If this “How It Works (I Think)” blog is going to be of any use to The New Yorker reading public, it must not shy away from the most difficult cases. So far we’ve taken on more or less classically constructed stories by George Saunders and Jhumpa Lahiri. Today we look at a more experimental piece by Lyudmila Ulitskaya called “The Autopsy,” which appeared in the August 28th print issue. (The New Yorker does allow some free articles every month, so I encourage you to click on the link and read the story first. Page references to the print edition below include the page number followed by the column number.)
“The Autopsy” baffled me the first time through, and maybe it baffled you as well. Maybe you were so charmed by it, you didn’t care that you were baffled. Or maybe you were so charmed, bafflement did not intrude at all.
Part of the difficulty of reading this story is that it takes the point of view of three different characters (over four sections): Kogan, a pathoanatomist (someone who does autopsies); Marya Akimovna (known as Masha), the mother of Volya; and Vsevolod (known as Volya), a musician, who is dead when the story begins. This story is relatively short, and each character has very little room to develop an individual plot arc.
First, a quick structural summary before we dive deeper into the analysis:
In the first section, Kogan performs a puzzling autopsy. More on this later.
In the second section, Masha learns that her son Volya has been killed and in the trauma of that moment “her life collapsed, ended” (58.1), metaphorically at least. And, as with people whose life passes before their eyes at their moment of death, she then imaginatively relives her life and reflects on her son’s. To the extent that she has a desire or a goal in the present, as she would if she had a conventional plot arc, it seems to be to figure out why Volya was killed. But as soon as she poses this question, one of Volya’s friends suggests that Volya’s musician friends killed him out of jealousy, and her section ends on that note.
Volya’s section, which follows hers, takes place entirely after he has entered the after-life. He becomes an angel, seems to think he did not fulfill his life’s work as a musician, and then finds he still has his flute, plays it, and realizes “time is no more” (60.3) because “everything was happening simultaneously, and in all its fullness” (60.3). Everything is always and already immanent. That’s the last moment we get from his point of view, but he also makes an appearance in Kogan’s second section, which concludes the story.
Arguably, as I’ll try to show below, Kogan is the only one of these characters who ends up with a complete plot arc, in the sense that he has problems and desires that he pursues in the course of the story and there is some suspense about how those things will turn out for him. The story also suggests his centrality by ending the story with his point of view.
But despite Kogan having the most realized plot arc, for two-thirds of the story we’re with Masha and Volya, before returning to Kogan at the end, just in time for Kogan’s death. This makes it difficult to know what to track throughout the story and to get a sense of what the story is about as it unfolds. It’s really only at the very end of the story that we see all of the pieces coming together.
With this unusual structure in mind, I want to suggest that, instead of a conventional plot, in which we follow a main character through some unfolding surface action or conflict, “The Autopsy” has something of the form of a magical realist conceptual puzzle: as we’ll see below, Kogan’s problems are posed in his opening section, and Masha’s and Volya’s sections provide the conceptual/thematic ingredients through which a reader might solve why Kogan ends the story apparently satisfied with his life, with a smile on his face, as he does in the story’s last line. To put this in terms we’ve used in previous blog entries: there is very little connected, cause-and-effect action at the surface level; just about everything needs to be assembled from the “understory,” where thematic elements progress and make the meaning of the story.
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Kogan’s job is to perform autopsies, and he’s been doing this work for a long time. In fact, in the opening section, we learn Kogan is “one of the oldest pathoanatomists and long retired” (57.2). But from time to time he’s called out of retirement to handle a particularly difficult case. During his career, he’s developed a fondness for performing autopsies on people who have died “at the proper time” (57.1). One of his problems is that he is “a little worried” he has joined the unfortunate ranks of what he terms “the forgotten” (57.1)—people who have lived too far past their “allotted time” (57.1). It’s a very idiosyncratic problem—worrying that one has lived the wrong amount of time—but it certainly fits someone with his occupation, which has given him plenty of time to dwell on when and why people die.
The difficult case he’s been called out of retirement to examine is a young man who has died from a knife wound to the chest (we will later learn this is Volya). However, this cadaver also has “two strange incisions” in his back, parallel to his shoulder blades, that seem to have been made after his death (57.2). We’re also told that the young man died after being brought to the hospital, which suggests the mysterious cuts happened when he was at the hospital. Kogan is “confused and perplexed” by these cuts, but, in a sign that he will not be progressing through a conventional, realistic (say, detective-style) plot, he does not attempt to investigate who at the hospital might have done this to the body. Instead, he “directed his thoughts toward fantastic novels fashionable in the last century about extraterrestrials, alien visitors” (57.3). At this moment, I thought of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s magical realist story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” though it’s a short story, not a novel, as a possible piece Kogan has in mind here. I began to wonder if this young man was somehow an angel who’d had his wings stolen.
Kogan’s opening section thus ends with two problems in the air: Kogan’s concern about dying at the right time and the unsolved mystery of the twin incisions.
We then have a section from Masha’s point of view during which we gather that her beloved son, Volya, has been killed. Readers used to the plot efficiencies of short stories may immediately suspect that Volya is the young man on whom Kogan performed his puzzling autopsy, though this is only confirmed later. One strong hint the young man with the incisions is Volya is when Masha remembers Volya as “an angel, not a child” (58.3).
Ulitskaya now has to show why it would be meaningful for Kogan to perform an autopsy on this particular person. What might this person have to do with Kogan dying at the right time or in the right way? And is that in turn related to the incision puzzle?
The story begins to answer these questions by using the Masha/Volya sections to create an opposition between Kogan and Masha/Volya: Kogan is marked as a reader and an intellectual whereas Volya and Masha are consistently described as bad students. Kogan sees a body subject to an autopsy as “an unread book.” An autopsy gives him the ability to “read the history of a life” (57.1). His children are also focused on reading and writing. His son “had lost his mind over some Kabbalistic books” (60.3). Kogan’s daughter writes about contemporary psychology, though Kogan reads her articles “with disgust” (60.3).
The sense of learned accomplishment—albeit inflected with futility, insanity, and disgust—that marks the Kogan family’s experience with reading and writing contrasts sharply with the anti-academic bent of Masha and Volya. We learn Masha was “the last in her class” (58.1). She “could read and write, but she had no use for the one or the other” (58.3 – 59.1). Volya was a “poor student” who “never finished his studies” (58.3) because he “could not pass the social subjects—history of the Party, scientific atheism, all sorts of political economy” (59.1). He does, however, have “musical talent” (59.1).
Volya plays and composes music. The music he composes has several interesting qualities: it is especially delicate and ephemeral (an attempt to record Volya fails); “it made you now weep, now smile” (59.2); and it makes his fellow musicians apparently jealous enough to kill him. The story also explicitly ties his music to his angelic nature. Volya’s friend Misha describes his music as “heavenly” (60.1) And it’s precisely Volya’s angelic nature, represented by the “inexplicable” incisions, that Kogan finds so irritating: because “it flew in the face of his strict and exact knowledge” (60.3).
This all suggests there is a conceptual conflict in the story between the academic and the intuitive, the critic and the artist, words and music.
As we begin Volya’s section, he is experiencing great pain, most likely at his very moment of death because the imagery suggests tropes of entering the afterlife: his pain crystallizes into a “tiny shining dot” from which the note “la” emerges. The pain morphs from a cone in his forehead to now being “in his back—sharp and as if double” (60.2). His pain, expressible as music, culminates in “the big moist wings that had sprouted from his back” (60.2). As he begins flying around, “the sound ‘la’ expanded unimaginably” (60.2). His wings are “semi-transparent” (60.2) which echoes a description of his music as “childlike and transparent” (59.3). If something is child-like and transparent, it doesn’t require reading or interpretation—it is simply apprehended, instantaneously understood. Shortly after becoming an angel, Volya has his realization that time is no more because everything is immanent, already present and graspable in its fullness, and his section ends.
In the final Kogan section, Volya himself is immediately grasped and understood when Kogan sees him in a sort of dream-like reality he enters at the moment of his death. After a long night of reading (60.3), Kogan goes to the bathroom, takes out his dentures, and goes to sleep. He soon wakes up (at least it seems to him that he wakes up; later, we realize he is dead at this point) and sees Volya: “Before him stood a hazily bright figure, unrecognizable yet familiar… Right, right, this was today’s dead man. No words were pronounced. Only the soft sound, as if from behind the wall, of poor, bright music” (60.3). Kogan follows this figure into the afterlife, and the next morning his wife finds him dead in his study “under a plaid blanket, smiling” (60.3).
Kogan, who begins the story worried he will not die at the right time, dies happy, with a smile on his face, which we know is one of the responses to Volya’s music. Crucially, he does not finish his reading of Volya’s body—he never explicitly recognizes Volya as an angel—only “a hazily bright figure”; if he resolves the meaning of the incisions, he does so wordlessly (no words are pronounced in his death dream), without directly commenting on it. Whatever is happening is immanent to him, transparent, or so instantaneously read that reading is not quite the right word for it. Volya’s intuitive, non-academic way of being and knowing has been granted to Kogan in a sort of annunciation, saving Kogan from an unhappy death.
Has Kogan done anything to earn his happy death? Well, when he’s first frustrated by Volya’s corpse, his imagination does turn to fantastical explanations instead of realistic investigation, as I discussed earlier, which you could say makes him receptive to Volya’s magical appearance. But I would argue this reach toward the fantastical is a bit of an aberration for Kogan, even out of character, and as such more of a sign of Ulitskaya needing to put a piece of her puzzle in play; he certainly doesn’t return to this possible explanation at the end of the day. Instead his last conscious living thought about the autopsy is how the incisions “flew in the face of his strict and exact knowledge.”
The arranged/puzzle quality of the story is reinforced by the use of fate as an organizing principle. Before he has any inkling he is about to die, Kogan decides that Volya will be his last autopsy—and so he proves to be (57.3). When Masha learns Volya has died, “she realized that she had always known, anticipated, that this was how it would be” (58.1). The story does not attempt to unfold with the cause-and-effect progression of realistic everyday actions; instead, the story is arranged by a larger force (Ulitskaya herself) much like a piece of music, with four movements that play off each other’s themes.
What has Kogan done directly to bring on his end? Kogan has essentially (and fittingly) read himself to death this night (when he finally stops “it was already past two” (60.3)), but that has not logically brought him any closer to correctly reading the mysterious cadaver. In fact, after all of his reading, his last thought about Volya’s body is to be irritated by its inexplicability. If he were to die after his last conscious action, it would be with a frown on his face, not a smile.
He is given his happy ending, I think, because Ulitskaya seems to want to suggest that in the end the intuitive and the musical trump the academic and the critical. The conceptual conflict is resolved in favor of art, music, intuition, maybe because they are better for us, because they actually make us happy.
You might say, then, that this story is a direct affront to the “How It Works” blog, because this blog is all about reading and analysis. But I would say, first, composing this interpretation has made me happy. And, second, as a puzzle, I believe this particular story itself is unusually dependent on super-careful reading. More conventional plots, even if they also invite or require interpretation, tend to be easier to follow and their meanings seem to flow more easily from their surface actions. In other words, “The Autopsy” paradoxically requires an extremely careful act of reading to grasp how the story suggests that reading, performing autopsies on bodies/texts, is not the point—the ephemeral music of life is the point. Or so suggests the artist (Ulitskaya), who, ironically, is stuck working in words. But it seems to me Ulitskaya has done her best to evoke in words the feelings and effects of music and to hold them up as most valuable.
Which takes me back to my original question? Were you irritated because you tried to read this story, or were you moved and charmed, as by a piece of music?
Please answer or make any other comment you want in the comments section below.
Andy Mozina 