The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka

279 Pages·2017·5.437 MB·English

by  Sharon Cameron

The Bond of the Furthest Apart

The Bond of the
Furthest Apart
Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka
sharon cameron
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2017 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in
critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago
Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2017
Printed in the United States of America
26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 41390- 7 (cloth)
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 41406- 5 (paper)
isbn-1 3: 978- 0- 226- 41423- 2 (e- book)
doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226414232.001.0001
Figure 2.1: Hans Holbein the Younger, The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521- 22). Oil and
tempera on lime wood, 32.4 × 202.1 cm. (acc. no. 318). Photograph: Kunstmuseum
Basel. Photography by Martin P. Bühler.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Cameron, Sharon, author.
Title: The bond of the furthest apart : essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and
Kafka / Sharon Cameron.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016034769 | isbn 9780226413907 (cloth : alk. paper) |
isbn 9780226414065 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780226414232 (e- book)
Subjects: LCSH: Bresson, Robert— Criticism and interpretation. | Tolstoy,
Leo, graf, 1828– 1910— Criticism and interpretation. | Dostoyevsky, Fyodor,
1821–1 881— Criticism and interpretation. | Kafka, Franz, 1883– 1924— Criticism and
interpretation.
Classification: LCC pn1998.3.b755 c35 2017 | ddc 809— dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2016034769
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi /niso z39.48-1 992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
List of Abbreviations vii
Introduction 1
1 Animal Sentience: Robert Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar 12
2 “Outside Christ”: Dostoevsky’s Joy 40
3 The Sight of Death in Tolstoy 75
4 Robert Bresson’s Pathos 119
5 Kafka’s No- Hope Spaces 168
Acknowledgments 199
Notes 201
Index 265

Abbreviations
ag Leo Tolstoy, “Alyosha Gorshok”
b Franz Kafka, “The Burrow”
bk Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
cp Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
d Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons
dfk Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910– 1923
e Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne
fc Leo Tolstoy, “The Forged Coupon”
i Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot
i Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”
ii Leo Tolstoy, “The Death of Ivan Ilych”
im Franz Kafka, “An Imperial Message”
l Leo Tolstoy, On Life
lm Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
mm Leo Tolstoy, “Memoirs of a Madman”
n Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer
ss Franz Kafka, “The Silence of the Sirens”
wp Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Introduction
The essays that follow can be read with an eye to a set of shared concerns,
or they can be read separately; their coherence does not depend on a single
argument. Nonetheless, recurrent, if uneven, connections dictate the logic of
the essays’ collection in the same volume, which should be illuminated for the
reader, who certainly deserves to know what the iconoclastic Catholic French
filmmaker Robert Bresson (1901–1 999), recognized for his aesthetic of mini-
malization and for the cultivation of automaticity and affectlessness in the
nonprofessional actors he routinely called “models,” could have to do with the
histrionics of the nineteenth- century Russian novelists Fyodor Dostoevsky
and Leo Tolstoy, never mind with the cosmic hopelessness of the enigmatic
creatures in the Czech Franz Kafka’s twentieth-c entury parables and stories.
Of course Bresson filmed Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, though he insisted on the
departure of his cinematography from its aesthetic origins: “Even if I make a
film from Dostoevsky, I try always to take out all the literary parts. I try to go
directly to the sentiments of the author and use only what can pass through
me. I don’t want to make a film showing the work of Dostoevsky.”1 Bresson’s
L’ Argent, which takes Tolstoy’s “The Forged Coupon” as its basis, transforms
that story’s ending, thus revealing “what can pass through me” as in fact re-
covering Tolstoy’s own earlier “sentiments.”
Bresson might extract “the literary parts” of the novels he adapts, excising
the language that anatomizes motive, intention, feeling— excluding whatever
insinuates access to inwardness, since such access is precisely what Bresson in-
sists cannot be signified or visualized.2 But he preserves the metamorphic, op-
positional quality that informs Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s writing. In Bresson’s
films anything at all (one could therefore say everything) has an irreducible