The Delighted States by Adam Thirlwell

Author:Adam Thirlwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2007-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter vi

Moscow, 1895: Economy (II)

In The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Laurence Sterne, or at least his surrogate narrator, came up with the witty orchestration of Dr Slop’s entrance to the Shandy house: ‘It is about an hour and a half’s tolerable good reading since my uncle Toby rung the bell, when Obadiah was ordered to saddle a horse, and go for Dr Slop, the man-midwife; – so that no one can say, with reason, that I have not allowed Obadiah time enough, poetically speaking, and considering the emergency too, both to go and to come; – though, morally and truly speaking, the man, perhaps, has scarce had time to get on his boots.’

This overlap of two time-frames – the time-frame within the fictional novel, and the time-frame of the real-life reader – was another effect which was only possible because of Sterne’s way of not obeying the simple principle that the story should be told in the same order that it happened. And so he could juxtapose not just time-frames within the story, but also the time-frame of the story with the present time-frame of the writer writing, and reader reading, the book. But, once these disjunctions have been admitted – and the admission is central to the art of the novel – other ways become possible of creating narrative form.

One neglected way is cropping.

To Bunin, Chekhov once said: ‘When one has written a story I believe that one ought to strike out both the beginning and the end. That is where we novelists are most inclined to lie. And one must write shortly – as shortly as possible.’

There are many anecdotes like this. And I like them – they make me warm to Chekhov more and more, with his charming insouciance. In his Reminiscences, Schoukin relates the following advice given him by Chekhov: ‘Try to tear up the first half of your story; you will have to change only very little in the opening of the second half, and the story will be perfectly intelligible. And as a rule, there must be nothing superfluous in it. Everything that has no direct relation to the story must be ruthlessly thrown away. If in the first chapter you say that a gun hangs on the wall, in the second or third chapter it must without fail be discharged.’

(Just as in Ernest Hemingway’s memoir, A Moveable Feast, Hemingway describes his ‘new theory that you could omit anything as long as you knew that you omitted and the omitted part would strengthen the story and make people feel something more than they understood.’ But it was not a new theory. Chekhov was there first.)

And in Sobolev’s memoir of Chekhov, Sobolev records how his friends used to worry that Chekhov’s manuscripts should be removed for his own benefit: ‘Otherwise he will reduce his stories only to this: that they were young, fell in love, then married and were unhappy.’ When Chekhov was told this, he replied: ‘But look here, so it does happen, indeed.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.