Chekhov's "Lady with the Pet Dog"

Today (November 16, 2010) marks the second anniversary of my blog “Reading the Short Story.” It is also the day my second short story has been published. It is entitled “Down Under” and is available at Marco Polo Quarterly at the following address: http://www.marcopoloquarterly.com/downundercmay.html

In the two years I have been writing this blog, I have tried to post at least one brief essay each week. Today is my 114th entry. To mark that occasion, for I dearly love to mark occasions, I am posting a brief discussion of one of the most admired short stories in the history of the form, Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” (as translated by Constance Garnett; translated by David Magarshack as “Lady with Lapdog”; also translated as “Lady with the Pet Dog,” “Lady with the Little Dog” and others).

I also will comment briefly on three modern tributes to the story: “The Lady with the Pet Dog” by Joyce Carol Oates, “The Man with the Lapdog” by Beth Lordan, and “Reading Chekhov” by David Means.

At the end of the nineteenth century Anton Chekhov, the great master of the short story, perfected the form’s ability to present spiritual reality in realistic terms by focusing on the essentially mysterious and hidden nature of the basic human desire to transcend the everyday. Critic Peter Bitsilli has suggested that the complexity of Chekhov's characters leads us to feel there is something about them we do not understand, a something hidden from us, a something that is part of Chekhov's appeal. That something, I suggest, is Chekhov’s understanding of the connection between the old romance form’s focus on spiritual reality and the modern short story’s focus on the secret inner desire of the individual to participate in that reality.

Although the theme of the basic desire of the secret self could be illustrated in any number of Chekhov’s short fictions, the paradigmatic statement can be found in one of his most famous stories, “Lady with the Dog.” Near the end of what seems to be merely an anecdotal tale of adultery, the central male character agonizes over the division he senses in himself.

"He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life, running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest, and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth—such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his “lower race,” his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities—all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night."

In "The Lady with The Dog"--a paradigm for the story of the illicit affair--it is never clear whether Gurov truly loves Anna Sergeyevna or whether it is only the romantic fantasy that he wishes to maintain. What makes the story so subtle and complex is that Chekov presents the romance in such an understated and objective way that we realize there is no way to determine whether it is love or romance, for there is no way to distinguish between them. Although Gurov feels that he has a life open and seen, full of relative truth and falsehood like everyone else, he knows he has another life running its course in secret, a true life, and the false only was open to others. "All personal life," he feels, "rested on secrecy."

At the end of the story, Gurov and Anna wonder how they can free themselves from their intolerable bondage, but only Chekhov and the reader are aware that there is no way to free themselves, for the real bondage is not the manifest one, but the latent bondage all human beings have to the dilemma of never knowing which is the true self and which is the false one. Although it seems to the couple that they would soon find the solution and a new and splendid life would begin, at the same time it is clear to them that they had a long way to go and that the most complicated part of it was only just beginning. Indeed, what seems so simple is indeed complicated.

This division between public life and secret life corresponds to the distinction anthropologist Mircea Eliade makes between the two modes of being, sacred and profane, experienced by primitive man. “The man of the archaic societies,” says Eliade, wished to live as much as possible in the sacred, for the sacred is equivalent, “in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being.” The realm of the sacred, or what Ernst Cassirer calls “mythic reality,” is the central subject of the short story. What Cassirer calls “the momentary deity” and Eliade calls the “sacred” is something that manifests itself as wholly different from profane or everyday reality. Eliade uses the term “hierophany” to designate the momentary disruption that marks the sacred, the paradox of which is that by “manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something else, yet it continues to remain itself.”

This phenomenon is well known to writers who have made the short story their primary fictional mode. Raymond Carver suggests it most emphatically when he notes, "It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things--a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring--with immense, even startling power.” As Flannery O’Connor says, "The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible.... His problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him.”

As Eudora Welty once said, "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the last to see mystery again. Every good story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows more beautiful. More so than in the novel, the short story most often deals with phenomena for which there is no clearly discernible logical, sociological, or psychological cause. As Welty says, the "first thing we notice about our story is that we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of its own. It is wrapped in an atmosphere. This is what makes it shine, perhaps, as well as what initial obscures its plain, real shape." To Conrad’s Marlowe, sitting Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” the "meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine."

In Chekhov’s great story, “Lady with the Dog,” The secrecy of Gurov’s idealized desire constitutes true reality for him, just as the sacred constituted true reality for primitive man and woman. Indeed, in the modern short story, idealized human desire--unsayable, unrealizable, always hovering, like religious experience in the realm of the "not yet"--replaces the sacred revelation embodied in primal short-fiction forms. As the couple sit looking at the sea, Gurov feels that “in reality everything is beautiful in this world when one reflects: everything except what we think or do ourselves…” When Anna leaves, Gurov thinks it has been just another episode or adventure in his life, nothing left but a memory that would visit him only from time to time. But she haunts him, and he imagines her to be lovelier and himself to be finer than they actually were in Yalta. The story ends with the couple agonizing about how to avoid the secrecy and to be free of their intolerable bondage. “How? How?” Gurov asks. But, of course there is no answer, no way that the romantic, spiritual ideal they store up in their ghostly hearts can ever be actualized, except, of course, as it is manifested in the short story—as the immanent, the liminal, the “not yet.”

Beth Lordan, professor of creative writing at Southern Illinois University, had just returned from a spring semester in Ireland when she wrote “The Man With the Lapdog,” the first story in her “novel-in-stories,” But Come Ye Back, about an American man and his Irish-born wife retiring to her homeland where the sea is near and the butter has a taste to it, but where he hates driving on the wrong side of the road and doesn’t care for the Guinness.

Although each story in But Come Ye Back is a perfectly formed independent fiction, the separate parts create an even greater whole. And the reason is the reader’s gradual discovery of, and growing concern for, the central characters. As you read each story, you experience shifting allegiances. At one point Lyle seems like a gruff curmudgeon and his wife long-suffering; at another, Mary seems to be shrewishly sharp tongued and Lyle quietly self-sacrificing.

Like most couples who have lived together for many years, Lyle and Mary chaff against each other, find it difficult to say how they really feel, and occasionally fantasize about how it would be to be with someone else. For Lyle, it occurs when he meets an American couple on holiday and discovers that the husband is dying of cancer; he imagines meeting the wife again later, but, as opposed to the famous Chekhov story of illicit love from which “The Man With the Lapdog” gets its name, he quietly values his own relationship.

In the final scene, when Mary goes for a walk with Lyle and they meet the American couple, Mary exhibits the gracious sympathy and hospitality the Irish are famous for by inviting them home for tea and putting her arms around the young American woman. As they part, Mary says, “Such lovely people,” and Lyle, who has rejected taking up Irish idioms, presses his arm against her side and says, “They are so. And it’s a sad thing, it is.” Lordan’s story is a delicately-done love story about those daily irritations and fantasies that tear at married couples and those occasional luminous moments that remind them of what holds them together.

Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Lady with the Pet Dog” (in High Lonesome) is not so delicate. Told from the point of view of the Anna character in Chekhov’s story, it is a modern story of adultery, focusing on a period six months after the lovers have broken it off. It is marred by Oates’ ignoring Chekhov’s famous dictum, “It is better to say too little than too much.” Oates has her female protagonist examine and ponder and wonder endlessly, even, predictably, making a half-hearted suicide attempt. The couple torment themselves with recriminations and shame; the cuckolded husband helplessly tries to hold on.

The basic problem I have with Joyce Carol Oates’ stories is that she does not seem to really like her characters, and she does not respect the intelligence of her readers, feeling compelled to explain everything and to center relentlessly on some thematic idea she wishes to convey. Too many of her stories are aesthetically astute but emotionally cold, resonant with the influence of literature but empty of the mystery of life.

Oates writes a great deal and seemingly publishes everything she writes. It is a fact of her literary life that makes one suspicious that in spite of the serious surface of her work she is a one-woman industry. There is no doubt that she knows the short story form well--has studied it and practiced it more than most living writers. However, her work is often imitative and repetitive, and many of the stories seem to spring from a dispassionate artistic "what if" than from a passionate involvement in the lives of her characters.

Too often, Oates' stories read like creative writing assignments. And indeed, students who want to learn how to write short fiction could do worse than read the stories of Joyce Carol Oates and imitate what she does. For she is a complete craftsman who can mimic the conventions of the form. However, as John Barth has his Genie and the archetypal storyteller Scheherazade say in his book Chimera (1972), telling stories, like making love, takes more than good technique; while both heartfelt ineptitude and heartless skill have their appeal, what one really wants is "passionate virtuosity." No matter how well a writer knows the conventions and techniques of a genre, without a deeply felt sense of human mystery that compels the great writer to write, the result is apt to be bloodless. Oates is certainly a virtuoso, but does she have passion?

David Means’ story “Reading Chekhov,” from his new collection, The Spot, is also a version of “Lady with a Pet Dog.” The story is told in brief sections that move back and forth between the man, who is a 35-year-old part-time student at a seminary, and the woman who is married with a twelve-year-old daughter. They know they are part of the overall tradition of adultery; they read “The Lady with the Pet Dog” together and compare themselves to Chekhov’s lovers.

Means has a very perceptive understanding of the subtleties of adultery, and it doesn’t hurt that his characters here are made intelligent about, and sensitive to, what they are involved in. While lace curtains spread a lattice across her body that he traces with his fingers, “from her belly—with its cesarean scar to her chin—“ he says that adultery is multifaceted: “It’s shapeless but at the same time has a rudimentary figure, like a snowflake; an abundance of clichés surround it and yet it’s unique, an entity different each time.” This, of course, is the challenge to writing a good story about adultery, as Chekhov well knew.

Means creates an irresistible trope of the woman’s skirt, which is charged with static electricity, “clinging in wavelets to her thighs, riding along her crotch, sliding up with each step as she climbed the stairs to his apartment.” When they walk down toward the river off the promenade, he lets her go ahead a few yards “so he could watch her hips shifting beneath her skirt, the movement of her rear against the silk fabric, light-and dark-blue daisy-shaped flowers.”

It is at this point that the story shifts, for her pumps make her unsteady on the soft ground and she twists sideways to the right and falls into the weeds, breaking a bone just above her ankle. She must lie to her husband as to how the accident occurred; and as she sits at home letting the bones heal, she apparently decides to end it. Her explanation to him about the importance of her marriage and her daughter seems so stilted she makes up something specific: “I went last night check my daughter, and she was uncovered and sleeping facedown and I looked at her back, the bones of her back, and they were, well, they reminded me of the bones of a sardine. You could chew and swallow them and not even notice.”
And it is indeed such specificities, both real and imagined, that characterize the affair. Here is how the story ends:

“Much later she’d hold specific memories of it…. She beheld a certain dignity in the exactitudes: the smell of cut flowers at a bodega, rubber bands bright red around their stems; the dusky light off Broadway on summer afternoons; the heavy wall along Riverside Park, cool against their claves, as they sat holding hands during lunch, turning now and then to glance down through the trees to the river, which was broken into shards, blue against the green.”

Like Borges, who once said that a short story may be, for all purposes, “essential," or Andre Dubus, who said he loved short stories because “they are the way we live," or Alice Munro, who once told an interviewer that she doesn’t write novels because she sees her material in a short-story way, David Means-- like Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley--sees the world in a short-story way.

One doesn’t go to David Means for plot that rushes to its inevitable end or for easily recognizable character, like the folks you meet every day. One reads David Means for some scary, sacred, sense that what happens is not as important as what it signifies. One reads David Means for mystery and the paradox understood by the great short story writers from Poe to Chekhov to Carver--that if you remove everything extraneous from a scene, an object, a person, its meaning is revealed--stark and astonishing.

New Yorker Stories by David Means, Junot Diaz, and Joyce Carol Oates

Although I get behind occasionally, I try to keep up with the fiction published weekly in The New Yorker. I don’t care what some critics say about the so-called standardized New Yorker story; issue for issue, the magazine consistently publishes some of the best short fiction being written nowadays. And at a story per issue (not to mention a couple of special fiction issues), they certainly publish the most.

During March, I read three stories in The New Yorker, back to back, and the experience got me to thinking about those age-old issues of critical judgment versus plain old personal taste. The stories are:

“The Knocking” by David Means, March 15
“The Pura Principle” by Junot Diaz, March 22
“I.D” by Joyce Carol Oates, March 29

I have commented on all three of these authors in previous blog entries. So, if you have been following me this past year, you know that I think Junot Diaz is more of a novelist than a short-story writer, that Joyce Carol Oates is a formulaic short-story writer, and that David Means is a short story writer of originality and brilliance.

Reading these three stories only reaffirmed these opinions. What does that say about me?

1. May is close-minded and unable to read these three authors without prejudice.
2. May has a personal preference for tight, language-intense lyrical stories.
3. May doesn’t like rambling first-person novelistic, ghetto memoir-type monologues.
4. May thinks Joyce Carol Oates is a compulsive professional story-making machine.

All these accusations may be true to some extent, but I would prefer to think that as a “guy who has read and written about a lot of short stories,” I am making an experienced, knowledgeable, objective critical judgment when I say that I think David Means’ story “Knocking” is a better short story than Junot Diaz’s “The Pura Principle” and Joyce Carol Oates’ “I.D.” Maybe not.

If you subscribe to The New Yorker, I wish you would read these three recent stories and tell me what you think. Here’s what I think:

“The Pura Principle” seems like just another chapter in the never-ending story told by Yunior, the young Dominican Republic voice of Diaz’s short story collection Drown and his novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In this installment of Diaz’s New York ghetto soap opera, Rafa, Yunior’s brother, is just home from eight months of radiation and chemo in the hospital. When Rafa brings home a new Dominican girlfriend, Pura Adames, his mother is “super evil” to her. After the two get married, she kicks them out of the apartment. Then when Rafa sneaks back to steal money from his mother, Yunior stops him, prompting Rafa to warn, “I’ll fix you soon enough, Mr. Big Shit.” But Mami knows about the stealing and gives Pura some more money when she claims that Rafa owes her two thousand dollars. Yunior says:

“The girl really was a genius. Mami and I both looked like creamed shit, but she sat there as fine as anything and confident to the max—now that the whole thing was over she didn’t even bother hiding it. I would have clapped if I’d had the strength, but I was too depressed.”

Yunior is even more pissed when Mami welcomes the prodigal Rafa back. Finally, on the way home from the store he gets smashed in the face by a mysteriously thrown Yale padlock. The story ends with Rafa saying to Yunior, “Didn’t I tell you I was going to fix you? Didn’t I?”

I know that a plot summary and a couple of quotes are inadequate to convey the significance and texture of the story. But, in my opinion, plot and voice is really all the story is. And of the two, voice is the most engaging. The voice of Yunior is, admittedly, hard to resist. But the story does not “mean” anything. It is just an anecdote about DR life in the ghetto. That may be all right for a chapter in a novel, but Diaz just does not know how to write short stories, or he doesn't want to.

Now there is no question that Joyce Carol Oates knows how to write short stories. She has written hundreds of them (and maybe even hundreds of novels—who really knows?). The problem I have with Oates’ story “I.D.”, and it is the problem I often have with her stories, is that it seems too pat and predictable, too disengaged and carefully crafted. The story is about a seventh-grade girl named Lisette Mulvey whose mother works as a blackjack dealer at a casino in Atlantic City. Halfway between being a little girl and a woman, Lisette passes a Kleenex lipstick kiss to a boy in her class, knowing that it means, “All right, if you want to screw me, fuck me—whatever—hey, here I am.”

After establishing the quality of the life of the young girl, much as she did in her most famous story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates then focuses on the girl’s inevitable coming-of-age encounter. She is called out of school to I.D. a dead body the police have found in a drainage ditch. Oates handles the pacing carefully and slowly to make the reader fear that the body is that of the mother. Then when Lisette is taken into the refrigerated morgue room, “quick—it was over. The female body she was meant to I.D was not anyone she knew, let alone her mother.”

In the last five paragraphs of the story, Lisette insists, “This is not Momma. This is no one I know.” The police show her a dirty, bloodstained coat that resembles her mother’s red, suede coat, but was filthy and torn. "It was not the stylish coat that Momma had bought a year ago, in the January sale at the mall.” When the police want to take Lisette to Family Services, she insists on being taken back to school. Although she feels she is in a “roaring sort of haze,” when her girlfriend asks her if she is O.K., she says, “laughing into the bright buzzing blur, ‘Sure I’m O.K. Hell, why not?”

It’s a well-done story, but it is completely predictable, right down to to the fact that when Lisette says that the dead body is not her mother, we know that in some calculated thematic way this is true. Furthermore, we know that the “bright buzzing blur” at the end of the story is like those “vast sunlit reaches of the land” that Connie goes toward at the end of “Where Are You Going?” "I.D." is a story that beginning college instructors will be happy to teach in their introduction to lit classes. It can be, as theorists like to say, “unpacked” so easily because it has been built so academically. I’ve said it before, and I say it again: If you want to learn how to write short stories, study the stories of Joyce Carol Oates. She knows how to do it by the book.

David Means’ story “Knock,” (which I assume will be in his new collection of stories, entitled The Spot, due out on May 25, from Faber and Faber) is the shortest of the three stories I am considering here—about a New Yorker page-and-a-half. The first page (consisting of three long paragraphs), introduces us to a first-person male teller who complains of knocking noises from the man who lives in an identical apartment above him. We read nothing about the narrator or the noisy neighbor—just a lot about the nature of the knocking—ranging from tapping heels, pounding nails, thudding printer, wheezing bedsprings. This has been going on for the two years the narrator has lived in the apartment, beginning with a brief meeting in the hall in which the two men develop a mutual distaste to each other. The knocking is not merely random racket, but meaningful menace. “He not only took knocking seriously but went beyond that, to a realm of pure belief in the idea that by being persistent and knocking only for the sake of knocking…he could increase his level of concentration, achieve rapture, and, in turn strengthen his ability to sustain the knocking over the long term.”

Three quarters through the story, we suddenly learn something personal about the narrator when he says that the knocking often comes late in the day when the man above knows that he is in his deepest state of reverie, “trying to ponder—what else can one do!—the nature of my sadness in relation to my past actions,” feeling the “deep persistent sense of loss; Mary gone, kids gone.”

In the last two paragraphs of this six-paragraph story, the narrator thinks, “Go on, old boy! Pound away! Get that nail in there!” He speaks to the man upstairs as if speaking to himself, recalling long afternoons when he was engaged in handyman projects about the house. Becoming more intense in his concentration on the knocking, he thinks each knock speaks directly to him. “A man who had lost just about everything, and was channeling all his abilities into his knocking. He was seeking the kind of clarity you could get only by bothering another soul…trying to put the pain of a lost marriage behind him…when there had been a great exchange of love between two souls, or at least what seemed to be, and he had gone about his days, puttering, fixing things, knocking about in a much less artistic manner, trying the best he could to keep the house in shape.” And with this identification between the knocker and the listener, the story ends.

I can more easily say what I don’t like about the Diaz and the Oates story than I can say why I like the Means story so much more. "Knock" has something to do with loneliness, something to do with having nothing worthwhile in your life at a given time, something to do with engaging in an activity that goes on and on, an activity that is annoying, but that you cannot cease doing, because you have nothing else to do. You want to scream, to grit your teeth, to hit someone, to repeat some curse or obscenity over and over again. The rhythm of the story somehow echoes these repetitive annoying, meaningless, endless, actions when it seems that such repetitive actions are all that you can do.

There is a timeless universality in Means' story missing in the Diaz and Oates stories. You don’t laugh at the character, although you might; you don’t sympathize with the character, although you might. Mainly, you become the character, or rather for a short time you become deeply embedded in the story, and its rhythm becomes your rhythm.

An indivisible bond exists between the action of the story, the character of the story, and the language of the story. You do not feel you are hearing a voice recounting an anecdote of something that just happened, as you do in the Diaz story, or of being cold-bloodedly manipulated by a skilled but heartless craftsman, as you do in the Oates story. Rather, you feel caught up in a language event that is, paradoxically, both a wildly personal obsession and an carefully controlled aesthetic creation. This transformation of mere “stuff” into art work is what makes the short story, as practiced by a master like David Means, the highest form of narrative art. At least for me, it does.