Reflections on my apparently substandard reading speed have led me, in turn, to consider the time that we devote to books and the time that those books must have demanded of their authors. How much have we gained from a book which we can encapsulate in a pithy sentence and dismiss immediately afterward? Having written a monograph approaching a book in length, I am more aware of the enormous disparity of effort separating the writing of a text from the cursory readings which we deign to grant to most works - after all, there are so many books to read!
At the same time, to take one example where many could stand in its place, it seems to me that anyone who has carefully read, say, Minima Moralia should be amply equipped to dismiss the many facile misreadings of Adorno as an elitist bourgeois intellectual pontificating ridiculously about the superiority of "high culture" from his rarefied perch in the Grand Hotel Abyss. Or better yet, those easy dismissals of Critical Theory's preposterous faith in progress - that absurd and impossible notion that seems to linger in the very being of every postmodernist thought put to paper (not to mention put through print runs) - that progress whose possibility, incidentally, Adorno seemed very much to doubt even while anchoring his project in its promise.
Even reductio ad absurdum ultimately affirms the logical system within whose limits the contradiction can exist. Against my sense of tact, I find myself returning again and again to the same question: what is the point of theory that ruthlessly undermines its own possibility without at least showing the good taste of ceasing to proliferate?
And the other thought - that anyone who can master - truly master - a single writer's magnum opus should, in doing so, gain so much; the myriad little insights scattered throughout the text, which resist easy summarization but point very precisely and intimately to a way of thinking, a way of seeing the world, not to mention a methodology: in mastering a powerful text - in being able to reconstruct its line of argument - the reader should absorb the thought process that created that text and should then be able to apply that thought process at will. That homo unius libri should have the full powers of his writer at his side in every engagement. But who reads that carefully when one's intellectual vanity demands the accoutrements of so much superficial knowledge?
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
There is nothing outside the culture
I find something unsettling in the film «Стиляги» (dir. Valerii Todorovskii), which came out in Russia late last year (the pace of pop culture makes this post seem anachronistic as a result). The same goes for the reviews and comments that I've found online which praise both the film and its eponymous 1950s westernized Soviet hipsters, as if the former were an endorsement of diversity and peaceful coexistence and the latter were rebels against Khrushchev-era Soviet society, typically conceived as a world of always-already crumbling concrete apartment blocks, shabby clothes, and crappy consumer goods.
Part of the problem is with the notion that a subculture of Soviet youths who emulated Western tastes in music and fashion could constitute a resistance movement worthy of respect, especially when it was probably the relaxation of state repression that came with the death of Stalin and the ascent to power of Khruschev in 1953 which permitted the stiliagi to appear in the first place. Somehow this reminds me of the assassination of Tsar Alexsander II - the most progressive and sympathetic of late Russian monarchs, or, perhaps, Gorbachev's attempt to loosen the repressions which were the only thing holding the moribund Soviet Union together by the 1980s. In each case, the forces of dissolution - to whatever extent they can be personified - seem to work against gradual reform and play into the hands of reaction.
But given my limited knowledge of the stiliagi movement, my main concern is with the film's presentation of them and their Soviet reality. The first thing that struck me about the film was its cinematography, or, more precisely, the over-saturated color of nearly every shot. Before I realized that it was a musical (what an intriguing possibility: a politically engaged musical!), the dancing camerawork and the brilliant colors suggested a subversion of stereotyped images: the Soviet 1950s portrayed with such vibrancy and mobility, in the total absence of traditional iconography of police-state oppression, that the past took on the aspect of something more fun than the present. The Soviet communal apartment, rendered in Utopian color, was transfigured into socialism in action. Unfortunately, this totally unexpected and intriguing idea - that Soviet banality could somehow be reconceived as a case study in the forces of small-scale happiness which hide in the dingy corners of daily life, and, more generally, that traditional filmic representations of the past could be subverted to give us a startlingly new image of the past (the actual past does not figure in this at all, of course) - all this hope soon bit the dust, as it became increasingly clear that the only reason for this infusion of light into the Soviet gloaming was the existence of the stiliagi and their sycophantic emulation of American consumption. The brilliance of the communal apartment scenes was, apparently, an side effect: they must never have bothered to change the filters on the camera lenses.
However, it is not fair to say that the film establishes a clean dichotomy between terrible Soviet reality and the Utopian praxis of the stiliagi. The communal apartment is, somehow, the site of kindness and toleration (the acceptance of the stiliaga's illegitimate black baby becomes a "real life" enactment of Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 patriotic comedy Circus. This is to say that there are no real bad guys in the film, or that those who come closest to being bad guys - the Komsomol group to which the protagonist Mels initially belongs (before being seduced by the stiliagi) is shown, as are the communal apartment dwellers, as true believers in a system which the film does not attempt to discredit explicitly. Its worst trait, evidently, is that its citizens wear drab clothing and don't listen to jazz.
The effect of this is that the stiliagi lose any kind of political engagement. The 1950s world they inhabit is one that is technologically advanced, (relatively) clean (if only because of those damned colors again), functional, and generally free of arbitrary displays of state power. What the stiliagi offer is unrestrained enjoyment (musical and sexual). The entrance ticket is proper attire and Westernization: Mels spends his hard-earned proletarian salary on ridiculous suits and drops the s from his name, becoming an American Mel and forsaking his Soviet identity (Marx Engels Lenin Stalin).
Unfortunately, the ideological conflict between the Komsomol kids and the stiliagi with which the film begins (and which could have led it into a refreshing and novel musical about young people, aesthetics, and political engagement) is obliterated by the burgeoning melodramatic love triangle, in which the leader of the Komsomol and the stiliaga girl vie for Mel's affections. Is this another inane hint that we live in a 'post-ideological' age, and that ideology never really mattered?
The end of the film is striking in light of that idea: as the stiliagi disintegrate - as one, the former leader, gets rejected by Mel after returning from some kind of business trip to America and informing him that stiliagi are a purely Soviet creation, and that no one would be caught dead on Broadway in their clothes, another one gets arrested, and Mel himself surrenders his Komsomol membership, and, by extension, his ability to attend the university - Mel parades down another brilliantly illuminated street and sings, and suddenly, members of all subsequent subcultures appear and join in. The songs were already anachronistic imitations of 1950s American music (Russian musical tastes long seemed to trail those of America by about a decade), but now, the entire historical setting explodes. The concept of subculture combusts with it. In the final analysis, how can a subculture retain its oppositional stance when it becomes self-aware, through exposure to other subcultures (or, by analogy, to the history of subcultures), and is exposed, thereby, as merely a different pattern of consumption? Mel the stiliaga encounters punks, metal fans, wiggers, and all manner of other hipsters, all merged together in an exceedingly modern image of subculture parodying itself, realizing that it is fully integrated into the dominant culture as a commodity ready for consumption, and that the only thing that characterizes an alternative mode of living in our hyper-aware postmodern world is an alternative mode of shopping.
In light of this, I can't decide what stance the film takes to the Komsomol members singing the praises of regimented communal solidarity (conformity).
There is much more to say about this (anthropologically) fascinating film, but that will have to wait.
Part of the problem is with the notion that a subculture of Soviet youths who emulated Western tastes in music and fashion could constitute a resistance movement worthy of respect, especially when it was probably the relaxation of state repression that came with the death of Stalin and the ascent to power of Khruschev in 1953 which permitted the stiliagi to appear in the first place. Somehow this reminds me of the assassination of Tsar Alexsander II - the most progressive and sympathetic of late Russian monarchs, or, perhaps, Gorbachev's attempt to loosen the repressions which were the only thing holding the moribund Soviet Union together by the 1980s. In each case, the forces of dissolution - to whatever extent they can be personified - seem to work against gradual reform and play into the hands of reaction.
But given my limited knowledge of the stiliagi movement, my main concern is with the film's presentation of them and their Soviet reality. The first thing that struck me about the film was its cinematography, or, more precisely, the over-saturated color of nearly every shot. Before I realized that it was a musical (what an intriguing possibility: a politically engaged musical!), the dancing camerawork and the brilliant colors suggested a subversion of stereotyped images: the Soviet 1950s portrayed with such vibrancy and mobility, in the total absence of traditional iconography of police-state oppression, that the past took on the aspect of something more fun than the present. The Soviet communal apartment, rendered in Utopian color, was transfigured into socialism in action. Unfortunately, this totally unexpected and intriguing idea - that Soviet banality could somehow be reconceived as a case study in the forces of small-scale happiness which hide in the dingy corners of daily life, and, more generally, that traditional filmic representations of the past could be subverted to give us a startlingly new image of the past (the actual past does not figure in this at all, of course) - all this hope soon bit the dust, as it became increasingly clear that the only reason for this infusion of light into the Soviet gloaming was the existence of the stiliagi and their sycophantic emulation of American consumption. The brilliance of the communal apartment scenes was, apparently, an side effect: they must never have bothered to change the filters on the camera lenses.
However, it is not fair to say that the film establishes a clean dichotomy between terrible Soviet reality and the Utopian praxis of the stiliagi. The communal apartment is, somehow, the site of kindness and toleration (the acceptance of the stiliaga's illegitimate black baby becomes a "real life" enactment of Grigori Aleksandrov's 1936 patriotic comedy Circus. This is to say that there are no real bad guys in the film, or that those who come closest to being bad guys - the Komsomol group to which the protagonist Mels initially belongs (before being seduced by the stiliagi) is shown, as are the communal apartment dwellers, as true believers in a system which the film does not attempt to discredit explicitly. Its worst trait, evidently, is that its citizens wear drab clothing and don't listen to jazz.
The effect of this is that the stiliagi lose any kind of political engagement. The 1950s world they inhabit is one that is technologically advanced, (relatively) clean (if only because of those damned colors again), functional, and generally free of arbitrary displays of state power. What the stiliagi offer is unrestrained enjoyment (musical and sexual). The entrance ticket is proper attire and Westernization: Mels spends his hard-earned proletarian salary on ridiculous suits and drops the s from his name, becoming an American Mel and forsaking his Soviet identity (Marx Engels Lenin Stalin).
Unfortunately, the ideological conflict between the Komsomol kids and the stiliagi with which the film begins (and which could have led it into a refreshing and novel musical about young people, aesthetics, and political engagement) is obliterated by the burgeoning melodramatic love triangle, in which the leader of the Komsomol and the stiliaga girl vie for Mel's affections. Is this another inane hint that we live in a 'post-ideological' age, and that ideology never really mattered?
The end of the film is striking in light of that idea: as the stiliagi disintegrate - as one, the former leader, gets rejected by Mel after returning from some kind of business trip to America and informing him that stiliagi are a purely Soviet creation, and that no one would be caught dead on Broadway in their clothes, another one gets arrested, and Mel himself surrenders his Komsomol membership, and, by extension, his ability to attend the university - Mel parades down another brilliantly illuminated street and sings, and suddenly, members of all subsequent subcultures appear and join in. The songs were already anachronistic imitations of 1950s American music (Russian musical tastes long seemed to trail those of America by about a decade), but now, the entire historical setting explodes. The concept of subculture combusts with it. In the final analysis, how can a subculture retain its oppositional stance when it becomes self-aware, through exposure to other subcultures (or, by analogy, to the history of subcultures), and is exposed, thereby, as merely a different pattern of consumption? Mel the stiliaga encounters punks, metal fans, wiggers, and all manner of other hipsters, all merged together in an exceedingly modern image of subculture parodying itself, realizing that it is fully integrated into the dominant culture as a commodity ready for consumption, and that the only thing that characterizes an alternative mode of living in our hyper-aware postmodern world is an alternative mode of shopping.
In light of this, I can't decide what stance the film takes to the Komsomol members singing the praises of regimented communal solidarity (conformity).
There is much more to say about this (anthropologically) fascinating film, but that will have to wait.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Hadji Murad
In Chapter XV of Tolstoy's late novella «Хаджи-Мурат», there is a sentence that I, with my paltry knowledge of the Russian language, find grammatically inexplicable:
What is the subject of this sentence? Кабинет? Then what explains the conjugation of the verb была?
Things like this bother me. Они не дают мне спать.
But insofar as it gives us pleasure to obsess about the most peripheral things pertaining to the objects of our youthful infatuation, I find this little preoccupation worthy of a post. But then we endeavor to gild our insipid little obsessions with a veneer of significance, and so I will do the same by including a paragraph which, I think, exemplifies what I love about Tolstoy's late prose style:
On the assumption that my few (I flatter myself) readers may not have the privilege of a familiarity with Russian, I will attempt a translation of this passage, although I cannot hope to duplicate the powerful simplicity of Tolstoy's prose - the way he skewers the philandering Tsar Nikolai I by describing his hypocrisy in the simplest possible terms:
Кабинет, в котором он принимал с докладом министров и высших начальников, была очень высокая комната с четырьмя большими окнами. (Emphasis added)
What is the subject of this sentence? Кабинет? Then what explains the conjugation of the verb была?
Things like this bother me. Они не дают мне спать.
But insofar as it gives us pleasure to obsess about the most peripheral things pertaining to the objects of our youthful infatuation, I find this little preoccupation worthy of a post. But then we endeavor to gild our insipid little obsessions with a veneer of significance, and so I will do the same by including a paragraph which, I think, exemplifies what I love about Tolstoy's late prose style:
Когда он в эту ночь вернулся в свою комнату и лег на узкую, жесткую постель, которой он гордился, и покрылся своим плащом, который он считал (и так и говорил) столь же знаменитым, как шляпа Наполеона, он долго не мог заснуть. Он то вспоминал испуганное и восторженное выражение белого лица этой девицы, то могучие, полные плечи своей всегдашней любовницы Нелидовой и делал сравнение между тою и другою. О том, что распутство женатого человека было не хорошо, ему и не приходило в голову, и он очень удивился бы, если бы кто-нибудь осудил его за это. Но, несмотря на то, что он был уверен, что поступал так, как должно, у него оставалась какая-то неприятная отрыжка, и, чтобы заглушить это чувство, он стал думать о том, что всегда успокаивало его: о том, какой он великий человек.
On the assumption that my few (I flatter myself) readers may not have the privilege of a familiarity with Russian, I will attempt a translation of this passage, although I cannot hope to duplicate the powerful simplicity of Tolstoy's prose - the way he skewers the philandering Tsar Nikolai I by describing his hypocrisy in the simplest possible terms:
When he returned to his room that night and lay down on his hard and narrow bed, on which he prided himself, and covered himself with his cloak, which he considered (and he said so) just as famous as Napoleon's hat, he could not fall asleep for a long time. He would by turns recall the frightened and delighted expression on the girl's pale face and the full, powerful shoulders of his habitual mistress Nelidova, and would compare the one to the other. As for the consideration that dissoluteness in a married man was not good, it did not occur to him, and he would have been very surprised, had anyone condemned him for it. But, despite the fact that he was sure that he had behaved as one should, it all still left a bad taste in his mouth, and, in order to forget this feeling, he started thinking about the thing that always calmed him down: about how great a man he was.From this fragment and the few other translations that I have attempted, I can conclude two things, which seem contradictory, but might not be: first, that translation is incredibly difficult and that it takes a knowledge of both languages that far exceeds my own, and second, that most of the translations I've read suck at communicating the feeling that the words of the work produce in the original. I think that this feeling is essential.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Some Thoughts on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky
Having avoided the task for a long time, I finally and impulsively decided to read Anna Karenina. It took me a long time - too long - but I am done, and now it remains for me to reflect upon the novel and my impressions of it.
I avoided Tolstoy's longer work for a long time in part because I was devoted to Dostoevsky and I have too often seen the two writers placed in opposition, as if Tolstoy and Dostoevsky represented the extremes of some kind of aesthetic-ethical-metaphysical spectrum, where Tolstoy was expansive, powerful, life-affirming, didactic, heretical, and almost, kind-of worthy of membership in Western civilization, while Dostoevsky was feverish, morbid, monomaniacally preoccupied with the psychological consequences of modernity, reactionary, polemical, but somehow open-ended and unfinalized - the author of polyphonic novels, but wild-eyed and utterly Eastern.
This caricature does not do justice to what I liked - and still like - about Dostoevsky's work, but it does, I think, suggest what I understood to be the essence of the Tolstoian novel - that is, something firmly grounded both in Tolstoy's moral views and in the tradition of the realist novel. Dostoevsky produced extreme, archetypal characters who were more real than real - more internally intense, more preoccupied, more vividly drawn than real people, who do not have the advantages of compressed novelistic space and time in which to concentrate their passions - and Dostoevsky's works are as concentrated and compressed as they come. Unlike Raskolnikov, we have to go to the bathroom. Unlike Alyosha Karamazov, we get annoyed by lines at the DMV. Dostoevsky's characters are obsessed with ideas to such an extent that the ideas speak through them and leave little in the way of a human remainder. I love the dramatic intensity of Dostoevsky's novels - the monologues, the minimal scenery, the compressed, stage-like environments, the preeminence of dialogue in establishing characters and moving the plot. Dostoevsky's works engage with the isolated, metaphysically tormented victims of the modern urban world. As such, they distort the novelistic world in proportion with the modern preoccupations and neuroses of their characters.
The voice that appears in Dostoevsky's non-fiction, or the voice applied to Dostoevsky by conventional interpetations, posits reactionary Orthodox Christianity as the solution to his characters' inability to live. If Chirst and reason stand in contradiction, it is presumably necessary and desirable to chose Christ. But this decision is plainly impossible - for all the progeny of the Underground Man, for anyone capable of conceiving such characters, and for any modern human being generally. Dostoevsky's characters remain distinct from the author, their problems unresolved, their voices not fully integrated into the works they inhabit.
But one of the problems with these characters is that they, as personified ideas - as the long monolologues of preoccupied and isolated people - seem, by and large, to lack self-awareness. The Underground man mocks himself, but his mockery consists of the same corrosive reasoning as his initial train of thought. He cannot escape this mode of expression. He can turn on himself, but he cannot, having grown disgusted with the circularity of his thoughts, stand up and leave his room. He lacks the insight for such an act.
Tolstoy's Levin is, in that regard, a strikingly human character. He is wracked by the same metaphysical anxiety as Ivan Karamazov, but he does not exist to contemplate that anxiety. Not only does he have a life (and Tolstoy creates an enormous world in which that life can exist - which it cannot do in Dostoevsky's musty rooms and dingy haymarkets) which distracts him from his contemplation, but he is also too multi-faceted, too changeable, and too easily distracted for the idea, even though it torments him to the point of suicidal despair, to become coterminous with Levin, like Raskolnikov becomes the logical progression of his own idea.
Levin fascinates me. It is all too easy to integrate him into that old opposition - between the breadth of Tolstoy, the man who cannot choose between the wordly and the afterworldly and the depth of Dostoevsky, who has stared too long into the abyss and is now consumed by it. But the brilliant vividness with which Tolstoy portrays Levin's frustration - frustration to the point of tears - when he discovers that his hunting companions have eaten all the food while he was away and that he will have to go hungry, or the tenderness he experiences toward his newborn son - all this strikes me not so much because of the masterfully rendered verisimillitude, but because Levin escapes the tyrrany of the polemic in a way that Dostoevsky's characters - for all the power of their individual voices - do not. Levin lives. And for all the certainty of his conversion at the end, it is reasonable to expect that his questions are no more resovled than those of Dostoevsky's characters.
This is of course the smallest part of Anna Karenina. Levin stands in opposition to the eponymous heroine, and the simplest reading of the novel is a polemical comparision of spontaneous passion to tender familial love. Anna lets her passion consume her, and the end is only the logical consequence of such an act, while Levin tests his love against dispair and is, somehow, absurdely, rewarded with a gradually maturing happiness. But Anna is striking because there is no way out from her at any point, since Aleksei Aleksandrovich is a pompous hypocrite, if a relatively benign one, and Tolstoy is not prepared to suggest that Anna could have submitted to the degradation of an empty marriage in a society of fools for the sake of her son, or any such Dostoevskian solution. The son is necessary but not sufficient, and so is Vronsky, and since they are irreconcilable, Anna is doomed.
The reader is also denied any substantive insight into Anna's personality. We know her disgust, her frustration, her passionate feelings, but we know nothing of her origin, her doubts, or the banalities of her life - the banalities that make Levin so complex and so conflicted. This contrast between the two characters is no doubt important, but I'm not sure what to make of it. Why is the heroine of the novel so opaque?
I read a comment somewhere online that Tolstoy wanted to punish Anna, and that the novel is the fulfillment of this perverted desire, as if Tolstoy were bitter about Anna's courageous self-assertion. This does not seem to be an adequate or reasonable explanation. It is certainly easy enough to posit Anna as a modern woman, ahead of her time and condemned to languish in a repressive patriarchal society, but what kills her is not the hypocrisy of the society, which is duly explored in the novel, but the inevitable consequence of her obedience to her passions. The latter seems like a central Tolstoyan theme - that this sort of mindless adherence to whim is no better than the pursuit of an ordinary and terrible life. The difference between Anna and her philandering brother is not just that he easily gets away with his crimes, but that he doesn't care about them. Vronsky gets away with his and does care - and it almost kills him. His membership in the patriarchy may give him carte blanche to steal other men's wives, but that doesn't stop him from putting a bullet through his chest when he thinks Anna is dying or to go to the Balkans in search of a Byronic death when she throws herself under a train. There is a great deal of despair in Anna Karenina. It is not so much that society causes it as it is that society cannot accomodate or acknowledge it. A discussion of Anna Karenina as a novel about Russian upper-class society is what kept me away from the book for so long in the first place.
These fragmentary thoughts will have to do for now.
It goes without saying that Tolstoy's style is fascinating. Anna Karenina's last moments are conveyed in what has got to be one of the first instances of stream of consciousness in literature.
But one other thing: Dostoevsky offers Christianity as the solution as if in complete ignorance of the non-Christian world (except for a few moments of horrifying anti-Semitism). Levin is at least not so blind as to make Pascal's wager. He cannot believe that historical accident has given him access to the one true religion. His saving delusion is that historical accident has given him access to acceptable answers and answerable questions.
I avoided Tolstoy's longer work for a long time in part because I was devoted to Dostoevsky and I have too often seen the two writers placed in opposition, as if Tolstoy and Dostoevsky represented the extremes of some kind of aesthetic-ethical-metaphysical spectrum, where Tolstoy was expansive, powerful, life-affirming, didactic, heretical, and almost, kind-of worthy of membership in Western civilization, while Dostoevsky was feverish, morbid, monomaniacally preoccupied with the psychological consequences of modernity, reactionary, polemical, but somehow open-ended and unfinalized - the author of polyphonic novels, but wild-eyed and utterly Eastern.
This caricature does not do justice to what I liked - and still like - about Dostoevsky's work, but it does, I think, suggest what I understood to be the essence of the Tolstoian novel - that is, something firmly grounded both in Tolstoy's moral views and in the tradition of the realist novel. Dostoevsky produced extreme, archetypal characters who were more real than real - more internally intense, more preoccupied, more vividly drawn than real people, who do not have the advantages of compressed novelistic space and time in which to concentrate their passions - and Dostoevsky's works are as concentrated and compressed as they come. Unlike Raskolnikov, we have to go to the bathroom. Unlike Alyosha Karamazov, we get annoyed by lines at the DMV. Dostoevsky's characters are obsessed with ideas to such an extent that the ideas speak through them and leave little in the way of a human remainder. I love the dramatic intensity of Dostoevsky's novels - the monologues, the minimal scenery, the compressed, stage-like environments, the preeminence of dialogue in establishing characters and moving the plot. Dostoevsky's works engage with the isolated, metaphysically tormented victims of the modern urban world. As such, they distort the novelistic world in proportion with the modern preoccupations and neuroses of their characters.
The voice that appears in Dostoevsky's non-fiction, or the voice applied to Dostoevsky by conventional interpetations, posits reactionary Orthodox Christianity as the solution to his characters' inability to live. If Chirst and reason stand in contradiction, it is presumably necessary and desirable to chose Christ. But this decision is plainly impossible - for all the progeny of the Underground Man, for anyone capable of conceiving such characters, and for any modern human being generally. Dostoevsky's characters remain distinct from the author, their problems unresolved, their voices not fully integrated into the works they inhabit.
But one of the problems with these characters is that they, as personified ideas - as the long monolologues of preoccupied and isolated people - seem, by and large, to lack self-awareness. The Underground man mocks himself, but his mockery consists of the same corrosive reasoning as his initial train of thought. He cannot escape this mode of expression. He can turn on himself, but he cannot, having grown disgusted with the circularity of his thoughts, stand up and leave his room. He lacks the insight for such an act.
Tolstoy's Levin is, in that regard, a strikingly human character. He is wracked by the same metaphysical anxiety as Ivan Karamazov, but he does not exist to contemplate that anxiety. Not only does he have a life (and Tolstoy creates an enormous world in which that life can exist - which it cannot do in Dostoevsky's musty rooms and dingy haymarkets) which distracts him from his contemplation, but he is also too multi-faceted, too changeable, and too easily distracted for the idea, even though it torments him to the point of suicidal despair, to become coterminous with Levin, like Raskolnikov becomes the logical progression of his own idea.
Levin fascinates me. It is all too easy to integrate him into that old opposition - between the breadth of Tolstoy, the man who cannot choose between the wordly and the afterworldly and the depth of Dostoevsky, who has stared too long into the abyss and is now consumed by it. But the brilliant vividness with which Tolstoy portrays Levin's frustration - frustration to the point of tears - when he discovers that his hunting companions have eaten all the food while he was away and that he will have to go hungry, or the tenderness he experiences toward his newborn son - all this strikes me not so much because of the masterfully rendered verisimillitude, but because Levin escapes the tyrrany of the polemic in a way that Dostoevsky's characters - for all the power of their individual voices - do not. Levin lives. And for all the certainty of his conversion at the end, it is reasonable to expect that his questions are no more resovled than those of Dostoevsky's characters.
This is of course the smallest part of Anna Karenina. Levin stands in opposition to the eponymous heroine, and the simplest reading of the novel is a polemical comparision of spontaneous passion to tender familial love. Anna lets her passion consume her, and the end is only the logical consequence of such an act, while Levin tests his love against dispair and is, somehow, absurdely, rewarded with a gradually maturing happiness. But Anna is striking because there is no way out from her at any point, since Aleksei Aleksandrovich is a pompous hypocrite, if a relatively benign one, and Tolstoy is not prepared to suggest that Anna could have submitted to the degradation of an empty marriage in a society of fools for the sake of her son, or any such Dostoevskian solution. The son is necessary but not sufficient, and so is Vronsky, and since they are irreconcilable, Anna is doomed.
The reader is also denied any substantive insight into Anna's personality. We know her disgust, her frustration, her passionate feelings, but we know nothing of her origin, her doubts, or the banalities of her life - the banalities that make Levin so complex and so conflicted. This contrast between the two characters is no doubt important, but I'm not sure what to make of it. Why is the heroine of the novel so opaque?
I read a comment somewhere online that Tolstoy wanted to punish Anna, and that the novel is the fulfillment of this perverted desire, as if Tolstoy were bitter about Anna's courageous self-assertion. This does not seem to be an adequate or reasonable explanation. It is certainly easy enough to posit Anna as a modern woman, ahead of her time and condemned to languish in a repressive patriarchal society, but what kills her is not the hypocrisy of the society, which is duly explored in the novel, but the inevitable consequence of her obedience to her passions. The latter seems like a central Tolstoyan theme - that this sort of mindless adherence to whim is no better than the pursuit of an ordinary and terrible life. The difference between Anna and her philandering brother is not just that he easily gets away with his crimes, but that he doesn't care about them. Vronsky gets away with his and does care - and it almost kills him. His membership in the patriarchy may give him carte blanche to steal other men's wives, but that doesn't stop him from putting a bullet through his chest when he thinks Anna is dying or to go to the Balkans in search of a Byronic death when she throws herself under a train. There is a great deal of despair in Anna Karenina. It is not so much that society causes it as it is that society cannot accomodate or acknowledge it. A discussion of Anna Karenina as a novel about Russian upper-class society is what kept me away from the book for so long in the first place.
These fragmentary thoughts will have to do for now.
It goes without saying that Tolstoy's style is fascinating. Anna Karenina's last moments are conveyed in what has got to be one of the first instances of stream of consciousness in literature.
But one other thing: Dostoevsky offers Christianity as the solution as if in complete ignorance of the non-Christian world (except for a few moments of horrifying anti-Semitism). Levin is at least not so blind as to make Pascal's wager. He cannot believe that historical accident has given him access to the one true religion. His saving delusion is that historical accident has given him access to acceptable answers and answerable questions.
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Departures
There is something particularly effecting about the song "Here" from Pavement's first album, Slanted and Enchanted. What is it? A certain resigned melancholy sound; the tone of the mostly incomprehensible lyrics suggests imminent departure or wistful recollection of that which has passed.
The interpretation is a little mawkish, but there is something about those fragmentary lyrics:
What these words evoke is a sense of the immediate existence of the relationship described; the person whose jokes are always bad and the connection between this person and the narrator, whose existence is documented by a few lines of song lyrics, is immortalized by the song. They are conjured anew every time the song is played, their image reappearing eternally. The situation described is infinitely tenuous: if these characters knew each other when the album was released in 1992, they have surely parted in the intervening seventeen years. But the song is still here, and every time I play it, the moment in which the one told bad jokes to which the other responded with laughter is born again.
Why this moves me so much is that the moment is so fragile, so utterly incapable of withstanding the passage of time, but the work in which it is preserved shields it with its own longevity. The moment is preserved like an insect in amber. And the banality of these objects acquires inexplicable charm in their defiance of time and decay. Playing the song reincarnates these two people and the moment of their interaction. And in so doing it reiterates the impossibility of doing so in life. Memory is a sad surrogate for this kind of necromancy.
As I remarked in an earlier post, I hate the abrupt termination of friendships, which always seem to develop so subtly that we do not realize how significant they become until we are forced to renounce them. And what I hate most of all is the nonchalance with which one is supposed to treat these occasions. It is egotistical but not altogether absurd to equate the departure of a friend with her death. If others are free of the jealousy that arises when one contemplates the possibility that a friend can happily forget the memory of the friendship whose ghost takes up residence in the rotting cellar of my mind, then I will have to remain alone with this frustration. Regardless, I do not understand how others overcome the despair of separation so easily and with so little permanent harm.
Perhaps I am wrong in this - perhaps I am just as insensible to the trauma of separation as anyone else, and I am merely preoccupied with the myth of my own circumspect concern with things. Perhaps I do not have enough distractions from these thoughts.
And all the same, I am sick of parting with people and knowing that I will, in all likelihood, never see them again and that, even more troublingly, I will eventually cease to care.
The interpretation is a little mawkish, but there is something about those fragmentary lyrics:
I'm the only one who laughs
at your jokes when they are so bad
and your jokes are always bad,
but they're not as bad as this.
Come join us in a prayer.
What these words evoke is a sense of the immediate existence of the relationship described; the person whose jokes are always bad and the connection between this person and the narrator, whose existence is documented by a few lines of song lyrics, is immortalized by the song. They are conjured anew every time the song is played, their image reappearing eternally. The situation described is infinitely tenuous: if these characters knew each other when the album was released in 1992, they have surely parted in the intervening seventeen years. But the song is still here, and every time I play it, the moment in which the one told bad jokes to which the other responded with laughter is born again.
Why this moves me so much is that the moment is so fragile, so utterly incapable of withstanding the passage of time, but the work in which it is preserved shields it with its own longevity. The moment is preserved like an insect in amber. And the banality of these objects acquires inexplicable charm in their defiance of time and decay. Playing the song reincarnates these two people and the moment of their interaction. And in so doing it reiterates the impossibility of doing so in life. Memory is a sad surrogate for this kind of necromancy.
As I remarked in an earlier post, I hate the abrupt termination of friendships, which always seem to develop so subtly that we do not realize how significant they become until we are forced to renounce them. And what I hate most of all is the nonchalance with which one is supposed to treat these occasions. It is egotistical but not altogether absurd to equate the departure of a friend with her death. If others are free of the jealousy that arises when one contemplates the possibility that a friend can happily forget the memory of the friendship whose ghost takes up residence in the rotting cellar of my mind, then I will have to remain alone with this frustration. Regardless, I do not understand how others overcome the despair of separation so easily and with so little permanent harm.
Perhaps I am wrong in this - perhaps I am just as insensible to the trauma of separation as anyone else, and I am merely preoccupied with the myth of my own circumspect concern with things. Perhaps I do not have enough distractions from these thoughts.
And all the same, I am sick of parting with people and knowing that I will, in all likelihood, never see them again and that, even more troublingly, I will eventually cease to care.
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