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| ISBN-13: | 9780810134911 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2017 |
| Pages: | 184 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d) |
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Turned Inside Out
Reading the Russian Novel in Prison
By Steven Shankman
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3492-8
CHAPTER 1
Incarceration and Transcendence
Dispossession, Transcendence, Incarceration: Dostoevsky'sNotes from the House of the Deadand Levinas as Prisoner
Both Dostoevsky and Levinas spent formative early years in prison. The reasons for their incarceration were very different. Dostoevsky was sentenced as a result of his participation in the Petrashevsky circle of utopian socialists. He was tried and convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Dostoevsky's death sentence was famously reprieved at the last moment, just as he was facing a firing squad in Semenevsky Square in St. Petersburg. His sentence was then commuted to four years of hard labor. Dostoevsky was first incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg in 1849, when he was twenty-eight years old. He spent part of his time in the prison in the Peter and Paul Fortress in solitary confinement. He arrived in Tobolsk prison in western Siberia in January 1850 and was released four years later, when he was thirty-two.
Levinas was taken as a French prisoner of war in Rennes with the Tenth French Army in June 1940. As a Jew, he was isolated and separated by his Nazi captors, along with other Jewish French prisoners of war, from his fellow non-Jewish French officers. His imprisonment in various labor camps, first in France and then in Nazi Germany, lasted five years, from 1940 to 1945. His incarceration began when he was thirty-four years old. He was released from a labor camp not far from the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp when he was thirty-nine. As Levinas himself explains on a number of occasions in his writings, it was his French officer's uniform that saved him, under the Third Geneva Convention, from being deported to a concentration camp, for the Germans — remarkably! — adhered to the Geneva Convention in this regard.
I am focusing this study around the subject's undergoing the trauma of being turned inside out (à l'envers) and on the relation of this trauma both to ethical responsibility and to the related emergence of the word "God" in the Bible. For Levinas, the glorious road to the subject's being turned inside out by, and responding to, the Other is a two-step process, as he came to see in composing Existence and Existents (De l'existence à l'existent, more accurately translated "From Existence to the Existent [i.e., to the concrete human being who exists]") and Time and the Other, two philosophical works that were conceived and, in the case of the first, largely drafted during his years of captivity. One can try to exit the anonymous rumbling of Being — which Levinas names the il y a, the "there is" — through what Levinas calls "hypostasis," that is, through a positing of oneself as a knowing subject. Levinas, who is no irrationalist, associates knowing with an assertive grasping of the true, and hence even with violence. Knowing, for Levinas, is burdened with a likely forgetting — a forgetting not, as in Heidegger, of Being, but rather of one's prior and infinite obligation to the Other, an obligation that precedes knowing and its light. Knowing, for Levinas, is associated with solitude. We can truly exit both the il y a and the essential solitude of the knowing subject, for Levinas, through the ethical relation, through a responding to, and a taking responsibility for, the Other.
The I, before being turned inside out by an awakening to its responsibility for the Other, first undergoes a thoroughly disorienting and indeed maddening exposure to what Levinas calls the "there is," the il y a, the horrifyingly impersonal and "irremissibile" (i.e., "no-exit") nature of Being. Levinas's reflection on the "there is," he notes in a conversation with Philippe Nemo, "starts with childhood memories. One sleeps alone, the adults continue life; the child feels the silence of his bedroom as 'rumbling' [bruissant]." Levinas goes on to say that his friend Maurice Blanchot comes close to articulating what Levinas himself means by the chilling anonymity of the "there is" when Blanchot, in his fiction, speaks of "a night in a hotel room where, behind the partition, 'it does not stop stirring' [ça n'arrête pas de remuer]; 'one does not know what they are doing next door.'"
I shall now draw my own example of what I believe Levinas means by the il y a from a famous episode entitled "Time Enough at Last" of the venerable television series The Twilight Zone (1959–64), created by Rod Serling and broadcast in classic black and white. The episode's protagonist, Henry Bermis, is a bank teller, a voracious reader, and a misanthrope who had been having lunch in the bank's vault. Bermis hears a tremendous explosion and then exits the vault to find himself the last person alive on a planet Earth that has just been destroyed by a hydrogen bomb. The bank teller is socially awkward and an avid reader who wears very thick glasses. After at first experiencing total despair at his situation of complete isolation, he spots an intact library in the distance. He approaches the building and suddenly finds himself among piles of books. He is greatly heartened. He passionately looks forward to all the time he can now spend with his many books. As he begins to dive into his first tome, he stumbles over a rock. His only pair of glasses falls from his face; the lenses lie shattered on the ground. He is now utterly alone in an anonymous universe, and unable to read any of the many books that surround him. There is now no apparent exit from the anonymous rumbling and the rubble of the there is, nor will there ever be any such exit, certainly not through books — and certainly not through the ethical relation, as this is a totally solitary world without others.
Neither Heideggerian anxiety about death nor Sartrean "nausea," as Levinas remarks in Existence and Existents, the book he drafted in captivity, accounts for the "horror" generated by the il y a, a horror in which "the subject is stripped of his subjectivity, of his power to have private existence. The subject is depersonalized. ... Horror turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out [à l'envers]. It is participation in the there is, in the there is which returns in the heart of every negation, in the there is that has 'no exits' [sans issue]." Horror, for the then incarcerated author of Existence and Existents, turns the subjectivity of the subject, his particularity qua entity, inside out. In the preface to Existence and Existents, Levinas says that this book was "begun before the war" and was "continued and written down for the most part in captivity." With his typical modesty, Levinas remarks that "the stalag [Nazi prisoner-of-war camp for noncommissioned, or enlisted, officers] is evoked here not as a guarantee of profundity nor as a claim to indulgence, but as an explanation for the absence of any consideration of those philosophical works published, with so much impact, between 1940 and 1945."
Levinas's description of the il y a, of the subject's being turned inside out by its encounter with the no-exit quality of Being in Existence and Existents, was doubtless influenced by his experience of incarceration as a profound dépouillement — a "dispossession"— of the bourgeois self, which is content to seek its own needs and comforts, and which is content to enjoy itself. The prisoner, despite his physical "installation" in prison, Levinas remarks in his prison notebooks, always feels himself "about to leave" [sur le point de partir]. Dostoevsky, likewise, notes that "every convict feels that he is," when in prison, "so to speak, not at home [ne u sebia doma], but on a visit [v gostiakh]." "Le bourgeois est un homme installé [the bourgeois is a man who sets himself up, who installs himself]," Levinas writes. Incarceration offers the I the opportunity of transcending the bourgeois self in order to become a responsible self. In Crime and Punishment, which Dostoevsky published after his semiautobiographical prison memoir Notes from the House of the Dead, the police investigator Porfiry Petrovich, who is convinced that Raskolnikov is the murderer he is seeking, urges the young man to confess. Perceiving Raskolnikov's resistance, Porfiry Petrovich asks Raskolnikov if he is "afraid of the bourgeois shame [styda burzhuaznogo]" of confessing his guilt. In Dostoevsky, as in Levinas, the term "bourgeois," which is foreign to the prison context, is associated with a conventionality that must be transcended if the I is to assume responsibility for the Other.
Joseph Frank, in his great biography of Dostoevsky, titles one of his chapters on House of the Dead "A World of Moral Horror" and observes that "life in the barracks" for the incarcerated Dostoevsky was "a never-ending, rasping assault on Dostoevsky's sensibility at one of its sorest points; there was no escape" from what Dostoevsky, in a letter to his brother Mikhail written just after his release from prison in 1854, describes as "the eternal hostility and quarreling around one, the wrangling, shouting, uproar, din." Upon first entering the prison camp in Omsk, there was no escape for Dostoevsky from the horror of what Levinas would later call the "there is." At the beginning of his incarceration in Siberia, the protagonist of House of the Dead says he preferred the risk of exposing himself to deadly diseases in the hospital rather than remain in the prison, for "life was unbearable there, more unbearable than the hospital, [more] morally unbearable [nravstvenno tiazhelee]." Nor could Dostoevsky imagine escaping the "there is" through books, as the bank teller in the episode from The Twilight Zone longed to do, for the prisoners were not allowed to have books, with the exception of the New Testament. As the protagonist Gorianchikov observes toward the end of House of the Dead, "living without books, I had no choice but to become absorbed [uglublialsia] in myself."
Levinas, in contrast, had access to books beyond the Bible during his five years of incarceration. His prison notebooks record his responses to many writers, including Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe, Vigny, Proust, Goncharov (Oblomov), Ariosto (Orlando Furioso), Racine (Phèdre), Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. In his prison notebooks, Levinas discusses his own plans to write novels. It was during his years as a prisoner of war that Levinas drafted, as we previously mentioned, his book Existence and Existents, with its profound reflections on Shakespeare's Macbeth and Hamlet. It is even a bit uncanny, given the fact of his later incarceration in a Nazi prison camp, that Levinas titled his first book, which he published in 1935, On Escape (De l'évasion). Even in this early work, before his incarceration, Levinas was interested in escape, in transcendence, in what Jacques Rolland calls the philosopher's early attempt at "getting out of being by a new path."
In Ethics and Infinity, Levinas remarks on what I have been calling the two stages of the subject's being turned inside out: first by the "there is" and then by the other in front of me. The I, confronting the impersonality of the "there is," is stripped of its agency. The ego then posits Being, which had just previously been experienced as anonymous, as something in which I inchoately participate, as a something. Levinas calls this something a "hypostasis" of Being (existence) by an existent who, through this very act of hypostasis, differentiates himself from the anonymity of Being. Being is thus posited and, in a sense, dominated. But then — as early as Time and the Other, which Levinas published within two years of his release from prison — Levinas speaks of a second and "an entirely different movement [un tout autre movement]," an entirely different way of being turned inside out:
To escape the "there is" one must not be posed [or "pose oneself," se poser] but deposed; to make an act of deposition, in the sense one speaks of deposed kings. This deposition of sovereignty by the ego is the social relationship with the Other. The dis-inter-ested relation. I write it in three words to underline the escape from being [i.e., from ested-ness] it signifies.
Levinas concerns himself with the obligations incumbent on the subject, on the I. I am responsible for the Other. Citing Dostoevsky's sentence "Each of us is responsible for everything, before everyone, but I more than all the others," Levinas insists that "it is I who support all." But isn't the Other, Philippe Nemo asks Levinas, also responsible for me? "Perhaps," Levinas answers, "but that is his affair." The other's responsibility for me, Levinas insists, is his affair. Nevertheless, it is hard to imagine, in Levinas's personal experience of incarceration, of five years of waiting and suffering, that Levinas did not wonder why others were not being turned inside out by the suffering of Levinas and the other victims of Nazi cruelty and oppression. It is hard to imagine that Levinas did not experience the "there is" of his captivity as a time in which others failed to rise to the dignity of their responsible selves and do something to stop the anonymous rustling of Being surrounding Levinas and his fellow Jewish prisoners.
Here is how Levinas, thirty years after his release in his essay "The Name of the Dog" (1975), describes the trauma of having been "stripped" by his Nazi captors of his human skin, of his humanity:
The French uniform still protected us from Hitlerian violence. But the other men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a smile — and the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes — stripped us [nous dépouillaient] of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and wretchedness of persecuted people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but we were no longer part of the world. Our comings and goings, our sorrow and laughter, illnesses and distractions, the work of our hands and the anguish of our eyes, the letters we received from France and those accepted for our families — all that passed in parenthesis. We were beings entrapped in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language. Racism is not a biological concept; anti-Semitism is the archetype of all internment.
Antisemitism is the archetype of all internment. All internment, for Levinas in this passage, strips the subject of his human skin and exposes the I to the relentless anonymity of the "there is." "In horror," Levinas writes in Existence and Existents, a subject is stripped (dépouillé) of his subjectivity. The verb dépouiller from this passage in Existence and Existents recalls Levinas's description, in his prison notebooks, of his experience of captivity as un dépouillement, a destitution and a dispossession, a having been stripped bare. The passage from Existence and Existents looks forward to Levinas's description, in the later essay "The Name of the Dog" cited above, of how his Nazi captors and other Germans in the vicinity of the camp had stripped (dépouillaient) Levinas and his fellow Jewish prisoners of their human skin. Levinas would have to wait patiently for five years for a responsible other, having been turned inside out, to dispel the horror of the "there is" for those held captive in their detention camp.
Dostoevsky, whose writings so consistently express a hostility to Jews, himself paradoxically experienced this same archetypal "anti-Semitism," this same subjection to horror of the "there is" without the possibility of escape while in prison, as described above by Levinas. We recall here Joseph Frank's description of Dostoevsky's speaking of the prison camp at Omsk as a world of moral horror. Dostoevsky experienced the dehumanization of persecution in his prison camp in Siberia. Though he eventually made friends and experienced remarkable acts of kindness from some of his fellow convicts, he was terribly isolated by the fact of his social class. He was a gentleman, a member of the educated class, while at least half of the other inmates were from the peasant class. In a letter from Omsk on February 22, 1854, that he wrote to his brother Mikhail just after his release, Dostoevsky expresses the full force of his resentment toward the peasant convicts who had so relentlessly persecuted him:
They are a coarse, irritated, and embittered lot. Their hatred for the gentry passes all limits, and for this reason they displayed hostility at the sight of us, along with a malicious joy at seeing us in such a sad plight. They would have devoured us if given the chance.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Turned Inside Out by Steven Shankman. Copyright © 2017 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgementsPrologue Chapter One Incarceration and Transcendence- Dispossession, Transcendence, Incarceration: Dostoevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead and Levinas as Prisoner