Hell is Other People
An inner-dialog involving Southern Conservatism and modern American caste relations in the context of Chekhov’s Enemies
by Anderson Evans
Oh, to be the White Middle-Class American Male in today’s changing world. Black presidents, Asian cars, Female Literature professors, Preteen bestselling novels… What happened? They told us wonderful things at the all-boys-private-school in Tennessee. They told us we ran the world, and now I turn my television station to MSNBC, and there is the handsome anchorwoman Rachel Maddow making former Nixon speechwriter, Pat Buchanan look a fool as he screams out in pain, anguish, and woe, “What about us? Why must you be so cruel the White Middle-Class American Male?!!! We gave you everything, and now you dust us off your pantleg! This country was ours!”* What happened to the silent majority? Why did they become mutes? They’re screaming from the rooftops, Pat. They’re driving around in RVs screaming, “Tea Party!” All thirty-seven of them. You see, Pat, they’re dying off, and what you’re left with are their offspring. You’re left with me, and Grandaddy might’a been a Dixiecrat Segregationist, but I’m not.
“Why not?”
That’s what I’m going to get at; that question: “Why not?” Is it all about the Benjamins? Badboy records? Nickelodeon? NPR? Hast thine mind been perverted by leftest corporate Jew-rhetoric? Probably, but it seems it’s something much simpler than any conspiratorial Macluhenian “hot stuff.”
“Then what, Man?! For God’s sake what?!”
This is where Chekhov comes in.
“Oh Jesus, here we go. What the hell does all that have to do with late 19th century Russian Literature you self-involved…?”
Shhhhhh. Allow me to direct you to Chekhov’s short story Enemies. Maybe if my Southern brethren back home read more “commie-red-muckrakin’,” we’d think about what it is we’re doing when we make a fool of ourselves in an attempt to honor ourselves on National television.
“I’m listening. What’s this story about anyway?”
Ugh, always have to make the question so direct don’t you? You want a summary? Here: A screaming rich guy walks into the house of a poor guy that happens to be a doctor (yes, yes times have changed). Anyway he’s the only doctor in the district, and the rich guy, let’s call him Abogin, asks the doctor, let’s call him Kirilov, to come help his wife that has passed out moments before citing heart problems. Here’s the rub: Kirilov’s son died five minutes before Abogin’s arrival. Kirilov’s son died as both parents watched the diphtheria strike with mortal consequence.
“DAAAAAAMN!”
Yeah, damn is right. So you can imagine, ol’ Kirilov is not exactly in the mood to be perscribing heart medication, but Abogin appeals to the doctor’s good nature.
“I well understand your position! God is my witness that I am ashamed of attempting at such a moment to intrude on your attention, but what am I to do? Only think to whom can I go? There is no other doctor here, you know. For God’s sake come! I am not asking you for myself… I am not the patient!”
This is just the beginning. The first of three acts, like a play, but rather than simply giving us new characters or new scenes Chekhov gives us a recipe. A simple mixture for a delicious hotplate of distaste, of existential rivalry. The first act is the origin of a relationship; a ruse of opposites attracting. It is mixed with a dash of inner communion between the reader and the doctor; this foreshadows, and heroism is not a thought process. There is trepidation and there is encompassing grief on one end… On the other is a rush of hurry and necessity.
“Humanity-that cuts both ways,” Kirilov said irritably. “In the name of humanity I beg you not to take me. And how queer it is, really! I can hardly stand and you talk to me about humanity! I am fit for nothing just now…. Nothing will induce me to go, and I can’t leave my wife alone. No, no….”
“That’s enough of that, are you getting to a point? Is there a point? There isn’t is there?”
Slow down, Cowpoke. That’s going to come after Act Three. I haven’t even explained Act Two yet, and that’s the best part, that’s where Chekhov’s pen really sings.
“Get on with it then.”
Get while the gettin’s good?
“Don’t be snide.”
Act Two then. The journey. It’s short, only a few paragraphs, filled with silence and exterior shots and feelings.
In all nature there seemed to be a feeling of hopelessness and pain. The earth, like a ruined woman sitting alone in a dark room and trying not to think of the past, was brooding over memories of spring and summer and apathetically waiting for the inevitable winter. Wherever one looked, on all sides, nature seemed like a dark, infinitely deep cold pit from which neither Kirilov nor Abogin nor the red half moon could escape….
This is the meat of the Enemies dish. The unchanging world personified only by man’s emotion and personification. It’s beauty and it’s cruelty revealed only through the lens of human perception. Holy and dubious. Black and white.
“There, now you’ve said it. Black and white. Different. You can’t understand another man in the darkness; on the road. There is always a search of cultural power, for personal objectivism”
Those are some big words. That is a mouthful. Yes, that secret argument taints our entire planet. You are coming to a different point than I am, which in the end will full-circle itself into Chekhov’s pure observation. Your argument is premature, you’ve already made your decision, and it is this that bothers me about you. While it was merely the earth itself that could be conceived of during the bouts of panic and of grief, reactions to the person-made world come to the protagonists of Act Three; the final ingredient of mental perversion, the tolerance over goodwill.
Chekhov’s haunting night-scape is abolished as Kirilov and Abogin walk into the latter’s home.
Kirilov was left alone… glancing in the direction where the clock was ticking he noticed a stuffed wolf as substantial and sleek-looking as Abogin himself.
In Abogin’s home it seems Kirilov is left to his own devices as the rich man goes to ensure his betrothed is ready to have the medical treatment he has traveled under hardship to make available. Instead of finding his ailing wife, Abogin discovers the woman has run off with some cad called Alphonse. He is quick to make this revelation known to Kirilov, demanding sympathy from the man who has lost his only son.
There is no sympathy from the poor heartbroken doctor to the heartsick upper class gent. If the time had been different, if the men themselves had been affected maybe only a hair different than they had been the following words might not have been exchanged:
“No, how dared you, knowing my sorrow, bring me here to listen to these vulgarities!” shouted the doctor… “Who has given you the right to make a mockery of another man’s sorrow?”
“You have taken leave of your senses,” shouted Abogin. “It is ungenerous. I am intensely unhappy myself and…. and….”
Chekhov offers a final insistence, an insistence that I will use as some sort of pseudo-semantic proof.
He condemned Abogin and his wife and Paptchinsky and all who lived in rosy, subdued light among sweet perfumes…
Time will pass and Kirilov’s sorrow will pass, but that conviction, unjust and unworthy of the human heart, will not pass, but will remain in the doctor’s mind to the grave.
Again, this is a recipe. It is food for thought, not a disease with an antidote. There is no cure for this simple human reality.
“Well I don’t understand your argument, if you mean for me to take it as that. It goes back to what I was saying earlier…”
It does indeed, however while some may choose their likes and dislikes based on such simplicities as race and religion, the realist knows that hatred is reactionary, and not directly so. Shapes, smells, and phases of the moon have every bit as much to do with what we feel as do talking points and documented evidences. Maybe your Grandaddy watched his Grandaddy lose each an’ evry one of his slaves when Sherman marched through Georgia. Me? I got wedgied in locker-rooms by corn-fed white boys going through puberty faster than I could while lifting heavier bar-bell-weights than I ever will, and time will pass, the colonic indentions will pass, but my desire to sleep with hotter girls than those dimwitted country-boy leatherheads?… that will remain my desire to the grave.
*HEAVILY Paraphrased, in fact, the quotation marks are pretty inappropriate. This interview can be seen in it’s more legitimate form here: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfoUuOwAaIc>
