the immorality of happiness
In Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries, a veterinary surgeon by the name of Ivan Ivanych tells some friends a story about his brother, Nicholai, who got a job in a government office, hated it intensely, languished in misery and dreamed all his life of buying a piece of land in the country and happily rusticating. To this rather aristocratic fantasy, we are told, the thought of having a gooseberry bush (like a white picket fence to the middle-class ideal of suburban life) was an important symbolic flourish. And though Nicholai was neither wealthy nor well-paid, he saved every rouble, denied himself every luxury, and even married an ugly old widow in order to inherit her money until at last he was able to fulfill his dream.
It is only when Ivan Ivanych pays a visit to his brother’s estate that the reader learns the true purpose of the story: not to chronicle the happiness of a retired government clerk, but rather to detail the strange effect the observation of that happiness had on his brother. For as Ivan watches Nicholai at last eat the symbolic plate of gooseberries, he confesses that, “at the sight of a happy man I was filled with something like despair.” Ivan is not jealous of his brother. His reaction has a more philosophical explanation: Ivan realizes that Nicholai’s happiness, that happiness itself, is callous because it depends upon a cultivated ignorance of human suffering—of “horrible poverty everywhere, overcrowding, drunkenness, hypocrisy, falsehood.” [1] Such ignorance is only possible because the screams, sobs and groans of human suffering do not reach our ears, but the silence beyond his window, and his acquiescence to it, makes the predicament of the happy man more, not less, disturbing because he must also accept that, “however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show its claws, and some misfortune will befall him—illness, poverty, loss—and then no one will see or hear him, just as he now neither sees nor hears others.” It is like an overlooked clause in a Faustian contract: One may laugh and smile while others suffer—but only on the condition that, at some future date, one is prepared to have their own screams muted while others laugh and smile. And it is this, the tacit sanction of an inequitable universe which one's happiness connotes, and not simply the inequity itself, that forms the basis to his despair. The insight provokes unease but it is not especially controversial. John Donne famously wrote that,
If we accept this and concede that, just as the population of a township is the sum of all its living inhabitants, so the shared fate of humanity is the sum of all individual fates, then image of a planet wracked with suffering and death on which Nicholai imperturbably munches gooseberries is no different to the image of a man on a sinking ship who fights his way through the panicking crowds to his cabin where, tuning out the screams, the sound of breaking glass and the groaning of the ship, he puts on his favourite record, closes his eyes, and smiles to himself with a completely sincere and therefore completely psychotic joy. It is logical: Universal compassion and true happiness cannot coexist in a world in which a single human being is suffering.
The problem has implications for theology because belief in God requires us to imagine that our world, so replete with suffering, is presided over by a mind of infinite awareness and compassion. [2] In Ecclesiastes 1:18, we are told that, “in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” If it is valid to apply this inverse ratio between knowledge and happiness to God, who is infinitely knowledgeable, then we are faced with a rather incongruous notion: a God that is infinitely unhappy. In Isaiah 53, which prefigures the coming of the Messiah, we find the phrase, “Man of Sorrows.” Perhaps that sorrow is not a prediction of the crucifixion but an innate attribute of the Godhead; perhaps the English theologian Leslie Weatherhead was correct when he asserted that, “the life of God is painful. In his heart are all the sins and suffering of the world and as long as there remains a single sinner in the universe, there will be no happiness in heaven.” [1] Clearly, Chekhov had one eye on Tsarist Russia when he wrote this story. In another, similar, story one of his characters realizes that to reconcile oneself to the suffering of others and still dream of happiness, “meant to dream of new suicides by overworked, careworn people, or by weak, neglected people, whom one sometimes talked about with vexation or mockery over dinner, but whom one did not go to help”—in other words, the serfs and servants whose toil and poverty are the buttress of the aristocracy. But the historical circumstances are almost incidental, and one need only swap around a few terms (labourer and capitalist, say, for serf and lord) to discover the relevance of Ivan’s despair to one’s own time.
[2] The topic under discussion differs from the long-standing problem of evil in theology: Whereas the theodicies of Irenaeus and Leibniz attempted to vindicate divine providence in the face of human suffering, Chehkov's character takes the existence of human suffering for granted and merely seeks to define an observer's moral relationship to it. |