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Overview
The defining quality of Russian literature, for most critics, is its ethical seriousness expressed through formal originality. The Trace of Judaism addresses this characteristic through the thought of the Lithuanian-born Franco-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Steeped in the Russian classics from an early age, Levinas drew significantly from Dostoevsky in his ethical thought. One can profitably read Russian literature through Levinas, and vice versa.
Vinokur links new readings of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Isaac Babel, and Osip Mandelstam to the work of Levinas, to ask: How does Judaism haunt Russian literature? In what ways is Levinas' ethics as "Russian" as it is arguably "Jewish"? And more broadly, how do ethics and aesthetics inflect each other? Vinokur considers how the encounter with the other invokes responsibilities ethical and aesthetic, and shows how the volatile relationship between ethics and aesthetics—much like the connection between the Russian and Jewish traditions—may be inextricably symbiotic. In an ambitious work that illuminates the writings of all of these authors, Vinokur pursues the implications of this reading for our understanding of the function of literature—its unique status as a sphere in which an ethical vision such as that of Levinas becomes comprehensible.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810152083 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2009 |
| Series: | Studies in Russian Literature and Theory |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Trace of Judaism
DOSTOEVSKY, BABEL, MANDELSTAM, LEVINASBy Val Vinokur
NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Northwestern University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-2585-8
Chapter One
Idiots and Demons: Dostoevsky's Aesthetic Perils
DOSTOEVSKY'S CHARACTERS tend toward vocal excess: excessive sincerity, insincerity, feeling, intellection, faith, doubt, and above all, excess speech. They talk too much. And their talk is typically charged with cosmic and practical questions of right and wrong—questions animated and muddled by the gales of human nature that Dostoevsky depicts so well.
Bakhtin was perhaps the Wrst reader of Dostoevsky to appreciate the aesthetics, the artistic structure, of what I would call this vocal excess. Bakhtin argues that in Dostoevsky's mature prose, the novel reaches its apotheosis as a truly dialogic genre, that the vocal excesses are a kind of poetics. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics leaves one with the sense that Dostoevsky's aesthetics—the formal structure of polyphony and multivalence that permeates his work—issues from an ethics of discourse that shuns monologic literature. In other words, while dialogue is often understood as an ethically positive category, Bakhtin turns it into something that is exemplary of a particular aesthetics.
In the process, Bakhtin offers a comprehensive way of understanding Dostoevsky's otherwise chaotic and emotionally contingent artistic form. Through Bakhtin, Dostoevsky's aesthetics make sense: he acquires a fitting, coherent poetics. This aesthetic approach does justice to Dostoevsky as a master craftsman and literary innovator. Such formal coherence, however, occasionally elides some of the more complex ethical problems in Dostoevsky's work, especially when these problems intersect with the aesthetic integrity of a given novel.
In this chapter, I seek to show how Levinas's idea of the face offers a deeper understanding of the ethical and aesthetic issues in The Idiot and Demons. Perhaps the face is a focal point to ambling prose the way poetic form is to poems: narratives and heroes turn toward the reader, pulling her along in time. And both of these novels specifically feature characters that respond to the human face in morally significant ways. The textual thread binding this discussion will be something that Bakhtin elides: the meaning of death—or more precisely, the end of consciousness and the beginning of facelessness—in the two novels. First, I examine the connections and key differences between Prince Myshkin and Levinas's "ethics of the face." After considering how Myshkin's aesthetically saturated ethics cannot make the transition into worldly justice, the chapter turns to Demons, a novel which represents the total failure and perversion of the aesthetic model of redemption first tested in The Idiot. Contra Bakhtin, I argue that in Dostoevsky's world the end of consciousness (i.e., a character's death or lapse into insanity) underscores the immortality of the human voice less than it reminds us of the fragility of the human face.
Just as a stain allows the cell biologist to highlight the features of a tissue sample under a microscope, so too, for many readers, the fate of a novel's characters colors the meaning of the book. When a character dies, we take note; and the manner and context of this death are often significant in our ultimate sense of the work as a whole. In "Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book," however, Bakhtin proposes a theory about the insignificance of death in the dialogic novel. To be sure, he appreciates the fact that "characteristic for Dostoevsky's world are murders (portrayed from within the murderer's Weld of vision), suicides, and insanity"; but more important for Bakhtin is the fact that "normal deaths are rare in [Dostoevsky's] work, and [that] he usually notes them only in passing." Unlike Tolstoy, whose narration frequents the minds of dying men, Dostoevsky holds that consciousness is ultimately as ignorant of its end as it is of its beginning:
Dostoevsky never depicts death from within.... What matters here is not simply that one cannot spy upon death from within, cannot see it, just as one cannot see the back of one's head without resorting to a mirror. The back of one's head exists objectively and can be seen by others. But death from within, that is, one's own death consciously perceived, does not exist for anyone: not for the dying person, nor for others; it does not exist at all.... In Dostoevsky's world death finalizes nothing, because death does not affect the most important thing in this world—consciousness for its own sake. (PDP 290)
According to Bakhtin, it is essential that for Dostoevsky "to kill does not mean to refute" (PDP 290–91). Though, certainly, consciousness "dies objectively," it is likewise an "objective fact" that consciousness cannot perceive its own death; and herein lies its uniqueness, its peculiar independence from the material organism in which it existed (PDP 284). From this second objectivity, this concrete lack of information, metaphysics or religion (or literature, in its own fashion) is free to step in and eternalize the departed consciousness. It is in this sense, I would say, that Bakhtin stresses the insignificance of death in Dostoevsky's novels.
The focus of my argument is different. I seek to examine the significance of the end of consciousness in Dostoevsky and, more specifically, how its occurrence may indicate the novelist's awareness of a grand artistic failure. This failure is an ethical reaction—in Emmanuel Levinas's sense—to the morally ambivalent and aesthetically indulgent nature of consciousness-for-its-own sake and, indeed, perhaps even of Dostoevsky's religious faith in positive beauty. Straying from the dynamic of nihilism versus Christian morality that has often shaped Dostoevsky criticism, I will offer a critique of The Idiot on ethical grounds, a reading that sharpens the view that the novel's ending is a refutation of the author's beloved hero. Then I look at Demons, where death—Bakhtin notwithstanding—appears ubiquitously, as if to snuff out any glimmers of Christian redemption in this darkest of Dostoevsky's overcast novels. In these two books, the end of consciousness should give less rise to statements about the literary or spiritual immortality of consciousness and its supposed eternal dialogicity, but more to questions about the ends of consciousness, about its meaning and purpose—its ethical dimension.
Just as Dostoevsky had misgivings about a "science of Ethics," so too Levinas recognized goodness in the ability to respond to the face that turns toward me in need, prior to any moral code or utilitarian calculus. Dostoevsky's works have often been called theatrical, but one could be more precise in this regard: almost every one of his novels is really a series of face-to-face encounters (punctuated by the thoughts of individual characters on their way to meet someone) spread out over time (the medium of character development). Where Dostoevsky's characters embody the ethical dynamics of the response to the face, Levinas uses the prose of phenomenology to describe these dynamics in a more rigorous way: "ethics is an optics," but "it is a 'vision' without image" (TI 23). That is, ethics is a vision that has not yet objectified the other, subsuming her within preexisting categories. Imaging—aesthesis—may well be the most perfidious form of intellection, precisely because it is often so disingenuous, pretending to a noncerebral spontaneity. But as I noted earlier in my introduction, ethics arises not in any preconceived notions, images, personalities, or memories I may superimpose over the face of the other: ethics is, rather, my almost instinctive position of solicitousness to a person who is irreducibly not myself. (The fact that our facing someone makes us hostage, so to speak, is why we tend to avoid making eye contact with strangers.)
The obligation entailed by the other's face is transcendent—infinite. Such responsibility is indeed not of this world, and yet can and must be attempted only in this world. This paradox informs Levinas's idea of "the third," of the second other:
The third must also have a face. If the third is also a face, one must know whom to speak to first. Who is the first face? And, in this sense, I am led to compare the two faces, to compare the two people. Which is a terrible task. It is entirely different from speaking to the face. To compare them is to place them in the same genre. The other is unique, unique to such an extent that in speaking of the responsibility for the unique ... I use the word "love." ... What is a loved one? He is unique in the world. Now when there are two unique beings ... [the] thought of comparison, of judgment, the attributes of the subject appear.... Justice is the way in which I respond to the face [the fact] that I am not alone in the world with the other.
The fact that the third is also the other necessitates justice, which is unethical in the pure sense, doing violence to one of two parties, so to speak. Otherwise, ethics cannot be pursued in this world. As I indicated earlier, for Levinas, Zosima's pledge of superlative personal responsibility is moot without justice.
In The Idiot Dostoevsky intended to "portray a positively beautiful human being." Prince Myshkin's virtue is linked to his regard for faces: he does not dispute Adelaida's remark that he is "an expert in faces." But he isn't merely able to read faces; he is also transfixed by visages, whether in real life or representations—he is moved and obsessed by what they evoke, as Leslie Johnson has suggested. He had "recognized a familiar face" (PSS 8:142; Idiot 168) in Nastasya's portrait, an image he associates with ingenuousness and holy suffering—with the cruel fate of the Swiss cowherd Marie, with the criminal facing execution, with Christ, or as Johnson notes, with "the projected image of himself as a child, orphaned and abused like Nastasya, almost out of his mind, trapped in the incommunicating chaos of a traumatized, autistic face." Myshkin even quickly kisses the image, as one would an icon. In a way, the face of the other—here first encountered in and, one could argue, conditioned by its portrait—is validated by means of its core commonality with the face of the familiar, of the self, even; and this is precisely not the validation sought by Levinas's philosophy of the commandment that comes from the other because he is other. For Dostoevsky, according to his stated views and to commentators such as Robert Louis Jackson and Bakhtin (if we extrapolate his own ethical views from "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity"), the face is precious inasmuch as it is an incarnation: litso (face) as iconic lik (countenance). Not only was man created in God's image, but God even assumed human form as Christ. In this fact dwells Christian morality: "The main thing is the image of Christ from which comes ... the thought that the chief acquisition and goal of mankind is achieved morality [; but] not Christ's morality, not his teaching will save the world, but precisely faith that the Word became flesh." Dostoevsky's enthusiasm for icons and for icon veneration reflects this desire for divine incarnation.
Tolstoy's Anna Karenina provides an interesting foil here: Levin's introduction to Anna through Mikhailov's portrait, an encounter that is emblematic of his "intoxication" by Anna and by the idleness of city life during Kitty's pregnancy. Of course, unlike Levin, Myshkin does not recognize this aesthetic encounter as the beginning of what is, in fact, intoxication. Robin Feuer Miller describes "the overall tentativeness" of this passage in The Idiot as indicative of "the moment of perception before any analysis of it has occurred." Analysis might reveal that Nastasya's portrait tells a story of abuse, despair, and corruption that the prince will never be able to overcome merely by perceiving and declaring her fundamental innocence. For Myshkin, however, she will remain what he first perceived in the portrait, reflecting an aesthetically conditioned ethics that ultimately helps no one in the novel.
The prince's relation to the face has more to do with emotions, with tears of sympathy, than with ethical deeds. (One could argue that even his attempt to marry Nastasya Filippovna manifests more pathos than ethos.) These emotions are provoked by the powerfully iconic clothing, the eager shroud of supreme mystery and pathos that covers the essential nakedness of the face in The Idiot. Myshkin echoes the Dostoevskyan need for a transcendently representative and Golgothic model of suffering, by which several familiarized faces blend into the supersaturated image (obraz), passive and timeless, and thus non-ethical. Levinas distinguishes ethics from imaging and divine incarnation, and thereby from aesthetics—as we saw above in his discussion of ethical seeing: "ethics is an optics," but "it is a 'vision' without image." Bakhtin, in "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity," makes a similar distinction between ethical and aesthetic activity, the latter being the "excess of my seeing, ... the bud in which form slumbers, and whence form unfolds like a blossom." Levinas's discussion, as one would imagine, is less concerned with aesthetics than with ethical activity, which is thwarted by this very excess of seeing:
A God invisible means not only a God unimaginable, but a God accessible in justice. Ethics is the spiritual optics.... The ideal is not only a being superlatively being, a sublimation of the objective, or, in the solitude of love, a sublimation of the Thou.... The Other is not the incarnation of God, but precisely by his face, in which he is disincarnate, is the manifestation of the height in which God is revealed. (TI 78–79)
Levinas emphasizes here that the other's face is not the incarnation of anything—not God, not the other, and certainly not of any iconic image lent by an onlooker. Nothing—not cognition, ideology, nor aesthetic consummation—precedes my vision of the other's face, a face inadequate to its possessor and signifying only nakedness, vulnerability, destitution, a weakness that makes unreasonable demands upon me. This face, and the ethics it calls for from its unknowable and unreciprocal height, are not a foundation for anything ("pre-originary," as Levinas says).
For Dostoevsky, however, to put it in the bluntest Bakhtinian light, moral teaching comes less from another, from conversation, than somehow because of another—from the Christian model of incarnation, which is the possibility of ideal form, of "positive beauty." This beauty hopes for a nontemporal morality coming from a horizontal, side-by-side harmony, in which a community exists so long as it is bound by a common ideal (i.e., we are like Christ, are all one in Christ). This differs from a Levinasian ethics that comes from my vertical relation to the other in his height, an other who is not an image or ideal but a person. Levinas's God is accessible to justice partly because he is invisible and unimaginable: the other is wholly other, beyond image or generalization, and hence a specific alterity that demands a particular ethics.
Prince Myshkin's confusion between face and image leads him to fail another crucial moment in Levinasian ethics—the appearance of the third, of the second face before me. One should not, I think, disregard Dostoevsky's brutal intellectual and artistic honesty in his depiction of the ultimate failure, the collapse and psychiatric regression, of Myshkin, his favorite hero: the prince's demise is precisely a function of his inability to deal with the second face, to engage in the Solomonic agony of justice. This is why he is undone by the triangle he forms with Nastasya and Aglaya. Though it is possible (and common) to identify Myshkin's problems as the fault of the world, to do so is not to appreciate Dostoevsky's achievement fully. Myshkin is someone who only truly loves persons as manifestations of an iconic meta-face and not as concrete and individuated faces.
This confusion of goodness with beauty, face with icon, is logical given Dostoevsky's beliefs. Robert Louis Jackson notes:
Christ came so that mankind might know that the human spirit can be in heavenly glory "in fact and in flesh, and not only in the dream and in the ideal." "Beauty will save the world," Dostoevsky observed in the notebooks to The Idiot.... The "utility" of a work (its moral element) is inseparable from the aesthetic element, from beauty incarnate, from form.... Myshkin's premonition of a higher life is a concrete aesthetic experience, a self-incarnation.
The idea of the face offered by Levinas, on the other hand, breaks even beautiful forms. Naked faces are
like those industrial cities where everything is adapted to a goal of production, but which, full of smoke, full of wastes and sadness, exist also for themselves. For a thing nudity is the surplus of its being over its finality. It is its absurdity, its uselessness, which appears only relative to the form against which it contrasts and of which it is deficient. The thing is always an opacity, a resistance, an ugliness.... To disclose a thing by science and by art ... is to clarify it by forms: to find a place for it in the whole by apperceiving its function or beauty. The work of language is entirely different: it consists in entering into relationship with a nudity disengaged from every form, but having meaning by itself, ... signifying before we have projected light upon it, appearing not as a privation on the ground of an ambivalence of values (as good or evil, as beauty or ugliness), but as an always positive value. Such a nudity is the face. (TI 74)
Myshkin's love of the beautiful prevents him from seeing the face in its vulnerable nakedness, just as it stops him from the justice, the choosing between faces that ethics demands.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Trace of Judaism by Val Vinokur Copyright © 2008 by Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixList of Abbreviations....................xi
Introduction Levinas and Russian Literature....................3
Chapter One Idiots and Demons: Dostoevsky's Aesthetic Perils....................15
Chapter Two "And I Most of All": Levinas in The Brothers Karamazov....................35
Chapter Three Isaac Babel's Dirty Ethics....................60
Chapter Four Osip Mandelstam's Judaism: Chaos and Cares....................93
Conclusion The Ethics of Aesthetics, the Aesthetics of Ethics....................133
Notes....................137
Bibliography....................167
Index....................179