“Like any self-respecting Russian artisan, Ivan Yakovlevich was a terrible drunkard,” Gogol tells us.
But he waits to share this—until after we have seen the nose that Ivan discovers inside a freshly baked loaf of bread—so that we don’t mistake the nose for a drunken hallunication.
Whenever Ivan barbers the Collegiate Assessor he lathers up the man “wherever his fancy took him” and this is where Gogol takes readers too.
First, by way of the Collegiate Assessor, and readers learn he makes a “b-rr-rr” sound with his lips when he awakens, though he couldn’t have “explained the reason for it”.
The way I’m telling you this, you could rightly figure that the Bread-Nose is the Collegiate Assessor’s nose.
But if you were reading the story it would probably surprise you…because there are so many other interesting details in between.
Like how many cups of coffee make for a good morning, an exact street address, the colour of police uniforms, which river runs under which bridge…
For the first time in the course of this project, when I paused at the end of the first page to record what I’d learned and what I expected next, I wrote just a couple of lines after my summary: I expect nothing, and I expect everything.
When Saunders contemplates the story, he enumerates things, as he has done with other stories, but not in a chart, only a paragraph that lists the layers of Multiple Superimposed Weirdness Syndrome.
This leads us to understand that “not only is Gogol’s universe off, his narrator is too.” (Unlike TICHN, Saunders doesn’t make an acronym of this, but I shall, because I feel like I’ve longed for this succinct summary before: MSWS.)
In a more traditionally instructive tone, he positions Gogol in the skaz tradition which “challenges the notion that a disinterested, objective, third-person omniscient narrator exists anywhere in the real world” (and cites Mark Twain and John Kennedy Toole as American variants). And this tickles me, because I’m reading Percival Everett’s James, which offers another perspective on Mark Train’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in a way that underscores that idea so solidly that the ballpoint pen of it all leaves a mark on the pages beneath.
Saunders also reflects on how often literature resides in realism. He explains that (mostly) Gogol’s prose is deliberately graceless, but also mentions that, in the original Russian, it’s apparently constructed to be funny, too—with “aural jokes and assonances and puns that can’t be rendered in English”. He regrets having only this paler experience of reading him in translation. He considers how Gogol occasionally offers his characters (and readers) a moment of grace. He considers one scene in detail which leans toward exposing the kind of ordinary “degradation and hopelessness” in countries falling under the weight of autocracy. He muses on the nose itself for some time. And then some more.
But “all of those loose ends and accumulating implausibilties”—and Saunders perfectly describes just how many different ways in which the story’s MSWS spreads and infects us all—result in a sense that readers trust Gogol anyway. For…reasons. But the most affective reason of all is that Gogol himself admits it’s a mess.
In the Afterthought for this story, Saunders writes: “We might imagine a story as a room -sized black box. The writer’s goal is to have the reader go into that box in one state of mind and come out in another. What happens in there has to be thrilling and non-trivial.”
Here he talks about how the kind of line-by-line reading that he focuses on with his class (and which we have an opportunity to join via these seven sections in this volume) requires the kind of attention from readers that writers dedicate to their work, editing line-by-line with the same deliberation and awareness. (For Saunders’ story readers, specific references to his personal construction process, his drafting and editing, would probably be a lot of fun.)
And, on the last page, he imagines a reader asking about that black box: “What’s going to happen to me in there?” Which recalls the times he’s described when he has had that same question, as a writer, approaching a draft.
For a story that makes very little sense, this section of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain makes a lot of sense. And, because I enjoyed Gogol’s eye for detail, the nose-in-a-loaf-of-bread Thing hasn’t put me off his work one bit.
This is the fifth story that Bill and Bron and I have read this year, inspired by Saunders’ book; Bron created the badge with Chat GPT. Two stories remain, and the links for our project are here: join if you wish.
Anton Chekhov “In the Cart” 1897 (February) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Ivan Turgenev “The Singers” 1852 (March) Trans. David Magarshack
Anton Chekhov “The Darling” 1899 (April) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Master and Man” 1895 (May) Trans. Louise Mude and Aylmer Maude
Nikolai Gogol “The Nose” 1836 (June) Trans. Mary Struve
Anton Chekhov “Gooseberries” 1898 (July) Trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky
Leo Tolstoy “Alyosha the Pot” 1905 (August) Trans. Clarence Brown
Without Saunders I knew nothing about skaz – so it is interesting to learn that there was an oral tradition for this type of story telling. I think the problem for me with this story is that I went into the black box confused and came out even more confused!
There’s a badge? No-one told me there’s a badge (no article for ‘Pond’, good idea since we keep getting mixed up between a and the).
My impression was that Saunders tried too hard. He kept saying/showing that the facts of the story didn’t make sense. But readers know from the beginning, from the nose in the bread, that this is a nonsense story, they (we) know instinctively how to consume such a story, and so are appreciative of nonsense facts, not confused by them.