Conclusion of "Under Western Eyes" and Silence (plus a note on Alexander Ghindin)

On Friday (August 5^th), I was in the audience of a master class offered by the great Russian pianist Alexander Ghindin to three participants in the Cleveland International Piano Competition. Mr. Ghindin, a member of the competition jury, is a brilliant teacher as well as pianist, offering a wealth of insight and advice without diminishing the student. The second pianist had performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Sonata, op. 36 (original version) during the semi-finals of the competition, and when he played the first bar for Ghindin, the Russian immediately offered extraordinary suggestions to reconceive and release the power of the opening. The most poignant moment in this session occurred when the slow theme sounded out less than two minutes into the sonata. Again, Mr. Ghindin offered a suggestion, and when he illustrated how the passage should be phrased, he played with such sorrow and tenderness that tears came to my eyes. Then he spoke of a Russian notion of pathos – of the isolation of suffering, of sadness, compassion, and yearning for happiness all mixed together. But it was his playing of the single line of music which spoke most eloquently of these things, incredibly tender and piercing. [Here is a link to one of Ghindin's cds: Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1 & 4 (Original Versions).]

There is a powerful expression of such empathic sorrow in Conrad's creation of the Russian women characters in Under Western Eyes. These characters struggle for meaning in a world where meaning is silenced; in such a realm, the capacity to empathize and to perceive another without blinders is endangered, for in this world compassion is manipulatively selective or erased from consciousness. Apart from Razumov, most of the Russian men enact totalitarian roles, even the travestied revolutionary Peter Ivanovich, an unholy combination of Kropotkin and Bakunin. Russian women, however, join Razumov in choosing to cast off their erased and betrayed status and to emerge, even if into silence and suffering, "to burn rather than rot" (177), to struggle for meaning within its silencing in a totalized society. [Here, again, is the Amazon link: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics).]

These women characters - Sophia Antonovna, Tekla, Mrs. Haldin, and above all the daughter Natalia - ironically and unstably shift between opposed roles, and their ambiguity constitutes a crucial structural tension in the novel. Western romance conventions shadow Razumov’s realization of “the possibility of being loved” by Natalia, but his discovery prompts the nightmare realization of what Sophia calls the “ignominy” of existence in the East (266).  There is a Dostoyevskian role of women, which is searchingly intense, revelatory, yet nurturing – Peter Ivanovich voices the standard cliché: "Admirable Russian women!" (86) – and in this novel it collides with the image of women as traditional heroines from Western fiction, gifted in attuning the community to the "heart's" needs. The instability of these characters - correctively shifting between Eastern and Western images and conventions - reinforces the sense of modern emergency in characterization and narrative convention. The portrait of these women characters enacts a sense of crisis in the silenced and erased status of the "human," a crisis in sustaining the capacity for empathic comprehension in the modern world. 

Perhaps the best way to describe the critical and structural instability achieved by Conrad is to broach the notion of "playing dead" - as a means of exploring the deadnesses of modern existence. The self-hobbling, interiorized, Dostoyevskian confession is a form of such playing dead, simultaneously desired by the totalitarian state yet not perfectly fulfilling its wishes, for Dostoyevskian confession subverts the totalitarian version of confessional rhetoric, making it the instrument for an unpredictable disorder and fullness of possibility, for polyphony to use Bakhtin's resonant term. In the case of Razumov's journal, its apparent "deadness" (with its implicit acquiescence in the act of confession) masks a subversive, invigorating flux of possibility, above all the possibility of contact.

For the victims of such a world of numbing simulation and lies, it is no accident that these characters should exhibit "a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity," as the Professor observes (6). This Russian ethos of contact – this use of language and form – offers a model for many future efforts in modern fiction to draw a voice from the silence of the controlled, "totalized," insulated world its characters inhabit. Thus Natalie Sarraute writes: "[A] continual, almost maniacal need for contact ... attracts all such characters like dizziness and incites them on occasions to try, by any means whatsoever, to clear a path to the 'other,' to penetrate him as deeply as possible and make him lose his disturbing, unbearable opaqueness" (33). 

Razumov's desperate act of "contact" is his confession to the very persons he has betrayed. In this way he subverts and silences the totalized expectations of his speech; after he is deafened for his troubles, he exists in a world of exterior silence, "playing" or appearing dead in terms of the fabrications and prefabrications of the totalized society. Yet as a result he is himself contacted, cared for, and listened to by Sophia, Tekla, and others, and he becomes a source of meaningful speech for the alienated inhabitants outside and silenced by the totalized field. Razumov and his fragile circle of survivors face the haunted, illusory specter - the deadness - of their society, and their role is not only to tell the dangerous, potentially immolating truths, to grieve in advance for all the betrayals their society suffers and enacts; their role is also to testify to the possibility of just and compassionate relations.

In "Autocracy and War," Conrad writes that - in the face of societal delusion and oppression - it is only by using "our sympathetic imagination" that we may glimpse the possibility of any "triumph of concord and justice" (84) [see this link to Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters]. In the end, Razumov and his listeners inhabit the land of the silenced where they struggle to imagine and communicate fragmentary, forecasting images of what community, freedom, truth, and justice might be. These characters thus embody a sort of waiting described by later writers - from Walter Benjamin (264) and Adorno (247) to Derrida (168) - a waiting which places their suffering and grief in the perspective of possibility: that the future may yet exist, obliterated though it now is, decipherable perhaps in the paradoxical cracks and crevices of a narrative which allows the significance of Razumov's silence to manifest itself. 

The idea of "playing dead" - and all it may signify - applies even to the British professor. Concerned always with detachment in manner and sentimental propriety in plot, his narration is "dead" to the motives and issues of the scenes he observes, issues we discover from Razumov's juxtaposed journal. As one reads the professor's narration, its deadness - its clichés, its imperceptions, its incapacity to comprehend or express the lives it attempts to render - becomes a structural paradox, for it is only in the West - inside Geneva and this Professor's denying, sentimentalizing narration - that the utterances of the novel exist at all. The novel thus becomes a model of how to balance East and West with and against one another, in order to allow for the mutual survival of human beings on both sides of the Slavic/Western or any imperial, racial, or national divide. The denials and deadnesses of the West become equally, then, a rhetoric of "playing dead," a paradoxical cover for the struggle to use speech to utter meaning. For Conrad, only in ironic tension and perspective can either language - Slavic or Western - be retrieved from its deadnesses; only so can silence produce meaning. (Rather different approaches to the significance of “silence” in Conrad can be found in studies by Carabine, Fogel, and GoGwilt.)

Conrad's art is based in a language which plays on the edge of silence. This is the core paradox of his modernism: his art would use language as if it utters meaning in order simultaneously to expose language's failure to convey meaning and sustain the vanishing possibility that meaning can be conveyed. Hence, silence becomes the sign of truth, of escape from the being and world of lies: the deaf Razumov at novel's end is visited by the characters whose endurance is nurtured by hearing him utter some form of truth from within his silence. Once again, the narrative emerges from silence and honors its origins. Conrad offers here an image of tragically belated romanticism; when Razumov writes in his journal on Rousseau's Island in Lake Geneva, he asks the same questions which Rousseau's Solitary Traveler posed there a century and a half before (206). Can we use silence and irony, the suspension and negation or "forgetting" of the self's roles, to create meaning?

In the answer offered by modernism's language for the arts, silence becomes speech, fragmentation suggests an absent wholeness, absence implies presence, dissonance is all the harmony there is, and descent into the heart of darkness can yield visionary illumination. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad employs modernist strategies akin to those in Heart of Darkness, where the totalitarian abomination is racist imperialism rather than autocracy. In each text, Conrad indicts the symbiosis of colonizer and colonized, master and servant, the former transformed - with god-like presumption and absolutism - into an instrument of barbaric domination, the latter struggling with desperate absoluteness to overcome dehumanized subjection. In the dialectical vision of each text, the reader is located at the focal point of modernist paradox, where endless interrogation dominates and exposes every facet of the human, where the "human" is driven into silence and negation and the literary text forced into fragmentation and perspectivism. 

In Conrad's novel of 1911, the reader experiences a far-reaching deconstruction of conceptions of the Slavic and of Russia; we are made to explore a paradoxical field where all "truths" are revealed to be compounded with illusion, all speech compounded with silence. Conradian perspectivism exposes the implacable insecurity of basing the struggle for meaning in any national, ethnic, or societal images; meaning is achieved only, if at all, in the shared recognition that it emerges from silence, from its own erasure. Compassion is an imaginative act in this regard, for it operates against all societal prompts to the contrary: "sympathetic imagination" - as Conrad calls it - locates the human and imagines meaning within the silenced and erased "other" who faces one across the divides which society erects. To act "as if" meaning exists, with a continual awareness of its emergence from erased images and silenced voices, is what can be achieved in a world where all manifestations of individual and community are shown to be either instruments or victims of interrogative domination. For Conrad, any conception of individual or community which now arises or endures can emerge only from the resulting silence. As if silence were a form of speech. 

Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Silence, continued (first section is an 11-2010 post):

Here's the continuation of the November 2010 post containing the start of my essay, which was published in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (issue 45:2, pp. 231-242).

The deepest terror exhibited and forecast by Under Western Eyes’ images of terrorism, autocracy, and the struggle to endure in Russian life is that, under circumstances of total simulation and dissimulation, truth disappears into silence, and reality undergoes an absolute erasure and substitution. Here we enter the region of Conrad's "néant," of negation. Conrad's readers are themselves made to experience a version of this negation, for the self-reflexive effect of the British professor's unreliable narration is to place them in the position of questioning the Western assumptions embedded in the text as a document written in English.

The resulting self-conscious and paradoxical perspectivism destabilizes our reading which depends on the Western professor's on-going narrative even when, for example, we realize that the compassion and perception he refuses to most of the Russians are what their struggle with erasure and suffering requires and embodies. "I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism," he writes even about the Russian with whom he sympathizes the most, Natalia Haldin (76).

The concept of Russian cynicism helps us again to observe how a motif is made to break down in the novel, and reveal instability and negation. On one side is the Professor's condescension for Natalia's "naive and hopeless cynicism" - his snide "key-word" for his chronicle (49). On the other, we find the protagonist Razumov's paradoxical formulation, contorted by fear and despair, of Russian suffering: '''Stoicism! That's a pose ... We are Russians, that is - children; that is - sincere; that is - cynical, if you like. But that's not a pose!'" (147). Further, there is the revolutionary Sophia Antonovna's comment that "'women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action'" (197). The novel's ironic questioning of irony is as brilliantly dislocating as it is compelling, for these carefully designed structural collisions and negations prompt readers to become as morally alert and delving as possible.

Found everywhere on this vertiginous landscape of dislocation is the primary mechanism of communication at work within a totalizing system and practiced even by Conrad's central, English narrator: that is, "interrogation" – detached, reductive, and imposing, for example, the Englishman's censure and sentimentality on the interrogated. Interrogation in his case is a metaphor to characterize the British professor's point of view on "things Russian," but in Conrad's vision of Russian life interrogation is more than metaphoric. It is at the core of experience itself, and most of the novel's key scenes involve acts of interrogation: the revolutionist Haldin's testing of Razumov and then the Intelligence bureaucrat Mikulin's questioning of both of them, the myriad interrogations of Razumov by the Geneva Russians - the Haldins, Sophia Antonovna, not to mention Peter Ivanovich - and finally Razumov's own self-interrogation in his Dostoyevskian journal.

Why is the intrusion and inquisition of interrogation essential in a totalized society like the Russian autocracy? It is the tool that allows the Intelligence apparatus (the brain of a totalitarian body politic) to confront the silence - and shape the speech - of the totalized Russian society presented by Conrad. The passive, impervious, even moribund nature of this body politic informs the recurrent image of a body - drunk, dead, or asleep - suspended in a vast frozen waste, and this image of groundless suspension in a frozen blank white void applies above all to Razumov. Silence is the meaning of these many encompassing images of being frozen alive, and is the focus of Conrad's interrogation of Russia and, finally, of language itself. The haunted fatality of this vision is confirmed by its echoing of Adam Mickiewicz's classic Polish critique of Russia eighty years earlier, the "Digression" in Forefather's Eve of 1832; Czeslaw Milosz writes that Conrad "seems to repeat its contents line for line in . . . Under Western Eyes" (225)

Silence is a signal characteristic of the frozen Russian wastes here. The novel's images of suspended corpses are silent, and as well the holders of power - Prince K, Councilor Mikulin, etc. - mumble or are silent; the key words in their sentences are ellipses, erasures, silences. The "truths" of Razumov's story are silenced, and by the end of the novel his world is literally silence: his eardrums are shattered by the counterspy Nikita’s gun. This final silence of Razumov's world merely makes manifest its actual condition: all previous hearing and speech have been invalidated by lies, within himself and within the world he inhabited; both the official story or history and his personal version are compounded of falsifications. The brunt and import of the novel's interrogation, then, reveal that language capable of uttering meaning is silenced in the Geneva of the revolutionaries, the Petersburg of the autocracy, and indeed the Europe of modernity.

The interrogatory rhetoric - of the nearly mute aristocrats and of the strategically mumbling Intelligence chief in Russia - plays at a silence which invites the interrogated to fill the gaps, to accede to and participate in a totalized societal speech. What the society evokes is, then, not only passivity and imperviousness, but also a sort of participation taking the peculiar form, however, of confession. Though, as we saw, Conrad was highly critical of Dostoevsky, this novel has characters who echo Crime and Punishment; and of course Razumov's confessional journal represents a development of the novel genre modeled by Dostoevsky, not least in Notes from Underground. Mikulin's interrogation of Razumov draws from him what is desired, confession, collusion, and betrayal, but in a Dostoyevskian confessional form which the interrogating apparatus does not expect and cannot decipher. Against the interrogating rhetoric of the totalized Slavic society, this "Slavic" English novel pits an alternative equally characteristic of Slavic culture - a confessional rhetoric based in a sort of silence.

Totalitarian speech, in sum, ironically and unstably calls forth the upwelling confessional speech it requires, but in a hybrid form undecipherable to it. In a further irony, the opacity of Razumov's confession complicates and reinforces what we have noted is the ironic doubleness of his character, making him simultaneously a haunted Petersburg hero of Eastern genre and origin and a coldly "English" rational Western temperament, though the latter recedes by novel's end. Finally, the novel's narrative structure ironically juxtaposes Razumov's Dostoyevskian confession with the British professor's narration and "translation" of that narrative. A Slavic literary form, then, is paired against and interacts with a more traditional, conventionally Western version of the novel genre, and a mutually deconstructive tension results, measuring Eastern and Western rhetoric against each other.

I'll post the conclusion of this essay next week. 

Here are Amazon links to Conrad's novel and to Dostoyevsky's two works cited above: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics) and Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics)  and Notes from Underground and The Double (Penguin Classics).

Part iv: Schnittke, Shostakovich, Mahler - the Art of Travesty

[These thoughts on Schnittke can be read either individually or in order parts i to iv - see i through iii below - or altogether on the "Art of Travesty" page. Also, for my discussion of Joseph Conrad - specifically "Speech and Silence in Conrad's vision of Russia" - see the Conrad page here.]

   The disintegration courted in each Schnittke score both distorts and salvages the contents of his society's music—its classical inheritance, its popular kitsch, its military marches, its buried religious forms, its peasant modes. He recycles these forms of music in such a way as both to salvage them, harmed and fractured as they are, to expose their fracture points, and to reveal the extremity which shadows survival in any totalizing order and which harms the members so “ordered.” As Adorno observes about Mahler, in Quasi Una Fantasia, “the individual’s fractures are the script of truth….In them any social movement appears negatively, as in its victims: the marches in Mahler’s Ninth Symphony are heard and reflected by [and from the standpoint of] those whom they drag away.” Similarly, in Schnittke’s travestied marches, tangos, or baroque obbligato, the distorted resurrection of haunted form itself becomes a mechanism of confrontation. The effect achieved here is similar to that of “the marginal, undomesticated element” in Mahler’s music, as Adorno describes it: “[That element]—archaic, outdated, [and] inimical to compromise—bound itself to traditional material, [which] was thereby reminded of the victims of progress, even musical victims: those elements of language ejected [but also calcified by tradition were] endowed with power in order to resist power. The shabby residue left by triumph accuses the triumphant.” Schnittke’s own accusatory and uncompromising travesties are akin to Adorno’s idea in Negative Dialectics of thought which scrutinizes itself and confronts its own complacency; music today must equally measure itself and be “measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, [or] it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims.”

Taruskin, in his discussion of the composer, makes use of the idea of ‘negative dialectics’ in order to characterize Schnittke’s use of resolution as a sign of degeneracy, as an ironic consonance, so that the noise of great affirmative gestures is exposed as noise. As we have seen, Adorno’s conception can lead to a still deeper understanding of the ways in which this composer’s art aspires to reach through and redeem the haunting and negated discards of history. Such music attempts not only to voice what Adorno calls, in Mahler, “the shriek of horror at something worse than death: pogrom music,” but to restore the life-after-death of history’s broken, extinguished, discarded elements. The notion of restoring the potential of what falls between the cracks of history is developed by both Adorno and his colleague in critical theory Walter Benjamin. Their shared aim is to formulate a critical witnessing of what is suppressed by societies based in rationalized domination and the manipulation of reason. The stance of such witnessing shapes and underlies the late- or post-humanist identity of Schnittke’s postmodern art.

Benjamin and Adorno help us to clarify, in particular, the relationship of Schnittke’s art to grieving. In a discussion of the modern fate of storytelling—analogous in key ways to musical form for a composer like Schnittke—Benjamin suggests that the vanishing remains of life and of an entire tradition can be reclaimed as images, in the “transmissible form” of aesthetic figments. As such music gazes backward like Benjamin’s Angel of History on its vanishing tradition, on the history of musical form, its simultaneous complicity and defiance become apparent in the face of the power of the encompassing society. Music like Schnittke’s witnesses there all the discarded forms, the dashed hopes for transformation and the struggles against silence, which are lodged like “chips” of Messianic hope and expectation in musical history, as in human history. This looking backward exerts a profound pressure to hear what has been silenced, to redeem what has been cancelled, to restore the suppressed to expressivity and an existence in the world of sound. The fertility and wit of Schnittke’s retrievals of past musical gestures—for example, his travestied Classical and Baroque effects—are examples of such resurrection and reconnection, not in a complacent ‘neoclassicism’ but as a means of showing us how grotesquely haunted and pregnant with suppressed possibility is our present in the light of the transformative expectation of us implicit in past art.

Travesty is Schnittke’s mechanism for affirming the expectation that the capacity to generate meaning can endure in the face of unmeaning, of the death of meaning in a commodified and media-dominated world. Travesty becomes productive as a form of mourning. The elegiac generosity and wit of his retrievals of a whole range of music—from hymn and fugue to tango and punk—coexist with the effect of grievous shock which his voracious imitations achieve, sometimes in the very brutality of their sound. In this way, his art creates a double perspective which joins a stark veracity of critical witness with the voracity of travesty, and this double strategy energetically exposes the brutal power of domination in contemporary society, as it simultaneously testifies to what is left out, what has been discarded in the garbage bin as invalidated and invalided. Experiencing the brilliant wit and grief in his musical travesties, a tentative community of listeners is developed. Each of us becomes a witness to the dwarfing excess of power and the haunting distortion of our own complicity, yet each of us also participates at least as auditors in an act of startling and even healing generation, giving voice to what survives, however banal or eccentric or deformed by the scarring dialectic with society’s force.