Short but very significant: George Saunders on great Russian stories

LITERATURE
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain
George Saunders
Bloomsbury, $34.99

Nabokov, so the story goes, was denied a faculty position at Harvard because the eminent structuralist critic Roman Jakobson objected that appointing a mere novelist to an academic post would be like making an elephant a professor of zoology.

Jakobson won that battle, but there can be little doubt that he has lost the war. Elephant professors (so to speak) have become commonplace. Over the past 50 years or so, the academic study of literature has been slowly but steadily eclipsed by quasi-vocational writing courses. And the students who flock to these courses naturally want to learn the secrets of their craft from the most accomplished and successful practitioners, not some mouldy old scholar. The more impressive the elephant, the more prestigious the course.

George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain uses its discussion of formal issues to open up a wider series of reflections on the purpose of fiction.Credit: Janie Barrett

George Saunders can be counted among contemporary American literature’s more imposing specimens. He is a highly regarded novelist and short-story writer, with a raft of major awards to his credit. (His first novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, won the Booker.) He also has a day job teaching writing at Syracuse University, even though, as he quips in the introduction to his latest book, he considers himself “more vaudevillian than scholar”.

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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is Saunders’ amiable contribution to the popular writing-guide genre. Its format is based on the exclusive writing workshops he runs at Syracuse. He presents us with seven short stories by great Russian writers: three by Chekhov, two by Tolstoy, and one each by Turgenev and Gogol. He then analyses the stories in detail, with a view to elaborating what makes them successful as pieces of writing.

The immediately surprising thing about Saunders’ story selections is that they skew towards realism, which is not his usual mode. His work is known for its quirky premises and at times cartoonish forays into cultural satire, beneath which it is possible to discern a preoccupation with the themes of suffering and compassion.

It is that restrained but persistent note of sentimental humanism that is most noticeably illuminated in Saunders’ attentive readings of the Russian masters, though the parameters of the book are set by its practical emphasis. Saunders goes out of his way to present himself as an affable guide. He adopts an informal tone, illustrating key points with anecdotes and humorous analogies that have presumably been refined over many years in the seminar room. When he informs us that we will shortly be required to read a dozen pages of Chekhov, he sounds almost apologetic.

Yet there is no avoiding the fact that A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is essentially a work of applied formalism. It rejects Jakobson’s line of demarcation between the savant-like creative writer and the scholar who undertakes the intellectual labour of working out what it all means. It turns out that the literary artist, no less than the critic, requires technical knowledge; both perspectives have a natural interest in the mechanics of storytelling, the significance of small details, and the affective power of subtle aesthetic choices.

Anton Chekhov and his wife, Olga Knipper. George Saunders discusses three of his stories.Credit:

What comes to define the book is the ambivalence with which Saunders approaches his role as mentor. As he goes along, he proposes several competing definitions of a “story”, ranging from the formal (“a limited set of elements we read against one another”) to the loosely metaphorical (“a system for the transfer of energy … a series of incremental pulses”).

These stabs at delineation are accompanied by advice of a general nature, much of which is standard writing-guide fare: express yourself efficiently, make sure every detail contributes to the overall effect, the better part of writing is revising, try not to bore your reader, and so on.

At the same time, however, Saunders is anxious to avoid prescriptivism. He stresses the provisional nature of all writing advice. He argues that writers should learn to trust their instincts, cultivate their own distinctive tastes, grant themselves the freedom to write without any predetermined purpose. In his conclusion, he makes a point of observing that the realism of Chekhov and Tolstoy was a stylistic innovation of the 19th century and should not be taken as a model for writing about life in the 21st century. He even goes so far as to deny that A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a writing guide at all.

In a sense, he is right. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain uses its discussion of formal issues to open up a wider series of reflections on the purpose of fiction. And on this question Saunders, for all his reticence, does have a clearly stated position.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain makes explicit a moral view that is implicit in his stories, which is that he believes people are essentially good. Yes, a few may be incorrigibly wicked, but for the most part cruelty and suffering are caused by misunderstandings and small individual failures of empathy.

As a view of human nature, this is debatable (Dostoevsky would certainly not agree). But it also entails its own element of prescriptivism. One of the book’s revealing anecdotes concerns a student who objected to a sexist remark in one of Gogol’s stories.

Saunders reports that he defused this tense situation by inviting the class to see this as a “technical flaw” rather than a moral one, at which point there was relieved assent that the story would have been “better” had the character not been traduced so unfairly.

Crisis averted. But I beg to differ. As Saunders acknowledges, Gogol was a serious weirdo. One might add that only a serious weirdo could have written a story as brilliantly bonkers as The Nose. The talent cannot be separated from the flaws. A morally unimpeachable Gogol would be pointless. Saunders goes on to quote Nabokov’s observation that “genius is always strange; it is only your healthy second-rater who seems to the grateful reader to be a wise old friend, nicely developing the reader’s own notions of life”.

Quite. If we are pondering counterfactuals, who’s to say Saunders might not be a better satirist if he was a misanthrope?

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