Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (12 page)

One reason it’s always hard to point to literary authority is that it must be partially hidden to succeed. If the author speaks to us in too pushy a manner, or overwhelms his poor little characters with his own huge ego, or rests his hand too heavily on the wheel of the plot, we will fail to credit his creation as real—and real it must be to us, at least on some level, if we are to invest our time and emotions in it. The author who brings a literary work into being must make something out of nothing. He is like a magician in that respect, except he cannot take his bows or beg for our applause, because if we notice him whisking the rabbit out of the hat, we will realize the performance is an illusion.

And now, having written that sentence, I can immediately think of three or four exceptions to it: Shakespeare, through Prospero, begging for our applause at the end of
The Tempest
; Swift brandishing the rabbit
and
the hat at us in the footnotes to
A Tale of a Tub
; Cervantes examining quite explicitly the whole question of an author’s authority; and all sorts of other examples from later in this chapter as well as earlier in this book. But I want to stress the way in which these exceptions prove the rule. They acknowledge the illusion precisely to get it out of the way, so that we can see that something else remains. They establish their own authority by being suspicious of authority in general, aligning themselves with our tendency to question authorial power and thus getting in ahead of us. What is left when they have done so—the residue, after our suspicions have been allayed—is what we take to be true.

The point of all this is that literature can never be
just
a trick. We need to feel that something more is at stake, that something is truly being created where nothing was before. So the author’s involvement at a human level, his egotistical, self-serving, non-godlike manipulation of words and feelings, must be transformed in some way, disguised, made secret and powerful—though none of these words quite tell the story, because they imply deception, and the essence of authority is its truth.

Literary truths may have little or nothing to do with historical truth. The Furies and Satan are mythical figures brought to life by the power of their authors’ imaginations, and the fact that many people once took them for actual beings has no effect, one way or the other, on how strongly I now credit them when I read the House of Atreus trilogy or
Paradise Lost
. Shakespeare borrowed his Cleopatra and his Richard II from history, but for me they are no more real than his Juliet and his Othello, whom he made up wholesale. Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Cervantes’s Sancho Panza never existed or else existed in a thousand quotidian forms, but either way, each of them has a strongly marked individuality which transcends that of most individuals I have met. This is not to denigrate life, which must in some form be the source—if only a vaporous, indirect source—of all literary authority. It is simply to comment on the extent to which the made-up sometimes trumps the actual in terms of believability.

Authority, as I am using it, has nothing to do with the authoritarian. The work that commands us to believe in it by virtue of its right to govern our thoughts—
Pravda
, say, or
Mein Kampf
, or the more regulatory passages of Leviticus—will have little hold on our imaginations once that right has been removed. This is not just a matter of tone. It would be inaccurate to say that authoritarian works command while works with authority persuade, for even the word “persuasion” is too blinkered, too end-achieving, too personally manipulative to cover the methods employed by the most powerful literature. (But the words “method,” “employ,” and “power” are also suspect here. They are blunt instruments standing in for something that is far more delicate and in fact nearly indiscernible.) The author who possesses authority has no palpable designs on us: we barely exist for him, just as he barely exists for us. In the face of the literary work’s reality, we bystanders—the many readers, the sole writer—become nonentities, like Shakespeare.

Which is not to say that we disappear entirely. The good writer remains vitally present in every line he writes, and even when the mortal author dies, the voice on the page is still alive with that individuality. Nor can the reader ever erase herself completely: there is no such thing as a purely impersonal reading. We bring ourselves to everything we do, and the more honestly and seriously we do it, the more we bring along the whole of ourselves. So I would be lying if I suggested that the two people engaged in the essential literary transaction, the writer and his reader, could ever vanish. But their relation to each other becomes more, and less, than personal. By virtue of the literary work over which they meet, the reader and the writer both begin to loosen their hold on selfhood. This is a grip that most of us maintain, quite rightly, throughout our conscious lives; we need to do so if we are not to be viewed as mad by ourselves and by others. I have nothing against selfhood. I rely on it daily, hourly even, and it fuels a great deal of my existence. It even fuels my existence as a reader, for that self is the one who chooses to take up a given book, to finish it or put it down, to engage with the characters, to see herself reflected in them. And yet at some point in the process of reading, if the work has authority enough, the self yields. It ceases to have objections or prejudices of its own. This is what allows the Buddhist to be gripped by
Paradise Lost
, the seasick-prone landlubber to immerse herself in
Moby-Dick
, the atheist to fall in love with
The Brothers Karamazov
.

*   *   *

Which brings us back to the Russian writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These writers, it seems to me, are in possession of a uniquely powerful conviction, fully and effectively transmitted to us, that what they are putting down on the page, though it might be labeled “fiction,” is the truth. More than any other comparable collection of writers, the Russians evidently believed that to tell the truth is literature’s highest calling, its primary aim, superseding all the usual fripperies such as stylistic acrobatics, career advancement, obeisance to tradition, rebellion against tradition, and other common forms of authorial game-playing. This is not to say that they don’t play games—they adore linguistic flourishes and newfangled constructions, as a quick glance at everything from Nikolai Gogol’s surreal “The Nose” to Andrei Bely’s fragmented, dreamlike
Petersburg
will suggest. But the games, however humorous, are always introduced for a serious purpose. They support the naked truth-telling even as they seem to embroider and disguise it.

There is, besides, our sense of the risks these writers have taken to bring us their truths. The risks needn’t be bodily threats to survival (though they sometimes were), and they needn’t be explicitly political or ideological (though some sort of politics was always a part of that Russian atmosphere, if only in the background). Yet something grave must be at stake. In order to imbue their words with the required weight, writers as different as Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, Gogol and Tolstoy, Goncharov and Herzen and Chekhov, must all convince us—quietly, almost invisibly, and without self-pity or self-aggrandizement—that it has cost them something to produce their revelations. The cost might be personal or public, psychological or economic, a nagging, constant loss or a violent, sudden one. Most likely it is a combination, and one that couldn’t be defined or quantified even by the author himself. The point is that truth is not free or easily come by. And if it costs these writers something to reveal it, it also costs us something to take it in. That is why reading a novel like
Crime and Punishment
or
Fathers and Sons
can be so viscerally painful even as it also brings us a special kind of pleasure.

This is not to say that Russian literature is irreversibly solemn or grave. There can be humor (though, granted, always in a sharp, ironic vein), and there can even be extreme kindness. One of the most darkly humorous books of the period is Ivan Goncharov’s
Oblomov
, which mingles a perspicacious eye for the truth with a strong sense of authorial generosity. If there is no hope for Ilya Ilyich Oblomov by the end, that is only a reflection of the character’s own accurate self-assessment—and there does seem to be some version of hope available to others, if only of a tenuous, temporary kind.

I first tried reading
Oblomov
when I was in my twenties, but it bored me, for reasons that I now see reflected more on me than on the book. In my impatience, I could not last through the part of the novel (representing at least the first hundred pages or more) where Oblomov simply won’t do anything. He won’t submit himself to being dressed or shaved by his serf-servant; he won’t allow his rooms to be cleaned; he won’t handle his own urgent business matters; he won’t read a novel, or visit friends, or go on pleasurable expeditions; in fact, he won’t even get out of bed. When I was twenty-five, I figured I had got the picture (lazy Russian nobleman in decline, representing whole lazy class in decline), and I gave up.

But lately I picked it up and finished the entire book, deciding in the course of my reading that this was one of the great pieces of nineteenth-century literature, perhaps even equal in quality to the works of Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, but more akin in tone to, say, the Eça de Queirós of
The Maias
. For what happens to Oblomov, in the parts of the novel I had never made it through before, is that he falls in love with a sensitive and intelligent young woman named Olga, and she falls in love with him. Being Oblomov, he eventually loses her through laziness, and then reverts to his previous sloth; in this respect, we seem to be following the usual predetermined path of the tragic Russian figure. But the novel does not end there. Olga goes on to marry Oblomov’s friend Andrei Stolz—a great character, and a great friend—and together Stolz and Olga try to rescue Oblomov from his life of sleep. That they do not succeed does not necessarily mean the novel ends unhappily, for though the title bears his name, Oblomov is not the only character we care about here.

Imagine a version of
Remembrance of Things Past
in which Marcel’s lover Albertine, whom he is constantly doubting, hiding, rejecting, and then wanting back, was able to fall in love with someone else and end up happily with him (or her); imagine a version that took us outside the mind of the everlasting Marcel and into the minds of other characters—including not only Albertine, but also her new love, and not only upper-class people, but also Marcel’s housekeeper and cook. Imagine a final volume in which we looked back on all these people not just from the position of Marcel, as we do in Proust’s own
Past Recaptured
, but from the perspective of a friend who outlives him. It would be a different book, of course, and we would lose a great deal: Marcel’s relentless introversion is part of what makes him memorable as a narrator, and valuable to us. But something like this revised Proust is what we get in
Oblomov
—a thoughtful, sharp-eyed, but also generous look at particular characters in their particular setting, with all the intelligence of a broad social commentary (for Oblomovism
was
a recognizable characteristic of Russian aristocrats in decline: I was at least right about that, in my callow youth), but with all the virtues of an astute psychological novel as well. Goncharov’s form of authorial truth—a bit like Chekhov’s, in this respect—mainly takes the form of unanswerable questions voiced by the characters themselves, whose lives the novel penetrates in a way that is at once piercing and tender. I have never read anything else quite like it, and certainly nobody had in 1858, when it first came out in Russia.

Alexander Herzen, the great nonfiction writer and activist who died in exile in 1870, had some instructive ideas about why the literature of his contemporaries carried the authority it did. “The terrible consequences of human speech in Russia necessarily give it added power,” he wrote in his masterpiece
My Past and Thoughts
, an autobiography which is itself one of the key works of nineteenth-century Russian literature. “The voice of a free man is welcomed with sympathy and reverence, because with us to lift it up one absolutely must have something to say. One does not so lightly decide to publish one’s thoughts when at the end of every page one sees looming a gendarme.”

Herzen—who himself tried to write novels before settling more comfortably into the nonfiction mode—attributes Russia’s literary achievements in large part to the national and individual awareness of tragedy. Personal and collective suffering, he suggests, are what account for the fictional truth-telling. “The Russian novel is nothing but pathological anatomy,” he says; “it is only a statement of the evil that gnaws at us, a continual accusation of ourselves, without respite or pity.” Contrasting his compatriots with Goethe and the other German idealists, he points out that in Russian literature “you do not hear a gentle voice come down from heaven, announcing to Faust forgiveness for sinful Gretchen. No consolation is sought: the only voices raised are those of doubt and damnation.” Yet it is this very descent into negativity—a mode Herzen characterizes as “Melancholy, skepticism, irony … the three chief strings of the Russian lyre”—that offers the only real hope for redemption. “He who frankly avows his defects feels that there is something in him that can escape and resist his downfall; he understands that he can redeem his past,” Herzen concludes.

In his own calmly secular way (and Herzen is truly our contemporary in this regard, as in so many others), he was able to put into such words both Dostoyevsky’s view and Chekhov’s, both the self-lacerating despair of the deeply religious man and the darkly humorous, skeptical vision of the scientific humanist. They are very different kinds of authority, it would seem, but in the remarkably unified world of Russian literature, they speak with a similar urgency and a similar strength. And they speak to us still. That is perhaps the oddest thing of all: that we needn’t come from Russia, or live under the tsars, or believe in the orthodoxies or counter-orthodoxies of that time and place (or even know what they were, in any great detail), to understand that what is being conveyed to us is the truth. Whether it will be true for all time is impossible for me to say, but I cannot imagine a world in which Oblomov and Rasknolnikov, Prince Andrei and Uncle Vanya, would not have a recognizable reality. I would not want to live in such a world, for it would have ceased in some essential way to be human.