Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: The Elements

The text of "The Overcoat," called "The Cloak" in this collection, from Project Gutenberg. (You'll need to do a search for "cloak" or Gogol, since the whole story collection is in one file.)

Just as in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, the St. Petersburg weather plays a significant role in "The Overcoat." The motif of St. Petersburg as a grid imposed upon chaos dates back to Peter the Great, who wanted to construct a "rational," western-European-style city on top of what was essentially swampland. Having been to St. Petersburg, I can tell you the weather is, to put it mildly, changeable; and the futility of trying to give structure to uncooperative nature drives many a Russian tale.

Near the beginning, Gogol suggests--though I don't think this is entirely true--that "The Overcoat" is a story about weather:

There exists in St. Petersburg a powerful foe of all who receive a salary of four hundred rubles a year, or there-abouts. This foe is no other than the Northern cold, although it is said to be very healthy. At nine o'clock in the morning, at the very hour when the streets are filled with men bound for the various official departments, it begins to bestow such powerful and piercing nips on all noses impartially, that the poor officials really do not know what to do with them. At an hour, when the foreheads of even those who occupy exalted positions ache with the cold, and tears start to their eyes, the poor titular councillors are sometimes quite unprotected. Their only salvation lies in traversing as quickly as possible, in their thin little cloaks, five or six streets, and then warming their feet in the porter's room, and so thawing all their talents and qualifications for official service, which had become frozen on the way.

Weather itself takes a back seat later to all the metaphorical weather to which poor Akaky is subject--namely bureaucracy, and the aforementioned cruelty of human nature. Still, I propose a writing experiment in which weather itself drives both plot and characterization. Not necessarily freakish weather (for example, riding out a storm on the high seas), but everyday weather. I'm thinking, for instance, of the Coen brothers' movie Fargo, in which different characters' preparedness for and understanding of snow--that is, endless miles of deep, drifting, relentless snow--signals who ultimately will and won't survive (the Steve Buscemi character being in the latter category).

A human and the weather--an elemental tale in many senses.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: Breaking the triangle

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

For the past year or so I've been obsessed with structure, and in particular with undermining "Freitag's triangle"--i.e., introduction --> conflict --> climax --> falling action --> resolution.* The Underground Man, naturally, hates having any structures forced upon him, including 2+2=4, and rails against such things at length in the first part of the book. And by railing, he does win out in the end--maybe he can't defeat 2+2, but he does wreck the triangle.

The first third of NfU, "Underground," is basically ranting. It has no clear narrative structure, no rising and falling action, only churning emotions, intellectual conundrums, and the constant love / hate, push / pull with the reader. The rest of the novel falls under the heading "A Propos of the Wet Snow," and is a much more conventional, triangle-shaped story. It's a memory from the UM's distant past, and may or may not explain how he came to be how he is now. He of course comes off badly, but possibly more sympathetically, in "Wet Snow." Or not. The more I think about the "Wet Snow" section, the more I wonder about its purpose. And that's what's great about this two-part structure.

I can imagine the responses Dostoevky would have gotten in a typical writing workshop: "The second part's great. It really moves. I can really see these characters and relate to them. Definitely cut the first part, though. You're just spinning your wheels. There's no action." But it's the weird relationship between Part I and Part II, and the narrator's refusal to tell a story until he's good and ready, that makes NfU what it is.

So here's an experiment to try, keeping in mind that your writing workshop may lambaste you. Spend the first third of your story (or novella, for that matter) not telling the story. Let the narrator who's on the verge of telling the story lay out all his or her motives, maybe preview the tale and give it some nice, inaccurate Cliff's Notes. Obviously your narrator has to be crazy enough to engage the reader for the duration of this section. You might think of that high school English teacher you loved to hate, and give that teacher some sort of unresolvable moral obsession--like proving the existence of God in a world that clearly suggests otherwise, or resisting some basic law of nature. Then go ahead and tell the story (or rather, a story) in the second part. Don't worry too much about tying the first part to the second, or, worse, with making the second part explain the first. This isn't a flashback to a traumatic childhood, for instance, that tells us why the narrator is such a monster today. It's more like another view of the narrator, and it shouldn't let him or her off the hook.

*BTW I give Eric Puchner a lot of credit for helping me think about these issues, through his Stanford Continuing Studies course, "Fiction that Breaks the Mold."

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: a new Overcoat

(What is Borrowed Fire?)

Here's Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

Oh, how can you not love this book? (I'm not saying you don't love it, gentlemen; I think you do. But perhaps you are not ready to admit it.)

How can you not love this guy:

One night as I was passing a tavern I saw through a lighted window some gentlemen fighting with billiard cues, and saw one of them thrown out of the window. At other times I should have felt very much disgusted, but I was in such a mood at the time, that I actually envied the gentleman thrown out of the window--and I envied him so much that I even went into the tavern and into the billiard-room. "Perhaps," I thought, "I'll have a fight, too, and they'll throw me out of the window."

The scheme occurs to the Underground Man, by the way, as he's returning from one of his nights of "filthy vice" (i.e. visiting prostitutes). He wishes to punish himself, or rather, have someone else punish him--so he can then play the victim, and then mock himself for playing the victim, and so on into infinity. He also wants the attention that being thrown through a window will bring him. But what happens instead?

An officer put me in my place from the first moment.

I was standing by the billiard-table and in my ignorance blocking up the way, and he wanted to pass; he took me by the shoulders and without a word--without a warning or explanation--moved me from where I was standing to another spot and passed by as though he had not noticed me. I could have forgiven blows, but I could not forgive his having moved me without noticing me.

It's the UM's manner of plotting and--sort of--exacting revenge that I'm interested in today. His first attempt is to write a satirical story about the officer, but it is rejected by a prominent journal, to his great consternation (perhaps some of us can relate to this particular failed plot). So he decides he is going to bump the officer in some public place. That is, he's going to get in the man's way and not step aside; the idea of doing this makes him absolutely giddy. (This whole section is worth several reads; I think it's hysterically funny, and I'm sure as hell not doing it justice here.) But first he has to prepare to bump him, and this involves obtaining proper attire. Specifically, he needs a new overcoat.

I had got ready long beforehand a good shirt, with white bone studs; my overcoat was the only thing that held me back. The coat in itself was a very good one, it kept me warm; but it was wadded and it had a raccoon collar which was the height of vulgarity. I had to change the collar at any sacrifice, and to have a beaver one like an officer's. For this purpose I began visiting the Gostiny Dvor and after several attempts I pitched upon a piece of cheap German beaver. Though these German beavers soon grow shabby and look wretched, yet at first they look exceedingly well, and I only needed it for the occasion. I asked the price; even so, it was too expensive. After thinking it over thoroughly I decided to sell my raccoon collar. The rest of the money--a considerable sum for me, I decided to borrow from Anton Antonitch Syetotchkin, my immediate superior, an unassuming person, though grave and judicious. He never lent money to anyone, but I had, on entering the service, been specially recommended to him by an important personage who had got me my berth. I was horribly worried. To borrow from Anton Antonitch seemed to me monstrous and shameful. I did not sleep for two or three nights. Indeed, I did not sleep well at that time, I was in a fever; I had a vague sinking at my heart or else a sudden throbbing, throbbing, throbbing! Anton Antonitch was surprised at first, then he frowned, then he reflected, and did after all lend me the money, receiving from me a written authorisation to take from my salary a fortnight later the sum that he had lent me.

All of this, as you may already know, is a parody of Gogol's "The Overcoat," which of course is a satire itself. (Ooh! I see they have "The Overcoat" on Gutenburg also, only in their collection it's called "The Cloak.") And of course the parody is completely knowing, a very self-conscious bit of meta-fiction. In fact, the UM says of the officer, "Devil knows what I would have given for a real regular quarrel--a more decent, a more LITERARY one, so to speak."

OK: metafiction can be cheesy, smarmy, snotty, snooty, and tiresome. Let's not do it like that. But we can try weaving a story we really love into one of our stories. We often do this sort of thing unconsciously--let's try it consciously. We can try a complex, ultimately admiring parody that doesn't just exist as a parody, but serves to advance the story. The game here is that the UM wants to be more literary, so he rewrites himself as a fictional character that he thinks his readers will recognize (he's aware that he's already fictional, but people don't recognize him--that's the problem). Maybe the story we choose to parody could even be NfU, or some episode therein, like the bump-plotting episode.

BTW, does the UM ever bump the officer? Yes he does.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: I am (not) a spiteful man

Here is our text on Project Gutenberg.

A brief bit of pendantry to start out with, but I think it will be worth it. About those famous opening lines--"I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man." The 1993 translation of NfU by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky renders the second line as "I am a wicked man." As Pevear explains in the foreword:

...the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a type of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky (xxiii).

My Russian is rusty, but it's evident from checking any dictionary that "zloy" means "wicked" or "evil." Pevear's explanation for how it got to be "spiteful" instead is intriguing, though I'm reluctant to simply attribute it to our namby-pamby (previous) century. It's true, as Pevear's foreword implies and as other critics have pointed out, translators have often felt compelled to clean up Dostoevsky's prose. They sometimes assume he was rushing to finish so he could pay off his gambling debts, and if he'd had more time, he would have said it their way (i.e. more eloquently).* So perhaps they don't believe he really meant "wicked," especially since people almost never refer to themselves as "evil." Truly evil people never do--they think they are the saviors of humankind. So what could it mean that this man, whom we are supposed to think of as an anti-hero of an anti-novel, calls himself "evil" on the first page? "Spiteful," while not a flattering way to characterize yourself, is more understandable--it's a bad habit, which is fixable. But being evil is perhaps not.

So here are a couple of writing experiments we can try.

1. Create a character who refers to himself or herself as "wicked." The character should also have a surprising, ambivalent relationship to that statement--no gleeful cackling, for instance, unless it's adulterated by at least one other emotion. What is the character trying to achieve by telling us he's evil?
   
   
2. Consider a story you have drafted, or one you are thinking about writing. Do as Pevear suggests, and translate psychological conditions into moral or spiritual ones. I'm thinking this could have the effect of raising the stakes in a story significantly. After all, Dostoevsky's characters literally go insane worrying about why God allows innocents to suffer. And I think a lot of contemporary fiction could use higher stakes.
   
   

* Update: I've edited this section to point out that "cleaning up Dostoevsky's prose" is a longstanding issue with translations.

Borrowed Fire: Notes from Underground: Gentlemen?

Borrowed Fire: a new regular feature on S and V, in which we steal writing from the gods.

Here's the text of Notes from Underground from Project Gutenberg.

Let's skip the infamous first few lines ("I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man") and perhaps return to them later. And let's approach the infamous narrator who utters them, the Underground Man, from a different angle--his addressees, whom he calls "gentlemen." For instance, here's a short passage from Part I:

You imagine no doubt, gentlemen, that I want to amuse you. You are mistaken in that, too. I am by no means such a mirthful person as you imagine, or as you may imagine; however, irritated by all this babble (and I feel that you are irritated) you think fit to ask me who I am--then my answer is, I am a collegiate assessor.

When I've taught this book in Comp Lit courses, I've seen students get quite irritated indeed by lines like these. Their reaction is something akin to what many of us feel reading stories in the dreaded second-person, to wit: "You are riding on the subway..." No, I'm not, you idiot.* The students say things like: How dare the Underground Man (or is it Dostoevsky?) assume I'm irritated? OK, I am irritated, but not for the reasons he thinks. He's putting words in my mouth; that's why I'm irritated. (Also, some will point out, we're not gentlemen.) And they read the rest of the book with a nice big chip on their shoulders.

But what if Dostoevsky, and the Underground Man, want us to read with that chip? Let's assume the UM knows we think he's misread us, and that we'll therefore resist what he has to say. What might be Dostoevsky's purposes in doing that? And how does that affect the narration?

So here's a writing experiment: creating a reader--to whom you explicitly refer in your story--whom your narrator deliberately, strategically misunderstands. This should go beyond the exercise of, say, writing a letter to a hostile or skeptical recipient. Your narrator is toying with the real reader by creating a sham version of that reader--a kind of voodoo doll that the narrator pokes to get a reaction out of the unseen person it represents. What strategies would you use for poking? Why and how do you want the reader to resist?

*By the way I have written a story in the second person. But I expect a fair number of people to loathe it.