Another Man’s Wife, or the Husband Under the Bed (1848)

In Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man, the narrator claims that the best readers look for “more reality, than real life itself can show.”  An actor’s body is more expressive than a candid person’s because the actor must reveal what a person experiences but cannot express.  Fiction does the same.  It is, as Melville puts it, “nature unfettered.”

I have at least three tendencies that hinder real life from showing me reality:

1.  Blurry thinking.  My tendency toward imprecise thinking, which causes me to skate over complexity.  The current of my brain naturally drifts this way because it’s easier than struggling upstream through life’s paradoxes.

2.  Self-deceit.  My tendency to rationalize my unsavory side and to distract myself from pain.  My field of vision is limited when I refuse to face my shadow.

3.  Familiarity.  My tendency to miss what’s right in front of me simply because I’ve seen it so many times before.  This slips me into the habit of overlooking much of reality.

Fiction can show me more reality than these real-life handicaps because it offers a work-around for each:  

1. Fiction can cut through my sloppy convictions though a careful imagining of details.  The written word has a way of laying bare contradictions.  Thoughts are like butterflies—they are harder to tell apart in flight than when pinned.  Ink pins down thoughts, which makes their variations harder to ignore.

2.  Fiction can cut through self-deceit through the process of empathy.  It’s hard to scrutinize myself, but it’s easy to scrutinize a stranger.  Fiction merges the two—I can scrutinize characters as I would strangers, but as I inhabit their experiences, I find myself within them.

3.  Fiction can cut through familiarity by the very fact of its being fiction.  Fiction is strangeness.  If it weren’t strange at all, that is, if it were completely identical to real life, it wouldn’t be fiction.  The “real life” that I bring with me to a book is isn’t really real life, it’s only my expectations of real life.  True reality is unexpected and strange.  I just don’t tend to think so for the reasons listed above.  Fiction reawakens in me the strangeness of reality.

I say reawaken because I knew reality was strange when I was young.  I can see this in the sort of stories that used to excite me.  G. K. Chesterton says that “a child of seven is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door and saw a dragon.  But a child of three is excited by being told that Tommy opened a door.”  Great fiction reawakens in me the strangeness of opening a door. 

Strangeness is surprising.  Therefore a lot of the best fiction surprises me with its strangeness, and then surprises me again by rendering the strangeness familiar, or as Charles Baxter puts it, “We meet ourselves coming in the other direction.”

“Another Man’s Wife, or the Husband Under the Bed” is full of the unexpected.  It opens with a man in an expensive coat acting servilely to a man in a poor one.  The strangeness increases when we realize that the man in the expensive coat, Ivan Andreyitch, suspects the other man of cuckolding him.  Still more when Ivan Andreyitch finds he can’t confront his wife without asking the suspected lover to help him.

The normal roles are reversed, as the title implies.  Normally, the lover hides behind the furniture, but here the husband does.  Normally, the lover feels guilty and the husband gets angry, but here the husband feels guilty and the lover gets angry.  Normally, the unfaithful spouse runs from the faithful one, fearful of being caught, but here, the faithful spouse runs. 

If everything went as expected, I, the reader, would feel snug in my present understanding of reality, but the unexpected destabilizes me and opens me to something new.  The strange makes me wonder.

But that isn’t quite true.  The merely strange doesn’t make me wonder.  It makes me shrug and say, “Well, that was weird.”  What makes me ask why is the strangeness that rings true.  “Fiction,” says Melville, “should present another world, and yet one to which we feel the tie.”

As usual, Dostoevsky doesn’t spell out why Ivan Andreyitch feels guilty for his wife’s infidelities or why, when something falls on his head at the opera, he continues to scan and scan the crowd until he finds someone laughing at him.  Dostoevsky leaves it to me to sleuth out causes.  

But he does give me a certain sense of coherence.  Ivan Andreyitch is full of contradictions, yet nonetheless, I sense there is some sort of inner unity beneath the contradictions.  Even the lapdog Ivan Andreyitch imagines seems a reflection of this underlying characteristic: “It is just as though a confectioner made it of sweetmeats.  And it’s such a funny little thing—gets entangled in its own coat and falls over.”

What I find particularly amazing about this type of characterization is that the unity remains off-page.  It’s precise, yet unarticulated.  It’s the art of focus.  The whole story revolves around this single trait, but what is the trait?  Jealousy?  Not exactly.  Othello was jealous, and this little resembles Othello.  Dostoevsky creates a tight circle around his theme and leaves its definition unspoken. The theme has only this name: Ivan Andreyitch.  The great acting teacher Constantin Stanislavsky claims that “the greater the literary work, the greater the pull of its super-objective.”  What’s marvelous about a character like Ivan Andreyitch is that I’m certain he has a super-objective, but I’m sure if you asked ten different readers what it was, you’d get ten different answers.

This is because I sense his coherence not logically but experientially.  Ivan Andreyitch’s behavior is irrational and exaggerated, yet familiar.  Phenomena like induced guilt and pain-shopping are everyday occurrences; I just often don’t notice them until fiction exposes their strangeness.