I'm a Tolstoy

I'm doing a lot of travelling this month, and rather than try to take several books with me, I decided to take just one: War and Peace. This isn't just to save luggage space; it's also a rare opportunity to try to read such a large book in a relatively short span of time.

I'm 650 pages (of about 1220) into it so far, and loving it. For all the normal reasons one might find a big fat novel engrossing: it's fun to get caught up in the soap opera and to know that there's still lots more to read about all these characters and what happens to them. But I'm also struck by how much I'm finding myself identifying with Tolstoy as author. Let me try to explain and qualify that.

A nice anecdote I've heard at third hand: an Oxford philosopher remarking that he's had a good career and is well aware of his abilities as a philosopher. And while he's never written a book as good as Hume's Treatise or Enquiries, he believes he's written a few paragraphs over the course of his career that are as good as almost anything in Hume. By contrast, he claims, were he to live a thousand years and write non-stop, he'd never come up with a single sentence that matches anything in Wittgenstein.

I don't think this anecdote is meant to illustrate Wittgenstein's superior genius to Hume's. The point is rather to distinguish between two different kinds of genius. Hume was great because he accepted the problems and framework of his day, and had thoughts about them that were more original, penetrating, and revolutionary than most of his contemporaries. Hume's intelligence impresses me, but it's also recognizable. He had ideas that I myself might have had in those circumstances, if only I were more brilliant than I am. By contrast, Wittgenstein is like an alien: what makes his work revolutionary isn't simply the keenness of its insight, but the fact that he thinks in a manner that's entirely different from anyone else. That's one reason why it's impossible to imitate his style without seeming obtusely sycophantic, far more so than if you were to try imitating the style of someone less distinctive.

It's a very rough distinction, but I think you can draw it more broadly: there's the kind of genius who sees more sharply than others, and there's the kind of genius who sees in a way that's totally different from others. In the latter group you have not just Wittgenstein but also Nietzsche, Kafka, Gogol, Van Gogh, and Blake. In the former you have not just Hume but also Dickens, Wordsworth, Aristotle, and, of course, Tolstoy. My enthusiasm has always been more for the ones who think totally differently. But I have to acknowledge that my own talents, such as they are, lie more in the camp of the sharp thinkers than the original thinkers.

This acknowledgment has been forced on me with particular clarity reading Tolstoy because I feel I'm reading someone who is more like me than almost any great writer I've read. I'm obviously very different from Tolstoy in very many ways (not least of which being writing talent), but in reading War and Peace I've been struck on numerous occasions by the feeling that someone I don't know is managing to express much of my own perspective about the world far better than I could hope to.

Part of it, I think, is that Tolstoy writes from a somewhat religious point of view without himself being deeply religious at this stage of his career (what does this presage for myself?). There isn't the deep religious yearning you find in Dostoevsky, but rather a sense hovering in the background that, of all the ways one might look on the world and other people, viewing it all sub specie aeternitatus is the most truthful, but that this perspective is one we catch only by glimpses and intimations. I should have bookmarked particular instances--if I don't have them at the tips of my fingers now, I never will. But it leads, first of all, to a rather bemused narrative voice whenever we're considering affairs that seem so crucial in the here and now, whether it's advancement in society or military matters, and this bemusement is occasionally accompanied by a brief allusion to someone's soul and the eternity that soul is struggling to see.

This bemusement leads Tolstoy to show gentle humour in dealing with his characters, but also great affection. (The one major exception so far is Natasha's near-fling with Anatole Kuragin, which struck me as out of character and imposed on her simply to complicate the plot, and it outraged me that he'd resort to such expedience with a character he's built up so lovingly.) It also leads him to write protagonists who are largely autobiographical, and I'm struck by what of myself I recognize in them too. I'm thinking here above all of Pierre Bezukhov, but also Andrei Bolkonsky. And I could say the same of Levin in Anna Karenina, and maybe even Vronsky. What strikes me about these characters most of all is their restlessness. Pierre and Andrei are both eager to lead meaningful lives, and sufficiently sincere in this eagerness that neither of them are particularly interested in the normal routes of advancement that their circumstances make very open for them. But neither of them seems able to settle on a course. Every six months, it seems, they'll throw themselves into some new endeavour--be it Freemasonry, modernizing Russia's bureaucracy, or tending a country estate--with a profound belief that now they've found themselves and are on the right path and that all that occupied them before was mere distraction. And then they'll change course six months later and consider this occupation also a distraction.

I find this a much more believable portrait of existential angst. I don't spend my life at a loss, wondering what to do, and just moping the whole time like some character out of Sartre. My problem is I'm not sure what path to follow. Sometimes I think I should be a philosopher. Sometimes I think I should be a playwright. Sometimes I think these are both distractions from the ascetic religious life I ought to be leading. Or ways of hiding from the life of political engagement that is the only decent way to live. And so on. One reason I think I've made so little progress in any of these directions is that I keep changing my mind and am unable to commit fully to any of them. I lack the clarity (or maybe the narrowness) to have a consistent vision of the good life. (On the other hand, it's only thanks to this restlessness that I've managed to do good work in more than one area.)

I don't feel like Tolstoy is writing primarily about Pierre or Andrei, let alone me. I feel he's writing about himself. I think this also comes through in the narrative voice that has this detached sense that there are deeper things that lie just beyond the fanfare that's distracting us. I don't think Tolstoy (at the time of War and Peace, at least) was writing as someone who could see beyond this fanfare and was writing from the perspective of an ironic knower. Rather, I think he was himself very much distracted by this fanfare and struggling with his sense that everything he did--including writing one of the world's greatest novels--was just further distraction. He was a man torn between a profound love of life and an ascetic conscience. I feel the same way, stuck somewhere halfway between Shakespeare and Wittgenstein, deeply admiring of both, but unable to follow either wholeheartedly.

And in that respect, I'm unsure whether to call Tolstoy's religious conversion later in life a fulfillment or a betrayal of the restless man who wrote War and Peace. On one hand, he seems to have achieved what his characters aspired to. On the other, it all feels a little phony from what I know of it, more a decision to deny a part of himself that was still very much alive rather than an acceptance of who he truly was. But I really don't know much about Tolstoy. Maybe I should read a biography. As long as I can find one that's shorter than the novels he wrote...

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.")