Essential Perception: Čechov and Modern Art

RussianLiteratureXYXV (I 994) 195-202 ~~~h-~~~~a~

ESSENTIAL PERCEPTION: CECHOVANDMODERNART

GEORGES.PAHOMOV

The history of literary criticism is marked by the borrowing of concepts from other disciplines. Thus, such terms as the baroque, neo-classicism, impressionism, and futurism have enriched literary discourse. It is the intention of this paper to adapt the recently coined term ‘minimal art’ (or minimalism) in a similar fashion and apply it to the case of cechov. Cechov’s description of landscape,character, or setting frequently focuses on a telling feature which remains vivid in the reader’s memory while all else fades. Scenesare thus reducedto a single object’s visual impact. The power of such a singular impression is also the goal of minimal art. Its primal colors, sharp lines, geometric patterns and geometric solids impress the viewer with an all-eliminating simplicity. The minimal is at once supremely meaningful. Such reduction to ‘essential’ irreducible form and to ‘pure’ experienceis a central method of phenomenology as set forth by Husserl and his school. Further analysis of prose, art and philosophy suggeststhe existenceof similarities at their very root. Cechov’s valuing of the effectiveness of such a reduced style has been noted. Maurice Valency quotesCechov’s letter: Do not give too much spaceto an overinsistentimage... To emphasizethe povertyof a beggarwomanit is not necessaryto speakof her miserableappearance,it is enoughto remark in passingthat sheworeanold rustycloak... (Valency 1966:61) 0304-3479/94/$07.00 0 1994- ElsevierScienceB.V. All rightsreserved.

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Valency himself feels that Cechov “[...I was chiefly concerned with the surface, and [...I made no obvious inference as to what, if anything, lay beneath it” (1966: 230). And it is specifically a concern “with the surface” or form, that marks the sphereof the psychology of perception. In a conversationwith Bunin, Cechov is recorded as saying: It is very difficult to describethe sea.Do you know the description I readof ic in thecopybookof a schoolboynot long ago? “The seawashuge.”Only that.I think it is beautiful. (Simmons1962:462;emphasisadded) Cechov’s discovery of the salient featureis evident in this statement to Gor’kij: I...] it is not easily understood,andit is difficult for the mind if I write: “A tall, narrow-chested,middle-sizedman, with a red beard,sat on the greengrasstrampledby passersby,satsilently, looking aroundhim timidly and fearfully.” This is not immediately graspedby the mind, whereasgood writing should be graspedat once,in a second. (Simmons1962:464) Cechov practiced what he preached, and his prose is marked by what interior decorators call ‘accent pieces’ which singularly ‘fix’ the scene in the mind of the reader. These are seemingly innocuous details which add nothing to characterization, promoting neither narrative nor advancing the plot. Yet the reader remembers Anna Sergeevna only when reminded that she is the woman with the white Pomeranian(‘Lady with the Dog’). The dog and its whiteness that trails the mistress is reiterated five times in the first two pagesof the story until it becomes an internalized visual tag. Even Gurov, her lover, much later thinks of Anna as “the lady with the dog”, with the phrase purposely set in quotation marks by the narrator. (In the languageof linguistics the phrase is composed of ‘the lady’, the ‘theme’, the unmarked, known, neutral member of the utterance; and the ‘rheme’, ‘with the dog’, the marked, charged, new member of the utterance- the tag.) The story is replete with other examples. Hoping to meet Anna, Gurov goes to her town and takes a hotel room in which the floor is covered with a field-gray felt “and the desk has an inkwell, gray with dust, with a rider on horsebackholding up a hat in his hand with his head broken ofl’ (‘Dama s sobaEkoj’; VIII, 1956: 404; emphasisadded).Gurov finds Anna’s house.“Immediately opposite it there stretcheda fence, gray, long, with nails (404; emphasis added). When Gurov first meets Anna, the narrator provides a lengthy sceneof

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the theater-going provincial gentry and ends with the governor’s box in which “in front sat the governor’s daughter in a feather boa with the governor meekly hiding behind a ‘portiere’, only his hands showing” (406; emphasis added).When Anna starts coming to Moscow, each time that she comes “she takes a room at the ‘Slavjanskij bazar’ and immediately sendsto Gurov a man in a red cap” (408). (I have been rendering the original Russianword order, in which the telling, marked information comes at the end of the sentence.) Other stories reveal the same device. In ‘Peasants’ Nikolaj &killdeev, a waiter in the restaurant of the ‘Slavjanskij bazar’ Hotel falls ill. His legs go numb so that his gait changesand “once while negotiating a corridor he trips and falls along with the tray on which there was a plate of ham and peas” (‘Muiiki’; VIII, 1956: 202). He is forced to quit his job. The story ‘In the Ravine’ has the following: [...I after the funeral [of Lipa’s child] the guests and priests ate a great deal and with such greed as though they had not eaten for a long time. Lipa waited at table, and the priest, pointing with his fork on which lay a pickled mushroom, told her: “Don’t mourn for the child. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (‘V ovrage’; VIII, 1956: 451; emphasis added)

The unexpectednessof the images, their non-sequitur quality, break all continuities and make us confront them as pure phenomena on the brink of absurdity stripped of all presuppositionsand a priori systems. The concretenessof these details indicates eechov’s underscoring of the importance of what is given in (visual) experience - a primary stance of the phenomenologist. A “room with dirty wallpaper” in ‘KaStanka’ (the story of a lost dog), the lady “with the dog”, the waiter with a plate of “ham and peas”, the narrator’s brother always talking of or eating gooseben-iesin ‘Gooseberries’, the house “with the raised porch” (in ‘Dom s mezoninom’) are all examples of the visual tag, and suggest that frequently the salient point of any experience is not a cosmology but a smell, or an image. Sensorymemory, Cechov seemsto say, is foremost. “You ask what is life? That is just the same as asking: What”is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot, and nothing more is known about it” (Cechov in a letter to Ol’ga Knipper, 20 April 1904). The orange-nessof the carrot, the whiteness of the Pomeranian. In the observation of an object, we apprehend among other things its color as a property, so that each time the dog is mentioned we see its whiteness. White as a color can be rigorously defined: white-is white is white all the time to all observers(a particular wavelength). Cechov has brought the reader to an irreducible minimal unit, which exists in the only given reality - an empirical reality.

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The Minimal artist attemptsto statepoint-blankin visual form what [modern] philosophiesand [modern] writers have been sayingverbally - phenomenologyis the basisof experience;to deal with experiencedirectly, we must stopmisusinglanguageto constructambiguousmeanings. (Leepa1968:205) Leepa, writing some sixty years after Cechov, echoes him, as does the well-known artist Frank Stella in the following: I alwaysget into argumentswith peoplewho want to retain the old valuesin painting...If you pin themdown, they alwaysend up assertingthat thereis somethingtherebesidesthepaint on the canvas.My painting is basedon the fact that only what can be seen there is there [...I All I want anyoneto get out of my paintings,andall I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can seethewhole ideawithoutanyconfusion...What you seeis what you see. (Stella1968:157-158) The minimalist view seesman as placed in a world in which there is no cosmology, no history, no secretsto be revealed, no linked discourse, no story to be told - only occurrences,the purely phenomenological. It is my belief that Cechov anticipated such a world and that this can be progressively demonstratedin his work. Cechov gradually removed encrustation from literature: fewer metaphors, less metonymy, less figuration, in favor of the work without signification, without message; the intentionality and the privileging of the author/senderis reduced,there is no context, only text and the apprehensionof the reader/receiver.The code is that there is no code, which servesas a negative (-) code that denies the loaded-up literary inheritance of Russia: the politics of CernySevskij, Michajlovskij, Gleb Uspenskij; the refined emotionalism of Nadson, Mej and Apuchtin; the tendentiousnessof Tolstoj and Dostoevskij. To all this encumbrance,this baggageof ideology and sensibility Cechov says “no”. The questions“What does it mean?“, “What am I supposedto feel?” (standardquestions begging for a canon) remain intentionally unanswered in Cechov and are left to the perceiver. Cechov thus reinvigorates and legitimates individual perception. (And that may be a secret message:remove yourself from the herd, trust yourself, you are a free person,not a slave. Historically, if Cechov had a political stance,this was it. This movement through minimalism to ‘freedom’ may parallel the transmutation of phenomenology from Husserl through Heidegger to the existentialism of Sartre.) The seedsof minimalism are already present in Cechov’s widelyrecognized impressionism, for in impressionism “it is no longer the ob-

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ject or the event in itself that is of interest, but its appearance to the observer” (Clarke 1977: 124; emphasis added). Moving the process of perception along, JosephL. Conrad writes that “the natural setting in the later stories is generally seenthrough the prism of the hero’s perception, e.g., in ‘The Bishop’ (1902) and ‘The Betrothed’ (1903). Thus refracted, nature becomesinternalized,..” (Conrad 1977: 95). It may be seenthat Cechov worked in the manner of the minimalists who make “works which are internal ‘gestalts’, [...I which demand to be seen all at once, as a single image” (Brook 1975: 23). So essential a perceptual core is achieved that it cannot be further resolved into available meanings. While seemingly a reductive working it is not “a process of diminution, but of intentional distillation aimed at more potent results” (Goossen 1968: 172). If the above word “distillation” is replacedwith the philosopher’s ‘essentialization’, the phrasebecomesa virtual description of the central step in phenomenology, at least of Husserl’s phenomenology in which ‘transcendental reduction’ leads to the apprehensionof ‘pure essence’(eidos) and which is an inquiry into the irreducible formal elements of any experience through a speculative effort to determine what is, wholly on the basis of the examination and analysis of what appears. As Cechov internalizes the object within the perceiver, he unknowingly (?) attacks the classic ‘phenomenon-noumenon’dichotomy in a way similar to that of phenomenology, as it has the subject intentionally ‘grasp’ the object in a ‘living dialogue’ through a kind of subjectivist fusion: what appearsmust be and what is must appear. In this dialectic “the perceived world is the always presupposedfoundation of all rationality, all value and all existence” (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 13). Thus, all a priori suppositions, all tacit metaphysical premises are “stripped away” so that a radical suspensionof all beliefs takes place and the perceiving self achieves unadulteratedcognition, a kind of pure seeing. This is central because“direct observation is the primary concern of phenomenology; and [ ...] is held to be prior to all theory. Thus Husserl spoke of the finality of ‘seeing’. That which is seencannot be explained away, and is the final standardin all truly philosophical thought” (Farber 1966:_48). Cechov seems to have been intuitively close to such sensibility. This is evident when he writes “I feel I’d like them ]nature descriptions] to be shorter, more compact, only about two or three lines long” (Heim 1973: 333). Later he writes: “Color and expressivity in nature descriptions are achieved through simplicity alone, through simple phrases like ‘the sun set’, ‘it grew dark’, ‘it beganto rain’, etc...” (Heim 1973: 338). At times the radical stripping away to pure cognition is used at peak moments. In ‘Poprygun’ja’ Ol’ga confronts her lover, the painter Rjabovskij, in an action that should precipitate a resolution of their affair. They

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have spent a summer on the Volga sharing a cottage in which a peasant woman cooks for them. In response to Ol’ga, Rjabovskij moves her aside: ei? pyKaMI9 I4 OTOLUWI, M eZt IIOKa3WIOCb, qT0 ero BbIpamano OTBparrIeHne II Aocaay. B 3~0 spewI 6a6aoc~opo~no IIecna eMy B o6enx pyKax TapeJncy co IuaMW, A Onbra MBalIOBHa Bn,IIeJIa KBK OHa o6MoWIna BO IWX CBON 6oonburwe Ii’aJIbL(bI. OH

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(‘Poprygun’ja’;VII, 1956:64-65;emphasisadded) He begins to eat. Minimalism. Ol’ga expects intense meaning at this culminating point of her affair with Rjabovskij. It is to be a turning point in her life but she gets only absurdity. Or rather, it is neither absurdity nor meaningfulness, it is just two thumbs in a bowl of cabbagesoup. Further in the same story, as Ol’ga Ivanovna’s husband,Dymov, lies dying of typhoid, she asks Korostelev, a doctor friend of her husband’s, whether he had sent for the famous specialist Schreck. The responseis classic minimalist understatement.“6, da Eto Trek! V suSEnosti,nicego Trek. On Trek, ja Korostelev - i bol’Senicego” (‘Poprygun’ja’; VII, 1956: 74). Later, while half-asleep, Ol’ga thinks of her dying husbandand the famous specialist: “‘Nature morte’: port,: - dumala ona, opjat’ vpadaja v zabyt’e, - sport... kurort... A kak Srek? Srek, grek, vrek... krek” (‘Poprygunlja’; VII, 1956: 75).

and in the visual arts the minimalist finds the essenceof his art in a holistic irreducible structure, stripped of all reference. This may be pure geometric shape or pure color. In the above example a In painting

man’s name, stripped of all reference, is reduced to an essential holistic structure that is pure sound. “&ek, grek, vrek... krek”. It is sound without nuance, connotation, without attributable value. If it were music it would be pure tone, without overtones, without the continuum of melody. In another story, ‘Gooseberries’ (‘Kryiovnik’), the hero fantasizes about his dream estate: ki

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MbIe KapTMHbI 6burn pa3JIWIHb1, [. . .] II0 nOYeMJ’-TO B KZKHOn ~3 HIIX HenpeMeHno 6bm KpbI~oBHBK. Ha OmoR ycaHb6b1, HEI OmIOrO n03TWqeCKOrO yrJIa OH Iie MOr ce6e IIpeACTaBMTb 6e3 TOI-O, w’06bI TBM He 6bmo KpbEKOBHFIKa.

(‘KryZovnik’; VIII, 1956:302)

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The gooseberries are the distilled essence of the dream, the irreducible core. Through a process of elimination there is reduction to a holistic minimum. At thesemoments Cechov is not concernedwith attributing value to things. He does not analyze experience, he just presents it. Minimalism tendstoward presentation,not interpretation. When presentedwith something, one perceives but may not understand becausethings can be named and described but ultimately never defined or explained. In the nineteenth century, Mendeleev’s periodic table demonstrated that the universe was made up of irreducible components. These elemental components could not be ultimately defined, one could only name them: hydrogen was hydrogen, cobalt was cobalt. The minimalist sensibility brought this inference into art: a carrot is a carrot, is a carrot. The world was neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply was. When the minimalist views art as an object he/she views it in opposition to the process of signification. Meaning flows from the presenceof the work of art, not from its capacity to signify absentevents or values. Cechov’s “ham and peas”, a sudden,concrete specific detail in a narrative stream to which it is unrelatedand unconnectedstops the gaze of the perceiver, distanceshim, isolates him, depriving him of the process of signification. (In the language of phenomenology and perception psychology this event is referred to as ‘eidetic prehension’, the grasping of the image: the arresting of the viewer’s gaze and the singular, instantaneous ‘internalization’ of the image.) In the words of the art critic Mel Bochner: [If] we bracket out all questionsthat, due to the nature of language,areindiscussable(such as why did this or that come to exist, or what does it mean) it will then be possible to say that the entire being of an object, in this case an art object, is in its appearance. Things beingwhateverit is theyhappento be,all we can know about them is derived directly from how they appear. (Bochner 1968: 92-93)

One cannot help but feel that if the mature eechov could have read formulations such as the above, he would have found them immediately meaningful and congenial. And it seems clear that in his attempt to surprise us into a radical mode of seeing Cechov anticipates the intent of Russian Formalism and of modern art to defamiliarize the world around us and to seeonce more with an essentialperception.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Bochner, M. 1968 Brook, D. 1975 Cechov, A.P. 1954-1956 Clarke, C.C. 1977 Conrad, J.L. 1977 Farber, M. 1966

‘Serial Art, Systems, Solipsism’. Minimal Art: A Criticaf Anthology (Ed. G. Battcock). New York. ‘Flight From the Object’. Concerning Contemporary Art (Ed. B. Smith). Oxford. Sobranie soffnenij v dvenadcati tomach. Moskva. ‘Aspects of Impressionism in Chekhov’s Prose’. Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (Eds. P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman). Columbus, Ohio. ‘Anton Chekhov’s Literary Landscapes’. Chekhov’s Art of Writing: A Collection of Critical Essays (Eds. P. Debreczeny and T. Eekman). Columbus, Ohio. The Aims of Phenomenology: The Motives, Impact of Husserl’s Thought, New York.

Methods,

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Goossen, E.C. 1968 ‘Two Exhibitions’. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Ed. G. Battcock). New York. Heim, M.H., Karlinsky, S. (Eds.) 1973 Anton Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary. Berkeley. Leepa, A. 1968 ‘Minimal Art and Primary Meanings’. Minimal Art: A Critical AnchoJogy(Ed. G. Battcock). New York. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1964 The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays. Evanston. Simmons, E.J. 1962 Chekhov: A Biography. Boston. Stella, F. 1968 ‘Interview in Art News’. Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Ed. G. Battcock). New York. Valency, M. The Breaking String: The Plays of Anton Chekhov. New York. 1966