Tolstoy, fiction, and history

I've now finished War and Peace, which did not disappoint. Besides my disapproval of Natasha's susceptibility to Anatole Kuragin's charms, my only other major reservation is the way that the Nikolai Rostov-Princess Marya-Sonya triangle was resolved by basically silencing Sonya from the last several hundred pages of the book and having some other characters reflect that it's all right since she's a "sterile blossom" anyway. Marya, if anything, is more of a sterile blossom than Sonya, but it suited the narrative so much more to have her marry Nikolai that I think Tolstoy had to basically annihilate Sonya in order to avoid the uncomfortable cruelty of this decision on the author's part.

This criticism ties into a broader concern that I might someday want to write about in more considered detail. It's the question, essentially, of what moral obligation we have to fictional characters. I think this question isn't normally addressed in aesthetics because aesthetics is normally written from the point of view of the audience rather than the creator of a work of art. I think an author does enter into some sort of ethical relationship with his characters, though sorting out just what this relationship is is rather complicated. You can certainly put your characters through difficulties that would be unethical to put real human beings through. However, I think there's some connection between the way we should treat real people and the way we should treat fictional characters, which is, to borrow Kant's maxim, that we should treat them as ends in themselves and not simply as means to other ends. In other words, we shouldn't use fictional characters any more than we should use real live people. One of the things I love about Chekhov is that he gives all of his characters, even the minor ones, an autonomous life that one feels extends beyond the story. His plots are less tidy than, say, Ibsen's, because his characters are more important to him than the story he wants to fit them into. One of the reasons Tolstoy's novels are so rich is that his characters, too, normally seem to extend beyond the stories in which they occur. Which makes it particularly striking and odious when the author suddenly seems to mistreat them for the sake of the story.

Since writing my last post, it's come to my attention that a lot of what I was saying had some similarity to Berlin's "The Hedgehog and the Fox," which I didn't realize until a couple days ago was centrally concerned with Tolstoy and War and Peace. I still haven't read it, so it might be a bit foolish of me to venture further words on Tolstoy's theory of history, but I feel I should put something down, however ignorant.

The main thought is that Tolstoy's view on history parallels the view he aims at in his fiction, which is essentially a God's eye view. I wrote last time about the bemusement with which he looks on various human endeavours, and the sense that the most truthful perspective (perhaps the only truthful perspective) is the one sub specie aeternitatus, which both Tolstoy and his characters seem to achieve only by glimpses and intimations. He seems to disparage historians too for lacking this perspective. Any account of causes and effects in history relies on gross over-simplification and an obtuse arbitrariness as to when to start and end the causal chain one deems relevant. Truly seen, i.e. divinely seen, everything is interconnected, and there is no beginning or end to human affairs, so that singling out any historical narrative is essentially an act of falsification.

How, then, are we to tell history? It seems Tolstoy's answer is that we should tell it something in the manner of War and Peace. That is, rather than look at the isolated actions of the grands hommes of history, we should zoom in and out, sometimes looking at the words and deeds of generals, sometimes at peasants, sometimes at masses of people in huge movements, sometimes at the intimate moments of individuals. Tolstoy's process of selection is ultimately as arbitrary and over-simplified as a historian's, but with two additional virtues. The first is that he has the authorial irony to acknowledge the limitations of his account within the account itself (hence the necessity of the historiographical digressions), and the second is that he has the authorial irony to present each perspective as limited in its way, and through the constant shifts and contrasts to present each perspective as contingent as well. He might not give us the full picture any better than the historians, but at least he helps us see how much we're missing.

All this also led me to reflect on Nietzsche. I think there's a fair amount in Tolstoy that Nietzsche would find sympathetic (I write this in ignorance of whether Nietzsche ever wrote anything about Tolstoy). In his middle period in particular (I'm thinking primarily of Human, All-Too-Human), Nietzsche seems keen to demolish the notion of free will, and to present a conception of human agency as inextricably caught up in causes and processes that are far too large for us to comprehend, and certainly far too large for us to arrogate to ourselves any claim to be acting autonomously or freely. Nietzsche also shares Tolstoy's perspectivism, his sense that we can't present the absolute truth of a matter, but at best can only offer varying perspectives.

Given these similarities, I'm struck by their very different takes on the figure of Napoleon. Tolstoy is witheringly dismissive of Napoleon's role in history, presenting at each point a person swept up in the events--less free to make his own decisions even than the people he was commanding--who nevertheless has the arrogance to think that all of his good fortune is due to his own genius and his misfortune is due to chance, and to persuade historians of this fact as well. Nietzsche, on the other hand, often talks up Napoleon as one of the political manifestations of his free spirits who make their own laws, etc. I can't help but feel Tolstoy's characterization of Napoleon is perhaps closer to the truth, and even closer to Nietzsche's own conception of will and causality. In fact, it's something I'm not entirely clear on within Nietzsche's work, how on one hand we seem not to have free will and on the other hand, history and character are determined by a struggle of wills.

I suppose the solution is that the will Nietzsche writes of isn't the same thing that most people would think of as personal agency. I don't have a single will that I direct at whatever purposes I adopt, but rather am a bundle of competing wills, both creator and creature, and I must first submit my own wills to some guiding law before I can impose that will on the rest of the world. Which is one of the reasons Nietzsche has a complicated admiration for asceticism. But by that criterion, was Napoleon really a Nietzschean free spirit? I don't see any reason to think that Napoleon's success came from some successful inner struggle. Was it that Nietzsche admired him because he was less burdened by conscience, was more an embodiment of the cheerful blond beasts of yore, who did what they wanted without worrying about the consequences? If so, should this admiration be at all qualified by Tolstoy's sense that Napoleon wasn't actually the agent of his many actions and successes? I suppose the best you can say for Napoleon is that, unlike most modern people, the competing wills within him didn't choke one another, and he exhibited an unusual clarity of purpose as a result. But this clarity of purpose surely wasn't due to the sort of liberation of spirit that Nietzsche most admires.

I guess really I ought to have re-read some Nietzsche before writing all that.

More responses

And then reading through the other stuff you wrote... I should note, first, that I say less in response than I maybe should. It's not that I don't find what you say interesting--completely the contrary--but that I don't feel I have much to contribute. I could say, "Wow, I should read Proust," but then I'd find myself saying that a lot. But I do really enjoy getting this overview of your reading.

You mention someone objecting to Berkeley by saying you can't really live his philosophy, and you say you're not thinking of Johnson. I wonder if you're thinking of Hume, who wasn't talking about Berkeley so much as his own sceptical conundrum. I can't remember the exact quote, but basically he says this can all seem deeply perplexing in the study, but as soon as you put the book down and step outside, you can't possibly go about the business of living while taking this scepticism seriously.

Your mention of Proust letting his characters shine through in their individuality, not letting the narrator control them too much, reminds me more than anything of Chekhov. It's the thing I think I most love about Chekhov: he's so generous to his characters. In Ibsen, the characters are caught up in this tragic momentum where they can do nothing to alter their course. In Chekhov, it feels like the plot meanders because the characters have so much freedom to be themselves, as if the author doesn't want to exert the control he'd have to in order to tighten the momentum of the tale. And yet, for all that--because of that, because the wills of the characters are put front and centre and aren't held back--his plays have tremendous tension.

I wonder about this thing about theory cheapening literature. I'm maybe not quite sure what it means, that is, what counts as theory in literature. Would Anna Karenina be better off without its opening sentence, or does that not count as a theoretical explanation of the themes of the novel? I suppose also Proust was writing before much postmodern experimentation had come along. Can Milan Kundera really be called out for theorizing about his own novels while he writes them? I suppose you could object to it, but in Kundera it's a very deliberate narrative strategy rather than simple clumsiness or preachiness.

That's so cool that your published work has earned you fan mail! What was the paper on, and what were the responses like?

As for Foucault and Nietzsche, you bring me back to the course I took on Foucault back in Toronto. I remember a friend of mine saying what he found weird about Foucault is the way that, in Nietzsche, the stuff about genealogy, will, power, and the like all has a kind of spiritual import--it's as if Nietzsche wants to sublime his soul--and in Foucault it all becomes political. Which is the reverse of what you might expect: if you simply described the two thinkers and were asked who you thought influenced whom, you might think that the more down-to-earth politically minded thinker came first, and he was succeeded by this guy who took those practical ideas and ran with them to create a project for the self-overcoming of mankind.

All that said, I seem to remember being told that the Nietzschean influence on Foucault's early work was rather slender (though I've only read bits of Les Mots et les Choses, so what do I know?). I think the suggestion was that, with his essay on Nietzsche, and following it up with Discipline and Punish and the History of Sexuality, Foucault entered a "genealogical" phase, and that his earlier work had been more characterized by "archaeology" and his conception of ruptures. Les Mots et les Choses, for instance, characterizes massive changes in the structure of thought, but doesn't seem to characterize them in terms of will or power enacting this shift.

You wonder why Eric A. Havelock gets almost as much mention as Proust in our tags. I think it's because I've been a little more consistent and diligent in my tagging than you have. But fear not, this post will get a tag for Proust and none for Havelock, so Proust will quickly be leaving Havelock in his dust! I'm also pleased to see Wittgenstein climbing up there. I didn't mention him at all for the first few months, which felt odd. Not that it was deliberate or anything.

Gosh, and now it's past my bedtime. It's Friday, but I'm not going to post either of these today because I'd really like to write to you about Wittgenstein and deconstruction, and I don't want to have sent out a couple posts before I do that. (If I do, I worry that the next time I find a moment to sit down with this blog, I'll be responding to your response to my stuff on thought and language and will run out of time again.) I don't know why I felt the need to flag this. Call it a peculiar sense of honesty--I'd feel oddly deceptive if I led you to believe that I'd just written this as soon as I posted it.

(It's now Monday evening and I can truthfully tell you that I'm writing this last sentence just before I click "Publish Post.")