Some Varieties of Armor and Innocence

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SOURCE: "Some Varieties of Armor and Innocence," in The Look of Distance: Reflections on Suffering & Sympathy in Modern LiteratureAuden to Agee, Whitman to Woolf, Ohio State University Press, 1985, pp. 15-40.

[In the excerpt below, Slatoff considers possible reader responses, including his own, to the character Ivan Ivanych in "Gooseberries."]

[Ivan Ivanych in "Gooseberries"] is an elderly veterinarian who over the years has become so horrified by his brother's piggish and blind complacency that he becomes incapable of watching anyone's happiness without an "oppressive feeling bordering on despair." After spending an evening with his brother, he says to himself:

How many contented, happy people there really are! What an overwhelming force they are! Look at life: the insolence and idleness of the strong, the ignorance and brutishness of the weak, horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, degeneration, drunkenness, hypocrisy, lying—Yet in all the houses and on all the streets there is peace and quiet; of the fifty thousand people who live in our town there is not one who would cry out, who would vent his indignation aloud. We see the people who go to market, eat by day, sleep by night, who babble nonsense, marry, grow old, good-naturedly drag their dead to the cemetery, but we do not see or hear those who suffer, and what is terrible in life goes on somewhere behind the scenes. Everything is peaceful and quiet and only mute statistics protest: so many people gone out of their minds, so many gallons of vodka drunk, so many children dead from malnutrition—And such a state of things is evidently necessary; obviously the happy man is at ease only because the unhappy ones bear their burdens in silence, and if there were not this silence, happiness would be impossible. It is a general hypnosis. Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and troubles will come to him—illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind—and all is well.

Ivan has been saying all this in a comfortable sitting room to his friends Burkin, a high school teacher, and Alyohin, a gentleman farmer, and he goes on to lament that he is an old man now, unfit for action, capable only of grieving inwardly, becoming irritated, and lying awake at night with his thoughts. "Oh, if I were young!" he exclaims several times, pacing up and down the room excitedly, and then pressing Alyohin's hands, he implores him not to let himself "be lulled to sleep! As long as you are young, strong, alert, do not cease to do good! There is no happiness and there should be none, and if life has a meaning and a purpose, that meaning and purpose is not our happiness but something greater and more rational. Do good!" All this he says "with a pitiful, imploring smile, as though he were asking a personal favor." The story does not report how Alyohin receives this plea; it ends with the three men sitting for a while in silence and then going off to bed.

As always in Chekhov, there is much that complicates our response—both to Ivan and his point of view. Among other things, he more than anyone else in the story seems able to enjoy life and even to sleep well (if I read the end of the story correctly); and the story itself suggests there is much in life, including the lovely maid Pelageya, to be enjoyed. At the same time, Ivan's vision is never deeply undermined; and near the very end of the story, Chekhov compels us to measure our response against that of Alyohin, who "did not trouble to ask himself if what Ivan Ivanych has just said was intelligent or right" and who is pleased because Ivan was "not talking about groats or hay, or tar, but about something that had no direct bearing on his life."

I myself have no settled response to the story. At times Ivan's seems a silly view to take. How absurd to be pained by the sight of a happy man or happy families because others are suffering, especially if, as is true in Ivan's case, one has no clear idea of what to do about the suffering. How futile to implore the sleepy and uncomprehending Alyohin merely to "Do good!" How dangerously the vision veers away from a concern with the plight of the sufferers toward a wish to inflict pain on those who ignore it, a wish that "behind the door of every contented, happy man" there would be someone with a hammer "continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people" (emphasis mine), as though the discomfort alone were of value.

Yet how close or loud must the suffering be for happiness to be properly viewed as ugly or inappropriate? Only within eyesight or earshot? Only when it occurs within our own family, or town, or neighboring town? Only when it has not happened behind our backs, which after all are always turned toward some victim, intentionally or otherwise? Only when we witness the crucifixion? Shall we say that we ought not be troubled by suffering unless we know how to alleviate it or can make some effort to do so? And if we once begin to take on others' pain, when, where, and for what reasons shall we stop short of taking on the pain of the whole world? Obviously these are not directly answerable questions, but they help account for an obsession like Ivan's and for my own compulsion to become that someone with a hammer as I urge my own students to question the happiness of Chekhov's young student and remind them of the suffering he has forgotten, and as I write this book. I say not directly answerable because I like to think that the effort we are engaged in here may be a way of answering as well as asking.

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