I recently finished reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders and really enjoyed it. I highlighted a few sections and have had them rolling around in my head, most notably on some recent bike rides. I’ve been turning over the Russian style of narration that Saunders discusses called skaz.
In discussing Nikolai Gogol’s story ‘The Nose’, Saunders says:
“The narration in “The Nose,” it turns out, is a particular Russian form of unreliable first-person narration called skaz. Imagine an actor telling a story in character. And that character is…not right. He is, per the literary critic Viktor Vinogradov, “sharply characterized by his substandard speech.” According to another critic, Robert Maguire, the Gogolian skaz narrator “has little formal education and little idea of how to develop an argument, let alone talk in an eloquent and persuasive way about his feelings, although he wishes to be considered informed and observant; he tends to ramble and digress and cannot distinguish the trivial from the important.” The writer and translator Val Vinokur adds that the resulting story is distorted by “improper narrative emphasis” and “misplaced assumption.” As Maguire puts it, the narrator’s “enthusiams outrun common sense.”
“There is no world save the one we make with our minds, and the mind’s predisposition determines the type of world we see.”
“If you’ve ever wondered, as I have, “Given how generally sweet people are, why is the world so fucked up?,” Gogol has an answer: we each have an energetic and unique skaz loop running in our heads, one we believe in fully, not as “merely my opinion” but “the way things actually are, for sure.”
The entire drama of life on earth is: Skaz-Headed Person #1 steps outside, where he encounters Skaz-Headed Person #2. Both, seeing themselves as the centre of the universe, thinking highly of themselves, immediately slightly misunderstand everything. They try to communicate but aren’t any good at it.”
Hilarity ensues.
I know I’m often rolling in my own skaz loop, particularly on bike rides. I’m sorting through ideas and envisioning things that I have no guarantee are correct, or will even occur in the manner in which I’m playing them out in my head – but I’m often operating under the pretense that they are real or true. It’s the full manifestation of the fact that we are all living our own unique version of reality and we are so enmeshed in it that we hardly – if ever – stop to consider the fact that everyone else’s reality is not the same. They’re all different. I can’t understand why so-and-so would do X or believe Y because it’s just not within my own reality to consider or contemplate. It doesn’t make sense. My distorted skaz loop is different than theirs – but my skaz loop has to be the right one, right?
I was struggling on this particular bike ride because I had swapped out my 29” x 2.3” wheel set for the 27.5” x 3” one. I’ve been riding the 29’s all summer and the bike felt great. I put the 27.5s on and suddenly it was garbage. I couldn’t do anything. It felt slow and sluggish and unresponsive. It was beating me up. I wasn’t having any fun. I realized the 29” skaz is not the same as the 27.5” skaz and I seemed surprised by that. This is ironic because I expected the bike to feel the same, but also I didn’t – or why else would I have changed the wheels? I wanted the same, but different. I didn’t even know what difference I was looking for – I just knew that “usually, around this time of year, I change the wheels.” My brain and body were still in a 29” skaz loop and the bike was in full on 27.5” skaz. It was cross-skazination.
My buddy Andrew recently got a new bike and was not having any fun on it. He’d been riding single-speeds and this one had a smorgasbord of gears. He was ready to sell the bike – but I knew it wasn’t the bike – it was in his head, but I couldn’t explain it exactly. After talking to the shop where he got the bike and getting a few pointers it became clear. He was trying to mash the pedals like the single speed instead of spin over obstacles on the geared bike. He was running a mash skaz on a spin skaz bike. Cross-skazination again.
No two skazes are the same. Monday 3:15pm skaz is not Thursday 6:43am skaz. David Lee Roth skaz is not Sammy Hagar skaz. My skaz is not your skaz – and yet, we can all strive to skaz out together.
Those Russian short story masters were bike riders too. Who knew?
Skaz on, friends.