Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

One could say something similar about the art of Nikolai Gogol. The Gogolian metamorphosis is not gratuitous. It is no mere spectacular effect. And it is no simple diversion (which it could, legitimately, be). In Gogol, it is not, because metamorphosis does not stop at its own game but, rather, insistently presents itself as the basis for a whole formal and thematic construction, without which it would be difficult to conceive modern fiction.

V

“Nevsky Prospekt lies at each hour of the day and night,” writes Gogol as he concludes his first tale of St. Petersburg. It is the devil himself who there lights the street lamps and sheds light on men and things, but only so as to “show them under an illusory and untruthful aspect.”

In order to see reality once more, transcend lies, and clarify deceit, Gogol sets up quite a literary strategy. He asks us, first of all, to confide in perspective, but also in proximity. The lenses we need to see the sun are as necessary as those we require to see insects.

Yet we shall see nothing at all unless we bathe the whole world in the light of strangeness. Reality will always deceive us if we complacently accept it as such. Gogol — this is his second weapon, following that of metamorphosis — invites us to conceive reality as a deception and violently wake up through the sensation of strangeness that the writer, with quite extraordinary results, employs throughout his work. Donald Fanger has remarked that it is almost impossible to render outside of the Russian language this Gogolian strangeness, what he calls this rendering strange, or ostranenie, which first expresses itself through the communication of language. But if Gogol’s language does not carry over in translation, the style does: in Gogol, it is the style of a strangeness which orchestrates the multiple voices of the narrative and of the dialogue. Gogol creates a new literary discourse based on synecdoche, in which a detail reveals the totality — the Latin formula of the pars pro toto —and so integrates a mosaic style, or an orchestra style, in which disparate and discrete elements unite to create the illusion of totality.

This illusion depends on a certain use of language, and it is at this level, immediately, that stylistic totality starts conspiring against itself: we must not believe even in this unity; it is yet another deception, and Gogol’s language, “exotic,” “strange,” “unfamiliar,” is a forecast of Bertolt Brecht’s alienation of the spectator.

I am incapable of citing the examples of Gogol’s verbal strangeness. But I can evoke the strangeness of actions which could not sustain themselves without a comparable strangeness of language. Such as this: The landowner Sobakevich, who looks like a crow and whose possessions — tables, chairs, sofas — proclaim, “I, too, resemble Sobakevich!”, offers Chichikov an epic meal — mutton, cream tarts, turkey stuffed with eggs, rice, and liver — served by a woman who resembles a goose. Sobakevich’s speech is as copious as the meal, and his powers of persuasion and haggling are extravagant as he negotiates the sale of the dead souls. Yet all this wealth of characterization does not attain its Gogolian pinnacle until the moment when Chichikov offers his hand in farewell to the headstrong Sobakevich and the landlord does not let go but, rather, steps on Chichikov’s foot and holds him there with a mad, comic violence which we will recognize, to a different purpose but with the same Gogolian strangeness, in Stavrogin in The Possessed and in Buñuel’s L’Age d’Or. Stavrogin pulls the nose (that most Gogolian of appendages) of a guest at a party. Buñuel’s actor (Gaston Modot) pulls the beard (the most Castilian of offenses) of an orchestra director while he is conducting Wagner. Their acts are the offspring of a Gogolian-style provocation, as are the celebrated pranks of the Surrealists in the Paris of the twenties: Peret & Breton’s invitation to slap the faces of the dead; the public slapping of a society lady (like Margaret Dumont?) by Louis Aragon during a banquet at the Closerie des Lilas.

Keep your hands to yourself: Chichikov refuses to play cards with the cheat Nozdryov; this gambler, who calls his own hands tenderly, in French, les superflues, attempts to strike his guest’s cheek with an arm as uncontrollable as Richard Nixon’s, but Chichikov locks Nozdryov’s arms together and holds on while his host calls his servants to save him from the unwanted embrace.

This same phenomenon takes over other scenes in Dead Souls, notably in Chapter 8, when in Chichikov’s bedroom, “a room well known by the reader, with the door blocked by a wardrobe and the corners swarming with cockroaches,” the protagonist looks at his face in a mirror, admiring himself for one whole hour, until he gives himself a gentle punch on the chin and says to himself: “Come on, handsome!” This is neither strange nor exceptional; one could write another novel concerning what people do in front of mirrors when mirrors are looking back at us. What is exceptional is that Chichikov should top his self-celebration by executing a cartwheel. The effects of such an exercise, adds Gogol, were not harmful: the night table trembled and the clothes brush fell on the floor.

Gogolian strangeness, in its minute but insinuating aspects, is characterized at times by an overriding sense of metamorphosis. There are women with red shawls but sans stockings, crossing the streets like bats at dusk; there is the superior use of the verbal non sequitur, almost an intimation of Lewis Carroll: “The patients … are recuperating like flies,” the major is optimistically told, and he is, indeed, a poet of the absurd: “Alexander the Great is a hero, but why destroy the furniture?” he says.

There is, finally, a strange gaze, unusual in narrative before Gogol, but to which movies have accustomed us: Chichikov falls asleep surrounded by the feathered snowfall of his down blanket, curls up like a pretzel, and wakes up the following morning to see a fly looking at him from the ceiling while two others have come to rest, one on his eye and the other on his nose; the latter is sucked in by the tunnel of breath and Chichikov is fully awake, sneezing.

It should be pointed out that the most remarkable thing about Gogol’s strangeness is that it envelops a theme that in its time was received with scandalized criticism for its “vulgarity.” Gogol is, indeed, the novelist who introduces the despicable into Russian literature; that is, precisely, the vulgar, the insignificant, the banal theme. His forerunner, certainly, is Pushkin, but the great poet has this to say about Gogol: “No other writer has had the gift of exhibiting so clearly the poshlost of life.”

The Russian word poshlost —so similar to the Amerindian word potlatch — signals something of little worth, a lowly thing, as ordinary as trash. The American potlatch is an escalation of values by which each gift from the individual or the tribe must be matched, and topped, by another one. The tribe or the individual whose potlatch can no longer be equaled is the victor: You’re the top. I have written of James Joyce as the master of ceremonies of a contemporary verbal potlatch which transforms the trash of language into the gold of literature. Gogol’s poshlost plays a comparable role: “The more ordinary the object,” he writes, “the greater the poet must be to extract the extraordinary from it.”

For Gogol there are no vulgar themes. “Blessed be the creator for whom there are no lowly themes in nature,” we read in “The Portrait.” “In banality, the artist-creator is as great as in the great; in the contemptible, he finds nothing contemptible…”

We have seen that thematic vulgarity was one of the sins Gogol was charged with by many critics when Dead Souls appeared. This kind of finger-wagging accompanied Gogol throughout his career. Starting with the publication of his first book, Evenings on a Farm, Pushkin addresses his friends, pleading with them, “for the love of heaven, to come to Gogol’s defense if journalists, as is their wont, reproach him for inconvenience of expression, bad taste, etc. The time has arrived to confound the precious ridicules of our Russian literature.”