New School 3

Rajeet Guha New School Homework 3 In Francine Prose’s book ‘Reading like a writer’, the esteemed female literary critic and luminary writer has devoted an entire chapter exalting the atheist Russian playwright and short-story writer videlicet Anton Chekhov. Francine Prose, a leading light of literary criticism, has paid a tribute to Chekhov, a peerless prose writer of short stories and plays, in the tenth chapter of her book appositely titled ‘Learning from Chekhov’. Prose strongly recommends the translations of Chekhov’s volume of short stories by Constance Garnett. According to Prose, Chekhov’s stories display aestheticism. Prose rates these stories by Chekhov highly as he depicts reality in all its starkness, monotony and unadorned banality. The verisimilitude achieved by Chekhov in his stories place him in the pantheon of virtuoso writers. Chekhov according to Prose is the unrivaled master of realism as he plumbs the depths of human emotion without pontificating. Chekhov is detached from his characters and sees them dispassionately. Chekhov has never passed moral judgment on the dramatis personae of his stories. The readers are spellbound and fascinated by his lucid and vivid prose. Chekhov’s imagery is beautiful. Chekhov is an inimitable master at penning down the extraordinary ordinariness of human happiness, hubris, humility, sorrow, pathos, fear, anxiety, truthfulness, falsehood, deception, duplicitousness, frustration courage, impetuosity, immaturity, tenderness, toughness, simplicity, complexity and other emotions as well. Prose says that the stories of Chekhov are moving and rightly so. Chekhov transports the reader to another world. Chekhov is a sublime artist and alchemist who magically metamorphoses coal into gold. Chekhov is arguably also a hypnotist who is second to none in creating the fictional dream. Chekhov seduces and spellbinds, entertains and engrosses, touches and tantalizes, fascinates and frustrates, mesmerizes and pares, reveals and conceals, treats and tricks, conforms and sticks to the rules and also contradicts and breaks the rules. Chekhov takes the reader into a reverie but also has the penchant and flair to take the reader out of his reverie and poignantly and piquantly show the cold, unvarnished truth. Chekhov often leaves the situations in his stories unresolved with intentionality, as he is not an idealist. Chekhov is a consummate realist who masterfully shows life as it is; frustrating, full of dilemmas, tense emotional undercurrents beneath the veneer of contentment, dissatisfied and lonely people, depressed and disgruntled people, people handicapped with Hobson’s choices, and with no magical solutions in the future also. Chekhov shows the incongruity and the insecurity of life and its actors. Chekhov pares down some details and leaves certain things unsaid. Chekhov wants the reader to be a participant in the story and fill up the gaps. Chekhov leaves his stories open to interpretation by the critics and the public knowing fully well the subjectivity of interpretations. Observation and consciousness is indispensable in writing stories. This is apparent in the stories of Chekhov. Another important ingredient in Chekhovian writing is point and counterpoint. Perspective is pervasive in Chekhovian literature. Perspective permeates the soul of stories in Chekhov. Plenty of points of view percolate the body and soul of these stories. Chekhovian literature comprises disparate themes juxtaposed in one succinct story. There are climactic moments on occasions; just as there are anticlimactic ones. At times these stories have no climax. Sometimes the stories are predictable; on other occasions they are not. Chekhovian stories are often bathetic. Bathos is replete in the Chekhovian oeuvre. Chekhov’s masterpiece ‘Lady with the Dog’ is one such work; inimitable and monumental in its scope, breadth and also in its depth. Chekhov’s nonjudgmental and lucid style of prose with its breathtaking imagery, vivid description, subtle symbolism, contemporary context, and finally telling, tense and topical themes is palpably apparent in this jewel of a short story. Chekhov explores the theme of adultery in an ultraconservative, pre-Bolshevik, reactionary Russian society that is stratified and overbearingly and officiously under the thumb of the omniscient Orthodox Church. In this puritanical environment, love outside marriage and adulterous affairs were inevitably not looked upon kindly. Extramarital affairs were considered to be taboo in such a sanctimonious society. Notwithstanding such an overt, holier than thou Zeitgeist prevalent in Slavic society and a subsequent scorning of amorous affairs as forbidden, Chekhov brings out the mixed and conflicting emotions, feelings, sentiments and sexual tensions inherent in Slavic societies just like in all other societies at all points of time. After all, humans in all societies including Russian society will always be human. Russians of all classes and backgrounds will have the same smorgasbord of human emotions, attributes, thoughts, feelings, foibles and desires that are extant everywhere in time and place populated by the human species. Adultery was rife in Russian, pre-revolutionary society as love and romantic feelings and acts are as natural as humans itself. No human, Russian or non-Russian, has been immune to charm and infatuation, across the vast canvass of living human history since time immemorial as they have verily, simply been human. Imperfections permeate the body and soul of human beings. In fact, without a shadow of doubt in my mind, it is these inherent imperfections that make humans human. The perfect imperfection of human lives is what makes human experience and behavior so rich, complex, interesting and dramatic above all else. The sordid, scandalous, secretive, surreptitious and serendipitous activities undertaken by humans actually add spice to mundane and monotonous experience of humans. Clandestine love affairs overtly looked down by Tartuffes but covertly practiced by them in all societies is nothing new. Infidelity, hypocrisy, duplicity and double standards are themes that have been mined deeply by Chekhov, the preternatural and prolific storyteller in world literature. The Nobel Laureate Ernest Hemingway penned down a short short story in the 1920s. This uber-short story is a part of his short story collection called ‘Men without Women.’ In Hemingway’s body of work, this super short story is simply peerless. It is a chef d’oeuvre. It wouldn’t be hyperbolic to call this piece of fiction a jewel in the crown. The entire story scripted in slightly more than three pages typifies pithy and powerful writing. The story centers on a seemingly casual conservation between two people in a small town in Spain: a man and a woman. The man is an American while the woman could be Spanish or a tourist as well. The story is of two people who have intimate relations with each other. They are peripatetic people who are bohemian in their outlook towards romance and relationship. They sojourn briefly at parochial places in Spain, a country celebrated for its speckless scenic beauty, panoramic and picturesque landscapes, haughty hills and verdant valleys. They lead extroverted, unpretentious and itinerant lives and savor the small joys and pleasures of life as it comes along. Lurking beneath the veneer of small talk is a big and cumbersome issue that has of late been perturbing them and adversely affecting their relationship. This exchange is set against the backdrop of hills in the riverine Ebro valley in Spain. These hills have been compared to white elephants. Only a marquee author of the first water, a keen preceptor of flora and fauna, and an acute observer of human nature like Hemingway with his seminal style of writing, laconic and crisp construction of sentences, culling of considerable detail yet congruent with naturalistic writing, his perceptive and terse prose and his magisterial grasp over poignant reality could pen down such a sublime story. The story does not have much of a plot. While having lunch at a bar cum restaurant in a railway station in a provincial and pretty Spanish town, a couple’s conversation is laced with a bit of tension and friction. The man, who is her lover, has impregnated the woman. This has been insinuated and shown through hints but not explicitly told in the story. The man doesn’t want the woman to have the baby and is in a very subtle tone and with the use of paradoxical rhetoric gently goading and prodding the woman along in aborting the unborn baby. He sees the prospective child as an obstacle and is espousing the abortion of the baby when he says that he doesn’t want anyone but her. The woman on the other hand wants to bear the child. She finds aborting the baby to be simply an outrageous and ghastly proposition. For her, giving birth to a baby and subsequent motherhood is a positive and enriching experience. It is here that Hemingway contrasts the diametrically opposite thoughts, views, desires and feelings encountered by males and females on something so relevant as new life or abortion. Hemingway hints that men’s outlook towards life is instrumentalist while women encompass an empathetic view of life that is in tune with communicative rationality. Also, the symbolism of the hills and their allusion to white elephants is strikingly pertinent as the hills represent something big in magnitude and like the hills a new life is also a big issue, an issue of incredible importance. The imagery used is apt. The simile ‘Hills like White Elephants’ says that the unborn baby is a white elephant for the couple concerned. A white elephant denotes a troublesome issue, a burdensome problem or an unwanted gift. In this case the man considers the prospective child to be an unwanted gift or a white elephant. For the woman, ever since she has become pregnant, the unborn baby is a white elephant as it has been contributing to the fraying of her relationship with her lover. Nevertheless, aborting the baby is a much bigger and the real white elephant for the woman as she considers killing the baby to be a grisly act. Abortion is the white elephant or burdensome problem for the woman as motherhood is a source of a tremendous joy for a woman and killing an unborn child id inconceivable to her. Joyce Carol Oates, in her piece, articulately writes that the author must understand that writing is both an art and a science. Writing is a craft based on technique and rules but not exclusively so as the writer continuously forges new rules by breaking the old ones with impunity. Writing is not just a science grounded in rationality, logic, coherence, analysis and synthesis but is also a versatile art that encapsulates the artist’s fecund imagination. The writer must let his imagination run riot, cross the Rubicon, transcend old boundaries, chart new vistas, paint a picture where the natural and supernatural coexist harmoniously, create a complex dream and through his or her artistry make the impossible possible in the minds and hearts of the reader. The writer must be unconventional in his or her outlook and not have a closed and narrow-minded outlook. The writer must jettison a blinkered attitude and embrace an eclectic Weltanschauung. The writer must be willing to look again and research written works and styles of writing that have been consigned to the trash heap of literature. At the same time no writer should have unalloyed, absolute praise of a written work or the corpus of work by an author so as to become dogmatic and reject any critical appraisal or shortcoming of the person’s work. The pros and cons of each author should be noted objectively. Oates believes that the more a person reads the superior the writer he or she becomes. She believes in being a voracious and omnivorous reader. She talks both about the importance of the breadth and depth of reading to improve and master the art of writing. She says that writers write what they read. Each writer owes a debt of gratitude to those authors whose works he or she has devoured. Each and every famous author brings his or her uniqueness, style, voice, diction, theme, genre, and strengths or lack of them to the table. Writers imitate the styles of the authors they have read. Written works read before writing has an incalculable influence on writers. She says that every writer while writing stories carries on the tradition and legacy of writers of the previous or the same generation in his or her writings.