Describe a Mind, Running

The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Session 1.5

Hi Everyone,

This is officially one of our Thursdays off but I wanted to do a quick post on one element of “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” the story we’re examining over beyond the paywall.

Some of this might not make sense if you’re a free subscriber and aren’t reading the story with us, but you can easily fix that…

In the course of the discussion, I asked us to think a little about two places on page 40 of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, where a group of men discuss the recent death of a friend (i.e., Ivan). I asked to what extent you “believed in” their reactions.

Here’s why I asked.

One of the ways I spur myself to doing new things in my own work is to think about what “thought” might look like, on the page. This stems pretty naturally from my interest in Buddhism and meditation but it’s also a refined form of the question: What is a human being, anyway?

I’d say that it’s impossible to “accurately” depict Human, Thinking. But the attempt to do so can lead us into new tonalities and voices.

In these sections on page 40, as you’ll recall, the friends are a bit….cold. Their first reaction (all of their first reactions, per Tolstoy) has to do with their own advancement. Several of you pointed out in the Comments that this would not be your first thought (or (blush) that it would).

Now, Tolstoy is doing an interesting thing here – he’s failing to distinguish between the individual men. They all have exactly the same reaction – which, in turn, seems to imply that Tolstoy believes that everyone (every one of us) thinks this way, end of story.

I don’t actually think Tolstoy thought this. What I think is happening here is that (as all writers must do) Tolstoy is making a simplified representation of that complex thing called “thought.”

In my view, “thought” takes place on multiple levels. That is, we’re always experiencing multiple thoughts (impulses, reactions, impulses) at once. We might imagine several train tracks running in parallel. But we can only focus on one thought at a time. Likewise in prose: language forces us to choose which train to foreground (which to express).

Here, we get the “How does this affect me?” response from Ivan’s friends, but none of the “Poor guy, how sad, I’ll really miss him” variety or of the “I didn’t know him very well but I’ll never forget how sad and embarrassed he looked that time he slipped and fell in the hall” variety.

But, no doubt, a version of these were present there, in the minds of those men, in varying proportions, just as they would be in our minds.

So, I think what we might want to carry forward is this question: Why did Tolstoy choose, in showing us the reaction of this group of friends, to foreground their fundamentally cold and selfish thoughts? That was a choice, an artistic choice. (He could have chosen to foreground thoughts of tenderness, nostalgia, etc.)

In the same way that an artist might choose to describe this feature rather than that feature of the physical landscape, in order to support an artistic intention, Tolstoy has made this choice for a larger, artistic purpose.

And we now get to see if we can figure out what that purpose was.

So….let’s keep that in mind as we read, for Sunday, Sections II and III (that is, pages 47 to 60).

In other news, The New Yorker just published “A Century of Fiction in The New Yorker, an amazing fiction anthology, in honor of the magazine’s 100th anniversary. Very happy and honored (and grateful) to say that one of my stories, “Tenth of December” is in there. You can also purchase it here, at the magazine’s site.

The magazine is also publishing "A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker," edited by Kevin Young.

Quote(s) of the week:

“When Small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.”

― Lin Yutang

“Unless we, through firmness and creative action, oppose the small men and thereby keep the sun up there.”

― George Saunders