Two sacks

 

Chekhov’s story, Gusev, gives us an account of the people in the hold of a steamship heading from the Pacific Northeast of Russia home to, most likely, the Black Sea. The people in the hold are very sick. The hold is a stifling place, and they are coughing and lying around and playing cards and dying. Gusev is one of them. Formerly an orderly for an officer, he is going back to, optimally, rest and recuperate in his village.

But this happens to him:

“He dozed, and murmured in his sleep, and, worn out with nightmares, his cough, and the stifling heat, towards morning he fell into a sound sleep. He dreamed that they were just taking the bread out of the oven in the barracks and he climbed into the stove and had a steam bath in it, lashing himself with a bunch of birch twigs. He slept for two days, and at midday on the third two sailors came down and carried him out.”

Normally in a story there are two forms of reporting. There is the report from the outside of what happens, or there is the report from some personality, some point of view, about what happens. In the former case the hint of subjectivity can stem from what Pasolini, following the linguists, called Free Indirect Discourse, where one feels that the objective report is actually correspondent to some ruling subjectivity. But in Gusev, what happens, in that sentence, is a sort of sweep between the two modes of reporting. An astonishing shift.  In that shift, the story lights up the impossibility of using our ordinary dualism to account for the real. The real is something other than both. The totality of our experience must include the things we must have experienced and yet don’t experience. These include birth and sleeping and death. And even dreams – for what and who is experiencing the dream? We spill out.

And eventually we are carried out. Whether that is done by orderlies in a hospital, sailors on a ship, or emaciated slaves in a concentration camp, we are carried out. There’s always a crime scene and always a crime – our deaths. Though death might be the law, it is also the crime.

To me, the death of Gusev seems more frightening in its matter of factness than the death of Ivan Ilyich. Gusev was written in 1890, and Tolstoy’s novella was published in 1888. In the novella, the death itself begins like this:

“For all three days, in the course of which there was no time for him, he was thrashing about in that black sack into which an invisible, invincible force was pushing him.”

And here’s the end:

"So that's it!" he suddenly said aloud. "What joy!" For him all this happened in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed. For those present, his agony went on for . two more hours. Something- gurgled in his chest; his emaciated body kept twitching. Then the gurgling and wheezing gradually subsided. "It's finished!" someone said over him. He heard those words and repeated them in his soul. "Death is finished," he said to himself. "It is no more." He drew in air, stopped at midbreath, stretched out, and died.”

There is a sack in Chekhov’s story too.

“He was sewn up in sailcloth and to make him heavier they put with him two iron weights. Sewn up in the sailcloth he looked like a carrot or a radish: broad at the head and narrow at the feet.”

The story of the story is that Chekhov, on the ship back from Sakhalin Island, had seen some sailors buried at sea. He wrote about that in a letter – Chekhov is one of the great letter writers – and thus the details of the burial were, as it were, at hand. Yet something else happens to Gusev, in as much as we identify the corpse with Gusev. Tossed with iron weights into the sea, the package sinks. Until this happens.

“Then he was met by a shoal of the fish called harbour pilots. Seeing the dark body the fish stopped as though petrified, and suddenly turned round and disappeared. In less than a minute they flew back swift as an arrow to Gusev, and began zig-zagging round him in the water.

After that another dark body appeared. It was a shark. It swam under Gusev with dignity and no show of interest, as though it did not notice him, and sank down upon its back, then it turned belly upwards, basking in the warm, transparent water and languidly opened its jaws with two rows of teeth. The harbour pilots are delighted, they stop to see what will come next. After playing a little with the body the shark nonchalantly puts its jaws under it, cautiously touches it with its teeth, and the sailcloth is rent its full length from head to foot; one of the weights falls out and frightens the harbour pilots, and striking the shark on the ribs goes rapidly to the bottom.”

It seems to be a cliché in Chekhov criticism that Chekhov’s long story, A Dreary Story, was written as a sort of response to The Death of Ivan Ilyich. But one cat can leap on a ball of yarn in a number of ways – and a writer can bang on a motif and make a different sound with each thump.

Myself, I am interested in the difference between the two sacks. I think it is noteworthy. Ivan Ilyich has, during his life, surely seen sacks. But given his position, these were surely sacks toted by servants and peasants He is not of the sack toting class.

The sailor’s sheet in which Gusev is wrapped, on the other hand, would have seemed familiar to the experience of Gusev alive, who as a lowly soldier would have toted many sacks. There was labor in the sack Gusev ends up in. The black sack into which Ivan Ilyich is being pushed, in contrast, was not something that responded to his muscle memory.

The sailor’s sheet into which Gusev is sewn has all the fragility of the products of hasty human labor. The shark rips it effortlessly, and the iron weights inside go vainly plunging down into the depths. It was not simply invisible forces that had stuck Gusev in that sack, it was two sailors, and it is not invisible forces that release him, but a hungry shark. Yet the sack, however misshapen and mistreated, is ultimately the product of a symbolic social process. Although the emaciated corpse of Gusev could have simply been tossed overboard, it got, instead, a proper funeral. Not a glorious one, but at least the effort was made. The sack, due to this, has a certain pathos.

Pathos is what is aimed for in Tolstoy’s phrase: “For him all this happens in an instant and the significance of that instant never changed.”

I am not trying to hold up Chekhov as a better artist to criticize Tolstoy. I merely want to point out that in the move from the mindforged black sack of Tolstoy to the sailors sheet into which Gusev’s remains were entrusted, we are moving between two distinct visions of mortality. The sacred, in the end, was always an aspiration and an abstraction of Tolstoy, while for Chekhov, there is an irreducible aura around the detail. And that is a form of the sacred that I am much more inclined to trust.