The Unsaid Anna Karenina PDF
Preview The Unsaid Anna Karenina
THE UNSAID ANNA KARENINA Also by Judith M. Armstrong * THE NOVEL OF ADULTERY ESSAYS TO HONOUR NINA CHRISTESEN (editor with Rae Slonek) IN THE LAND OF KANGAROOS AND GOLD-MINES, by Oscar Comettant (translator) * Also published by Palgrave Macmillan The Unsaid Anna Karenina Judith M. Armstrong Senior Lecturer in Russian and Language Studies University of Melbourne M MACMILLAN PRESS © Judith M. Armstrong 1988 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1 st edition 1988 978-0-333-44395-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended), or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Aifred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1988 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LT D Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Armstrong, Judith M. The unsaid Anna Karenina. 1. Tolstoy, L. N. Anna Karenina I. Title 891.73'3 PG3365.A63 ISBN 978-1-349-19409-4 ISBN 978-1-349-19407-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-19407-0 To My Children, Hugo and Piers Contents Foreword ix 1 Tolstoy's Dead Mother 1 2 A Life for Levin 22 3 The Returns of Reading 48 4 The Roots of Passion 70 5 Executing a Figure 107 6 The Daughter's Reduction 126 7 Lenin Deconstructs 142 8 The Rhetoric of Morality 161 Afterword 186 Notes 193 References 195 Index 199 Foreword Between the unconscious mind and the finished poem there supervene the social intention and the formal control of the conscious mind. In his essay on Freud and literature, from which the above quota- tion is taken, Lionel Trilling was mildly reproaching his subject, Freud, for apparently making the working of the unconscious mind equivalent to poetry itself: Of all mental systems (he writes), the Freudian psychology is one which makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the mind. Indeed, the mind, as Freud sees it, is in the greater part of its tendency exactly a poetry-making organ ... But in discussing the concept of psychoanalysis as a 'science of tropes, of metaphor and its variants, synechdoche and meton- ymy', Trilling has, en passant and out of the corner of his eye, left us with a perfect and concise model for a comprehensive approach to the finished poem - or novel. Other terms might of course be substituted for Trilling's: Bernheimer talks more of 'psychopo- etics', Eagleton of ideology. But the fact remains that these three large areas - the unconscious mind, the social intention, and the formal control - constitute what must be involved in any but a selective study of a piece of fiction. The fact that each term is a small, neat label dissimulating the complexity, self-contradictoriness and overall vastness of its referent is of course daunting; but the value and fascination of using them in a comparative approach to the study of one novel seems self-evident. The novel in question will be Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. ix 1 Tolstoy's Dead Mother Oedipus-shmoedipus - what does it matter as long as you love your mother? Tolstoy'S mother died when he was one-and-a-half years old. That Tolstoy consciously considered this an enormous loss is attested to by a reference he made to her in his last years - and which was preserved even though it was recorded only on a scrap of loose paper. It read: Felt dull and sad all day. Towards evening this state changed to one of deep emotion - a desire for tenderness, or love. I wanted, like a child, to cling to some loving, compassionate being, and weep with emotion, and be comforted .... Become like a little boy and cling to my mother, as I imagine her to myself. Yes, Mother, whom I never called that, because I could not talk then. Yes, her, my highest image of pure love; but not cold, divine love - earthly, warm, maternal love. Mother, hold me. All this is mad, but it is all true. (55 20, p. 235) Nevertheless, the significant separation from his mother, psycho- logically speaking, had already taken place even before the hazily remembered physical loss - and must, moreover, have been a necessary and positive preliminary step in a maturation process that would produce not only Lev Tolstoy the adult, but also L. N. Tolstoy the creative writer. The theory explaining the connection between the development of identity and creativity has been mostly visibly put forward by D. W. Winnicott, in his book Playing and Reality (Winnicott, 1971). Concerned with the idea of how an infant adjusts to the realisation that the mother's breast is not always and forever available, that longer and longer periods of separation from the mother must occur, Winnicott suggests that the infant has access to two sources of consolation. One is his own thumb, which he has used ever since he was born; the other is the special object, usually something soft and cuddly, like a teddy- 1 2 The Unsaid Anna Karenina bear, that the mother later offers the child, and indeed expects him to become addicted to. The intermediate period - between the thumb and the teddy-bear - is one characterised by 'transitional' objects and phenomena, for example a corner of a sheet or blanket which is sucked or stroked, or the first babblings which are to lead on to the songs and tunes which an older child will lull itself to sleep with. The infant at this stage does not fully recognise that the transitional objects are part of external reality, just as he has not properly distinguished his mother from himself; thus this period constitutes an intermediate area of overlap between that which is subjectively apprehended and that which is objectively perceived, a blurred border between 'inside' and 'outside'; this is the place or space where the infant's capacity to 'create, think up, devise, originate and produce an object' operates (p. 2). In time the specific transitional object comes to lose its meaning, being replaced by 'the whole intermediate territory between inner psychic reality and the external world as perceived by two persons in common, that is to say, [by] the whole cultural field' (p. 5). ' ... This intermediate area ... constitutes the greater part of the infant's experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work' (p. 14). Charles Bernheimer, in his book Flaubert and Kafka: a Psychopoetic Study (Bernheimer, 1982) sums up one of the ultimate results of the transitional object in an enjoyable sentence. 'Hence', he says, 'in a bemusing genealogy, literature inherits the function of the teddy- bear and the text mediates between subjective meanings, the projections of personal identities, and objective, external realities' (p. 19). The Winnicottian link between teddy-bear and text becomes one of the chains in Bernheimer's complex and sophisticated argument in which he seeks to establish the links he detects between two opposing but interconnecting poles of psychological and linguistic rhetoric: between Eros and metonymy on the one hand and Thana- tos and metaphor on the other. 'Bluntly stated', he writes, 'the textual system of Eros is generated by the absence of the mother's breast' (p. 9). And, according to him, this results in the essentially recuperative structures of the Erotic system, which aim either to recreate the symbiotic relation of infant to nurturing mother, or to compensate for the loss of this relation by the intentional creation of alternative modes of continuity. One such restorative activity is
The list of books you might like
