Ur-story: No Stranger to the Joys of Darkness

Where were we before our brief cultural meanderings? Right, we were looking at Beckett's Malone Dies—we cannot escape its orbit.

In Malone, we found traces of the lingering religious bias in literature in its assumption of a soul, something beyond thought, beyond physical suffering. Something that may or may not endure. No such religious atavism in Remainder, however. All traces of religious influence have been effaced, deferred, distanced; the most prominent occurring spectacularly at the end with the haunting, magisterial image of the plane flying a figure eight (the symbol for infinity), almost like a prayer, in the sky:

"I looked out of the window again. I felt really happy. We passed through a small cloud. The cloud, seen from the inside like this, was gritty, like spilled earth or dust flakes in a stairwell. Eventually the sun would set for ever—burn out, pop, extinguish—and the universe would run down like a Fisher Price toy whose spring has unwound to its very end. Then there'd be no more music, no more loops. Or maybe, before that, we'd just run out of fuel. For now, though, the clouds tilted and weightlessness set in once more as we banked, turning, heading back, again."

Malone attempts to distanciate himself from his dying by telling stories, something he refers to as play:

"This time I know where I am going, it is no longer the ancient night, the recent night. No it is a game, I am going to play. I never knew how to play, till now. I longed to, but I knew it was impossible. And yet I often tried. I turned on all the lights, I took a good look all round, I began to play with what I saw. People and things ask nothing better than to play, certain animals too ... I shall never do anything any more from now on but play. No, I must not begin with an exaggeration. But I shall play a great part of the time from now on, the greater part, if I can. ... I must have thought about my time-table during the night. I think I shall be able to tell myself four stories, each on on a different theme. One about a man, another about a woman, a third about a thing and finally one about an animal, a bird probably." (180-81)

There is some initial confusion in Malone Dies as to whether Malone is telling his stories verbally or writing them down with his nib of a pencil in his exercise book. Beckett doesn't really distinguish between the two, though he does indicate: "At first I did not write, I just said the thing. Then I forgot what I had said. A minimum of memory is indispensible, if one is to live really." (207)

The first story he tells involves the young Saposcat. As everyone knows, the name is a combination of Sapiens and scat, or "I know shit." [Macmann-'son of man'; Malone-'evil one'; Lambert-'unit of light'; Lemuel-'belonging to god'; Moll-'prostitute', nickname for Mary; blah, blah, blah]. This story-within-a-story feels like it might have been a story once written by the younger Beckett and wrangled into the context of Malone's telling. It is a traditionally realist story..."What tedium," interjects Malone into the telling. How telling!

"What tedium. And I call that playing. I wonder if I am not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of lying on any other subject? I feel the old dark gathering, the solitude preparing, by which I know myself, and the call of that ignorance which might be noble and is mere poltroonery. Already I forget what I have said. That is not how to play...." (189)

[Poltroon=coward] Even though it is his own story, Malone seems to have little control over it—at least ostensibly. He doesn't understand why Sapo isn't expelled from school for an infraction over a stick. This lends credence, in my mind at least, that this happened to Malone and he doesn't understand the grace or human kindness that spared him punishment for his sin: "I shall make him live as though he had been punished according to his deserts." (190) So, he treats Sapo as if he had been expelled. This feels like remorse by Malone, wishing he hadn't sinned—though it is quite opaque in the story how Sapo relates to Malone. Fact is, it doesn't matter, though it makes for fun speculation.

Beckett qua Malone continually interrupts and comments on the ordinariness of his story: "Sapo loved nature, took an interest This is awful." (191) Yet he continues with the story of Sapo/Macmann. Malone doesn't like his own writing. We are lead to ask whether this is Beckett commenting on his own writing style, or, more broadly, on traditional modes of storytelling. It is a good question. So, leave it to Beckett to answer his own question:

"We are getting on. Nothing is less like me than this patient, reasonable child, struggling all alone for years to shed a little light upon himself, avid of the least gleam, a stranger to the joys of darkness. Here truly is the air I needed, a lively tenuous air, far from the nourishing murk that is killing me. I shall never go back into this carcass except to find out its time." (193)

How reliable is this comment? Who knows.

Throughout the novel, there is Beckett's trademark, marvelous humor. For example, the story about the Lambert's dead mule: "Together they dragged the mule by the legs to the edge of the hole and heaved it in, on its back. The forelegs, pointing towards heaven, projected above the level of the ground. Old Lambert banged them down with his spade." (212)

That's good, old-fashioned slapstick. Could've been in a Monty Python film.

Then there's Beckett's perverse side:

"When the meal was over Edmund went up to bed, so as to masturbate in peace and comfort before his sister joined him, for they shared the same room. Not that he was restrained by modesty, when his sister was there. Nor was she, when her brother was there. Their quarters were cramped, certain refinements were not possible. Edmund then went up to bed, for no particular reason. He would have gladly slept with his sister, the father too. I mean the father would have gladly slept with his daughter, the time was long past and gone when he would have gladly slept with his sister. But something held them back. And she did not seem eager. But she was still young. Incest then was in the air. Mrs. Lambert, the only member of the household who had no desire to sleep with anybody, saw it coming with indifference. ... What tedium." (215-16)

This is classic, realist narrative with that perverse Beckettian twist. It extends the form, but does not [transcend] it. What tedium. It is not enough for the artist.

Neither is the naturalist, mimetic beauty of Beckett's prose:

"Then Mrs. Lambert was alone in the kitchen. She sat down by the window and turned down the wick of the lamp, as she always did before blowing it out, for she did not like to blow out a lamp that was still hot. When she thought the chimney and shade had cooled sufficiently she got got [sic] up and blew down the chimney. She stood a moment irresolute, bowed forward with her hands on the table, before she sat down again. Her day of toil over, day dawned on other toils within her, on the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains. Sitting, moving about, she bore them better than in bed. From the well of this unending weariness her sigh went up unendingly, for day when it was night, for night when it was day, and day and night, for the light she had been told about, and told she could never understand, because it was not like those she knew, not like the summer dawn she knew would come again, to her waiting in the kitchen, sitting up straight on the chair, or bowed down over the table, with little sleep, little rest, but more than in her bed. ... " (216-17)

Such lyrical beauty; this could easily be the description of a still life by a Dutch master: the dying light, the posture, the face, the sadness. Yet, to Beckett qua Malone: "Mortal tedium." (217)

Still, tedious or not, writing is crucial to remembrance: Malone drops his pencil and cannot find it for forty-eight hours. "I have spent two unforgettable days," he tells us, "of which nothing will ever be known..." (222)

What is to be done? Malone reverts, as he promised, from storytelling to describing his 'present state'—a standard novelistic move. Malone, like Ivan Ilych, feels himself dying gradually, feels his body distancing itself from him:"

But this sensation of dilation is hard to resist. All strains towards the nearest deeps, and notably my feet, which even in the ordinary way are so much further from me than all the rest, from my head I mean, for that is where I am fled, my feet are leagues away. And to call them in, to be cleaned for example, would I think take me over a month, exclusive of the time required to locate them. Strange, I don't feel my feet any more, my feet feel nothing any more, and a mercy it is. And yet I feel they are beyond the range of the most powerful telescope. Is that what is known as having a foot in the grave? And similarly for the rest. For a mere local phenomenon is something I would not have noticed, having been nothing but a series or rather a succession of local phenomena all my life, without any result. But my fingers too write in other latitudes and the air that breathes through my pages and turns them without my knowing, when I doze off, so that the subject falls far from the verb and the object lands somewhere in the void, is not the air of this second-last abode, and a mercy it is." (234)

Frantically, Malone reverts to storytelling: There is some wallowing and squirming in the mud. There are possessions, lost, found, and lost. There is a hat on Macmann and one on an ass. There are sticks and bloody clubs. And Macmann comes/goes to the asylum. There is sex with his keeper, Moll. There is a tooth carved in the shape of a crucifix. There is murderous rage and a murder. There is the theft of bacon from the 'excursion soup' by the unscrupulous keeper, Lemuel. And there is the inmates' murderous excursion to the island with the asylum's benefactor, Lady Pedal.

Then, again, Malone's dying:

"A few lines to remind me that I too subsist. He has not come back. How long ago is it now? I don't know. Long. And I? Indubitably going, that's all that matters. Whence this assurance? Try and think. I can't. Grandiose suffering. I am swelling. What if I should burst? The ceiling rises and falls, rises and falls, rhythmically, as when I was a foetus. Also to be mentioned a noise of rushing water, phenomenon mutatis mutandis perhaps analogous to that of the mirage, in the desert. The window. I shall not see it again. Why? Because, to my grief, I cannot turn my head. Leaden light again, thick, eddying riddled with little tunnels through to brightness, perhaps I should say air, sucking air. All is ready. Except me. I am being given, if I may venture the expression, birth to into death, such is my impression. The feet are clear already, of the great cunt of existence. Favourable presentation I trust. My head will be the last to die. Haul in your hands. I can't. The render rent. My story ended I'll be living yet. Promising lag. That is the end of me. I shall say no more." (283)

Malone fails at his projects. He does not complete his stories—and what he completes is tedium, mortal tedium—though he scribbles furiously and unconsciously. His possessions seem to take on a life of their own, refusing inventory, wandering off, returning mysteriously. And his present state, well his present state dwindles into a homunculus inside his head and, after the rest of his body, is extinguished into a terrible darkness.

Such is Beckett's stark vision of the inner life of the dying Malone. Trying to avoid himself, he finds himself. Trying to escape his fate, he dies. We watch him, in that most memorable phrase, "being given...birth to into death."

In terms of the Ur-story theme we've been pursuing, Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych was pure porn, a literary snuff piece, if you will, much like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was pretty much a pornographic, snuff film: the level of the storytelling is intense, direct, realistic; trapped within its own form. Beckett tries to escape the ambit of 19th Century realism by commenting—derisively we might add—on his own storytelling. In the face of the Ur-story, Beckett seems to be showing us, straight-on storytelling simply will not suffice. Tom McCarthy has absorbed this lesson. Remainder (and with it, Synecdoche, New York) is, indeed, the child of Malone Dies.

Ur-story: Tolstoy's Ilych

There are echoes of Kafkaesque bafflement in the life of Ivan Ilych. Clearly, Tolstoy—and particularly this novella—was a great influence. But whereas Kafka would have his protagonists die without ever coming to any sort of insight into the enigma of their fate or the workings of their government, Tolstoy wants to be instructive. His method is irony. Though it is too late for poor Ivan Ilych to apply the insights he learns in his death-bed revelation and conversion, it is not too late for us.

Tolstoy treats his minor characters like props. In the first chapter the character of Pyor Ivanovich is promising in a Nick Carraway sort of way. But he fades into irrelevance thereafter. And Ivan Ilych is no Gatsby. The remainder of the characters, except for Gerasim, merely serve to highlight by contrast the experience Ivan Ilych suffers. They, the bourgeois with all their propriety and decorum, are the target of Tolstoy's scorn. Gerasim is useful, sympathetic, symbolic. None are developed. His main character, Ivan Ilych, he punishes mercilessly.

Tolstoy ventures into the mind of a dying man. This is bold, imaginative. Commendable. But, to our modern mind, he lets the man off too easily. The death-bed conversion changes nothing about the life he had led. It is as worthless as the sacraments his wife forces him to accept. It changes nothing about the man, other than his mind which, as we all know, is in the fits and spasms of excruciating pain. It merely allows him to die more or less at peace with himself, though impotent to aid and impart his hard-won insight to his grieving son.

The portrait of the thoughts and suffering of the dying man, Ivan Ilych, is unparalleled—certainly unprecedented—because it is from the inside! It surely took an enormous effort on the part of the writer. The process of creation and discovery for the artist must have been exhilirating, exhausting, excruciating—all at once. It is a supreme artistic achievement.

Tolstoy, likewise, succeeds in showing us how we ought to live—at least by his own lights. His message draws on Socratic and Buddhistic and Christian insights and he communicates it clearly, using among other things contrast, repetition, rhetoric, and plain old moralizing. We feel sympathy for the suffering, dying Ivan Ilych and, in identifying with his plight, we may profit from his revealed wisdom. Fine. But is this really the purpose of fiction? Are we supposed to learn a lesson from literature? Should the writer moralize?

I suspect there are any number of let us call them lesser works of fiction where a similar, even identical message, is presented, but less effectively or, more to our point, less aesthetically compelling. Didacticism for didacticism's sake doesn't work for me; it cheapens the artwork. Artistic preaching, on the other hand, presents a more complicated case, especially where the artistry is of such exemplary merit as in The Death of Ivan Ilych.

The critical response, it seems to me, is to set aside the so-called 'message'; bracket it. Identify it, accept it or refuse it, isolate it, and let it be. Then can begin an appreciation of the work qua work, not qua vessel for a message. That is the way I've tried to approach this reading.

In this vein let's see how Tolstoy's story fails. First, there are his social biases. From our post-modern mindset, Tolstoy's identity relations in this novella are readily apparent. He idealizes the peasant boy, Gerasim. Romanticizes his simplicity. This is echoed in his apparent sympathy for Ivan Ilych's son—his innocence, his pure grief, his pity for his father: note that it is only after he wakes to his son kissing his hand that Ivan Ilych realizes there is nothing more he can do and feels he must finally let go. Then, "there was no terror, because death was not either." In their simple pity the boy and the peasant are Tolstoy's chosen vehicles of instruction and wisdom. On the other hand it is clear Tolstoy has nothing but scorn for the aspiring middle class. They are all depicted as self-serving, calculating, hypocritical, false, unenlightened. Their cares are not genuine. Theirs are not the ultimate concerns (to borrow Paul Tillich's remarkable phrase). One suspects there were plenty of conniving peasants and even enlightened bourgeois in 19th Century Russia. Yet Tolstoy chooses to typify them—stereotypify them, if you will. This is a literary failure: dealing with types instead of specific characters acting in specific ways in specific situations. It is easy to generalize, especially when the author is trying to score points; indeed this is the armature of Tolstoy's message. In truth no one is true to type.

Second, though Tolstoy chooses a certain omniscient irony to drive home his point—Ivan Ilych's epiphany comes too late for him to rectify his own life or save his family from a similar fate—it seems there might have been an even greater poignancy had Ivan Ilych never come to such an insight. Had Tolstoy allowed II to die in let us call it an unrepentant state, without insight, the same way he lived, the novella would have felt less preachy.

Do we really need revelation, epiphany, insight in how to live? How important is it, after all, to live right? To find meaning and fulfillment? Wasted lives are a part of the human condition—perhaps the norm given Tolstoy's preachments. So what? Given this state of affairs, then, how does one make one's peace with extinction? Is there no nobility in just getting by? Surviving in the face of a hostile universe? Can the dying psyche not objectively assess the living being without resort to ethical or theological norms? Just as these questions take hold in the story, Tolstoy pulls out. He evades them with an easy moralizing out. Instead of trying to drive a point home, could Tolstoy not simply have given us a fuller portrait of the life and death of a complicated, complex man—good or evil—and allowed us to form our own value judgments about its worth. He gives us no credit. Yes it is realistic that a character such as Ivan Ilych would reassess his life in the face of impending death. But it is not enough. The Death of Ivan Ilych in this respect is ultimately unsatisfying.

Ivan Ilych is a shallow man who lives a shallow life. There is no real complexity to his character until, at the end in the midst of his great suffering, he achieves a remarkable insight into the meaning of death in and for life. There appears to have been no chance for him to reach this position of enlightenment during the course of his life—an opportunity he could have accepted or declined (either to great narrative effect). As with a sermon, we are called on to evaluate our own lives in the failure of his. Yet the picture of his life is too general. Tolstoy tells us through retrospection the story of his life in overly broad strokes. We are almost never 'in scene' with him except in his suffering, dying moments. How then are we to identify? Sure I went to law school, too. Thus Ivan Ilich represents me? Sure I have a wife and kids. Okay I get it! Sure I'm attempting to make a better life for me and my family. Ah-ha! Just as the minor characters are types, so is Ivan Ilych; only more fleshed out.

Ivan Ilych's response to the inbreaking of insight is simply to die. It has no consequence. The essence of fiction, the Ur-story, is in coming to grips with the consciousness of our sense of loss and grief at our own mortality. Those around us die and we come to realize that is ultimately our own fate as well. What we do in response to this is who we truly are. Do we embark on a quest for eternal life? Do we seek to revive lost ones? Do we try to bridge the void? Do we conceive ghosts? Do we concoct religions or succumb to delusions? Do we embark on murderous rages? Do we try to set things aright? Do we seek out love to assuage the pain? Do we laugh at the absurdity of it all? These are legitimate responses to this fundamental truth of human existence and they provide complex grounds for literary exploration.

The Death of Ivan Ilych does not deal with the consequences of this insight. Tolstoy merely presents his own version of the insight but gives none of his characters the opportunity to respond to it urgencies. At the end Ivan Ilych himself regrets not having lived right and in pity for the suffering of the others finally gives himself over to death. Regrets? Sure, I've had a few. But life is more complex than that. More wonderful. More beautiful. More mystifying. More profound.

Ur-story: Tolstoy's Ilych—Too Late?

When I started this set of posts on Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych I didn't think it would be so intense and detailed. There are plenty of gaps in my literary education and Tolstoy's works is one of the biggest. I first started to read TDoII because its theme related to a theme of the novel I'm now working on. It was purely for research—to see how he handled it over a century ago. Yawn. I never expected to find it so compelling. I know, I know. Tolstoy is one of the greats, how could it not be wonderful? Let's put it this way: I've been fooled before.

Where were we? Right. The last time we dropped in on poor II, we found Count LeoTolstoy slumming—spiritually at least—with the peasant Gerasim. He was allowing his simple young servant to provide some aid and comfort to the bourgeois enemy. It does not last long. II's pain increases. Doctors continue to come and go, functionary professionals just like the lawyers with whom II practiced before he was taken ill. Ivan feels himself losing control of his family and household. He stews internally, his rage boiling as the family discusses their plans for attending a performance that evening by the famed actor Sarah Bernhardt. Yet, when they leave—their falsity and "decorous deception"—the pain remains.



When she returns Praskovya Fyodorovna, Ivan's wife, gives II some opium:

"Till three o'clock he slept a miserable sleep. It seemed to him that he and his pain were being thrust somewhere into a narrow, deep, black sack, and they kept pushing him further and further in, and still could not thrust him to the bottom. And this operation was awful to him, and was accompanied with agony. And he was afraid, and yet wanted to fall into it, and struggled and yet tried to get into it. And all of a sudden he slipped and fell and woke up. ... he could restrain himself no longer, and cried like a child. He cried at his own helplessness, at his awful loneliness, at the cruelty of people, at the cruelty of God, at the absence of God." (Ch. IX)

Then begins an internal dialogue. Ivan wants only to live the way he used to live and no longer suffer. But when he begins to relive his life, it now seems "trivial, and often disgusting". "It was like a memory of someone else." Only his childhood, he realizes, held any joy. Law school sucked (so what's new!). His marriage was "as gratuitous as the disillusion of it and the smell of his wife's breath and the sensuality, the hypocrisy." His professional life entailed nothing but soul-deadening anxiety.

"'Can it be I have not lived as one ought?' suddenly came into his head. 'But how not so, when I've done everything as it should be done?' he said, and at once dismissed this only solution of all the enigma of life and death as something utterly out of the question."

Tolstoy, in full preacherly mode, is telling us this is the one question we should never avoid: What does it mean to live a good life? How ought one to live? This question, as old at least as Socrates, should guide our lives, should be of ultimate concern. When it intrudes latterly on the defenses set up by the unexamined bourgeois life it will be with all the attendant pain Tolstoy here inflicts on poor Ivan Ilych.

II begins to lose hope of ever recovering. His illness has persisted three excruciating months, worsening by the moment. His suffering has become nigh unbearable. "Just as the pain goes on getting worse and worse, so has my whole life gone on getting worse and worse," he thinks. Yet he cannot comprehend what his life, with all its propriety, correctness, and regularity, was for.

He resists the thought for a couple weeks, but soon the revelation dawns upon him:

"His moral sufferings were due to the fact that during the night, as he looked at the sleepy, good-natured, broad-cheeked face of Gerasim [!], the thought had suddenly come into his head, 'What if in reality all my life, my conscious life, has been not the right thing?' The thought struck him that what he had regarded before as an utter impossibility, that he had spent his life not as he ought, might be the truth. It struck him that those scarcely detected impulses of struggle within him against what was considered good by persons of higher position, scarcely detected impulses which he had dismissed, that they might be the real thing, and everything else might be not the right thing. And his official work, and his ordering of his daily life and of his family, and these social and official interests,—all that might be not the right thing. He tried to defend it all to himself. And suddenly he felt all the weakness of what he was defending. And it was useless to defend it.

'But if it's so,' he said to himself, 'and I am leaving life with the consciousness that I have lost all that was given me, and there's no correcting it, then what?' He lay on his back and began going over his whole life entirely anew. When he saw the footman in the morning, then his wife, then his daughter, then the doctor, every movement they made, every word they uttered, confirmed for him the terrible truth that had been revealed to him in the night. In them he saw himself, saw all in which he had lived, and saw distinctly that it was all not the right thing; it was a horrible, vast deception that concealed both life and death. This consciousness intensified his physical agonies, multiplied them tenfold. He groaned and tossed from side to side and pulled at the covering over him. It seemed to him that it was stifling him and weighing him down. And for that he hated them." (Ch. XI)

II's wife coerces him to take the sacrament. He lies to her and tells her it makes him feel better, but the hatred still thrives within him. "From that moment there began the scream that never ceased for three days..."

"All those three days, during which time did not exist for him, he was struggling in that black sack into which he was being thrust by an unseen resistless force. He struggled as the man condemned to death struggles in the hands of the executioner, knwing that he cannot save himself. And every moment he felt that in spite of all his efforts to struggles against it, he was getting nearer and nearer to what terrified him. He felt that his agony was due both to his being thrust into this black hole and still more to his not being able to get right into it. What hindered him from getting into it was the claim that his life had been good. That justification of his life held him fast and would not let him get forward, and it caused him more agony than all.

All at once some force struck him in the chest, in the side, and stifled his breathing more than ever; he rolled forward into the hole, and there at the end there was some sort of light. It had happened with him, as it had sometimes happened to him in a railway carriage, when he had thought he was going forward while he was going back, and all of a sudden recognised his real direction.

'Yes, it has all been not the right thing,' he said to himself, ' but that's no matter.' He could, he could do the right thing. 'What is the right thing?' he asked himself, and suddenly he became quiet." (Ch. XII)

Tolstoy makes a bit of mistake in his 'blocking' here. Ivan becomes quiet, he says. Then his son comes into his room 'at that very moment' while 'the dying man was screaming and waving his arms.' But such a lapse is forgivable given the intensity of the emotion he is trying to present. His son cries and kisses his father's hand. "He opened his eyes and glanced at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife went up to him. He glanced at her. She was gazing at him with open mouth, the tears unwiped streaming over her nose and cheeks, a look of despair on her face. He felt sorry for her."

Pity for the plight of humanity replaces the hatred of its hypocrisy and the fear of death that had lodged in his soul.

"And all at once it became clear to him that what had tortured him and would not leave him was suddenly dropping away all at once on both sides and on ten sides and on all sides. He was sorry for them, must act so that they might not suffer. Set them free and be free himself of those agonies. 'How right and how simple!' he thought. 'And the pain?' he asked himself. "Where's it gone? Eh, where are you, pain?' ... He looked for his old accustomed terror of death, and did not find it. 'Where is it? What death?' There was no terror, because death was not either.

In the place of death there was light.

'So this is it!' he suddenly exclaimed aloud.

'What joy!'"

The irony for poor Ivan Ilych is that this revelation comes too late in his life for it to have any meaningful effect. He can't relive his life knowing what he knows now. Moreover, in his condition he is unable to impart this insight to his family. Embrace the fact of mortality, examine life in all its finitude, and try to live as one ought by easing the pain and suffering of others. It is a good message. The kind of thing you can hear on weekends at any number of churches, synagogues, mosques, ashrams, or temples all around the world. The literary power of it comes in Tolstoy's parallel portrayal of pain and epiphany. Ivan Ilych's enlightenment comes at the terrible price of his suffering. He earns his epiphany through suffering and irony. In dying he embraces death—albeit too late.

Ur-story: Tolstoy's Ilych—Romancing the Peasant

Through his suffering Ivan Ilych has earned his solitude, his chance to come to terms with his own mortality. Tolstoy has systematically stripped him of the comforts of the middle-class life that stood between him and his authentic self. He has forced his protagonist to confront the emptiness of his life. It is a painful process: his life has left II with a bad taste in his mouth and an inchoate but persistent aching inside. Everyone, including II himself, is waiting for him to die, to "free the living from the constraint of his presence." Tolstoy tortures him with greater and greater pains, sleeplessness, and incontinence. Even the sop of opium Tolstoy allows II doesn't assuage this existential suffering.

Now comes Tolstoy to plague poor Ivan with his vision of populist authenticity in the person of Gerasim. One might compare it (uncharitably) in the idiom of present day politics to someone like a patrician Mitt Romney or George Bush feigning populism:

"Gerasim was a clean, fresh, young peasant, who had grown stout and hearty on the good fare in town. Always cheerful and bright. At first the sight of this lad, always cleanly dressed in the Russian style, engaged in this revolting task [cleaning the bedpans and soiled bedcloths], embarrassed Ivan Ilych.

One day, getting up from the night-stool, too weak to replace his clothes, he dropped on to a soft low chair and looked with horror at his bare, powerless thighs, with the muscles so sharply standing out on them.

Then there came in with light, strong steps Gerasim, in his thick boots, diffusing a pleasant smell of tar from his boots, and bringing in the freshness of the winter air. Wearing a clean hempen apron, and a clean cotton shirt, with his sleeves tucked up on his strong, bare young arms, without looking at Ivan Ilych, obviously trying to check the radiant happiness in his face so as not to hurt the sick man, he went up to the night-stool."

Notice the profusion of adjectives: clean, fresh, young, stout, hearty, cheerful, bright, cleanly dressed in the Russian style, light strong steps, pleasant, fresh (again), clean (again and again), strong bare (arms), radiant, happiness. We get the picture. Nothing subtle here. Gerasim is the idealized peasant, the noble workman, the authentic other. The name 'Gerasim' in Russian means 'elder' or 'older one', implying wisdom; Gerasim qua peasant is an old soul. Where Tolstoy seems to have nothing but contempt for the bourgeois who inhabit this novella, he seems to have nothing but adoration for this simple peasant boy who lives his life according to an exemplary morality.

"The terrible, awful act of his dying was, he saw, by all those about him, brought down to the level of a casual, unpleasant, and to some extent indecorous, incident (somewhat as they would behave with a person who should enter a drawing-room smelling unpleasant). It was brought down to this level by that very decorum to which he had been enslaved all his life. He saw that no one felt for him, because no one would even grasp his position. Gerasim was the only person who recognised the position, and felt sorry for him. And that was why Ivan Ilych was only at ease with Gerasim. He felt comforted when Gerasim sometimes supported his legs for whole nights at a stretch, and would not go away to bed, saying, 'Don't you worry yourself, Ivan Ilych, I'll get sleep enough yet,' or when suddenly dropping into the familiar peasant forms of speech, he added: 'If thou weren't sick, but as 'tis, 'twould be strange if I didn't wait on thee.' Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed clearly that he alone understood what it meant, and saw no necessity to disguise it, and simply felt sorry for his sick, wasting master. He even said this once straight out, when Ivan Ilych was sending him away.

'We shall all die. So what's a little trouble?' he said, meaning by this to express that he did not complain of the trouble just because he was taking this trouble for a dying man, and he hoped that for him too someone would be willing to take the same trouble when his time came."

Patrician moralizing or merely patronizing? You make the call.

Gerasim, the natural man, ministers to his master's neediness, babies him, satisfies the constant longing in his soul to be comforted from the oppressiveness of his emptiness and inauthenticity, brings the fundamental truth of one human touching another in his suffering. There is no question raised as to the propriety of the master-servant relationship or, more specifically, as to whether Gerasim is merely being kind out of a sense of duty and obligation (he'll lose his job if he doesn't accommodate his master's demands) or whether his is the sort of authentic fellow-feeling Tolstoy seems to want to portray here. This romanticizing of the peasant feels like a failure of imagination on Tolstoy's part. As a technical matter, though Gerasim is clearly meant to be symbolic if not emblematic, I don't believe Tolstoy's failure to confront the morality of an unequal power-relationship is a concession to the limited formula of the novella because this theme of comfort and pity is so central to the story.

Many accuse the later Tolstoy of preachiness, didacticism, moralizing. It is passages like this that lead them to bring that charge. Nabokov makes light of it in his Lectures on Russian Literature:

"this story was written in March 1886, at a time when Tolstoy was nearly sixty and had firmly established the Tolstoyan fact that writing masterpieces of fiction was a sin. He had firmly made up his mind that if he would write anything, after the great sins of his middle years, War and Peace and Anna Karenin, it would be only in the way of simple tales for the people, for peasants, for school children, pious educational fables, moralistic fairy tales, that kind of thing. Here and there in The Death of Ivan Ilych there is a half-hearted attempt to proceed with this trend, and we shall find samples of a pseudo-fable style here and there in the story. But on the whole it is the artist who takes over. This story is Tolstoy's most artistic, most perfect, and most sophisticated achievement."

The authentic, noble, wise response to the harsh, painful truth of human mortality (the Ur-story) is portrayed in Gerasim's kindly attitude when cleaning II's filth and cradling his legs, the simple pity for the suffering and grief of one who is finally having to come to terms with his ultimate aloneness.

Ur-story: Tolstoy's Ilych—The Condition My Condition Is In

We continue with our look at Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. Before we get too far it might pay to define our terms. What exactly is a novella? The glib answer is it is a work of fiction shorter than a novel (~80,000+ words) but longer than a short story (~5,000 - 10,000 words); but the quantitative answer doesn't really tell us much of anything except that publishing a novella in either a journal or in book form is not going to be a ready option in the American market. Taking TDoII as our model, we can assert an intriguingly substantive thesis: in a novella one character has the space to grow and/or experience some sort of motivated, significant change, physically and psychologically, though none of the others do. The novel has more space to develop parallel, modifying plots; explore multiple themes and styles and points of view; and allow other characters to have their own emotional arc etc. The short story does not allow for much back story or thematic development. It must address its main characters 'crisis' efficiently. Here I think it safe to say none of the other characters has an interesting story arc. They are the props, the furniture upon which Tolstoy develops his story of II. They feel relatively fixed, symbolic even (as we have seen). They are there mainly to provide color and contrast for the protagonist's story. Let's leave it at that, a provisional definition of the novella, and get back to our look at the story.

As we have seen there is no mystery here: II is fallen man and as such his fate is death. Tolstoy's lesson is obvious. The concerns of fallen man, here synonymous with those of the middle class—careerism, wealth, orderly lifestyle, and social climbing—are temporal, vanishing. They result in a life filled with hypocrisy, vanity, obsession. Fair enough, Count.

The bad taste in II's mouth, the discomfort in his side, his irritability all continue to worsen. Life goes on around the dying man and he steadily retreats from it—losing interest in his friends, his cards, his job, his family—and into himself. Doctors are consulted. Diagnoses are proffered and withdrawn. Medicaments prove to no avail. No cure is forthcoming. Nor any salvation. II languishes in his study. His family and servants come and go. No one seems to understand him or his predicament. And no one will tell II the truth of his condition. This is an important Tolstoyan point for he repeats it several times to make sure we get it (we are using the Constance Garnett translation):

"The doctor said: 'This and that proves that you have such-and-such a thing wrong inside you; but if that is not confirmed by analysis of this and that, then we must assume this and that. If we assume this—and so on. To Ivan Ilych there was only one question of consequence, Was his condition dangerous or not? But the doctor ignored that irrelevant inquiry." (Ch. IV)

"Suddenly he felt the familiar, old, dull, gnawing ache, persistent, quiet, in earnest. In his mouth the same familiar loathsome taste. His heart sank, his brain felt dim, misty. 'My God, my God!' he said, 'again, again, and it will never cease.' And suddenly the whole thing rose before him in quite a different aspect. 'Appendix! kidney!' he said to himself. 'It's not a question of the appendix, not a question of the kidney, but of life and ... death. Yes, life has been and now it's going, going away, and I cannot stop it. Yes. Why deceive myself? Isn't it obvious to every one, except me, that I'm dying, and it's only a question of weeks, of days—at once perhaps. There was light, and now there is darkness. I was here, and now I am going! Where?' A cold chill ran over him, his breath stopped. He heard nothing but the throbbing of his heart.

"'I shall be no more, then what will there be? There'll be nothing. Where then shall I be when I'm no more? Can this be dying? No; I don't want to!' He jumped up, tried to light the candle; and fumbling with trembling hands, he dropped the candle and the candlestick on the floor and fell back again on the pillow. 'Why trouble? it doesn't matter,' he said to himself, staring with open eyes into the darkness. 'Death. Yes, death. And they—all of them—don't understand, and don't want to understand, and feel no pity. They are playing." (Ch. V)

The accoutrements and amusements and diversions of the bourgeois life, II discovers, are merely defenses, forestalling acknowledgment of the terrifying thought of death's universality and inevitability. And they are impenetrable; that is why he is unable to connect with his friends, family, or even his doctors. As these defenses fall away, losing their power to shield II from this terrible truth, he has an epiphany. One day at work, in the middle of reciting the "familiar words that opened the proceedings" of business in the law court, the pain in II's side reasserted itself:

"It riveted Ivan Ilych's attention. He drove away the thought of it, but it still did its work, and then It came and stood confronting him and looked at him, and he felt turned to stone, and the light died away in his eyes, and he began to ask himself again, 'Can it be that It is the only truth?' And his colleagues and his subordinates saw with surprise and distress that he, the brilliant, subtle judge, was losing the thread of his speech, was making blunders. He shook himself, tried to regain his self-control, and got somehow to the end of the sitting, and went home with the painful sense that his judicial labours could not as of old hide from him what he wanted to hide; that he could not by means of his official work escape from It. And the worst of it was that It drew him to itself not for him to do anything in particular, but simply for him to look at It straight in the face, to look at It and, doing nothing, suffer unspeakably.

And to save himself from this, Ivan Ilych sought amusements, other screens, and these screens he found, and for a little while they did seem to save him; but soon again they were not so much broken down as let the light through, as though It pierced through everything, and there was nothing that could shut It off.
...

'And it's the fact that here, at that curtain, as if it had been storming a fort, I lost my life. Is it possible? How awful and how silly! It cannot be! It cannot be, and it is.'

He went into his own room, lay down, and was again alone with It. Face to face with It, and nothing to be done with It. Nothing but to look at It and shiver." (Ch. VI)

And thus, in this It, we are confronting the inbreak of the Ur-story, the essence of fiction, from the inside. The shiver of destiny. Note the motif of light and dark, the leitmotif of screens and curtains. Note the allusion to Kierkegaard's sickness unto death as a metaphor for the human condition, a predominant literary trope through at least Sontag. Notwithstanding, Ilych must now acknowledge his destiny, his defenses having fallen away, and he must confront his own mortality. Alone!

Tolstoy has brought us to this place as no one before him has. Others have danced around it, confronting it from the outside. Dealing with its effects upon the living: the inconvenience, the annoyance, the denial, the anger, the grief. But now we, with Ivan Ilych, are learning how to die.

Ur-story: Tolstoy's Ilych—Nearly Fallen Man

After a breathtaking, magisterial first chapter that on its own has surely stood the test of time, Tolstoy reverts in the second chapter of The Death of Ivan Ilich to a more traditional, nineteenth-century mode of storytelling—however fine. Where the first chapter was presented in a free indirect style from the point of view of Pyotr Ivanovich, an acquaintance and colleague of the protagonist, the second chapter rather omnisciently tells the backstory of Ivan Ilych.

"The previous history of Ivan Ilych was the simplest, the most ordinary, the most awful," begins the second chapter a line echoed by Ford Maddox Ford in the first line of his The Good Soldier: "This is the saddest story I have ever heard." Indeed, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." One suspects this might have been the original beginning of the novella; it has that classic first line ring. It seems to me the first chapter must have been written after the rest was finished for the reasons we discussed yesterday.

II leads a good, some would say ideal, bourgeois life with only a few minor professional and family annoyances, for seventeen years until he experiences what my kids today term an MLC:

"The summer of that year [1880], to cut down his expenses, he took a holiday and went with his wife to spend the summer in the country at her brothers'.

"In the country, with no official duties to occupy him, Ivan Ilych was for the first time a prey not to simple boredom, but to intolerable depression; and he made up his mind that things could not go on like that, and that it was absolutely necessary to take some decisive steps."

II gets a big promotion and raise and patches up things with his wife. He takes new apartments in Petersburg and, in a truly modern fit of OCD, throws himself into its interior decorating to make it just so. Then this: "One day he went up a ladder to show a workman, who did not understand, how he wanted some hangings draped, made a false step and slipped; but, like a strong and nimble person, he clung on, and only knocked his side against the corner of a frame. The bruised place ached, but it soon passed off." Tolstoy passes off what is one of the most consequential actions in the story in two scant, non-descript sentences. Then he intrudes to insult his protagonist's self-satisfied—albeit bourgeois—taste:

"In reality, it was all just what is commonly seen in the houses of people who are not exactly wealthy but want to look like wealthy people, and so suceed only in being like one another—hangings, dark wood, flowers, rugs and bronzes, everything dark and highly polished, everything that all people of a certain class have so as to be like all people of a certain class. And in his case it was all so like that it made no impression at all; but it all seemed to him somehow special."

Ouch! The snark of aristocracy cannot but exert itself, no matter the authenticity of one's alleged conversion, eh, Count? Which is worse, you might well ask, the bruise of the fall or the ironic glance of the classist blow? No matter, II shrugs the whole thing off: "'It's as well I'm something of an athlete. Another man might have been killed, and I got nothing worse than a blow here; when it's touched it hurts, but it's going off already; nothing but a bruise." Right, but we moderns know better. Though still animated by bourgeois striving and dissatisfaction, their lives improved, the Golovins perservere, pursuing education, society, and professional advancement with only a few noticeable cracks in the facade of their new-found existence.

Chapter Four begins:

"All were in good health. One could not use the word ill-health in connection with the symptoms Ivan Ilych sometimes complained of, namely, a queer taste in his mouth and a sort of uncomfortable feeling on the left side of the stomach.

"But it came to pass that this uncomfortable feeling kept increasing, and became not exactly a pain, but a continual sense of weight in his side and irritable temper."

From here it's all downhill for poor II. Tolstoy subjects his protagonist to a run of the sort of sadistic nastiness we don't really see much of until Nabokov imperiously strides upon the New World. [to be continued]

Ur-story: Tolstoy's Ilych

"In the great building of the Law Courts..." sounds like the opening line of a Kafka story, a parable of the unfathomable enigma of life. But no; it is the opening of Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilych. We soon discover that someone named Ivan Ilych has died. Who is he? Why should we care? Well, Tolstoy tells us, II "was a colleague of the gentleman present, and all liked him. It was some weeks now since he had been taken ill; his illness had been said to be incurable." The men, his colleagues, we learn through a feat of authorial omniscience, immediately begin thinking about their own promotions and raises as they rise to fill the professional void. There is also a perfunctory sort of 'there but for the grace of god go I' relief and a nod to the call of social duty. Someone must call upon poor II's widow and children. This falls upon one Pyotr Ivanovich whose main concern seems to be whether he can get in and out of the dead man's home in time for the evening's game of bridge.

Pyotr Ivanovich stands in for us, the readers. He gives us our cue as to how we are to react on this somber occasion:

Pyotr Ivanovich went in, as people always do on such occasions, in uncertainty as to what he would have to do there. One thing he felt sure of—that crossing oneself never comes amiss on such occasions. As to whether it was necessary to bow down while doing so, he did not feel quite sure, and so chose a middle course. On entering the room he began crossing himself, and made a slight sort of bow. So far as the movements of his hands and head permitted him, he glanced while doing so about the room. Two young men, one a high school boy, nephews probably, were going out of the room, crossing themselves. An old lady was standing motionless; and a lady, with her eyebrows queerly lifted, was saying something to her in a whisper. A deacon in a frockcoat, resolute and hearty, was reading something aloud with an expression that precluded all possibility of contradiction. A young peasant who used to wait at table, Gerasim, walking with light footsteps in front of Pyotr Ivanovich, was sprinkling something on the floor. Seeing this, Pyotr Ivanovich was at once aware of the faint odour of the decomposing corpse. On his last visit to Ivan Ilych Pyotr Ivanovich had seen this peasant in his room; he was performing the duties of a sicknurse, and Ivan Ilych liked him particularly. Pyotr Ivanovich continued crossing himself and bowing in a direction intermediate between the coffin, the deacon, and the holy pictures on the table in the corner. Then when this action of making the sign of the cross with his hand seemed to him to have been unduly prolonged, he stood still and began to scrutinise the dead man.

I am a sucker for a novelistic thesis statement, which is what this is: a map to the core of the book. An exegesis of the images Tolstoy sets up here would bring us fairly close the central meaning of the book: the awkwardness of the established rituals of society and its religion; the goings-on of the children of the family; the women's oddness and secrecy; the symbolically incontrovertible deacon; Gerasim, the noble peasant at the center of things, helping us deal with the stench of death; the uncertainty of Pytor's allegiances and the middle ground he strikes with his bowing; and his feeling when he has sufficiently paid his respects that it is time to turn his attention to the dead man. There is psychology (expectations and intentions), action (compromise), and the sort of sensuous detail (whisperings, putrescence) necessary to bring us in close: the true signs of a master.

There is a comic tone, a sense of satire, to Tolstoy's treatment of Pyotr here and throughout this first chapter. His awkwardness, his being buttonholed by the widow, his having to attend the service and miss his bridge game (the comic wink of Shvarts giving the game away), his wrestling match with the ottoman's "deranged springs", his fumblings over the widow's black lace fichu. Tolstoy is even unkinder regarding Praskovya Fyodorovna. She does not much care so much that her husband has died as she does for her own position. She quibbles with II's butler over the cost of a burial plot. She inveigles Pyotr to assist her in obtaining a grant and increasing her pension from the government. II's suffering was a burden to her which made it hard for her to be sympathetic with his plight. Pyotr attends the service with II's sullen daughter and her rich fiance and II's grieving son, his spirit and image, during which "[h]e did not once glance at the dead man, and right through to the end did not once give way to depressing influences, and was one of the first to walk out." Gerasim shows him out, remarking that II's death was "God's will. We shall come to the same." Pytor Ivanovich makes it to his friend's house just as they are finishing their first rubber, "just at the right time to take a hand." Thus ends the first chapter of Tolstoy's novella.

This first chapter is in and of itself brilliant as a short story. It stands alone and if Tolstoy had stopped right there it would certainly have passed into the canon as one of the masterpieces of the genre. It satisfies our criteria for Ur-story: confronting the inevitability of loss and grief (or as Umberto Eco put it "fate and death") as integral to the human condition. The story does just that, indicting all the characters except Gerasim. The son is in the state of youthful innocence and grieves truly; the daughter is narcissistic and haughty, untouched by it all, and doesn't want to be bothered; the widow is mercenary, concerned only with her own material situation; Pyotr Ivanovich, our guide here, is only doing what society requires of him; neighbors are secretive and gossiping; servants and butlers continue to function; and the deacon resorts to his prescribed theological niceties. Gerasim alone is philosophical, accepting. Thus, he stands in for Tolstoy: Gerasim's is the attitude he wants to inculcate in us.

So, how does Tolstoy go on from this magnificent opening? Were he to take the tack we've seen in, e.g., the Gilgamesh, Pyotr Ivanovich would embark on a great quest to come to terms with his true feelings (or lack thereof) concerning the death and suffering of his lifelong friend and colleague. But that is not Tolstoy's approach. What Tolstoy does—and I'm not sure anyone had ever attempted this prior to this story—is to take us inside the dying man's mind. Remarkable. He shows us how this man, Ivan Ilych, confronts his own mortality and in the process hopes to show us how to die. With respect to the former task—let us call it the psychology of Ur-story—Tolstoy's portrait is masterful, original, profound. Ultimately, however, he fails with respect to the latter task. We'll talk about this in a subsequent post.