Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe
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Lost in the Shadow of the Word: Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810134133 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2016 |
| Pages: | 376 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 16.50(h) x 1.00(d) |
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Lost in the Shadow of the Word
Space, Time, and Freedom in Interwar Eastern Europe
By Benjamin Paloff
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3414-0
CHAPTER 1
The Metaphysics of Reading In Between
A remarkable phenomenon: the more our immediacy absorbs us, the more we feel the need to offset it, so that we live, in one and the same moment, within the world and outside it. Hence, when we confront the sideshow of empires, all that remains for us to do is seek a middle term between the skull's grin and serenity.
— E. M. Cioran
Though intermediacy as a theme of interwar Eastern European literature was energized by dramatic shifts in the modern conception of space and time, it is ultimately rooted in a problem fundamental to the philosophy of representation, namely: How can I represent the unity of Being — what Bruno Schulz will call the "extreme monism of substance" — if my knowledge of reality is always divided between inner and outer experience, between the subjective and the objective, and ultimately between the episodic nature of memory and the indifferent continuity of the exterior world? In short, how can I represent this totality when representation itself, whether in literature, the plastic arts, or thought, peels off from and betrays that unity?
While this epistemological dichotomy is ages old, we may just as well ask what it is about European discourses in the early twentieth century that makes them especially fertile ground for representing in-betweenness. The answer lies in changes within the European milieu, in the evolving understanding of how individuals exist in space-time. This was a period when technological, scientific, and philosophical advances were closing in on the monism-dualism divide, albeit from different directions. At the turn of the century, and for the first time in human history, people living in distant villages could imagine that they shared the same time — their respective town clocks were now synchronized — and space, since it was now possible to travel efficiently from one place to another with advance knowledge of when one would depart and when one would arrive. With the advent of the cinematograph, artists, scientists, and the urban public could finally visualize simultaneous action in multiple locations. A world that for centuries had been defined by differences of culture, language, religion, and class was giving way to the highly integrated, multicultural, and urban existence more familiar to us today.
Of course, this modernization was not yet an accomplished fact, and in the interwar period there remained enough tension between a subjective approach to experience, rooted in intuition, and its objective counterpart, based in disinterested observation, for the public disagreements of philosophical partisans to make the international news. In his last major work, Edmund Husserl identified this tension as a "crisis" of knowledge, noting that "the difficulty which has plagued psychology, not just in our time but for centuries — its own peculiar 'crisis' — has a central significance both for the appearance of puzzling, insoluble obscurities in modern, even mathematical sciences and, in connection with that, for the emergence of a set of world-enigmas which were unknown to earlier times." For Husserl, the disciplinary shift of the sciences toward concrete data and mathematical demonstration — he calls this "physicalistic rationalism" — does not relieve humanity of the burden of unraveling "the enigma of subjectivity." On the contrary, the rapid accumulation of knowledge about the world — which Husserl, a mathematician by training, otherwise lauds — makes it all the more urgent for us to understand how we, as individuals, fit into a universe so indifferent to our individuality.
Accordingly, we are not dealing merely with a crisis of knowledge in a scientific sense but with a crisis in the very constitution of subjectivity, what the influential Russian Symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok calls, in a famous 1919 declaration, the "crisis of humanism." Just as Husserl identifies positivist claims toward objectivity as a way of sidelining the subject, Blok sees the crisis, rooted in the Reformation and invigorated by eighteenth-century revolutions, consisting in the individual's being absorbed by the masses. But it is another, later Eastern European thinker, the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, who provides some of the most elegant explications of this tension between individuation and universality:
If I oppose the sole truth of Unity by a necessarily deceptive Multiplicity — if, in other words, I identify the other with a phantom — my rebellion is meaningless, since to exist it must start from the irreducibility of individuals, from their condition as monads, circumscribed essences. Every act institutes and rehabilitates plurality, and, conferring reality and autonomy upon the person, implicitly recognizes the degradation, the parceling-out of the absolute. [...] We measure an individual's value by the sum of his disagreements with things, by his incapacity to be indifferent, by his refusal as a subject to tend toward the object.
In a rapidly industrializing society, this "refusal as a subject to tend toward the object" — the rejection of conformity, membership, and even of sympathy with the Other — constitutes a rebellion against the collective. Thus the individual might affirm his own freedom and autonomy. In rebelling, however, the individual must also run up against "the sole truth of Unity," the material fact of our arising from and disintegrating into the same substance, as well as the social interpenetration that is increasingly evident in technological advances and philosophical explanations.
The literature of in-betweenness, then, is a product of this tension between the expansive inner life and the failure of the outer world to reflect it. In his earliest efforts to theorize this problem in literature, Lukács described it as the painful incommensurability of soul and form. The achievement of European Romanticism, Lukács argues, is that it underscored the struggle of essence to make itself fully manifest in a world that was not its equal. Accordingly, in his critical reading of Søren Kierkegaard's engagement to Regine Olsen, Lukács suggests that the Danish philosopher had to separate himself from the woman whom he passionately loved, if only to realize his Romantic ideal of separation from his lover and, by so doing, to bring his outer reality into closer alignment with his inner self-concept.
There is a clear line of development from this principle to Lukács's more mature discussion in The Theory of the Novel, where he suggests that "[t]he abandonment of the world by God manifests itself in the incommensurability of soul and work, of interiority and adventure — in the absence of a transcendental 'place' allotted to human endeavor." The "world" in question is that which arises in the soul of the character, the inner world that must strive against the efforts of one's milieu to delimit it. "[E]ither the world is narrower," Lukács continues, "or it is broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions."
In Romantic and post-Romantic literature, the "abandonment of the world by God" fuels the Faustian dilemma of modern man, who must become a demiurge in order to reshape the external world in the image of his own interiority. The potential prize is free will as such, the perfect equivalence of inner conception and outer manifestation. If we take this notion to its logical extreme, the boundary between inside and outside, between soul and form, dissolves. Ultimately, the inner world of the subject not only becomes "broader than the outside world assigned to it as the arena and substratum of its actions" but absorbs the outside world entirely.
One cannot expect literary models to achieve such extremes without a wholesale rejection of the representative norms built into the Western tradition. Indeed, many of the Surrealist and Futurist artistic programs of the early twentieth century predicate their claims to total creative freedom on their revolt against a traditional tendency to mold literary space against some semblance of lived praxis. This is the case, for example, with Velimir Khlebnikov's "trans-sense language" (zaumnyi iazyk, or simply zaum) or Vladimir Mayakovsky's declaration that "the past is cramped," and that we must therefore "toss Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and the rest from the steamship of Modernity." The soul, in a sense, becomes form.
Lukács, however, does not apply his spatial comparison of inner and outer worlds to the avant-garde. Rather, he is interested in developing a method of conceptualizing the spatial-temporal milieu of the literary text as we see it in Don Quixote — that is, in the infancy of the European novel. This construct has been, in Kundera's formulation, "depreciated" by the rationalistic privileging of verisimilitude. The figure of Don Quixote offers us an enduring example of the hero or thinking subject as metaphysically in between: he is both a mentally unstable old man and a gallant knight-errant, both a reader infected by the chivalrous tales he has read and the author — by virtue of his wayward performance — of a tale of his own. Through his associative delusions, windmills are transformed into giants, and a ruined beggar becomes his Dulcinea. Except in moments when the contrast between fantasy and reality offers some comic payoff, Cervantes's method carefully prevents the reader from peeking behind the curtain of his artifice, allowing us instead to put real stock in Don Quixote's unreal world, which most often appears to us as he, the hero, would have it. In this sense, Sancho Panza is Don Quixote's first "reader." As we have already seen in Kafka's "The Truth about Sancho Panza," the squire serves first to express our initial doubts, and then to acquiesce to his master's vision in our stead.
What Lukács describes in The Theory of the Novel is the failure of Western literature to assimilate this sense of intermediacy. When we do see shades of it again, according to Lukács, it is already the second half of the nineteenth century, and it is not in the West, but in Russia. Thus one of the most provocative assertions in Lukács's book comes in its closing passage: "[The world of the renewed epic] is the sphere of pure soul-reality in which man exists as man, neither as a social being nor as an isolated, unique, pure and therefore abstract interiority [...]. It is in the words of Dostoevsky that this new world, remote from any struggle against what actually exists, is drawn for the first time simply as a seen reality." Without offering details as to how Dostoevsky achieves this renewed epic, Lukács leaves the challenge to his readers. He would not perform the necessary analysis himself; in a gesture befitting the Underground Man, he took a sharply Marxist turn, disavowed The Theory of the Novel, and produced his masterwork, History and Class Consciousness, in 1923. It fell to a young Russian philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, to demonstrate how Dostoevsky's narrative universe constitutes a "pure soul-reality," a milieu of maximal freedom.
On its face, Dostoevsky's work seems an unlikely candidate for such potential. His novels are meticulously plotted demonstrations not only of how freedom allows choice but of how our choices lead to inevitable spiritual and social consequences. The interpretations offered by Dostoevsky's best critics of the nineteenth century and early twentieth underscore those consequences and reify the monologic philosophical and ideological positions that Bakhtin would reject. Bakhtin had started a translation of The Theory of the Novel in 1921 and abandoned it, having learned that Lukács now rejected the work. The text that Bakhtin subsequently produced, Problems of Dostoevsky's Creative Work (Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, 1929), is an extravagant attempt to out-Lukács Lukács. By taking the Hungarian critic's bait and choosing Dostoevsky for his primary texts, Bakhtin essentially constructs an elaborate escape act within an otherwise self-enclosed and inescapable narrative system.
With Bakhtin's help, the hero will escape from the author, but this escape proves consequential for the reader's milieu as well. The hero's escape from the author also allows the critic to escape an unacceptably hermetic critical tradition; as Mikhail Gasparov puts it, "Bakhtin is the mutiny of the self-asserting reader against the pieties imposed on him." In a sense, Bakhtin provides a mirror for the pointlessly rebellious predilections of Dostoevsky's protagonists, for whom transgression — prestuplenie, the word more commonly translated as "crime" in the Russian title of Crime and Punishment — is a necessary probing of freedom's limits. Bakhtin transforms Dostoevsky into a box from which he, the reader, then escapes, and in the pure exercise of escaping Dostoevsky Bakhtin turns him into a Modernist aesthetic object, much the same way that Houdini's lockbox, that definitively Modernist amusement, becomes an art object or, at the least, a set piece: a safe from which a man can release himself while blindfolded and chained upside-down is both more and less than a safe.
Bakhtin's reading of Dostoevsky liberates the novelist, meanwhile, from didactic purpose or practical social or ethical critique. Like Kafka's Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the literary text becomes a platform for pure performance, where Dostoevsky's characters and their ideas seem to exist in a free space, independent of the finalizing will of their author. Thus Bakhtin tests the potential of twentieth-century metaphysics to introduce freedom into the locked-down world of the literary text. His now-canonical interpretation represents a sequence of hermeneutic escape acts, each tied to a particular critical or philosophical impasse. Along the way, Bakhtin transforms Dostoevsky the author into Dostoevsky the hero.
Dostoevsky and the Future of Reading
Before Bakhtin, the main currents of Dostoevsky criticism had described a writer who used fiction to animate and illustrate lucid philosophical and social critiques. Numerous early studies paint Dostoevsky as an author who burdens young men with troublesome ideas and invites the reader to witness how those ideas come into moral conflict in — well, if not the real world, then the Realist world, delineated by rigid temporal constraints and accurately mappable spaces. Witness, for example, the spiritual struggles played out in Crime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866), Demons (Besy, 1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (Brat'ia Karamazovy, 1880), as well as the corresponding readings of their heroes as encapsulations of monologically definable ideas about responsibility and redemption.
So monologic was the tendency in reading Dostoevsky, in fact, that his work had given rise to a critical paradigm that I sometimes call the school of "Dostoevsky as _____": the critic will complete the analogy with whatever role best reflects his own interest. This habit of reading Dostoevsky as a reflection of the reader himself was inaugurated by A. F. Koni's canonical essays on Dostoevsky from 1881, composed shortly before the novelist's death. Koni, a celebrated jurist, presented Dostoevsky as a criminologist working in fiction. Four years later, Vladimir Chizh, a psychiatrist, suggested the possibility of reading Dostoevsky as a psychopathologist. Antonii Khrapovitskii and Vladimir Soloviev, a Russian Orthodox bishop and theologian, respectively, advanced the popular notion that Dostoevsky was a kind of religious prophet. It is a tradition that continues into the twenty-first century with philosopher James Scanlan's Dostoevsky the Thinker.
Much as he rebels against this critical tradition, Bakhtin nevertheless takes up one of its central tasks, namely, to address the nexus between the metaphysical and the ethical, a problem we see clearly in the oft-repeated précis of Ivan's attitude in The Brothers Karamazov, that if there is no God, all is permitted. Given the spiritual struggle in that novel between the brothers Ivan and Alyosha, this formulation has inevitably been interpreted from a Christian theological perspective, but for Bakhtin — as later for the French Existentialists — the premise is metaphysical rather than essentially religious: if God, who instantiates time, is removed, then so too is time. Outside time, individuals enjoy absolute freedom as individuals — "their freedom and self-sufficiency in the very structure of the novel in relation to the author," Bakhtin says of Dostoevsky's characters — but they must also face the ethical meaning, rather than the temporal consequences, of their free choices.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lost in the Shadow of the Word by Benjamin Paloff. Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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