Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life

Essays Notable Articles
March 16, 2010 | 46 5 min read

coverIn the same way that it would be hard to meet Scarlett Johansson and not be distracted by her beauty, it is difficult to read War and Peace and not be preoccupied with its reputation as the greatest novel ever written.  As lay readers, the specific qualities that make War and Peace so great can be hard to assess.  But just as it takes specialized knowledge to understand exactly why a magnet attracts metal, yet any five-year-old can identify a magnet when he sees one, it is one thing to apprehend the formal properties of a great work of art, but another, much more accessible question, to assess its effects.  And so, having recently finished reading War and Peace, what I want to think about is just what it is that great art does.

One way to think about what a work of art does is to imagine the counterfactual—how would my life have been different had I not spent the last three months reading War and Peace?  The answers, I think, tend to group into three categories: The social experiences I had because of the book; the ideas the book incorporated into my life; and the aesthetic moments that were opened to me because of what I was reading.

The social consequences first.  It’s a fair bet that without War and Peace I would not know that my father-in-law read the book himself in two feverish weeks 35 years ago while on sabbatical in West Berlin.  People, as I discovered, tend to remember where they were when they read War and Peace, and when they saw me with the book they told me those stories.  I learned that my friend Paul read War and Peace as a 25-year-old Peace Corps volunteer in Colombia in the late-sixties.  He told me that the experience was revelatory in that it showed him that “a classic that came with the gravity of adult recommendations could be more engaging than life and easy to read, too.”

War and Peace lends itself to sharing with others more than most books.  I wouldn’t say that shareability is an essential element of great literature, but where present, it helps.  As I read, I frequently retold episodes from the book.  I remember taking a long walk with my wife in early February and telling her the story of how Pierre, who was kind-hearted but lacked will, became engaged unwittingly to Helene who was beautiful.  With my father-in-law, as part of a conversation about how to plan for the future, I brought up the tragic tale of young Petya Rostov, who joined the Russian army in a fit of patriotic fervor, but whose romantic visions of war blinded him to its dangers right up until the moment he was shot through the head.  And on a happier note, I shared with my friend Eric a retelling of the scene of Natasha at the opera, a scene charged through with the erotic energy of a young woman suddenly becoming aware of her beauty and the power it holds over men.

This is not something I usually do, tell stories from books I read, but the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.  The fact that the scenes in War and Peace are easy to retell is also in keeping with a claim my friend Paul likes to make that Tolstoy’s writing is so irreducible that the translation doesn’t matter. (For my part, I began reading the Maude translation and switched halfway through to the new Pevear and Volokhonsky; I found that while my mind was stimulated all the same, my heart raced twice as fast with the newer version.)

After the social experience of the book there is the intellectual one.  I have read other novels where the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s intellectual agenda in the book was to expose the meagerness of historical accounts of the War of 1812 that tried to reduce the world-remaking conflict to a finite and knowable set of causes.  Instead, Tolstoy wanted to depict the war in all its complexity and contingency, to show that the outcome rested at least as much on the decision of an individual soldier to charge or not as it did on Napoleon’s machinations, and that both the soldiers and the Emperor were controlled equally by forces larger than themselves.

It’s an expansive idea and one that finds ready application in almost any facet of one’s life.  I thought of Tolstoy when reading about climate change (he probably would have been a skeptic) and when assessing President Obama’s leadership on health care (I think, based on his favorable depiction of General Kutuzov, who abandoned Moscow to the French in order to preserve the Russian army, that Tolstoy would have endorsed Obama’s decision to forego the public option).

I applied War and Peace to my life in smaller ways, too.  A passage about the forced idleness of regimental life clarified vague thoughts I’d had about how having a baby makes it easier to nap guilt-free.  And at one point—I may have been walking through a park when this happened—I stopped short after reading a passage on Prince Andrei’s decision to withdraw from life into the work of his estates that seemed, minus the part about the estates, like a mimeograph of my own mind.  (One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.)

In the end, though, the reason I read novels is not because I can talk about them with other people, or because I’m looking for ideas to explain the world.  I read them for the pure aesthetic moment that comes from seeing life perfectly distilled into words.  In this respect, I don’t think there is a more able book than War and Peace.  Tolstoy’s singular genius is to be able to take the torrent of conscious experience and master it.  There are countless moments in the book where this happens, but the one that left me reeling was Tolstoy’s long, exquisite depiction of the Battle of Borodino, which was the deciding battle in the war and one of the bloodiest in history.

The night I finished reading about Borodino, it was plainly obvious that I had just read something great.  Yet here I was sitting in a corner of my couch, just the same as I had been an hour before.  I thought about the question with which I opened—what is it that greatness does?  An encounter with greatness, I would say, is like a bright light fixed in time, a marker that defines memory and makes it clearer than it otherwise might have been, that we were here.

Previously: Scenes of Retreat in War and Peace and Atonement, Selections from a Winter Reading War and Peace

Bonus Link: The Millions Interview: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

, a staff writer for The Millions, writes the Brainiac ideas column for the Boston Globe and blogs about fatherhood and family life at growingsideways.wordpress.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @kshartnett.

Books as Objects Essays

The Physical Book Will Surely Endure: But Will It Endure for the Right Reason?

Books as Objects Essays
January 24, 2017 | 8 5 min read
As an empirical matter, reading on a tablet cannot remotely approach the sensual literary experience offered by an old-fashioned book. The latter is, I’d venture, intrinsically more pleasurable than the former, not unlike the intrinsic difference between high quality toilet paper and the sandpaper stuff used in bus stations.
Books as Objects Essays
| 8 5 min read
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Essays

The Rosenbergs Live: On Nostalgia and Red Scare Realities

Essays
October 16, 2015 | 5 6 min read

“Judge Irving Kaufman, of Rosenberg Spy Trial and Free-Press Rulings, Dies at 81.” The 1992 New York Times obituary stated that Judge Kaufman hoped “he would be remembered for his role not in the Rosenberg case…but as the judge whose order was the first to desegregate a public school in the North.” Kaufman was appointed to the federal bench in Manhattan in 1949. Two years later, the “espionage trial of the century” landed in his courtroom.

Consider the backdrop. America, flush with victory, was pivoting to Cold War politics. Redbaiting was in; Fireside Chats out. Against the shiny orange roofs of proliferating Howard Johnsons and the pulsating floors of teenage sock hops, the country was off to war again. This time on the Korean peninsula, fighting a new enemy called Communism.

Our literary imagination remains captive to this era, as if we could jump in a Studebaker and road trip past the nostalgic caricature of ourselves to discover something new. In her seminal The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym opines: “Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy…The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia.” We may not be stuck mid-century, but if Mad Men is an indication, we’re still trying to figure a few things out.

“Damn Cold in February,” part of Joni Tevis’s stunning new essay collection, The World Is on Fire, combs the 1950s for atomic kitsch. Tevis lines up Buddy Holly with choice snippets of U.S. government operating manuals (and propaganda), artifacts to underscore the era’s cultural ironies. In 1957, The New York Times “explained how to plan one’s summer vacation around the ‘non-ancient but none the less honorable pastime of atomic-bomb watching.’” After winning Miss Atomic Bomb, “a local woman poses for photos with a cauliflower-shaped cloud pasted to the front of her bathing suit.” Tevis clicks through the slides of an atomic view-master toy and concludes, “Not only do Americans want to see the bomb, we want to become it, shaping our bodies to fit its form.”

It turns out, however, that it’s much less fun once the Russians have it. In 1949, a successful Soviet nuclear test threatened our self-image as supreme in the world, invoking terror around the country. Treason took on new meaning with rumors of espionage and leaks of classified documents to our former ally Russia. Everyone, it seemed, was building a fallout shelter — public buildings, apartment houses, families. School children practiced for bomb attacks.

The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was all about the Russian threat. HUAC revved up in the late-’40s, holding hearings the broadcasts of which stoked public fear and paranoia. Congressman Richard Nixon cut his teeth crushing the distinguished public servant Alger Hiss, convicted of perjury — not espionage — charges the merits of which are still debated. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy fulminated, wielding a list of alleged Reds lurking in the State Department. HUAC pitted neighbor against neighbor and colleague against colleague, destroying careers in Hollywood and plenty of others too. Old Blue Eyes may have been ascendant, but celebrated actor/singer Paul Robeson went down for his politics.

Enter Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They bonded over the Communist Party the tenets of which, they believed, would level the playing field between the haves and have-nots. Julius, an electrical engineer, and Ethel, an aspiring actress/singer turned secretary, were struggling to provide for their two young sons on New York’s Lower East Side when the FBI set them in its crosshairs. The Rosenbergs were indicted in 1950 — Julius on atomic espionage charges for passing secrets to the Russians, and Ethel as his accomplice. Ethel was denounced on apparently false charges by her brother, David Greenglass, an Army machinist at the weapons installation in Los Alamos. To state the barest facts — the Rosenbergs were tried in 1951, found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, and given the electric chair on June 19, 1953.

Jillian Cantor steps into this space with her forthcoming novel, The Hours Count, narrated by Millie Stein, fictional neighbor to the Rosenbergs. Millie’s consuming interest is her son, David, who appears to be autistic. Largely estranged from her family, Millie is unable to connect to her husband, Ed, a surly and often drunk Russian, who may or may not be entangled in nefarious political activities.

This isn’t the first time Cantor has fictionalized history. In Margot, Cantor imagines Anne Frank’s older sister to have survived, living in Philadelphia. Like Margot, The Hours Count is narrated by a woman who declines to swim through history’s riptides, but instead bobs passively along. Perhaps the passivity of these narrators is meant to bring the surrounding characters into focus. In The Hours Count, Ethel Rosenberg is such a character, portrayed as a devoted wife and mother, and a caring friend.

Much of The Hours Count is taken up with Millie’s strange and conflicted relationship with a man who promises to help her disabled child. Dramatic scenes from the Rosenbergs’ execution at Sing Sing are spliced throughout the novel. But the main part of the story breaks off when Ethel departs for the grand jury, leaving her two young sons in Millie’s care.

Ethel never returned. She refused to testify against her husband and was taken straight to prison, leaving her boys behind. Michael and Robert Rosenberg were six and 10 when their parents were electrocuted three years later. They were ultimately adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, changing their last names to Meeropol. (Abel Meeropol, incidentally, wrote both the words and music to the iconic song, “Strange Fruit.”)

What of those children, purposefully orphaned by the State? E.L. Doctorow takes them on in The Book of Daniel, tackling the whole raging tragedy. Reimagining them as Daniel and Susan Isaacson, Doctorow explores the agonized years between their parents’ arrest and execution when they moved among harsh grandparents, private homes, and an orphanage. He gives us the lawyer who not only had the thankless task of representing their parents, but also worked tirelessly to find an appropriate home for Daniel and Susan. (The lawyer’s widow accuses the Isaacsons of causing her husband’s untimely death.) And the anguished stepparents, who cannot staunch Daniel’s fury, nor heal his sister, a former radical dying in a mental institution. “Today Susan is a starfish,” Daniel says. “There are few silences deeper than the silence of the starfish. There are not many degrees of life lower before there is no life.”

Published in 1971, The Book of Daniel remains as charged as a live wire. This big meaty book follows Daniel as he plunges into the radical 1960s, an angry young father on a quest to confront the people in his parents’ and thus his own drama. He suggests his parents mistook shared political ideology for friendship, and socialist doctrine for life advice. Of lessons learned from his father, who “ran up and down history like a pianist playing his scales,” Daniel says, “I heard about the framing of Tom Mooney and the execution of Joe Hill, and all the maimed and dead labor heroes of the early labor movement. The incredibly brutal fate of anyone who tried to help the worker.”

Cousin Linda, whose father betrayed Daniel’s mother and got 10 years instead of death, tells him, “neither you nor I was responsible for what happened. But we’ve borne the brunt…This is what happens to us, to the children of trials; our hearts run to cunning, our minds are sharp as claws.”

The real children, Michael and Robert Meeropol, have dedicated their lives to bringing justice to their executed parents. Their continued presence on the public stage subverts nostalgia; if you’re paying attention, it’s pretty tough to get sentimental about this time period. In August 2015, The New York Times ran a lengthy Op Ed by the Meeropols, pleading their mother’s case and urging her posthumous exoneration. Their father might have been “legally guilty of the conspiracy charge, but not atomic spying,” but their mother “was prosecuted primarily for refusing to turn on our father.”

“The government held her life hostage to coerce our father to talk, and when that failed, it extracted false statements to secure her wrongful execution…[with] disturbing implications in post-9/11 America.”

What about the judge who meted the sentence, Irving Kaufman? Doctorow portrays him as an ambitious man who saw the trial as a means to advance his career. Here’s Daniel’s father, describing the fictional Judge Kaufman. “Not having known of [the judge’s] existence even a few short months ago, [he] knows a good deal more about him now, including [the judge’s] most intimate professional secret, that he hopes to be appointed to the Supreme Court. All the lawyers in the corridor know this. [The judge] has heard more cases brought by the government in the field of subversive activities than anyone else.”

In 1960, Judge Kaufman published a lengthy piece in the Atlantic Monthly called “Sentencing: The Judge’s Problem,” in which he asserted his belief that judges should have wide discretion in sentencing. “In no other judicial function is the judge more alone,” Kaufman wrote. Judges take their role seriously; every judge “is painfully aware of what five years without a father may mean to a prisoner’s son.” Moreover, sentences that are too harsh “have historically had an effect opposite from the one intended.” A judge should have the “satisfaction” of saying “to oneself, ‘I have never consciously rendered an unjust decision.’”

It’s not a leap to read this article today as post hoc justification for sending the Rosenbergs to their deaths. Whatever its intent, the following year Kaufman received a promotion to the Second Circuit Federal Court of Appeals where he served more than a quarter century.

The trial and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are sobering reminders of how public sentiment can affect the wheels of justice. The Rosenbergs were tried within a particular context: Congress inflaming the Red Scare, the country again at war, and mounting fears about the A-bomb. Ideally a judge would take extra precaution to separate hysteria from legitimate danger. Judge Kaufman, it seems, thought he would do well to embrace the times — “The general attitude of the public toward a particular type of crime…must be taken into consideration if respect for the law is to be upheld.”

Perhaps we’d best let the Meeropols have the last word: “Neither of our parents deserved the death penalty.”

Image Credit: Wikipedia.

Essays
| 5 6 min read
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46 comments:

  1. “One somewhat disquieting effect of reading War and Peace is that the more your own thoughts show up in its pages, the less original your life begins to feel.”

    During the time when I was reading War and Peace, I actually found this exact same effect to be comforting. I realized I wasn’t crazy and that the various thoughts running through my mind were the same thoughts others had been having for centuries. Sometimes it’s nice to know you aren’t alone or even original :)

  2. Having just finished reading The Brothers Karamazov (also the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation) last night just after midnight, and today still reeling from the encounter, as you say, of great art on my ordinary life, I really appreciate your thoughts.

    And for the time being, I’m swearing off epic length novels, and focusing more on novels that don’t require a quarter of a year to conquer.

  3. Nathan, I like your interpretation of the ‘unoriginality’ point. And I would say I too, on the whole, found the universality of War and Peace to be more reassuring than not.

    And Winston, thanks for reading. I’ve made a couple false starts at Bleak House in the days since I finished W&P, so it remains to be seen whether I’ve got one more big book in me, or whether it will be time to tackle more modestly sized novels for awhile

  4. It’s funny what big books can do to a person. Earlier in the year I read “The Savage Detectives” and “2666” right in a row and when I was done I found my ability to read anything of any kind of length or difficulty to be completely demolished.

  5. Lovely piece. In talking about what art does, I find it is always an assertion not of what we have done or where we have been but of what we can do. To pick one of my favorite examples, Cassavetes’ ‘A Woman Under The Influence’ is a portrait not of a marriage but of what a marriage can truly be, and expands understanding of why love matters now and forever.

  6. I do think it’s the best book ever written. Nice piece on it. I read it during a physical, emotional and religious crisis in my life in my mid thirties. I feel like it honestly helped me through it, the compassion in it is that strong.

  7. I loved your essay. I appreciate your point that as much as I might not remember a book in all its detail, I remember vividly where I was in life when I read some of my favorite ones and how the story shaped my perception of that time. In the spring of my senior year, a few months after my mother died, I read Marilynnne Robinson’s Housekeeping for an English class. The story focuses a lot on memory and loss, and it shaped the way I dealt with how my memory of my mom would change over time, a thought I was struggling with a lot right then.

  8. Very nice post. I share your interest in and passion for War and Peace. In fact, since getting a Kindle I’ve been in the habit of reading a chapter of the book a day during my subway commute. As there are 365 chapters in the book I finish a cycle every year. It’s an interesting way to read the book.

  9. I loved your sentence about how “the controlling idea of the story came to serve as a lens through which I viewed my days, but never has this happened quite as thoroughly as it did with War and Peace.”

    I think that must be why, when I was reading this novel, that everyone told me that I should re-read it every five years. Your experience of both life and the reading of the novel, changes depending on what’s happening around you.

    I first read W&P about 3 years ago (oct 07), when the war in Iraq was flailing and the American public was angry. It was a really interesting experience to read all of those war passages at that time. I wonder what life will be like in a couple of years, when I do my first re-read of the book.

  10. Maire and Brian, thanks for reading! It is nice to imagine that life is long enough to make room for more than one reading of War and Peace.

  11. Pingback: Reading War and Peace: The Effects of Great Art on an Ordinary Life « Kevin Hartnett

  12. Really great piece. I found it hard to discuss this book with people without sounding pretentious, but I think you did a fine job of describing the allure and the magnificence of the novel.

  13. Great essay.
    War and Peace is clearly the best book I’ve read. Or the one I’ve enjoyed the most. Or both.
    It also impacted my way of seeing things in millions of ways.

    As for long books (I’ve also tackled 2666 this year and am now reading Against the Day), it’s not about the length, it’s about the book.

  14. “…the spectrum of experience depicted in War and Peace, combined with the precision with which it’s captured, creates an infinite number of roads into the book and an infinite number back out.” Spectrum and precision are two words so aptly applied to Tolstoy. The same could be said for this essay! I admire your taking on W&P is such a short space here, and yet covering so much ground. I’ve enjoyed reading about your journey with the book and especially appreciate that you’ve taken the time to read it in a “whole self” way, and to report it to us in the same vein.

    Interesting to hear about your experience with the two translations, as well. Thanks, Kevin!

  16. Pingback: Reading Tolstoy » Novel Readings - Notes on Literature and Criticism
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  18. The more I think about it the more things I could say. Perhaps that is the greatness of a great art work – that it is rich enough to provoke all manner of responses even from one person.

    I read it in three enchanted weeks just before my 19th birthday in about August 1977. I was unemployed and had the time to do nothing else for those three weeks.

    Even though reading Tolstoy’s biography and thought makes me less impressed with the man than i was as a teenager the memory of the experience of reading it, though i had quite forgotten it, was summoned back by this article.

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  20. The praise for War & Peace has left me shaking my head and wondering what the heck you people have been smoking. War & Peace is the worst novel ever written. I’ve read technical manuels on how to repair computers that had better writing and more drama. It’s a long winded piece of tripe. A good editor should have wittled down this monstrosity of hot air to three hundred pages or less, but even then it still would probably be a bad book. If War & Peace is considered a farce, a social mockery of the Russian elite of that era, then perhaps I would consider it an okay book, but to take it as a serious piece of literature let alone consider it a work of art is shocking.

  21. Kevin, I enjoyed your essay (found it linked on artsandlettersdaily.com). I love serendipities and this is one of the best I’ve experienced in awhile. May I explain?

    As a life-long passionate reader, I decided to quit by job (as an attorney) two years ago, primarily to have more time to read quality literature. When people would ask me about this, my pat line was “I want more time to read–I want to be able to immerse myself in War and Peace”.

    Well, I’ve been reading quite a bit these past two years (I won’t even try to begin to list everything I’ve read, but it does include Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time”–all six volumes). In any event, last night I finished “Flaubert’s Parrot” by Julian Barnes and announced to my wife that at long last it was time to tackle War and Peace. So last night I pulled it from the shelf (I also have both translations you reference, but am reading the more recent one), removed its dust jacket and began reading the introduction.

    Then this morning, while enjoying my first cup of coffee, I see the link to your essay. Imagine my delight!

    Now I’m even more excited to dive into this masterpiece.

  22. Kevin, thanks for reminding me of the experience of reading W&P. As memorable and moving a 2-3 week period as any I can recall having ‘lived’ through in ‘real life’

  23. Nice essay. I would suggest a correction: While Napoleon’s invasion of Russia occured in the same year, the “War of 1812” more commonly refers to the war between the US and Britain. Your phrasing could be clearer.

  24. I was a 15 year old asthmatic finding release through two agonizing weeks in the pages of War and Peace. It provided me with an escape from a painful situation and the characters were strong companions crowding around my sick bed.

  25. This essay captures well that sense of a great novel as a world where the reader may live, move, and have another being. Good fiction extends the sphere of our living – not only in time and space, but in the life of the mind and of the emotions. It offers virtual change of air, light, relationships, experiences, perspectives. Its magic works inwardly for growth and renewal.

  26. War and Peace is magnificent, but Anna Karenina is really the better novel. Just ask Nabokov. If you haven’t read it, wait a year to give Tolstoy a rest. Then give it a try.

  27. I agree because Scarlett Johansen is really quite ugly and only reported to be beautiful because it says so in her press release – it is the same with Tolstoy. His nose is too big.

  28. I too, can endorse the magnificence of “War and Peace”, but I would recommend “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo for a similar if not even more illuminating experience!

  29. Excellent piece. I read W&P in my 20s, b ut the BBC dramatisation the 1970s had me fall in love with Natasha when I was 16. I’m still in recovery. I flicked your piece to a friend who is not yet engaged by page 50. This should spur him on.

  31. I came across this blog by accident, and I am delighted to have found it. It was referenced by someone who posted on a Proust thread which I follow. Anyway, it took me two attempts to read W&P. the first time I quit about a quarter of the way through. The second time, a few years later, i was more able to take the time and intellectual patience to appreciate this great work of art. While I respect the entire sweep of the novel, I think the description of the Battle of Borodin is the most profound account of war and its horrible aftermaths of anything I have ever encountered.

    On a somewhat less profound note, I also like Woody Allen’s description of War and Peace: It’s a book about Russia….:-)

    Sherm

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  33. I too came to this conversation through a link on a Marcel Proust thread I follow. Kevin’s description of the experience of reading War and Peace was delightful and made me decide to reread it myself.

    Somebody else recommends Les MIserables. Hugo’s interpretation and description of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia is the complete opposite of Tolstoy’s and it is very interesting to compare the two.

    According to Jerry Seinfeld, Tolstoy’s original titles for the novel was “War–What Is It Good For?”!

  35. It’s 25 years since I last thumbed through War & Peace and around 15 years longer since I actually read it. But just two weeks ago, I had a conversation with my wife about Russia, only to find Natasha dancing to the front of my subconscious, where she has hung around ever since, now joined by Pierre, Nicolai and Marya. I’m delighted to welcome my old friends back. Such is the power of this book! I must read the new translation.

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  38. Ironically, I am nearing the end of War and Peace just now. I purchased a Kindle about two months ago and decided to make it one of my first books (to make up for the latest Dan Brown novel that was, in fact, my first.) This article resonated most in describing how changed the author felt one hour after beginning the parts of War and Peace describing the battle of Borodino, yet without ever leaving his sofa. That is an incredibly insightful way of thinking about what art and literature do for us.

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  42. Great article – you basically articulated everything I’ve been thinking about all week (thanks to a sprained ankle, I just marathon-read W&P in 7 days). I read books too, to hear “life perfectly distilled into words” (hoping that I’ll eventually figure out how to do it too), so Tolstoy was fairly awe-inspiring. This book was honestly a joy to read… even though he didn’t seem to know what an epilogue is :)

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  45. Yes, even I instantly caught the “War of 1812” thing, and I’m no history buff, or anything. But this article is two years old, now, so I guess I’m just being a nitpicky troll for no goddamn reason, and long after the fact, even.

    I don’t know who I am anymore.

  46. Nicely stated description of the novel and its effect on readers. I bought the book in three volumes (Everyman’s Library) for ease of handling and finished it in a few weeks. I enjoyed Anna Karenina more, but there was a great enjoyment in reading it late at night. One had something to eagerly return to before the day’s weary end. I was less impressed with the battle scenes and catastrophes, but found the weaving of peoples’ lives through turbulent and remarkable times into a rich and thought provoking tapestry to be so worth the long read. I think everyone one says ‘Wow!’ when finished, both for making a real reading effort and for experiencing a novel everyone talks about, but very, very few ever read.

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Essays

It Has Always Been Thus

Essays
October 2, 2013 | 8 5 min read

The debate between writers and critics over authorial intent is literally a life and death struggle. By literally, I mean figuratively. On the one hand, you have critics who have trumpeted “the death of the author” for several decades now, the view that holds that authors can’t be the true masters of their creations, can’t fully grasp the implications of language they pluck, seemingly, from a great assembly line of words and idioms. On the other hand, you have writers like those anthologized in The Story About the Story and The Story About the Story II, who argue, more often than not, that to read is to feel your mind, however fleetingly and incompletely, jacked into the mind of another, a connection that is perhaps more alive than even our relations with those we consider intimates.

The debate is preposterous on its surface. Of course the publishing industry, with its book packaging scandals and its ridiculous pseudonym play (I once met a man, an ex-convict, who claimed to have profited three-quarters of a million dollars ghostwriting a series of Little House books for a descendant of Laura Ingalls Wilder), undermines the sense that reading is interaction with another discrete life. But anomalies don’t founder what is intuitively true.  When I read, I read for what I think an author wants to be expressing. In this, I’m not alone. Many years ago, Henry James complained – a plaintive cry, really – that critics of his own time were “apt to stand off from the [artist’s] intended sense of things.”

Where does this impulse come from? There are many sources, of course: the new critics and the intentional fallacy, and T.S. Eliot would probably be in this camp, and maybe the surrealists, and perhaps someone like Mallarmé. I don’t claim to be a scholar of all that, and anyway “the death of the author” traces most directly back to Roland Barthes’s 1967 essay, “The Death of the Author,” a short piece that, pound for pound, may be one of the most influential texts ever produced.

And what did Barthes intend? That’s not entirely clear. “The Death of the Author” begins with a quote from Balzac’s story “Sarrasine,” a musing passage that Barthes reads as neither a character’s free indirect speech, nor the author “acting directly on reality.” From this he declares both the death of the author and the “birth of the reader”: an active interpreter of writers who are no longer authors at all, in the old sense of the word. Proust is Barthes’s best example of this new writer, the “scriptor” whose character is a depiction “of he who is going to write.” This “enunciation is an empty process,” and scriptors merely supply a “tissue of quotations.” “I is nothing other than the instance of saying I,” Barthes writes. It’s only in the mind of the new reader that words and images come to mean anything at all.

The old position of the author, Barthes claims, mistakenly demanded that we think of books as written in code. Hear, hear. Other than that, all Barthes really seems to mean is that reading has become a cooperation of imaginations. What he doesn’t recognize – couldn’t have recognized – is that the same electric jolt that he had used to execute the author would shock to life a correspondingly monstrous critic.

To back up a bit. What’s meant by the “literary canon”? Literally, a canon is any authoritative set of standards, but figuratively the literary canon most closely resembles the processes of Biblical canonization, by which Christian sects debated and decided which ancient scriptures were of divine origin, inspired. In other words, a bunch of folks got together to look at work they knew was written by a person, and they simply decided that whoever wrote it no longer mattered, because God wrote it. Those writers might as well be dead – and that’s sort of what became of Barthes’s essay. Literature is a secular revelation of a more earthly god, human consciousness, and all that was needed was a critic/theologian to interpret it for laypeople, for mere “readers” who would be less encouraged to read for themselves than compelled to listen to interpretations. That pretty much describes both the modern Ph.D. in English and the practice of teaching literature to children as a compulsory subject in the public education system.

But the demotion of writers to figures stumbling blindly through the collective unconscious falls to the same arguments that toppled B.F. Skinner’s, and behaviorism’s, simplistic claim that consciousness doesn’t exist (See Chomsky, Koestler, Carl Rogers, and others). More simply, Samuel Butler once refuted this same species of skepticism – the claim that matter itself was hypothetical – by pounding his foot on a stone and proclaiming “I refute it thus!” To the literary obstetrician Barthes attempting to midwife a new reader, one might feel compelled to proclaim, “It has always been thus!”

Because he wasn’t saying anything new. And I don’t mean new critics or Mallarmé  For at least a couple hundred years, writers have understood that their work wouldn’t amount to much without the reader’s imagination percolating away on the other side of the page. It was there in 1837, in “The American Scholar,” when Emerson coined the phrase “creative reading” in the same sentence that gave us “creative writing.” It was there six decades later, when Henry James described The Turn of the Screw as a “process of adumbration,” a sketch the reader colors in with “his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy.”  And it was there a couple decades after that, in Barthes’s beloved Proust’s “On Reading”:
And there, indeed, is one of the great and marvelous characters of beautiful books (and one which will make us understand the role, at once essential and limited, that reading can play in our spiritual life) which for the author could be called “Conclusions” and for the reader “Incitements.”  We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author ends, and we would like to have him give us answers, while all he can do is give us desires.  And these desires he can arouse in us only by making us contemplate the supreme beauty which the last effort of his art has permitted him to reach.  But by a singular and, moreover, providential law of mental optics (a law which perhaps signifies that we can receive the truth from nobody, and that we must create it ourselves), that which is the end of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of ours, so that it is at the moment they have told us all they could tell us, that they create in us the feeling that they have told us nothing yet.
To be fair, Barthes had his regrets.  Ten years after “The Death of the Author,” and shortly before he died, he kicked back at his own, “I is nothing other than the instance of saying I.” In its first pages, A Lover’s Discourse insists that “To that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I.”

So how does the struggle end? Perhaps with simple statements, rather than melodramatic metaphors. Critics who have taken up the dead author standard would have us regard creative work as an elaborate Freudian slip: don’t read for what a writer is trying to say, read for what they’ve said in spite of themselves. That’s wrong. Literature (and all the arts, really) is the product of concentrated, intelligent minds to which we are granted intimate, but temporary and incomplete, access. We should embrace and not denounce that opportunity to comingle thought. Art is not an accident.

Essays
| 8 5 min read
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