Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

He buys the overcoat and has only one night to show it off; a gang of muggers steal it from him as he returns home. He appeals to the higher authorities; he demands justice from an exalted personage in the bureaucracy, a man who is quite courteous to his peers but behaves insufferably toward his inferiors in rank. Justice comes to Akaky from above; but death comes to him from below. He dies of a fever and then returns, as a ghost, neither high nor low, but implacable, to despoil thieves and functionaries of their coats, without ever implying that one and the other are synonymous.

The dynamic displacement of the splendid narrative structure in “The Overcoat” is heightened by the space in which it takes place. This is the space of the city, a Petersburg of infinite labyrinths. This is a city lit by the central problem of Gogolism: the postponement of identity. Action and language displace themselves so that identity can be deferred. In the labyrinth of Petersburg, “streets and buildings … confuse themselves … in the head.” It is impossible to orient oneself: to identify. The displacement of place ( Dead Souls, like Don Quixote, begins: “In a certain” place in the provinces, which the author does not wish to remember) resembles displacement in time: “The Overcoat” occurs during a day … a day … a … a … No, says Gogol, “truthfully I am not able to state with precision the day on which Petrovich finally delivered the overcoat.”

There is, finally, displacement in the Freudian sense: as omission, modification, or regrouping of the material of dreams; a work of oneiric censorship which displaces the character, distancing him from the thoughts that do not really interest him and thrusting him toward impulses that at first might seem alien to his actions but which in the end the character cannot resist because they are truly his own. He does not know it: displacement leaves him exhausted (like Kafka’s Prometheus), and his will voluntarily surrender’s to a speculation, at times silly but sometimes frightening, which forces the character to flee, to displace himself, and, finally, slowly to change his strategies in dealing with reality: he has learned that he can displace his compulsions infinitely, but he cannot dissipate them.

Gogol does not sublimate this psychological picture. He transforms it into a symmetrical literary art of constantly postponed identities. Displacement serves to pluralize identification, which becomes social (Akaky is the urban victim of official indifference), which becomes religious (Akaky’s soul is invincible, even if his body is fragile and ephemeral), which is ethical (Akaky personifies a longing for fraternity, which is denied him), which is political (Akaky belongs to a group that is defenseless for the very reason that should strengthen him: his individual freedom), and which is, finally, aesthetic: the form of the story, as Boris Eikhenbaum said, “is the focus of its value.”

Such plurality of meanings (of identities) is the work of displacement and it transforms “The Overcoat” into a perpetual “hermeneutical challenge” where the possibility of evocation, which is infinite, does not diminish the pleasure of comprehension. Being all that it is and can be, “The Overcoat,” as we know, is a story about significance and insignificance in life and literature. It is, as Fanger remarks, a “monument to the capacity of art — not to ‘reflect’ the great realities of life but to join them.”

VII

I think that, by the very methods proposed by Gogol, we are nearing the center of his work: identity. We are coming to it as Gogol desired us to, through a displacement which is also a postponement. The Russian formula for this rhythm, Fanger tells us, is called ne to: things are not what they seem, they are not where they should be, and they are not what they could be; the surest expectations are frustrated and give way to astonishment. Displacement does reveal an identity, but it is an astonished identity: postponed: finally, comic.

This procedure is something that Hispano-speakers (perhaps even better: Hispano-thinkers) can understand with special ease and interest. Along with Russia, Spain and Hispano-America have been eccentric communities and, perhaps for this reason, dogmatic ones. When he questions himself on the role peculiar to the writer in Eastern Europe, Vissarion Belinksy noted, in the time of Gogol, Pushkin, and Dostoevsky, that “the public sees in Russian writers its only readers, defenders, and saviors.” This is an undesirable burden. In a sane civil society, such an obligation should be shared by diverse sectors of the society. We live the extremes defined by Philip Roth: in the East, everything matters and nothing goes; in the West, nothing matters and everything goes.

This “Rothian” humor is not peculiar to the West. Speaking about the importance of literature in Russia, the critic Kireyevsky has this to say: “… The indefatigable solicitude of a far-seeing government frees private individuals from the necessity of concerning themselves with politics, and thus the sole index of our intellectual development remains literature.” This critique of critical criticism contains a great dose of irony: the privilege of literature here becomes the burden of literature. True, the Slavic world has been particularly demanding of its writers in the performance of these “social” duties. The reason is ancient and has to do with the position of the elder, the narrator, the starets, the holder of the word: in the world of the villages, the holder of the word and of memory is the center of truth: its bequeather.

The great Russian critics of the nineteenth century — Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Mikhailovsky — ask that literature speak for the village-nation and be the bearer of institutional change. From Gogol to Chekhov, by way of Dostoevsky, Goncharov, and Tolstoy, literature is seen as “a psychological and moral agency”—as Fanger puts it, “an essentially personalistic instrument of what might legitimately be called consciousness-raising, in the belief that a better society” would at length come into being.

Fanger’s suggestion is that Gogol only possesses an identity as a writer at the price of not having any personal identity. When, in his “Four Letters to Various Persons,” he decides to explain himself to his readers, he becomes vague, hyperbolical, and arbitrary; he falls into solipsism and personal pathology. When Gogol ceases to be Gogol, he makes a call to engagement: “The writer — he proclaims — shall be strictly called to account if his works do not generate some benefits for the soul.” Once this is said, Gogol ceases to write literature and sinks into the metaphysical, moralizing, preachy, and jingoistic swamp of his Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends.

Let us come back to the creation of Nikolai Gogol, not to his destruction. It is a creation based on a search for identity which constantly postpones such identification. From these presuppositions arises what Fanger calls “the Gogolian universe,” both “wider” and “more primitive” than what could be termed a Gogolian world. This universe has its sources in Gogol’s text and only incidentally, or reflectively, in “reality.” “Five years were needed,” states the French critic Gustave Aucouturier, “to bring the first part of Dead Souls into a safe harbor; ten years were needed to pilot the second part into shipwreck.”

Gogolian satire, for example, offers us a picture of “radical cretinism” fed by an obstinate fidelity to the values of complacency, vanity, rank, and gossip. But the source of this stupidity, no matter how true and extended it is, both in society and in nature, is to be found for Gogol in neither, but rather in the Gogolian text itself, without which these realities would certainly have a social but not an artistic existence.