Reflections on Le Père Goriot

Old Goriot is a fascinating book. It could be approached from any number of directions. One of the first which emerges for me is its influence upon Dostoevsky's conception of Crime and Punishment: what does a talented young man do when he realizes that the Social Contract was a swindle? It would not do to take the comparison too far, but Vautrin sounds strikingly like Raskolnikov at times. The odd juxtaposition of the gruesome and the saccharine finds its way into both novels. In one, they meet in the figure of Goriot, in the other - let's say, provisionally - the Marmeladov family (the only nuclear family in the novel). Both have self-sacrificing women, although the poor sisters and rich society women of Balzac's novel are reconfigured as Raskolnikov's sister (who gets her own corrupt and wealthy suitor) and Liza, the obligatory bearer of consummate humility.

Rastignac and Raskolnikov are both young men whose talents brook no comparison with the wretched stop reserved for them by society. More interesting, perhaps, than the difference in responses is the degree of success each meets in defiance of his lot.

But of course Old Goriot is as much about the its eponymous character as it is about Rastignac, who enters from one side of the narrative and departs from the other, his future rather more open than Raskolnikov's after the epilogue of Crime and Punishment. As far as Goriot is concerned, his story might have found a parallel in a slightly more melodramatic Kafka story told from the point of view of the father's disappointment in his inadequate son.

Goriot's love his daughters is as exaggerated as the squalor to which his devotion has reduced him. In his imagination, God's attitude toward his creation compares unfavorably to the old man's regard for his daughters. Several times, our narrator describes his feelings for them as those of a young lover.

The relationship is mutually parasitical. He has given them the fruits of his life's work, but he has denied them the capacity for independent existence. Again and again the daughters lament that they have been given into marriage before they had a chance to learn to think: "Fathers ought to think for us." Both end up in the clutches of avaricious and contemptible men. Both take on lovers as a matter of course, but Rastignac soon discovers that this is not a particularly lucrative position. The relationship of mistress and lover is likewise that of reciprocal exploitation. The father cannot bear to be apart from his daughters, but he has promoted them to circles into which he cannot be admitted. They are at the mercy of a social system which strips them of the money which granted them access to it. In the end he condemns the institution of marriage for separating daughters from fathers and the succession of generations for leaving daughters without the protection of their patriarch. The reproduction of the species and the process of life are obstacles to the feedback loop in which father and daughters are supposed to remain, profiting from each other as they wither away. Given the state of the world, the old man knows that his daughters could never be faithful to him. As is so often the case, he reveals his wisdom in the ravings of his dying hours:

'Neither of them!' cried the old man, sitting up. 'They are busy, they are sleeping, they will not come. I knew it. You have to die to know what your children are. Ah! my friend, do not marry; do not have children! You give them life; they give you death in return. You bring them into the world, and they push you from it. No, they will not come! I have known it for the last ten years. I sometimes told myself so, but I did not dare believe it.'

He invests his life in them, but he expects a return: a lifetime of attention from them both. But he knows it will not come. Like Georg Bendemann's father knows that his son has been plotting his betrayal with the Russian friend.

This relation of parent and children brings to mind that of Vautrin and Rastignac.

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.