Since my last post, I've gone on a whirlwind vacation to Gettysburg, Washington DC, and Philadelphia, and then returned to Massachusetts for the summer. I'm still missing my puppy a lot; I have to catch myself to not call to her when I walk in the door, and the house is so quiet without her. But, I'm getting used to it and my mom and I are working on the yard to make an area for the dogs, where we'll bury their ashes.
I've also started reading for fun, something I look forward to every summer. Jarrod and I have a tradition of reading massive books all summer; our first was James Joyce's Ulysses back in 2008, then Anna Karenina in 2009, last year was In Search of Lost Time (Jarrod didn't really stick to that one...), and this year, we're reading War and Peace. This is my second foray into Leo Tolstoy's literature, and I'm just as captivated the second time around. I love Tolstoy's characterization; every character has the inconsistencies and imperfections, the ugliness and beauty of humanity.
In the first book, I found the death scene of Count Bezuhov most fascinating, especially in comparison to the death scene of Nikolai Levin in Anna Karenina. Nikolai Levin's death spurred a deep meditation on mortality and a revelation of the fragility and mystery of life in his brother, Konstantin, but in War and Peace, the final sufferings of Count Bezuhov brought out only petty, ugly, undignified bickering over a will. The difference between a poor death and a rich death is striking in these two books. Nikolai died in a filthy hotel room, penniless, surrounded only by his mistress, his brother Konstantin, and Konstantin's wife Kitty. He was desperate to live and his death was terrible and painful. Count Bezuhov does not cling to life so fiercely, and dies in his massive estate, one of the largest in Russia, surrounded by his large family. A greater difference lies in the reactions of the spectators to the death throes, however; where Kostya is inspired with awe and terror, and contemplates his own mortality and the secret knowledge of death, the potential heirs to Bezuhov's fortune elide the mystery and horror of death. They fixate on what will outlive the Count, his enormous fortune, and fight with each other over the will with hideous cunning and selfishness. Their behavior was shameful, far more shameful than Nikolai Levin's desperation to continue living, his refusal to accept his fate.
A more direct confrontation with death occurs among the soldiers in battle at the beginning of Book Two; the young Nikolai Rostov experiences war and the imminence of death for the first time. I'll write more about this after I finish the second book, but for now, I notice a pattern in Tolstoy's writing, that people will use any means possible to avoid a confrontation with mortality and death, and so the only way to face it is to strip away all the distractions and view it in its naked horror.
Showing posts with label Tolstoy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tolstoy. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Pink Moon
Death is a catastrophe which no one can ever fully anticipate. Even when we know it is coming, that knowledge is abstracted and incomplete; my knowledge is merely second-hand, through the deaths of grandparents, aunts, uncles, neighbors, teachers, and it will remain so. I am not certain that the body ever experiences its own death, or only the process of dying. The decline of health and the sensation of a diminished life may be all that we feel until consciousness finally ceases. That moment, the intersection at which life ends and death occurs, may remain a mystery forever.
Somehow, that moment still holds tremendous power, even if it's an experience on which one can never reflect, which ends as soon as it begins. It's impossible to fully conceive, and the element of the unknown is part of why death is so terrifying. But another part of the fear is that we have an instinctual sense of what death is, and confronting the end of consciousness, the "impossibility of possibility" and its finality is terrifying. We lose consciousness in sleep, but it's never total; we dream, as a sort of assurance that the brain is still active, that consciousness has not completely abandoned us, and that the waking perceptions will arrive again to displace these sleeping dream visions.
But death is final. Waking will not come, and the self is lost, irrecoverably.
I often look to literature as a means of analyzing these mysteries. Death can never be fully elucidated, but it's presence in literature does provide opportunities to ponder it. Through the deaths of fictional characters, I am led to ask, How does one confront that finality of one's own death? Is it possible to face it joyfully, like Father Zosima's brother in The Brothers Karamazov? Although he was young, Markel comforts his weeping mother.
"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would we should have heaven on earth the next day" (BK, Part II, Book VI).
There is subsmission in Markel's dying days; he accepts the will of God, and he is not bitter. Instead, in his final days, he comes to comprehend life. He lives more fully in his acceptance of death than he ever did when he was healthy. He even died "fully conscious... up to his last hour he did not change," but accepted his death calmly, full of joy and love (BK). Father Zosima's narrative of his own life and his experiences with the deaths of others provides comfort for his followers-- not really for himself, since he has already accepted death and is waiting for it patiently.
Is it possible to accept death and be done with the fear? Tolstoy offers a very different depiction of death in Anna Karenina, with Levin's brother Nikolai. He is never peaceful in confronting his death, even though he has long known it as imminent. In terrible pain, he continues to believe that the medicine will cure him, that by ferociously clinging to life, he might drive death away. He cries out that he does not want to die, and his final words are, "Not yet... soon" (Tolstoy 574). Nikolai embodies the rationalist kind of society against which Alyosha Karamazov is positioned; Nikolai mistakenly places all of his faith in medicine, and fails to achieve the kind of introspection that characterizes Markel Zosima's death and Alyosha's guidance to the schoolboys in the death of Ilyusha. When Levin rushes to visit his brother before his death, he expects the dying man to say "something of peculiar gravity and importance, but Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting that he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped" (Tolstoy 559). Nikolai thinks of neither life nor death, but only pays obsessive attention to his present condition, bearing "the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living" (Tolstoy 560). This attitude is so vastly different from Markel's demeanor; although he was just a boy himself, he urged his younger brother (Father Zosima) to go play and live, because he could not. Nikolai Levin covets life so greedily that he unknowingly squanders it in his final days.
Yet, the death of Markel is so idealized that one has to wonder if such an approach is possible; there is no sign of suffering in Markel's death, and Zosima insists that the boy somehow remained fully conscious until he died. Nikolai, in contrast, suffers greatly, and the chapters detailing his death emphasize his physical anguish. Perhaps the spiritual anguish is inevitable in the face of such bodily pain.
Levin, however, faces Nikolai's death without despair (though still with horror and fear), because he is taken outside himself in his brother's death, a level of abstraction that he could not attain in facing his own mortality when he had seen his sickly brother the previous autumn. Unlike Nikolai, Levin abandons himself and surrenders to life and all its incomprehensibility. Levin is thereby removed from tragedy; by holding onto the self so desperately, his brother and Anna both meet tragic ends, but Levin is able to transcend himself. He experiences life more fully by accepting it as it is, even though he is still afraid and uncomfortable with death.
But Levin does not die in the course of the book. His brother's death is followed immediately by his wife's pregnancy; he immerses himself in life, abandoning the question of death.
Perhaps that is how death should fit into life; it explodes into consciousness at particular moments and demands its due attention, but it must fade back into the background and allow life to continue. One should be too busy living to worry about dying; the time to think of death is when death arrives. Does this leave us unprepared? I'm not sure. Until I am dying, I can only experience death in the abstract, in times like now when I have learned of a family member's death. I can ruminate on it, and embrace this experience of the return of the ultimately repressed, the intrusion of death into life, but this feeling cannot last. Death will necessarily slip away from me again, until the next time, whether it's a recognition of the frailty of my own existence or the loss of someone else. It's an uncertainty that I must accept; I can never know when exactly death will return again, but I do know that I cannot outrun it, that I must stay with it for a while and learn from it.
The lesson from the few literary deaths that I have detailed here has been, for the living characters to discover something about life. Levin discovers the wonder and awe in the two extremes of life, its inception and its end; he experiences the power of both. Markel Zosima learns to live and love; in losing his own life, he knows life's true beauty and value. Life and death are linked, and one teaches us about the other.
Somehow, that moment still holds tremendous power, even if it's an experience on which one can never reflect, which ends as soon as it begins. It's impossible to fully conceive, and the element of the unknown is part of why death is so terrifying. But another part of the fear is that we have an instinctual sense of what death is, and confronting the end of consciousness, the "impossibility of possibility" and its finality is terrifying. We lose consciousness in sleep, but it's never total; we dream, as a sort of assurance that the brain is still active, that consciousness has not completely abandoned us, and that the waking perceptions will arrive again to displace these sleeping dream visions.
But death is final. Waking will not come, and the self is lost, irrecoverably.
I often look to literature as a means of analyzing these mysteries. Death can never be fully elucidated, but it's presence in literature does provide opportunities to ponder it. Through the deaths of fictional characters, I am led to ask, How does one confront that finality of one's own death? Is it possible to face it joyfully, like Father Zosima's brother in The Brothers Karamazov? Although he was young, Markel comforts his weeping mother.
"Don't cry, mother," he would answer, "life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won't see it; if we would we should have heaven on earth the next day" (BK, Part II, Book VI).
There is subsmission in Markel's dying days; he accepts the will of God, and he is not bitter. Instead, in his final days, he comes to comprehend life. He lives more fully in his acceptance of death than he ever did when he was healthy. He even died "fully conscious... up to his last hour he did not change," but accepted his death calmly, full of joy and love (BK). Father Zosima's narrative of his own life and his experiences with the deaths of others provides comfort for his followers-- not really for himself, since he has already accepted death and is waiting for it patiently.
Is it possible to accept death and be done with the fear? Tolstoy offers a very different depiction of death in Anna Karenina, with Levin's brother Nikolai. He is never peaceful in confronting his death, even though he has long known it as imminent. In terrible pain, he continues to believe that the medicine will cure him, that by ferociously clinging to life, he might drive death away. He cries out that he does not want to die, and his final words are, "Not yet... soon" (Tolstoy 574). Nikolai embodies the rationalist kind of society against which Alyosha Karamazov is positioned; Nikolai mistakenly places all of his faith in medicine, and fails to achieve the kind of introspection that characterizes Markel Zosima's death and Alyosha's guidance to the schoolboys in the death of Ilyusha. When Levin rushes to visit his brother before his death, he expects the dying man to say "something of peculiar gravity and importance, but Nikolai began speaking of his health. He found fault with the doctor, regretting that he had not a celebrated Moscow doctor. Levin saw that he still hoped" (Tolstoy 559). Nikolai thinks of neither life nor death, but only pays obsessive attention to his present condition, bearing "the stern, reproachful expression of the dying man's envy of the living" (Tolstoy 560). This attitude is so vastly different from Markel's demeanor; although he was just a boy himself, he urged his younger brother (Father Zosima) to go play and live, because he could not. Nikolai Levin covets life so greedily that he unknowingly squanders it in his final days.
Yet, the death of Markel is so idealized that one has to wonder if such an approach is possible; there is no sign of suffering in Markel's death, and Zosima insists that the boy somehow remained fully conscious until he died. Nikolai, in contrast, suffers greatly, and the chapters detailing his death emphasize his physical anguish. Perhaps the spiritual anguish is inevitable in the face of such bodily pain.
Levin, however, faces Nikolai's death without despair (though still with horror and fear), because he is taken outside himself in his brother's death, a level of abstraction that he could not attain in facing his own mortality when he had seen his sickly brother the previous autumn. Unlike Nikolai, Levin abandons himself and surrenders to life and all its incomprehensibility. Levin is thereby removed from tragedy; by holding onto the self so desperately, his brother and Anna both meet tragic ends, but Levin is able to transcend himself. He experiences life more fully by accepting it as it is, even though he is still afraid and uncomfortable with death.
But Levin does not die in the course of the book. His brother's death is followed immediately by his wife's pregnancy; he immerses himself in life, abandoning the question of death.
Perhaps that is how death should fit into life; it explodes into consciousness at particular moments and demands its due attention, but it must fade back into the background and allow life to continue. One should be too busy living to worry about dying; the time to think of death is when death arrives. Does this leave us unprepared? I'm not sure. Until I am dying, I can only experience death in the abstract, in times like now when I have learned of a family member's death. I can ruminate on it, and embrace this experience of the return of the ultimately repressed, the intrusion of death into life, but this feeling cannot last. Death will necessarily slip away from me again, until the next time, whether it's a recognition of the frailty of my own existence or the loss of someone else. It's an uncertainty that I must accept; I can never know when exactly death will return again, but I do know that I cannot outrun it, that I must stay with it for a while and learn from it.
The lesson from the few literary deaths that I have detailed here has been, for the living characters to discover something about life. Levin discovers the wonder and awe in the two extremes of life, its inception and its end; he experiences the power of both. Markel Zosima learns to live and love; in losing his own life, he knows life's true beauty and value. Life and death are linked, and one teaches us about the other.
Rest in peace, Uncle Doug
Friday, February 12, 2010
Love and Literature
This post isn't just for the sake of Valentine's Day; love is a constant theme in literature, and regardless of the day on the calendar, it's worth contemplating.
This is not the first time I've written about love in books on this blog, either. My first post, on Albert Camus' The Plague, remarked on the novel's rather bleak outlook on human relationships. Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about marriage. Romantic longing is a motif throughout the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, and becomes even more prominent in "Swann In Love." Love is part of the human condition, a mysterious force that affects everyone. Authors will write about it, scholars will analyze it, and everyone else is striving to figure it out too.
I'm uncertain of how helpful literature is in that quest to figure it out; novels, plays, and short stories often dramatize when love fails. Jealousy, infidelity, disparity between ideals and reality, objectification, conflict of natures, fears of lost freedom, desire for possession: all of these are well-represented in literature. In Camus, love generally fails because of the impossibility of mutual freedom. In a similar vein, for Tolstoy, love is a struggle for power and control. Anna and Vronsky attempt to dominate each other and strive to break the other's desire for independence in Anna Karenina. They use guilt and anger as tools of manipulation, to force the other to make grandiose declarations of their love. Their affair ends tragically. So does the marriage in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata"; it ends in death, caused by domestic violence after a fit of jealousy and lucid fury. Even the one "successful" couple in Anna Karenina, Levin and Kitty, complete their narrative with Levin's withdrawal from his family life as he retreats into solitary spirituality. He and Kitty are alienated; she can never comprehend his spiritual experience, and he only reluctantly returns to her and their son in the novel's final scene. Tolstoy offers a view of love as an impossible, frustrating attempt to bring two individuals into union through possession.
Possession and love are also closely linked in Proust, although in a less violent and tragic way than in Tolstoy. In Search of Lost Time's first instance of love, between the narrator as a young child and his mother, is so fulfilling because the narrator believes that he possesses his mother completely. With her, he feels "that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone" (Proust, p. 261). The narrator feels at ease with his mother's love because, he believes, that when she kisses him goodnight, he occupies the entirety of her thoughts and feelings. In that kiss, she exists for him alone. Sartre points out that the narrator requires not only physical possession of the person he loves: "It is certain that the lover wishes to capture a 'consciousness'" of his beloved (McDonald, p. 199). In this episode of the maternal kiss, the physical contact fulfills the desire for physical possession, but what distinguishes her kiss from that of any subsequent mistress is that he may be secure that there is not "the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone." He dominates her consciousness in that evening kiss; in true Freudian fashion, he is confident that this mother is an object without her own independent consciousness. She is the Freudian archetype of an object of desire, and to compound this desire further, it is not even challenged by his father; in fact, the night when the boy appeared in the hallway to demand a kiss as his parents went to bed, his father suggested that his mother sleep in the boy's room, rather than with him. Apparently, the narrator never feels that complete and uncomplicated possession of a woman, and I think it's because, as an adult, he is no longer able to so easily deny the subjectivity of another.
Swann's love for Odette also involves his belief that he possesses her. Proust remarks that, "in his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her" (p. 277). Indeed, Swann fails to find Odette physically attractive or even particularly interesting, but her persistence in flattering him provokes love. He does not stop there, though; he sustains his love by superimposing an ideal Odette over the real woman, obscuring her with similarities he draws between her physical appearance and Boticelli's Zipphora, with invented virtues she lacks entirely. Through this idealized image and disregarding the actual Odette, he achieves total possession; she becomes his creation, and thus completely under his control. It is not easy to maintain this control, however; Swann has to continuously delude himself and dispell his recognition of her separateness.
Love in Proust, however, is not so simply explained-- not even Swann's delusional love for Odette. Mixed with this desire to possess is the intrigue of mystery, remoteness, and the exotic. Part of why Swann finds Odette desireable is her position outside of proper society; she is described as a demimondaine (a woman of ill repute, on par with a prostitute), which is wildly divergent from his aristocratic social sphere. Her perverse secret life simultaneously titillates Swann (because she is exotic and her sordid world a mystery to him) and disturbs him (because he still longs to possess her). The narrator experiences similar ambivalence toward Swann's daughter Gilberte. When he sees her, he feels that she looks at him with disdain and mockery; at this assertion of her superiority, of an unbridgeable gap between them, his "humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to bring her down to its own" (Proust, p. 200). This is the desire for, if not possession, then at least admission into her now-exotic world of dinners with Bergotte (an author the narrator admires) and his family's refusal to receive her or her mother in their home. Yet the remoteness from himself and his experiences, the notion that she occupies a separate plane of existence, is what first stimulated his interest. He is conflicted between wanting possession (symbolized in his voracious attempts to remember the nearby hawthorns and bringing up her name in conversation whenever possible) and attraction to the distance that separates them.
The question remains, however; is this useful? In Search of Lost Time has thus far presented love in terms of pain, unfulfilled longing, possessiveness, and self-delusion. Not exactly a model for a good relationship. Tolstoy of course offers few comforting words, and Camus and Sartre declare love impossible because mutual freedom cannot exist. I could give numerous other literary examples of failed love or superficial love, but I've already gone on for long enough. In spite of all this negativity, though, I believe that love does work, it doesn't have to be possessive and frustrating (although I think that there is truth in the simultaneous desire for complete union and maintaining separateness).
This weekend, I'm going to read the Symposium, and I may return here with some better insight into the nature of love. But for now, I will invoke Sartre again, in a more helpful way. Perhaps Sartre was right in saying that the thing itself can never be described. Love is the thing, and attempts to describe it necessarily distort it, constrain it, reduce it. In that case, I shall let it be as it is, in its entirety, without any attempt to label and control it. That may be the best approach to love: not to elaborate or put it into a narrative.
Love is. And that's all that needs to be said.
This is not the first time I've written about love in books on this blog, either. My first post, on Albert Camus' The Plague, remarked on the novel's rather bleak outlook on human relationships. Leo Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata" is about marriage. Romantic longing is a motif throughout the Combray chapter of Swann's Way, and becomes even more prominent in "Swann In Love." Love is part of the human condition, a mysterious force that affects everyone. Authors will write about it, scholars will analyze it, and everyone else is striving to figure it out too.
I'm uncertain of how helpful literature is in that quest to figure it out; novels, plays, and short stories often dramatize when love fails. Jealousy, infidelity, disparity between ideals and reality, objectification, conflict of natures, fears of lost freedom, desire for possession: all of these are well-represented in literature. In Camus, love generally fails because of the impossibility of mutual freedom. In a similar vein, for Tolstoy, love is a struggle for power and control. Anna and Vronsky attempt to dominate each other and strive to break the other's desire for independence in Anna Karenina. They use guilt and anger as tools of manipulation, to force the other to make grandiose declarations of their love. Their affair ends tragically. So does the marriage in Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata"; it ends in death, caused by domestic violence after a fit of jealousy and lucid fury. Even the one "successful" couple in Anna Karenina, Levin and Kitty, complete their narrative with Levin's withdrawal from his family life as he retreats into solitary spirituality. He and Kitty are alienated; she can never comprehend his spiritual experience, and he only reluctantly returns to her and their son in the novel's final scene. Tolstoy offers a view of love as an impossible, frustrating attempt to bring two individuals into union through possession.
Possession and love are also closely linked in Proust, although in a less violent and tragic way than in Tolstoy. In Search of Lost Time's first instance of love, between the narrator as a young child and his mother, is so fulfilling because the narrator believes that he possesses his mother completely. With her, he feels "that untroubled peace which no mistress, in later years, has ever been able to give me, since one has doubts of them even when one believes in them, and never can possess their hearts as I used to receive, in a kiss, my mother's heart, whole and entire, without qualm or reservation, without the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone" (Proust, p. 261). The narrator feels at ease with his mother's love because, he believes, that when she kisses him goodnight, he occupies the entirety of her thoughts and feelings. In that kiss, she exists for him alone. Sartre points out that the narrator requires not only physical possession of the person he loves: "It is certain that the lover wishes to capture a 'consciousness'" of his beloved (McDonald, p. 199). In this episode of the maternal kiss, the physical contact fulfills the desire for physical possession, but what distinguishes her kiss from that of any subsequent mistress is that he may be secure that there is not "the smallest residue of an intention that was not for me alone." He dominates her consciousness in that evening kiss; in true Freudian fashion, he is confident that this mother is an object without her own independent consciousness. She is the Freudian archetype of an object of desire, and to compound this desire further, it is not even challenged by his father; in fact, the night when the boy appeared in the hallway to demand a kiss as his parents went to bed, his father suggested that his mother sleep in the boy's room, rather than with him. Apparently, the narrator never feels that complete and uncomplicated possession of a woman, and I think it's because, as an adult, he is no longer able to so easily deny the subjectivity of another.
Swann's love for Odette also involves his belief that he possesses her. Proust remarks that, "in his younger days a man dreams of possessing the heart of the woman whom he loves; later, the feeling that he possesses a woman's heart may be enough to make him fall in love with her" (p. 277). Indeed, Swann fails to find Odette physically attractive or even particularly interesting, but her persistence in flattering him provokes love. He does not stop there, though; he sustains his love by superimposing an ideal Odette over the real woman, obscuring her with similarities he draws between her physical appearance and Boticelli's Zipphora, with invented virtues she lacks entirely. Through this idealized image and disregarding the actual Odette, he achieves total possession; she becomes his creation, and thus completely under his control. It is not easy to maintain this control, however; Swann has to continuously delude himself and dispell his recognition of her separateness.
Love in Proust, however, is not so simply explained-- not even Swann's delusional love for Odette. Mixed with this desire to possess is the intrigue of mystery, remoteness, and the exotic. Part of why Swann finds Odette desireable is her position outside of proper society; she is described as a demimondaine (a woman of ill repute, on par with a prostitute), which is wildly divergent from his aristocratic social sphere. Her perverse secret life simultaneously titillates Swann (because she is exotic and her sordid world a mystery to him) and disturbs him (because he still longs to possess her). The narrator experiences similar ambivalence toward Swann's daughter Gilberte. When he sees her, he feels that she looks at him with disdain and mockery; at this assertion of her superiority, of an unbridgeable gap between them, his "humiliated heart sought to rise to Gilberte's level or to bring her down to its own" (Proust, p. 200). This is the desire for, if not possession, then at least admission into her now-exotic world of dinners with Bergotte (an author the narrator admires) and his family's refusal to receive her or her mother in their home. Yet the remoteness from himself and his experiences, the notion that she occupies a separate plane of existence, is what first stimulated his interest. He is conflicted between wanting possession (symbolized in his voracious attempts to remember the nearby hawthorns and bringing up her name in conversation whenever possible) and attraction to the distance that separates them.
The question remains, however; is this useful? In Search of Lost Time has thus far presented love in terms of pain, unfulfilled longing, possessiveness, and self-delusion. Not exactly a model for a good relationship. Tolstoy of course offers few comforting words, and Camus and Sartre declare love impossible because mutual freedom cannot exist. I could give numerous other literary examples of failed love or superficial love, but I've already gone on for long enough. In spite of all this negativity, though, I believe that love does work, it doesn't have to be possessive and frustrating (although I think that there is truth in the simultaneous desire for complete union and maintaining separateness).
This weekend, I'm going to read the Symposium, and I may return here with some better insight into the nature of love. But for now, I will invoke Sartre again, in a more helpful way. Perhaps Sartre was right in saying that the thing itself can never be described. Love is the thing, and attempts to describe it necessarily distort it, constrain it, reduce it. In that case, I shall let it be as it is, in its entirety, without any attempt to label and control it. That may be the best approach to love: not to elaborate or put it into a narrative.
Love is. And that's all that needs to be said.
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