A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
4 stars
1) "For a young writer, reading the Russian stories of this period is akin to a young composer studying Bach. All of the bedrock principles of the form are on display. The stories are simple but moving. We care about what happens in them. They were written to challenge and antagonize and outrage. And, in a complicated way, to console. Once we begin reading the stories, which are, for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical, this idea may strike you as strange; but this is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer's politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every …
1) "For a young writer, reading the Russian stories of this period is akin to a young composer studying Bach. All of the bedrock principles of the form are on display. The stories are simple but moving. We care about what happens in them. They were written to challenge and antagonize and outrage. And, in a complicated way, to console. Once we begin reading the stories, which are, for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical, this idea may strike you as strange; but this is a resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer's politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind."
2) "Characterization, so called, results from just such increasing specification. The writer asks, 'Which particular person is this, anyway?' and answers with a series of facts that have the effect of creating a narrowing path: ruling out certain possibilities, urging others forward. As a particular person gets made, the potential for what we call 'plot' increases. (Although that's a word I don't like much-let's replace it with 'meaningful action.') As a particular person gets made, the potential for meaningful action increases. If a story begins, 'Once there was a boy who was afraid of water,' we expect that a pond, river, ocean, waterfall, bathtub, or tsunami will soon appear. If a character says, 'I have never once in my life been afraid,' we might not mind it so much if a lion walks in. If a character lives in perpetual fear of being embarrassed, we have some idea of what might need to happen to him. Likewise with someone who loves only money, or confesses that he has never really believed in friendship, or who claims to be so tired of her life that she can't imagine another."
3) "We put this aside for now. But notice that, even as we do, we're again enacting an expectation of efficiency―if it turns out that this tendency of hers isn't somehow used later, we will feel it (slightly) as wasteful. Yes: it's a harsh form, the short story. Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows."
4) "A story is not like real life; it's like a table with just a few things on it. The 'meaning' of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another. Imagine these things on a table: a gun, a grenade, a hatchet, a ceramic statue of a duck. If the duck is at the center of the table, surrounded closely by the weapons, we feel: that duck is in trouble. If the duck, the gun, and the grenade have the hatchet pinned down in one corner, we may feel the duck to be leading the modern weaponry (the gun, the grenade) against the (old-fashioned) hatchet. If the three weapons are each hanging precipitously over one edge of the table and the duck is facing them, we might understand the duck to be a radical pacifist who's finally had enough. That's really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another."
5) "I once heard the great Chicago writer Stuart Dybek say, 'A story is always talking to you; you just have to learn to listen to it.' Revising like this is a way of listening to the story and of having faith in it: it wants to be its best self, and if you're patient with it, in time, it will be. Essentially, the whole process is: intuition plus iteration."
6) "We get none of that daily, calendar-tending, mere accounting. Why not? Because those days don't matter. They aren't meaningful. By whose standard? The story's. The story is telling us, by skipping those days, that nothing meaningful happened during them and that it intends to set us down in front of the next thing it judges meaningful, i.e., relevant to its purpose. The boldness of this leap teaches us something important about the short story: it is not a documentary or rigorous accounting of the passage of time or a fair-minded attempt to show life as it is really lived; it's a radically shaped, even somewhat cartoonish (when held up against the tedious real world) little machine that thrills us with the extremity of its decisiveness."
7) "One thing Chekhov did, back in the early pages of the story, was to make Olenka a particular person by giving her a specific trait: when she loves someone, she becomes that person. As we saw in our discussion of 'In the Cart,' once a specific person has been made (via facts), we then know, of all the many things that could happen to her, which would be meaningful. We might say that in specificity lies nascent plot. Story: 'Once upon a time there was a woman who became whatever she loved.' Chekhov: 'Really? How about we test that supposition? Hmm. How to do that? Oh, I know: kill off her first love and present her with a second.' So, 'good writerly habit' might consist of continually revising toward specificity, so that specificity can appear and then produce plot (or, as we prefer to call it, 'meaningful action')."
8) "So: a chance for us, again, to think about how stories end. What allows them to end? When they bypass a place where they might have ended, what must they then go on to accomplish? Given the extreme efficiency of the form, what will those pages need to do, to not be felt as extraneous? To our accruing list of universal laws of fiction (Be specific! Honor efficiency!), which, by the way, we should continually remind ourselves to distrust, we might add: Always be escalating. That's all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating."
9) "[Even] in translation, one of the pleasures of Gogol's prose is the way a genuine emotion, passed through the distortive skaz filter, comes out the other side, still genuine but twisted. I heard a version of this growing up. Late at some neighborhood party, cornered by some pal of my parents' who'd had too much to drink and longed to convey to someone, anyone, how the world seemed to him (beautiful, unfair, full of hidden messages he'd missed), a sort of Chicago skaz got performed: 'You got moxie but, trust me, the fucks are gonna fuck with you, and you gotta give 'em this'—insert raised middle finger—first time they try that shit!' 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, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening."
10) "Five writers might be sitting in a row at a long table in the same café, all believers in specificity, but at the moment of truth, some of them will find a charming way of being specific and others won't. So, that's harsh. But it's also freeing. It narrows the number of things we have to worry about down to just one: the moment when, reading a line of our work, we decide whether to change it. 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."
11) "The writer and the reader stand at either end of a pond. The writer drops a pebble in and the ripples reach the reader. The writer stands there, imagining the way the reader is receiving those ripples, by way of deciding which pebble to drop in next. Meanwhile, the reader receives those ripples and, somehow, they speak to her. In other words, they're in connection. These days, it's easy to feel that we've fallen out of connection with one another and with the earth and with reason and with love. I mean: we have. But to read, to write, is to say that we still believe in, at least, the possibility of connection. When reading and writing, we feel connection happening (or not). That's the essence of these activities: ascertaining whether connection is happening, and where, and why. Those two people, in those postures, across that pond, are doing essential work. This is not a hobby, pastime, or indulgence. By their mutual belief in connection, they're making the world better, by making it (at least between the two of them, in that small moment) more friendly."
