Borrowed Fire: The Overcoat: Justice Done

Here is 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.)

For this writing exercise, I'm borrowing from two living souls, in addition to Gogol. One is Julie Orringer, whose creative writing class I took several years ago; she taught "The Overcoat" to make us think about fiction as a means of dispensing justice. The other is William Flesch, whose recent talk at Stanford also focused on justice in storytelling. He argues that perhaps the most satisfying aspect of storytelling, from a reader's perspective, is "altruistic punishment." Fantasized punishments, in which those who've done wrong come to see the error of their ways, are more appealing than virtue rewarded--though writers must be careful not to take the punishment too far, or we begin to feel sorry for the punishee. (The same dynamic holds for real life.)

Gogol negotiates this balance perfectly, I think, by making the punishment truly fantastical, even with in the context of fiction (which is already fantasy by definition). After our poor hero, Akaky, finally saves enough to buy his new overcoat, and the coat somehow starts to make his whole life better, he's robbed on the street and his coat is stolen. Seeking help, Akaky goes to see a "prominent personage," who, although he appears late in the story, quickly becomes the main villain. The "prominent personage" verbally abuses Akaky so severely that Akaky becomes ill and, after a short time, dies. At this point, we really, really want to see justice done, and Gogol provides. But he also makes Akaky's ghost the instrument of justice, so that we remain just a bit doubtful as to whether the retribution really happens:

Suddenly the important personage felt some one clutch him firmly by the collar. Turning round, he perceived a man of short stature, in an old, worn uniform, and recognised, not without terror, Akaky Akakiyevich. The official's face was white as snow, and looked just like a corpse's. But the horror of the important personage transcended all bounds when he saw the dead man's mouth open, and heard it utter the following remarks, while it breathed upon him the terrible odour of the grave: "Ah, here you are at last! I have you, that--by the collar! I need your cloak. You took no trouble about mine, but reprimanded me. So now give up your own."

The pallid prominent personage almost died of fright. Brave as he was in the office and in the presence of inferiors generally, and although, at the sight of his manly form and appearance, every one said, "Ugh! how much character he has!" at this crisis, he, like many possessed of an heroic exterior, experienced such terror, that, not without cause, he began to fear an attack of illness. He flung his cloak hastily from his shoulders and shouted to his coachman in an unnatural voice, "Home at full speed!" The coachman, hearing the tone which is generally employed at critical moments, and even accompanied by something much more tangible, drew his head down between his shoulders in case of an emergency, flourished his whip, and flew on like an arrow. In a little more than six minutes the prominent personage was at the entrance of his own house. Pale, thoroughly scared, and cloakless, he went home instead of to Karolina Ivanovna's, reached his room somehow or other, and passed the night in the direst distress; so that the next morning over their tea, his daughter said, "You are very pale to-day, papa." But papa remained silent, and said not a word to any one of what had happened to him, where he had been, or where he had intended to go.

This occurrence made a deep impression upon him. He even began to say, "How dare you? Do you realise who is standing before you?" less frequently to the under-officials, and, if he did utter the words, it was only after first having learned the bearings of the matter. But the most noteworthy point was, that from that day forward the apparition of the dead official ceased to be seen. Evidently the prominent personage's cloak just fitted his shoulders. At all events, no more instances of his dragging cloaks from people's shoulders were heard of. But many active and solicitous persons could by no means reassure themselves, and asserted that the dead official still showed himself in distant parts of the city.

So "The Overcoat" dispenses justice, but--this is the key--not too neatly. Akaky suffers just a little too much, and his suffering is not quite redeemed. The punishment for those who hurt him, while seemingly fitting, can't be verified. And it's these imbalances that somehow give the story perfect balance, making it supremely satisfying.

The writing lesson here? When it comes to justice, give with one hand and take away with the other.

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: The Overcoat: Cordon off the Sentiment

Oh, hell, let's do The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol. (On Project Gutenberg, it's part of a collection of Russian short stories, and the title is translated here as "The Cloak." Just search for "cloak" or "Gogol.") I've been resisting this one a little, since my story, "An Eye for Alicia" (in the current issue of the Alaska Quarterly Review) is patterned, so to speak, on this story. The whole business started with an exercise in a class I took with Julie Orringer many years ago, in which we read "The Overcoat" and talked about fiction as a way of dispensing justice. So talking here about "The Overcoat" as a model for fiction somehow feels self-serving and self-sabotaging at the same time...but enough about me and my issues. The story is a great model for those of us who aspire to surrealism and satire, in part because it walks that delicate line between satire and cruelty. The story's oddball narrator invites us to mock the hapless protagonist, Akaky Akakiyevich--but lest we indulge ourselves too much at his expense, the narrator, every so often, calls us out.

Early on in the story, after several amusing paragraphs recounting the history of his ridiculous name, his unfortunate physical appearance, his tedious labors as a copying clerk, and so on, comes this passage:

The young officials laughed at and made fun of him, so far as their official wit permitted; told in his presence various stories concocted about him, and about his landlady, an old woman of seventy; declared that she beat him; asked when the wedding was to be; and strewed bits of paper over his head, calling them snow. But Akaky Akakiyevich answered not a word, any more than if there had been no one there besides himself. It even had no effect upon his work. Amid all these annoyances he never made a single mistake in a letter. But if the joking became wholly unbearable, as when they jogged his head, and prevented his attending to his work, he would exclaim:

"Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?"

And there was something strange in the words and the voice in which they were uttered. There was in it something which moved to pity; so much so that one young man, a newcomer, who, taking pattern by the others, had permitted himself to make sport of Akaky, suddenly stopped short, as though all about him had undergone a transformation, and presented itself in a different aspect. Some unseen force repelled him from the comrades whose acquaintance he had made, on the supposition that they were decent, well-bred men. Long afterwards, in his gayest moments, there recurred to his mind the little official with the bald forehead, with his heart rending words,

"Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?"

In these moving words, other words resounded--"I am thy brother." And the young man covered his face with his hand; and many a time afterwards, in the course of his life, shuddered at seeing how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage coarseness is concealed beneath refined, cultured, worldly refinement, and even, O God! in that man whom the world acknowledges as honourable and upright.

I love this brief pivot into the consciousness of a minor character, the "young man," who will never be heard from again in the story--and the way this leads to the narrator's sudden cry from deep in his heart: how much inhumanity there is in man! Through the young man's brief appearance, all of Akaky's suffering, and the narrator's sympathy for him, get compartmentalized and distilled. Thus there's no need to lard the whole story with ineffectual calls for sympathy (otherwise known as sentimentality): there's a black hole of human suffering right here, narrow but infinitely deep. Kind of like the LaBrea tar pits, cordoned off but still dangerous, containing eons of suffering, in the middle of downtown LA. In other words, hem in the emotion; keep it tight, fleeting, and intense.