When I was in college, I took a class on Chekhov’s short stories. The model of this class was very much in the “reading like a writer” school: we read the works of this Russian master, and tried to absorb osmotically what he had done. Chekhov, like pretty much all writers I studied in college, was a genius of a very mysterious sort; the stories worked, but I wasn’t really privy to how. Each story seemed to be one indissoluble whole, a monolith dropped from space, glowing and impenetrable. The class was like touring a church in order to praise the results of its magnificent construction, and be humbled by its grandness. I developed a sense of what felt “Chekhovian”: namely, forlorn peasants lamenting their little, unexciting lives, constantly wanting “to live, only to live!” and falling victim to absurd setbacks. My sense of the Chekhovian was strong enough to write an imitation story, which was fun, though of course it was only superficially similar; I had no ability to imitate the intricacies of his mechanics.
That’s fine; it was an undergraduate class, and I was still a freshman. But as my education progressed, the technique of simply observing the masters didn’t seem to vary. It became more and more apparent to me that this technique of aspirational osmosis was the only one that would be used, and I wondered exactly how far it would take me. I wanted to dig in and find what stories were really made of, but I didn’t have the tools. I was like a biology student unable dissect the dead frog on the table, because I had no scalpel; all I could do was marvel at it from a short distance.
George Saunders dissects seven classic, Russian short stories, including three by Chekhov, in his newest book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and gives us our own sharp scalpels for future use. My impression of Saunders, as a writer and as a person I’ve met a couple of times, is that he is unflaggingly generous. In essence, this book is a written version of a graduate writing course, which is a huge boon to the hundreds of us who wanted to work with him as MFA students but didn’t get into the program. The structure of the book, which offers the text of the short story and accompanying analysis (sometimes interspersed with the story text), is a brilliant way to ground the analysis, which might otherwise drift off into the abstract, like so many works of literary theory. We always have Saunders’ kind, encouraging, funny, curious voice to return to. The book felt, for me, like a gift. I only wish it had been around when I was an undergraduate, anxiously circling the temple of fiction but unable to get in.
Saunders’ basic approach is less “reading like a writer” and more, perhaps, writing like a reader. That is, Saunders takes a mindfulness-oriented approach toward these Russian masters, and diligently tracks in great detail what happens in his mind (and his students’) during the process of reading them. With the story as the anchor, Saunders shows just how far you can extrapolate with basic observation, which turns out to be amazingly far. He uses these Russian short stories to dig as deep as possible into what a story actually is: an “organic whole [which]…responds alertly to itself” (29); a “system for the transfer of energy” (35); a “limited set of elements that we read against one another” (48); a “set of incremental pulses” (60). It’s quite the same as the biology student using the particular frog carcass to extrapolate what the frog form is in general, and yet, for some reason, throughout my education it seemed like professors shied away from this sort of thing. There is still plenty of remaining belief that art ought to remain mysterious and unexplained. But the short stories Saunders dissects here still have plenty left to admire after the dissection is over; the little systems created within them do their job well enough that they point outward, to the overall strangeness of existence.
The most interesting thing I noted about Saunders’ pronouncements was the metaphor of energy which popped up over and over. It reminded me of Viktor Shklovsky’s explanation of the “energy of delusion”, a fascinating if somewhat nebulous idea. Saunders tends to view a story as a machine or as a phenomenon of physics (including the metaphor he’s used in a previous work, of a story as a little Hot Wheels track), filled with dynamic movement. The funny thing about this is that, in my Chekhov class, I saw his stories as mostly plot-less; they felt like people just doing a lot of traveling and talking (which, to be clear, was a plus for me). Saunders shows just how much movement there is in every beat of a Chekhov story, and I’m grateful for his incisive instruction.
There is still a division between literary fiction and popular storytelling; the latter operates on rules which are pretty recognizable if you care to look. The basic rhythm of set-up and payoff has become so familiar that we instantly sense when an ending is unsatisfying, or the TV show we’ve watched leaves too many “loose ends.” This setup/payoff dynamic is the dominant principle of story writing as we experience it in our daily lives, as consumers of mass media. Saunders’ analysis mostly hews to this, but adds more complexity, particularly in the chapters on Gogol’s “The Nose” and Chekhov’s “Gooseberries”. This marriage of more “basic” storytelling technique with explanations of more complex phenomena like omission and non-realism shows how compatible the two areas really are. There is no need, in my opinion, to exclude elementary concepts like setup/payoff from academic literary analysis. They are quite modifiable and expandable.
There were a couple of times I found myself twitching while reading, particularly in Saunders’ analysis of Tolstoy, which hinges around the unfortunate concept of “truth.” Saunders presents the idea that part of the appeal of a short story is whether it seems to reflect reality in some “true” fashion to the reader. However, when Saunders references Nabokov’s quote about Tolstoy’s “accuracy of perception” (219), I had to cringe. As Saunders himself points out, Tolstoy was notoriously terrible in his treatment of his wife, overly admiring of meekly suffering peasants, and kind of a jerk in general. But this isn’t just a minor personality flaw – he can be argued to be, according to our modern understanding, classist and misogynist. Saunders addresses this when he explains that problems in a story that appear to be about sexism can be rendered as “neutral, more workable technical observations” (246) – but why? I’m not sure why one would want or need to do this. Why can’t the study of fiction writing include observations about the sociological biases present? Why are these separated out of the discussion? It feels like a cop-out.
I’m not suggesting canceling Tolstoy; I’m suggesting we take these dusty old concepts of “truth” and “greatness” down from the pedestals they’ve been on. At one point, Milan Kundera is quoted speaking about “every true novelist” (220) – what exactly is a “true” novelist? I worry that this term is presented as something vague and ambiguous (like obscenity, you “know it when you see it”), but actually refers to something quite specific: “truth” comes from educated, European-descended men. Tolstoy’s “truth” might feel noble and right to him, but I squirm when it is presented as some kind of collective truth, unearthed by a “great” mind. These discussions of “truth” and “greatness,” as general qualities of good art should, I think, be thrown out the window.
There is another squishy concept sloshing around in the book, which is the “feel” a writer uses to decide what moves to make in a story. Saunders writes: “My experience is that, late in the game, finishing a story, we’re in such deep relation to it that we’re making decisions we’re not even aware we’re making, for reasons too fine to articulate…We’re operating in an intuitive zone, deciding quickly, without much deliberation” (109). There is certainly something to be said for this, because no matter how much you describe even the most minute patterns of your mind, there is always a massive remainder of material that you cannot possibly be conscious of, simply because there is too much. The quantity of single thoughts in every instant of human consciousness is staggering, producing a constant zone of neural activity that must remain semi-conscious or even totally unconscious, which becomes “intuition.” Certain artists like David Lynch take great advantage of this, while others try to assign more familiar structure to their work. But no artist, no human, is capable of minding every single thought he has. Which is good, because it dispels the fear of over-explaining fiction, like the fear of ruining a good joke by pulling it apart.
My anxiety about this vague concept of a writer’s “feel” is essentially the same as the one I have about “truth” – that it’s a specific, contingent set of ideas meant to be presented as universal. The discussion of storytelling as an art would ideally include analysis of who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, which stories are typically put forth as great or noble, and which stories are usually derided or criticized. Saunders has offered us so much in this book that it feels a little unfair to assign this task to him as well. The conversation has already been greatly advanced, in my opinion, by this truly excellent book on craft; the next step may be to find a way to address these problems of supposed universality as embodied by stale concepts like “greatness”.* Speaking personally, and going back to my memories of being a curious but unfulfilled undergrad, I know how damaging they can be to the young and easily-influenced. In general, though, Saunders has done more here to debunk the idea of mysterious, untouchable “genius” than most, showing us a set of comprehensible principles that can be adapted and manipulated. Though I wish this book had been around twenty years ago, I’m more than happy to have it now.
* In fact, writers like Matthew Salesses and Felicia Rose Chavez have already taken on the task of addressing cultural context within the teaching of writing, and I intend to write about them in future blog posts.
paradoxography 