Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

The condition for such an art, an art that does not reflect reality but becomes one with reality, completes it, or constitutes a counterpart of the real, is a peculiar form of irony. In Gogol, irony is more radical than in other post-Cervantes authors (the English novelists from Defoe to Thackeray, or the first French realists) because it is an irony that, far from hastening the identification of reality, as in Fielding or Balzac, postpones it, as if the author feared being discovered or placed biographically, and thereby being ironically discovered in the midst of nothing. But there is more: Gogol proceeds by postponing the very things he is searching for (identity) because he believes that the existence of his text depends on the postponement of that identity.

If it is true that all irony is dissimulation, Gogol employs it to reveal something more important than his personal identity or the immediate, realistic identification of his ideological intentions. Identification in the case of Gogol is, first of all, identification of the literary creation. By deferring the question of the meaning of the text, Gogol brings to the forefront the question of the creation of the text: A text offered as a reality synonymous with possibility — the possibility of art.

Gogol’s is an art that speaks of the possibility of art. The condition for this is that nothing should possess a stable identity in his text, not the author or his characters, not the literary meaning, not the political, social, or psychological message.

To identify a person or group immediately is the province of propaganda: “lackey of imperialism,” “red stooge,” lynchable black, exterminable Jew, displaceable Palestinian. In this, its most strident manifestation, instant identification has its place (that is, in the political pamphlet, the crusading journal, the bureaucratic ukase). But Gogol’s work is art precisely because it radicalizes the question of identification, deferring it throughout a text which only becomes identifiable thanks to a paradox: its identity is being questioned.

But this, as we shall now see, hastens another, far more critical identity: the literary and moral identity of the novel as the form of an unfinished speech, as work which is perpetually open. That is why the novel is the privileged vehicle of two ways of being: narrative and freedom: to be new (novel) in a speech open to all, and to be free in a speech that never concludes.

VIII

The comic genius of Gogol brings all this into proper focus. There are the masterpieces, Dead Souls and The Inspector-General, and the characters Chichikov and Khlestakov.

Both works are a gift from the generous genius of Pushkin. The story of the wild entrepreneur in Dead Souls was given to Gogol by Pushkin. So was The Inspector-General: “Do me a favor,” Gogol writes to Pushkin, “give me a subject, even an anecdote, funny or not, but purely Russian. My hand trembles to write a comedy.”

Pushkin’s second gift to Gogol is the most extraordinary comic play of nineteenth-century theater. I believe that Gogol owes Pushkin something more than the theme, and this something is the narrative velocity, comparable to that of an opera buffa by Rossini, but comparable, most of all, to the splendid lesson on velocity to be found in another masterwork of rhythm, Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin.

In Gogol’s play, a poor drifter called Khlestakov arrives in a provincial town, where he is mistaken for the feared inspector-general that the central government periodically sends to the provinces, like the missi dominici of the Carolingian empire or the judges of residence of the Spanish colony, to see that things are proceeding properly in the domains of our Lord the King.

Donald Fanger has noted that Gogol’s genius consists of presenting the false inspector as a naïf and not, as demanded by tradition, as a rogue. This innocent man finds a perfect partner in stupidity in the town mayor; both embark on a folie à deux, a shared madness. This is Gogol at his greatest: his comedy is based on the absence of a deliberate deceit: the false identities of Khlestakov and even of Chichikov are the creation of others. Khlestakov never pretends that he is the inspector; he is not, as the author indicates, “a habitual liar; sometimes he even forgets that he is lying … He feels expansive, he feels well, he sees that everything is going well, he is listened to … He lies with sentiment … This is the best and most poetic moment of his existence, almost an inspiration.” Chichikov, too, is the proprietor of all the hypothetical identities assigned to him by the townsfolk.

The problem of lie is here intimately related to the problem of identity. Curiously, Gogol’s two great liars are not liars at all: their false identities are the creation of others. This is certainly not the case of the classical liar of the Gogolian universe, the landowner Nozdryov, a man who lies constantly, without any need to do so. Nozdryov is a master of euphemism — he calls his lies “a rich invention”—and it is he who unleashes the finale of the novel when he appears at the governor’s ball and tells the truth about Chichikov: the stranger is a vulgar merchant in dead souls.

Now, everyone knows that Nozdryov is a liar. But it suffices to launch a lie, as long as it is also news, to ensure that it will be passed on to other mortals, even if only for the pleasure of saying: “Look what whoppers they are telling these days!” The new persona attributed by Nozdryov the liar to Chichikov is in fact the real one, but it is one which has accreted on top of all the identities that the impressionable ladies of the town have already conferred upon him. Yet, because this is the true identity, it dissolves Chichikov’s deceit and forces him to flee. This is not the result of the community’s moral values but rather the work of poetic chance and truth in a world where language is inauthentic and the sense of original unity between truth and objects has been lost.

Language: Chichikov speaks to a servant woman in the first stop of his picaresque tour:

“Who are you?” asked the old woman.

“A gentleman, good woman.”

The word gentleman seemed to impress the old woman.

“One moment, I will go and tell my lady,” she said.

This same linguistic deceit affects Chichikov’s false public position; the ladies of the town are impressed by him and decide that he is a millionaire. But it is the word, its sound, not what the word means, which dazzles them. And it is not a sentiment of greed that makes them call him a millionaire. They do it to honor him, laugh with him, and bow before him — all this stemming from the name they themselves invent.

But appearance is a deceit as well, and language then appears to support a truth which, otherwise, no one would perceive: Chichikov arrives at the house of the miser Plyushkin and asks a man who looks like a majordomo:

“Is the master at home?”

“The master is here.” says the man.

“Where?” asks Chichikov.

“Axe you blind?” comes the reply. “I am the master.”

As in Dracula’s castle, the servant is the master. In this roundelay of mistaken identities in which appearance does not support words and language does not support perception, there is a final point, and it is called old age and death. “Today’s young man would recoil in horror if he saw the old man he will one day become,” Gogol comments in Dead Souls. But, between life and death, what insinuates itself is a profound indifference toward the other: the other is forgotten, and this turns out to mean we have forgotten ourselves.

Alongside Balzac’s Colonel Chabert, Gogol initiates one of the tragicomic traditions of modernity: that of a man forgotten by his fellow men. Kafka will give it its fullest expression. But if K the land surveyor in The Castle has been radically forgotten by everyone, the false inspector of Gogol’s comedy has been remembered by all. Khlestakov has been given an identity, even if a false identity. K is deprived of an identity, even if a true identity. Such is the distance between the nineteenth and the twentieth century.