Nikolai Gogol's major stylistic short-story
innovation is to combine the fanciful and earthy folklore of his native Ukraine
with the literary and philosophic imagination of German Romanticism he had
learned in school; the result is a hybrid generic form created by the
combination of fantastic events and realistic detail, the most obvious example
of which is "The Nose" (1836).
The fantastic story of assessor Major Kovalyov's waking one morning
without a nose, which he later meets in the streets wearing a gold-braided
uniform, has often been dismissed as a farce with little or no meaning or
significance, an attempt by Gogol to exploit the convention made popular by
Adelbert von Chamisso's story of Peter Schlemihl's loss of his shadow and
E.T.A. Hoffmann's story of Erasmus Spikher's loss of his reflection.
However, the
difference between using a shadow or reflection as an image of one's identity
and using a nose is that whereas the former are metaphoric, the latter is
metonymic. Gogol's whimsical exploration
of the theme of lost identity suggests that if one is the sum total of his
physical presence and social persona in the world, then the loss of that part
of the face that most characterizes one's physiognomy means the loss of
self. As Kovalyov laments: "If I
had lost an arm or a leg, it would not be so bad; if I had lost my ears, it
would be bad enough, but still bearable; but without a nose a man is goodness
knows what, neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring--he isn't a
respectable citizen at all!"
Gogol not only parodies the basic assumption of
characterization of realistic fiction--that one is the sum total of how one
faces the social world--he also undermines the basic plot assumptions of such
fiction--that causes have plausible effects and that even unusual events have
discoverable causes. For example, at the
end of parts one and two of the story, he uses what later becomes a standard
film technique and fades abruptly to a new scene, claiming, "here the
incident is completely shrouded in fog and absolutely nothing is known of what
happened next." Thus, the usual
driving force of narrative--"what happens next"--is self-consciously
frustrated.
Just as
"The Nose" begins with what Goethe had earlier claimed to be the
anecdotal source of the novella form--an unheard-of event that actually takes
place--it ends by challenging the reader's expectations that fiction has either
plausibility and significance. The narrator confesses with mock seriousness
that he simply cannot understand the story or why authors would choose such
subjects. "All the same, on second
thoughts, there really is something in it.
Say what you like, but such things do happen--not often but they do
happen." Donald Fanger says "The Nose" is a manifesto, not
because of what it means, but by the very fact of its existence, for it mocks a
serious attitude toward plot, and the very assumption that language is the
carrier of messages. "The
Nose," says Fanger, "triumphantly proclaims its existence as pure
instrumentality."
Gogol's most influential narrative play with the
underlying assumptions of prose is, of course "The Overcoat" (1842)
which Frank O'Connor, in his study of the short story The Lonely Voice,
says that Gogol's marks the true origin of the short story, for nothing like it
had every appeared before. O. Connor
argues that the story uses the old rhetorical device of the mock-heroic to
create a new form that is not satiric nor heroic, but something that transcends
both. "So far as I now, it is the
first appearance in fiction of the Little Man, which may define what I mean by
the short story better than any other terms I may later use about it."
The classic 19th-century Russian view of "The
Overcoat" is that it a realistic story of social significance, one of the
first Russian narratives about the little man crushed by the Tsarist
regime. However, in the 1920s, B. M.
Ejxenbaum presented a famous formal argument that it is Gogol's combination of
rhetoric with folktale convention that makes the story such a masterpiece. Ejxenbaum says that Gogol takes the old
narrative form of the Russian folktale, the skaz, and juxtaposes it
against the sentimental rhetoric of the speaker to make the reader unsure about
whether to feel sorry for Akaky or laugh at him. "This pattern," says Ejxenbaum,
"in which the purely anecdotal narrative is interwoven with a melodramatic
and solemn declaration, determines the entire composition of "The
Overcoat" as a grotesque." The
story "plays with reality," breaks up the ordinary so that the
unusual logical and psychological connections of reality in the story become
unreal. Ejxenbaum says that the
structure of the short story as a genre always depends in large part to the
kind of "role which the author's personal tone plays in it."
O'Connor and Ejxenbaum's famous comments represent
the critical dichotomy the story has stimulated--whether to focus on Akakey's
heart-rending cry, "I am your brother" or to emphasize the voice of
the narrator who seems to subvert the seriousness of that cry. The problem the story confronts is echoed by
the problem the tailor encounters when Akakey comes to him to get his old coat
repaired: how to make something out of
nothing. If Akakey is no more than his
coat, then, he, as the tailor says, is hardly "there" at all. But, since this is a story of how a nobody
becomes a somebody, when he gets a new coat, the expression "clothes make
the man" takes on an almost literal significance. Moreover, if the story is a about a person
who is treated as if he were an object, it is simultaneously about an object
treated as if it were a living person.
Whereas the first is cause for sympathy, the second is clearly cause for
laughter. If one were to object that you
can't have it both ways, Gogol would instantly reply, "Of course you
can."
Having it both ways at once--realistic and
fantastic, metonymic and metaphoric, pathetic and comic--is precisely what
Gogol achieves in this famous story. If in the end of the story reality seems
to lead to fantasy, it is because we have been presented fantasy that looks
like reality all along. If Akakey is one
of the most famous grotesques in the history of short fiction, it is because
when you make something out of nothing you inevitably exaggerate its
importance. Almost one hundred years
later, Sherwood Anderson helps initiate another revolution in the development
of the short story in Winesburg, Ohio by once again focusing on the
grotesque result of "making something out of nothing."
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