Prince Vassily and the "Realistic Villain" in War and Peace

Stephen Rea as Prince Vassily and Gillian Anderson as Anna Pavlova in BBC's War and Peace

Inspired by the recent BBC War and Peace miniseries, I have been rereading War and Peace and really enjoying some of its most subtle moments. This morning I came across Tolstoy's wonderfully nuanced portrayal of Prince Vassily:

Prince Vassily did not think out his plans. Still less did he think of doing people harm in order to profit from it. He was simply a man of the world, who succeeded in the world and made a habit of that success. According to his circumstances and his intimacy with people, he constantly formed various plans and scheme which he himself was not quite aware of, but which constituted all the interests of life. He would have not one or two of these plans and schemes going, but dozens, of which some were only beginning to take shape for him, while others were coming to completion, and still others were abolished. He did not say to himself, for instance, " Here is a man who is now in power, I must gain his trust and friendship and through him arrange for myself the payment of a one-time subsidy," nor did he say to himself: "Here Pierre is rich, I must entice him to marry my daughter and borrow the forty thousand that I need from him"; but let him meet a man in power, and in the same moment his instinct would tell him that the man might be useful, and Prince Vassily would become intimate with him and at the first opportunity, without any preparation, instinctively, would flatter him, behave familiarly, talk about what was needed.

Prince Vassily is a creature of instinct that merely operates according to his nature. There is not a grand theory here of what constitutes evil. Prince Vassily is part of the order of the world, a world whose full operation is never totally understandable by the human characters of the novel. What is so great here is how a small subtle description of a character fits in so nicely with the larger structure and weltanshauung of War and Peace.

Karate Bear out!

George Eliot and the Novelist Historian

Many of the great social novelists of the 19th century wrote into their novels great theories of historiography. By historiography I mean not only the study of the methods used by historians, but as was particularly the case in the later 18th and the whole of the 19th century, the "shape" or overall meaning of historical phenomena and processes. Great 19th century novels like War and Peace, Les Miserables, and Vanity Fair have these theories. Eventually I will get to writing about them, but for now I'm about 150 pages into Middlemarch and I had some thoughts.

As I was reading George Eliot's Middlemarch, I cam across something I wasn't particularly expecting:

A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (Beginning text of chapter 15)

 Eliot seems to be eschewing working a grand scheme for the meaning or shape of history into Middlemarch. She seems to be arguing that the world has changed since the time of Henry Fielding and his The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The reference to the ticking clock is a clear reference to historical process. That historical processes have sped up along with the increase in "our needs." Moreover, "our needs" are linked to "money," which is a clear reference to the advancement of capitalist processes.

George Eliot

The advancement of capitalism and the change in human experience it brought change in the way that historical processes could be properly understood and written about, even in fictions. So for Eliot, using broad strokes to paint historiography into Middlemarch would have been a misstep because it would have missed the intricacies of human experience in her contemporary time, which much be thought and written about on a smaller scale because of the advancement of historical time and capitalism. Instead, she moves on to in depth description of her characters.

It will be interesting to see how Eliot's thoughts on historiography play out through the course of the novel, and how they under gird its structure.

-Karate Bear out!

Minneapolis Central Library Book Run!

Don Quixote and Idealism

Here are some thoughts on Don Quixote as I finish up reading  E. C. Riley's Unwin Critical Library analysis. I shall outline my thoughts below to better organize them.

Perhaps the main point in which scholars of Cervantes differ in their view of Don Quixote is how they imagine the author's view of the hero's quixotic idealism.

1. Don Quixote's idealism is based on illusion. He (an his preoccupation with the Medieval romance genre and with Chivalry) embodies an arcane world where epistemology works differently, where the appeal to authority is the primary source of knowledge and mode of transmission for worldviews. Don Quixote is out of place in 16th century Spain where, at least theoretically, epistemology has changed and empirical evidence is the primary source of knowledge. If Don Quixote's world of chivalry ever truly existed, by Don Quixote's time, it is gone in more ways than one.

His "madness" is one of having worldviews and illusions discordant with those of 16th century Spanish readers and is literary in the sense that it is strongly informed by the romance literature of an earlier era. Through his travels and failures, Don Quixote gradually comes to move into a more contemporary system of epistemology and the illusions of his Quixotic adventures dim. He repents for the "sin" of his earlier Quixotic worldview and dies sane. Informed experience triumphs over naive, bookish idealism.

Or...

2. Don Quixote is a tragic hero in a corrupt world. There is something truly noble about his idealism. Never mind that Cervantes criticizes the romance genre, Don Quixote embodies a lot of influence from the genre in ways that are often positive. In other words, Cervantes did not want to throw out the romance genre, incorporating it into Don Quixote to produce something new instead.

Though imperfect, Don Quixote has noble intentions and rather than always ending in failure, sometimes his adventures are even victories (See Nabokov). Cervantes takes some strategies of contemporary picaresque novels to show Don Quixote adventuring through a corrupt and often cruel society. The hero's gradual loss of idealism is a tragedy that ends in his death. Cruelty, corruption and deceit win over idealism.

3. My opinion is that Don Quixote is a sophisticated enough work to espouse both views at the same time. It opens the question, but leaves itself open to ambiguous interpretation because the question of the value of idealism is not a question that can be definitively answered.

4. In any case, Don Quixote's idealism is closely associated with how he thinks of the illusory Dulcinea del Toboso. She never actually appears in the book and is purely an idea in the mind of Don Quixote, who bases many of his actions and words on based on her idealized existence in his mind. While it may be difficult to argue she is directly a symbol for the chivalric ideal, she certainly has a close relationship to chivalry, and idealism more generally in the mind of Don Quixote. When Dulcinea's idealized form is put into question, as when Sancho tries to convince him that an ugly peasant girl is Dulcinea under enchantment, Don Quixote's idealism is equally called into question.

I reserve the right to add more to this general list of ideas as I read more about Don Quixote.

Karate Bear out!