Dave Badtke’s Blog

Anton Chekhov in 1902

—- Chekovian Gravity: In a letter to his older brother Alexander, Anton Chekhov, shown here in a photograph from 1902, said the key to characterization is action and interaction:

In displaying the psychology of your characters, minute particulars are essential. God save us from vague generalizations! Be sure not to discuss your hero’s state of mind. Make it clear from his actions. Nor is it necessary to portray many main characters. Let two people be the center of gravity in your story: he and she. (Letter to Alexander Chekhov, May 10, 1886, from Dana Gioia’s website.)

A character’s state of mind shouldn’t be sad; his actions should be. A character’s hatred or love for another should be expressed through action, not through feelings that are hung on him like a suit of poor-fitting clothes.

When I discuss this concept with my students, I have the habit of asking one of them to join hands with me in front of the class. We circle about our center-of-mass in a crude dance intended to give phyiscal action to Chekhov’s concept. This makes the student who volunteers nervous, of course, and the class titters at our awkward display.

Chekhov's Birth Home in Taganrog Russia

Like all analogies, this one is imperfect because Chekhov is talking about dramatic action, the emotional dialectical synthesis (see diagram below) that provides the force that is his gravity, not physical action.

But gravity is also a poor metaphor for the tremendous force exerted by emotions, the psychological energy generated by the struggle between needs and impediments that effects turning points and resolutions. The gravitational force is, after all, some 10^36 times weaker than the atomic force that holds us together as human beings. It’s because of the weakness of gravity that distances are so vast in our solar system, Milky Way and universe; it’s because of the strength of the emotional force that the distance between us can become so small if it’s attractive, so destructive if it’s repulsive: Love can make one from many; hate can destroy all.

—- RSVP + U: In reflecting on Chekhov’s insight and in struggling to help my students understand how litterary tragedy can create hope – we’re reading Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” as well as Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” — I have once again concluded that the moral accountability at the heart of both these authors’ works may seem elusive without a grounding in ethics.

In my English 1 class, ethics is introduced as Rules, Sympathy, Virtue, and Piety, RSVP, with utilitarianism, U, added when RSVP offers insufficient guidance.

RULES (R): Rules are derived from Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative:

. . .a moral law that is unconditional or absolute for all agents, the validity or claim of which does not depend on any ulterior motive or end. “Thou shalt not steal,” for example, is categorical as distinct from the hypothetical imperatives associated with desire, such as “Do not steal if you want to be popular.” For Kant there was only one such categorical imperative, which he formulated in various ways. “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law” is a purely formal or logical statement and expresses the condition of the rationality of conduct rather than that of its morality, which is expressed in another Kantian formula: “So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or in another, always as an end, and never as only a means.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

His categorical imperative requires that moral laws, based on reason, be universal, without ulterior motive, and that they treat people as ends, never only as means. Since Kant’s restriction that there be no ulterior motive can be problematic, I include as well John Rawls’s veil of ignorance, requiring that one blind oneself to one’s own situation when formulating rules.

SYMPATHY (S): Rules applied without consideration of extenuating circumstances will ultimately lead to unethical results. This is why our legal system conducts trials with judges and, in some cases, juries, people who can apply the rules while taking into account special situations. Here empathy is important, the need to understand points of view other than one’s own, so that appropriate emotional actions can be taken such as sympathy or antipathy. Sympathy stands in for this range of emotional reactions. It is because of sympathy that the commandment not to kill is understood to be relative, not absolute. Indeed, if acting in self-defense, killing may be justified.

PIETY (P): Piety is a recognition that because our sympathies are strongest with those closest to us and because we are born into a world of customs, ceremonies and relationships that existed before us and that will continue to exist after we’re gone, we must consider piety when making ethical decisions.

UTILITARIANISM (U): When rules, sympathy and piety don’t enable us to come to an ethical conclusion, doing the most good for the greatest number becomes the final arbiter. If, for example, a pilot knows his plane is going to crash, killing all on board, going down into a residential neighborhood rather than an apartment complex, assuming he has the choice, is the right ethical decision because it will probably minimize death, thus maximize benefit.

VIRTUE (V): A person who practices these ethical principles is virtuous, hence its inclusion in RSVP, which is a mnemonic that helps students remember the concepts.  And it’s the various ways in which virtue succeeds and fails that are at the heart of literature.

—- VIRTUE AS CHEKHOVIAN FORCE: While birth, love, success, failure and death are central to literature, the virtue of characters as they strive to fulfill their needs in spite of impediments is the force that drives them to their turning points. And in reflecting on their resolutions, we use ethics to measure their success or failure.

1. When the man on the train in Grace Paley’s “Samuel” pulls the emergency cord killing the eponymous boy, the man is violating an ethical rule by treating the boys as a means to his self-serving end to teach them a lesson. He is also violating piety because he’s an adult, born before Samuel, who should strive to assess the consequences of his actions before committing to them.
2. When Connie sacrifices herself in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, she understands the importance of family, of piety. Walter Younger realizes the same in “A Raisin in the Sun” whereas his mother realizes that piety can violate rules when she ignores Walter’s need to be an end in himself, a unique individual different from his mother, different from his father.
3. The narrators of Sherman Alexie’s “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” and Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” come to understand the self-defeating nature of stereotypes, which treat others as means, not ends: emotionally, one who is ethical, who is trusted — the girlfriend in Alexie’s story, the blind Robert in Carver’s story — helps us “see” empathetically.
4. Sammy in John Updike’s “A&P” finds himself without a job, on the street, with no girls in sight, because he’s struggling to find a purpose in a stifling retail environment. So he violates our sense of rules, sympathy and piety by walking out on his boss and coworkers.  But we have sympathy for Sammy nonetheless because he’s young and because we know that the cliché “rules are meant to be broken” can be right when our sympathy for his need to find himself overrides Kant’s categorical imperative and the mores of a small northeastern town.
5. And Laurel in ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” discovers the unethical nature of rules in the form of stereotypes that are hypothetical rather than categorical, serving means rather than ends, yet she uses her new knowledge to understand rather than condemn her father.

And so we’re confronted in Flannery O’Connor’s stories with pairs of characters who are the centers of gravity of their respective stories, Hulga and Manley Pointer in “Good Country People” and The Misfit and Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Maybe O’Connor was thinking of Chekhov. Certainly, she wanted to create characters who would pay a high price for believing in nothing.

If you live today,” we have heard Flannery O’Connor declare, “you breathe in nihilism. In or out of Church, it’s the gas you breathe.” (Ralph C. Wood in Flannery O’Connor and the the Christ-Haunted South, page 179)

What distinguishes O’Connor, making her a “hard read” as one of my students said, is the almost complete lack of sympathy in her characters. Since the characters in these two stories hardly ever express sympathy that derives from empathy rather than narcissism, it can be hard for the reader in return to feel sympathy. In some sense it’s as though O’Connor wanted to create societies in which sympathy plays little role, so her characters must face their conflicts with only means-centered rules and a piety based on hypocritical Christian meanings rather than ethical ends.

Hulga learns from Manley Pointer that to believe in nothing, to believe that RSVP is irrelevant, doesn’t require a Ph.D. in philosophy. We’re left wondering what a “good country person” is in this story only to see a fleeting glimpse of it between the Misfit and Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

When she finally sees in the Misfit the kind of piety she’s creating — “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” — the grandmother touches The Misfit on the shoulder, at which point he shoots her three times in the chest. Her act is a flash of sympathy that causes The Misfit to recoil in horror, as if “a snake had bitten him” because sympathy is nowhere in his moral calculus.

Thus we see that virtue is the Chekhovian force at the center of stories and plays. In the case of Walter Younger, Connie, Laurel and Bub, it is a constructive force that helps them find purpose. In the case of Hulga and the grandmother, it’s a destructive force. Hulga loses her leg to Manley Pointer and is left with the nothing that is at the heart of her nihilistic philosophy. And the grandmother’s moment of grace when she realizes that The Misfit is a child of her self-serving, racist Christianity is cut short by The Misfit’s bullets.

In The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, Alison Gopnik writes that “Children and adults are different forms of Homo Sapiens”, this from a review of the book by Michael Greenberg in the March 11 issue of the New York Review of Books:

For one thing, the prefrontal lobe, which has a major part in blocking out stimuli from other parts of the brain and fostering internally driven attention, is undeveloped in young children, and doesn’t fully form in most people until they are in their twenties. Internally driven attention, cognitive research suggests, isn’t a capacity that children fully acquire until at least the age of five. What arouses them is what is in front of their eyes, the first burst of information about cause and effect in the physical world.”

Because of this rather direct link between the physical world and experience, an infant’s perception may be something like ours when we suspend our disbelief and become emotionally engaged in a movie or play. Certainly this is not surprising on some level, for we know we are acting most childlike when we play imaginatively or when we’re able to drop our defenses, built up through years of adolescent and adult training, and experience something new as a child, who’s seeing so much for the first time, might. Now, it appears, there’s increasing quantitative evidence to support our suspicions. But these data go further by suggesting that morality may be different from what Piaget and others thought:

There is a complicated interplay between rules and morality in young children, a sophisticated sensitivity to intention when rules are broken, and a subtle appreciation that some rules are important, others less so. Moral knowledge, Gopnik argues, is imaginative knowledge, a direct outgrowth of empathy, which babies seem to experience in some form or another from almost the moment they are born.”

While babies certainly have original emotions, they also learn by imitating the joy and sorrow of others. When we smile at a baby, we expect at some point to see that smile mirrored. Perhaps the same is true of sadness though we more often than not try to hide this emotion from children. Gopnik speculates that babies may not see the difference between their emotional reactions and the world’s:

It’s possible that babies literally don’t see a difference between their own pain and the pain of others. Maybe babies want to end all suffering, no matter where it happens to be located. For them, pain is pain and joy is joy. Moral thinkers from Buddha to David Hume to Martin Buber have suggested that erasing the boundaries between yourself and others in this way can underpin morality. We know that children’s conception of a continuous separate self develops slowly in the first five years.

However, because of their ability to empathize, children can also quickly pick up discriminatory behaviors as when they learn to exclude rather than include others because “a tiny, arbitrary distinction becomes a reason for enmity. Children as young as three can refuse to play with another child because of the color of her hair or the clothes that he’s wearing.

While there’s much that I’m skipping in the review, I want to jump to the concluding thought which seems to capture a difference between the Chekhovian concept of description, in which one connects to a narrative along a zoomed path that focuses on details, to the less focused observation often associated with non-narrative poetry and Zen-like ideals:

The Philosophical Baby is both a scientific and romantic book, a result of Gopnik’s charming willingness to imagine herself inside the consciousness of young children. She compares “the lantern consciousness of childhood…to the spotlight consciousness of ordinary adult attention.” With lantern consciousness “you are vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular. There is a kind of exaltation and a peculiar kind of happiness that goes with these experiences too.”

Gopnik likens lantern consciousness to Romantic poetry, the uninhibited receptiveness that is the artist’s ideal, and the Zen ideal of “beginner’s mind” where the meditator relinquishes attachment to his inner “I.” “Babies, like Buddhas, are travelers in a little room,” she writes. Lantern consciousness provokes the feeling that “we have lost our sense of self…by becoming part of the world.”

So, it seems, we make it past five years of age, enter first grade, then second. On and on we struggle to organize our identity and our lives, but may only find ourselves most in touch with ourselves and others when we return to a mental state that is similar to a period that we can no longer remember, but that we sense when we’re with a baby who searches our face and smiles.

This is the title of a book by Jonathan Lear that I began reading again after I wrote about Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of  Cultural Devastation. I first read Happiness, which evolved from The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, an award Lear received in 1999, when it was published, but I remember little from that time perhaps because Lear’s style isn’t transparent — but well worth the effort — and also because I’m getting older and older.

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of

From Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness”

While I’ve only just begun to reread Happiness, my sense is that it’s a dialectical investigation in which Lear examines Aristotle’s thesis that what we do for “the good” brings us happiness and Freud’s antithesis that we’re subconsciously influenced by “the death drive.” Finally, Lear arrives at a synthesis, I think, that relates to including what Lear feels has been a previously excluded middle, which is what we do with the “remainder of life.”

The idea certainly seems interesting, but I may have this all wrong, so more with updates and corrections as I read.