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Ivan’s speech is the stuff of an excellent essay: articulate, earnest, precisely expressed, supported with examples, infused with sincere intent. That’s why we believe it and why we’re moved by it. But then Chekhov makes double use of the speech by attributing it to Ivan. When Ivan, speaking through Chekhov, diverges from Chekhov (when, on page 9, he gets heated and cranky and inexact), Chekhov lets this be (“It’s not me, it’s him”) and allows the story to react to that new Ivan. Noticing this new aspect of Ivan he’s just discovered, Chekhov tracks him into that “big room in which stood two old wooden beds,” asking, “What might a person in such a state (agitated, frustrated, just having delivered a passionate speech that fell flat) do next?” And discovers an answer: “He might thoughtlessly forget to clean his pipe, then, spent, fall asleep.”
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).
If I’m writing in a character’s voice and he or she suddenly blurts something out, is that “me”? Well, sort of. That blurt came out of me, after all. But is it really “me”? Do I “believe” it? Well, who cares? There it is. Is it good? Any power in it? If so, it would be crazy not to use it. That’s how characters get made: we export fragments of ourselves, then give those fragments pants and a hairstyle and a hometown and all of that.
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 it.
Over and over.
It’s kind of crazy but, in my experience, 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.
“There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway,” said Randall Jarrell, a pretty good critic himself. “What is good is good without our saying so, and beneath all our majesty we know this.”
“Alyosha’s pathetic fate moves us to pity,” Clarence Brown said, “but most readers will wonder what exactly we are to do or refrain from doing as a result of reading about it.”
Right. We do wonder. We’ve seen such a cruel thing happen: a small life, with no pleasure in it, blossomed momentarily (a red jacket! a girlfriend!), and it seemed that Alyosha might have a chance to be loved, a chance even the humblest person deserves, but no, that possibility gets yanked away, for no good reason, and no one apologizes, because no one sees anything wrong with it.
In the scale of things, this is a small injustice, but imagine the number of such injustices that have occurred since the beginning of time. All of those people who were wronged in life and remained unavenged or unsatisfied or bitter or longing for love on their deathbeds (all of those people who found this life a frustration, a disappointment, a torment), what, for them, is the real end of the story of this life?
Well, aren’t we all, at some level, one of those people? Has it all gone perfectly for us down here? At this very moment, are you (am I) at total peace, completely satisfied? When the end comes, will you feel, “If only I could go back and do it over, I’d do it better, fighting boldly and fearlessly against all that would reduce me” or “All is well, I was the way I was, for better or worse, and now I’m leaving happily, to rejoin something bigger”?
Still, I often find myself constructing rationales for the beneficial effects of fiction, trying, in essence, to justify the work I’ve been doing all these years.
So, trying to stay perfectly honest, let’s go ahead and ask, diagnostically: What is it, exactly, that fiction does?
Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking all along, as we’ve been watching our minds read these Russian stories. We’ve been comparing the pre-reading state of our minds to the post-reading state. And that’s what fiction does: it causes an incremental change in the state of a mind. That’s it. But, you know—it really does it. That change is finite but real.
And that’s not nothing.
It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.
Essentially, before I read a story, I’m in a state of knowing, of being fairly sure. My life has led me to a certain place and I’m contentedly resting there. Then, here comes the story, and I am slightly undone, in a good way. Not so sure anymore, of my views, and reminded that my view-maker is always a little bit off: it’s limited, it’s too easily satisfied, with too little data.
And that’s an enviable state to be in, if only for a few minutes.
It’s important, I think, to see the whole MFA thing as a pretty freaky but short-term immersion. You are not going to be doing this workshop crap forever. You are doing it to get a little baptism by fire, purge yourself of certain habits (of sloth, of under-revision, of the sin of thinking you’ve made a thing clear when you haven’t) and then you are going to run away from the whole approach like your pants are on fire, and not look back, but return to that sacred land where your writing is private and you don’t have to defend or explain it one bit. If you need that immersion and think it would help, go for it. If not, not. And don’t apply just because you think it’s the thing to do or is a “good career move” or everyone else in your school is doing it. Apply when you really feel you need … something: shelter or focus or good readers or just some time out of the capitalist shitstorm.
If you want the privilege of competing in a team sport, Scout, show us that you can live within our perfectly reasonable system of directives designed to benefit you.
Kyle's parents lol
Afterward, our protestations of love poured forth simultaneously, linguistically complex and metaphorically rich: I daresay we had become poets. We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly an hour. It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.
In the end, here’s how bad it got: I used a corner of the desk.
What’s death like?
You’re briefly unlimited.
I sailed right out through the roof.
And hovered above it, looking down. [...] killers all, all bad, I guess, although, in that instant, I saw it differently. At birth, they’d been charged by God with the responsibility of growing into total fuck-ups. Had they chosen this? Was it their fault, as they tumbled out of the womb? Had they aspired, covered in placental blood, to grow into harmers, dark forces, life-enders? In that first holy instant of breath/awareness (tiny hands clutching and unclutching), had it been their fondest hope to render (via gun, knife, or brick) some innocent family bereft? No; and yet their crooked destinies had lain dormant within them, seeds awaiting water and light to bring forth the most violent, life-poisoning flowers, said water/light actually being the requisite combination of neurological tendency and environmental activation that would transform them (transform us!) into earth’s offal, murderers, and foul us with the ultimate, unwashable transgression.
Wow, I thought, was there some Verbaluce™ in that drip or what?
But no.This was all me now.
Larry Donfrey of Larry Donfrey Realty stood near Roosten in just a swimsuit. Donfrey was a good guy. Good but flawed. Not that bright. Always tan. Yeow, what was his Boy of Summer? Surfer? Lifeguard? Partial Nudist? Was Donfrey attractive? Cute? Would the bidders consider Donfrey cuter than him, Al Roosten? Oh, how should he know? Did he like guys? Was he some kind of expert judge on the cuteness of guys?
No, he didn’t like guys and never had.
There had been a period in junior high, yes, when he had been somewhat worried that he might perhaps like guys, and had constantly lost in wrestling, because, instead of concentrating on his holds he was always mentally assessing whether his thing was hurting inside his cup because he was popping a mild pre-bone or because the tip was sticking out an airhole, and once he was almost sure he’d popped a mild pre-bone when he found his face pressed against Tom Reed’s hard abs, which smelled of coconut, but, after practice, obsessing about this in the woods, he realized that he sometimes popped a similar mild pre-bone when the cat sat on his groin in a beam of sun, which proved he didn’t have sexual feelings for Tom, since he knew for sure he didn’t have sexual feelings for the cat, since he’d never even heard that described as being possible. And from that day on, whenever he found himself wondering whether he liked guys he always remembered walking exultantly in the woods after the liberating realization that he was no more attracted to guys than to cats, just happily kicking the tops off mushrooms in a spirit of tremendous relief.