Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

In his great study The Historical Novel, Georg Lukács draws a parallel between the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Hegel’s philosophy of history. But he also notes that “Scott had no knowledge of Hegel’s philosophy and had he come across it would probably not have understood a word.” The point is not that Scott was a dummy, but that the Marxist critic has to say the smart, philosophical things for him. Scott could only write these epochal works. We must explain them in ways he would never have been able to write or understand.

The contemporary novelist is different, in that she has foreseen the shopworn theoretical appropriations of her work—even if this appropriation is still allowed to proceed and guarantee a lasting and lucrative place on college syllabi. In an older generation, Salman Rushdie, J.M. Coetzee, and Toni Morrison, and (as Nicholas Dames has argued) among newer writers, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, and Jennifer Egan, all already know their Hegel (so to speak—their Adorno, their Said, their Derrida). If we critics come onto the scene to explain their works, it is only to trace the steps of a foregone conclusion. Gayatri Spivak’s readings of J.M. Coetzee often feel this way: what can the postcolonial academic critic say that the novelist has not already foreseen and brilliantly “hidden”? (Elizabeth Costello has produced at least one such masterful reading, by the philosopher Cora Diamond.)

Undoubtedly Coetzee has constructed a puzzle for us: Is this what he thinks? Why does he not just come out and say it? The device of the book and its tireless parading of content (in the form of lectures, responses, debates) has encouraged many academic papers about its engagement with philosophy, animal rights, as well as studies of Coetzee’s self-reflexivity and distance.

The book all but dictates this response. For instance, when Elizabeth Costello the character opines that the traditional novel is “an exercise in making the past coherent,” we can take the bait and ask if Elizabeth Costello is a traditional novel? Does it make the past coherent? Is “she” coherent enough as a “person” that we should ascribe this “belief” to “her”? Or, when Elizabeth voices her suspicion of rationalism—“Understanding a thing often looks to me like playing with one of those Rubik cubes. Once you have made all the little bricks snap into place, hey presto, you understand.”—are we supposed to apply this suspicion to our own literary hermeneutics?

But we do not have to play along. Elizabeth Costello does not get to set the terms of its reading, no more than any other book. No one takes Tolstoy’s own reading of War and Peace (the second epilogue) seriously. Dante would not have understood why a reader would read the Inferno without desiring to pass to Paradiso. Sterne’s Tristam Shandy has as complicated a framework of ideas and voices as Dostoevsky or Coetzee, but it is not necessary to read Sterne’s sermons or Locke’s philosophy to get the joke. Coetzee does not get to pick the terrain (“traditional novel,” “coherence,” “belief”) on which we read his book.

*

The topic of the book is inadequacy. (Not, as James Wood thought he detected, death.) The inadequacy of the lover to be the thing desired. The inadequacy of words on a page to stand up and proclaim, this is what I mean! The inadequacy of the performer to the role. The inadequacy (or refusal) of the speaker to comply with the terms of the invitation to speak. The inadequacy of our consciousness to imagine the experiences of other beings. The inadequacy of a conference or lecture to respond to a topic like evil. The inadequacy of our “beliefs” to give an account of ourselves.

And then the response of the character, Elizabeth Costello, to this piling-on of disappointments, frustrations, cross purposes, impossibilities, and impositions.

*

In the first chapter (Coetzee calls them “lessons” but we do not have to), Elizabeth receives a prize from an American college, for which she is expected to give a public address. —She queries her son, an academic, “What exactly do they want from me?”, but none of his practical, immediate answers satisfy her. — “It seems a great ordeal to put oneself through, for no good reason. I should have asked them to forget the ceremony and send the cheque in the mail,” she says. —“It doesn’t work that way, I am afraid, Mother. If you accept the money, you must go through with the show… It’s the only way they have… They want to honour you. It is the best way they can think of doing that.” 

Elizabeth is a withholding mother, an uncharismatic public speaker, a frustrating interview. As a public literary figure, she knows and resents what people want from her; her strategy is to pretend not to understand, so as to throw their presumption back in their faces. “No one in this place wanted to hear about realism,” the subject of her lecture, her son tells her. Still, the son has sex with an attractive academic editor, not because of anything about himself, “but because he is his mother’s son.”

Elizabeth asks aggressive questions for which she already knows the answer. She foists her morbid self-concerns—her age, her impending death, her vanished looks—upon unwilling audiences. She scores “cheap points” hectoring people about meat-eating, by making polarizing comparisons to the Holocaust. At all times she seems bent on making someone else feel bad or uncomfortable or challenged. —“That is the note on which…the proceedings [come] to a close: acrimony, hostility, bitterness… [Her son] is sure that is not what [the prize committee] wanted. Well, they should have asked him before they invited his mother. He could have told them.”

Elizabeth’s sister is a missionary worker in Africa. They disagree about the value of the humanities, about religion, about the prospects of meaning for a human life… but they are interchangeable as hostile, prickly, icy old women. When her son says that he has not had time to ask her about the sudden intensity of her concern for animals, Elizabeth brushes aside the excuse: “A better explanation… is that I have not told you why, or dare not tell you.” Her sister concludes a lecture by announcing, “I do not belong among you and have no message of comfort to bring to you.”

It is a strange thing to keep doing, showing up places and disappointing people, telling them how little you can comply with their expectations or needs. At one point, she delivers a tirade, a judgment of obscenity, against an author who is literally in the audience, proclaiming that “the consequences have arrived,” in the form of her unseemly, unsolicited gripe.

The question of the book, then, is what would you have to think about yourself to justify being such an odious thorn in the side of everyone? And here is where Coetzee’s book is remarkable, because we can enter into Elizabeth’s passions, the way she sees things, her inconveniences and fears and regrets, the indignities that she goes through. Even her confusions: “She is not sure, as she listens to her own voice, whether she believes any longer in what she is saying… On the other hand, she no longer believes very strongly in belief.” —When she declares that she is out to save her soul, we can weigh this concern. When she is cornered into saying what she considers the truth, what voices she will speak for, there is unmistakable self-reflexiveness in her answer: “Do you think the guilty do not suffer, too?”

Finally, Elizabeth’s answers, her belief, her agonized, pressurized judgments and self-castigation, are indefensible. I mean, this is not a reading of her character, this is the plot: she is indefensible. Whatever writing, believing, advocating, confessing, challenging, repeating, are supposed to do on their own—they don’t do.

My Struggle (Book 1) by Karl Ove Knausgaard

It would be folly to make grand pronouncements about the entirety of My Struggle before having read all six volumes, indeed before the whole work has even appeared in English. One never wants to be in the position of the undergraduate laying claim to the entire edifice of Dante’s Divine Comedy or Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, having only just hung his coat up in the entryway. But there is value, I think, in noting how an author “works up” his material and themes—even if we expect that, in a truly inspired work, we are due for a reversal and transformation of these early footholds.

In this spirit, I want to look at only a few quotations from the first book of My Struggle, which I hope will indicate what Knausgaard is up to, and why we should care:

• “There is no one who does not understand their own world.” 
• “I had no history.” 
• “By then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance.” 

I could have chosen any number of variations on these sentiments, and a number of additional themes besides: death, family, art and reality, alcoholism, the feeling of being different from other persons, the banal seductions of narcissism, and so on. Alternately, one could speak of the great set-pieces which dominate the novel: a long replay of an adolescent New Year’s Eve, or the preparations for a family member’s funeral. Lastly, there is the remarkable joining of the jagged, non sequitur recollections that Knausgaard is seemingly just toggling through.

There is no plot to speak of, but the assemblage is less random than it feels in the reading. The entire point of the New Year’s Eve episode, it would seem, is that present experience, while one is “in it,” is always looking in the wrong place. From page 56 to 144, Karl Ove (as we will call the central character) has no idea about the oncoming, defining disaster of this epoch of his life, namely his parents’ divorce (page 166). Perhaps this episode will come to attach itself to some other meaning as the book goes on: already there is a horrible irony in the effort Karl Ove goes to hide alcohol from his family...

The main question I have about the narrative at this point is how interested Knausgaard is in motivation. For example, in Remembrance of Things Past, Proust takes great care to outline the mechanisms of desire, jealousy, habit, association, the ambitions and disdains relating to class, the Oedipus complex around the maternal goodnight kiss, hypochondria, and so on. Each of these is an explanation, something we can point to in answering the question why [does a character do such and such]? Balzac, Wagner, Zola, Eliot, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Racine—the great line of Proust’s forebears—all have their own bank of motivations and drives. We will have to see how Knausgaard stands in this respect, in future volumes.

“There is no one who does not understand their own world.”

In the most obvious sense, this is plainly wrong. At the least, it is what in the philosophy of Hegel functions as a speculative remark: we have to re-learn what terms like “understand,” “own,” and “world” mean. Because one wants to immediately retort: children don’t understand their world. But what we learn is that children don’t have a world of their own, or to the extent that they do, then this cul-de-sac of ignorance and exclusion is well-understood.

Much of Karl Ove’s task is putting things in their right place. This has a few different iterations, some small (which house are we going to call “the house of the bottles,” for instance), but the very large thing to be put into place is his father, and even how his father put things in their place, organizing his life:

I was eight years old that evening, my father thirty-two. Even though I still still can’t say that I understand him or know what kind of person he was, the fact that I am no seven years older than he was then makes it easier for me to grasp some things... The meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. “Family” was one such term, “career” another. 

Over and over in the story, Karl Ove finds that he cannot “read” his father, that he is opaque, that he is transgressing the partitions and categories Karl Ove has built around him, diverging without invitation from an earlier impression. As in Proust’s insistence that no room is a priori habitable, but only acquaintance and immersion silences the clocks, softens the footfall, lowers the ceilings, and so on, “understanding one’s own world” is really a procedure of ignorance and limited perspective, not of cognitive grasping or curiosity:

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it… At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. 

In Proust, of course, this procedure primes us for recognition scenes, the coming-upon a well-known quantity in an unknown aspect, or the unexpected union of two “separate” characters (or places) in a disturbing identity. For Knausgaard, however, the point seems to be more a matter of scale and regulation. He wants to keep a distance, to monitor proximity and intensity, as in his curious image of time as a boat in a lock. To understand something is to be at a safe distance.

“I had no history” 

That must be it, I thought, and closed my eyes briefly to rid myself of the feeling that I was an idiot, which this train of thought had produced, since it was so obviously based on an illusion. I had no history, and so I made myself one, much as a Nazi party might in a satellite suburb. 

My Struggle is, obviously, titled after Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. When Knausgaard compares himself to the Nazis in the above passage, however, he is not invoking the embattled destiny of a Volk, but rather how deracinated and belated he feels. The Nazis conjured by this analogy and by the book’s title are not trying to resurrect a past, to summon up primal associations, but are almost pathetic. Defeat is something that, hopefully, if you move far enough away from, people will not associate you with, and you can work without that baggage. And so Karl Ove has cut himself off from his past, from his family, striving for equilibrium and the lowering of tension.

It is curious for the writer of an extraordinarily detailed, multi-volume memoir to proclaim that he has no history, and moreover, no interest in his personal past:

I remembered hardly anything form my childhood. That is, I remembered hardly any of the events in it. 

Now I had burned all the diaries and notes I’d written, there was barely a trace left of the person I was until I turned twenty-five. 

And while I spent a lot of time thinking about the past then, almost a morbid amount of time… the past is now barely present in my thoughts. 

Again, we have to learn to read “I had no history” as a speculative remark. Karl Ove has a history, a past, a memory, and so on. But wants to not have these things, for memories to no longer stir up anything or intrude. (In this sense it is the opposite of le temps retrouvé. The author of My Struggle would prefer le temps perdu.) When Knausgaard discusses the book as his only way of dealing with the past, the point is not to “exorcise his demons” or some such traumatic-cathartic approach; he is very explicit: writing is about breaking down, in the sense of chewing, making manageable. In writing about his father, Karl Ove stresses that the obstacle was the proximity of the subject; in discussing the art of Rembrandt, it is the “distance between reality and the portrayal of reality... this interlying space”; writing is about “the there itself” of writing, not (as in a traumatic confrontation) “what actions are played out there.” And it is true so far that history, the past, is useless clutter. There is simply nothing to do with it but set to work on it, scrubbing it away.

“But by then I am on the outside looking in. Inside, I don’t have a chance.” 

“On the inside” has two meanings in the novel. One is: to be included, invited, generic, a familiar, part of a crowd; the other meaning is almost the opposite: the smoldering trap of one’s own private self-mistrust, the perspective of falsity and inevitability that keeps one at a distance from the first meaning.

The first meaning is the dullness of a zero-degree of egoism, embodied by the adolescent Karl Ove, which the author Knausgaard is at the furthest distance from. In the past tense: “I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.” But in the present tense: “I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me.”

To be inside is to be “a focal point,” someone to whom “people paid attention.” At the same time, Karl Ove is afflicted by how his speech impediment must sound to others, how he looks, how his opinions sit in the hand.

Being on the inside also turns out to have a secret terror: Karl Ove is worried that if he gets drunk, he will slip into the world of those he detests, “allow it to swallow me up whole and no longer be able to see the difference.” This guardedness and analysis prompts a painful self-consciousness: “All spontaneity vanished ... My awareness of the situation was too acute, and that put me outside it.” In this sense, the imagination of the attention of others turns into the scrutiny Karl Ove imposes on himself. He remains socially “outside” because he is always “outside” in sense number two:

As a rule I was always aware of how I looked, of how others might think of what they saw… It had never happened that the eyes that saw me meant nothing at all, or that the surroundings I was in were as if expunged.” 

The other meaning of “inside”/“outside” is the difference between spontaneity, the present, awareness, the unprotectedness of responding and feeling, as compared to retrospection, dissection, judgment, and shame.

I didn’t care anymore. But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the outside. 

There is a nightmarish compulsion built into this second meaning, reminiscent of Saint Paul: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.”

How could we have been so stupid? It wasn’t what I had wanted, in fact it was the very last thing I had wanted... Yet that was precisely what I had done. 

It remains to be seen, of course, what Knausgaard is going to do with these questions.

Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Dead Ends

Thomas Mann writes about the paradox of Anna Karenina as “the greatest society novel in all literature” which is also “an anti-society novel.” Tolstoy prefaces his novel with the Biblical admonition, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord.” But Mann wonders where in Tolstoy’s novel the difference can be located between God’s punishment and the fatal constrictions placed on Anna by society: “How far do they coincide in the heart of the socially circumscribed human being?” And indeed the greatness of that novel is the complexity of Tolstoy’s response to Anna’s self-destruction. At no point is she an innocent victim of society; at no point do we not understand and sympathize with her. But this is only to say that Tolstoy is everywhere wrangling with questions of guilt and error. The question of responsibility and error is not absent; it “hovers unanswered over the whole novel.”

Buddenbrooks, another candidate for “greatest society novel” poses similar questions: Do the Buddenbrooks deserve their decline? Does Thomas’s death pay back his unscrupulous dealings with Herr von Maiboom’s estate? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the sons? Was there some alternate, evasive course of action possible and not taken?

These must be answered in the negative. Mann is not interested in tragic causality, whereby the hero (in Sidney Lumet’s phrase) creates the situation, and the situation strips him down to his essence. In the tragic novels of Thomas Hardy, for instance, every decision is a mistake that reveals the character. His heroes are the sum of their miscalculations, weaknesses, blindness, regrets, and wrong turns. We understand them, but we would (now) do everything differently. Buddenbrooks has no irreversible, fate-sealing moments. In this, it differs from the prototypes of the “decline of a family” genre, Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Theban plays. The disasters awaiting the House of Atreus and the House of Thebes are built, as Cassandra prophesies: “For in the home a dreadful anger waits. It does not forget and cannot be appeased.”

Buddenbrooks, unlike these tragedies, is both forgiving and forgetful. Forgiving, because catastrophic effects don’t threateningly pile up—they dissipate and fade into background. The family’s decline is inexorable, but not crushing and didactic, as in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The Buddenbrooks are not bankrupted or otherwise “ruined” financially or socially. Forgetful, because the disastrous marriage between Tony Buddenbrook and Bendix Grünlich is not a permanent black mark, as it would be in another novel.  “The years slipped by. The traces of what had befallen Consul Buddenbrook’s daughter grew more and more blurred, both in town and in the family.” Contrast with the tragically memorious Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, or Baron Innstetten in Effie Briest, neither of whom have heard of a statue of limitations. Past sins are eternally valid and actionable for these characters. Not so for Buddenbrooks, which is a record of entropy, lapses, and the wearing effects of time.

This is not just a feature of Buddenbrooks’ world and plot, but its form. The novel is episodic, continually skipping forward, foregoing any effect of concatenation and causality. Sometimes it is “just one thing after another.” A contrast might be helpfully drawn here with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The reader of Proust must be especially attentive because, as with a mystery novel, any small detail might come back later. Proust narrates with the eye of the jealous lover. Buddenbrooks is as detailed as you could want, but does not presume much “recall” on the reader’s part. The narrator shares our distracted lapses: “Sometimes we happen to recall someone, think of her, and wonder how she is doing, and suddenly we remember that she is no longer to be found strolling about the streets, that her voice is no longer part of the general chorus, that she has simply vanished from the arena of life and now lies beneath the earth somewhere.”

Nicholas Dames has drawn a distinction between the modernist novel, which we imagine as engaged in “heroic acts of preservation,” and the Victorian novel, in “memory is less a valorized theme than a dilemma or a threat.” In Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, we find rather “the death of memory,” and recollection operates only by a nostalgia that is useful for the present. The goal is “to eliminate the possibility, in psychological terms, of traumatic fixation, and in narratological terms, of the eruption of desultory, chaotic reminiscences.” Life is then conceived as “no longer burdened by the past, a life lived as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and finally memorizable.”

Where does Buddenbrooks fit? Here is a passage following Tony’s divorce:

She was soon enjoying her role of ‘innocent woman afflicted by tragedy’; her wardrobe was dark now, her pretty ash-blond hair was parted and neatly drawn back, just as she had worn it in her youth; and, to compensate for her lack of social pleasures, she found inexhaustible joy and great dignity in the gravity and importance of her new situation and provided the household with her views on marriage, Herr Grünlich, and life and destiny in general.

Tony transforms her own bitter failure into a generic type, an identifiable “role.” She begins to dress the part and perform “experience” as an empty set of gestures. This is recollection only insofar as Tony’s alteration is general and socially recognizable. 

She is assiduous about recording the event of her divorce in the family ledger:

She assumed a serious face and approached [her father], saying, ‘You did enter it in the family records, didn’t you, Father? No? Oh, then surely I should. Please, give me the key to the secretary.’ And right beneath the lines that she had entered after her name four years before, she resolutely and proudly wrote: ‘This marriage was dissolved by law in February of 1850.’

Then she laid down her pen and pondered for a moment. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I know very well that all this leaves a blot on our family history. Yes, it does—I have given it a great deal of thought. It’s the same as if there were a splotch of ink on this page. But don’t worry, it’s up to me to see that it is erased. I am still young… One can’t spend one’s whole life being the silly goose I once was. Life sweeps one along with it.’

The legal details that Tony firmly presses onto the page immediately are canceled out as so much illegible ink: she sees her entry not as an archive but as a “blot” or “splotch.” And no sooner has she written it than she is striving to have it “erased.”

From this point on, moreover, Tony began to use a certain phrase frequently: ‘After all, life is like that…’ And at the word ‘life’ she would open her eyes wide in a pretty but serious sort of way to indicate what deep insight she now had into human life and human fate. 

Tony’s “deep insight” is a tautology, mere phrase-making and posturing. And yet has she gone through the same experience and made the same error as Sue Bridehead, Dorothea Brooke, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karenina. Still, she does it again a hundred pages later, marrying the doltish Herr Permaneder, and this too comes out badly. She marries her daughter Erika off with no better luck. And yet:

She met all these very adult experiences with something like incredulity, and [...] she experienced them with a child’s gravity and a child’s sense of importance and—most of all—a child’s inner powers to overcome them. She did not understand what she had done to deserve her suffering; for, although she sneered at her mother’s great piety, she shared in it, believing that justice is rewarded on this earth.

In short, Tony’s suffering is short-sighted and spiteful. She registers and savors the wrongs done to her, but only as expletives of scorn and slighted pride:  “Babbit!”  “That Möllendorpf woman, or Hagenström, or Semlinger, or whatever, that Julie, that creature!” Even in being brought low by time, Tony is  “unutterably smug.”

Very late in the novel, Tony comforts her nephew Hanno, a frail and artistic child who has been sent to the seashore for health reasons but has returned with no improvement.

It was Aunt Tony who showed the most ready understanding for Hanno’s yearning for the sea, which was like a wound that slowly scabbed over but would begin to sting and bleed again at the least touch of the rigors of everyday life. She obviously enjoyed listening to his descriptions of life in Travemünde and joined in enthusiastically whenever he wistfully sang its praises.

“Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the true things in life will always be true, and Travemünde is a beautiful spot. Until they lower me in my grave, I will always have happy memories, you know, of the weeks I spent there one summer when I was just a silly young goose. I lived with a family that I liked so much, and they were fond of me, too, it seemed. I was a pretty young thing back then —I’m allowed to say that now that I’m an old lady... Yes, what a wonderfully exciting time I spent with them. I learned so much there, you see, views and opinions and facts that have stood me in good stead all my life, and if other things had not interfered, all sorts of things that just happened—the way they do in life—I could have profited from it even more, even though I was a silly young goose. Do you want to know how stupid I was back then? I wanted some of those pretty colored stars that jellyfish have inside them. So I wrapped a whole bunch of them in my handkerchief and took them home and laid them out neatly in the sun on the balcony, so they would dry up. That way, I thought, only the stars would be left. Right... and when I went back to look, there was just a big wet spot. And it smelled a little like rotting seaweed.”

This brings us to the figure of Hanno. If  Tony “had never once felt the need to swallow a defeat and overcome it in silence... Nothing left unsaid gnawed at her; no unspoken emotions weighed her down. And so she did not have to carry her past around with her,” Hanno seems designed to feel every prick of the world’s torment with heightened sensitivity and tearful, weak endurance. 

Hanno is the anti-Tony. We can see this in the record he makes in the family ledger. If Tony wants to erase the blot made by her marriages, Hanno draws under his own name “two neat, lovely horizontal lines across the bottom,” explaining to his incredulous father that, “I thought... I thought... there wouldn’t be anything more.”

Any reader of novels will recognize in the passage where Tony consoles Hanno a warning about the “wrong” way to make permanent the blissful moments of life. One cannot preserve the lights of youth by setting starfish out to dry. One has to write a novel! So David Copperfield and Remembrance of Things Past teach us. Hanno is the only possible candidate for this task, being a “tenderhearted dreamer” rather than a practical man of business. Hanno is absorbed by a passion for Wagner and Beethoven, but the greatest passages of the novel are reserved for explaining Hanno’s weakness, how inadequately shielded he is from so many “instances of decline, dissolution, and termination” that slam his family and his own fragile being:

He had once again felt how painful beauty truly is, how it plunged you into shame and yearning despair and at the same time gnawed away at your courage and fitness for daily life. He had felt it as a dreadful, gloomy mountain pressing down on him so heavily that once again he was forced to admit that something more than private grief must be weighing him down, that some burden must have oppressed his soul from the very beginning and would suffocate him one day.

Hanno’s artistic sensitivity is indissociable from the pain he seems destined to bear the full brunt of. This is the cruelest irony. To be an amnesiac like Tony is to be invulnerable to the past, voluble and irrepressibly expressive. Thomas Buddenbrook, his father, is wracked by an awareness that he is only performing his own life, that he is out of step with his time and duties, but his habits, artifice of dignity, and disappointment with others make up a shield against this awareness. Memory is a threat, while to feel is to be swallowed up in a swarm of anguished, cacophonous racket. The music Hanno improvises belongs to “the fanatical cult of nothing... There was also something insatiable and depraved beyond measure in the way it was savored and exploited. It sucked hungrily at its last sweet drops with almost cynical despair, with a deliberate willing of bliss and doom, and it fell away in exhaustion, revulsion, and surfeit.” His improvisation is the closest thing that Buddenbrooks presents to its own recapitulation and appropriation of the past, but it ends in exhaustion, without a witness: the motifs simply wear themselves out.

Readers of The Magic Mountain will recognize here Mann’s “philosophy of disease” [Quotation from his essay on Goethe and Tolstoy]:

Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too far to say that disease is spirit, or, which would sound very tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a willful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man, the more detached he is from nature—that is to say, the more diseased he is?

“Spirit is disease.” Notice how far we are from the Hegelian idea that spirit is history. Disease is inescapably presentist, while history is burdened with the accumulated wreckage of the past. Although Mann has written one of the great historical novels, in the sense of Buddenbrooks being a period piece, it is a history that sinks, voiceless, into the mire, its lips murmuring as they are dragged beneath the whirlpool.

History in Buddenbrooks is a debâcle, but one that vanishes wordlessly, without any return of the repressed or messianic plea or twilight of the gods. There is no blame or moralizing about how the bad end was avoidable. There is only the underscoring that this was a dead end of history, bequeathing nothing: account closed.

I take the last lines of 100 Years of Solitude to be doing the same thing. There, too, the family and its memory “would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” and their family records and “everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The underground man represents a certain type of freedom. Or at least a kind of revolt. A revolt against reason, which would classify, mathematize, systemize, and reify our nature in the name of instrumental pragmatics. Against these utilitarian classifications, the underground man asserts desire, chaos, destruction, the irrational, perversion, and against teleology, calculation, finality, and egoistic self-interest. In short, freedom and flux against control and partition. 

These philosophical positions will remind us of any number of postures: Existentialism, Deleuzian schizophrenia, and of course, Dostoevksy's original targets for his satire/caricature: the nihilists and radicals of the 1860s. Notes from the Underground is not a set of positions but a performance; not a polemic but a (one-person) dialogue; not a critique of society but an immanent critique (à la Hegel) of the contradictions and unravelling of this subjective position and its fraught, untenable paradoxes.

The "radical" positions of the underground man can be summarized as follows:

• Consciousness is not to be equated with rationality, but with suffering.
• Desire is independent of egoism and utility.
• Consciousness is immobilizing and incompatible with action, in a kind of Zeno's paradox.
• There is no possible, final foundation for certainty and justification.

Now, on their own, these are positions we should take seriously, criticize, etc. But these positions are not on their own. Rather they emerge, seething, from a bilious insecurity. They are determinate positions, moored in the dubious niches of the underground man's screed.

To begin, the "free, unfettered desire... one's own fantasy, sometimes roused to the point of madness" is not at all represented as free, but (in René Girard's) term is always in Dostoevsky a mediated desire. The underground man has no desire that is original to himself: he learns what to want from the others. The entire address of Part One is quivering with a cringing, crouching anticipation of the (imagined) audience's judgments and response:

(That's a poor joke, but I won't cross it out. I wrote it thinking that it would be very witty; but now, having realized that I merely wanted to show off disgracefully, I'll make a point of not crossing it out!)

I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements. I knew that they had been swarming inside me my whole life and were begging to be let out; but I would't let them out, I wouldn't, I deliberately wouldn't let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame; they drove me to convulsions and--and finally I got fed up with them, oh how fed up! Perhaps it seems to you, gentlemen, that I'm repenting about something, that I'm asking your forgiveness for something? I'm sure that's how it seems to you... But really, I can assure you, I don't care how it seems...

These contradictory elements are, to be sure, masochism / sadism, exhibitionism / isolation, vanity / self-humiliation, etc. But there is no masochism without the other's desire; there is no exhibitionism without the other's gaze; there is no self-humiliation without the super ego's surveillance.

Thus, the revolt of the underground man, his maintaining a "loophole" for himself, an escape route to evade finalization and objectification, is always voiced, petulantly asserted:

Of course, it was I who just invented all these words for you. That, too, comes from the underground. For forty years in a row I've been listening to all your words through a crack. I've invented them myself, since that's all that's occurred to me. It's no wonder that I've learned it all by heart... But can you really be so gullible as to imagine that I'll print all this and give it to you to read?... Confessions such as the one I plan to set forth here aren't published and given to other people to read. 

But what does it mean, this undermining of consciousness by desire and the willful frustration of reason? "Desire is a manifestation of all life," we are told. Consciousness is the analytical awareness of this desire to desire, the registering of the sore, rusty taste of dissatisfaction. Consciousness, further, is the agent of this frustration, when it becomes the obstacle itself (as in the discussion of revenge in Chapter I).

What kind of life is manifested by desire, though? Wouldn't we rather say that the Notes evince an avoidance of life? and life's replacement by an unceasing stream of words? The underground man cuts off everyone entirely, is "terribly afraid of being seen, met, recognized," whose apartment "was my private residence, my shell, my case, where I hid from all humanity." And this paranoid isolation... this is the concept of life that follows from the above philosophy. "I wanted to remain alone in my underground."

To be thrust into life is to not have all the answers. Only in the underground does one have all the answers. In life, there is every chance that one will be drawn into the needs and pleadings of others, their sad stories, and find oneself bound (constrained!) to responsibility. To be thrust into life means any number of situations where there is no possible "last word." But the underground man's entire philosophy means having the last word. This is the point of making a scene.

A word about his much-vaunted freedom. It is a bluff, a filibuster. There is no last, fundamental desire at the bottom of the underground man. There is only the next response, the arbitrary shift to one side. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, "The underground man not only dissolves in himself all possible fixed features of his person, making them all the object of his own inspection, but in fact he no longer has any such traits at all, no fixed definitions, there is nothing to say about him, he figures not as a person from life but rather as the subject of...[a] dream."

He says as much himself, if you know where to look. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving to himself constantly that he's a man and not an organ stop!" That is, the point is the proof, the unattainable certainty and guarantee that one is independent, unconfined, not calculable. This is the cruelest paradox (one also found in Crime and Punishment): the whole story of the underground man is to misbehave so badly, to say something so unforgivable, to cut people off so irreparably, that one's isolation will be confirmed and permanent. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving..." means that this very logic of autonomy is subordinated to a quest for finality: to really be left alone forever. But this is just what is intolerable. 

What the underground man wants in this last, undefinable freedom of desire is not freedom or an ontological flux, but to have held something back from the game of otherness. As I wrote elsewhere, "The self-importance of the scandal purports to 'hold back' some image of the self which would not be tainted by finitude or need..." It is really being-something-at-all which is disgusting to the underground man. 

Of course, you can read this on the last page: "We're even oppressed by being men--men with real bodies and blood of our very own. We're ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace and we strive to become some kind of impossible 'general-human-beings.'"

Dostoevsky equates this self-disgust with a cynical need for power, the suppression of pity: "For me love meant tyrannizing and demonstrating my moral superiority." Finally the underground man blurts out, at the critical juncture of his moral life, "They won't let me... I can't... be good!"

Why? Because to be loved, to be needed, is above all to be weak. The utmost exposure and vulnerability rob us of power. When the prostitute Liza understands that the underground man himself was "unhappy," sees that "it must have been very painful for me to utter all of this," it is this sensitive perception which is unforgivable. The entirety of the Notes is a dodge to make sure that this never happen again.

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual crisis (documented in A Confession), which led to a complete renunciation of his possessions, his class status, and the copyright to his works, and at last to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Until the end of his life, Tolstoy became increasingly "enlightened" (and bitterly dogmatic) about the injustice of the political and social order, and increasingly frustrated with the failure of those around him to keep pace with his relentless activism and self-criticism. As Tolstoy successively elaborated and revised his vision of a Christian non-violent anarchist asceticism, anyone who did not see the atrocious sins of existing society with the clarity that he saw them, could only be deluded and mystified. It was all so stunningly apparent to Tolstoy.

During this time of his religious conviction, Tolstoy wrote a great deal of short fiction which has the reputation of being the finest in the world: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "Hadji Murat," "Master and Man," "Father Sergius," "The Forged Coupon," et al. However, the one long late novel, Resurrection, is little-known and has been easily ignored as a work of Christian propaganda. It is an entirely different creature than War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and perhaps therefore an inevitable disappoint. The closest comparison really is to the hundred-page screed on the philosophy of history that either encapsulates or mars War and Peace, as much of Resurrection is only one step away from intrusive, non-dramatic sermonizing.

Some aspects of Resurrection will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the main line of the nineteenth-century novel. The injustices of the penal system had been explored in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit,the "fallen woman" had been depicted by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the depravity of the slums and prostitution and urbanized peasantry were exposed in Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. And in Tolstoy's earlier work, in the figures of Pierre Bezukhov and Constantin Levin, we find antecedents for Resurrection's protagonist, Dmitri Nekhlyudov, the existentially-torn aristocrat searching for a transcendental and profound statement of "the meaning of life."

In a sense, Resurrection marks the end of the line of that style of social-critical novel, or even something past the end of the line, being almost an exit from the novel form itself.

In Chapter 38 of Part II, we read that the hero, Nekhlyudov, has seen two men, prisoners being marched to Siberia, die of sunstroke in one day. In addition, "three more men... had dropped down dead from sunstroke. One had been taken to the nearest police-station like the first two, and two more had collapsed in the station itself." At this point, Tolstoy inserts a footnote of his own (not the Penguin editor's): "In the early 1880s five male convicts died of sunstroke in a single day while being marched from Butyrsky prison to the Nizhny Novgorod railway station." Is it too much to say that this footnote marks the precise end of the realist novel? Tolstoy breaks every rule of the novelist's relation to historical verisimilitude; even that other novelist-prophet Hugo never added "And this is really true; it actually happened!" to his works. Suddenly we are in a newspaper account, or a prefatorial apparatus.

Or, as it eventually becomes clear, a Christian sermon that finally has no interest in narrative resolution, and concludes abruptly with several pages of quotation from the Gospel according to Matthew, accompanied by commentary. Whereas in War and Peace, Tolstoy confined this explicit didactic summary to an epilogue, Resurrection becomes more and more a vehicle for outright judgments and expositions of a code of moral conduct and a recapitulation of Tolstoy's institutional critique. I saw "Tolstoy's" and not "Nekhlyudov's," because there is finally no pretense of a merely-implied author, and the text merges with the non-fiction writings that Tolstoy was churning out simultaneously, like The Kingdom of God is Within You and "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?"

Bakhtin has a word for this quality of Tolstoy's prose: monologic. At times, this is his greatest novelistic strength, as in the great Isaac Babel quote: "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." In his best writings, we feel that Tolstoy's characters are understood and described as from another plane of consciousness: human fragility and self-deception are not condemned so much as they are shown to be our lot, the very mode of our being and the conditions of our goodness and reason. In the early going of Resurrection, one finds this Tolstoy often, as striking as ever. After describing the freshness and gladness of a spring day, when children and the entire natural world are bathed in a free grace, Tolstoy notes that "In the office of the provincial prison nothing sacred or significant was seen in the grace and gladness of spring given to all animals and people; the sacred and the significant consisted in the arrival the previous day of a stamped and numbered document on headed paper." He observes the powerlessness of our decisions to take hold of our lives. When Nekhlyudov is planning to break with his mistress, he listens eagerly to gossipy reports that suggest (while prompting some jealousy) that she might have a new lover. He knows already that he cannot expect to raise himself out of this miserable attachment entirely on his own.

Throughout the novel, Tolstoy punctures the self-importance of rank and function, and the entire span of human vanity, but he is working on a reduced canvas. The main oddity of Resurrection is that it consists of a number of brief portraits, canned encounters, as Nekhlyudov busily tries to reform his life and free a wrongly-convicted prisoner. Officials, prisoners, bureaucrats, wives, peasants, stewards, railway men, guards--everyone is drawn with the inimitable brushstroke of Tolstoy, but the reader quickly learns that these characters will never reappear in the story, that one need not learn their names. Nekhlyudov is somewhat like Dante in the Divine Comedy, reduced to being an observer of an unstructured "bad infinity" of individual cases of justice, without being able to interfere in 9 cases out of 10, and himself standing in the safety of his aristocratic privilege.

The ostensible action of the novel is Nekhlyudov's moral transformation and personal redemption, which leads him into the thickest morass of human cruelty and abuse of power, the Russian prison system. However, Tolstoy undermines this action in several ways.

First, the "endpoint" of the novel, the spiritual resurrection of Nekhlyudov, is not a surprising and narratively-immanent one: it is simply Tolstoy's own personal code of morality, legible outside of the novel in numerous essays, speeches, and exhortations. This external Weltanschauung exercises a curious gravity on the novel and its characters. All opinions, values, and decisions in the fictional universe are evaluated against this independent, non-narrative standard. This means that the worst characters are those with the fewest resolutions in common with the late Tolstoy, while the best characters are those in progress towards a complete overlap with the author's viewpoint. And every person in the novel can be clearly mapped on this continuum.

The validity of Tolstoy's judgments, or the persuasiveness with which he argues his case, are not in question here. But these conclusions can be safely found, undiluted, in Part III, Chapter 19:

All forms of violence, cruelty and brutality are not only not proscribed, they are actually permitted by the government, when it suits, and therefore they are all the more readily accepted by these very people who are suffering imprisonment, poverty and hardship. It is almost as if these institutions had been specially invented to create the highest degree of corruption and evil, unattainable by any other means, with the specific aim of disseminating the corruption and evil over the whole of society on as wide a front as possible. "It's as if they had run a competition for corrupting the greatest number of people in the most effective and infallible way," thought Nekhlyudov, contemplating all that was being done in the prisons and at the halting-stages. Every year hundreds of thousands of people were reduced to the lowest level of depravity, and when they had been thoroughly corrupted, they were set free in order to communicate the corruption acquired in prison to the rest of the population.

The problem is a narrative one. Once the reader knows that the above conclusion is where we are headed, and that the novel is constructed as an iron case against the status quo, everything is entirely predictable and undramatic. There is no tension or suspense, since the only plot is Nekhyludov's spiritual awakening. But he is only going to awaken into agreement with the narrator's voice that is present from the start.

There is another problem. Tolstoy's worldview dictates that the offenses and hard-heartedness inherent in the system stem from mystification, blindness, and a conspiracy to deceive people through religion and poor education. This is a classic anarchist position, one that derives from the Enlightenment and especially Voltaire. Tolstoy the social thinker does not have the patience for "ideology" as a set of lived practices, for the real existence of illusory relations---everything "true" can be accomplished for him by the single yanking away of a blindfold. Thus, for Tolstoy the peasants are spontaneously good and perceptive, because uncontaminated.

This is disastrous for the novel, because all of the insights into the sinfulness of the world's organization (which should take 500 pages to unpack and synthesize) all clump together and are of a piece. Tolstoy is committed to the obviousness of evil, and therefore to a sudden enlightenment rather than an arduous and complicated travail of the soul.

"Everything was now quite clear and unambiguous... What a muddle he had got himself into over these insoluble questions with their endless ramifications. He now asked himself the same questions, and was surprised how straightforward it all was. It was straightforward because he wasn't thinking about what was going to happen to him, which was irrelevant, but only about what he was duty-bound to do."

"This explanation of everything that was taking place seemed so clear and straightforward to Nekhlyudov, but the very simplicity of it all made him reluctant to accept it. Surely a complex phenomenon like this couldn't have such a simple and terrible explanation."

"Everything was clear to him. It was clear that all things considered good and important are actually useless or vile, and that behind all this glamor, all this luxury, lurked all the old familiar crimes, which not only go unpunished, they wax triumphant, embellished with every charming device the human mind can dream up."

What happens to the novel form when Nekhyludov attains this almost-instant access to an undiluted truth? The story is thereby deprived of the very struggle that made Pierre and Levin so compelling. Nor does Tolstoy show Nekhyludov involved in a set of tragic commitments as in The Mayor of Casterbridge or Nostromo, where complications and responsibilities absorb and frustrate the reform of self and society.

The novel from Don Quixote onward has represented the world as impervious to idealism. Resurrection ends up resembling and confirming Don Quixote, but to its cost. Tolstoy does not show Nekhlyudov's resolutions being practically realized in the world of prisons and legislation, and the book becomes a mere series of encounters, mere reportage with an entirely arbitrary ending. And Nekhlyudov's realization that the system is organized such that grievous wrong is "nobody's fault" (the original title for Little Dorrit, by the way) is a correct description of a social pathology, but not something that Tolstoy eventually wants to explore.

At last, then, Resurrection sputters to a halt, having made its point long before. Besides the narrative consequences, there is one further drawback to Tolstoy's thinking, one which was borne out in his biography. This is the risk that, in trying to "get way, get away from all these false dealings," in turning away from society and towards a rigorous program of denunciation and critical analysis of a widespread deception, one will cut oneself off from those who love and need one's sympathy and understanding. As a man, Tolstoy failed to see this, and the book is tinged with a bitterness that urges Tolstoy to inflict only more self-denial upon Nekhlyudov. It is a hard saying, and one that threatens to pull "the truth" ever further from the other persons who are right there.