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August 8 - August 27, 2023
The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind. —
We too were the malformed detritus of capitalism, the necessary cost of doing business.
We live, as you may have noticed, in a degraded era, bombarded by facile, shallow, agenda-laced, too rapidly disseminated information bursts.
art—namely, to ask the big questions: How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it? How can we feel any peace when some people have everything and others have nothing? How are we supposed to live with joy in a world that seems to want us to love other people but then roughly separates us from them in the end, no matter what?
To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works:
Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.
Out of the mist of every-story-that-could-possibly-be, a particular woman has started to emerge.
We might imagine structure as a form of call-and-response. A question arises organically from the story and then the story, very considerately, answers it. If we want to make good structure, we just have to be aware of what question we are causing the reader to ask, then answer that question.
Chekhov’s challenge is to use these expectations he’s created but not too neatly. No pressure.
A story is not like real life; it’s like a table with just a few things on it. The “meaning” of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another.
Chekhov once said, “Art doesn’t have to solve problems, it only has to formulate them correctly.”
He sang, completely oblivious of his rival and of all of us, but visibly borne up, like a strong swimmer by the waves, by our silent, passionate attention.
The contractor’s performance was described in terms of what he could do, Yashka’s in terms of what he caused his listeners to feel.
We’re always rationally explaining and articulating things. But we’re at our most intelligent in the moment just before we start to explain or articulate.
What we turn to art for is precisely this moment, when we “know” something (we feel it) but can’t articulate it because it’s too complex and multiple. But the “knowing” at such moments, though happening without language, is real. I’d say this is what art is for: to remind us that this other sort of knowing is not only real, it’s superior to our usual (conceptual, reductive) way.
We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he wanted to express, and then he just, you know, expressed it. That is, we buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and beautiful and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully. A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices that he’s arranged
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“A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.”
Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration.
So, Kukin has died, there in Moscow. As a new friend of Olenka’s, I am sorry for her, the darling. But as a reader, I am sort of glad. Goodbye, Kukin, you gave your life for rising action.
So, “good writerly habit” might consist of continually revising toward specificity, so that specificity can appear and then produce plot (or, as we prefer to call it, “meaningful action”).
And it’s these reactions that make us feel melded to the author, as if we are playing a very important, intimate game of some kind with him.
The ghosts don’t change Scrooge into someone else; they remind him that he used to be someone else.
Yes. It could be truthful in the way it reacts to itself, in the way it responds to its premise, in the way it proceeds—by how things change within it, the contours of its internal logic, the relationships between its elements.
Ivan doesn’t say any of this, and in the distance between his reaction and what ours would have been the Gogolian world begins to be made.
Then he takes the nose to St. Isaac’s Bridge and tosses it into the river. There he’s accosted by a second policeman, not for tossing a nose into the river but for the crime of standing on a bridge in a story by Gogol.
This scene, like the entire story, is infused with what we might call Multiple Superimposed Weirdness Syndrome.
The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor telling a story in character. And that character is…not right.
Our narrator is touched with a stiff but imprecise literary formality. He’s pedantic and superior and overestimates his intelligence and charm. He has one arm over our shoulders and something strange on his breath as he (clumsily, grandiosely, making basic errors) invites us, his fellow sophisticates, to join him in looking down at his (lowly) characters.
There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see.
I think, therefore I am wrong, after which I speak, and my wrongness falls on someone also thinking wrongly, and then there are two of us thinking wrongly, and, being human, we can’t bear to think without taking action, which, having been taken, makes things worse.
this is what our mind is doing all the time: making, with words, a world that doesn’t, quite, exist.
The world is full of nightmares waiting to happen to us but the people to whom Kovalyov turns don’t believe this, or don’t believe it yet, just as we don’t; they understand this nightmare to be uniquely Kovalyov’s (exceptional, freakish, embarrassing) rather than a preview of the (pending, inevitable) nightmare that will eventually come for all of us.
What is his hero’s journey? “A momentous, miraculous thing happened to me, and I stayed the same throughout, although, at times, I did become rather vexed.”
one way to get a story out of “the plane of its original conception” is to try not to have an original conception.
The story turns to us and says, “See why I had to indulge in that digression? To give myself some space in which to self-complicate, and thus avoid being merely a one-dimensional position paper against happiness, and become something mysterious and beautiful that, no matter how many times you read it, will keep revealing new dimensions to you, many of which George is entirely missing in this essay.”
A story means, at the highest level, not by what it concludes but by how it proceeds.
Kurt Vonnegut used to say that part of what makes Hamlet so powerful is the fact that we don’t know how to understand the ghost of Hamlet’s father: Is it real or only in Hamlet’s mind? This infuses every moment of the play with ambiguity. If the ghost is imaginary, it’s wrong for Hamlet to kill his uncle. If real, it’s necessary that he do so. That ambiguity is part of the play’s power.
“The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations.”
These days, it’s easy to feel that we’ve fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection.
These questions are above my pay grade. (Even asking them has made me a little anxious.) I raise them just to say that whatever fiction does to or for us, it’s not simple.
God save us from manifestos, even mine. (“An explanation does not go up to the hilt,” said Tolstoy.)
