A story is a series of incremental pulses, each of which does something to us. Each puts us in a new place, relative to where we just were. Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art (where we were before we read it and where we were after) and (2) getting better at articulating that response. What I stress to my students is how empowering this process is. The world is full of people with agendas, trying to persuade us to act on their behalf (spend on their behalf, fight and die on their behalf, oppress others on their behalf). But inside us is what Hemingway called a “built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” How do we know something is shit? We watch the way the deep, honest part of our mind reacts to it. And that part of the mind is the one reading and writing refine into sharpness.
Apparently, in addition to writing some of my favourite long and short fiction, George Saunders is an Assistant Professor in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing Program, and one of the classes he teaches to the MFA students is on the Russian short story. Reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is like sitting in on this class as Saunders dissects seven of his favourite (or, at any rate, illustrative of some point) 19th century stories from Russian authors (three from Chekhov, two from Tolstoy, one each from Gogol and Turgenev), and not only does he explain the methods behind the writing of such precisely-constructed stories, but Saunders also illustrates how to read and recognise the craft in them. The tone is knowledgeable but casual — Saunders invites his students and readers to disagree with him (to employ their own “shit detectors” and trust their own tastes) — and I ended this book feeling both educated and entertained; it receives my highest recommendation. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
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. Great art occurs — or doesn’t — in that instant. 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 beyond 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.
If I had one complaint it would be about the formatting of the analysis of the first story, Anton Chekhov’s In the Cart: For this story only (and Saunders does warn that he’ll be treating the first story uniquely, but I didn’t pick up on his meaning at the time), Saunders shares the story one or two pages at a time and then asks questions about what, as readers or writers, we assume will happen next or how we feel about the latest development or what we think Chekhov intends for us to learn. This process would certainly help writing students to understand the mechanics of the story and its construction, but it didn’t make for an enjoyable reading experience and I was happy to discover that each of the ensuing stories is included in full before Saunders begins to analyse them (this seems a peevish complaint but I’m including it merely as a warning for anyone else who may be turned off at that point; do carry on.)
But to the good: Saunders has studied and taught these stories for decades, in various translations, and knows them intimately. His analyses include historical and biographical information that bring Russia and these authors to life, and by including details about his own life and writing process, Saunders invites us into the mysteries through which art is created — showing how it's done and why it matters. Again, while specific information (on how to write a sentence, for instance, and how to then revise it into a better sentence) seems essential learning for his writing students, Saunders makes it also feel like essential information for those of us who simply want to read and appreciate well-written fiction. And as someone who hasn’t read a lot of Russian short fiction — and also as someone who doesn’t feel like I always understood what I did read — this book entertainingly filled voids in my education of which I was only vaguely aware. I closed this book feeling enriched; enlarged.
To get to a few specifics, Saunders discusses the Russian trope of “the Holy Fool” and debates whether Leo Tolstoy was employing it in Alyosha the Pot (or whether, as a devout Christian, Tolstoy was unironically writing about a character who perfectly displays Christian virtues; the genius of the story being in that unconscious debate in the reader’s mind). Nikolai Gogol’s The Nose was one of the stories included here that I had read before — without really understanding — and I appreciated Saunders’ discussion of the Russian literary technique of skaz that Gogol was employing:
Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out`comes...poetry, ie., truth forced out through a restricted opening. That’s all poetry is, really: something odd, coming out. Normal speech, overflowed. A failed attempt to do justice to the world. The poet proves that language is inadequate by throwing herself at the fence of language and being bound by it. Poetry is the resultant bulging of the fence. Gogol’s contribution was to perform this throwing of himself against the fence in the part of town where the little men live, the sputtering, inarticulate men whose language can’t rise to the occasions but who still feel everything the big men (articulate, educated, at ease) feel.
Saunders explains the ambivalent appeal of Ivan Turgenev’s journalistic approach to short fiction (Henry James was a fan; Nabakov, not so much), and concludes of The Singers:
I’m moved by this clumsy work of art that seems to want to make the case that art may be clumsy if only it moves us. I’ve sometimes wondered if this effect was intentional: a sort of apologia from Turgenev for his own lack of craft. If we are moved, Turgenev has, via this story that claims that emotional power is the highest aim of art and can be obtained even in the face of clumsy craft, demonstrated that very thing. Which would be, you know — pretty great craft.
I appreciated that Saunders mentioned that Master and Man was Tolstoy’s effort, twenty years later, to make something more artful out of his experience of getting lost in a storm than his initial effort in The Snowstorm (which I then needed to find and read; also adding Hemingway’s Cat in the Rain — to learn how a story’s action can be urgently propelled a paragraph at a time — and revisiting Saunders’ own Victory Lap — to experience how a story’s action can go in directions that surprise even its author; I do love a book that leads me to do further reading off the page.)
There are many versions of you, in you. To which one am I speaking, when I write? The best one. The one most like my best one. Those two best versions of us, in a moment of reading, exit our usual selves and, at a location created by mutual respect, become one. That’s a pretty hopeful model of human interaction: two people, mutually respectful, leaning in, one speaking so as to compel, the other listening, willing to be charmed. That, a person can work with.
I highlighted far more passages in this book than I could reasonably share — there are so many directions this review could have taken — but this last one hit me personally: My very favourite books have always compelled me to say that they “charmed” me and I have to pay respect to an author who understands that, as a reader, I approach every book with this willingness to be charmed; that my least favourite reads are those that — through sloppy, illogical, lazy writing — make me feel disrespected instead. I love that Saunders’ approach to teaching is to highlight this imperative; that’s where art gets made.
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. The change is finite but real. And that’s not nothing. It’s not everything, but it’s not nothing.
So, that’s what it’s all about: Through the analysis of seven short stories from 19th century Russian authors (also included are two more from Chekhov: The Darling and Gooseberries), Saunders explains how to write, how to read, and why both matter — and that’s not nothing. I loved every bit of this.
