Audio Book:
Much more similar in structure and tone to The Student than Lady With the Dog, Goosberries features another Ivan walking the fields, this time with a friend, and this time entering the space of a landowner rather than humble widows. Below I've included an excerpt from a really great article in The Atlantic about the hidden meanings in the story which is worth reading. The entire article is worth reading but very long, so here is the meat of it:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/george-saunders-on-chekhovs-different-visions-of-happiness/516798/
The story is an extended meditation on the idea of happiness. It’s basically a story of two friends who get caught in a rainstorm while they’re out hunting, and they go to a nearby house of someone they know named Alekhin. After they take a swim, one of the friends, Ivan, tells a story about his brother, who had an obsession with owning a small estate, and with eating the gooseberries that he grew on the porch. As Ivan tells the story of his brother it becomes a kind of a screed about how happiness—especially his brother’s happiness—disgusts him, how pig-like people who pursue their own happiness are.
Ivan’s story builds in intensity, and by the end he’s making this beautiful, passionate case for why happiness is a confusing, undesirable emotion. In his telling, it’s almost a delusion to be mindlessly happy when others are sad. The sentiment is so heartfelt that it’s almost as though it came right out of Chekhov’s journals:
At the door of every contented, happy man somebody should stand with a little hammer, constantly tapping, to remind him that unhappy people exist, that however happy he may be, sooner or later life will show him its claws, some calamity will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and nobody will hear or see, just as he doesn’t hear or see others now. But there is nobody with a little hammer, the happy man lives on, and the petty cares of his life stir him only slightly, as wind stirs an aspen—and everything is fine.
I always come out of that passage feeling like it’s a beautiful piece of rhetoric, one that articulates something I really believe. I’ve quoted this line on book tours, trying to explain why I don’t mind writing dark fiction: One role of literature, I’ll tell them, is to be the guy with the hammer, saying, “Look, we’re all pretty happy right now, but let’s just not forget the fact our happiness doesn’t eradicate the suffering of others.” It’s a beautiful insight about the lazy nature of happiness—and, for a few minutes, I think we’re meant to think that this stirring speech by Ivan is the whole point of the story. In a way, it is. Except, on the next page, we see that Ivan’s audience is bored and disappointed by the story. They wish that he’d had something better to say, and the whole evening ends on a flat note. But then there’s this wonderful little reversal at the end, a mysterious and beautiful turn. It happens when Ivan goes up to his room, which he’s sharing with his friend Burkin. They’re both in bed, beds which have been made up by Alekhin’s beautiful maid:
Their beds, wide and cool, made up by the beautiful Pelageya, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.
Ivan Ivanych silently undressed and lay down. “Lord, forgive us sinners!” he said, and pulled the covers over his head.
His pipe, left on the table, smelled strongly of stale tobacco, and Burkin lay awake for a long time and still could not figure out where that heavy odor was coming from.
Rain beat on the windows all night.
Ivan leaves his unclean pipe out all night, keeping his friend Burkin awake. And that’s how Chekhov gets away with putting his real feelings about the oppressive nature of happiness into a character’s mouth. Without irony, without condescension, he just lets the character have his say. But then, here, Chekhov destabilizes the beautiful rhetoric of the previous section by showing another side of the guy who made that impassioned speech: He’s also self-obsessed and thoughtless enough to burden his friend with a smelly pipe. It's a great double whammy. You get the beautiful, articulate case against happiness, and then you get this complicating overtone of selfishness in the person who just made that beautiful speech.
We’re often told not to put our passions and political feelings into a story. But I actually think it’s a good idea. Put them in there, then step away. Imagine that the idea isn’t you, that it’s just an idea that part of you expressed. Then you can use the structure and the form of the story to kind of poke at your own beliefs a little and see if you can get more light out of them.
That’s exactly what happens, structurally, in “Gooseberries.” Ivan starts to tell his story right on the first page, but he’s interrupted by the rainstorm. And while they get in out of the rain, meet their host, and bathe, a full third of this nine-page story goes by. I always ask my students: What’s the point of this digression? Because the short story form makes a de facto claim of efficiency—its limited length suggests that all the parts are there for purpose. If there’s a structural inefficiency that never comes home to roost, or never produces beauty later, we note that as bad storytelling. And so whatever ultimate meaning “Gooseberries” has, it has to have something to do with what's contained in that digression—or else it’s a flawed piece.
No comments:
Post a Comment