Superfluous Man

I was reading the Russian short story Diary of a Superfluous Man by Ivan Turgenev today. (Link to the complete text here.) A very "typical" story, which is not to say it is bad but rather it is yet another example of the "superfluous hero" type ubiquitous in the nineteenth century Russian literature. He is generally an aristocrat, smart, intelligent, attractive and well-educated. His head is also filled with ideas of Byron, Hegel and French socialists and radicals like Saint-Simon and Fourier but himself bored, alienated and isolated when he comes into contact with other people in the society. And most importantly his hyper self-consciousness makes himself hesitant, indecisive, weak-willed and incapable of any meaningful action. Instead his energies are spent in musings about his own feelings and thoughts and imagining and manipulating those of others.

A basic plot would be something like this:

The hero arrives in some province. He charms everybody by his wit and intelligence. Among them a beautiful and young girl who is excited by the melancholy and brooding personality. Some scandal happens concerning a rival suitor. A duel is arranged and fought, which always results in hero's favour. But in the end the love story ends unhappily because the hero can't decide or can't imagine a future for himself and decides to flee instead.

Of course this type is not something new to Russian literature. With so many references to Byron, the Russian writers themselves make clear as to who their inspiration is. But what makes these characters so fascinating, (and I think) even more than characters like Manfred or Don Juan, is the complex material social and political context they find themselves in. It then becomes a sharp and revealing social-political critique, a commentary on the unjustness of stifling social conventions and institutions, besides being a fantastic of a romantic spirit.

In the same spirit then, a few lines from the story of my personal favourite superfluous hero Eugene Onegin (from the translation by Charles Johnston which I like less than that of James Falen):

O flowers, and love, and rustic leisure,
o fields -- to you I'm vowed at heart.
I regularly take much pleasure
in showing how to tell apart
myself and Eugene, lest a reader
of mocking turn, or else a breeder
of calculated slander should,
spying my features, as he could,
put back the libel on the table
that, like proud Byron, I can draw
self-portraits only -- furthermore
the charge that poets are unable
to sing of others must imply
the poet's only theme is ``I.''

Another Byron devotee, Mikhail Lermontov, creator of another great superfluous hero Pechorin, is more explicit about his debts:

"No, I'm not Byron"

No, I'm not Byron; I am, yet,
Another choice for the sacred dole,
Like him - a persecuted soul,
But only of the Russian set.
I early start and end the whole,
And will not win the future days;
Like in an ocean, in my soul,
A cargo of lost hopes stays.
Who, oh, my ocean severe,
Could read all secrets in your scroll?
Who'll tell the people my idea?
I'm God or no one at all!

The Anatomy of Melancholy

The latest issue of New York Review of Books has an essay on Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy, the sixteenth century classic study of, mainly Melancholy, but also every other thing on the planet. I first came to know about the book after reading an article in The Guardian about it. Nicholas Lezard in his short paperback-of-the-week column says:

Paperback not so much of the week as of the year, of the decade -- or, I am inclined to say, of all time. And why ? Because it's the best book ever written, that's why. I use the word "book" with care. It's not a novel, a tract, an epic poem, a history; it is, quite self-consciously, the book to end all books.

I later came to know more about the book and no reference of the book that I found anywhere were without the wildest superlatives imaginable, just as in the Guardian article above. This book is at the top of the Complete Review best books list. Check out its book page here.

So, when I saw the book mentioned on the front page of the New York Review I decided to pick up the copy. And the essay is quite delightful, although a trifle disappointing (at least to me) because the reviewer spends most of the time discussing medicinal history and the stylistics of sixteenth century English prose and not the nature of melancholy itself. Although when he briefly touches this aspect, it is not without some great insight. The quotes from the book are alone worth reading the entire essay. As here when Burton is lamenting the complexities and mysteries of the melancholy temperament and heart:

Who can sufficiently speak of these symptoms, or prescribe rules to comprehend them?... If you will describe melancholy, describe a fantastical conceit, a corrupt imagination, vain thoughts and different, without which who can do? The four and twenty letters [of the alphabet] make no more variety of words in diverse languages, than melancholy conceits produce diversity of symptoms in several persons. They are irregular, obscure, various, so infinite, Proteus himself is not so diverse, you may well make the moon a new coat, as a true character of melancholy man; as soon find the motion of a bird in the air, as the heart of a man, a melancholy man.

As noted by the reviewer, what actually makes The Anatomy a work of literature, rather than simply a dense medical and philosophical treatise, is Burton's ability to transcend the specificities of medicinal aspects to reach some profound understanding of the general human condition. Although he does it by looking at everything through the prism of melancholy:

And who is not a fool, who is free from Melancholy? Who is not touched more or less in habit or disposition?... And who is not sick, or ill-disposed,in whom do not passion, anger, envy, discontent, fear and sorrow reign?

What I found most interesting in the article was a discussion of the ways in which Melancholy was viewed throughout history. In sixteenth and seventeenth century, an affectation of melancholy was a favourite pose for those who made claim to a superior refinement, a noble spirit and a sensitive, poetic heart. The somber delights of melancholy were generally supposed to outweigh its anguish and misery. Keats even composed an Ode on Melancholy and Burton himself opens his book with a poem which enumerates all its lugubrious pleasures ("naught so sweet as melancholy"). There are innumerable passages from Byron (most memorably from Manfred, my all time favourite English poem) which also explore and celebrate similar mental states.

After Burton, the term lost its poetical, personal meaning and got subsumed into a larger word ennui, or boredom, which had more sociological and impersonal import than the previous meaning. Most of the greatest works of nineteenth century literature capture this meaning quite truthfully. Julien Sorel's quest, in Stendhal's Red and Black, is to find that abstract thing called Happiness (the novel, by the way, is dedicated to "the happy few") but in more concrete terms it is its inverse -- quest to find some way to escape from boredom. All his amorous conquests, love affairs and political machinations, at the most basic level, are means to escape the boredom of small-town, petit-bourgeois life. And talking of the boredom of provincial life who can forget Madame Bovary and its creator Flaubert, who would himself, as his greatest creation, have definitely fit the description of a melancholy man perfectly. The great Russian novels of nineteenth century also explore this with great success. They even coined a new term for this kind of personality; they called it "the superfluous men". The anarchists and rebels in Dostoevsky's novels are not the idealistic young men that they think they are, they are merely a confused lot who have read lots of romantic literature and philosophy (Byron was very popular in Russia at that time) and want to escape the boredom of their lives. Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time clarifies some of these themes in its title itself. Here is a nice article on the book and an extract:

Pechorin, the hero, is a strong, silent man with a poetic soul who, either from shyness or a contempt for the herd, especially the aristocratic herd, assumes the mask of a snob and a bully. Unlike the classic type of "superfluous men" who opt out of society, Pechorin is a strong character at odds with the world. He is proud, ambitious, strong-willed but having found that life does not measure up to his expectation of it, he has grown embittered, cynical and bored. At the age of 25 (as he is in the book) he has experienced all that life has to offer and found nothing that gives him more than a passing satisfaction or interest. He sees that life has let him down, failed to provide for him some cause that would be worthy of his superior powers. So, he is reduced to dissipating his considerable energies to petty adventures. And he embarks on his adventures with no illusions that he was doing no more than a temporary escape from boredom.

The essential characteristics of boredom as depicted in these great works of literature were an alienation from the society, because of the superiority of refinement and spirit, a deep sensitivity of the heart and disgust at the vulgarities of bourgeois life (Flaubert and Homais come to mind). The word soon took on a grand meaning of, not just a void of interest or a sophisticated indifference, but a dissatisfaction with the world, with civilization. And with this last thing we enter into modern literature and its profoundly pessimistic world, of Proust for example. The following passage excerpted in the article from somewhere else is so Proustian, in its description of pervading ennui and in its profound and final devastating insight into the human condition:

Yesterday evening I admired the numerous guests who were at my house; men and women like machines with springs who came and went, spoke and laughed, without thinking, without reflecting, without feeling; each one played his role through habit; Madame de Duchess of Aiguillon burst with laughter, Mme De Forcalquier showed her disdain for everything. Mme de la Valliere jabbered about everything. The men were no better, and as for myself, I was buried in the deepest reflections; I thought that I had passed my life in illusions; that I had hollowed out for myself all the abysses into which I had fallen; that all my judgments were false and rash and always too precipitate; and finally that I had never really known anyone, that I had never been known, and that perhaps I did not know myself.

This is perhaps the reason why melancholy has been able to retain a curious if perverse fascination for writers and thinkers throughout the history of human civilization and I can now understand all the superlative adjectives that writers and scholars heap on a book like this. Because they know what Burton is saying is true. But with all the "somber delights" that a melancholy heart offers, Burton also warns the ingenuous readers not to fall for its perverse charms just for its own sake. As he says, "For the unhappy few, melancholy could be irresistible". Yes, indeed.

Dostoevsky, Visconti (and Bhansali)

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's new film Saawariya is reportedly based on a story by Dostoevsky. I have nothing to say about the film and I am not very excited about its release either. Other than the usual complaints, it will no doubt add yet another episode in the long tradition of endogamy that has become a peculiar tradition of Bollywood. (Both the leads are sons and daughters of yesteryear's stars.)

Anyway a few words about the short story in question. It is one of his early works and would be quite obscure had it not been adapted by two of Europe's greatest film directors - Robert Bresson and Luchino Visconti. (That must surely be where Bhansali got his idea from too in the first place.) I haven't seen Bresson's film which is called Four Nights of a Dreamer but did see Visconti's La Notti Bianche (White Nights) with Marcello Mastroianni in the lead a while back. A few words about the film later.

Coming to the Dostoevsky's story, it is called White Nights with the subtitle informing what it is about - "A sentimental love story from the diary of a dreamer." White Nights of the title refers to the twilight nights in the summers of St. Petersberg. (I am not well informed on these astronomical matters so I will just point to the wikipedia article.) The story is told through the diary of the narrator and is set in these four consecutive nights. The narrator of the story, who remains unnamed throughout, is a character type who will be familiar to readers of Dostoevsky - a hyper self-conscious dreamer and a romantic who is also painfully aware of his own ridiculousness. (At one point in novel he thinks he is behaving like the hero of some two-penny "Russian society novel.") In this he is yet another example of superfluous man. On one of his routine lonely wanderings through the streets of St. Petersburg he runs into an equally lonely and desperate young girl. They soon strike up a tentative friendship based on mutual understanding. (There is a bravura monologue in the "second night" chapter where he explains why he is uncomfortable having any visitors - a fantastic portrait of an alienated soul.) The narrator naturally sees a glimmer of hope but the girl explains to him that she is actually waiting for her lover (played by the great Salman Khan in the Bhansali film) who left her a year ago promising to come back again if his business deal or something goes fine in Moscow. The day of meeting has already passed and he hasn't yet showed up. There is a suspense in the story - whether he will come back or not and some familiar cliches of love triangle - before it ends on a slightly lachrymose note. It is a subject that Dostoevsky returned back to later, in his more well-known masterpiece "Notes from Underground." It makes you a little uncomfortable once you realize that the nice young hero would turn into someone like the underground man with the passage of time.



Visconti's film is a faithful adaptation of the story, thought it enhances the dreaminess and romanticism of the story with the lighting and the way sets are designed. He also changes the setting to winter and adds a character of the prostitute (played by the great Rani Mukherjee in the Bhansali film I think, another evidence that it is not perhaps a direct adaptation but rather a copy). Mastrioanni and the actress who plays the girl are both very good. It is also an interesting film in Visconti's own career. He was one of the pioneers of Italian neo-realism and made his name by directing gritty and stark melodramas about working class people like Ossessione and La Terra Trema. This film also tries to capture the life of the working class people but the style here is radically different. One can't call it artificial though, only its approach to cinematic truth is different. Visconti later went on to make Senso (which Martin Scorsese likes very much) and The Leopard, none of which I have seen yet.

The film misses one vital element of the story - the alienating effect of the city life, specially the effect of such an "artificial city" as St. Petersburg (as the Underground Man calls it). In his writings Dostoevsky anticipated a lot of themes and subjects of modernist European literature - specially their treatment of city life and how romanticism and excessive self-consciousness turns so easily into psychosis in the modern industrial and post-industrial cities. This particular story is nowhere near Notes from Underground but it does point in the same direction. I was hoping the Visconti film would get into these subjects too but it is instead more concerned with the romantic drama of the two principals.

You can read the whole story in the translation by Constance Garnett here. It is also available in this collection by modern library. More information about La Notti Bianche here.

Two of my other favourite Italian films with Notte in the title - La Notte by Antonioni and Le Notti di Cabiria by Fellini.

Ivan Turgenev: Virgin Soil

Virgin Soil was the last and the longest novel that Turgenev wrote. The characters, the political and philosophical ideas, the writing style, the tone, all would be familiar to those who have read his earlier works like Fathers and Sons or Rudin. Like so many heroes in his novels, the protagonist of Virgin Soil Nezhdanov is also a "superfluous man" - an educated and over-sensitive young man, a misfit and an outsider, full of self-doubts and hesitations and torn between two poles of aestheticism and political commitment.

In one of his many melancholic and self-critical confessions in the book Nezhdanov says:

How I loathe this irritability, sensitiveness, impressionable- ness, fastidiousness, inherited from my aristocratic father! What right had he to bring me into this world, endowed with qualities quite unsuited to the sphere in which I must live? To create a bird and throw it in the water? An aesthetic amidst filth! A democrat, a lover of the people, yet the very smell of their filthy vodka makes me feel sick!

It is as if he is "possessed" by the idea of populist socialism, the idea that educated people must go to the russian peasantry and incite them to revolt against the Czarist authority. And yet he feels torn about his political commitment. Everything feels vague to him and he can't decide whether he really believes in "the cause." He despises himself for writing poetry which is what comes most naturally to him. There is a wonderful portrait of Marianna, the girl who falls in love with him and shares his political beliefs but more out of her contempt for the rich aristocratic way of life and conventions of society. Turgenev in a real life supported feminist ideas passionately and it shows in the way he creates these female characters. (He was also a good friend of George Sand, the great nineteenth century feminist novelist, alongwith Flaubert.)

Kubla has already written about this book comparing it with Dostoevsky's The Possessed which is very instructive because it dramatizes similar events but the tone and the style of the two books couldn't be more different. It is also interesting to note that Turgenev wrote this book before revolutionaries were apprehended for inciting revolts among workers and peasants in real-life. It was almost like a case of life imitating art. Dostoevsky's novel in contrast was written after the Nechaev affair. He distorts many of the revolutionaries characters, heaping contempt on them and ridiculing their political ideas. Turgenev on the other hand is much more sympathetic and generous even if he is equally pessimistic about their political beliefs.

Like his Fathers and Sons, Virgin Soil was also hugely controversial when it was published. Turgenev faced angry and impatient criticisms from both the left, who felt that he deliberated portrayed Nezhdanov as weak-willed and confused, and the slavophile, Conservative right for obvious reasons since it is obvious from the book that the prevailing status-quo disgusted Turgenev as much as the younger revolutionaries. The epigraph to the book puts the criticisms of the radicals rather succinctly:

"To turn over virgin soil it is necessary to use a deep plough going well into the earth, not a surface plough gliding lightly over the top."--From a Farmer's Notebook.

The reactions to his book in Russia contributed a lot to the bitterness of last few years of Turgenev's life in which he grew more and more pessimistic about Russia's future. Isaiah Berlin's brilliant essay on Turgenev links the reactions to his works to tragic current of russian history itself in which liberal and inclusive political beliefs were crushed and defeated by the extremes.

Some more information in this introduction[pdf] to the nyrb edition of the book

Ingeborg Bachmann: Malina

Finally after much struggle I have managed to read the whole novel. It took lot of effort and it is all a little more than I can chew. There is a very useful essay in the afterword of the book by Mark Anderson. He says in the beginning:

Ingeborg Bachmann's novel Malina, presented here for the first time in English, in a translation by Philip Boehmm, is not a book one picks up--or puts down--lightly. Narrated in an unremittingly fragmented stream-of-consciousness, filled with references to Austrian history and culture, to psychoanalysis, twelve-tone music and contemporary philosophies of language, this passionately experimental novel presents all the stylistic and intellectual challenges of the most rigorous modernist and postmodernist prose texts of the century. Nor is the novel's historical content, which fuses the heroine's personal trauma with her country's collective guilt in the Holocaust, intended for merely pleasurable consumption. Once the reader does pick up Malina and enters its first pages, a curious mix of pleasure, fascination and horror makes it impossible to leave.

Also the English translation comes with many untranslated German idioms and also words and phrases in many French, Italian and Latin all of whose meanings are given in a glossary in the end. There are some references to music too which I didn't understand.

There are many other background details which are needed to understand the book. Malina was a part of a cycle of novels called "Ways of Dying" or "Death Styles" that Bachmann was planning to write. She could finish only this novel before her death in a fire accident and the other two novels, The Book of Franza and Requiem for Fanny Goldman were published from her unfinished manuscripts. They are available in English translations too. At a few places Malina references Fanny Goldman which will confound readers who are not familiar with the character from the other book. All these books were supposed be about the death of women in patriarchal society. Death here is not the physical extinction but rather extinction of an authentic voice. In the dramatic ending of Malina the "I" representing the feminine voice disappears in a crack in the wall and Malina, her masculine counterpart then denies that she ever existed after a phone call asks for her. These are the final lines of the novel:

Steps, Malina's incessant steps, quieter steps, the most quiet steps. A standing still. No alarm, no sirens. No on comes to help. Not the ambulance and not the police. It is a very old wall, a very strong wall, from which no one can fall, which no one can break open, from which nothing can be heard again.

It was murder.

The most interesting (though not easy to read at all) part of the book was the middle chapter titled The Third Man (which Anderson says is a reference to the great film also set in Vienna) which is a collection of fragmented nightmarish scenes in which the narrator is repeatedly humiliated, raped, murdered by her (symbolic) father and then consigned to "a cemetery of murdered daughters." The father is a Nazi figure and in one of the scenes the narrator finds herself in a gas chamber:

My father calmly takes the first hose off the wall, I see a round hole through which it's blowing inside, and I duck down, my father walks on, taking down one hose after the other, and before I can scream I'm already inhaling the gas, more and more gas. My father has disappeared, he knew where the door was and didn't show me, and while I am dying my wish to see him once more and tell him just one thing dies as well.

I can't say anything, since I have to escape my father and get over the marble wall, but in another language I say: Ne! Ne! And in many languages: No! No! Non! Non! Nyet! Nyet! No! Nem! Nem! Nein! For in our language, too, I can only say no, I can't find any other word in any language. A rack on wheels, perhaps the giant Ferris wheel that dumps excrement from the gondolas, approached me and I say: Ne! Nem! But to stop me from crying out my no, my father drives hi short, firm, hard fingers into my eyes, I am blinded, but I must go on. It's unbearable. I have to smile, since my father is reaching for my tongue and wants to pull it out to stop anyone here from hearing my no, despite the fact there's no one to hear me, but before he can tear my tongue out something horrible happens, a huge blue splotch runs into my mouth, so that I can no longer utter a sound.

It is tempting to read these horrifying passages as tirades against the fascism of patriarchy but I think it is not that easy. Many of these scenes are interspersed with narrator's "dialogues" with Malina which indicate that the passages work more as a portrait of a psychic disintegration, it is not that she is not saying anything about women's experience under patriarchy just that we can't take her exaggerations and paranoia at the face value. That she is losing her mind and finally her voice in the end, is itself a powerful comment against it. It is also interesting to compare these passages to Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy. The nazi daddy metaphor there always felt "borrowed" to me, unlike in this novel where it works as a political comment also. Like her other fellow Austrian writers she bitterly resented her national identity too. She mentions this in the novel too -- in one the answers to the questions of a faux journalist interview which forms a part of the first chapter (it is based on real life event too. Anderson says that Bachmann was subjected to long and detailed interviews by her editors. Her answers in the book are quite caustic).

Well, I have already mentioned how the book ends. I hope it is not a spoiler :) Overall, I think it is not the kind of book one reads for pleasure. The prose is austere, the narrative non-existent and fragmented, no conventional psychological portraits, no life-enhancing lessons (and thank God for that!), so why should I read it. Well, apart from the fact that one can boast of reading an experimental feminist German novel on one's blog, the book is in fact quite provocative and has lots of ideas that one can chew on in leisure.

Also a comment on translation. Almost all what I read these is translated, and it is natural to worry when reading a translation that who are you reading, the author or the translator? Sometimes you worry more and sometimes not that much. I think it was one of those cases where I worried more. Though Anderson in his afterword praises the translation ("[it] has been rendered in a translation by Philip Boehm so fluent and consistently inventive that one can easily forget one is not reading the original"), I felt that, specially in the first chapter, the translation falters. The idea must have been to inhabit different voices and different styles of writing -- it contains a melange of different styles -- but the translation reads flatly. So the language of fairy tale almost reads the same as the language of the letters that her secretary sends to many different people, heads of committees, directors of universities etc. And yes, I forgot, the book contains a nice fairy tale about a princess who is abducted by Hungarian tribesmen and is befriended by a dark stranger. But make no mistake, it isn't a lightweight diversion from the grim main narrative. The afterword says that the fairy tale makes many references to Paul Celan's poems and the dark stranger of the tale is modeled on Celan himself, who was a good friend of hers. I think more intelligent people will have more to say about it. I will also add more when I read and understand more.

Here is a nice article about her and a short review of the novel from the new york times. I will try to find more essays and link later.

I will end with this poem by Bachmann (also from the afterword):

Exile

I am dead man who wanders
registered nowhere
unknown in the realm of the perfect
superfluous in the golden cities
and the greening land

written off long ago
bequeathed nothing

Save wind and time and sound

I who cannot live among people

I with the German language
this cloud about me
that I keep as a house
drive through all languages

Oh how this cloud darkens
the somber ones the rain notes
only a few fall

Into brighter places it bears the dead man high

Austrian Literature Blogs

While browsing yesterday I came across this wonderful collection of blogs about the turn of century Austrian culture and literature. Check the links on the right sidebar. There are lots of links to different blog posts on Musil, Schnitzler, Hofmmansthal and others.

I found this post on Man Without Qualities a little amusing. She calls it "superfluous", says she was "extremely bored" with it and that the hero Ulrich was "basically the same throughout the novel." "He began by not knowing what he wanted to do and ended the same way." hmmm, that doesn't sound too good, does it? It is quite true actually. I was desperately hoping for some solution of this problem of not knowing what to do too, some way of escaping from this "hovering life" as Musil calls it, but it seems there is no solution. I didn't quite finish the book, a few hundred pages were still left (I did read eleven hundred of them though) but the sexual-mystical stuff was getting a little too vague for me. I had to return the book back to the library anyway because I had kept it for so long. Will pick it up again sometime. It is also a little disappointing that not much of secondary literature about Musil is available in English. In my own rather smallish neighbourhood library there are shelves and shelves of books on Thomas Mann but not a single one on Musil.

There are also a few posts on the Stanley Kubrick film Eyes Wide Shut. I saw it again a few months back after reading the Arthur Schnitzler story Traumnovelle ("Dream Story") on which it is based and found it even worse than what I had remembered it to be. It is embarrassingly bad. The incomplete post should be somewhere in the drafts, will try to post it soon. The Schnitzler story itself is weaker than his other more famous works like Fraulein Else and Lieutenant Gustl which are both small masterpieces.