by Wendy Lesser
Yet that is not the only function of the linguistic scrim. It unites us with the characters, but it also sets us apart from them, as if to suggest with its veiling habit that all insights are partial and most questions unanswerable. When we reach the end of a Penelope Fitzgerald novel, we are generally at a loss. We do not know what will happen next; we may not even fully comprehend what has already happened. Like Henry James at the end of The Bostonians, but with much less of a melodramatic flourish, she leaves us in doubt. In keeping with this, her novels tend to hinge or even end on moments of spontaneous silence. It is in those wordless moments—the ones between the lines, or before the lines begin, or after they end—that her tales have their secret life. What she gives us on the page, she manages to suggest, is only a small part of what is really there.
If Penelope Fitzgerald is the mistress of this technique, then Joseph Conrad is its master. Very few of his novels or novellas come to a firm conclusion. Reaching the end of Nostromo or Lord Jim, the first-time reader almost invariably turns back to the beginning. One finishes Heart of Darkness and realizes that the warning in the title, though ill-heeded, meant what it said: clear answers will never be forthcoming. This obscurity may be in part a function of Conrad’s deep-seated irony, an authorial distance from his characters so extreme that it lends an otherworldly despair to his work—as if God, say, had tried to see into mortal souls but then given it up as a bad job and abandoned us to our random fates. But there is something more human going on here as well, something that can be felt mainly at the level of language. Once again, there is that faint screen, that nearly indiscernible layer of mist, lying between us and the characters. It is not exactly a narrator (though in some of Conrad’s works there is indeed a narrating figure superimposed on the story); it is more of a linguistic slippage. Perhaps this is due to the fact that his first language was Polish and his second French, so that English, when he came to it, always retained some of the tantalizing allure of the incompletely familiar. Perhaps it is due to something else entirely. Whatever the cause, Conrad’s prose has a slightly alienated quality that makes it the perfect environment for inscrutable characters and their incomprehensible actions.
The two novels which seem to me to do this best—to present the inexplicable in a way that draws us completely inside and at the same time leaves us hanging—are The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Both are political novels of a sort, and both reflect an anti-Russian bias that perhaps comes naturally to a Pole. But to be anti-Russian, in the sense of being suspicious of the tsarist government’s autocratic and tentacular reach, is also to be very Russian indeed. It is precisely this attitude that Conrad shares with Turgenev, with Dostoyevsky, with Gogol, with Chekhov, and with all those other pre-revolutionary writers who would not necessarily have felt they had much in common with each other. This Russian atmosphere so permeates Under Western Eyes that the last time I read the novel, I found myself carelessly turning back to the title page to see who had done the translation. I caught myself and laughed, but my mistake had alerted me to a realization: that the novel’s portrayal of Russian activists and Russian spies felt absolutely like a view from within, despite or perhaps even because of its terrifying Conradian irony.
Both the immersion and the distance are habits of mind he could have gleaned from the Russians, and no doubt did. For every writer that came after them, those towering nineteenth-century figures became the essential source, the standard to measure oneself against—and this is as true of writers from China and South Africa as it is for Europeans and Americans. No one had ever before learned to tell the truth as those great Russians did, and no one would ever do it better. I am not sure how to account for their superiority in this regard; I am not even sure how to describe it fully. But if I were to characterize what they had in common, one of the words I would use is authority.
FOUR
AUTHORITY
For those of us who came of age during a period of rebellion and unrest—whether in 1789, 1848, 1917, or 1968—the word is bound to carry a negative connotation. To some, it evokes uniforms, officialdom, governmental interference in the rights and activities of the private individual. To others, it suggests parents, teachers, clergymen, deans, and the whole range of unpleasant “authority figures” designed to prevent one from doing exactly as one wishes. In either case, it is seen as a bad thing, something to be dismantled or at the very least resisted.
But that is not at all the sense in which I mean it here. When I speak of authority in a work of literature, I am referring back to the word’s root, its connection to the idea of authorship. The kind of authority one finds in a literary work is the opposite of the guns-and-uniforms kind (or even the spankings-and-homework kind). It has no legal power to enforce anything. It cannot punish or deprive. It depends for its effect on the acceptance, the acknowledgment, of those receiving it. The writer possesses authority, but only by virtue of the reader who senses it. Not everyone will discern authority in the same set of writers, and people will disagree about which elements give rise to it even if they agree it is there. It is one of the trickiest areas to discuss, and its presence in a given work is impossible to prove to anyone’s complete satisfaction.
One reason it’s always hard to point to literary authority is that it must be partially hidden to succeed. If the author speaks to us in too pushy a manner, or overwhelms his poor little characters with his own huge ego, or rests his hand too heavily on the wheel of the plot, we will fail to credit his creation as real—and real it must be to us, at least on some level, if we are to invest our time and emotions in it. The author who brings a literary work into being must make something out of nothing. He is like a magician in that respect, except he cannot take his bows or beg for our applause, because if we notice him whisking the rabbit out of the hat, we will realize the performance is an illusion.
And now, having written that sentence, I can immediately think of three or four exceptions to it: Shakespeare, through Prospero, begging for our applause at the end of The Tempest; Swift brandishing the rabbit and the hat at us in the footnotes to A Tale of a Tub; Cervantes examining quite explicitly the whole question of an author’s authority; and all sorts of other examples from later in this chapter as well as earlier in this book. But I want to stress the way in which these exceptions prove the rule. They acknowledge the illusion precisely to get it out of the way, so that we can see that something else remains. They establish their own authority by being suspicious of authority in general, aligning themselves with our tendency to question authorial power and thus getting in ahead of us. What is left when they have done so—the residue, after our suspicions have been allayed—is what we take to be true.
The point of all this is that literature can never be just a trick. We need to feel that something more is at stake, that something is truly being created where nothing was before. So the author’s involvement at a human level, his egotistical, self-serving, non-godlike manipulation of words and feelings, must be transformed in some way, disguised, made secret and powerful—though none of these words quite tell the story, because they imply deception, and the essence of authority is its truth.
Literary truths may have little or nothing to do with historical truth. The Furies and Satan are mythical figures brought to life by the power of their authors’ imaginations, and the fact that many people once took them for actual beings has no effect, one way or the other, on how strongly I now credit them when I read the House of Atreus trilogy or Paradise Lost. Shakespeare borrowed his Cleopatra and his Richard II from history, but for me they are no more real than his Juliet and his Othello, whom he made up wholesale. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Cervantes’s Sancho Panza never existed or else existed in a thousand quotidian forms, but either way, each of them has a strongly marked individuality which transcends that of most individuals I have met. This is not to denigrate life, which must in some form be the source—if only a vaporous, indirect source—of all literary authority. It is simply to comment o
n the extent to which the made-up sometimes trumps the actual in terms of believability.
Authority, as I am using it, has nothing to do with the authoritarian. The work that commands us to believe in it by virtue of its right to govern our thoughts—Pravda, say, or Mein Kampf, or the more regulatory passages of Leviticus—will have little hold on our imaginations once that right has been removed. This is not just a matter of tone. It would be inaccurate to say that authoritarian works command while works with authority persuade, for even the word “persuasion” is too blinkered, too end-achieving, too personally manipulative to cover the methods employed by the most powerful literature. (But the words “method,” “employ,” and “power” are also suspect here. They are blunt instruments standing in for something that is far more delicate and in fact nearly indiscernible.) The author who possesses authority has no palpable designs on us: we barely exist for him, just as he barely exists for us. In the face of the literary work’s reality, we bystanders—the many readers, the sole writer—become nonentities, like Shakespeare.
Which is not to say that we disappear entirely. The good writer remains vitally present in every line he writes, and even when the mortal author dies, the voice on the page is still alive with that individuality. Nor can the reader ever erase herself completely: there is no such thing as a purely impersonal reading. We bring ourselves to everything we do, and the more honestly and seriously we do it, the more we bring along the whole of ourselves. So I would be lying if I suggested that the two people engaged in the essential literary transaction, the writer and his reader, could ever vanish. But their relation to each other becomes more, and less, than personal. By virtue of the literary work over which they meet, the reader and the writer both begin to loosen their hold on selfhood. This is a grip that most of us maintain, quite rightly, throughout our conscious lives; we need to do so if we are not to be viewed as mad by ourselves and by others. I have nothing against selfhood. I rely on it daily, hourly even, and it fuels a great deal of my existence. It even fuels my existence as a reader, for that self is the one who chooses to take up a given book, to finish it or put it down, to engage with the characters, to see herself reflected in them. And yet at some point in the process of reading, if the work has authority enough, the self yields. It ceases to have objections or prejudices of its own. This is what allows the Buddhist to be gripped by Paradise Lost, the seasick-prone landlubber to immerse herself in Moby-Dick, the atheist to fall in love with The Brothers Karamazov.
* * *
Which brings us back to the Russian writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These writers, it seems to me, are in possession of a uniquely powerful conviction, fully and effectively transmitted to us, that what they are putting down on the page, though it might be labeled “fiction,” is the truth. More than any other comparable collection of writers, the Russians evidently believed that to tell the truth is literature’s highest calling, its primary aim, superseding all the usual fripperies such as stylistic acrobatics, career advancement, obeisance to tradition, rebellion against tradition, and other common forms of authorial game-playing. This is not to say that they don’t play games—they adore linguistic flourishes and newfangled constructions, as a quick glance at everything from Nikolai Gogol’s surreal “The Nose” to Andrei Bely’s fragmented, dreamlike Petersburg will suggest. But the games, however humorous, are always introduced for a serious purpose. They support the naked truth-telling even as they seem to embroider and disguise it.
There is, besides, our sense of the risks these writers have taken to bring us their truths. The risks needn’t be bodily threats to survival (though they sometimes were), and they needn’t be explicitly political or ideological (though some sort of politics was always a part of that Russian atmosphere, if only in the background). Yet something grave must be at stake. In order to imbue their words with the required weight, writers as different as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy, Goncharov and Herzen and Chekhov, must all convince us—quietly, almost invisibly, and without self-pity or self-aggrandizement—that it has cost them something to produce their revelations. The cost might be personal or public, psychological or economic, a nagging, constant loss or a violent, sudden one. Most likely it is a combination, and one that couldn’t be defined or quantified even by the author himself. The point is that truth is not free or easily come by. And if it costs these writers something to reveal it, it also costs us something to take it in. That is why reading a novel like Crime and Punishment or Fathers and Sons can be so viscerally painful even as it also brings us a special kind of pleasure.
This is not to say that Russian literature is irreversibly solemn or grave. There can be humor (though, granted, always in a sharp, ironic vein), and there can even be extreme kindness. One of the most darkly humorous books of the period is Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov, which mingles a perspicacious eye for the truth with a strong sense of authorial generosity. If there is no hope for Ilya Ilyich Oblomov by the end, that is only a reflection of the character’s own accurate self-assessment—and there does seem to be some version of hope available to others, if only of a tenuous, temporary kind.
I first tried reading Oblomov when I was in my twenties, but it bored me, for reasons that I now see reflected more on me than on the book. In my impatience, I could not last through the part of the novel (representing at least the first hundred pages or more) where Oblomov simply won’t do anything. He won’t submit himself to being dressed or shaved by his serf-servant; he won’t allow his rooms to be cleaned; he won’t handle his own urgent business matters; he won’t read a novel, or visit friends, or go on pleasurable expeditions; in fact, he won’t even get out of bed. When I was twenty-five, I figured I had got the picture (lazy Russian nobleman in decline, representing whole lazy class in decline), and I gave up.
But lately I picked it up and finished the entire book, deciding in the course of my reading that this was one of the great pieces of nineteenth-century literature, perhaps even equal in quality to the works of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, but more akin in tone to, say, the Eça de Queirós of The Maias. For what happens to Oblomov, in the parts of the novel I had never made it through before, is that he falls in love with a sensitive and intelligent young woman named Olga, and she falls in love with him. Being Oblomov, he eventually loses her through laziness, and then reverts to his previous sloth; in this respect, we seem to be following the usual predetermined path of the tragic Russian figure. But the novel does not end there. Olga goes on to marry Oblomov’s friend Andrei Stolz—a great character, and a great friend—and together Stolz and Olga try to rescue Oblomov from his life of sleep. That they do not succeed does not necessarily mean the novel ends unhappily, for though the title bears his name, Oblomov is not the only character we care about here.
Imagine a version of Remembrance of Things Past in which Marcel’s lover Albertine, whom he is constantly doubting, hiding, rejecting, and then wanting back, was able to fall in love with someone else and end up happily with him (or her); imagine a version that took us outside the mind of the everlasting Marcel and into the minds of other characters—including not only Albertine, but also her new love, and not only upper-class people, but also Marcel’s housekeeper and cook. Imagine a final volume in which we looked back on all these people not just from the position of Marcel, as we do in Proust’s own Past Recaptured, but from the perspective of a friend who outlives him. It would be a different book, of course, and we would lose a great deal: Marcel’s relentless introversion is part of what makes him memorable as a narrator, and valuable to us. But something like this revised Proust is what we get in Oblomov—a thoughtful, sharp-eyed, but also generous look at particular characters in their particular setting, with all the intelligence of a broad social commentary (for Oblomovism was a recognizable characteristic of Russian aristocrats in decline: I was at least right about that, in my callow youth), but with all the virtues of an astute psychological novel as well. Goncharov’s form of authorial
truth—a bit like Chekhov’s, in this respect—mainly takes the form of unanswerable questions voiced by the characters themselves, whose lives the novel penetrates in a way that is at once piercing and tender. I have never read anything else quite like it, and certainly nobody had in 1858, when it first came out in Russia.
Alexander Herzen, the great nonfiction writer and activist who died in exile in 1870, had some instructive ideas about why the literature of his contemporaries carried the authority it did. “The terrible consequences of human speech in Russia necessarily give it added power,” he wrote in his masterpiece My Past and Thoughts, an autobiography which is itself one of the key works of nineteenth-century Russian literature. “The voice of a free man is welcomed with sympathy and reverence, because with us to lift it up one absolutely must have something to say. One does not so lightly decide to publish one’s thoughts when at the end of every page one sees looming a gendarme.”
