A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

by George Saunders

Her presence supports Ivan’s position that “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.” Why does she have to work so hard to get these men comfortable so they can sit around discussing the extent to which the pursuit of happiness is valid?

A form of honorable happiness is possible, his presence says, if one dedicates oneself quietly to a task—no bliss, just quiet satisfaction.

Burkin functions as a sort of anti-joy, stolidity-enforcing referee, putting the brakes on Ivan whenever Ivan gets too enthusiastic.

What’s keeping Burkin awake there at the end is the bitter truth, which, like that smelly pipe, is not always pleasant. The Burkins of the world prefer their truth to be flattering and palatable so they can sleep right through it.

The storm introduces into the story the notion that happiness exists in relation to material conditions, conditions beyond our control.

Luckily, we don’t have to say. That’s part of why the story was written: to produce that irreducible final moment, about which nothing more needs to be said.

If we understand the story to be asking, “Is it right to seek happiness?” the material contained within the digression splinters that question into others: “If we choose to disavow happiness, what do we lose?” “Is life to be lived for pleasure or duty?” “How much belief is too much?” “Is life a burden or a joy?” And many more that I’m sure your mind supplied as you read or is supplying now, as we work through the story.

Also, I might seem to be implying something (that I have no way of knowing) about how the story was written: that Chekhov first wrote Ivan’s speech and then purposely framed it with the pre- and post-speech material, to complicate it.

what we first felt as waste or indirectness (the digression) turns out to be exactly what elevates the story “out of the plane of its original conception” and makes it so complex and mysterious.

A story means, at the highest level, not by what it concludes but by how it proceeds.

“Gooseberries,” as we’re seeing, proceeds by a method of persistent self-contradiction.

The story is not there to tell us what to think about happiness. It is there to help us think about it. It is, we might say, a structure to help us think.

the story seems to want its reader to stay off autopilot, to stay alert to the possibility that it (and the reader) might be solidifying around some too-simple concept and in the process becoming false. So, it keeps qualifying itself until it qualifies itself right out of the business of judgment.

It reminds us that any question in the form “Is X right or wrong?” could benefit from another round of clarifying questions. Question: “Is X good or bad?” Story: “For whom? On what day, under what conditions? Might there be some unintended consequences associated with X? Some good hidden in the bad that is X? Some bad hidden in the good that is X? Tell me more.”

In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).

But, as a technical matter, fiction doesn’t support polemic very well. Because the writer invents all the elements, a story isn’t really in a position to “prove” anything.

This allays our suspicion that the story is merely the occasion for an authorial lecture. Chekhov has it both ways: he gets the power of his heartfelt opinion (the truth of which we feel), destabilized by its attribution to Ivan (whose flaws we note).

You’re arguing against that latent part of yourself. When you get mad at a political opponent, it’s because he’s reminding you of a part of yourself with which you’re uncomfortable.

Writing, we get a chance to change the mix. Quieter instruments are allowed to come to the fore; our usual blaring beliefs are asked to sit quietly, horns in their laps. This is good; it reminds us that those other, quieter instruments were there all the time.

Three years after their swim, in 1898, Chekhov wrote “Gooseberries.”

What I think you’ll find is that the later works feel like more highly organized systems.

So, to generalize a bit here: in a highly organized system, the causation is more pronounced and intentional. The elements seem to have been more precisely selected. Things escalate decisively; everything is to purpose.

Be specific and efficient. Use a lot of details. Always be escalating. Show, don’t tell. And so on.

We can reduce all of writing to this: we read a line, have a reaction to it, trust (accept) that reaction, and do something in response, instantaneously, by intuition.

that’s the whole game: (1) becoming convinced that there is a voice inside you that really, really knows what it likes, and (2) getting better at hearing that voice and acting on its behalf.

So, what we’re calling a “more highly organized system” is the cumulative result of all of this repetitive choosing on the line level, those thousands of editing microdecisions.

The point is: if you start with that sad little swath of prose and then begin (to use another fancy technical term) “energetically messing with it,” per exactly your taste (no defense or rationalization needed), it will start to become a more highly organized system. It just will. And it will have something of you in it.

it’s the intensity with which you apply your taste that will cause the resulting work of art to feel highly organized.

This something was that he found out, to his amazement, that besides those connections between people based on someone needing something from somebody else, there are also very special connections: not a person having to clean boots or take a parcel somewhere or harness up a horse, but a person who was in no real way necessary to another person could still be needed by that person, and caressed, and that he, Alyosha, was just such a person.

He felt like this might stop him working the way he used to work.

“Looks like I have to,” said Alyosha with a laugh, and then he began to cry.

Alyosha is presented with the complicating frequencies filtered out, winnowed down to just one trait. In this story, simple as a fairy tale, that trait is cheerful obedience.

“Since I have to get through this, I’ll try my best to do it happily.”

In a story, attribute must meet adversity.

The first hint of a question appears over the story: “Might there be a downside to Alyosha’s cheerful obedience? Is he, maybe, too obedient?” That is, our sense of fairness tells us that he is being ill-used but his sense of fairness doesn’t. We diverge a bit from him. What we felt as a positive trait is now being called slightly into question.

Tolstoy has reached an understanding that would pervade modernism: a person and her language can’t be separated. (If you want to know my truth, let me tell it to you in my words, in the diction and syntax natural to me.)

At this moment, a contemporary reader looks over at Alyosha, disappointed. He seems weak and deficient. His supposedly positive trait seems like a character flaw. Is his cheerful obedience actually habitual passivity? Evidence not of humility but of a limited imagination? A knee-jerk response to authority? A sort of working-class flinch?

We’re in new territory now. So is he. For the first time in his life, his obedient cheerfulness has cost him something, and he knows it.

Both men are punished severely for the hubris of presuming to be fully human.

Alyosha dies not because he falls off a roof but because Tolstoy, at this late point in his art, knows what it is that we want to know and aims to give it to us as quickly as possible.

Tolstoy doesn’t say this, exactly, but the story is a masterpiece of understatement, and (impelled by the strong emotion generated by the breaking off of the engagement, which is still fresh in our minds, since it happened just one page ago) we put two and two together and feel that, as he leaves the world, Alyosha sees things as we do: he could have been loved, he could have been a full human being.”

Tolstoy was “determined to forswear the ‘nonsense’ of his former style and to make all of his fictional works conveyances for the message of the Christian teaching as he understood it.”

That is, Chekhov set out to parody Olenka, only the Holy Spirit of “suprapersonal wisdom” came upon him, and he came to love her, and now, so do we.

In “Alyosha the Pot,” we might say that Tolstoy did the inverse: he unintentionally cursed what he set out to bless.

He also wrote this, thirty years earlier, in 1865: “The aim of the artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably but to make people love life in all its countless inexhaustible manifestations.”

“I think he regards Christ as simple and deserving of pity,” Gorky wrote, “and, although at times he admires him, he hardly loves him. It is as though he were uneasy: if Christ came to a Russian village, the girls might laugh at him.”

The story makes a beautiful case for cheerful obedience. The story makes a beautiful case for the argument that making a beautiful case for cheerful obedience is a gift to tyrants. Which is it? The wonder of the story is that it fails to answer that question; or, rather, that it answers—it succeeds in answering—in favor of both views, simultaneously.

“The story” is really these two coexistent interpretations, eternally struggling for prominence. If we decide that the story supports cheerful obedience, it does. If we decide that it opposes cheerful obedience, it does. Both readings feel radical; both pose the question of how to deal with oppression,

He had, in that moment, let’s say, some discomfort (not overt, intellectual discomfort but buried, subconscious discomfort) about his desire to advocate for cheerful obedience. In that swerve we feel him resisting his own didacticism. A form of what we might call artistic reserve kicked in.

The most artful and truthful thing is sometimes simply that which allows us to avoid being false: the swerving away, the deletion, the declining to decide, the falling silent, the waiting to see, the knowing when to quit.