Comic Relief in My Reading

I had a dream the other night, that I had traveled to somewhere, perhaps Arizona, to run a marathon, and it was an hour and 20 minutes past the start of the marathon, but instead of being at the start line, I was watching an Andy Griffith movie.

Dreams are really strange, and they seem to make sense when you are dreaming them, but when you wake up, they are patently absurd. There are many logical incongruities. For instance, I was watching the Andy Griffith movie on a television set out in a green field, and it didn't look like Arizona at all.

But even though the images in the dream are colorful and amusing, sometimes it is obvious what the dream is trying to tell you. (In this case, it meant I needed to get signed up for thesis hours ~ the semester started a month ago. I am done with my coursework, and now need to get some information from my advisers, so I can get started on studying for comps, so I can get past that and get my thesis going. The marathon had started, and I wasn't even at the start line yet.)

While my academic work is stalled, I've been trying to concentrate on reading some literature. I am halfway through Toni Morrison's Beloved, and it is a fabulous book, but I am such a wimp. I can only take so much misery of the human condition in one sitting. Or even in several sittings.

In the Vonnegut book I recently read, he says, "Do you realize that all great literature -- Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" -- all are about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it a relief to have somebody say that?)"

He is right, of course, but I am still planning to finish Beloved, and then go on to more wretchedness.

But I needed to take a break, so I read a short story, "The Nose," written in 1832 by Gogol.

It is about a fellow, kind of a pretender and a womanizer, who suddenly finds that his nose is missing. Then, strangely enough, he finds his nose running around in the form of a civil servant, a gentleman of higher rank and social status than himself. In an effort to get his nose back, he files a classified ad. The Nose is later apprehended while trying to leave town, and is eventually reunited with the man's face. All of this is related as though it were perfectly logical ~ just the way it would appear to your brain if you were dreaming it.

This is a very funny story. Of course, it is Serious Literature; there is a lot of symbolism involved, including phallic imagery, and it ties in with religious issues, as well. (In 1927, Shostakovich wrote an opera based on this story. Which gave me the idea that I might be able to use this in my thesis, a document which now exists only in dreams.) Gogol ends his tale with some remarks about the absurdity of the situation, and of his writing about it:

"But the strangest, the most incomprehensible thing of all, is how authors can choose such subjects. I confess that this is quite inconceivable; it is indeed...no, no, I just can't understand it at all! In the first place, there is absolutely no benefit in it for the fatherland; in the second place...but in the second place, there is no benefit either. I simply don't know what to make of it....

"And yet, in spite of it all, though, of course, we may assume this and that and the other, perhaps even...And after all, where aren't there incongruities?--But all the same, when you think about it, there really is something in all this. Whatever anyone says, such things happen in this world; rarely, but they do."

So even though the story made me laugh, and provided much-needed comic relief in the midst of the heaviness I was reading while not working on my thesis, Gogol is making an observation about the incongruities of life, and the spiritual crisis, and yep, (Vonnegut is right!) the suckiness of the human condition.