by James Wood
In a famous scene in Notes from Underground, published in 1864, the narrator, an insignificant but proudly rebellious outcast, has an encounter with an impressive-looking cavalry officer in a tavern. The officer, blocked by the narrator, casually picks him up and moves him out of the way. The narrator is humiliated, and can’t sleep for his dreams of revenge. He knows that this same officer walks every day down the Nevsky Prospect. The narrator follows him, “admiring” him from a distance. He determines that he will walk in the opposite direction and that when the two men meet, he, the narrator, will not budge an inch. But whenever the encounter arrives, he panics, and moves out of the way just as the officer strides past. At night he wakes, obsessively turning over the question: “Why is it invariably I who swerves first? Why precisely me and not him?” Eventually he holds his ground, the two men brush shoulders, and the narrator is overjoyed. He returns home singing Italian arias, feeling properly avenged. But the satisfaction lasts only a few days.
Dostoevsky was the great analyst—in a sense, almost the inventor—of the psychological category that Nietzsche called ressentiment. Again and again, Dostoevsky shows how pride is really very close to humility, and how hate is very close to a kind of sick love, in just the way that Rameau’s nephew is far more dependent on the existence of his famous uncle than he will actually admit to, or in the way that Julien both loves and hates Madame de Rênal and Mathilde. In the Nevsky Prospect anecdote, the weaker man loathes but “admires” the officer—and in a sense, loathes him because he admires him. His impotence has less to do with his actual circumstances than with his imaginary relation to the officer, which is one of impotent dependence. Dostoevsky would call this psychological torment the “Underground,” meaning a kind of poisonous, impotent alienation, a chronic instability of self, and a vaunting pride that at any moment might unexpectedly crash into its inverse—cringing self-abasement.5
Nothing in fiction, not even in Diderot and Stendhal, quite prepares one for Dostoevsky’s characters. In The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, the clownish Fyodor Pavlovich is about to enter a dining room at the local monastery. He has already acted terribly in the cell of the saintly monk, Father Zosima. Fyodor decides that he will act scandalously in the dining room also. Why? Because, he thinks to himself, “it always seems to me, when I go somewhere, that I am lower than everyone else and that they all take me for a buffoon—so let me indeed play the buffoon, because all of you, to a man, are lower than I am.” And as he thinks this, he remembers being asked once why he hated a certain neighbor, to which he had replied: “He never did anything to me it’s true, but I once played a most shameless nasty trick on him, and the moment I did it, I immediately hated him for it.”
92
Dostoevskian character has at least three layers. On the top layer is the announced motive: Raskolnikov, say, proposes several justifications for his murder of the old woman. The second layer involves unconscious motivation, those strange inversions wherein love turns into hate and guilt expresses itself as poisonous, sickly love. Thus Raskolnikov’s mad need to confess his crime to the police and to Sonia the prostitute presages Freud’s comment on the action of the superego: “In many criminals,” writes Freud, “especially youthful ones, it is possible to detect a very powerful sense of guilt which existed before the crime, and is therefore not its result but its motive.” Or in the case of Fyodor Karamazov and his desire to punish the neighbor to whom he was once nasty, you could say that guilt is causing him, unconsciously, to be horrible to his neighbor; his behavior recalls the quip—both funny and deadly serious—of the Israeli psychoanalyst who remarked that the Germans would never forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. The third and bottom layer of motive is beyond explanation and can only be understood religiously. These characters act like this because they want to be known; even if they are unaware of it, they want to reveal their baseness; they want to confess. They want to reveal the dark shamefulness of their souls, and so, without knowing quite why, they act “scandalously” and appallingly in front of others, so that people “better” than they can judge them for the wretches they are.
93
There is something deeply philosophical about Dostoevsky’s analysis of human behavior, and Nietzsche and Freud were attracted to his work. (One chapter of Dostoevsky’s novella The Eternal Husband is entitled “Analysis.”) Proust, who said that all of Dostoevsky’s novels might have the one title, Crime and Punishment, studied him with perhaps more care than he would admit to. It is Proust who elaborates and develops the philosophical analysis of psychological motive. In Proust, you can see every element of characterization—and indeed of fiction-making itself—living happily together, as if you were watching schools of fish underneath a glass-bottomed boat. Thus, his characters are in some sense both externally seen and yet highly inward; they are “flat,” but are extensively analyzed by Proust as if they were “round”; and of course the novel is so massive that their flatness gets elongated over time, and no longer seems like flatness. Proust is not afraid of caricature, and positively loves to “tag” his characters with leitmotifs, or repeated “characteristics,” in a Dickensian way—as, say, Marcel’s grandfather likes repeatedly to say “On guard! On guard!” and Mme Verdurin always complains of getting a headache whenever music is played. He uses this method to “fix” his characters, just as the earliest novelists did, or, nearer to his own time, as Dickens, Tolstoy, and Mann all did.
But his fiction simultaneously mounts a revolt against the tyranny of fixed, Theophrastan “characteristics.” Combray is presented as a closed world in which everyone knows everyone else, and Marcel’s family is seen as having a supremely secure sense—sustained largely by their system of “tagging” friends and acquaintances with leitmotifs—of what people are like. When someone informs Marcel’s aunt that she has just seen a stranger in the village, she wants to send the maid over to Camus, the chemist,6 to ask him who this can be: the very notion of someone not known to the family is an outrage. But as Proust puts it, “our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people.” His characters in fact change in unexpected ways, and we must constantly adjust the optic that we use to view these people. Marcel’s family is sure that they know M. Swann thoroughly; but Proust reveals that they have seen only one side of him, and the least authentic at that. Likewise, Swann falls in love with Odette, because, in part, she reminds him of a woman in a painting; but over the course of many strenuous months, he will find that one of the dangers of love is that it encourages us to fix in our amorous minds a picture of the beloved. Sometimes these alterations are caused by the smallest gestures and revelations, and are in themselves mysterious in origin. Marcel changes his idea of M. Legrandin because he glimpses him talking animatedly to someone and bowing in a peculiar way:
This rapid straightening-up caused a sort of tense muscular wave to ripple over Legrandin’s rump, which I had not supposed to be so fleshy; I cannot say why, but this undulation of pure matter, this wholly carnal fluency devoid of spiritual significance … awoke my mind suddenly to the possibility of a Legrandin altogether different from the one we knew.7
Progress! In Fielding and Defoe, even in the much richer Cervantes, revelation of this altering kind occurs at the level of plot—an unexpected sister, a lost will, and so on. It does not alter our conception of a character. Don Quixote, though an infinitely deep comic idea, is the same kind of character at the end of the book as at the beginning. (That is why his deathbed change of heart is so disconcerting.)
94
The Russians and the French essentially set the terms of the modernist novel as it flourished in Britain and America between 1920 and 1945. You can trace the excitement of encounter in Virginia Woolf’s essays, especially those written in the teens and the twenties of the century, as she discovered the new translations of the Russians into English by Constance Garnett. She put it like this in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1923):
After reading Crime and Punishment and The
Idiot, how could any young novelist believe in “characters” as the Victorians had painted them? For the undeniable vividness of so many of them is the result of their crudity. The character is rubbed into us indelibly because its features are so few and so prominent. We are given the keyword [e.g., “I never will desert Mr. Micawber”] and then, since the keyword is astonishingly apt, our imaginations swiftly supply the rest. But what keyword could be applied to Raskolnikov, Mishkin, Stavrogin, or Alyosha? These are characters without any features at all. We go into them as we descend into some enormous cavern.
Ford Madox Ford agreed (though his master was Flaubert). Other than Richardson, he argued in his deliciously biased book The English Novel, nothing was worthy of adult attention in English fiction until Henry James came along. For Ford, the serious European novel began with Diderot:
It was to Diderot—and still more to Stendhal—that the Novel owes its next great step forward … At that point it became suddenly evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore as a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. It came into its own.
95
This new approach to character meant a new approach to form. When character is stable, form is stable and linear—the novelist begins at the beginning, telling us about his hero’s childhood and education, moving decisively forward into the hero’s marriage, and then toward the dramatic crux of the book (something is wrong with the marriage). But if character is changeable, then why begin at the beginning? Surely it would be more effective to begin in the middle, and then move backward, and then move forward, and then move backward again? This is just the kind of form Conrad would use in Lord Jim and The Secret Agent, and Ford in The Good Soldier. Ford, again, in his memoir of Conrad:
What was the matter with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship with your fellows you never do go straight forward. You meet an English gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the model of the boy from an English public school of the finest type. You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic, dishonest in matters of small change, but unexpectedly self-sacrificing, a dreadful liar, but a most painfully careful student of Lepidoptera and, finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who was once, under another name, hammered on the Stock Exchange … To get such a man in fiction you could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and then work backwards and forwards over his past …
Is it contradictory to have defended the flatness of characters while simultaneously arguing that the novel has become a more sophisticated analyst of deep, self-divided characters? No, if one resists both Forster’s idea of flatness (flatness is more interesting than he makes it out to be) and his idea of roundness (roundness is more complicated than he makes it out to be). In both cases, subtlety of analysis is what is important.
Form
96
Form is related to story as a crowd is related to the people in that crowd. The crowd is the sum, the shape, the outline of the people in it. Likewise, form is the sum, the shape, the outline of the stories it contains. These elements are necessarily related. A certain group of people creates a certain kind of crowd—there’s an obvious difference between a cocktail party and a violent mob, or between two lovers going for a stroll and thousands of people waiting in Times Square for the New Year. Rules of scope and proportion come into play: you can’t fit twenty thousand people into a sitting room, while just two people standing in Times Square on New Year’s Eve would seem not only a category error but a bit forlorn. In similar ways, story is related to, and to some extent determines, form. And form to some extent determines story, just as crowds or parties can take on a life of their own, and drive the activity and mood of the individuals in that crowd. The form of an epistolary novel clearly controls and limits the kind of story that will be told (it limits the communication available to the characters, for instance). Likewise, every novelist knows that the decision to write in the first person sets off a chain of narrative consequences, a calculus of benefits and losses; a formal choice has a determinative effect on the content.
97
Modernism was born out of an understanding that, since reality has changed, the forms of the stories we tell about that reality must also change. If you trust in marriage, God, the progress of history, and the solidity of character, then the fictions you make about that reality may take complementary forms: stories culminate in the solution of marriage; characters examine their consciences, and wrestle with moral dilemmas; and these moral struggles are represented in finished paragraphs and stable language. Plots may be initially opaque but culminate in clarity, and many different plots—as in War and Peace and Middlemarch—prove to be consolingly interrelated: human beings successfully communicate with each other, rather as the plots involving those human beings successfully communicate with each other.
But imagine that these stabilities are crumbling, that they are newly hard to believe in, that faith in them has been shattered by the carnage of the Great War or the calamity of the Holocaust. The form of an artwork may then have to reflect that new uncertainty. Now human beings struggle to communicate with each other; so perhaps a familial proliferation of many plots, warmly interrelated, will suddenly seem inauthentic. History does not seem to be progressing so much as stalling, or self-immolating, so perhaps the fictions set amidst that history must break off, or sliver into fragments, rather than sail on toward marriage and harmony and a spreading consensus. Words no longer seem to connect to their referents, because the surety of meaning has been exploded; words have become like an inflated currency—empty, insultingly worthless. So words must be used differently, with less certainty perhaps, and more self-consciousness: a self-conscious difficulty. Words—as in Beckett, say—may even have to die, to lapse into silence.
98
These are just a few of the ways in which form might have to be responsive to new realities, and it is more or less what Ford Madox Ford meant when he talked about feeling the need to write lives backward and forward rather than simply forward, as before; or what Knut Hamsun meant when he said—around the same time as Ford—that “I dream of a literature with characters in which their very lack of consistency is their basic characteristic”; or what Virginia Woolf meant when she claimed that her generation of modernist artists had to write in what might seem, to an older generation, fragmentary, spasmodic, “unsuccessful” forms.
99
You could say that form becomes newly important in the modern age. For both modernism and postmodernism, form is where contemporary anxieties, preoccupations, and pleasures are inscribed. The frame comes off the painting, or the frame is itself painted over. The found object becomes an artwork, and by implication the artwork becomes a found object. The three-movement musical form is invaded by four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The tidy, “safe” beginnings and endings of Dixieland fray into the ragged, complex improvisations of bebop. A new cultural center in Paris is turned inside out, and wears all its mechanical systems (wiring, air ducts, and the like) on its exterior. Novels are published in loose-leaf form, to be assembled at will by the reader; other fictions dwindle to fragments, are interrupted by silence and a good deal of white space.
Of course, these are the radical, pioneering examples; most art can’t be as magnificently fearless, and must occupy the space most of us live in from day to day, a mixture of obedience and a desire to escape that obedience, of conventional obligation, and a wish to escape that obligation. Jenny Offill’s novel Dept. of Speculation is a good example of a contemporary novel that is quietly radical rather than titanically experimental—its postmodernism seems to be confidently inherited rather than strenuously seized. It may not be titanic, but it is a distinctively modern book: it belongs to, and is produce
d by its times—it wouldn’t even resemble a “proper” novel to George Eliot or Balzac or Henry James, as Elliott Carter’s music or a song by Frank Ocean would be almost unrecognizable to Schubert or Brahms.
Canny and original, it offers a nice example of form and content working in complementary relation. And it is narrated by a woman who is herself caught between obligation and the desire to throw over obligation, between convention and grand disobedience. The unnamed narrator is a youngish mother who lives in New York, and who is also an ambitious writer, committed both to her daughter and to her writing. She is struggling to find the energy and ambition for both tasks. She’s happily married (at least, at first), but her plan was never to get married, because of the danger it posed to creative success and fulfilment: “I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.” She was twenty-nine when she finished her first book, and there has been no successor, and the head of the department where she teaches creative writing has a habit of reminding her of this: “Tick tock. Tick tock.” (The creative clock horridly mimicking the woman’s biological clock.)
The marriage deteriorates. Our narrator discovers that her husband has been having an affair. She suffers all the usual emotions—rage, shock, shame—but is determined to keep the marriage intact. She is near collapse, under terrible mental strain. She wants to check herself into a hospital but is afraid that if she does, she might not come back.
