Where's Anton?

Martin Handford's Waldo

The other day I was visiting with some friends. Their two-year-old daughter kept busy while we chatted by examining a version of a "Where's Waldo" book. You know the type: a book of photos or pictures where there is one small element the viewer has to find, a balloon in this case, or in another case the famous Waldo. Waldo is always there--you just have to scan the crowds, look behind tree trunks and in the windows of buildings, seek among hikers on crowded mountain trails. If you're focused enough and develop the right technique, if you train yourself and practice, you will always eventually find Waldo. The genre of this type of book guarantees success.

Vladimir Nabokov famously talks about a similar phenomenon in the last paragraph of his memoir Speak, Memory: that gratifying and pleasurable moment when the thing unseen reveals itself.

There, in front of us, where a broken row of houses stood between us and the harbour, and where the eye encountered all sorts of stratagems, such as pale-blue and pink underwear cakewalking on a clothesline ... it was most satisfying to make out among the jumbled angles of roofs and walls, a splendid ship’s funnel, showing from behind the clothesline as something in a scrambled picture – Find What the Sailor Has Hidden – that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen. A brilliant, and moving, mixture of perception and reality. 

A few years ago a student pitched a potential paper topic to me, and I had to strike it down. He wanted to search through the plays and short stories of Chekhov and identify the character in each who expressed Chekhov's own views, and through this search come to a conclusion about the relationship between the author and his characters.

I explained that of all Russian authors, Chekhov was the worst one to subject to this procedure, that Chekhov tended to distribute his own views among his characters rather than creating a "mouthpiece" in his fiction, and indeed that perhaps part of Chekhov's purpose was to undercut the "poet-prophet" model so prevalent in Russian fiction. You know the model, I told him, the one in which the author's views--of the present, past, and the future--are the best views possible, and the reason we are to read the works is to be enlightened and come to share those views.

My student thought about it, and chose another paper topic.

This may be one of the things I love best about Chekhov. As he liked to say, "the role of the artist is to ask questions, not to answer them." It's more interesting to have the questions laid out and to think them through yourself than to seek and find the answer the author has prepared for you.

The biographical approach to fiction (what events in the author's life are the prototype of those we find in her work? in which characters can we see his mother, his sister, his wife? where is the autobiography in what is purportedly fiction?) is a game that works very well with a roman à clef but which is only mildly entertaining. Once you find the sailor, you can never unsee him; once Waldo emerges from the scene, he will always be visible and indeed come to dominate the picture. It seems to me that while biography can be illuminating, it may not illuminate the fiction in ways that enhance our reading pleasure.

I actually think that the technique we use to examine a page of a Richard Scarry or a Martin Handford book is not the worst approach to Chekhov--as long as we remember that we will never find Anton himself lurking in costume within his works.

What we do find, as we scan the pages of a Chekhov story, and then go back over them inch by inch with a magnifying glass, and then put the book at a distance to get yet another view, is the images, descriptions, intonations, quotations, ironies, and everything else Chekhov has embedded in his text. We can enjoy the sound texture, the repetitions, the variants; we can imagine the joking, and the frustration, and the despair, and the joys experienced by the characters. We hear the sounds of birds, and we explore the shadows and color shifts in the sea, or the forest, or a crowded plaza.

We cannot check the box, as Nabokov does in finding that hidden sailor and achieving momentary satisfaction.

But what we can do is in the end much longer-lasting and much more subtle. We have found Anton after all.