The end of fantasy

Chekhovian loss and being "post-fall"

John Christian Schetky

I’ve always loved novels that follow a particular narrative arc: a young man has fantasies of finding glory or honor in some grand gesture, and abandons a comfortable or ordinary life to seek it out. When he finally journeys toward it, he realizes that the fantasy he dreamed of was a sham. A mirage. It was a bloody journey full of false gods. When he returns he is changed. Broken fundamentally in some ways, healed in others. He has come to some semblance of self-knowledge. The route is not the same route he had first embarked on with youthful spirit and joyfulness, but with wisdom and humility.

Some name this aftermath “post-fall”: having been brought to your knees, or brought to the edges of oneself. Before God, or the world.

We all embark on our bespoke “grand journeys” at some point and it inevitably leads to disillusionment. We don’t get the recognition for the hours and months and years of the unforgiving slog, we make humiliating mistakes, we hurt the ones we love. There are smaller cruelties, too. A middling life you are lukewarm about — nothing is really bad, but nothing is the aching sort of good. No primal joy.

Maybe the point is to go on the journey regardless if the fantasy gets fulfilled. At least then you’d have contended with the dream.

But the characters that have captured my heart the most always chose to return to, or see, reality for how it was.¹ And loved the deeply flawed human world because it was Real — not contrived, not airless or soundless or unbruised. It was real, and had violence and rapture, and bodies that aged, and buildings that crumbled, but by that same hand: fervor, courage, and human striving.

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This week I’ve been reading A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, a technical deep reading of classic nineteenth century Russian short stories by Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, based on his Syracuse University MFA class syllabus.

In one of the first stories, In the Cart, by Anton Chekhov, we meet a very lonely woman trapped in a banal life with no clear way out. The implicit question the story asks is, how do we resolve her loneliness? The obvious structural answer is to give her a love interest, someone to pine over. Chekhov gives us one brief glimmer of a potential love interest, but then dissolves it quickly. Why? Why not give the reader what they hope for?

Saunders’ reading is that retracting the easy conclusion makes the story bigger and more ambitious. Tidy stories aren’t very useful. The question the story asks then becomes much more profound - What happens when you can’t absolve yourself from loneliness? There is no easy way out, and sometimes no way out of it at all.

Here’s Saunders at the end of his analysis:

It seems to say that such loneliness has always been with us and always will be. As long as there’s love, there’ll be people who aren’t loved. As long as there’s wealth, there’ll be poverty. As long as there’s excitement, there’ll be dullness. The story’s conclusion, essentially, is: “Yes, that’s how it is in this world.”

The tidy story is not useful because it doesn’t make us sing or weep or feel. If we got everything we asked for there would be no prayer, nor hope. A good story captures a moment of great change, and we can imagine after the story is done the lives of the characters continue unfolding beyond us. Saunders writes, “a work of art moves us by being honest.”

We respect stories when they they reveal difficult truths about the world and human nature. Rarely are Chekhov’s characters fully saints or sinners. Our heroine can be pitiable and innocent, yet complicit in her own suffering, the brave knight can be a naive drunkard and hapless fool. We come to care deeply about a character because of their believable internality. Not because they are perfect people, but because they are imperfect and we recognize ourselves in them. We feel for our lonely imperfect narrator, as we too, are lonely and imperfect beings.

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I was terrified last year of time passing inconsequentially. Of course there were too many pleasurable moments to count. An evening out with friends, a house party to linger at, a specific purchase. But none of these were deeper, more profound feelings of aliveness.

When did I feel alive? When I was dancing, feeling the blood rush to my fingertips and the back of my hamstrings. When I was writing, and located something true and right beneath language such that I felt it echo in my heart. When we walked for hours from embarcadero to china basin or from chinatown to washington square park or scott street to divisadero and talked desperately, as if we’d run out of time.

David Whyte:

Whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds…what always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you. It’s this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world.

It is important to overhear the world rather than narrate it in advance. This year, I am pushing new things into the world, but noting down carefully my lived experience. I expect when I look back on all the notes I collect this year, I’ll see the inverse of fantasy - that what lasts, what feels right, looks nothing like what I first imagined or dreamed about. What emerges when you make contact with reality is always richer, deeper, and more true.

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1. I highly recommend Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, or Miyazaki’s Boy and The Heron as examples.

Joseph Knecht, the main character of Hesse’s book spends his entire life perfecting intellectual theory — an abstract game. He rises to become the master of the game, but eventually rejects the sealed, abstract world in attempt live a morally responsible and embodied life.

Mahito in Boy and The Heron, shattered by his mother’s death and dislocated by war finds himself a magical, parallel world where his mother is still alive, but instead ends up choosing the flawed, finite reality.