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.

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...