes, “An orange sun is rolling across the sky like a severed head….The odour of yesterday’s blood and of slain horses drips into evening coolness.” The detail is gruesome at best, but it prepares the reader for the mindset of the narrator. Death is so pervasive that the first thing he would liken the movement of the sun to is a severed head. He knows of the killings that occurred the day before and he recognizes the scent of them on the wind. Not every narrator would recognize the smell of day old death and fewer still would use it as an atmospheric detail.

Pan Apolek

Babel uses the same technique in several other of the Red Cavalry stories. In “Pan Apolek” he writes, “The scent of lilies is pure and strong, like spirit. This fresh poison is sucked in by the deep seething respiration of the kitchen range, deadening the resinous odour of the fir logs that are scattered about the kitchen.” This is the story of a painter, Pan Apolek, who uses the faces of local people for his paintings of saints. Apolek is commissioned to paint the church and he uses the faces of nonbelievers for some of Christianity’s most important figures causing a general uproar. His paintings are beautiful like the lilies, but they cut with a double edged sword. The “fresh poison” that Babel writes of is the heretical ideas that Apolek is spreading (e.g. that Jesus fathered Deborah’s child). Babel is saying that in spreading his subversive ideas through beauty, Apolek is able to infiltrate worlds he might not otherwise have access to. Apolek is despoiling the comfortable, resinous smell of the ideas of the local people. He is covering over their homey ideas with the poison of his beautiful lilies.

Gedali

In “Gedali,” Babel writes, “Here before me is the bazaar and the death of the bazaar. Slain is the rich soul of abundance. Rich padlocks hang on the stalls and the granite of the paving is as clean as the bald pate of a dead man.” “Gedali” is the story of the narrator’s wanderings as he awaits the Sabbath. He is wandering among many closed shops, but the description made me wonder if they were closed because of the impending Sabbath—on which no work can be done—or if they were closed for good. Perhaps they are closed for other reasons, because of pogroms, or because of the death of a way of life. The stalls are padlocked up, but the cleanness of the pavement denotes emptiness. There is no litter, no trace of humans having passed through. And the reference to the “pate of a dead man” makes it sound as though the area itself is dead and that it was closed up long ago. Whether these stores were locked up for eternity or merely for the Sabbath, Babel’s description of them enhances the strangeness and isolation of Gedali’s store. Babel likens the store to Dickens’s Curiosity Shop, but he didn’t need that reference to make the shop seem obscure and isolated. He had already done so with the detail of his description.

I know this use of atmospheric detail is something I tend toward in my own work. I admit it is often an unconscious effort in early drafts, but I can see that it is a powerful tool that I would do well to pay attention to as I revise. By being specific about the details I invest in the scenery, I can point the reader in very decided directions. If I am not specific, I can point the reader all over the place. I particularly enjoy this way of dealing with setting because it feels subtle but because it can have a strong effect on the way the story is read. It also gives meaning where there would not necessarily be any. For my novel, this is particularly important in descriptions of the river. A casual reader can enjoy the story without taking notice of this kind of detail, but a reader who cares to find meaning there can. I particularly liked where I felt Babel was going with his description in “Pan Apolek.”  It felt like he was describing his own subversion and that opened up for me the reading of many of the other stories in the collection. I think that is what I particularly enjoy about Russian writers is the layers of the writing. I am not yet skilled at investing layer upon layer of meaning into writing, and in some ways I don’t have the natural need because I am much less likely to be censored, but it is still something that intrigues me. I am interested in how the reader experiences satire and double entendres in writing. It always scares me a little that a reader who doesn’t get it could take the work in exactly the opposite way. I think that is at the root of my quandary over explaining and not explaining. I would hate to see a work used to the opposite end of its intent. Perhaps the atmospheric detail is one subtle way to direct the mind of even the most clueless reader (which I sometimes am).

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Red Cavalry and Other Stories from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.

Unreliable Notes from Underground

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Notes from Underground by is strangely constructed. The narrator, who seems to have logorrhea, goes on about the laws of math and nature and why he could never be an insect and really every other thing for the first half of the novel. It isn’t until the second half of the story that a more conventional narrative develops, by which point the narrator has so discredited himself as a reliable narrator that I didn’t know whether to believe what he said or not. Except that he portrayed himself in such an unflattering light as he insults everyone from schoolmates to a prostitute; it seems unlikely he would have been lying. He often contradicts himself and sometimes out and out says he was just lying. As a reader I felt afloat with nothing to grab onto because I didn’t know what to believe in except my own judgment of this man’s character.

Sound of the Text

The initial sentences of the novel are made of such short clauses that they take on a staccato sound and it is somewhat jarring to read. Dostoyevsky writes, “I’m a sick man…a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about me. I think there is something wrong with my liver.” It isn’t just that the sentences are so short, it is also that the subject matter seems to wander. I wondered at times whether the narrator was mentally ill. This wandering subject matter contributed to my afloat feeling. I was exhausted just trying to follow his train of thought.

Drafting a Manifesto

The first section reads like a manifesto or a confession. The narrator keeps addressing an audience (who later turns out to be imaginary) as in, “Do you think I’m trying to make you laugh?” or sometimes as ladies and gentlemen. This second person plural address gave the effect of him being in an institution, whether mental or correctional. I loved the way Dostoyevsky implied questions and comments from this audience within the narrator’s ramblings. He took the words right out of my mouth when he said, “if you’re irritated by all my babble (and I feel you must be by now).” In that way Dostoyevsky turned this monologue into a dialogue. At times he goes so far as to provide a counterargument for what the implied audience would have said, as in, “’Ha-ha-ha!  Strictly speaking there is no such thing as will!’ You may interrupt me.” I’m still trying to decide whether to use the second person address in my second novel, but I found the use of implied dialogue much more engaging than when the narrator was talking to himself and I would borrow that for certain.

Allegorical Insertions

There is one point in this first section where Dostoyevsky seemed to be making a point about free will through his narrator that could be taken as a larger commentary on Russian society, “Now you scream that no one intends to deprive me of my free will, that they are only trying to arrange things so that my will coincides with what is in my own interest.” It seems harmless enough because at this point I was convinced the narrator was quite mad and a few sentences later he retracts it saying, “Of course I’m joking, my friends, and I realize my jokes are weak.” But the point is made. I liked the way Dostoyevsky slipped in information that could ostensibly be recanted but couldn’t really.

The transition between the first section and the second was lovely. A few sentences before the actual shift from manifesto to story, the narrator says, “Today for instance I am particularly oppressed by an old memory.” He then intersperses ramblings with lead up to the story until the changeover. It made for a very nice transition because he alerted the reader that the subject was changing but also interspersed the logorrhea with the more narrative quality of the next section which tied the two together. I used a lot of white space between my sections for Polska, 1994, though I thought for a long while about looking for ways to better transition between them like tempering eggs before adding them to a batter.

The second person address and the blurts continue into the second section but what is really interesting is the note at the end of the novel, “Actually the notes of this lover of paradoxes do not end here. He couldn’t resist and went on writing. But we are of the opinion that one might just as well stop here.” This note simultaneously validates the second person address and brings into question the whole meaning of the story. I’m still thinking about this. I like that the story has given me something open and unfinished to ruminate on.

If this review made you want to read the book, pick up a copy of Notes from Underground from Powell’s Books. Your purchase keeps indie booksellers in business and I receive a commission.