Richard and IQ84 and DeLillo and Chekhov's Gun

{very minor spoilers regarding Book 2]

Good old Chekhov. Try as I might, I can rarely convince my Intro to Drama students that The Cherry Orchard is a comedy (even after reading statements from Chekhov himself insisting that the play is a comedy).

The wily old Russian has popped up twice in IQ84. Once with the Gilyak travel narrative that Tengo reads to Fuka-Eri (which you book-clubbers have already discussed) and again in Book 2 with the idea of "Chekhov's gun," introduced by Tamaru as he procures a handgun for Aomame. This oft-cited maxim states, basically, that if a gun is introduced early in a narrative, we know it's going to get fired later on. It's a very meta idea, if you think about it, diverting our attention away from the "reality" of the work and toward its artificiality, toward the narrative devices that make the work cohere. This is appropriate for IQ84, of course, since "reality" seems to be bending more and more toward Tengo's fictional world.

Aomame has found herself suddenly transported from one world to another, from 1984 to 1Q84, and (as one might suspect in such an instance!) she feels a little unbalanced. The gun, however, brings a sense of power, restoring a bit of control over "reality": with one bullet SHE can control the transition from one world to another, in this case from life to death. But such a power transfigures reality as well: "The awareness that she now possessed a pistol was enough to make the world look a little different. Her surroundings had taken on a strange, unfamiliar coloration" (353). Those lines, in particular, transported me from one literary world to another: out of IQ84 and into DeLillo's White Noise, in which Jack Gladney, mild-mannered professor of Hitler Studies at the College on the Hill, experiences for the first time the power of holding a gun: "The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate." Jack has spent his life terrified of death, living a purposefully mundane life because he doesn't want to "enmesh" himself in "plots." "To plot is to die" is one of his mantras. But late in the novel, in possession of his trusty "25-caliber Zumwalt automatic," his philosophy undergoes a complete reversal and he begins to believe that "to plot is to live." So what will Aomame's future hold? Like Jack, she too has found herself bound up in a dense plot, the likes of which she has heretofore managed to avoid, yet she feels like the "rules" can be defied: "not all guns have to be fired," she thinks, in reference to Chekhov's law.

Let's stay tuned and find out who's right.