A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

The pattern here is, roughly: Kovalyov tries something reasonable and gets an unsatisfactory response.

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.

Each of them stays strictly within the bounds of what they’re allowed to do and expected to do by the system of which they are part. That system (their society) has been engineered for normal operation; it can’t help someone in such extraordinary need as Kovalyov.

His emphasis is not “My nose has gone missing” but “My nose has offended me by leaving my face to become someone else, someone above me who is not treating me with respect and needs to be caught and brought into line.”

And we learn something about Kovalyov that rings true for all of us: he adapts quickly (too quickly) to insane new conditions. He has access to limited outrage. Sooner than we expect him to, he accepts his terrifying new state and goes on living, sad, peeved, but not rebellious; that would be impolite.

Most of the evil I’ve seen in the world—most of the nastiness I’ve been on the receiving end of (and, for that matter, the nastiness I, myself, have inflicted on others)—was done by people who intended good, who thought they were doing good, by reasonable people, staying polite, making accommodations, laboring under slight misperceptions, who haven’t had the inclination or taken the time to think things through, who’ve been sheltered from or were blind to the negative consequences of the belief system of which they were part, bowing to expedience and/or “commonsense” notions that have come to them via their culture and that they have failed to interrogate.

But on the mundane side of things, if we want to understand evil (nastiness, oppression, neglect) we should recognize that the people who commit these sins don’t always cackle while committing them; often they smile, because they’re feeling so useful and virtuous.

they aren’t anti-Semites, but they’re also not, in those moments, anti-anti-Semites. They’re well-mannered, abashed-but-willing parts of the Nazi machine.

Let me underscore something here: the story doesn’t add up.

That is, as we’ve said, the meaning of a story in which something impossible happens is not that the thing happened (it’s only language, after all, with somebody at the other end of it, making it up) but in the way the story reacts to the impossibility. That is how the story tells us what it believes.

In a Gogol story, when something impossible happens, either: (1) no one notices, or (2) they notice but misunderstand it and then proceed to miscommunicate about it. This includes the narrator, who keeps failing to comment on oddnesses we notice, and misinterpreting things and providing explanations we don’t buy, and failing to provide reasonable methods by which the things he is narrating could have occurred.

It’s not just that these questions aren’t answered; it’s that most of them couldn’t be answered, not in a way consistent with the spatial and temporal facts laid out in other places in the story.

This elaborate joke—a story that seems to make a certain logical sense but doesn’t—is done so well that it tricks our reading mind into assuming coherence in the same way that the eye, perceiving a series of snapshots, sells it to us as continuous motion.

But the higher-order reason is this: we come to feel that the story’s strange logic is not the result of error, is not perverse or facile or random, but is the universe’s true logic—that it is the way things actually work, if only we could see it all clearly.

A life without earnest striving is a nightmare.

(When desire vanishes from a normal life, that is called depression.)

“The Nose” suggests that rationality is frayed in every moment, even in the most normal of moments. But distracted by the temporary blessings of stability and bounty and sanity and health, we don’t notice.

Gogol is sometimes referred to as an absurdist, his work meant to communicate that we live in a world without meaning. But to me, Gogol is a supreme realist, looking past the way things seem to how they really are.

That is what makes Gogol great—that he somehow felt inclined to do that, and then did it, with such strange, happy confidence. The inexplicable uptick in fondness for the world I feel, moving through that section, which is not essential to the action of the story but seems to have been done just for the fun of it, is, for me, what Gogol is all about.

So, Kovalyov is a fool. But he’s also any one of us. There are some issues with a medical test. Could this be it? Our life suddenly seems precious, our habits stupid. Why do we golf so much? Why are we always on email, when our precious wife is sitting right there? The results come back: all is well. The mind relaxes into its previous torpor, and we’re happy again, and hop on email to see about booking a tee time, as our wife sits there watching.

That story would seem to be saying something like “Once a man lost his nose and got it back and it didn’t change him.”

All along we’ve been trusting this narrator and now, here at the very end, he still hasn’t come clean.

We’re having dinner with a friend. It’s going badly. Something has been off since the moment we sat down and now dinner’s almost over. What to do? Well: admit it. Blurt out the truth.

make a protest about the story’s failure to cohere logically. “I know, right?” the narrator says. “It’s a train wreck, isn’t it?” Somehow that’s enough.

To use an archery metaphor (and how often does a person get to do that?), one way to produce the thrill is to stop aiming at the target and concentrate on the feeling of the arrow leaving the bow. In this alternate version of archery, the arrow then sails off in a certain direction and keeps adjusting course, and wherever it lands…that’s the target.

This approach might be called “following the voice.” An idea for a voice appears, and off you go. You just “feel like” doing that voice. (And you find that you can.) Sometimes the inspiration for that voice might be a real person.

The main thing I’d like to say about this mode of writing is that it’s fun. When I do it, I’m giving almost no thought to anything but sustaining the voice—not thinking of the story’s themes or what needs to happen next or any of that. In the early stages, I might not even be clear about why the person is talking the way he is. My only goal is to keep the energy of the voice high, to keep the character sounding like himself, which means, I’ve found, that the voice has to keep expanding.

But there are many methods. Each involves the writer proceeding in a way that honors or helps her pursue something about which she has strong opinions.

The idea is that with her attention focused on that thing that delights her, about which she has strong opinions, she’s less likely to know too well what she’s doing and indulge in that knowing-in-advance that, as we’ve said, has a tendency to deaden a work and turn it into a lecture or a one-sided performance and drive the reader away.

Man needs not six feet of earth, not a farm, but the whole globe, all of Nature, where unhindered he can display all the capacities and peculiarities of his free spirit.

He could not picture to himself a single country-house, a single rustic nook, without gooseberries.

I made my way to the house and was met by a fat dog with reddish hair that looked like a pig. It wanted to bark, but was too lazy.

“We embraced and dropped tears of joy and also of sadness at the thought that the two of us had once been young, but were now gray and nearing death.

I want to tell you about the change that took place in me during the few hours that I spent on his estate.

The falsehood that exalts we cherish more Than meaner truths that are a thousand strong.

And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.

There is no happiness and there should be none, and if life has a meaning and a purpose, that meaning and purpose is not our happiness but something greater and more rational. Do good!”

But in Toby’s reading, we could hear how funny Chekhov was, how personable and bright, how closely he was in communication with his audience.

Was writing supposed to be smart or entertaining? Philosophical or performative? Enlightening or fun? Toby’s reading of Chekhov answered: Yes, of course, all of those.

Nothing much happens in it, really. There’s no big culminating action, no active conflict. Nobody’s trajectory gets altered forever. Nobody dies or fights or falls in love.

“What is the heart of the story?”

And because that speech (the heart of the heart of the story) is “about” the question of whether our urge to be happy is to be indulged or resisted, we feel the story to be a sort of meditation on that question.

But, actually, there are two paragraphs left, the first of which, it turns out, changes everything.

Or it’s somehow suspect, coming from a source unable to take its own advice—a speech about leading a thoughtful life from someone who’s just acted thoughtlessly.

Does this revised reading (“Ivan is actually, sometimes, energetically for happiness”) override the earlier one (“Ivan is against happiness”)? No. The two readings coexist, making a truth bigger than either would have alone.

Ivan doesn’t really believe that happiness is bad, or, if he does, he also, at the same time, believes that it’s essential.

Pelageya is a human version of that refreshing pond. She is unexpectedly beautiful, in that household—more beautiful than we expect her to be, more beautiful than she needs to be. She is, in short, a source of gratuitous delight, a reminder that beauty is an unavoidable, essential part of life; it keeps showing up and we keep responding to it, our theoretical positions notwithstanding, and if we ever stop responding to it, we have become more corpse than person.

Chekhov tells us nothing about her (no hair length, no height, nothing about her body, or her perfume, or the color of her eyes, or the shape of her nose) and yet the fact that she stuns these two presumably well-mannered old farts into borderline rudeness causes me to see her, or create her, in my mind.

She makes us feel, viscerally, how joyless and pedantic and brittle it would be to deny that beauty is real or claim that happiness is best avoided.

Ivan and Burkin’s reaction to her seems so involuntary as to be beyond critique—the equivalent of an audible gasp at a fireworks show. What kind of person suppresses that gasp?