"War and Peace" and Mobile Phones

Heavy snow is blowing and swirling past my window this morning and I’m musing about why I consider “War and Peace” to be such a great novel.  It’s prompted, not just by the weather but also the BBC’s new television mini-series.

I’ve never read any formal literary criticism of the novel; I’ve never wanted to because the book speaks so directly to me. Here’s a famous passage, the conclusion of Prince Andrei’s experience of the Battle of Austerlitz.  Andrei has picked up a fallen Russian standard, rallied the retreating soldiers around him and is running, leading an improvised charge against the French line on foot:

            ‘What are they doing?’ thought Prince Andrei as he gazed at them. ‘Why doesn’t the red-haired gunner run away since he is unarmed? Why doesn’t the Frenchman stab him? He won’t get away before the Frenchman remembers his bayonet and stabs him…’

            And in fact another French soldier, trailing his musket, ran up to the struggling men and the fate of the red-haired gunner who had triumphantly secured the mop and still did not realize what awaited him, was about to be decided.  But Prince Andrei did not see how it ended.  It seemed to him as though one of the soldiers near him hit him on the head with the full swing of a bludgeon. It hurt a little, but the worst of it was that the pain distracted him and prevented his seeing what he had been looking at.

            ‘What’s this? Am I falling? My legs are giving way,’ thought he, and fell on his back.  He opened his eyes, hoping to see how the struggle of the Frenchmen with the gunners ended, whether the red-haired gunner had been killed or not, and whether the cannon had been captured or saved. But he saw nothing. Above him there was now nothing but the sky—the lofty sky, not clear yet still immeasurably lofty, with grey clouds gliding slowly across it. ‘How quiet, peaceful, and solemn, not at all as I ran,’ thought Prince Andrei ‘—not as we ran, shouting and fighting, not at all as the gunner and the Frenchman with frightened and angry faces struggled for the mop: how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last! Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky. There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God!...’

In this single passage, you see the elemental, precision of the Iliad with the genius to make it subjective and so personal.  Then, without warning, the focus, the drama of the soldiers attempting to take the gun emplacement is ironically disrupted by the wound that crumples Andrei onto his back.  We and Andrei see the sky, remote, objective, implicitly beautiful with a single, perfect adjective, “lofty,” and yet we’ve moved more deeply into Andrei’s subjective experience with absolutely credible thoughts that are the heart of so much philosophy with echoes back to Ecclesiastes.  Yet it is still told with the same concrete, direct language.  It is as surprising and breath-stealing as the best turn in a Sherlock Holmes story and absolutely believable.  There are so many surprises: plain observation leading to subjective speculation spiraling into objectivity which is actually a deeper subjectivity of philosophical speculation. 

When I think of novelists, short story writers, poets and even historians who have written with terrible, fierce insight about war, Bierce, Remarque, Owen, T. E. Lawrence, Hemingway, Powers, Klay, and so many others, I see Tolstoy in them.

But this is only one passage:  Tolstoy writes with equal insight about family life, society, the equally fierce and complex struggles that women face.  These days, we applaud novelists for their world building, and rightly, too.  But sometimes we fail to recognize the same accomplishments in older works.  Tolstoy was writing fifty years after the events he chronicles.  Russian and French society had changed and were still changing, dramatically.  Yet, he succeeds in making his world detailed and complex as Tolkien’s and as visceral as Hemingway’s.

The new BBC series appears to have little time for philosophy and rumination.  It’s main characters simply don’t appear to think as much as their counterparts in the novel. Even though the production design feels absolutely authentic, I half expect all the young people at a ball to be surreptitiously texting on their mobile phones.

(The illustration is “The Battle of Borodino” by Leonid Pasternak, the original illustrator.)

Just Reading

Lynn and I have been exchanging emails with a great old friend of mine, a member of the legal profession and a judge, about Hemingway’s short story “Indian Camp.” Both Lynn and I consider it one of the great short stories in English.  In one of our exchanges, my friend speculated about how his professional reading, necessarily highly focused and meticulous, affected his reading of Hemingway’s story.

It’s a deep and interesting issue, deserving of serious analysis and attention.  And, it alludes to the even more important question of how we read in general and how we should read.

One of my two Bachelor degrees is in English Literature, granted by a University and the faculty of “the Department of English.”  In fact, the department would have been more accurately named a department of Literary Criticism and Analysis (which dabbled in Linguistics and Creative Writing.)  These days, I find I would much rather have a Bachelor’s degree in Reading.

“Reading?”  Just “Reading?”

Yes.  Consider how many ways there are of reading.  For example, there is the immersive, velocitized reading for recreation, often brought to Science Fiction or Fantasy where a primary goal is to imagine as completely and viscerally as possible a world the author has labored to imagine.  Often, language is meant to be a pure transport mechanism, innocuous and transparent, though not always.  In contrast there is Kingsnorth’s “The Wake” or Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” in which a peculiar, sometimes difficult language is almost a character itself, claiming its own share of the reader’s attention.

But there are so many more ways of reading and ways a text is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to be read.  One can read for rhetorical structure, identifying how rhetorical strategies and structures are employed.  One can read for selection of detail and the consequences of those choices.  One can read with attention to point of view.  One can read for story structure or character arc.  Or one can read in the context of how a work engages with a well-defined audience, it’s effect and meaning for them.  One can read purely for definition, logic and persuasiveness of argument, even fiction can be read this way.

One can read historically, attempting to read in the context of a particular time in the past, bringing to it the insights and limitations one would have had at that time.  It’s no small achievement to do that well.  I’m reminded of Ricky Jay’s masterful demonstration of how a card trick would have been performed four different ways at four different points in history.

Simply, there are an infinite number of ways to approach a text and read it.  How should one read it?  How do you make an intelligent determination?  How many times do you read it?  How do you know you’re executing your reading strategy, perhaps paradigm is a better word, effectively?

That’s what I would expect from a college degree in “Reading.”  Further, I’d argue that it’s never been more important.  Consider the number and diversity of texts you engage with each day, some are even properly hyper-texts and need to be understood in that context.  Unless, everyone becomes more accomplished readers do democratic societies, of which I personally happen to be particularly fond, have a chance of surviving?

Last November I read “Professor Borges:  A Course on Literature” a collection of lectures given by the great literary figure recovered and edited by Martin Hadis et al.  More than anything it was a course in reading and how a great mind read carefully, well and differently.  Reading as others have read, decades or even centuries ago can be surprisingly helpful in making the particular weaknesses, obsessions and biases of the present apparent.