Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  To be sure, depiction of the internal discourse of literary characters was widely practiced before Tolstoi (one need only recall the fevered interior monologues of Julien Sorel while in prison). Nonetheless, it is in fact with Tolstoi that the interior monologue is associated, as if he were its inventor. External discourse in pre-Tolstoian literature merged imperceptibly with internal discourse, remaining quite undifferentiated from it. Tolstoi turned internal discourse into something highly distinctive, functionally setting it off from authorial discourse and from the colloquial speech of his characters. And this is true of both the logical and the non-logical varieties of the Tolstoian interior monologue. Tolstoi really was the first to convey the uninterrupted yet disjointed stream of consciousness, and he transformed logical internal discourses into a special, unprecedentedly powerful means of analysis possessing a sort of unmediated authenticity: the individual analyzes himself, resorting for the sake of greater clarity to articulated formulations.

  If you substituted “Shakespeare” for “Tolstoi,” this would retain much of its force. Infuriated by Shakespeare, Tolstoy nevertheless was contaminated by him, as were all except the French, until the advent of Romanticism. Lydia Ginzburg extends her argument to Anna Karenina:

  The brilliant interior monologue of Anna Karenina before her suicide anticipates (as many others have written) the stream of consciousness of twentieth-century novelists. But the remarkable thing about Anna’s monologue is that both kinds of internal discourse—both purposes—are in conflict in it. On the one hand there is the famous ‘Tiut’kin Coiffeur’…je me fais coiffer par Tiut’kin”—an alternation of disjointed but linked thoughts emerging as a result of the intermittent intrusion of accidental impressions from the street and the pressure of the character’s obsessive inner awareness of her misfortune. And then in the midst of all this, the persistent and familiar sounds of Tolstoian “rationality” is suddenly audible: “ ‘Well, I shall obtain a divorce and become Vronskii’s wife. Will Kitty then stop looking at me the way she did today? No. Will Serezha stop asking and wondering about my two husbands? And what new feeling can I invent between Vronskii and me? Is any kind of feeling, not happiness even, but merely freedom from torment, even possible? No, it is not,’ she answered herself without the slightest hesitation” (pt. 7, chap. 30). This clearly articulated discourse is necessary because Anna has come to see everything “in that piercing light that now revealed to her the meaning of life and human relations” (Levin made the acquaintance of that piercing light during his own crisis). But the stream of tortuous, alogical associations is also necessary to give expression to the increasing spiritual confusion that threatens Anna and that draws her toward her death. Tolstoi, boldly combining the alogical interior monologue with the logical variety, understood the conventional nature of what he was doing. But what he was doing was concerned more with artistic cognition of the principles of internal discourses than with an attempt to reproduce it—something that in any case would have been impossible by means of external language intended for intercourse among people. Tolstoi had no wish to undertake naturalistic tasks that were incapable of solution.

  This is adroit and useful, yet is exemplified more fully by Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists. Brutus, Othello, Cleopatra move to their suicides in different ways, but all of them manifest solutions to naturalistic labors that go beyond the external language of dialogue into the verge of transcendence. Hamlet, more than anyone else in all of literature, calls into question the limits that Lydia Ginzburg believes to be unassailable.

  It will always be one of the mysteries of imaginative literature that Leo Tolstoy was outraged by William Shakespeare. His dreadful pamphlet of 1906 begins by quoting Shelley, among others:

  “ ‘King Lear’ may be recognized as the perfect model of the dramatic art of the whole world,” says Shelley.

  Anyone who has read Shelley deeply knows that this great lyric poet was also a profound skeptical intellect, and, like Milton, possessed immense learning. I have been teaching King Lear for almost two-thirds of a century to many gifted students, and they, like me, agree with Shelley. Tolstoy, a powerful mind determined to narrow its own consciousness, approaches a kind of lunacy in writing about Shakespeare. He warns that the reader will be demoralized and all but ruined by Shakespeare:

  But, above all, having assimilated the immoral view of life which penetrates all Shakespeare’s writings, he loses the capacity of distinguishing good from evil. And the error of extolling an insignificant, inartistic writer—not only not moral, but directly immoral—executes its destructive work.

  This is why I think that the sooner people free themselves from the false glorification of Shakespeare, the better it will be.

  First, having freed themselves from this deceit, men will come to understand that the drama which has no religious element at its foundation is not only not an important and good thing, as it is now supposed to be, but the most trivial and despicable of things. Having understood this, they will have to search for, and work out, a new form of modern drama, a drama which will serve as the development and confirmation of the highest stage of religious consciousness in men.

  Secondly, having freed themselves from this hypnotic state, men will understand that the trivial and immoral works of Shakespeare and his imitators, aiming merely at the recreation and amusement of the spectators, can not possibly represent the teaching of life, and that, while there is no true religious drama, the teaching of life should be sought for in other sources.

  Confronting Dostoevsky’s hatred of Jews is a moral shock. Tolstoy, one of the double handful of Western writers who matter most, is a very different matter. He insisted that he had read Shakespeare in the original, in Schlegel’s German translation, in Russian, and in French, and one wonders what he means by “reading.” If you begin reading King Lear with a moral and spiritual virulence all your own, can you read it at all? And yet this was the author of The Cossacks, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and much the best story I have ever read or could read, Hadji Murat.

  The critic John Bayley, in some introductory remarks to The Cossacks, indicates what he calls “the anxiety of influence” as manifested by the young Tolstoy in regard to Pushkin and Lermontov. Pushkin remained a lifelong inspiration for Tolstoy, though he incessantly denied it. I would suggest that Tolstoy never could get rid of having internalized both Shakespeare and Pushkin. Necessarily, there were other influences: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Les Misérables by Victor Hugo, the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and, later, Far Eastern scriptures. More than anything else, the Bible and Homer are always present in Tolstoy.

  War and Peace is of no genre. It does not help to describe it as a novel. Nor does national epic nor Russian Iliad catch its idiosyncratic flight from Western literary convention. If you can say that so vast a panorama has a central protagonist, aside from Tolstoy in the mask of his serenity Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov, that would not be Napoleon but Pierre Bezukhov, who in some strange sense emerges from the inward recesses of Tolstoy’s own moral character. Pierre is a quixotic quester, an immensely wealthy bastard, and thus initially an outsider, who goes through freemasonry in search of the ethical life and encounters its curious use, probably by way of Rosicrucianism, of the Kabbalistic gematria:

  If the words “Le Empereur Napoléon” were constructed by the cipher, the sum total of the figures added together would be 666. Hence Napoleon was the Beast spoken of in the Apocalypse. Moreover, by adding the figures corresponding in the same cipher to the French words quarante-deux, the period of years set for his power, the sum of 666 is again brought out, which indicated that the year 1812, as being the forty-second year of his age, would be the last of his rule.

  He then discovers, of course, that the calculation for his own name rendered very awkwardly as L’Russe Bestuhof also made 666, so determining that he would be the one who would put an end to Napoleon
!

  Thomas De Quincey’s “Origin of the Rosicrucians and the Free-Masons” was first published in January 1824. I doubt that De Quincey was a Freemason, but he had read Emanuel Swedenborg, whose visions were appropriated by some Masons who established the Swedenborg Rite. Setting aside Pierre’s self-indulgence in mystical speculation, good readers agree that he is a person we are obliged to love. Indeed, all the protagonists of War and Peace bring us into a world of love, despite the Napoleonic onslaught. Natasha, Prince Andrei, Princess Marya, Count Nikolai Rostov, Platon Karataev join Pierre, Kutuzov, and Tolstoy himself, narrator and close observer, as benign presences, sometimes erring, but always surging back to a normative consciousness that envelops the reader.

  Tolstoy would have been provoked to anger by my necessary conviction that the Bible, the Iliad, and Pushkin could not have sufficed to liberate the author of War and Peace into his new freedom to form so many separate yet intertwined personalities. Olenin, for all his amiability, is not vivid enough to sustain his role in The Cossacks. The book is saved by Lukáshka, Maryánka, and Daddy Eroshka, persuasively rendered Cossacks.

  The unforgivable and unforgived precursor was William Shakespeare, who with Cervantes and Montaigne invented what we now call personality. Tolstoy was devoted both to Cervantes and to Montaigne, and he absorbed their influence with gusto. Neither of them could have taught him how to portray women. It is one of the glories of War and Peace that its women, not just Natasha and Princess Marya, but also Princess Hélène, Pierre’s brazenly unfaithful first wife, and Sonya are totally realized personalities. Their Shakespearean lineage is a complex meander; I would be glad to track it, but this is not the place.

  My friend Martin Price deftly employed Wittgenstein in his depiction of the forms of life in Tolstoy. Wittgenstein loved Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Beethoven and Michelangelo, but went askew when he read Shakespeare, who to him was “a creator of language.” I met Wittgenstein once, in the summer of 1948, if I remember accurately, when I lived with Stuart MacDonald Brown, Jr., his wife, Catherine, and their four children. Brown had been my philosophy teacher, and we did a semester of independent study on the works of Saint John of the Cross. Wittgenstein was living with his friends Norman and Lee Malcolm quite close by. I had no idea at that time who Wittgenstein was, but I recall being fascinated by his face and his gentle manner. Once, when both the Browns and Malcolms were shopping at a supermarket, I sat outside with Wittgenstein and we talked about Saint John of the Cross, who clearly interested him. That was seventy years ago, and I do not remember much more. I did not read Wittgenstein until my senior year at Cornell, when I took a course taught by Professor Max Black, who later became a good friend. In 1964, Max published A Companion to Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus,” which I still find useful, because it employs Wittgenstein’s later writings and sayings to illuminate the Tractatus.

  At my advanced old age, I still find Wittgenstein difficult, though some of his aphorisms never abandon me. Somewhere in the Tractatus is the adage: What the solipsist says is wrong, but what the solipsist means is right. I remember that Max Black traced that to Schopenhauer’s presumably early influence upon Wittgenstein. There is a late maxim by Wittgenstein: Love is not a feeling. Love, unlike pain, is put to the test. We do not say that was not a true pain, because it passed away so quickly.

  Schopenhauer, whom Tolstoy admired, may be another link between Tolstoy and Wittgenstein. For me the prime connection is their more or less mutual stance toward Shakespeare. It is not that Wittgenstein participated in Tolstoy’s extravagant moral outrage. There is a tone of puzzlement in Wittgenstein on Shakespeare. He mentions King Lear and evidently had read it, either in English or in what is usually called the Schlegel-Tieck German version. I reflect that Wittgenstein had the instinctive aesthetic capability of recognizing Georg Trakl’s subtle and heartbreaking poetry. It seems not possible to me that Ludwig Wittgenstein, confronted by King Lear, the ultimate Western tragedy, was not affected by it. Perhaps he was testing himself for what he believed he lacked, and did not like Shakespeare because he did not like himself. I still believe much the best story I have ever read is Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat. Wittgenstein gave Norman Malcolm a copy of the short novel, urging him to read it. Going into battle as an Austrian officer in World War I, Wittgenstein carried with him Tolstoy’s brief version of the Gospels. There can be no question as to Wittgenstein’s aesthetic sensibility, yet the capaciousness of Shakespeare offended him. I think Tolstoy and Wittgenstein were quite accurate in seeing that Shakespeare was free of any concern with the Incarnation and had gone beyond limits in empathic portrayals of Iago, Edmund, and Macbeth.

  You cannot diminish Shakespeare, even if you are the author of War and Peace. The ever-expanding inward self possibly passed from Martin Luther through William Tyndale to Shakespeare, but Hamlet’s incredibly capacious consciousness is something radically new, and is attended by a new kind of charismatic personality, prefigured in the Court Historian’s King David and then in the Yeshua of the Gospel of Mark.

  Maxim Gorky, now remembered not so much for his own fictions but for his complex relations with both Lenin and Stalin, composed the most revealing pages about Tolstoy the man that I have ever read. His Tolstoy worships Tolstoy and truly does not believe in God. Tolstoy the writer is indispensable and always will be. Tolstoy the man disturbs me. He hated women because they gave birth to men but could not give their sons literal immortality. That is madness. What else can we call it? Gorky thought that Tolstoy, the great natural force, wistfully fancied that nature would make an exception for him, so that he could live in the body forever. Goethe and Ibsen sometimes diverted themselves with the same pathetic folly. Tolstoy and Goethe died at eighty-two, Ibsen at seventy-eight. It is alas accurate to assert that none of the three ever deeply loved anyone except himself, be it wives, children, mistresses, friends. Nothing is got for nothing, and I am perpetually grateful for Hadji Murat, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Goethe’s poetry and his outrageous Faust: Part Two, Ibsen’s Brand, Peer Gynt, Emperor and Galilean, Hedda Gabler, When We Dead Awaken. Perhaps only sublime solipsists could have managed precisely those breakthroughs. Infants appear to be solipsists, but only at the start.

  But, then, one can oppose to Dante, Milton, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Tolstoy the imaginative titans who were anything but solipsists: Chaucer, Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Molière, Keats. It is not a choice between, but of. In the literary heaven of heavens, Shakespeare is God. He would have been the last person to think so. That Tolstoy attempted to be not just the Russian prophet and Homer, but also the Russian God, with whatever fervor he would have disavowed that, is simply the cost of his confirmation as the inescapable writer of his language, supplanting even Pushkin.

  I return to War and Peace, which means to Pierre, who continues to surprise me. Throughout his life and work, Tolstoy trusted to an unmediated will. Pierre has never fired a gun, yet in his duel with the nasty Dolokhov, who supposedly never misses, he seriously wounds Dolokhov, who has been cuckolding him with Hélène, and who misses his shot. Rightly discarding his unfaithful wife, who has also had an incestuous affair with her brother Anatole, Pierre tries to begin again, dimly aware that he is in love with Natasha. Eventually, he allows Hélène to return, but in time she destroys herself with an overdose intended to abort her pregnancy.

  Pierre’s is the most complex personality in all of Tolstoy, more difficult to apprehend fully than his nearest rival, Levin, in Anna Karenina. Dostoevsky’s protagonists are rarely coherent. The most fascinating—Svidrigailov, Stavrogin, Prince Myshkin, Mitya and Ivan Karamazov—are not so much polyphonic voices as they are vortices of ambivalences.

  One problem with both Pierre and Levin is that, unlike Hamlet, they cannot think so well that they think themselves into the truth, but are endlessly frustrated. Hamlet thinks beyond all limits and attains truths that he incarnates, yet lacks time to tell us. Those unspoken truths set inwardnes
s against outwardness, as in the prophetic modes of Amos, Micah, 1 Isaiah, and the tormented Jeremiah, who tells us that Yahweh has written the Law upon our inward parts. It is not that Pierre and Levin are prophets but that Tolstoy victimized himself through becoming one. Prophetic poets, be they Biblical or classical, English or Russian, French or German, or American in the wake of Walt Whitman, more easily contain the double burden of truth telling and imaginings. A prophetic novelist, like Victor Hugo in Les Misérables or Tolstoy in War and Peace, navigates more perilous tides.

  Martin Price accurately sees that Tolstoy was always a vitalist, particularly in his moral and spiritual concerns. For Pierre, life is God and God is metamorphic. For Tolstoy, life is God and God is Tolstoy. Aesthetically, this is justifiable, because Tolstoy, unlike Dostoevsky, knew how to represent fundamental changes in the personality of his protagonists. I find no change in Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, Prince Myshkin, Stavrogin, and all the others who torment and fascinate me in Dostoevsky’s Schwärmerei.

  I can think of few fictive personalities, outside of Shakespeare’s, that change so fully as that of Pierre Bezukhov. As a prisoner of the French, profoundly moved by the Russian serf Platon Karataev, his fellow captive (executed by the French when he is too sick to march farther), Pierre casts away all his doubts about human existence. He achieves a Tolstoyan natural transcendence, which ought to be an oxymoron, and yet Tolstoy’s art makes it work:

  The sun had set long ago. Bright stars lit up here and there; red as fire, the glow of the rising full moon spread on the edge of the horizon, and the enormous red ball wavered astonishingly in the grayish haze. It was growing light. The evening was already over, but night had not yet begun. Pierre got up and walked away from his new comrades, between the campfires, to the other side of the road, where he was told the captive soldiers were camped. He wanted to talk with them. On the road a French sentry stopped him and told him to go back.