List-making

In graduate school I had a favorite New Yorker cartoon that got me through some of the tough times.

Making lists is one of the great ways to organize one's life. And especially in a profession where you make your own choices as to how to allocate your working hours, lists are both a way of keeping track of time and obligations and a way to achieve satisfaction and get affirmation. I love lists -- I make them all the time. Inevitably, if I put on a pair of pants I haven't worn in a while, I will find an old list in the pocket. I have a fantasy about an art project where I collect lists -- my own, other people's -- and make a shellacked decoupage side table. But that project -- inspired by the mother of my best friend in graduate school, and perhaps conceived as long as twenty-five years ago -- is currently on the back burner.

My list this morning looked like this:

1. write blog post about list-making
2. work on narrative for grant (edited volume)
3. work on narrative for grant (monograph project)
4. think up good title for new monograph project
5. check health insurance coverage
6. prepare for class
7. work on gender article revisions.

Will I get to all of it? Maybe not. I'm not proceeding in the correct order, and indeed, the order is fairly arbitrary -- I have to, and want to, prepare for class tomorrow, so it's not as though I will do that sixth today.

Getting off the launchpad in the morning always includes writing a list. And so far today I've written the list, done some email, fielded a few phone calls, dealt with some student-related issues, and am just now starting item one, the blog post. It's already 10:30 AM.

But the whole topic of list-making requires a lot of thought, and it automatically generates all kinds of questions: what is the correct order? Should I list in order of importance, in order of urgency, in order of how things occur to me? How does each item on a list relate to the others, and to the whole, and to the items left off the list this time around? The very process, and the choices that have to go into it, are more complex than it seems at first.

Yesterday my students and I were discussing three very early Chekhov stories, stories he wrote during his first years of medical school, when he was in his early 20s. Each of the stories was actually a list-story:

1. Elements Most Often Found in Novels, Short Stories, Etc. (1880)
2. Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician (1882)
3. A Brief Human Anatomy (1883)

The first two stories have no "frame" narrative: no introductions, no explanations, nothing. 

"Elements..." is absolutely hilarious -- it careens from one register to another, high lyrical poetic description followed by conversational slang, and it ends, quite flatly, with the words "The end." What better last item on such a list? You can't have a novel, a short story, or any piece of writing without having some sort of ending. 

This brief story features gems that have entered the Russian language as set pieces, including "an aunt in the town of Tambov" and "gentle hints at portentous circumstances," which in Russian is even more funny, since "gentle" renders a word that also means "thin," and "portentous" in Russian also means "thick" or "fat" (in and of itself a funny locution: "thick circumstances"?!). The characters that are lacking in that particular element eventually rise up off the page to become real in Chekhov's later story "Fat and Thin" (1883). 

But "Elements..." is not just funny, it is also a piece of literary criticism. Chekhov here sums up the writing of his contemporaries and creates a template for writing derivative prose, which he himself in future will do only in parody or jest. He's also exploring the boundaries of what sells, something we all wonder nowadays as we try to make ourselves more marketable. See numbers 2, 3, 4 in my to-do list above.

As my students noticed, "Questions Posed..." does not really convey the title of the second piece. We know that its purported author is a mathematician, and zadachi could really be translated as "Problem Set." But then, the problems themselves go beyond the story problems we all remember from school. My favorite involves transportation:

Wednesday, July 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. 

In this "problem," as in almost all the others, the reader begins to calculate the distances while reading, before trying to find out the task at hand. My first thought was, ugh, math in an authoritarian regime becomes even harder because the parameters are always shifting.

But then the question is posed: "Who is capable of loving longer, a man or a woman?", and we remember that the mathematician is not just plagued by official orders, but has suffered some trauma that has made him "mad." The mathematician has problems far greater than his problem set, and even greater than the oppressive society in which he lives; he is facing epistemological problems, and he does not have the language to pose them, let alone solve them. Chekhov is juxtaposing categories -- and he leaves us without solutions.

The third of these "list" stories emerges from a medical school curriculum and is introduced by a brief anecdote about taking an exam. It continues: "Man as an anatomical entity consists of:" and then a list, from inside (skeleton) to outside and literally from head to heels. Within each definition are semi-related ideas that play with medical school vocabulary (for example: "the paunch. Not a congenital organ, but an acquired one") and that lampoon Russian social conventions, from rank-consciousness to corporal punishment to denunciations. Not, maybe, as hilarious as the first story, and not as poignant as the second, but food for thought nonetheless.

Stories -- narratives of all kinds -- must be arranged somehow, just as we must arrange our activities across a work day. William Turner, a medical doctor and professor of "medical humanities," talks about the relationship between life and literature being analogous to that between experience and structured experience. Which is why, he says, stories can help us -- and future medical staff --understand and empathize with others.

What Chekhov does in these stories is to choose a method of structuring thoughts which, without a frame, stands alone. Each item on the list has its own meaning. Each item comments on the others, and the list as a whole becomes a puzzle, a problem set which we struggle to solve. "Human Anatomy"? a student playing with, and parodying, his homework, as he gains the vocabulary for a new profession. "Questions Posed"? a sad commentary on a perhaps lonely man whose tools for understanding the world around him are failing. And "Elements"? an internalization of literary clichés, the better to rise above, scuttle below, or simply wallow in them.

I have yet to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. But I have checked on that health insurance coverage.