Chekhov, Salinger, and Epictetus

ROBERT WEXELBLATT
As a mark is not set up for the purpose of niissing
the aim, so neither does the nature of evil exist
in the world.
Epictetus, Encheiridion, XXVII

N THE WHOLE, modern literature and ancient

O philosophy mix poorly. Having so little in com-
mon, they tend to regard things differently. For in-
stance, the modern storyteller characteristically mis-
trusts abstraction (or at least is advised by his editor to
keep passages of speculation out of his story), while
few ancient philosophers seem to have had any re-
spect for storytelling at all. Consequently, it is some-
thing of a surprise when a composer of indisputably
modern fictions quite willfully dredges up doctrines
from Antiquity. Such occurrences are both surprising
and potentially interesting; and, as Kierkegaard says,
all uniqueness is a spiritual privilege. As it happens,
the same doctrine—Epictetan Stoicism—has been
employed by both Anton Chekhov and J. D. Salinger:
the one presenting Stoicism rather critically, and the
other with positive admiration. At the core of Chek-
hov's great novella. Ward No. 6, is a debate between a
doctor and a madman and, to a very considerable
degree, the topic of this debate is Stoicism. Salinger
mentions Epictetus in more than one place, but the
work which seems to me closest in spirit to the
Creek's thought is the last of the Nine Stories—
"Teddy"—which again is built around a discussion of
ideas.
All by itself, the above observation would perhaps
be enough to sustain an essay, though probably not an
interesting one. What is wanted is not a mere correla-

(50)
 STOIGISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 51

tion of this with that, but an analysis which promises

to illuminate something or other—the stories, the
philosophy, or, best of all, that which they are all
about. For example, it would be interesting to see
why Chekhov and Salinger disagree about Stoicism.
After all, there are a few respects in which the two
writers seem to resemble each other: their mastery of
short-story form, their considerable decency, sympa-
thy with children, sensitivity to social categories, im-
patience with conformity or stupidity, and, of course,
their wit. On the other hand, the historical situations
of the two men are so different—late Czarist Russia,
early affluent America—that these may go a long way
in accounting for their distinct views of Stoicism.
Besides this. Stoicism (with the capital "S") is a quite
elaborate philosophy—comprising not only an atti-
tude of emotional discipline, but also highly sophisti-
cated religious and ethical doctrines. Therefore, one
might look for the differences also in what aspects of
Stoicism each writer has chosen to write about. In
other words, Chekhov and Salinger, while appearing
to talk about the same thing, may be talking about
different ones.
A really interesting—and thorough—essay on such
a theme should be expected to illuminate the philos-
ophy as well as the stories. It is not at all impossible
for a modern fiction to teach us something about an
ancient philosophy. For example, take the questions:
"By speaking of Stoicism, what has Chekhov told us
about Creek philosophy in general in Ward No. 6?" or
"Why is it that Salinger habitually associates Epic-
tetus with Oriental poetry and religion?" If Stoicism
is a sort of minor in which each writer reflected
something of deep concern to him, what sort of mirror
did each think he was holding up to his time? And
what, after all, has Stoicism—a philosophy as dead as
Brutus—to do with those times, with Russia in 1892 or
52 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

America in 1952? Such questions may not confer a

spiritual privilege, but they are at least worth looking
into.
Ward No. 6: Contra Apatheia
The most extreme statement of that aspect of Stoi-
cism examined in Ward No. 6 is this extraordinary
piece of advice from Epictetus:
. . . If you are kissing your child or wife, say that it is a
human being whom you are kissing, for when the wife or child
dies, you will not be disturbed. (Beckner, 80)
Like most extreme statements of a philosophical po-
sition, this is at once revealing and misleading. Prop-
erly understood, Epictetus' advice can clarify a good
deal of the famous Stoic apathy; however, the exam-
ple chosen and the language used suggest a kind of
indifference normally associated with emotional fri-
gidity and moral irresponsibility, and this is rather
unfair to the Stoics.
Certainly the doctor in Chekhov's story tries to use
the Stoics to validate his emotional torpor and ethical
indifference, but this only shows him to be guilty of a
misunderstanding. What Epictetus meant will appear
more clearly if we examine a concrete example bf his
imperturbable paterfamilias.
Let's say this marvelously rational man's wife and
daughter are flying across the country. The plane is
fifty thousand feet over Kansas when, owing to metal
fatigue, the bolts holding one of its engines in place
come loose. As a consequence, the engine tumbles
free, the plane heels over, loses lift, and crashes to the
ground. There are no survivors. Now, to be an exem-
plary Stoic, our man must first consider exactly what
has occurred, and he must do so dispassionately. The
exemplary Stoic has been emotionally toilet-trained;
which is to say that he puts his passions only in the
appropriate places. He cares only about that over
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 53

which he has control. First off, then, he will observe

that those who were killed were, as Epictetus says, all
human beings. What is a human being? It is a biolog-
ical entity capable of growth and much more, but it is
also doomed to die. Moreover, the human frame is not
constructed to endure a fall of fifty thousand feet.
Thus, our man would have to conclude that, in
perishing, his wife and child had indisputably obeyed
the laws of nature. No less did the airplane: when
Bernoulli's Principle and the Laws of Thermodynam-
ics ceased to operate in favor of the plane's flight, its
massive weight became subject to the Law of Gravity.
The worn-out bolts likewise behaved entirely law-
fully in giving way. It is in the nature of metal to grow
fatigued, as it is in the nature of human beings to die
and in the nature of mass to strive to reach the center
of the earth. The nature of things is not under our
control; thus, it would be futile to rebel against the
laws of nature. Indeed, the whole universe depends
on these very laws: one could not sensibly call the
Law of Gravity "bad." To the Stoic, the universe is not
run by chance or by miracle; it is run in obedience to
divine providence—i.e., in accordance with nature's
laws. Properly understood, then, in the case of the
plane crash, nothing bad has occurred. As Epictetus
puts it:-
. . . The universie is powerful and superior, and consults
the best for us by governing us in conjunction with the whole.
And further; opposition, besides that it is unreasonable, and
produces nothing except a vain struggle, throws us into pain
and sorrows. . . . Demand not that events should hap-
pen as you wish; but wish them to happen as they do happen,
and you will go on well. (Albert, 88-89, 97)
So, one should actually agree with the plane crash, as
one should concur with the Law of Gravity.
To the Stoic there are only three kinds of events:
good, bad, and indifferent. Only virtue and vice can
54 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

be good or bad; for all that we are able to control is our

own will, and where there is no choice there is no
morality. Whatever is not under our control (including
the outcome of our own choices) is thus a matter of
indifference. What is more, if we should care about
any such matters, we are bound to be made unhappy.
To be made unhappy is to be disturbed, and to be
disturbed is to lose the game. It is true that Epictetus,
in an uncharacteristic gesture of generosity toward the
emotional unruliness of humankind, allows that one
might perhaps prefer that the plane not crash. How-
ever, a mild preference about a matter of essential
indifference is a pretty cool thing indeed.
Indifference to externals, then, is a rudimentary
Stoic concept; Andrew Ephimich is quite correct
about that:
. . . It is possible not to feel the cold, as well as every pain
in general. Marcus Aurelius has said: "Pain is a living con-
ception of pain; exert thy will, in order to change this con-
ception; put it away from thee, cease complaining, and then
pain shall vanish," which is true enough. . . . (Ghekhov,
413)
This indifference to physical discomfort is, in fact, the
root not only of Stoic anti-hedonism, but of the phi-
losophy-in-general. Zeno the Phoenician, founder of
Stoicism, was much influenced by the Cynics. In fact,
in Ward No. 6, Diogenes, a Cynic, is linked to the
Stoics by Andrew in his first interview with Ivan. It
was the conviction of the first Cynic, Antisthenes, that
one should free oneself completely from dependence
on the material and social world, master one's desires,
and live quite undisturbed, however unconvention-
ally. Antisthenes himself is believed to have said that
he would rather go mad than feel pleasure.
Andrew is also right about another aspect of Stoi-
cism—its unconditional rationalism. "One must strive
toward a rationalization of life; therein lies the true
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 55

good," he tells Ivan—an amusing exhortation to offer

a paranoid schizophrenic. Yet it is, of course, precisely
Ivan Dmitrich's capacity for feeling—and in particular
his sensitivity to the brutality and stupidity of his
society—which has led to his madness. This sensitiv-
ity of Ivan's is set against the Stoics' rationalization of
all external events by contrasting Ivan's indignation
with Andrew's acquiesence in the status-quo.
In view of the political overtones of Ward No. 6
(Ivan pointedly refers to the filthy mental ward of the
title as "a little Bastille," for instance), the choice of
Stoicism as the philosophy admired by Andrew is a
sharp one. "Status-quo," the most Roman of political
expressions, is likewise the most Stoical. It is no
wonder that Stoicism, of all philosophical imports,
flourished best in late Republican and early Imperial
Rome. Not only did its ethics (of which more later)
correspond to home-bred "Roman virtue," but its
dedication to stability made a perfect fit with the
world-Empire Rome was rapidly building. Everyone
(including slaves, of which Epictetus himself was
one) was handed a role by fate, by providence. No one
was to question the role, just to play it well. On top of
this. Stoicism was a truly cosmopolitan philosophy—
unlike any other Greek system—perhaps because,
unlike Plato, Aristotle, or Epicurus, Zeno was not a
Greek. The Hellenic habit of regarding non-Greeks as
barbarians never made for stable empires. But the
Stoic conception of all men as "distinct portions of the
essence of God" supported the decisive Roman strat-
egy of extending citizenship to selected non-Romans,
giving even Gauls and Spaniards a stake in the con-
cern. Epictetus, an import himself, epitomizes the
Stoic political philosophy eloquently:
For what is a man? A part of a commonwealth; first and chiefly
of that which includes both gods and men; and next, of that to
which you immediately belong, which is a miniature of the
56 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

universal city. . . . You are a citizen of the universe, and

a part of it. . . . What does the character of a citizen
imply? To hold no private interest; to deliberate of nothing as
a separate individual, but rather like the hand or the foot,
which, if they had reason, and comprehended the constitution
of nature, would never pursue, or desire, but with a reference
to the whole. (Albert, 91)
Whatever occurs is either for the good of the universe
or of the State. Stoics can scarcely be rebels; on the
contrary, they are provided with airtight rationaliza-
tions of all injustices committed by anyone other than
themselves. In short. Stoicism is the perfect philoso-
phy for a purposeful life in a corrupt empire.
It is of course this power to rationalize life in an
unjust empire which Andrew Ephimich desires from
the Stoics, for he has much to rationalize away. Gon-
ditions at the hospital for which he is responsible are
atrocious: roaches, bedbugs, and mice, everywhere;
orderlies and nurses living in the sick wards with
their entire families; erysipelas of epidemic propor-
tions; equipment amounting to only two scalpels;
patients routinely robbed by the staff; incompetent
assistant doctors, and so forth. Andrew realizes the
place ought simply to be shut down; however, he
convinces himself that this is not up to him and takes
no meaningful action at all. Ghekhov was not a writer
who believed that people are motivated—or under-
motivated—by philosophical precepts alone or even
primarily. He meticulously depicts Andrew Ephimich
as a bourgeois—never beaten by his father, yet forced
into a career he never desired—who is guilty of com-
plicity in an unjustifiable system, not because he is
ignorant or hecause he is an evildoer, nor even he-
cause he has been impressed by the arguments for
Stoic indifference to external conditions; but rather
because he is exceptionally shy, unassertive, and lazy.
The rationalizations of Stoicism come after and not
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 57

before Andrew settles into his post and accustoms

himself to the irregularities at the hospital and the
backwardness ofthe town:
Andrew Ephimich is exceedingly fond of intelligence and
honesty, yet he has not sufficient strength of character and
belief in his rights to establish an intelligent and honest life
about him. (397-98)
Overwhelmed by the futility of his job—by the enor-
mity of the corrupt empire, so to speak—Andrew
Ephimich commences to rationalize his position and
thus to betray a profession Chekhov himself served
heroically on more than one occasion:
. . . Why hinder people from dying, since death is the
normal and ordained end of every being? . . . Wherefore
should sufferings be alleviated? (398-99)
Fortified by reflections of this sort, it is not long
before Andrew gives up attending his patients in favor
of drawing his salary, sitting comfortably at home
sipping tea and vodka at regular intervals, reading
history, philosophy. The Physician, and holding forth
nightly to his yes-man, Michael Averianich, the post-
master.
Is this really Stoicism or is it merely irresponsibi-
lity? Well, in a sense it is both, even though the two
are actually contradictory. Andrew is stoical in striv-
ing after a "rationalization of life," and, to some de-
gree, the form this rationalization appears to take is
that of the Stoics'. However, Andrew Ephimich really
is not a Stoic at all; in fact, he is something quite
different. He is not a Stoic because he has utterly
ignored Stoic ethics, the absolute regard for duty
which made the Roman Stoics such extraordinary
soldiers and such incorruptible civil servants. Indeed,
Ivan Dmitrich recognizes this, and before attacking
both Andrew and the Stoics, he says:
"The Stoics, whom you parody, were remarkable
men . . . (414).
58 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

Ivan is right; Andrew merely burlesques Epictetus.

That philosopher never denied the existence of emo-
tion or declared that one was to care about nothing at
all. On the contrary, Epictetus himself responded to
this popular misconception thus:
. . . I am not to be undisturbed by passions, in the same
sense as a statue is; but as one who preserves the natural and
acquired relations; as a pious person, as a son, as a brother, as a
father, as a citizen. (Albert, 101)
To the Stoics, every individual exists as the focal
point of a set of relationships. Some of these relations
are given by nature (such as a son's relation to his
father or a brother's to his brother), while others are
acquired (an employee's relation to his employer or a
doctor's to his patient). Each such relationship dic-
tates a variety of duties which can be readily dis-
cerned by the dispassionate use of reason. For ex-
ample, a Stoic would argue that if X is Y's son, then it
is X's duty to obey Y; or, if X is a citizen of Rome, then
X must be prepared to give his life in Rome's defense.
It is of no account whether Y is an alcoholic and a fool
or if Rome's cause is avarice and lust of power. These
are subjective judgments—mere "appearances"—and
as such are quite irrelevant to the objective relation-
ship itself. So, what is especially distinctive about the
Stoics' conception of duty is that they see no gap at all
between the "is" of a relationship and the "ought" of
a duty—no interval of moral ambiguity, no chasm of
choice between being a citizen and the obligation of
duty toward the state, or between being a doctor and
one's obligations to one's patients. Choice there is,
but not a choice as to what one's duties happen to be,
only as to whether or not one wills to execute them.
This willing to accomplish one's obligations is, in fact,
so important to the Stoics that they say it is the only
thing we should really care about. We control nothing
but our own wills, and it is in the will that we triumph
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 59

in virtue or fall into vice. Therefore, even if we are

unable to succeed in meeting our obligations—say,
the obligation to provide decent medical care in a
province of Czarist Russia in the 1890s—we are
nonetheless required to bend every effort of will
toward that end, and even to do so passionately. True,
if we fail anyway, we are not to care; but this apathy as
to the result can never excuse us from attempting to
prevent failure at any cost to ourselves.
Andrew Ephmich is not a Stoic, then; in fact, he
comes closest to being one of the Stoics' major oppo-
nents in the philosophical wars of Antiquity. Practi-
cally speaking, Andrew Ephimich is an Epicurean.
Stoicism and Epicureanism originated at about the
same time and place, in Athens, circa 300 B.C. Both
systems were responses to the same historical condi-
tions: decadence, vulgar superstition, the fear of
death, cultural retrenchment, resurgent mysticism,
and the digestion of the city-state by the vast, corrupt
Empire. The Stoics and Epicureans were rivals from
the first and, a few hundred years later, running bat-
tles were still being fought in Rome, where both
philosophies caught on. The differences between the
two are obvious enough: the Stoics are pantheists, the
Epicureans materialists; the Stoics are antihedonists,
the Epicureans hedonists, albeit passive and moder-
ate ones; the Stoics believe in positive and public
moral obligations, the Epicureans in cultivating one's
garden and prudently obeying local ordinances; the
Stoics are moral absolutists, the Epicureans relati-
vists. Andrew Ephimich is an Epicurean because he
evades his responsibilities, is a materialist, and makes
his own comfort the primary concern in organizing his
existence—not his obligations.
On the other hand, there are some respects in which
the Stoics and the Epicureans are up to the same
thing. Eor instance, both philosophies aim at an ideal
60 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

state which is at once negative and defensive: the

Stoics at apatheia (without destructive passion), the
Epicureans at ataraxia (without trouble or pain). Also,
both philosophies are indeed "rationalizations of
life"; each demands that its adherents live wholly in
accord with the dictates of reason and both employ
reason to eradicate fear—for example, the fear of
death which both attempt to dispose of with syllo-
gisms. In the most general terms, both philosophies
are solutions to protecting the individual in the vast
unjust empire, in a world where forces have grown
large and over which the individual has no significant
control. Both build walls. Epicurus himself built a
physical wall around his school, the Garden. The
Stoics build a figurative shell of rationalization, an
armor of apathy around themselves in which they can
function in the public world without being disturbed
by anything from defeat to the death of wives and
children. In this sense, Ivan Dmitrich's condemnation
of Stoicism is certainly applicable to Epicureanism as
well. In fact, Ivan's protest is even more far-ranging
than this; for it is based on a conception of human
nature at odds with the basic presumption of all clas-
sical philosophy: the presumption that it is reason
which makes us human.
Rationalization. . . . The inward, the outward.
. . . Pardon me, I don't understand it. All I know
. . . is that God created me out of warm blood and
nerves—yes! And organic tissue, if it be imbued with life,
must react to every irritant. And I do react! To pain I respond
by screaming and tears; to baseness, by indignation; to vile-
ness, by revulsion. According to me that, precisely, is what
they call life. The lower the organism the less sensitive it is,
and the more weakly does it respond to irritation, and the
higher it is the more receptively and energetically does it
react to reality. How can one be ignorant of that? You are a
doctor—and yet you don't know such trifles! (414)
Ivan, the madman, the rebel, the unlucky one, does
 STOIGISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 61

not find true human nature, or the aim of evolution, to

lie in a capacity for rationalizing life away so as to
insulate ourselves from disturbances. On the contrary,
he sees the ability to respond to life's irritations, to be
literally sensitive, as the distinctively human quality.
Chekhov, with his wryly objective impartiality, does
not neglect to remind us that this same sensitivity has
driven Ivan mad. Ivan does not deny that he is insane
either; he only complains of the injustice of making
him and his fellow inmates serve as "scapegoats for
everybody." And yet Chekhov has certainly given the
madman the better of this argument. As against the
Stoics' goal of hardening the self by channeling feel-
ing only into what can be controlled, Ivan opposes the
ideal of having no armor whatever. He is a romantic
Utopian (Chekhov averages about one such character
per major work) who infuses the external world with
passion and whose hope is all the more touching for
its apparent futility.
Chekhov may have had any number of things in
mind while writing Ward No. 6, though it is charac-
teristic that he merely said of the work that "it smells
of a hospital and a mortuary" and added that he was
"not one for this kind of story" (Struve, 106). It is
possible that he may have wished to respond indi-
rectly to Tolstoy's recent pronouncements on non-re-
sistance to evil; perhaps he wanted to chastise some of
his medical colleagues; or maybe he was analyzing
himself into the extremest versions of his divided ego:
doctor-bourgeois and madman-artist; or again, per-
haps he was writing the allegory on Russian sloth,
backwardness, and injustice, the critics of the time
assumed the story to be. However, along the way,
Chekhov has—however inadvertently—also summed
up the major change philosophy had undergone in the
preceding hundred years.
At the end of the eighteenth century—through the
62 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

work of Rousseau and Kant, in the rise of Romanti-

cism, through the revolutionary events in America
and France, and in response to the industrialization
and urbanization just underway—Western culture
began to change its mind about reason. The old irra-
tional threats of barbarians and wild animals were
replaced by the new and rational ones posed by the
machine and the bureaucrat. The program of the
nineteenth century was an exploration of all that is
buried under reason and its product, civilization. At
the end of that century, Chekhov wrote Ward No. 6 in
which the conservatively apathetic doctor harks back
to ancient modes of thought and the madman looks
progressively, somewhat hysterically, to the future. As,
for the Stoics, Ivan Dmitrich dismisses them because:
. . . their teaching had congealed even two thousand
years ago and hasn't advanced by a jot, nor will it advance,
since it is not practical and does not pertain to life
. . . The majority . . . never did understand it
. . . as for despising sufferings, that would mean
. . . to despise life itself, since all of man's nature consists
of sensations of hunger, cold, affronts, losses, and a Hamletian
trepidation in the face of death. All life consists in these
sensations: one may find it burdensome, may hate it, but
never despise it. . . . The teachings of the Stoics can
never have a future. . . . (414-15)
Ivan then cites the example of a Stoic who gave
himself to slavery to redeem another man, which he
says shows
. . . that even a Stoic reacted to an irritant, since for such a
magnanimous act . . . one must have a soul that has been
aroused to indignation, that is compassionate. (415)
And, in the conclusion of this debate, Chekhov has
Ivan ask the doctor a question of such importance that
it can be said to have transformed the discussion of
abstract philosophy—the very question posed with
such force by Karl Marx:
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 63

Let us suppose that man's tranquility and contentment are not

outside of him but within his own self. . . . Let us sup-
pose that one ought to despise sufferings and be astonished by
nothing. However, on what basis do you teach that? (415)
It is the question of interests, of subjectivity thrown in
the face of apparent objectivity. Did Epictetus be-
come a Stoic because it helped him to endure slavery?
Is his emotional coldness traceable to his having been
sold into slavery by his own parents? Does Plato
prefer government by an elite because he was born an
aristocrat? Does Aristotle favor middle-class self-gov-
ernment because he was a member of that class? And
does Andrew Ephimich mouth his philosophical
propositions because, after all, ". . . these form
the most suitable philosophy for the Russian slug-
gard," as Ivan says?
There are no more philosophical discussions in
Ward No. 6, only a long process of poetic justice.
Andrew himself is declared insane by his envious
assistants and the other notables of the town—who
had always resented his aloofness—and is himself
shut up in Ward 6. Now that his rationalization of life
is put to a real test, it crumbles. In a last, symbolic act
of rebellious fury and unity, Andrew and Ivan pound
on the locked door of the ward. The brutal old soldier
Nikita—an imbecile of law and order and repres-
sion—bursts in and beats them until they are quiet.
Andrew's last thought is a plain one: "How could it
have come about, during the course of twenty years,
that he had not known and had not wanted to know all
this?" (437)
That very evening Dr. Andrew Ephimich Raghin
dies from an apoplectic stroke.
"Teddy": Pro Pantheismus
Chekhov thought of the Stoics when he came to
depict how a given man or even an entire class might
64 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

abuse philosophy in order to find excuses for laziness,

irresponsibility, and lack of imagination. At any level
of meaning. Ward No. 6 is an attack on indifference to
the sufferings of others and on the rationalization of
this absence of compassion. Chekhov wrote about
what he objected to most in the Russian Empire of his
time, and his story has this sense whether it is read
literally or allegoiically.
J. D. Salinger also writes about things he objects to,
and Stoicism is definitely not one of them. The rea-
sons for this are not far to seek: Salinger abhors what
he sees as the American glorification of the separate
ego and the train of emotionalism, vulgarity, and lack
of discipline, which follows upon it. This detestation
begins at a high level in the Nine Stories and ascends
to stratospheric heights by the time of the quasi-
jeremiad at the start of "Seymour—An Introduction":
In this entre-nous spirit, then, old confidant, before we join
the others, the grounded eveiywhere, including, I'm sure, the
middle-aged hot-rodders who insist on zooming us to the
moon, the Dharma Bums, the makers of cigarette filters for
thinking men, the Beat and the Sloppy and the Petulant, the
chosen cultists, all the lofty experts who know so well what we
should or shouldn't do with our poor little sex organs, all the
bearded, proud, unlettered young men and unskilled gui-
tarists and Zen-killers and incorporated aesthetic Teddy boys
who look down their thoroughly unenlightened noses at this
splendid planet where (please don't shut me up) Kilroy,
Christ, and Shakespeare all stopped. . . . (97-98)
What Salinger likes best about Stoicism, then, is
that is values egolessness, self-discipline, anti-
hedonism, and condemns their opposites. One is even
tempted to say that Salinger is drawn to the Stoics for
the sake of their anti-Americanism, though this would
be a spiritual, not a political, term for the author.
Salinger sometimes quotes Epictetus directly. The
context of these citations is neither moral or psyclio-
logical, but always religious. This is not surprising
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 65

given Salinger's interest in Oriental religion and the

fact that, of all Western philosophies. Stoicism comes
closest to the Buddhist or Hindu point of view. There
is quite a catalogue of similarities: both are anti-
hedonistic, emphasize duties given by nature, see the
world as in some sense a "stage," preach mind over
matter, are monistic rather than dualistic, contemptu-
ous of unrestrained emotion, speak of "the enlight-
ened" versus the "unenlightened," tend toward pas-
sivity rather than activism, aim at final egoless states
of quietude and contentment, and, above all, are
pantheistic. Whereas Chekhov is concerned with the
intellectual and ethical aspects of Stoicism—particu-
larly with apathy in the "bad" sense—Salinger is
attracted to the religious doctrines of the Stoics. In
"Zooey," for example, when the title character ven-
tures into the room once shared by his thoroughly
enlightened older brothers, he reads through a
"mammoth" piece of beaverboard which has been
meticulously calligraphed "with four gorgeous-look-
ing columns of quotations from a variety of the world's
literatures." Salinger gives us a few samples of these
gems to read along with Zooey. The first passage is
three paragraphs from the Bhagavad Gita, the third a
haiku by Issa. Between these is a brief sentence from
Marcus Aurelius ("It loved to happen") and the fol-
lowing extended quotation from Epictetus:
Concerning the Cods, there are those who deny the very
existence of the Codhead; others say that it exists, but neither
bestirs nor concerns itself nor has forethought for anything. A
third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only
for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on
earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in
heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each
individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are
those that cry:^^-
'I move not without Thy knowledge!' (177-78)
66 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

"Teddy" is in some respects the least satisfying of

Salinger's stories; it is certainly the most didactic. Its
chief character is a ten year-old religious genius, and
such creatures are so rare that they are difficult to
realize aesthetically and perhaps even harder to get
readers to identify with. That is to say, Teddy's un-
childish wisdom is not altogether credible or sympa-
thetic. One can even imagine someone thinking him a
bit of a brat—his father, for example. Moreover, like
Ward No. 6, "Teddy" is short on plot, and minor
characters serve as either props or cartoons. And yet
"Teddy" is in a sense an inevitable story for Salinger
to have written. In it he has conjoined two of his
favorite preoccupations—childhood innocence and
Oriental (or Stoic) religious ideas. The child-genius is
to Salinger what the worldly-wise physician is to
Chekhov, an essential type. One thinks of how those
Glass kids must have been when they were ten and
appearing weekly on "It's a Wise Child." Teddy is a
little Seymour, and then some. This "then some" is
the strongly ideological component of the portrayal,
and the ideology is religious.
Stoic religion differs markedly from ordinary West-
ern religion in a number of important regards. It is, for
example, characteristic of Judaism and Christianity to
conceive of a personal God outside nature and history,
a God who can therefore intervene in either, to sus-
pend the laws of nature or probability, through mira-
cles. Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor speaks for the
majority of Western believers when he remarks cyni-
cally that ". . . man seeks not so much God as the
miraculous." But, as the earlier instance of the plane
crash showed, the Stoics see God as identical to the
laws of nature, to necessity, to the rational order of the
universe. Gonsequently, for them there is no conflict
between reason and religion, and a physicist is, as it
were, a theologian. The Western habit of confusing
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 67

prayer with wishing is thus quite alien to the Stoics;

or rather, the Stoics wish only for that for which there
is no need at all to wish. Epictetus states this clearly
in the prayer with which he concludes the Stoic
Handbook:
Lead me, O Zeus, and thou O Destiny,
The way that I am bid by you to go:
To follow I am ready. If I choose not,
I make myself a wretch, and still must follow.
But whoso nobly yields unto necessity.
We hold him wise, and skill'd in things divine. (Beckner, 90)
Teddy is indeed wise and skilled in things divine.
But to make his skill more attractive and his wisdom
clearer, Salinger surrounds him with those sloppy,
self-seeking, anti-Stoical elements of our culture he
dislikes most. For example, on the second page of the
story Salinger describes Mr. McArdle's voice in these
categorical terms:
. . . he had what might be called a third-class leading
man's voice: narcissistically deep and resonant, functionally
prepared at a moment's notice to out-male anyone in the same
room with it, if necessary even a small boy. (167)
Show business, narcissism, competition, domina-
tion—Salinger's exposition is not very ambivalent.
Conversely, Teddy has a gaze that is at once "whole
and p u r e , " while his face carries "the im-
pact . . . of real beauty."
The opening scene shows us Mom and Dad in their
stateroom bed—lazy, undisciplined—not only arguing
viciously with one another, but trying to use Teddy as
one of the arguments. Love as possession; possession
as domination; emotionalism as destructive; and de-
structiveness as violence ("I'd like to kick your god-
dam head open," McArdle remarks to his wife)—once
again, the exposition of contrast is so unequivocal as
to be blunt. For, over against these emotional detona-
68 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

tions and domestic turmoil, Salinger depicts a Teddy

who can serenely enjoy the way discarded garbage
floats on the ocean. He even offers his parents the
unwanted gift of a little lecture on these orange peels:
Some of them are starting to sink now. In a few minutes,
the only place they'll still be floating is in my
mind. . . . (171)
But not by a long shot are all children either so
enlightened or so innocent. For instance, Teddy's
younger sister Booper is already well on her way to
becoming her mother: possessive, commanding,
egoistic. The first image given us of this sibling-mur-
derer is of her up on deck playing with • a stack of
shuffleboard discs:
"Look!" Booper said commandingly to her brother as he
approached. She sprawled forward and surrounded the two
stacks of shuffleboard discs with her arms to show off her
accomplishment, to isolate it from whatever else was aboard
the ship. (176)
But Teddy is both older and difficult to command.
Booper is thus supplied with a younger and more
tractable companion, one Myron, whom she not only
orders about but humiliates with relish:
You're the stupidest person I ever met. . . . You're the
stupidest person in this ocean. Did you know that?
Booper is full of hatred, mayhem, and herself; with
her around, how could anyone think Teddy a brat?
No, Teddy is a saint and this story is hagiography.
More interesting with respect to the present ques-
tion, though, is Teddy's extraordinary notebook. Here
we can see his precociously Stoical outlook in his
private attitudes toward duty, death, and even art; for
Teddy is a kind of Benjamin Franklin of the spirit.
See if you can find daddy's army dog tags and wear them
whenever possible. It won't kill you and he will like it.
(179-80)
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 69

Teddy thus stands scrupulously ready to "preserve

the natural and acquired relations," and Salinger's gift
for touching detail tells us much in a few words about
the boy's sensitivity and his father's ego. "Life is a gift
horse in my opinion," Teddy writes. Like Epictetus,
he feels it is wrong and presumptuous to check the
teeth of the cosmos. Professor Walton is not like that,
however; and Teddy privately objects to Walton's
criticism of his parents (criticisms Salinger allows the
reader to imagine for himself): "He wants people to
be a certain way," Teddy observes. A Stoic accepts
the external as it is—including other people, of
course—and is even willing to ignore his own judg-
ments, let alone the judgments of others:
Remember that it is not he who reviles you or strikes you, who
insults you, but it is your opinion about these things as being
insulting. When then a man irritates you, you must know that
it is your own opinion which has irritated you. (Beckner, 82)
As for his death—of which Teddy is gifted with accu-
rate foreknowledge—he merely records that: "It is
ridiculous to mention even." This is very like Epic-
tetus who says the same thing at greater length:
When death appears as an evil, we ought immediately to
remember, that evils are things to be avoided, but death is
inevitable. For what can I do, or where can I fly from it?
. . .. Whither shall I fly from death? Show me the place,
show me the people, to whom I may have recourse, whom
death does not overtake. Show me the charm to avoid it. If
there be none, what would you have me do? I cannot escape
death; but cannot I escape the dread of it? . . . Death is
nothing terrible. . . . But the terror consists in our notion
of death, that it is terrible. (Albert, 97)
Of particular interest are Teddy's ruminations on
Western poetry, which one of thei professors who is
studying him seems very eager to foist on the boy.
Teddy, however, does not find the stuff at all to his
taste:
70 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

I am quite sick of it. . . . A man walks along the beach

and unfortunately gets hit in the head by a cocoanut. His head
unfortunately cracks open in two halves. Then his wife comes
along the beach singing a song and sees the 2 halves and
recognizes them and picks them up. She gets veiy sad of
course and cries heart breakingly. That is exactly where I am
tired of poetry. Supposing the lady just picks up the 2 halves
and shouts into them very angrily "Stop that!" Do not mention
this when you answer his letter, however. It is quite con-
troversial and Mrs. Mandell is a poet besides. (180)
What Teddy has described is the difference between,
say, Shelley's "Adonais" and a Buddhist mondo—the
Western impression upon existence of subjectivity in
general and of passion in particular versus the nearly
verbless, serene epiphanies of haiku or the unex-
pected homeliness of a koan; the difference between
the poetry of a dynamic dualism and the reflections of
a placid monism. Again, the similarity to Stoic atti-
tudes is striking. For instance, here is Epictetus on
the subject of tragic drama:
"Wretched old man, have I kept my gray hairs for
this!" . . . Who speaks thus? Do you think I quote some
mean and despicable person? Is it not Priam who says it? Is it
not Oedipus? Nay, how many kings say it? For what else is
tragedy, but the dramatized sufferings of men, bewildered by
an admiration of externals? If one were to be taught by
fictions, that things beyond our will are nothing to us, I should
rejoice in such a fiction, by which I might live prosperous and
serene. . . . (Albert, 98)
One might note, incidentally, that the great art of the
West is a celebration and exploration of the mystery of
existence and, as such, is based upon the experience
of existing rather than a theory of existence. The tragic
drama Epictetus despised is especially adept at
showing how the irrational and amoral impinge upon
our organized existence and how our own emotions
may undermine our rationality. As Ivan Dmitrich
might have pointed out, the tragic drama establishes
 STOICISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 71

the limits on a rationalization of life. No doubt that is

why there are so many tragedies about Stoics: devoted
to reason as they are, they appear all the more ripe for
being profoundly undermined without losing for a
moment their dignity. Of course, Salinger's having
ended "Teddy" with the boy's death does not of itself
make this story tragic, but orie wonders why he
elected to do so if not for the dramatic effect achieved.
In any case, Teddy amplifies his views in the sec-
tion for which, one feels, the story was written: the
interview with Nicholson, a thiityish graduate student
of education. This man is yet another foil for Teddy,
therefore another Western egoist—but an intellectual
one this time, and thus a foil who gives Salinger and
Teddy the opportunity to pull out all the stops. Like
Mr. McArdle, Nicholson's voice gives him away at
once:
Though his voice was, in the usual connotation, well bred, it
carried considerably more than adequately, as though he had
some sort of understanding with himself that anything he had
to say would sound pretty much all right—intelligent, literate,
even amusing or stimulating. . . . (183-84)
As if this weren't enough, Salinger declares that Ni-
cholson has a smile that is "social, or conversational,
and related hack, however and indirectly, to his own
ego." .
The two begin on the pathetic fallacy. Teddy com-
plains that poets are "always sticking their emotions
in things that have no emotions." When Nicholson
objects that this is just what a poet is supposed to do,
Teddy responds hy promptly quoting two haikus hy
way of refutation.
But soon they are at the heart of the matter: the
relationship between emotionalism and faith. Again,
Teddy's tack is Stoic:
72 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

"I wish I knew why people think it's so important to be

emotional," Teddy said, "My mother and father don't think a
person's human unless he thinks a lot of things are very sad or
very annoying or very—very unjust, sort of. My father gets
very emotional even when he reads the newspaper. He thinks
I'm inhuman." (186)
Here it is quite plain that Teddy (Salinger?) is at odds
with the cultural revolution of the late eighteenth
century, that watershed at which the definition of the
human was itself revolutionized. From believing that
what made us human was the capacity for being
rational, the new consensus was that it is, on the
contrary, our capacity for being emotional that makes
us what we are. "Anyone can know what I know," said
Goethe's Werther, "only I can feel what I feel."
Teddy would seem to be an anti-Werther.
Nicholson teasingly supposes that Teddy has no
emotions and Teddy tells him flatly that if he does
have emotions, he doesn't know "what they're good
for."
Remembering what he lightly calls Teddy's "forte,"
Nicholson asks if Teddy loves God.
Yes, sure I love Him. But I don't love Him sentimen-
tally. . . . If / were God, I certainly wouldn't want peo-
ple to love me sentimentally. It's too unreliable. (187)
Again Teddy strikes the truly Stoic note: reliability
is, after all, the Stoic forte, and it is far better guaran-
teed by reason and a sense of duty than by even the
strongest of sentiments, whose strength is, in fact,
against their reliability. And what is true of spiritual
relations is true also of human ones. Teddy explains
his feelings for his parents thus:
I have a very strong affinity for them. They're my parents, I
mean, and we're all part of each other's harmony and every-
thing. . . . I want them to have a nice time while they're
alive, because they like having a nice time. . . . But they
don't love me and Booper . . . that way. I mean they
 STOIGISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 73

don't seem able to love us just the way we are. They don't
seem able to love us unless they can keep changing us a little
bit. They love their reasons for loving us almost as much as
they love us, and most of the time more. It's not so good, that
way. (187)
As for Salinger's attraction to what I initially called
Stoicism's "anti-Americanism," we get Teddy's word
on it. The boy believes he has been reincarnated as an
American because, in his last life (as a Hindu making
fair progress) he had unfortunately "met that lady."
His U.S. citizenship is thus a sort of divine punish-
ment, and it enables Salinger to make his point:
I m e a n it's very hard to m e d i t a t e a n d live a spiritual life in
America. P e o p l e think y o u ' r e a freak if you try to . . . My
mother . . . d o e s n ' t think it's good for m e to think a b o u t
God. . . . S h e thinks it's b a d for m y health. (188-89)
After this, Teddy offers his own charming exposition
of the Stoic-Oriental doctrine of pantheism on which
all these opinions are founded:
I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair
stood up, and all that. . . . It was on a Sunday, I re-
member. My sister was only a very tiny child then, and she
was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was
God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was
pouring God into God, if you know what I mean. (189)
Epictetus explains his own pantheistic faith in re-
markably similar terms:
You are a distinct portion of the essence of God; and contain a
part of him in yourself. . . . Why do you not remember,
when you are eating, who you are who eat; and whom you
feed? . . . You carry a God about with you, poor wretch,
and know nothing of it. (Albert, 90)

Conclusion: Ironia
Abstract systems of thought—no less than concrete
poems and stories—grow out of particular historical
circumstances, though they are not limited to those
circumstances. Stoicism evolved as a response to
74 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

conditions in the Hellenistic world and was advanced

in the period of the Roman Republic and early Em-
pire. As a specific doctrine with self-identified ad-
herents, it has not survived that epoch; yet much of
Stoicism has endured in other forms. The doctrine of
divine providence, for example, has been incor-
porated into Christianity, while the attitude of apath-
eia is one Freud reclassified as a quite ordinary
defense-mechanism (as in "he's taking it philosoph-
ically"). Moreover, the West's relatively recent dis-
covery of Eastern thought has uncovered parallels in
Oriental philosophy and religion which have given
Stoicism a new lustre for those attracted by Hinduism
and Zen Buddhism.
Beyond this. Stoicism is, perhaps, a "fall-back posi-
tion," a way of hardening the self against not only
trauma or misfortune but against any force beyond
one's power to influence or control, while resisting
the withdrawal of Epicureanism or of madness. Be-
cause of this, the distinctively Stoic attitude toward
life, if not its every doctrine, has not only survived
into the modern world, but has given it a common
adjective.
But Chekhov and Salinger, in their respective
stories, go well beyond the merely adjectival in treat-
ing Stoicism. They have taken account of it as a
complex philosophy, depicting how it might be
adopted or abused in the modern world with its vast
empires and massed forces. Cranted that Chekhov's
fable of identity presents a false Stoic in Dr.
Raghin—that is, an undutiful one—yet it reveals how
the defensive discipline of Stoicism can quite easily
become irresponsibility and the condition oi apatheia
mere moral indifference. Chekhov punishes his doc-
tor because he is against conditions in provincial
hospitals, against the complacency of the Russian
bourgeoisie, and against a socio-political system built
 STOIGISM AND RESPONSIBILITY 75

on injustice and superstition. To some degree, one

feels the author shares in the madman's revolutionary
denunciation of Andrew: "There was a time when you
drank men's blood, but now they'll drink yours.
Splendid!" (434) With this in mind, it is worthwhile
noting the response of one particular reader to Chek-
hov's story. Lenin's sister has recorded that the no-
vella:
. . . had such an oppressive effect on him that he felt like
going out of his room and taking a breath of fresh air; while he
was reading it, it seemed to him that he had himself been
locked up in Ward No. 6. (Struve, 107)
In general, then, Chekhov is anti-Stoical because he is
opposed to the conditions under which he lived and
Stoicism calls for a fatalistic acceptance of those con-
ditions.
Salinger too is against the prevailing conditions of
the culture in which he found himself But, unlike
Chekhov, he is impelled by neither political nor
moral indignation, but rather by a sort of spiritual
revulsion—a revulsion which has evidently led him in
the end to adopt the physical wall-building recom-
mended by Epicurus.
And so we may conclude with this irony: it is the
attacker of Stoicism who, even in his attack, comes
nearest to fulfilling the Stoic moral ideal of public
responsibility; while the sympathizer with the Stoics
has, so far as I can tell, adopted, if not the final
position, then at least the manner of life of their most
bitter opponents.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert, Denise, and PeteitVeund, eds. Creut Traditions in Ethics. New York,
1953.
Beckner, Fogelin, Jones, and Sontag, eds. Approaches to Ethics. New York, 1962.
Chekhov, Anton. Ward No. Six. Trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney. Short Novels
of the Masters. Ed. Charles Neider. New York, 1948.
76 THE MIDWEST QUARTERLY

Davidson, Robert F. Philosophies Men Live By. New York, 1974.

Salinger, J. D. Nine Stories. New York, 1964.
. Franny and Zooey. New York, 1964.
. Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour—An Introduction
New York, 1965.
Struve, Gleb. "Preface" to Ward No. 6. In Seven Short Novels by Chekhov.
Trans. Barbara Makarowitzky. New York, 1963.