Twenty-three centuries earlier, Plato had essentially the same lightbulb moment.  “Images are treacherous!” he decides, bringing his own set of household evidence to bear on the problem: “Beds are of three kinds, and there are three artists who superintend them (he counts on his fingers): God… the maker of the bed… and the painter.”  Continuing to muse: “So God is the super-artisan, making the form-of-the-good Bed (something pricy and mahogany, no doubt).  Running a close second is the bed-maker, who crafts real (rather than theoretical) furniture for real (rather than theoretical) people.”  Here he pauses with distaste.  “But the painter’s bed is a mere shadow of bedness—third-order mimesis on a woefully inadequate two-dimensional plane.”  Plato’s implications are clear: even the most beautiful of the painted beds (and Magritte has quite a few to choose from) is inferior to the worst of the real, three-dimensional beds (case in point: the hastily-assembled purple LEIRVIK bought on steep discount at Ikea.  At least it sleeps two and has storage compartments).

So.  The ceci n’est pas crew has thrown down a hefty gauntlet: do faux-pipe, faux-bed images have value or weight in our living world of bodies and motion?

I’m going to use portrait-images to answer that question, perhaps by starting with a few counter-queries of my own.  Why do babies love mirrors?  Why do lovelorn teens destroy photos after breakups?  Why do facebookers cache reams of personal pictures (painstakingly tagging each one)?  What’s up with effigies?  Art historian E.H. Gombrich poses us a related thought-experiment: imagine yourself opening a newspaper and finding an image of your favorite public figure.  Easy enough.  Now, imagine yourself picking up a pin and stabbing it into the ‘eyes’ of the (wo)man represented.  More difficult, I would hope.  Gombrich describes his own feeling of empathy for the portrait-image: “However well I know with my waking thoughts that what I do to his picture makes no difference to my friend or hero, I still feel a vague reluctance to harm it.  Somewhere there remains the absurd feeling that what one does to the picture is done to the person it represents.”  The implied principle seems to be this: the world of the picture-plane and our world of existence just don’t seem all that far apart.  We know that portrait images are not flesh and blood.  (Thanks Magritte, we figured that one out for ourselves.)  Perhaps, though, they’re the next best thing—offshoots of selfhood, little agents of us-ness that carry our names outside of ourselves into the world at large.  If the individual is the nucleus, his images form a corona around him.  This relationship is intuitive.  Of course we don’t stab out Barack Obama’s ink-dot eyes; of course we purge ourselves of spurned love by expunging its visual fingerprints; of course Dad is filming this piano recital in three different digital media.  The common thread compelling all of these situations is that strange, instinctive homology between the individual and images that capture his likeness.  We interact with images because they form a bridgeway to other people and ourselves, a bridgeway that transcends both space and time.

For the ancients, this sense of kinship between portrait and portrayed was upgraded to a relationship of almost-perfect equivalence.  In Mesopotamia (~2500 BCE), the great Temple of Inanna was peopled with wide-eyed stone figurines who stood in attendance to the goddess. Like lightning rods, those little maquettes were made to channel the great power of divine favor directly to their human counterparts.  With their meek handclasps and luminous owl-eyes, these perpetual worshippers functioned on behalf of their pious donors’ souls, giving them the freedom to live non-ascetic secular lives.

Portrait-images in Egypt, beginning around the same time, were produced on the same assumption of equivalence.  In this case, the function was primarily funerary rather than devotional: whether crafted from plebian terracotta or imperial diorite, a man’s portrait-statue served as the posthumous home for his ka (animating spirit) to reside.  Statues had a great and terrible responsibility—those constructs of earth and stone anchored souls to the world, preventing their dissipation and loss.  No wonder the great god-emperors used such formidably hard rock for their portraits—it would be a terrible faux pas for the deity-on-earth to lose his lofty spirit to erosion.

In the Roman republican era, this ‘perpetuation of memory’ theme was a fundamental concern of the patrician family-cult.  First gambit: the living generation honors and worships their ancestors who stay ‘alive’ through their presence in the lives of the living. Classicist Eric Varner refers to this act of remembrance a sort of afterlife.  In return, the ancestors’ renown galvanizes the younger generation to greater glory in the family name.  After all, the family screwups and black sheep don’t make it into the record books—they’re denied remembrance, that trump card on death accorded to their more-illustrious relatives.

The ancestral portrait-image serves as the locus point for this intergenerational rite, both in the creation of ancestral death masks (imagines) for permanent display within the household as well as the lavish funerary procession that followed each new death in the family.  Because these visual representations were homologous to the individuals they depicted, they served as a means to directly honor (therefore preserving) the ancestral spirit.  Funerary portraiture was the integral vehicle of praise: tribute paid to an ancestral portrait was directly transferable to the spirit of the man himself.  How did this work, exactly?  All of the imagery employed during the funeral procession was geared towards reanimating the images, treating them as living beings to bring them back to life.  Each new procession was a cue not only to celebrate the newly-deceased man, but for the family to trot out all of the ancestors and re-venerate them in one fell swoop.  The intent of the procession was to make it seem “as if the ancient dead had returned to earth.”  The ancestors supplied their faces (the imagines, funeral masks made at the time of their death); the life was supplied by real, living bodies: men who wore the masks and the curule garb which would denote their high rank (the funerary procession was a patrician affair).  With this setup, the procession began—a work of family-cult theater intended to stage the afterlife in the corporal world.

Revivification: A Drama in Five (Rather Synchronic) Acts

Act I: Orienting the bodies

During the honorary funeral procession, the body of the deceased himself was most commonly ‘conspicuous in an upright posture.’  The dead man would be dressed to the nines in his finest toga and accouterments and paraded through the streets.  Meanwhile, the masked and costumed representatives of his curule ancestors were enthroned on the ivory chairs that denoted their elite magisterial ranks.  Though slightly less mobile than your average hero-popstar-demigod-conquering general (other notable recipients of parades), the upright figure of the deceased and the seated images of his ancestors occupied space as they did in life—proud, autonomous, regal… almost lifelike.

Act II: The Processional

Continuing the parallel between representation and reality, the deceased and his ancestral representatives were borne high above the streets in classy chariots, accompanied by all the emblems of their elite rank (a la homecoming queen and court).

Act III: Proclamations

Appropriate, I think, for the climax-point of the processional, this stage is the auditory exception to what has heretofore been a largely visual spectacle.  The ritual of speech-making made manifest the reanimating sentiments driving the event.  According to Polybius, “he who makes the oration over the man about to be buried, when he has finished speaking of him, recounts the successes and exploits of the rest whose images are present, beginning with the most ancient.”  Explaining the implications of this auditory program, he states that “by this means… the celebrity of those who did noble deeds is rendered immortal.”  With every new addition to the family crypt, each familial great man received a fresh eulogy, a renewed exposure to the minds and memories of his living successors.

Act IV: Coming Home

Depositing the portrait-image in its final resting place capped the honorary public performance.  After the stately funeral procession and the interment of the deceased, the family brought home the imagines of departed and ancestors and deposited them in a wooden shrine within the house.  This shrine, couched in a conspicuous part of the household, allowed the ancestral imagines a prominent place in the daily visual fabric of the living family, a sort of pantheonic throne from which to rule the cult of kinship.

Act V: Transcending Time

I suppose my paradigm of the five-act drama has been a bit disingenuous—this last element is no denouement, but rather a jumping-off point.  The honorary funeral rites mentioned above—image orientation, mode of carriage, auditory component, and final destination—are all elements of the procession, occurring within a fixed timeline on the day of the ceremony.  The final, most integral aspect of ancestor-veneration—the imago or commemorative portrait-head—transcends this timeline, remaining a daily fixture within the household until the family line itself dies out.  Enjoying pride of place within the family shrine, these simple wax masks with their remarkable fidelity of feature were the only permanent element of the elaborate funeral celebration, returning home from each ceremony to be placed back on display within the house.  All the other accouterments of the procession—fasces, curule chairs, and insignia-emblazoned togate bodies—were ephemeral costumes, worn only for the duration of the day’s rites.

The assertion that the face/head is central to the Roman funerary cult may seem to negate the mechanisms described earlier, which required full and lavish representations of the body to achieve their full honorific effect.  Clothed in majestic magisterial togas, these bodies were striking assertions of republican power and civic service.  Was this rich display less important than the humble wax imagines?  Why were only the imagines preserved?  Perhaps what’s at work is the face-body dichotomy that characterizes so much of Roman portraiture.  In this schema, the face is unique to the man portrayed, serving to indicate personal identity in naturalistic, lifelike terms.  The body, in contrast, is an indicator of social identity, outfitted in the garb of the elite and accompanied by appropriate symbols of rank.  These two forms of identity—personal and social—coalesce in life but disaggregate in death.  In life, the individual is born with a unique personal identity and matures into a typified social role (a patron, a magistrate).  He brings his personal identity to the grave, but the social identity is generic and nonstransferable.  Eventually he must cede it to his successors.

The funeral procession posthumously recombined imago and toga, reuniting personal identity with social, and reanimating the dead in a stately promenade.  However, like life itself, that procession was ephemeral.  At its end, the ancestors again released their social personae and returned to the household shrine retaining only their individual, innate identities, encapsulated within the simple facial portrait.

Leaving the republican era and moving into the imperial, we see the same trend of the living interacting with the dead through portrait images.  Here, though, we won’t be looking at the honorific perpetuation of memory but rather the infamous damnatio memoriae (‘obliteration of memory’).  If honor was accorded to those whose portraits were readily visible, the opposite fate—shame and ignominy—were the desserts of those whose portraits were removed or destroyed.  To brutalize an image was to physically manifest abstractions such as disgrace and revenge.  Whereas the funeral procession consisted of a public parade of portraits designed to promote remembrance of the dead, the imperial obliteration of portraiture was intended to induce social amnesia, removing the memory of the condemned from the collective consciousness (Stalin’s purges operated on the same principle).  Ultimately, “the condemnation, damnation, or abolition of an individual’s memory is a posthumous destruction of his or her very essence or being.”  Memory being homologous to portrait image, the removal and destruction of such likenesses acted as direct blows to the spirit and social legacy of the deceased.

In the early years of the empire, a nascent form of the damnatio memoriae fulfilled its condemning function by simply removing the imago of the deceased man from any funerals in which it would usually have been present.  Ordered by senatorial decree, this state-sanctioned process implied the negation of the dishonored spirit through its conspicuous absence from the procession of its peers.  Given the potency of portrait images as vehicles of praise and commemoration, this snub accorded to the imago of a disgraced man would have been a striking mark of dishonor.  The fundamental principle behind this action of posthumous disgrace was the inversion of norms.  Standard funeral rites had established principles for displaying portrait images; the purpose of these typified actions was to praise and propagate the memory of the deceased.  By directly negating these norms, forbidding the display of a dead man’s imago, the proto-damnatio created a stark visual antonym: if exhibition meant honor, omission could only mean disgrace.

As the empire matured, the damnatio process evolved as well, although it continued to operate on the principle of norm-inversion.  Taking the language of praise, especially that typified in the traditional funeral procession, the damnatio systematically reversed it.  What was created was an orthogonal set of visual and methodological signs that became the standard language of blame.  The effectiveness of the damnatio lies in its subversive simplicity: what more effective way to create a vocabulary of dishonor than to take the existing lexicon of praise and turn it on its ear?  Rather than reinventing the wheel, damnatio set the existing one rolling in reverse.  If the family-cult procession was a somber sort of comedy, the damnatio perversely reverses its vocabulary of action into a profane kind of tragedy.

Act I: Orienting the Body (Throw it on the Ground)

Remember the dead man (rather eerily) ‘standing’ through his funeral procession as a last nod to his upright, dominant posture in life?  The damnatio process overturned this convention of body orientation as the crowd began its denunciation by toppling the statue of the condemned individual.  Think Saddam Hussein.  Lying in the dust, the statue of the dishonored dead was subordinated into a humiliating position that connoted defeat and death.

Act II: The Processional

Ancestral honorees at the funeral procession rode high above the street in chariots, preceded by all the emblems of their rank.  Statues of the damned were borne by chariots as well: dragged behind them like dishonored corpses, lying facedown between their wheels.  Often, this contempt accorded to the statue echoed the treatment received by the slain body it represented.  Blacklisted imperial enemies often went the way of Hector, battered in the dust beneath Achilles’ wheels.

Act III: Proclamations

… of jeering rage and dissatisfaction.  From hired claques to senatorial groups to the general mass of the crowd, all participated in chanting the damnatio.  During the later empire, the Senate’s chanting was systematized into a bastardized mimicry of praise-standards from the Theodosian Code.  By perverting the preexisting language of praise, such chants created an easily recognizable and effective language of blame; again, simply by reversing norms of praise and honor, the crowds conducting the damnatio created a standard idiom and practice of humiliation.

Act IV: Coming Home?

No indeed.  Comfortable interment and imago preservation being the province of the honored dead, statues which had undergone damnatio ended up thrown into waste pits, recut into new portraits, or simply warehoused and forgotten.  Whether a latrine or a neglected storeroom, these final destinations for portrait statues were the unmarked graves which relegated the former emperor or dignitary to ignominy and, ultimately, oblivion.  Often, the statue that had undergone damnatio underwent the treatment as the disgraced body it represented: “corpses ended up in the sewage system as with any other refuse.”

Act V: Losing Face

In its paradigm of honor-inversion, the damnatio focused its destructive activities on the images of the face.  The symbolism behind the mutilation is “the loss of identity,” and—for the same reason that the imago was the iconic ancestral image—this identity was most frequently associated with the unique features of the face.  Though the full-body statue was toppled, dragged, taunted, and eventually disposed of, specific and intentional mutilation was reserved for the facial features.

The iconic image of face-based damnatio memoriae is probably the tondo portrait of emperor Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna, and their two children Caracalla and Geta.  It’s a fairly standard family portrait, the adults looking sweetly parental, imperial headdresses jauntily perched on their heads; young Caracalla gazes solemnly into the middle distance, all doe-eyes and long side-curls.  To his right, his younger brother Geta…oh wait.  He doesn’t have a face. When young doe-eyes ascended to the throne he took issue with co-ruling alongside his little sib and had him killed in a fit of pique.  Since fratricide wasn’t enough to efface Geta’s (apparently) threatening memory, Caracalla went through the corpus of family portraits and had his brother erased from each one.  In the case of the tondo portrait, this ‘erasing’ creates a tragicomic cognitive dissonance: the remnants of the happy family don’t square with angry childish scribblings where the fourth head should be.  Really Caracalla?  Are you a pouty two-year-old?

Apparently so.  In any case, the tondo portrait is an exemplary-if-rude specimen of the face-based thrust of the damnatio.  Mutilation and Transformation, by classicist Eric Varner, is a comprehensive study of surviving imperial images that bear evidence of damnatio memoriae.  Of all the full-body or extended-bust statuary, none show signs of intentional body-mutilation.  All, however, bear evidence of facial mutilation, transformation, or, more-rarely, decapitation.  Clearly the agents of damnatio did not need to destroy the body to destroy the memory of the man: because the governing source of personal identity was the head and facial features, the honorific body on its own had now specific meaning, purpose, or power.

The tondo portrait is not the only case of Geta getting short shrift from his paranoid and power-mad brother.  Another image to get the effacement treatment is a heroic portrait statue of the younger imperial son.  As future co-emperor, Geta is depicted with all of the imperial honors accorded to his rank: from the sculpted cuirass and sweeping military cloak to the martial hand gesture and barbarian underfoot, Geta’s regalia is clearly imperial.  The fate of the statue, however, negates this regal imagery.  Caught in the purges, the damage done to the statue conforms to the pattern mentioned earlier: Geta’s face was violently and entirely chiseled off of his head, leaving a gaping and gruesome shallow of marble where features should be.  His body is completely unharmed—although now ludicrous in its assertion of imperial might and military virtus.  Unlike the honorific funeral portraits in which the body is transient while the face remains, the only aspect of Geta’s statue that endures is his generic, typified body.  The portrait body accords military and imperial honor to its wearer.  However, because the face has been pried off, removing all signs of his individual character, there is no means of attributing the virtus portrayed by the body to Geta, its intended recipient.

So.  The evidence is in.  The question now is how these ancient mechanisms of praise and blame help us counter the Magritte/Plato insinuation of image falseness and irrelevance.  In the Roman context, the portrait image is a mediator of subtle semiotics, a locus through which the living may bequeath honor or shame upon the dead.  Let’s go back to Gombrich’s thought-experiment: the principle staying our hand from defacing the grainy black-and-white image is precisely the same principle compelling Caracalla’s scribbling rage. Portraits equal people, and that’s all there is to it.  That scratched-out face on the family portrait would be mere petty silliness if Geta’s graven image didn’t have real significance in their shared world.

I propose a new model, then, to counter all the foregoing talk of pipes and beds.  Because household items have cornered the market on the nature-of-reality debate, let’s look to Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs.  It’s a simple piece: a straight-backed wooden chair—a tangible, sit-worthy one—flanked by an image of itself on the right and the dictionary definition of chair to its left.  The object, Kosuth concedes, is not the same as its images.  The central, physical chair is the One underscored in the title of the piece (nod to Magritte here).  However, the whole trinity forms a greater unit, necessary to our complete understanding of chairness.  Those Three—image, object, and verbal understanding of the concept—sum into our conceptualization of…whatever it is we’re dealing with.  It could be chairs, it could be newspaper clippings, it could be prom photos, or (if we’re elite Romans) it could be ancestral images and prefigurations of the life after death.  The province of the artist is not the creation of new life—that’s the work of God, or biology.  Rather, the artist’s role is to reframe understanding within the already-existing world of flesh-and-blood.  His image-based subjunctive reframes and expands upon the simple indicative of worldly fact, contributing richness, color, and complexity to the day-to-day syntax of our lives.

It’s hard to say whether this kind of thing—making a case for a dead writer, I mean—was easier in the past than it is now. My guess is that it was. Easier, that is. It’s not so much that the critics of the past had more on their plate so much as they were eating more or less the same meal at more or less the same time. And when they wrote on this dead writer or on that dead writer, the question, voiced or silent, would rarely be of the Gospel of John, or Juvenal, or even Joyce up until a few decades ago, were worth chewing up, but rather of how he should be chewed up. But now we can eat whatever we like, at whatever hour of the day, or night, we please, and if you should like cucumbers but not onions and I onions but not cucumbers, that’s alright. But if you happen to write an essay on cucumbers and I one on onions, it’s quite clear we’re not from the same planet. My interest in the texture of those little frecklish lumps, your interest in the way the peeled skin holds the light: they’re not nothing, but they’re also not something. And of course the point of essays like these is to explain our enthusiasms to the world at large, to entice one another into indulging in the other’s tastes. But say we try everything that’s recommended to us; then say we say because it can’t be done. Even if weekends were as long as months and hours long as weekends, it’s simply not in us to take everything in.
But that’s beside the point. The point’s actually a problem. And the problem isn’t that composing an essay on Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852) is hard because he’s dead, or that he needs an introduction. It’s in how the nature of his art works directly against the form of the review essay, which takes finitude as its basic premise: because our time on earth is limited, and our minds unsuited to take everything in, we have to make choices with regards to what art we, to put it crudely, consume. Though we live in an age when matters of taste have become almost completely individualized, and though today’s reviews may be more inarticulate with regards to appreciating art, they remain as grounded in a notion of circumscribed time as when Samuel Johnson and Matthew Arnold trod the English earth. For interesting reasons that would be interesting to explore (but do we have the time?), nowadays we tend towards evaluating films and albums numerically rather than verbally, be it through top ten lists, a four star scale, a ten point scale, or that all-too-familiar hundred point system masked by five letters of the alphabet and two adverbs, plus and minus. Perhaps we don’t judge anymore, but we compensate by grading everything relentlessly: restaurants, songs, professors, internet videos, news articles, microwave ovens, human beings: you name it and we’ve got numbers for it. And though you could argue that at least the fine arts and literature remain exempt from the rest of the creative world, it only takes a field trip to an art auction and to the Amazon website to realize just how far we’ve come in transforming even high cultural aesthetics and criticism into statistics, econometrics, arithmetic: finite figures.
So it’s not hard to imagine problems arising when we try to decipher Gogol, whose central essence, as far as I can tell, consists precisely (or imprecisely, as the case may be), of a linguistic infinity overwriting (or devouring) an infinite reality. Our fixation on numbers as the measure of all things hides, I think, a fantasy of unbiased perception and communication: Gogol’s language is unlimited precisely because it delights in the functions of speech that have nothing to do with making statements clear, the likes and ums and you knows and I don’t knows that form—and this is Gogol’s insight—the wheat of our everyday language, and not, as we’d prefer to think, its chaff. In opposition to the idea that literature clarifies, delineates, selects, and above all fixes reality, Gogol presents a spectacular universe lying between all categories but belonging to none. Instead of our familiar either/or he offers a nebulous neither/nor: he brackets things with what they aren’t and refuses to affirm what they are. It’s no accident that most of the dramatic action in Gogol’s short stories takes place at night, when the distinctions of the mind cave in. when things cease to be and begin to suggest. But though Gogol’s sheer profusion of descriptive material invites all manners of interpretation, in the end it’s a mistake to try to grasp Gogol using concepts: all his works seem to take place in those strange states of mind which are defined precisely by their lack of metaphysical content: certain of the provincial stories in The Collected Tales as well as his final masterpiece Dead Souls feel as if they were composed solely in that thoughtless stupor that follows a tremendous meal, and the more obviously fantastic tales, such as the inexplicable “The Nose,” in which the titular organ of a petty official comes to life and begins a civic career of his own, have all the fluid incongruity of dreams. If realism thinks of words as a fence, Gogol sees them as paths, as “roads…crawling in all directions like caught crayfish dumped out of a sack,” to borrow one of Dead Souls’ weirder metaphors. Like rain and orbits, the road’s a noun defined by motion: one of the things Gogol retains an especial fondness for throughout his writings is movement. His descriptive passages swiftly flash from image to image, as in for example the Ukrainian (Gogol was an Ukraininan) pastoral described in the tale “A Terrible Vengeance”:

Fair is the sight from the midst of the Dnieper of the high hills, the broad meadows, and the green forest! Those hills are not hills: they have no foot; they are sharp-peaked at both bottom and top; on the slopes are not woods; they are hair growing on the shaggy head of the old man of the forest. Under it his beard washes in the water, and under his beard and over his hair – the tall sky. Those meadows are not meadows: they are a green belt tied in the middle of the round sky, and the moon strolls about in both the upper and the lower half.

Or take the famed passage on driving near the end of the first book of Dead Souls:

The horses got moving and pulled the light britzka along like a bit of fluff. Selifan just kept brandishing and shouting “Hup! hup! hup!” bouncing smoothly on his box, as the troika now flew up and now rushed full-tilt down a hummock, such as were scattered the whole length of the high road, which ran down a barely noticeable slope. Chichikov just smiled, jouncing slightly on his leather cushion, for he loved fast driving. And what Russian does not love fast driving? How can his soul, which yearns to get in a whirl, to carouse, to say sometimes: “Devil take it all!”—how can his soul not love it? Not love it when something ecstatically wondrous is felt in it? It seems  an unknown force has taken you on its wing, and you are flying, and everything is flying: milestones go flying by, merchants come flying at you on the boxes of their kibitkas, the forest on both sides is flying by with its dark tanks of firs and pines, with axes chopping and crows cawaing, the whole road is flying off no one knows where into the vanishing distance, and there is something terrible in this quick flashing, in which the vanishing object has no time to fix itself—only the sky overhead, and the light clouds, and the moon trying to break through, they alone seem motionless.

In some sense all of Gogol’s language seems to be written in italics , in speech tilted and transformed by some invisible and omnipresent force, or else all underlined as if the words themselves were horses galloping. Or even all struck through, as if to say mistakes and hesitations can be rejected, but never erased . Nothing is illuminated, but everything gets emphasized, obfuscated, warped, sung. For Gogol, there is neither a single thing nor a single human being in the universe that deserves to waste away unspoken, and it’s not too much to claim that the ridiculous splendor of Russian prose in the rest of the 19th century would have been impossible if Gogol had not offered before it his vision of a literature founded on comprehensive and uncompromising love . Tolstoy’s luminous, absolute, and  unbounded scrutiny, Dostoevsky’s hallucinogenic images and his compassion for outcasts, the absurdist speech of Chekhov’s plays and the subterranean mysticism of his stories: it all would have been diminished, restrained, and impoverished without Gogol’s impatience with literary form and his hunger   for material of every kind, be it physical or verbal, provincial or urban, alive or dead, animal, vegetable, or mineral, interesting or banal, tasteful or not.
And it’s precisely this bold and undiscriminating passion that, I think, makes Gogol especially valuable for us. The democratization of taste that began in the 1960s opened up for us tremendous horizons in terms of what stuff we could like and dislike, but what it failed to abolish was the squeamishness upon which the idea of taste ultimately derives—in fact, it allowed that squeamishness to balloon: without a language to express and explain aesthetic preferences, the sheer assertion of contrary taste or distaste takes on a terrifying valence from which we can’t help but shy away. We withdraw into cliques, or into ourselves, or both, giving up the great world out of fear, and this takes place not only in art, but also in our everyday lives, in our politics. There’s a Gogol tale, “Viy,” in which a young man, Khoma is forced to spend three nights in a church with the dead body of a beautiful witch. Swarmed by dark spirits, he somehow survives two nights, but when the spirits call out the monster Viy on the third night, he looks into its eyes and dies right away. Khoma, a young philosopher, spends most of the story running away from everything, first from the university, then from the witch, then from her father, a Cossack chief. By the time he’s trapped in a closed space by all his fears (incidentally Viy is the Russian pronoun for “you”), it’s too late to face them all. His fears are strong enough to destroy him. Convinced of his strange literary creations, Gogol died of guilt and starvation in 1852. Sixty-five years later, after countless procrastinations of reform, the czarist system whose stagnation Gogol described so vividly in Dead Souls would die as well. It’s too early to tell precisely how well our own society will hold up, but one of the many reasons we might read Gogol, and I think read literature as a whole, is that in reading we’ll find out what to do before it’s too late.

1. Interestingly enough, Gogol lived for a long while in Rome, having fled Russia after the success of his story collections: Dead Souls, his most ambitious and most “Russian” work, was mostly composed a thousand miles from home.

2. Incidentally enough, Gogol published all of his writing in the space of something like a dozen years: he spent the last years of his life convinced that his power of writing was something diabolic: the reason Dead Souls’ second book comes down to us only in fragments is not only because Gogol gave up on it, but because he burned his manuscript of the text. Of course, everything published before then had become, in a very real sense, public property: pretty much all of the characters in Dead Souls became pretty much instantly proverbial; and decades later the city of St. Petersburg commissioned a sculpture of a giant nose in homage to Gogol’s tale.

3. Love here used in a more mystic sense: as far as actual women went, Gogol was something of a complete failure.

4. Apparently.

5.  Like several of the main characters in Dead Souls, Gogol devoured food with a passion. It’s not too hard to make the connection between his passion for food and his passion for language: in both cases once-living matter is rendered dead and then begins to reenter life through motions of the mouth.

Note: all headings represent the five compulsory components for an audition for piano at the undergraduate level at Northwestern University

I – a contrapuntal baroque composition equivalent in difficulty to a three-voice fugue
I perform a suite of Brahms’ late piano pieces for a recital held by my professor that evening at one of Berlin’s best-known higher education institutes for art and music.  I was in good company, hearing alongside my performance some prototypical Schubert, Liszt, Bach, and Mendelssohn.

In a very German tradition, the performances are celebrated by a post-recital drink.  Twenty-something-year-old musicians, still analyzing every minor imperfection after putting out the results of their hours of incarceration in practice rooms, are given the chance to unwind, or at least drink away their sorrows.
Where am I from?  one of those students asks me.  All ceremony.  I answer ‘the US’ and throw the question back to him, although truth be known, his brand of Hochdeutsch already gives him away.  Turns out that he has lived in Berlin his entire life.  Ein echter Berliner-‘a true Berliner’.

-And uh, how did you hear about this professor?  he asks.  Translation: How did I cut in front of all those other hopefuls in line for this coveted studio time?

-A colleague of the professor’s…

I answer with hesitation, partly because of my scrambling for German adjective endings but mostly because I know I’m revealing that I hadn’t gone through the full terror of auditions to earn a spot in the schedule.  My fears are confirmed when he clarifies:

-Oh, so you didn’t do a full audition.

I take a nervous sip of my beer to stall time, but what he says is clearly true.  From that moment on, no amount of Pilsner can prevent the feeling of judgment being poured upon me.  From that moment on to him, I am no musician, there is little echt about me.  Schtum he keeps, but his irritation, compounded no doubt by the German love for doing things through the proper channels and fine print, is clear.
And, as what happens when time runs out at all auditions, he needs to move on.

“Thank you for coming today.”

II – a complete classical sonata, preferably by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert

I sometimes want to believe that conservatories are places of sabotage, where fierce competition between musicians leads to some rather impetuous offstage behavior.  In reality, though, the saboteurs are generally the unwarmed hands of the pianists, the unwatered throats of the singers, and the unprepared nerves of the chokers.  The music audition, then, becomes the optimal scene of a crime.
This past summer over one hundred musicians, of which only ten could be selected, arrived in Berlin in hopes of securing a future in the world of classical music through the channels of a well-established music school.  This future, contingent upon the assent of big-name professors and the attention of record labels, would all be determined in about fifteen minutes of stage time.  Given the circumstances, one would imagine that musicians would be given full liberties to present ‘themselves’ to the faculty.  Yet, as it is practiced in the great music schools and conservatories of the world today, the audition allows little room for variation.   Audition parameters, and the space of self-invention they delimit, tend to confine talent rather than liberate it.  The audition poses the individual against the canonized conceptions of the proper repertoire and its standards of “interpretation”—whatever meaning that word still has given the context.

The set lists of audition repertoire define the range of music in which every student must demonstrate competency.  Although each music school has its own slightly different take on what is or is not musically significant, there is a general format, a square prix fixe menu: the Bach prelude and fugue or suite, the classical sonata, the large Romantic work, the  work written in the twentieth- or twenty-first-century, and the virtuosic étude.

Each school has managed to make this simple, albeit restrictive, arrangement into a veritable menagerie of repertoire requirements, limiting the potential repertoire list even further as auditioners are forced to resort to Venn diagrams to find where all the schools can agree.  For example, the “classical sonata” requirement at five of the nation’s most important graduate music schools reads as follows:
Yale: “a sonata or variations by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, or Schubert (for the recording, prepare at least two contrasting movements; for the live audition, prepare an entire work)”
Manhattan School of Music: “complete sonata by Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, or Beethoven”
Northwestern: “a complete classical sonata, preferably by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert”
New England Conservatory: “a complete Classical sonata.”
Juilliard: One of the following:
a. An entire sonata by Beethoven (excluding Opp. 14, 49, and 79), or
b. Haydn Sonata in E-flat Major, Hob. XVI: 52, or
c. Mozart Sonata in D major, K. 576, or
d. One of the following Schubert sonatas: G major, Op. 78; A minor, Op. 143; A minor, Op. 42; D     major, Op. 53, or one of the three posthumous sonatas, or the Wanderer Fantasie.

Significant composers of great classical era music like Clementi (we’re talking his sonatas here) and Hummel have been pushed out by the classical quadropoly: Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven.   The judges are trying to control quality by canonizing a set of works they feel equipped to adjudicate, all the while severely marginalizing other worthy works.  “Classical” then becomes a narrowly represented style instead of a process of broad exploration.  The intent it seems is to prevent those who thump out the first few bars of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” in the common room of a dormitory from ever getting a few feet from a sustaining pedal; perhaps this much they have accomplished.

But the required list of repertoire is simultaneously too restrictive and too inconsistent.  The judges look for elements like technical ability, musicality and competency, but have dissociated these skills in a rigid format from creativity—the prime locus of true musical genius.  Interestingly, the French and the Germans refer to this whole practical study as “interprétation” and “Interpretation” respectively, whereas the North American system refers to it as “performance.”  The French and German models stress intellectual thought and recognize almost explicitly the subjectivity of the art.  Each musician becomes a type of “re-inventor” and this type of informed re-invention is the acme of music making.

I decided to play Copland’s “Piano Variations” for a competition last year.  My interpretation was overlaid with “bell-like” tones in the third variation and “coloristic” flourishes, the professor told me.  He explained:
-I really like it, but this judge has grown up with this work and has admitted to me that he is predisposed to being prejudiced against any interpretation that doesn’t line up with his.  Best avoid alienating him.
I ended up getting second place in the competition, alienating all the way through.  When I received my judging sheets back, one judge told me that my sound judgment intelligently shaped the trajectory of the piece.  Another told me to go back to the drawing board and re-examine the structure altogether.

III – a romantic work
It is quite a romantic notion to use the arts as a mode of re-enchantment of the world, as a force of heroism that reinvigorates one’s faith in mankind.   Perhaps there are some ways to be creative and circumvent these narrowly-defined repertoire lists and re-invigorate one’s faith in music as an art rather than sermonized pedagogy.

Some tinkering is possible in Juilliard’s “Romantic” requirement:

“A substantial composition by Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, Liszt, or Mendelssohn.  (Etudes, nocturnes, short dances, waltzes, or comparable pieces are not acceptable).”

Who is to say then, that Schumann does not mean Clara Schumann, whose artistic and performative talents were the subject of envy from her husband Robert, the Schumann to whom the designation clearly points?  What about Felix Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny Hensel’s Largo con espressione No. 9, WV 322, a large work wrought with more disquiet than most, if not all, of her brother’s piano works?  If we must resort to wordplay and onomastical divertissement to upset the system and bring back some fresh imagination to our musical regimens, it is only to reinvigorate a history of classical performance that seems to believe there is a dearth of good, “acceptable” standards.

(To be fair, there are many schools that specify, simply enough, just a complete romantic work, or better yet, a complete work of the 19th-century.  Those playing Clara Schumann and Fanny Hensel would probably be considered with a fair amount of skepticism but also grinning appreciation.)

IV – a work from the impressionist or contemporary period
The spirit of the audition destroys the visceral character of music, and seeks to break down aesthetic balances of structure and form in favor of scheduling efficiency.  We would be wrong to believe that the last refuge of the classical sonata is within the conservatory.  No, even musicians must often become deejays, cutting and pasting a work, disjointing and wrecking its inherent symbiotic relationships to meet time requirements.  Despite the requirement for a complete contemporary work, a student who was making her rounds of auditions last year entered conservatories prepared to play only select movements of Boulez’s Douze Notations, a brittle, glassy, atonal, and at times extreme work from 1945, knowing full well conservatives would be more than willing to fragment this divisive piece.  In more extreme cases, I have been forced to cut and paste phrases from single movements together to make sure I did not go over the audition time, the musical equivalent of actors making décollage of verses iambic pentameter.  (In fact, artists recording back in the days of 45 and 78 rpm discs had to do something similar, accommodating “creatively” to fit 4-minute chunks of larger works onto a single side of the record.)

Auditions have also led me to believe that the moved audience member at live concerts is a complete faker fully able to contain his emotions.  There is some vast, barren landscape on the psychological map separating a sweating candidate having just experienced musical catharsis and the sobering banalities of the adjudicating panel thereafter.

I am reminded of Gene Weingarten’s feature in the Washington Post about renowned violinist Joshua Bell’s 45-minute stint as a street performer, when he could not so much as get spare change performing in disguise on a $3.5m Stradivarius in a Washington Metro station (L’Enfant Plaza, to be exact) during the morning commute in January 2008.  The experiment presupposed Joshua Bell’s “greatness” and tested people’s reactions to this greatness packaged in a context of shoeshiners, doughnut vendors, and other fixtures of urban junctures.

In auditions, the process is reversed: the greatness is attributed to the listeners, and it is the musician who must measure up.  In either case, music is dropped into a particularly unfavorable environment-the victim, like so much great art, of “viewing conditions.”  With professors listening eight hours a day to “Pathétiques,” “Appassionatas,” “Springs,” “Pastorales,” “Hiccups,” “Wild Hunts”, “Forest Murmurs,” “Happy Islands,” and, if they could be so lucky, “Dried-up Embryos” (that would, of course, be Satie’s pianistic ménage à trois invertébrés) listening less for intuitive impact but rather for the ability and potential to make such an impact, then shouldn’t we all concede that music simply cannot be judged in such sub-optimal conditions?  Even if the state of modern music is that Cageian doctrine that music is where you find it, I sincerely doubt anyone ever thought Sibelius to stoic silence qualified as such.

V- an étude of virtuosity
Entering the practice rooms for the ten-minute warmup at auditions one spring, I entered an Ivesian world of cacophony, with snatches of the coda from a Chopin ballade and mammoth chords heaved out of a Rachmaninoff prelude, complete with sweaty-palmed conservatory hopefuls pacing, humming, playing passages into the pulsating air.  We all know what we are up against—every single performance of the piece ever heard by the adjudicators, every pre-conceived notion of how a phrase could and should be shaped, every factoid written on how the composer might have intended such a work to be performed.  Why do we put ourselves up upon the rack as so many before us have?

In a sense, the answer seems contradictory to what I’ve been writing about this entire time.  Perhaps if we cannot escape the canon, we must become a part of it.  It’s a tough, but not impossible task to woo the listening public over with your brand of interpretation.  Some performers have “legitimized” their interpretation to such an extent so as to have left an indelible mark upon the work itself for future generations.  Gould’s Goldberg Variations, Uchida’s Mozart sonatas, and Bernstein’s Appalachian Spring immediately come to mind.  Music, like most other disciplines, is an art of persuasion, and it is a particular challenge in this case because all the persuasive arguments in the form of “definitive recordings” have come before.  Finding the new—this is the art.

So as I head into auditions, I won’t let my audition be my musical persona, but my persona will fully be present in the audition.  The canon has potentially dire consequences for someone like me, who simply cannot accept a musical persona drawn up from audition repertoire lists.  As a result, I’ll have to partially divorce my audition repertoire from my other active performance repertoire.

Take, for instance, a performance of a Messiaen piano work planned for February as part of a belated centennial celebration that took over the 2008 classical music scene.  In addition to a Messiaen work of my choice, I was told to perform a work by a composer influential on or influenced by Messiaen.  After scouring the literature for a compelling connection, I stumbled upon Albéniz’s Iberia suite, a collection of 12 impressions of Spain, infamous for its finger-contorting difficulties.  The sheer profusion of notes, dynamics, and marks of articulation make the score of the ninth piece ‘Lavapiés’ look like Jackson Pollock’s ‘Lavender Mist’.  Albéniz has little room in my audition program though, and it would frankly be a more economical choice to play a Bach prelude and fugue and push for the association with Messiaen so I can recycle it for my auditions.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Bach, but in a more intimate setting.  Am I stupid to be pursuing far more hours than I need in the practice rooms learning the Albéniz for a single performance than to revive a multi-purpose, easily transferable Bach work?  Maybe, but perhaps this is where the audition comes back with a wagging finger.  It’s like a mother telling a child to eat his vegetables, that he can’t actually live on cookies and ice cream alone.  This is true, at least when you are under your parents’ roof.  When you grow up and free yourself from the confines of other people’s rules, that’s when you can eat to your heart’s content.

Download “DeLillo: The Art of Representation” as a PDF.

The detail appears in an early short of Beckett’s, “Dante and the Lobster,” the first in his collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934). The protagonist is a university student named Belacqua. He is obsessed by Dante, and named, rather curiously, after a character that appears in the Purgatory section of The Divine Comedy – a young Florentine lute maker who is condemned to sit crouched under a rock for idleness. After taking an Italian lesson, Belacqua picks up a lobster for dinner with his aunt. He assumes that the lobster he carries back with him is dead. When he realizes that it’s not, he’s horrified, but his aunt assures him that “lobsters are always boiled alive.”

Belacqua imagines the lobster’s journey: “In the depths of the sea it had crept into the cruel pot. For hours, in the midst of its enemies, it had breathed secretly. It had survived the Frenchwoman’s cat and his witless clutch. Now it was going alive into scalding water. It had to. Take into the air my quiet breath.”

Nicely stated, but the sentiment is a bit odd. It appears more so in light of the fact that earlier in the story Belacqua read with disinterest an article about a man who was going to be executed, or that in the collection Belacqua constantly disparages the women around him and mocks their love for him. The crustacean catches him off guard: why? Perhaps it’s the immediacy, or the fact that it’s unexpected, but quite transparently, it becomes an occasion for Belacqua’s own musing on the pain of dying and the inevitability of death. After all, it’s Belacqua, not the lobster, who has an affinity for Keats’ “quiet breath.”

To console himself, Belacqua thinks: “it’s a quick death, God help us all.”

The narrator’s reply: “It is not.”

The humor entwined with pessimism points straight to Beckett, but the author of More Pricks than Kicks is not the same author that would later write the trilogy of Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953) – novels which set Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille to scratching their heads, and sent Harold Pinter into paroxysms of praise. Nor is it the author that would captivate Western theater audiences with his two-act play, Waiting for Godot (1952), and it’s most especially not the same author that would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 for writing that, in the words of the Swedish Academy, “in the destitution of man acquires its elevation.”

No, the author of More Pricks than Kicks was an unknown and largely unemployed 28-year-old who had earlier cast aside a promising academic career at Trinity College in Dublin, and who had little reason to believe that anything he wrote would be either widely or narrowly read. It’s the work of a young man with a stubborn determination to create, but without a very clear idea why, how, or for whom.

It’s a shame that a story like “Dante and the Lobster” is almost always read in the shadow of Beckett’s later work because, taken separately, there’s something extremely refreshing about it. The simple short illuminates aspects of Beckett that can get lost in the fray as a reader struggles with the difficulty of his mature work. Namely, there is real yearning in Belacqua’s sentimentality. The strong narrative voice that comes in to strangle it leaves the reader rather unseated, even if he’s chuckling in his discomfort. The narrator seems to be making a bold and merciless push for the truth, refusing to accept any consolation. Still – why so uncompromising? The curt response hints that there’s something the narrator’s hiding: vulnerability. It’s a human weakness that he’s shunted entirely to the character, but Belacqua’s yearning is also the narrator’s. The fiction reveals something about the morose storyteller that he can’t quite admit to himself, and by doing so it eludes the narrator’s grasp. It’s a story that the older Beckett simply could not have written.

Most of those who are familiar with Beckett know him through his play Waiting for Godot, and further reading or theater-going probably took them to plays like Endgame (1957) and Krapp’s Last Tape (1959). He’s an author who stands very close to the heart of the 20th century Western canon, but most of his work, and especially his prose, tends to go unread. The work has its own inherent difficulty and obscurity, but it doesn’t help that it now exists amidst a glut of postmodern criticism – both good and bad, or that a reader often encounters the work mediated through the unrestrained praise of the cult. Consider Pinter’s “I’ll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty.” The accuracy of the statement is not what’s in question, but the fact that it’s delivered from a vantage point that it would take the uninitiated reader quite some time to reach. The average reader approaching Beckett can hardly be blamed if his or her expectations have been set artificially high or if in the first fifty or sixty pages of reading he or she sees little to no sign of this acquiring-of-elevation-in-the-destitution-of-man.

Beckett’s work is full of paradox, and a keen reader will quickly realize that his popularity is not without contradictions. It’s paradoxical that his work is so focused on insignificance, and yet is surrounded by those who are determined to proclaim its importance. Beckett was always puzzled by his success, and believed it was based on a misunderstanding. In many ways, his work resists canonization and it resists popularity. A writer who presents the human condition as grounded fundamentally in pain, suffering and uncertainty cannot be heralded with trumpets. Praise can quickly reach such a pitch that it seems the only point is to drown out and ignore the voice of the praised work. Where the gushing acclaim about Beckett begins, the man and his work end.

Of course, not everyone is lining up to prostrate themselves at the Beckett shrine. Beckett is an author capable of inducing genuine hostility in his readers, and those who develop an aversion to his work often read him just as closely and thoughtfully as those who profess enormous admiration. The most pronounced complaint brought against him is that he’s nothing but a dark and depressed man determined to hoist his misanthropic vision onto the world at large. The impression creeps in at the end of “Dante and the Lobster” through the voice of the narrator. It’s a voice that becomes much more developed, albeit refined, in his later work.

The fact that Beckett read Schopenhauer would seem to support the complaint. Schopenhauer was a philosopher writing in the 19th century who believed that the driving force in the world is the will. In his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1819), he suggests that we are all products of one vast will, and that our separateness is only an illusion. The rather enormous catch is that Schopenhauer’s will is wicked and is the source of endless suffering. Though our lives are destined to be full of pain and though death will win in the end, he suggests that most of us will still pursue our futile ends “as we blow out a soap-bubble as long and as large as possible, although we know perfectly well that it will burst.”

The only way out of the situation is to break down one’s will in any way possible, to practice poverty, chastity, fasting and self-torture. The view is not very different from that of ascetic monks, but whereas they are seeking some sort of communion with God, in Schopenhauer the end is wholly negative. He says, “We freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in which the will has turned and denied itself, this our world, which is so real – with all its suns and milky ways – is nothing.” It’s worth noting that Schopenhauer himself never saw a need to put his world-view into practice, and lived a rather comfortable life. In his philosophy, a compelling reason not to commit suicide also falls by the wayside.

Schopenhauer’s ideas surface in Beckett in myriad ways. In his trilogy, the move from traditional narration to the troubled voice of The Unnamable calls into question just how individual the narrator is. The stripping down of form is analogous to Schopenhauer’s call to break down one’s will. In Beckett’s first novel, Murphy (1938), the title character attempts to induce a sort of nirvana-like state by tying himself into his rocking chair. Throughout Beckett’s texts, there is also frequent reference to birth as little more than a death-sentence. Thus Hamm yells “Accursed progenitor” at his father, Nagg, in Endgame and Molloy, in a fit of frustration, refers to his mother as a “uniparous whore.” What is most illuminating in a comparison of Beckett and Schopenhauer, however, is where their ideas diverge.

The most obvious distinction between Beckett and Schopenhauer is that the latter was a philosopher and the former was not. Though Beckett was a contemporary of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, he never aligned himself with the existentialist camp or wrote philosophy of any kind. The closest he came was in his early essay on Proust, titled simply Proust (1931). Ostensibly, its subject is the author’s A Remembrance of Things Past (1927), but the influence of Schopenhauer runs pretty much all through the essay, noticeably when Beckett suggests that original sin is “the sin of having been born.” The essay was one of the first to pick out the strain of Schopenhauer running through Proust, but Beckett is also using Proust as a template to work out his own artistic concerns. Like “Dante and the Lobster,” it’s the work of a young man attempting to veil his weaknesses and his doubts, a young man who feels compelled to make a positive assertion.

What the younger Beckett tried to hide, the older Beckett embraced. It’s the admission of his own vulnerability that would later make a story like “Dante and the Lobster” impossible. The character who is a patsy for the narrator’s weakness would get absorbed to an ever greater extent by the narrator himself. The move is cathartic in some ways, but if the reader thinks that increased self-awareness will bring the narrator peace, he’s gravely mistaken. In Beckett’s prose, nothing will ever be quite so simple as “Dante and the Lobster” again.

Bertrand Russell, commenting on Schopenhauer, wisely notes that “belief in either pessimism or optimism is a matter of temperament, not of reason.” One suspects that Beckett’s temperament was close to that of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but any world view to be extrapolated from his works is, if anything, a constant struggle against pessimism. What he staked himself on as a writer was complete uncertainty. He was known to enjoy quoting St. Augustine’s shapely lines, “Do not despair, one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume, one of the thieves was damned.” Perhaps the most difficult and shocking thing about reading Beckett is realizing just how much we tend to presume.

Beckett’s insistence upon uncertainty is apparent in the most popular question about his work: what does Godot symbolize? The usual hypothesis is that Godot is God, and that the play is about how God has abandoned man. In Anthony Cronin’s biography, The Last Modernist (1997), he catalogues a few other possibilities. One is that the name comes from a French racing cyclist in the fifties known as ‘Godeau.’ Another is that it comes from the French slang for boot, ‘godillot.’ Another is that it came from an encounter Beckett had with a prostitute on the corner of rue Godot le Mauroy in Paris. When he turned her down, she asked him sarcastically if was Waiting for Godot. Others have noted that it echoes Nietzsche’s German lines, “Gott ist tod” (God is dead). The fact that in French the emphasis is on the second syllable rather than the first has even played a factor in the argument. The reason that Godot doesn’t symbolize God is that it could just as easily symbolize the absence of God. It’s the state of not knowing, the “waiting,” that is the heart of the play.

Waiting for Godot is, in its way, a brilliant and simple demonstration of man’s state of uncertainty. In Beckett’s prose, “not knowing” was to take on a much different and more complicated character. Beckett’s reputation as a novelist rests chiefly on the basis of his trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. All three were composed in the space of only about four years, from 1946 to 1950 – far and away Beckett’s greatest burst of productivity. It was while working on The Unnamable that he wrote Waiting for Godot as a break from the monotonous task of writing and rewriting the novels. Each text was written first in French, the author’s second language. A few years later when Beckett saw what a difficult time the translator of Molloy was having re-creating the text in English, he took up the task of translating himself – something he would do for almost all his later work. He had to ensure that the text came into English very much alive rather than as a stale direct translation from the French.

The trilogy proceeds by disintegration. Molloy still has something of a plot to it. First, there is Molloy’s failed search for his mother, and then Jacques Moran’s failed search for Molloy. Malone Dies is the monologue of Malone as he sits alone in bed waiting for death. He decides to make up stories to pass the time, and though they quickly develop into beautiful and captivating narratives, he can’t help but interrupt himself with retorts like “what tedium” or “this is awful.” He states his dilemma quite clearly, saying:

If this continues it is myself I shall lose and the thousand ways that lead there. And I shall resemble the wretches famed in fable, crushed beneath the weight of their wish come true. And I even feel a strange desire come over me, the desire to know what I am doing, and why. So I near the goal I set myself in my young days and which prevented me from living. And on the threshold of being no more I succeed in being another. Very pretty.

Malone, like Beckett, is searching for answers to the most fundamental questions, the what and the why. His narrative of the young Saposcat suggests a younger version of himself in “a thousand ways,” but it is a disgust with the artificial that leads him to repeatedly abandon it. It would make no difference if he called the young boy “Malone” because he realizes that memory is far too imperfect to produce the narratives that are demanded of it, and so even the story of his past would be subject to craft. What he’s concerned with is his present situation, and there’s a push to find something that is pure and sacred, something that will satisfy his wish to “know.”

The result is a constant stripping down of all that strikes the narrator as false. In the close of Malone Dies, the narrator’s desire to dismantle his fictions is projected into one of his characters as a terrifying murderous impulse. The momentum at the end of the novel carries the reader into the world of The Unnamable. The text begins, “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.” It’s a – perhaps the – novel of doubt, one that starts with Descartes skeptical stripping down of everything, but doesn’t have such an easy time building up something from nothing. The book is determined to kick down every fictional prop, to rid itself of every logical means it has of sustaining itself, and yet to persist.

Referring to the narrator of the text is questionable because he doesn’t always go so far as to ascribe himself a body. He admits that he was the one who created the characters of Molloy and Malone, and though he does his best to keep himself from telling “fairy tales,” there are still a few fictions in the text. There’s the story of Mahood, who returns home one day on crutches of uneven length so that he’s left revolving about his house while his family moves from window to window to watch his approach. By the time he reaches the home, they’re all dead. Later, Mahood manifests himself as a torso kept outside a restaurant in a jar, set out as an advertisement. Most of the novel, however, is best conceived simply as a voice coming out of the dark.

To say the least, it’s a frightening and unsettling read. At times, the main thing pulling the reader through the text is simply the beauty of the prose; there’s not a line in the book that doesn’t seem to be invested with urgency and longing. Here’s a sample:

But it’s not I, it’s not I, where am I, what am I doing, all this time, as if that mattered, but there it is, that takes the heart out of you, your heart isn’t in it any more, your heart that was, among the brambles, cradled by the shadows, you try the sea, you try the town, you look for yourself in the mountains and the plains, it’s only natural, you want yourself, you want yourself in your own little corner, it’s not love, not curiosity, it’s because you’re tired, you want to stop, travel no more, seek no more, lie no more, speak no more, close your eyes…

The lines come from a paragraph that’s about a hundred pages long. Beauty not-withstanding, most readers will eventually have to ask themselves: what’s the point?

The voice of the text is paralyzed by his doubt and his vulnerability. In Waiting for Godot, Vladimir and Estragon seem somehow stoic, if not oblivious, with regard to their current situation. The tension is in the form of the play rather than in the characters themselves. In the novels, the voice is one of a narrator who is hyper-conscious of his situation and his suffering. Here, the tension is not only in the form, but behind the form. It comes from the narrator as the reader might imagine him.

The Unnamable’s search for something sacred, for the what and the why, seems in a sense to have become a search for self, a way to verify his own existence. Earlier I mentioned Descartes. One shouldn’t over-estimate his presence in the text, which struggles with quite a few of the major problems in Western philosophy. Still, Descartes is useful because everyone knows his proof of his own existence: “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am). Needless to say, it would not be enough to satisfy The Unnamable. What the philosopher has observed is that there’s thinking going on. What, one might ask, is there to assure Descartes that he is the one doing the thinking? On this point, The Unnamable says, “I don’t say anything, I don’t know anything, these voices are not mine, nor these thoughts, but the voices and thoughts of the devils who beset me.” Is it any less possible that someone else could be injecting the thoughts into Descartes’ head, that it only seems as if the thoughts are his own?

For that matter, what makes Descartes so confident that the pronoun “I” justifies his identity? Recall some of the first words of the text: “I, say I. Unbelieving.” In a fascinating essay called “Subjectivity in Language” (1971), linguist Emile Benveniste points out that the pronoun “I” is a product of discourse, discourse being spoken and not written language. As he says, “It is in the instance of discourse in which I designates the speaker that the speaker proclaims himself as the ‘subject.’ And so it is literally true that the basis of subjectivity is in the exercise of language.” The pronoun “I” is what is called a deictic pronoun. It is derived from discourse and is used to bring attention to the existence of a particular thing in space in relation to the person speaking. It’s the same type of word as “here” or “there” except that it’s meant to refer to the body of the speaking individual. The original function of the pronoun, the link to the body, became obscured when it was taken up in the written text. After all, one can be reading the words of an author long since dead – in that case what does the pronoun refer to? With time, “I” came to stand in for one’s identity, for the core of the onion, for the way that each of us imagines the true self that controls his mind. What The Unnamable seems to find is that the referent of the pronoun, the “true self,” is ever elusive and indeterminable.

It would be a lie to say that the reader who finds such philosophical speculation not far removed from navel-gazing would be as excited by The Unnamable as one who finds it enthralling. Yet the text reveals an incredible falsity about philosophy. David Hume once said that “the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” The implication seems to be that people are motivated by their religion in a way that they are not by philosophy, that they go to religion with a zealous desire to find a meaning to life whereas they go to philosophy with a cold and detached intellectual attitude. The Unnamable is not speculating. He attacks such philosophical problems with religious fervor. The form of the text is such that even if one were to read it in a foreign language that they did not speak, they would still be able to sense the spiritual craving running from line to line.

The Unnamable was published in 1953, shortly after the close of the Second World War. Beckett’s role in events was by no means unique. He was living in Paris at the start of the war, and retreated to a small village in the south of France called Roussillon. He played a minor role in the French Resistance for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre, though he dismissed his actions as “boy scout stuff.” A number of his close friends ended up in the German concentration camps, and some of them died there. As the war drew to a close, Beckett was one of millions trying to fathom what had happened. They were faced with suffering that was simply too large to fit into the reasoned dialectic of History. Optimism suddenly came to seem like blasphemy and an affront to the war’s victims. There were no words for consolation.

It is difficult to imagine a time when pessimism and despair would be a greater temptation. Beckett’s misanthropic temperament had been violently cast onto the world without his having written a word. There were millions who could not reconcile their old religious and philosophical ideas with what had happened. In more fortunate times, uncertainty had seemed simply a negative alternative to optimism. It now became the guardian of hope. Beckett never wrote about the war (except for one very brief essay), and he never tried to explain the suffering that would become omnipresent in his work. Instead, he imagined worlds peopled by those who are given no reason to hope and yet hope, worlds peopled by those given no reason to persevere and yet persevere. It’s a theme which doesn’t always make for a cheerful night at the theater, but one that all of us have felt in our darkest, and perhaps our most truthful, moments. The Unnamable’s final lines: “I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

If all of this seems dreadfully heavy, it helps that Beckett had a razor-sharp sense of humor. It seems only fitting that one dedicated to uncertainty couldn’t take himself seriously all the time. For all the exegesis surrounding Beckett’s work, it’s something which usually goes completely unmentioned. It seems either that scholars have a poor sense of humor or in their wisdom they’ve realized that nothing kills a joke like trying to explain why it’s funny. Still, an attempt could be worthwhile because Beckett’s comedy is one of the most fascinating aspects of his work.

At times, it is straight-forward physical comedy in the vein of Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In Waiting for Godot, there is Vladimir and Estragon excitedly swapping hats, and Estragon’s trousers falling to the ground without his realizing it. In Krapp’s Last Tape, there is Krapp with a banana lodged in his mouth staring blankly into space, or reveling in the sensation of pronouncing the word ‘Spool.’ Yet the humor that is most difficult to understand is that which seems to be based on suffering itself. As Nell says from her trash bin in Endgame, “Nothing is funnier than unhappiness… Yes, yes, it’s the most comical thing in the world.”

Beckett’s humor often seems to contain the very means to undermine it. It should have the trajectory of a bottle rocket, going up with the laugh and coming back down with the realization of the suffering on which it is based, but it just doesn’t. The humor seems to come from a gradual building up of tension that is calling for release. Lives pervaded by so much pain must eventually find a counter-balance in some sort of pleasure. With unhappiness, there’s a necessity behind the laughter that isn’t there in other types of humor. Yet the necessity would seem to suggest that these are desperate laughs, which most of Beckett’s are not. One can’t be too general about the humor because each laugh is unique, but they are all similar in that they are not a distraction from the current situation. They are a reminder of it.

As an example, I’ll take Nagg’s joke in Endgame. Nagg is Nell’s husband, confined to a trash bin beside her, just far enough away that they are not able to kiss. They seem to have been put there by their unappreciative son Hamm, the central character in the play. Nagg tells the story of an Englishman who has a tailor make him a pair of trousers for the New Year. After his first visit, he comes back four days later to find that the tailor made a “mess of the seat.” He then comes back a week later to find that he’s made “a hash of the crutch.” The man is happy for the tailor to fix them because he knows that “a snug crutch is always a teaser.” He returns ten days later to find that the tailor’s made a “balls of the fly.” Again, he concedes that “a smart fly is a stiff proposition.” The tailor proceeds to “ballockses the buttonholes,” and finally the man’s patience breaks. He says, “God damn you to hell, Sir, no, it’s indecent, there are limits! In six days, do you hear me, six days, God made the world. Yes Sir, no less Sir, the WORLD! And you are not bloody well capable of making a pair of trousers in three months!” The tailor calmly replies, “But my dear Sir, my dear Sir, look – at the world – and look – at my TROUSERS!”

In many ways, it’s a traditional joke. With each return of the Englishman, the audience’s expectation grows, especially once it has recognized the pattern. In the tailor’s punch line, there is a release of tension, by this time the audience is expecting something funny. Yet looking at the stage one sees that the joke is told by a miserable old man stuck in a garbage can, abused by his son, unable to kiss his wife. When one examines the punch line of the joke, the underlying message seems to be that the world is miserable. There is something incongruous about the laughter in a situation that, by all accounts, calls for despair. Why do we laugh? Aren’t we debasing the character by doing so? What if someone really were suffering like this?

These questions might seem to channel Beckett into the theater of the absurd, and the comparison would be fitting despite the fact that the absurdist label was one that Beckett particularly despised. Beckett saw ‘absurdism’ as just another value judgment about man’s existential condition, one based on groundless speculation. Labeling the humor as ‘absurdist’ can also lead to a dismissive analysis of the “but it’s funny” variety. It may be trite, but it’s still often forgotten just how many true things are said in jest.

Answers to the questions posed by Beckett’s humor can lead in two directions. One is how humor affects the audience’s ability to empathize with the character. The other is what laughter does for the suffering individual.

It’s worth considering that most people attending a Beckett play do not go to it in a mood of despair. When they sit in the audience and observe characters in distress, their mood must be brought down to that person’s level. If one doesn’t truly feel the way that the character does than there can be a hint of condescension in their pity. If the audience member does feel that the play has lowered their mood, then there can be a touch of resentment for the despairing characters that brought them down.

What Beckett’s humor does is give the audience a different point of entry to the character’s emotions – a point that is likely much closer to their own as they sit in the theater. When they laugh, they find themselves empathically involved in the character’s situation without their even having made an effort. With a little reflection, they would realize that the joy of the laugh is entwined with the character’s despair. They’ve become implicated in the character’s situation without their even having been aware of it. As for the characters themselves, if they were to reflect on their laughter, they are not inclined to trace its links to the despair with which they are already all too familiar. Instead, they observe the incongruity and they revel in it. They observe themselves not giving into despair when they have every logical reason to do so, and it is re-assuring. The laugh perpetuates itself. The bottle rocket does not come down.

It’s the raw elements of Beckett – the uncertainty, the suffering, and the humor – that can occasionally get lost as people grapple with understanding his work. Due to his reputation, many approaching Beckett feel pressure to like what is before them and to appreciate it. Such pressure is ill-founded. Like any ‘great’ work of art, Beckett only has so much to offer at a glance. Leonardo da Vinci’s “A work of art is never finished, only abandoned” is particularly fitting for the serious Beckett reader. If one initially feels repelled when they encounter Beckett, the feeling is completely natural. His work is not didactic, but the cult around it can make it seem that way. The work itself doesn’t insist upon its own importance, but if one really wants to become involved in it than it presents a profound challenge. As Salman Rushdie points out in an essay on Beckett, the terms are clear: “Surrender.”

When people are trying to make sense of Beckett’s art, they often turn to the text the “Three Dialogues” (1947). It’s a fictionalized dialectic on the subject of modern painting. Beckett put it together based on conversations with friend and fellow art enthusiast Georges Duthuit, casting himself as Plato and Duthuit as Glaucon. Like in Proust, painting is only the ostensible subject – Beckett is really trying to work out his own ideas about his writing. Beckett speaks of a “new art” that will break with that of the old, which is content to survey the world with “the eyes of building contractors” and “never stirred from the field of the possible.” When Duthuit asks him what it will be based on, he puts forward the often-quoted manifesto-like lines, “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” The lines contain the same merciless push for truth as the final words of the narrator in “Dante and the Lobster,” all the confidence and gusto but none of the vulnerability.

Though never quoted, the dialogue continues. Duthuit retorts, “But that is a violently extreme and personal point of view.”

And Beckett’s reply: “—”

Download “About Beckett” as a PDF.

“What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? / It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?” (ll. 1-2).

A consistent tone of ambiguity concerning an unidentified specter haunts the rest of the poem. To establish tension with the audience, the speaker alludes to a deep personal familiarity with the unfamiliar and unstated object, fleshing out an implied author with secrets beyond the text. The gift is known not by its content, but by the speaker’s speculations informed by her personal experience. The speaker thus constructs a self outside of both the poem and of the interpretive vision of the reader by hinting at some essential fact about her relationship with the object, while simultaneously denying the reader access.
The subject of “A Birthday Present” is not a literal gift, for the object becomes a mere object of speculation for the speaker. The gift serves as a prop for the speaker’s thoughts, which form the main subject of the poem. The problematic issue with this poem, however, is that the speaker’s personality proves to be just as elusive as the veiled gift. While the speaker is overtly present, with “I” or “me” found in most of the stanzas, the essential identity is nevertheless hidden from view. Consider the lines, “If you only knew how the veils were killing my days” (l. 37), where the speaker directly tells the reader that there is some unknown activity happening beneath the surface of the words. The reader was not supposed to know that there was anything being veiled until the speaker complained about their effect in lines 16 and 37. The speaker also refers to a self beyond the text through less direct means, with enigmatic lines like, “Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!” (ll. 9-10). The reader’s need for coherency in forming her interpretation of the text compels her to posit some sort of context that would make such lines meaningful. The reader must form an interpretation of the knowledge that some sort of annunciation is expected in a very particular form, and that the unknown form of the annunciation is presented to the speaker defies her expectations in a darkly humorous manner. The indeterminacy, clumsiness, and vagueness of this paraphrased reading of the text shows how many necessary and vital details exist outside the poem, and, most importantly, beyond the possible knowledge of the reader. Thus, although the subject of the poem seems to be the speaker, its cryptic language renders the speaker absent in a form that can be understood by the reader.
The clandestine activity outside the poem does not merely add contextual weight for fleshing out the poem, but also forms the critical center of the text. Taken at face value with no inferences, the poem would lose most of its vital meaning; the richness and complexity of the speaker’s hidden personality becomes only more intriguing when it is left to speculation. More specifically, the implied author is not just a construct of the words within the poem, but of the words that the reader is told are not in the poem. The reader knows that the speaker wishes for death, but not any reason why (ll 39-42). Even more crucially, the reader does not even know who has the death wish, or any other contextual information besides hints at domesticity (“When I am quiet at my cooking (l. 4)”), relative youth (“I should be sixty” l. 64), familiarity with the “you” of the poem, and prior desires for death (l. 15).
The absence of important aspects of the speaker’s self is created by the narrative voice itself, which posits a persona that not only links these scanty details, but supersedes them entirely. Some theorists argue that much speech can be classified as performative, meaning that the language serves to assert the existence of its own source. The voice could almost be seen as anti-performative, as the statements of the speaker can be reduced to a quite loud and paradoxical “I am not here”. In this case, however, the reader must decide where else the speaker, as the critical center of the text, may be found. The reader’s search for her comes to be one and the same with the interpretive process itself. Since attempting to construct this enigmatic speaker out of so few textual details is nearly impossible, the reader must also take into account the tone of the work. Although in some cases tone may be seen as a force that distorts language, tone in this case provides crucial information beyond the explicit words. Tone can be thought of as the most accessible location of the voice of this text. In “A Birthday Present”, the voice comes to play a practical role not so much with what is said, but how it is communicated. The literal details that “A Birthday Present” provides the reader about the desire for death are reinforced by the suicidal and destructive tone. This makes it quite clear the speaker is sincerely opposed to herself. In this sense, she is quite overt and almost overbearing, with the frank talk of personal secrets. She is just as casual when describing her cooking in the kitchen as when mentioning off-handedly her desires for death. When first confronted with the terrifying gift, her reaction is not to engage the subject directly, but to laugh at its arrival.
The emotional content of the words do not distort the subject, but rather become the object of the art itself. The critics Wimsatt and Beardsley claim that the emotional content of the work can be its own artistic object (“The Affective Fallacy” pp. 1401-1402). The tone helps to create a portrait of the speaker’s personality; thus, the voice of the text itself is its own subject. At first, this might seem contradictory to the supposed absence of the subject of the text, even more so than the aforementioned presence of so many “I”s, since the voice permeates the entire text. However, this voice may be seen as emanating from a self that is largely removed from the poem, so that the voice is still that of an absent presence. The process of interpretation is akin to trying to find the location of a speaker in a separate room, with tone as an analogue to the direction from whence you hear the voice. When trying to construct an absent presence, the issue of this figurative location becomes wrapped up with the question of identity.
As the poem meditates upon the physical object of the gift, more and more is revealed about the mysterious speaker. The reader learns through lines like, “It stands at my window, big as the sky. / It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead centre” (ll. 49-50), that the speaker is haunted by some sort of force that both permeates her inner world and blocks out her ability to see beyond. This gradual revealing of the speaker’s self, which forms the center of the poem, slackens the tension between the words internal to the poem and the external context. As the self-destructive tone of the speaker becomes more and more explicit, such as with revelations of her fantasies about “carbon monoxide” (l. 40), we come to more fully understand the true nature of the poet as suicidal. Once this is firmly and explicitly established, however, there is little weight left to the implied character. The revelation thus undermines the power of the context that the reader constructed. The relation between the hidden nature of the speaker and her presence within the poem is revealed with the verses, “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil / If it were death / I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes” (ll. 57-59). Thus, the reader gaining direct knowledge of the speaker would amount to a form of death, for the implied self is a construct of the veil. The speaker may be seen as more of a silhouette than real presence; with the dropping of the veil, her nature as a shadow inevitably vanishes.
This unveiling of the speaker by the poem also works to undermine the implied self outside the text; the speaker becomes less mysterious and unsettling once her intentions are made explicit. The text’s implied horror and emotional weight congeal into just another aesthetic object of the poem, instead of a powerful projection of the reader’s mind. The charged language of death that dominates the poem, yet which never quite states the speaker’s intent, loses some of its power on line 59 when the present it unwrapped. The course of the poem, then, serves as an instrument of the implied speaker’s death, for it eliminates the presence that is posited outside the verses. This is a violent poem, and the objects within it suffer a brutal and destructive treatment. By slowly letting the protective veil down and stepping into the action of the text, the speaker subjects herself to the violence of the poem in order to let herself be destroyed.
If we treat the speaker as if she is just another character within or, in our case, outside the poem, then this self-destruction seems innocuous when the stability of the text is considered. The poem would safely contain the suicidal speaker as if she were a mere object of the art, a pitiful, yet comfortably remote, imitation of an unstable person. As previously mentioned, the poem would still lose its own power by explicitly stating the implied, yet this only is an issue of the poem’s force, rather than its stability. However, the difficulty with “A Birthday Present” is that the speaker seems to be one and the same as the author of the poem.
Why is this first-person character to be considered more than just another aspect of the text, but also its textual voice? One reason is that the speaker in “A Birthday Present” is the self-allusions to her life outside of the poem. The speaker does not seem to be just another character that gains the privilege of the first person, but instead is something larger than the text itself. The speaker cannot be compared to other first-person characters like Faulkner’s Benjie or Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, because these texts allow the reader to know more than their speakers. In the case of this poem the speaker has mastery over both the diegetic (narrative) and mimetic (representational) worlds.
The total subjectivity gives her control over every nuance of the poem, and she is fully aware of its every aspect. This would destroy the typical relationship between author and character that exists in other first person narratives. Even in works where the first person speaker has some sort of omniscience, such as when she is recounting past events, the reader may still make judgments about the stability and veracity of the voice. For instance, a case in which the first person narrator and the implied author may be separate could be when the narrator obviously lapses, such as when glaring contradictions appear in the text. In “A Birthday Present”, the subjectivity permeates the poem so deeply that it is impossible for the reader to discern an authorial voice beyond that of the speaker. The tone of the speaker also grants all the words a separate layer of meaning, thus fulfilling the function of the implied author as the guide for how to treat language. The reader thus must take the implied author to be one and the same with the speaker.
When reading Plath’s poetry, the question of the biographical context of the text inevitably arises. “A Birthday Present” was among the last batch of poems Plath wrote before her suicide. Thus, it is tempting to read the poem as a work of autobiography, as the themes of the text seem so salient to the historical writer’s life. For this reason, the reader might identify the speaker, the implied author, and the writer all as the same person. The problem with this interpretation, however, is that it might lead the reader to see Plath’s biographical information as the missing center of the poem. When imposing Plath’s life onto the poem to solve the riddle of “A Birthday Present”, the poem ceases to be about the world created by the words, and instead the words become a product of the world that created them.
In one light, this interpretive strategy might seem most useful, for all art can be said to have at least some sort of connection to the context of its production. Context is essential to understanding texts ranging from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the Bible. However, this strategy proves to be problematic in “artistic” texts, as argued in the past theories of the New Critics. The biographical information of the writer becomes an extension of all her work. The writer’s life is seen as part of the text itself, as the knowledge of her life. The reader may interpret a text through information gleaned from journal entries, personal interviews with friends, literary influences (reading habits), diet, etc. These all become the true source of definitive meaning, on equal or even superior grounds to evidence from the written text itself. Such an ill-defined pool of information complicates interpretation to the point where the words of the text no longer matter, and reading a text turns into an exercise in history and archaeology. In addition, the biographical information of Plath simply does not agree with the content of her poems; it would be fallacious to plot a correlation between her verses and the events in her life. The implied author of “A Birthday Present”, then, must be understood as a separate character of the text who is both at once its center and its source of meaning. If we reject the idea that Plath herself is the implied author, it becomes the reader’s task to recreate this construct out of the text alone.
If the reader accepts that the speaker is the same as the implied author, then the text loses much of its own stability for the aforementioned reasons. A text might remain stable despite only having an implied object; the difficulty with having this particular speaker as an invisible center of “A Birthday Present” is that she is inherently self-undermining. The self destruction that the speaker desires is an attack not just on the invisible subject of the poem, but also the voice through which we might hope to discover it. The words of the poem form an assault against the voice that produces them, casting doubt upon their own stability. When the poem may be reduced to a voice that wishes for its own silence, it becomes a problematic issue as to how to interpret the text. One such difficulty, for instance, is the question as to why the voice of the poem perpetuates itself in the medium of poetry if it wishes to cease to exist. Also, if the speaker inherently opposes the subject, the issue arises as to whether the reader should trust the presentation of this artistic center. If we allow the implied speaker to tell us how to manage the language of the poem, each word must be treated as having a self-nullifying double meaning.
According to this interpretation, the implied speaker of the work, which forms its center, is built upon words that inherently oppose it. This interpretation becomes so knotty that perhaps the reader’s construction, not the text, is flawed. While the reader is trying to recreate the implied personality of the author, the speaker is attempting to destroy it with the very same verses. The arc of the reader’s interpretation runs counter to that of the voice of the text. The aforementioned anti-performative interpretation becomes even more problematic, shifting from, “I am not here” to “I am silencing myself with these words”. An equally devastating alternative to this problem of the self-silencing author is the possibility that it is merely a case of insincerity. If the implied author does not really believe in the self-destruction she dwells upon, then the entire text falls apart into a case of either dark irony or incoherent duplicity. In the case of this poem, the text loses the stability of both its presentation and subject matter if it is insincere. This instability is unacceptable, because the entire purpose of the reader positing an implied author was to generate coherency. Our interpretation of the text fails according to its own criteria.
Perhaps by examining the theories of implied authorship, this problem of instability may be resolved. Wayne Booth describes the implied author as a creation who embodies a set of biases, which work towards the content of the text: “The emotions and judgments of the implied author are…the very stuff out of which great fiction is made” (“Authors Should Be Objective”, p. 86). The problem with my interpretation of the poem is that I allowed our understanding of “emotions and judgments” of the speaker qua character in the poem to be imposed upon the speaker qua author. I projected the character within the poem onto the speaker, and then forced this understanding of the speaker back upon the content of the poem. This circularity undermined itself. The speaker’s opposition to herself as a character within the text became the same as the implied author’s opposition to herself within the poem. This interpretation made the text unstable. The problem with my previous interpretation of the poem is that the text does make sense and achieve some level of coherency. The reader will most likely come to a general understanding about the particular character through her own voice, but not use her own words against her ability to speak.
The speaker as a character in the poem, then, is not the same person as the implied author. Obviously it would be problematic for an author who stabbed herself (ln. 60-63) to write this poem after her death. Previously, I argued that because the position of the speaker was outside of the poem and because she had mastery over the mimetic and diegetic worlds, she could be treated as the implied author. As has been shown, this undermines the text. This poem, then, requires the reader to form a different understanding of the author. Returning to the original premises for our interpretative strategy, it is still necessary for the reader to infer some sort of context for the speaker’s life outside of the words of the poem. After all, the goal of interpretation would most likely be to generate coherency out of the text. Perhaps, then, the reader needs to interpret the poem according to an alternate strategy.
Returning to the content of the poem, the speaker of “A Birthday Present” ultimately destroys herself by projecting her death upon the void of an unknown gift. The speaker becomes an author by writing her own story of her death upon the object:

“Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty / by the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it” (ll. 53-54).

The character in the poem tells stories about her own future and fantasizes about her own death. Perhaps this is the model of authorship that Plath means to assert in the poem. The speaker should be allowed to create herself, without the reader projecting an entire personality upon her, and then destroying the meaning of the poem when the projections do not coincide with the text. Despite my rejection of the previous interpretation, the poem is nevertheless about a person who undermines herself who also happens to tell her own story. This does not mean that we should take this one aspect of the poem and then apply it to the whole text. If that were the case, the reader, rather than the speaker would be the author. Previously it was mentioned how the self-destruction of the author ran in contrary motion to reader’s interpretation. The problem may be seen not to arise from the destruction of the poem, but from the reader attempting to become an author of the author. When the creative voices of both the reader and the implied author enter the text, there is bound to be some sort of instability. Thus, the vision of authorship offered by “A Birthday Present”, simply enough, is one in which the author tells her own story; the reader only needs to make inference that fill in the gaps of coherency; it is not necessary to postulate an entire center absent from the poem. The poet tells the reader what she needs to know in order to understand the content of the text, without needing her to become a co-author.
This brings us back to the issue of the multiplicity of voices within a text. The problems with my unstable interpretation of the work reveal a voice even more elusive than that of the implied author: the reader’s voice. The reader’s voice may be the most difficult to detect of all, for it invisibly permeates every interpretation. Just as it is impossible to write without some sort of bias, no one can interpret in a “pure” manner. In texts that require more complex interpretations, the reader’s voice may even play a more dominant role than the implied author. This becomes problematic in the process of reading, as has been shown in my analysis of “A Birthday Present”, when this undetected voice comes to covertly overshadow the voices within the text. The reader’s influence can undermine the process of interpretation; nevertheless, is just as impossible to silence this voice than that of the implied author. The reader must always make at least some decisions as to how to interpret the work, and introduce some personal creativity to compensate for missing, yet vital, information within a text. Likewise, the model of implied authorship itself requires the input of the reader, for it is just another interpretation. The challenge to the reader, then, is to properly separate her own voice from that of the construct of the implied author that she helped to create.
Perhaps the reader must self-consciously posit some sort of model of reader-authorship in order to properly balance the textual voices. In this way, the reader may construct an interpretation that forms, rather than undermines, stability. The reader needs to be aware as to when she turns a text into a prop for projecting a certain voice. The speaker of “A Birthday Present” may be accused of treating her poor, neglected gift in such a manner. By the end of the poem, we still have no idea what the present really is, or if there really was a present outside of her imagination. Still, the poem proves all the richer because of the departure from the ostensible topic at hand.
For a more intimate case example, this essay itself treats “A Birthday Present” as a sort of prop for discussing other topics without actually delving into real analysis. Such methods of interpretation may be useful, but they should not claim to substitute for textual analysis. The United States Constitution, for example, has been a prop for the projection of many individual interests, such as when corporations took advantage of the 14th amendment to protect their interests as ‘persons’. In such cases, a text becomes a tool for a specific purpose, rather than an opportunity for interpretive discovery or reflection. When these two roles of the text become confused, incoherency arises; the reader will be left to account for the inconsistencies that arose from the meaning that she imposed upon the text.
With too little intervention, a text cannot be interpreted coherently; with too much influence, the reader, like the speaker in “A Birthday Present”, will end up talking to herself about herself. Thus, the reader must be just as aware of her own presence within a work as that of the implied author. Otherwise, the reader’s voice will begin to displace that of the implied author while still attributing the skewed version of the text to the author, whether he or she is identified as Shakespeare, the Founding Fathers, God, etc. This is problematic not just because of the misidentification of voice, but because the competing voices will displace one another, leading to incoherency. It is not until these voices have been sorted out that the text will have a stable and coherent enough foundation for truly productive interpretation.

Download “The Absent Author: Sylvia Plath’s ‘A Birthday Present’” as a PDF.

So V.S. Naipaul finally gets the prize.
It’s said he’s willing, through unblinking eyes,
To make his observations, then recall
The bleakest Third World countries, warts and all.
While valuing his writing, I still think
It wouldn’t hurt if, now and then, he’d blink.
—Calvin Trillin, “On V. S. Naipaul’s Nobel Prize”

Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S. Naipaul is a provocative and contentious figure. He is of mixed race, conflicted heritage, and divided sentiment. His family is Hindu; he was raised in Trinidad; he is half Indian and half Trinidadian; he lives in England; he is haunted by the colonial histories of all his homelands. His relationship to his complex background comes through in most of the 16 novels and 15 works of nonfiction he has published between 1957 and the present. As David P. Lichtenstein puts it, Naipaul’s “inability to form spiritual connections with his heritage, be it Trinidadian, Indian, or even British, dominates his thought as it appears in his work.” In his 2001 Nobel lecture, Naipaul puts it this way: “When I became a writer [, the] areas of darkness around me as a child—“[t]he land; the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world, to which I also felt myself related; [and] Africa”—“became my subjects.” For Naipaul, the struggle to connect with his heritage is a struggle to illuminate darkness.

Many critics, notably Edward Said, see Naipaul’s project of illuminating “areas of darkness” as biased and insufficiently supportive of postcolonial, nonwestern causes. For Said, in conceptualizing his subjects—most of whom are natives of the developing world—as beings of “darkness,” Naipaul “allow[s] himself quite consciously to be turned into a witness for the Western prosecution,” sustaining rather than subverting “colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies.” Similarly, Hilton Als accuses Naipaul of ridiculing and disdaining many of his subjects, of being “dismissive…toward everything ‘peasant’ and ‘tribal’—which is to say, black, poor, [and] illiterate.” Many writers, too, like Naipaul’s fellow West Indian Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, are uneasy about his attitude toward the nonwestern world. Walcott chides Naipaul for dismissing Trinidadian artists as primitive, cultureless “bongo islanders”; for Walcott, the artistic life of the West Indies is “quite nurturing and rich.” Many contend that Naipaul minimizes or misses this richness, choosing instead to portray postcolonial societies as backwards and unenlightened. Naipaul’s supporters answer that though Naipaul’s work perpetuates stereotypes like that of the “bongo islander,” it also forces us to confront our own fictions about the developing world. As Lichtenstein puts it, Naipaul employs his “penetrating vision” to “[knock] down idealized views of the places he journeys to…in favor of a more complex, bitter, sometimes even contradictory truth.”

The debate between those who see Naipaul’s project as productive and those who do not recalls a contemporary debate about the prejudices of one of Naipaul’s literary ancestors, Joseph Conrad. In awarding Naipaul the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy called him “Conrad’s heir as the annalist of the destinies of empires in the moral sense: what they do to human beings.” Both authors depict how imperialism affects humans; but for some, these depictions themselves smack of imperialism. As Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe famously puts it, speaking of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, an inquiry into imperialism can also be a “celebration” of “dehumanization.” Achebe accuses Conrad of depicting Africans as unhuman—as a melee of “limbs” and “rolling eyes”; that “[leap] and sp[i]n and ma[k]e horrid faces” in a “black and incomprehensible frenzy.” For Achebe, Conrad means this frenzy to be the antithesis of “Europe [,] and therefore of civilization.” Conrad, Achebe asserts, is haunted by “the lurking hint of kinship” between himself and the Africans he represents—he is worried that the black frenzy may spread to white men.

Naipaul echoes Conrad in ways that are unlikely to please Achebe—he, too, can be read as positing a frenzied non-west against an enlightened west. In Naipaul’s novel A Bend in the River, he speaks of the “frenzy” of “faces of Africa.” This Conradian description is amplified in “A Little Paperwork”—the “Traveller’s Prelude” to Naipaul’s 1964 travelogue An Area of Darkness—in which Naipaul, traveling by boat from Europe to India, feels Europe giving way to “chaos of uneconomical movement”; he feels its “physique” “melt[ing] away” “into that of Africa,” in which “men [are] “diminished and deformed.” When Naipaul’s ship confronts “the tedium of the African ports,” he laments that “four of the passengers [have] not been inoculated against yellow fever.” This is partially Naipaul’s concern for his fellow passengers; nonetheless, like Conrad, Naipaul depicts a “fever”—a frenzy—of African origin as a threat to enlightened Europeans. And Naipaul’s fever is contagious: one needs only to touch Africa’s darkness to catch it. Naipaul may see himself as a light-bringer, but for critics like Said (and presumably for Achebe), his implicit assumption that “the aborigines; the New World; the colony; the history; India; the Muslim world…[and] Africa” require Naipaul’s illumination makes Naipaul presumptuous, callous, and perhaps even subtly racist. If nothing else, in casting the nonwestern as dark, Naipaul certainly seems to favor the west: to regard him “as anything other than reflexively pro-West,” Brian May comments, “is to go against a tough grain in recent postcolonial criticism.”

This essay goes against that grain. Naipaul’s depictions of nonwestern darkness are not as simple as his parallels to Conrad suggest; they can, in fact, be seen as challenges to the western literary tradition. Although Naipaul writes very much in this tradition, he uses it in a way that subverts it, adopting and modifying conventional western modes, styles, and motifs, then deploying the products in ways that both celebrate the western tradition and highlight its drastic shortcomings. And in Naipaul’s refigurings, Naipaul himself and the west as a whole—not the nonwestern—end up distorted.

His depiction of the Indian bureaucracy he encounters in “A Little Paperwork,” for instance, reflects the bureaucracy of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 short story “The Overcoat.” In Gogol’s story, the lowly clerk Akaky Akakievich negotiates the bureaucracy of Saint Petersburg in a vain attempt to regain his stolen overcoat; in Naipaul’s, Naipaul negotiates the bureaucracy of Bombay in a vain attempt to regain his confiscated liquor. Both bureaucracies are infuriating and unnavigable—but these are characteristics of most bureaucracies, and are alone insufficient to draw a significant line from Gogol to Naipaul. Other similarities help to draw this line more clearly. First, the strict system of occupational roles in Naipaul’s Bombay—in which an individual’s caste dictates what he can and cannot do, in all sectors of life—recalls a similar system in Gogol’s Petersburg. Second, Gogol’s bureaucracy is permeated with paper: his protagonist is a copyist; Naipaul’s bureaucracy references and develops this permeation by making paper an element of bureaucratic oppression. Finally, the embodiment of bureaucracy in Gogol, an “important person” who dashes Akaky Akakievich’s final hopes of recovering his overcoat, reappears in Naipaul—but in a radically different context. .

Whether or not Naipaul’s allusions to Gogol are intentional on Naipaul’s part is largely irrelevant to this essay, which seeks to show that reading Naipaul alongside Gogol demonstrates that Naipaul’s illumination of Indian darkness is equally an illumination of the darkness that allows the west—allows Naipaul—to misunderstand India.

Gogol occupies a complex niche in the western canon. He can be seen as a father of the western short story, a precursor to modernism, and even a starting point for postmodernism. In entering into dialogue with Gogol, Naipaul engages with the west. He mimics Gogol’s satire, but he also expands on it in a way that indicts both himself and the west. He illuminates India, but in doing so, he also illuminates his western prejudice, thus providing something of an answer to charges from critics like Said. For Naipaul, the discovery is not only of India itself, but of his own complex relationship to India and the west.

One could object that in borrowing from the western canon to depict a bureaucratic Bombay, Naipaul idealizes the west and degrades India. From this perspective, Naipaul’s appropriations from Gogol buttress Said’s case, suggesting that Naipaul believes the nonwestern can be depicted only through the use of western models. One could also object that Naipaul is presumptuous in using India to make a point about the western psyche—as though for Naipaul, India were valuable only as a subservient element of an argument about the west. Such a protest would be in the vein of one of Achebe’s objections to Heart of Darkness, which maintains that Conrad displays a “perverse arrogance” in using Africa as the backdrop for “the break-up of one petty European mind.” These objections would be misguided, for two reasons. First, the aspects of the west that Naipaul borrows are not exactly worthy of idealization—stifling bureaucracies are nothing to brag about—which is why “The Overcoat” is usually seen as a satire of western bureaucracy, not as a glorification of it. Second, if Naipaul exalts the west, this exaltation comes alongside an indictment of western complicity in the construction of the nonwestern: Naipaul amplifies Gogol’s satire, turning Gogol’s social order on its head to chastise the west for its flawed conceptions of India. To see Naipaul as simply impugning India is to ignore the complexity of his perceptions and his project.

“A Little Paperwork” and “The Overcoat” share much textually, especially with respect to their depictions of bureaucracy. But Naipaul borrows from western giants other than Gogol, too; “A Little Paperwork” engages with Franz Kafka’s 1925 novel The Trial, for instance, perhaps more intensively than it engages with “The Overcoat.” Why compare Naipaul to Gogol and not to Kafka? Simply put, accounting for differences of temporal and national context, Naipaul and Gogol share almost as much as their fictions. Particularly, they share a complicated and conflicted orientation to the west. In Gogol’s case, this conflict is partially a product of his location in the Russian literary tradition, which straddles an unstable line between occident and orient. But Gogol is more torn than most Russian writers. Like Naipaul, his background is a patchwork of ethnicities, cultures and nationalities.

Gogol was born in 1809 to a noble family in a Ukrainian-dominated segment of Ruthenia, a culturally diverse Eastern European territory now geographically divided among Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Slovakia and Poland. His childhood was spent “in [a] mixed surrounding of local small-time nobility and everyday village life”; his family was Ukrainian, but it also professed ties to both Russia and Poland. For whatever reason, Gogol declared his connection to Poland “artificial” and looked instead to Russia, writing in Russian as opposed to his native Ukrainian and moving to Saint Petersburg in 1828. While in Russia, he retained ties to the Ukraine, seeking a university appointment there and even undertaking to write a history of his “Little Russia,” but he resisted allegiance to any nation: “I do not know,” he wrote to his friend A.O. Smirnova in December 1844, “whether my soul is Ukrainian or Russian.” Despite Gogol’s resistance to national definition, he was seen in Ukrainian literary circles as a symbol of Russian empire during the country’s “post-colonial rebirth” in the early 1900s, in the course of which the Ukraine won independence from Russia in 1917—only to lose it, to the Soviet Union, in 1922. But Gogol was soon in vogue throughout the Soviet Union as one of a group of suppressed Soviet writers who enjoyed a propagandistic but sincere revival at the beginning of the Cold War. (By “propagandistic but sincere,” I mean that though Gogol’s work was revived largely to serve as a source of allegories that could be used to glorify the Soviet Union, Soviet leaders and critics did not, by and large, misrepresent his work, either maliciously or unintentionally—they merely simplified it to serve as propaganda.) At a state celebration of Gogol in 1952, V.V. Erlimov deemed Gogol “a great ally in the struggle to oppose” “darkness.”

Gogol—a writer with a complex heritage who writes in the language of empire and fights darkness—sounds a lot like a Slavic 19th-century V.S. Naipaul. There are of course major differences: Naipaul’s empire is British and Gogol’s is Russian; Naipaul writes after colonialism and Gogol writes at its height; Naipaul conceptualizes his own project as an “illumination of darkness,” whereas in Gogol’s case, that conception is critically imposed. Despite these differences, Gogol nonetheless struggles with the same issues of hybridity and divided allegiance that characterize Naipaul’s work, Naipaul’s life, and contemporary postcolonial discussions in general. Comparing Naipaul to Kafka would be useful to contextualize Naipaul’s view of bureaucracy. But to see how Naipaul’s bureaucracy can contribute to an indictment of the west, Gogol serves us better: Gogol is both a giant of western literature for Naipaul to expand upon and subvert and a kindred spirit for him to echo and commune with. He is, in short, an especially enlightening counterpoint for comparison with Naipaul, both textually and biographically. On, then, to such a comparison.

In “The Overcoat,” Akaky Akakievich is caught in a bureaucratic machine similar to the one that ensnares Naipaul in “A Little Paperwork.” When Akaky Akakievich’s overcoat is stolen, he must navigate an arduous network of “departments, regiments, offices” and “officialdom.” A policeman witnesses the crime, claims ignorance, and sends him to an inspector; but the inspector seems more likely to cheat him than to help him. “Early [the next] morning” Akaky Akakievich seeks help from “the superintendent,” “but [is] told that he [is] asleep; [Akaky Akakievich] c[omes] at ten and again [is] told: asleep; he c[omes] at eleven o’clock and [is] told that the superintendent [is] not at home,” and “at lunchtime” he is flatly refused entry. When Akaky Akakievich finally gains an audience, “the superintendent t[akes] the story about the theft of the overcoat somehow extremely strangely” and Akaky Akakievich leaves “not knowing whether the case of his overcoat [will] take its proper course or not.” Naipaul must negotiate a similar system—a seemingly endless maze of contradictory officials and superfluous permits—in an attempt to regain his liquor. The following passage is representative of his trials:

The officer who had sent me on the track of the transport permit was pleased to see me back. But the transport permit wasn’t enough. I had to go to Mr Kulkarni to find out about the warehouse charges. When I had settled what the charges were I was to come back to the clerk over there, with the blue shirt; then I had to go to the cashier, to pay the warehouse charges; then I had to go back to Mr Kulkarni to get my bottles.
I couldn’t find Mr Kulkarni.

Cumbersome bureaucracies thwart both Akaky Akakievich and Naipaul.

These bureaucracies share much with one another aside from simply being bureaucracies. Both, though confounding, are strictly ordered: Gogol’s by ranks of the Russian civil service and Naipaul’s by the caste system. The narrator of “The Overcoat” declares that “rank must be announced first of all,” then gives us Akaky Akakievich’s rank as “eternal titular councillor.” With this eternal rank, Akaky Akakievich works as a “copying clerk” in a system in which “everything go[es] in the strictest order”; he is “always to be seen in one and the same place, in the same position, in the same capacity.” The bureaucrats in Naipaul’s Bombay are similarly mired in their roles. This is illustrated when Naipaul’s companion faints in a customs office, and Naipaul asks a clerk for water to help relieve her. Neither the clerk nor her supervisor moves to retrieve water, instead advising Naipaul to “[l]et her rest.” Naipaul shouts “Water!” at a third clerk, who leaves the room and returns “waterless.” When Naipaul asks him where the water is, “[h]is eyes distastefully acknowledge [Naipaul’s] impatience,” he “neither shrug[s] nor speak[s],” and “presently” “a messenger appear[s],” “carr[ying] a tray” on which “st[ands] a glass of water.” Naipaul chides himself: “I should have known,” he says, “[a] clerk [is] a clerk; a messenger [is] a messenger.” In Gogol’s Petersburg and Naipaul’s Bombay, individuals have set roles in strict, hierarchical systems.

But far from feeling trapped by these roles, Gogol and Naipaul’s clerks take pleasure in them and refuse to deviate from them. Gogol’s narrator tells us that “[i]t would hardly be possible to find a man who lived so much in his work” as Akaky Akakievich; “he serve[s] with love,” “[d]elight,” and “zeal.” When a director “order[s] that he be given something more important than the usual copying”—“changing the heading and changing some verbs” in “an already existing document”—“[t]his [is] such a task for him that he g[ets] all in a sweat, rub[s] his forehead, and finally sa[ys], ‘No, better let me copy something.’” Naipaul’s clerks are similarly dedicated to their prescribed work and reluctant to stray from it. They care for papers and folders with “reveren[ce],” and they decline Naipaul’s perfunctory thanks for doing what they see as their privilege. Naipaul even describes one clerk who “after many years” on the job must “subdu[e]” his “excitement” at continually “discovering the richness and variety of his work.” And later in An Area of Darkness, Naipaul describes Ramnath, a “happy” “clerk in a government department” who serves as a stenographer, or “steno.” When Ramnath’s supervisor demands that he begin typing in addition to dictating, he respectfully declines—typing “is not [the] job” of “a steno.” Gogol and Naipaul’s clerks are confined in prescribed roles, but they revel in their confinement.

In addition to similarities with respect to ranks and roles, Gogol and Naipaul’s bureaucracies share a preoccupation with paper. Gogol’s entire system—from the devoted copyist Akaky Akakievich to the forces that thwart him—is linked to paper. When Akaky Akakievich seeks the help of the superintendent in locating his overcoat, it is the superintendent’s scriveners, rather than general clerks, who attempt to send him away. Naipaul’s system is also suffused with paper. Naipaul must negotiate “badly printed illiterate forms” which the customs clerks fill in with a “blunt, indelible, illegible pencil which government offices throughout the former Empire use, less for the sake of what is written than for the sake of the copies required.” These government offices are saturated with paper—it is “in the hands of clerks,” and “in the hands of khaki-clad messengers”; it is “shaggily staked” “on desks,” “on chairs,” and “on shelves rising to the…ceiling.” Clerks exist “scattered” among “mounds and columns and buttresses of paper,” “camouflage[d]” by it. In Naipaul as in Gogol, paper pervades the bureaucratic system.

Gogol and Naipaul’s depictions of bureaucracy share much, but major a difference between their protagonists points toward Naipaul’s subversiveness. Gogol’s protagonist, Akaky Akakievich, is both an element and a victim of “all [the] officialdom”; he—like those who turn him away from the superintendent’s office—is a scrivener. Naipaul’s protagonist is Naipaul himself, and he seems, unlike Akaky Akakievich, to have no part in constituting the bureaucracy that frustrates him. But by alluding to Gogol, Naipaul implicates himself in the bureaucracy by placing himself at its highest levels; then he undercuts both himself and the west.

The important person is an embodiment of Gogol’s “irascible…officialdom.” When Akaky Akakievich’s efforts with the superintendent fail, he is advised by one of his fellow clerks that “the best thing would be to address a certain important person,” who “by writing and referring to the proper quarters, could get things done more successfully.” This course of action proves more calamitous than previous ones. Much like the police, the inspectors, and the superintendent, the important person impedes Akaky Akakievich, cruelly detaining him “in order to show” a visiting friend “what lengths of time clerks spent waiting in his anteroom.” When he finally admits Akaky Akakievich, he chides him for breaking rank, telling him that he “ought to have filed a petition about it in the chancellery,” which “would pass to the chief clerk,” then “to the section chief, then be conveyed to [his] secretary,” and finally would come to the important person himself. To emphasize his displeasure and his authority, the important person “stamp[s] his foot” and “raise[s] his voice to” “a forceful note.” Akaky Akakievich is so “stricken” with fright that he collapses; and after a trying trek home, he takes to his bed and dies. The dead Akaky Akakievich haunts the important person, leaving him “pale, frightened, and minus his overcoat”; but the important person is ultimately permitted to return home safely. Gogol’s important person is the most powerful manifestation of the bureaucracy that oppresses Akaky Akakievich.

An important person appears in “A Little Paperwork,” too, but not as a manifestation of bureaucracy: Naipaul himself is described as a “person of importance” by a customs clerk (16). Gogol disrupts the social order he presents by allowing Akaky Akakievich to steal the important person’s overcoat; Naipaul goes further, making the important person a victim of bureaucracy. Gogol’s important person, though disrobed, remains in control of the system; Naipaul’s person of importance—Naipaul himself—is trapped within it.

Naipaul is both victim and perpetrator; he suffers under bureaucracy even as he helps to perpetuate it. After leaving the customs office and retiring to a friend’s flat, he tells an acquaintance that his companion fainted at the customs office, “[p]erhaps” from “the heat”—his way, he indicates, of veiling his frustration and trying not “to sound critical.” The acquaintance recognizes his obfuscation and calls him on it: “It isn’t the heat at all. It’s always the heat or the water with you people from outside. There’s nothing wrong with her. You make up your minds about India before coming to the country.” Not only is Naipaul wrong about what ails his companion, he is wrong in a telling way. What ails her—be it heat or bureaucracy, be it in reality or in Naipaul’s fib—is of Naipaul’s own construction. Naipaul’s companion is overheated by the customs house because he expects she will be. Naipaul encounters a bureaucratic nightmare in India because from the moment the “quarantine flag c[omes] down” on his ship in the Bombay Port, he expects to encounter one—indeed, the first Indian Naipaul mentions is a guide “sent by the travel agency to help” him navigate “the customs.” Naipaul helps birth the Bombay bureaucracy through his biased preconceptions of India. And the target of the acquaintance’s charge is larger than Naipaul alone: his criticism of “you people from the outside” sounds very much like an indictment of touristy westerners. Perhaps things could be different, the acquaintance suggests; but not so long as “you people” continue in ignorance of India, not so long as “you” continue “reading the wrong books.”

Naipaul the character may be reading the wrong books, but Naipaul the author is writing the right ones. In Naipaul’s conversation with his acquaintance, we can see what Robert D. Hamner calls Naipaul’s “humiliating” “philosophical detachment”: Naipaul simultaneously bares his own prejudice and impeaches himself for it. An Area of Darkness has been criticized for distorting the realities of India. But it has also been praised for the exact opposite, for “bring[ing] the essence of a social situation so vividly to life” that Ashish Roy wonders “whether all the sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists” “have not labored in vain.” Naipaul may or may not distort India, but in his detachment, he does give us a distortion of himself. As Bruce Bawer puts it, Naipaul must acknowledge the complexity of his experiences—he must “notice and remember…the[ir] ambiguities”; he must represent “the whole human person rather than to reduce him… to a one-dimensional symbol.” Naipaul must give us a version of himself that appears contradictory and distorted; anything else would be overly and falsely simple. Naipaul recognizes his prejudice, the west’s prejudice; and he illustrates bias—personal and cultural, his own and the west’s—without offering easy solutions. Said calls Naipaul “a witness for the Western prosecution” (53). Naipaul is a witness. Like a good witness, Naipaul, in Bawer’s words, recounts “testimony”—his own or that of others—“and states his conclusions without regard to whether they square with anyone’s ideology” (379). If Naipaul is a witness for the west, he is equally a witness against it; for in illuminating the darkness of India, he illuminates the western darkness within himself.

Gogol had ambitions for himself as a witness of a sort: he badly wanted to be a historian. As he wrote to his Ukrainian friend M.A. Maksimovic in November 1833, history was his way of saying to the Russian and European worlds “what before [him had] not been said” about the plight of his “unique poor Ukraine.” History, in other words, was Gogol’s way of illuminating Ukrainian darkness. And like Naipaul, he was not about to stop with his ancestral homeland. In addition to his history of the Ukraine, Gogol had plans for a history of the Middle Ages, “in eight or, perhaps, nine volumes”; and for “a universal history,” which would fill “four large or six small volumes.” Gogol’s ambitions amounted to only one publication, an introductory article “in the April, 1834, issue of the Journal of the Ministry of Pubic Instruction” entitled “‘Excerpt from a History of Little Russia. Volume I. Book I. Chapter I..’” Gogol produced no further historical volumes, books or chapters, on the Ukraine or any other subject.

Fortunately, Naipaul has been more prolific. Gogol, one thinks, would be pleased with Naipaul’s controversial success. In December 1833, while hard at work on his history of the Ukraine, Gogol wrote to his friend M.P. Pogodin: “My history of Little Russia is extremely unrestrained, and how should it be otherwise? I am criticized…that it is unhistorically fiery and vivid; but what sort of history is it if it is boring?” Naipaul’s illuminations of nonwestern darkness may be too vivid for some, but they are anything but boring. Naipaul’s intricate light is blistering, but it is also indiscriminate—the nonwestern, the west, and Naipaul himself are all left scorched.

Download “Fiery & Vivid” as a PDF

But what good is can’t when want
strings together words, which should
never be spelled out for anyone else,
to anyone who matters. When routine
gives way to agitation. To selfish
giving and taking what’s yours.

This is how it should be done
with words to some other nape,
shifting focus and no remorse.
With lies and with lying
down. With things being mutual.