Nikolai Gogol The Nose (1836)
A man goes into a cafe and orders a bread roll. When the roll arrives, he discovers a foreign object within, specifically a human nose. Elsewhere, an academic gentleman realises that his own nose is missing, leaving just smooth, blank skin at the centre of his face. The nose is seen about town, dressed as an official, somehow passing itself off as a person and acquiring quite a reputation. Eventually it returns to our guy's face.
The story is riddled with inconsistencies, not least being how the nose in the bread roll figures in any of this, and of course the issue of scale; but that's because it's a story, for fuck's sake. It can do what the hell it likes. Gogol says as much himself in wrapping up the tale with an admission that he doesn't actually understand any of it, adding that it seems absurd, but then daily life is itself absurd. In directly addressing the reader as part of a tale of nebulous reality, Gogol might be seen as foreshadowing all sorts of stuff more recent and more familiar to members of this congregation, but then again, it was 1836, so maybe it's simply that the novel was yet to settle into its current habit of pretending to present a window on reality with author as no more than the individual cranking the handle of the projector.
Either way, I really have to read more by this guy. I'm not even sure why I'm only getting around to it now at the age of fifty-three.
A man goes into a cafe and orders a bread roll. When the roll arrives, he discovers a foreign object within, specifically a human nose. Elsewhere, an academic gentleman realises that his own nose is missing, leaving just smooth, blank skin at the centre of his face. The nose is seen about town, dressed as an official, somehow passing itself off as a person and acquiring quite a reputation. Eventually it returns to our guy's face.
The story is riddled with inconsistencies, not least being how the nose in the bread roll figures in any of this, and of course the issue of scale; but that's because it's a story, for fuck's sake. It can do what the hell it likes. Gogol says as much himself in wrapping up the tale with an admission that he doesn't actually understand any of it, adding that it seems absurd, but then daily life is itself absurd. In directly addressing the reader as part of a tale of nebulous reality, Gogol might be seen as foreshadowing all sorts of stuff more recent and more familiar to members of this congregation, but then again, it was 1836, so maybe it's simply that the novel was yet to settle into its current habit of pretending to present a window on reality with author as no more than the individual cranking the handle of the projector.
Either way, I really have to read more by this guy. I'm not even sure why I'm only getting around to it now at the age of fifty-three.
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