Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999
Page 15
What Frank describes here is, on a larger scale, the same phenomenon that Bakhtin calls dialogism. But implicit in Frank’s account is what Bakhtin leaves out: that to the degree that Dostoevskian dialogism grows out of Dostoevsky’s own moral character, out of his ideals, and out of his being as a writer, it is only distantly imitable.
Although Frank is a biographer, it is literary biography he writes, as he warned his readers as early as the preface to the first volume: ‘Anyone who seeks a conventional biography in the following pages will be sorely disappointed . . . I do not go from the life to the work, but rather the other way round. My purpose is to interpret Dostoevsky’s art.’ These rather austere aims are modified in the second volume, in which Frank concedes that what he is actually trying to do is to fuse biography and social-cultural history with literary criticism.5 Nevertheless, in each of the volumes there is a goodly amount of literary-critical commentary, with Dostoevsky’s more substantial books getting chapters to themselves.
Frank is a literary theorist in his own right, author of the influential essay ‘Spatial Form in the Modern Novel’ (1945), in which he applies the modernist theory of montage to the study of prose fiction, showing that many modern novels are better understood as juxtaposing their narrative elements in space than as unrolling them in time.6 His affiliations are to American New Criticism, Russian Formalism and, to an extent, to the literary Structuralism of Gérard Genette. Though the seams inevitably show, he is, on the whole, singularly successful at working his rather ahistorical formal analyses of texts into the larger historical and cultural project.
In the first volume of the biography, Frank called into serious doubt Freud’s account of the origins of Dostoevsky’s epilepsy by showing that Freud got many of the facts of the case wrong. But Frank’s scepticism about psychoanalysis and other grand theories of the inner life has its drawbacks. We do not get from him, for instance, any truly searching exploration of the intertwining of pity and cruelty characteristic of Dostoevsky’s darker characters. At one point he does remark that the subconscious in Dostoevsky is ‘usually moral’ (that is to say, the messages that come to Dostoevsky’s characters in their dreams or in sudden wellings up of feeling are usually to be trusted). But he does not follow up the implications of this assertion, which seems to me to make Dostoevsky less disturbing than he truly is. (p. 145) (It is hard to know how many exceptions Frank allows himself with ‘usually’: is Svidrigailov, for instance, one of the exceptions?)
In the biographical sections of the book the reader misses a sense of the growth and development of Dostoevsky the man. But then, as Sidney Monas has pointed out, the notion of steady growth is as foreign to Dostoevsky’s imagination as it is fundamental to Tolstoy’s. Dostoevsky’s novels are essentially scenic in construction, moving from one crisis to the next. Perhaps the same is true of his life.
The Miraculous Years has its longueurs. To support his claim that Dostoevsky was not only an innovator in the novel but a great technician too, Frank feels obliged to demonstrate at sometimes unnecessary length how minor scenes contribute to the whole. He assumes, without explaining why, that Dostoevsky’s characters have real-life models and spends pages speculating on who these models might be. While he is adept at keeping several strands of narrative going at the same time (the masters of the nineteenth-century novel stand him in good stead here), his use of the device of foreshadowing – ending a chapter by hinting at what is to follow – tends to be mechanical. The index is comprehensive, but the addition of a chronological table would have made the volume more friendly as a reference source. (The index to Volume Three, by the way, manages to get most of the page numbers wrong.)
At another level, while Frank is able to show with exemplary clarity why Dostoevsky chose to shape Stavrogin in the mould of ‘the doomed and glamorous Russian Byronic dandy’ of Pushkin, he does not look critically enough at Dostoevsky’s claim that avatars of the dandy in the 1870s continue to attest to subterranean movements in the national psyche. (p. 467) Dostoevsky’s historical intuitions were usually right, but in this case history does not seem to bear him out.
But these are quibbles. In his larger aim of elucidating the setting within which Dostoevsky wrote – personal on the one hand, social, historical, cultural, literary, and philosophical on the other – Frank succeeds triumphantly.
12 The Essays of Joseph Brodsky
I
IN 1986 JOSEPH BRODSKY published Less than One, a book of essays. Some of the essays were translated from the Russian, others he wrote directly in English. In two cases the English matrix had a symbolic importance to him: in a heartfelt homage to W. H. Auden, who did much to smooth his path for him when he quit Russia in 1972, and whom he regarded as the greatest poet in English of the century; and in his memoir of his parents, whom he had to leave behind in Leningrad, and who, despite repeated petitions to the Soviet-era authorities, were never granted permission to visit him. He chose English, he explained, to honour them in a language of freedom.
Less than One is an outstanding book in its own right, worthy to stand beside Brodsky’s principal collections of verse, A Part of Speech (1980) and To Urania (1988). It includes magisterial essays on Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, and Marina Tsvetaeva, the poets of the generation before Brodsky to whom he felt closest, as well as two gems of autobiographical recreation: the memoir of his parents and the title essay, ‘Less than One’, on growing up amid the stupefying boredom of Leningrad of the 1950s. There are also travel essays. A trip to Istanbul, for instance, gives rise to thoughts on the Second and Third Romes, namely Constantinople/Byzantium and Moscow, and thus on the meaning of the West to Westernising Russians like himself. Finally, there are two of the virtuoso literary-critical essays which later became Brodsky’s stock in trade, in which he explicates (‘unpacks’) individual poems particularly dear to him.
In 1995 came On Grief and Reason: Essays, which collects a further twenty-one pieces. Of these, a number are without question on a par with the best of the earlier work. In ‘Spoils of War’, for instance – an essay classical in form, light in touch – Brodsky continues the amusing and sometimes poignant story of his youth, using those traces of the West – corned-beef cans and short-wave radios as well as movies and jazz music – that found their way through the Iron Curtain to explore the meaning of the West to Russians. Given the imaginative intensity with which they pored over these artefacts, Brodsky suggests, Russians of his generation were ‘the real Westerners, perhaps the only ones’.1
In his autobiographical journeyings Brodsky never reached the 1960s, the time of his notorious trial on charges of social parasitism and his sentencing to corrective labour in the Russian far north. This silence was, in all likelihood, deliberate: a refusal to exhibit his wounds was always one of his more admirable traits (‘At all costs try to avoid granting yourself the status of the victim,’ he advises an audience of students). (On Grief, p. 144)
Other essays also continue where Less than One left off. The dialogue with Auden begun in ‘To Please a Shadow’ is carried on in ‘Letter to Horace’; while the long analytical essays on Thomas Hardy and Robert Frost can stand beside the earlier readings of poems by Tsvetaeva and Auden.
Nevertheless, as a whole, On Grief and Reason is not as strong as Less than One. Only two of the essays – ‘Homage to Marcus Aurelius’ (1994) and ‘Letter to Horace’ (1995) – mark a clear advance in, and deepening of, Brodsky’s thought. Several are little more than makeweights: a jaundiced memoir of a writers’ conference (‘After a Journey’), for instance, from which Brodsky emerges less than creditably, and the texts of a couple of commencement addresses. More tellingly, what in earlier essays had seemed no more than passing quirks now reveal themselves as settled elements of a systematic Brodskian philosophy of language.
II
Brodsky’s system can best be illustrated from the essay on Thomas Hardy. Brodsky regards Hardy as a neglected major poet, ‘seldom taught, less read’, particularly in Ame
rica, cast out by fashion-minded critics into the limbo of ‘premodernism’. (On Grief, pp. 373, 315, 313)
It is certainly true that modern criticism has had little of interest to say about Hardy. Nevertheless, despite what Brodsky says, ordinary readers and (particularly) poets have never deserted him. John Crowe Ransom edited a selection of Hardy’s verse in 1960. Hardy dominates Philip Larkin’s widely read Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973) with 27 pages as opposed to 19 for Yeats, 16 for Auden and a mere 9 for Eliot. Nor did the Modernist avant-garde dismiss Hardy en bloc. Ezra Pound, for instance, tirelessly recommended him to younger poets. ‘Nobody has taught me anything about writing since Thomas Hardy died,’ he remarked in 1934.2
Brodsky’s claim that Hardy is a neglected poet is part of his attack on the French-oriented modernism of the Pound—Eliot school, and on all the revolutionary -isms of the first decades of the twentieth century, which, to his mind, pointed literature in a false direction. He wishes to reclaim leading positions in Anglo-American letters for Hardy and Frost and in general for those poets who built upon, rather than broke with, traditional poetics. Thus he rejects the influential anti-naturalist poetics of Viktor Shklovsky, based on unabashed artificiality, on the foregrounding of the poetic device. ‘This is where modernism goofed,’ he says. Genuinely modern aesthetics – the aesthetics of Hardy, Frost and later Auden – uses traditional forms because form, as camouflage, allows the writer ‘to land a better punch when and where it’s least expected’. (On Grief, p. 322)
(Everyday, common-sense language of this kind is prominent in the literary essays in On Grief and Reason, which appear to have had their origin as lectures to classes of undergraduates. Brodsky’s readiness to operate at his audience’s linguistic level has its unfortunate side, including an eagerness to use youthful slang.)
Strong poets have always created their own lineage and, in the process, rewritten the history of poetry. Brodsky is no exception. What he finds in Hardy is, to a degree, what he wants readers to find in himself; his reading of Hardy is most compelling when in veiled fashion it describes his own practices or ambitions. His suggestion – dropped almost in passing – that the germ of Hardy’s famous poem ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ (on the sinking of the Titanic) probably lay in the word ‘maiden’ (as in the phrase ‘maiden voyage’), which then generated the central conceit of the poem, ship and iceberg as fated lovers, is a stroke of genius, but beyond that gives an insight into Brodsky’s own creative habits. (On Grief, p. 352)
Behind ‘The Convergence of the Twain’ Brodsky points to the presence of the Schopenhauer of The World as Will and Idea: ship and iceberg collide at the behest of a blind metaphysical force devoid of any ultimate purpose, a force which Brodsky calls ‘the phenomenal world’s inner essence’. In itself this suggestion is not novel: whether or not Hardy had Schopenhauer in mind, Schopenhauer’s brand of pessimistic determinism was clearly congenial to him. But Brodsky goes further: he recommends to his audience that they read Schopenhauer, ‘not so much for Mr. Hardy’s sake as for your own’. Schopenhauer’s Will is thus attractive not only to Brodsky’s Hardy but to Brodsky himself. (On Grief, p. 347)
In fact, through his reading of five Hardy poems, Brodsky intends to reveal Hardy as no more than a vehicle for a Schopenhauerian Will acting through language, more like a scribe used by language than an autonomous user. In certain lines of ‘The Darkling Thrush’, ‘language flows into the human domain from the realm of nonhuman truths and dependencies [and] is ultimately the voice of inanimate matter’. While this may not have been what Hardy intended, ‘it was what this line was after in Thomas Hardy, and he responded’. Thus what we take to be creativity may be ‘nothing more (or less) than matter’s attempts to articulate itself’. (On Grief, pp. 333, 310)
What is here called the voice of inanimate matter more often becomes, in Brodsky’s essays, the voice of language, the voice of poetry, or the voice of a specific metre. Brodsky is resolutely anti-Freudian in the sense that he is not interested in the notion of a personal unconscious. Thus to him the language that speaks through poets has a truly metaphysical status. And as it sometimes spoke through Hardy, Brodsky makes it clear, language is capable of speaking through every real poet, including himself. In a disconcerting way, Brodsky here finds himself not at all far from the kind of reductive critique which claims that speakers are little more than the mouthpieces of hegemonic discourses or ideologies. The difference is that, while it is accepted that these discourses and ideologies change with the historical times, Brodsky’s language – the time-marked and time-marking language of poetry – is a force operating through and within time but outside history. ‘Prosody . . . is simply a repository of time within language’; ‘Language is older than state and . . . prosody always survives history.’3
Brodsky is unequivocal in taking away control of the larger-scale history and development of poetry from poets themselves and handing it to a metaphysical language – language as will and idea. In Hardy’s poetry, for instance, having pointed acutely to a certain absence of a detectable speaking voice, an ‘audial neutrality’, he suggests that this apparently negative attribute would turn out to have great importance to twentieth-century poetry – would, indeed, make Hardy ‘prophetic’ of Auden. But, Brodsky maintains, it was not so much the case that Auden or any other of Hardy’s successors imitated him as that Hardy’s neutrality of voice became ‘what the future [of English poetry] liked’. (On Grief, p. 322)
For an idea so fundamental to his philosophy of poetry, it is odd that the experience of being spoken through by language figures so seldom in Brodsky’s own poetry. In only one or two poems, and there only fleetingly, does Brodsky directly thematise that experience (of course, he may claim that the experience is embodied in all his poems). One explanation might be that the experience is more appropriately treated at a dispassionate remove in discursive prose. A more interesting explanation would be that the meta-poetical theme of poetry reflecting on the conditions of its own existence is absent precisely because, as an attempt on the part of the poet to understand and thus to master the force animating him, it strikes Brodsky as not only impious but futile as well.
But even granting the claim that poetry is written in a state of possession by a higher force, there remains something strange, even eccentric, in the elevation of prosody in particular to metaphysical status. ‘Verse meters in themselves are kinds of spiritual magnitudes for which nothing can be substituted,’ writes Brodsky. (Less than One, p. 141) They are ‘a means of restructuring time’. (On Grief, p. 418) What precisely does it mean to restructure time? How thorough is that restructuring? How long does it last? Brodsky never explains fully, or fully enough. He comes closest in the essay on Mandelstam in Less than One, where the time that utters itself through Mandelstam confronts the ‘mute space’ of Stalin; but even there the core of the notion remains mysterious and perhaps even mystical. Nevertheless, when Brodsky says, in On Grief and Reason, that ‘language . . . uses a human being, not the other way around’, he would seem to have the metres of poetry above all in mind; and when – particularly in his lectures to students – he pleads for the educative and even redemptive function of poetry (‘love is a metaphysical affair whose goal is either accomplishing or liberating one’s soul . . . [and] that is and always has been the core of lyric poetry’), it is submission to the rhythms of poetry he is alluding to. (On Grief, p. 87)
If I am right, then Brodsky’s position is not far from that of the educationists of ancient Athens, who prescribed for students (men only, not women) a tripartite curriculum of music (intended to make the soul rhythmical and harmonious), poetry and gymnastics. Plato collapsed these three parts into two, music absorbing poetry and becoming the principal mental/spiritual discipline. Those powers that Brodsky claims for poetry would seem to belong less to poetry than to music. For instance, time is the medium of music more clearly than it is the medium of poetry: we read poetry on the printed page as fast as we
like – usually faster than we ought to – whereas we listen to music in its own time. Music thus structures the time in which it is performed, lending it purposive form, more clearly than poetry does. So why does Brodsky not make his case for poetry along Plato’s lines, as a species of music?
The answer is, of course, that, while the technical language of prosody may derive from the technical language of music, poetry is not a species of music. Specifically, because it works through words, not sounds, poetry has a semantic dimension; whereas the semantic dimension of music is at most connotational and therefore secondary.
Since antique times we have had a well-developed account, borrowed from music, of the phonics of poetry. We also have scores of theories of the semantics of poetry, of poetry as a kind of language with special rules of meaning. What we lack is any widely accepted theory which marries the two. The last critics in America who believed they had such a theory were the New Critics; their rather arid style of reading ran out in the sands in the early 1960s. Since then poetry, and lyric poetry in particular, has become an embarrassment to the critical profession, or at least to the academic arm of that profession. None of the schools of criticism that rule the academy wants to deal with poetry in its own right; in practice it is read as if it were prose with ragged right-hand margins.
In ‘An Immodest Proposal’ (1991), a plea for a federally subsidised programme to distribute millions of cheap anthologies of American poetry, Brodsky suggests that lines like ‘No memory of having starred / Atones for later disregard / Or keeps the end from being hard’ (Robert Frost) ought to enter the bloodstream of every citizen, not just because they constitute a lapidary memento mori, and not just because they exemplify language at its purest and most powerful, but because, in absorbing them and making them our own, we work toward an evolutionary goal: ‘The purpose of evolution, believe it or not, is beauty.’ (On Grief, p. 207)