A Great Time for Personal Narrative

Just like 1863

This is a post that I started writing last fall, back when I was teaching. It was inspired by the first office hours I held after the election. I remember getting there a few minutes late, a student was waiting in the hallway, and at first I felt guilty for having stopped for coffee; then we went into the office, and she asked her question—about whether I had tips for how to sustain a sense of the meaningfulness of writing Fiction and Personal Narrative (the title of the class) in light of everything that was happening right now in this country and in the world—and then I took a looong sip of the coffee that I was heartily glad to have by that point, and launched into my Usual Answer, which involves “War and Peace.” Afterwards, I thought I should write it down—partly to share with others who have the same (very common) question, and partly so I myself can revisit and rethink it; because I realized that, even though it is “my current opinion,” I formulated it during the first Trump administration, and my thoughts have already changed a bit since then, and will doubtless keep changing.

So OK, here goes. I think the question—how to sustain a sense of meaningfulness of personal narrative (fictional or otherwise) in politically volatile times—comes from a sense of alienation: a feeling that the great concerns of personal life—family, romance, friendship, sex, conversation, art, etc.—are totally disconnected from the larger, impersonal-seeming forces that subject millions of people to war and poverty. The good news is that certain kinds of narrative are engineered to address precisely this sense of alienation.

Take “War and Peace.” “A big question in “War and Peace” is why people go to war; specifically, what caused the Napoleonic Wars to happen the way they did. It includes multiple historical-philosophical chapters in which Tolstoy sets out, and disagrees with, various military, biographical, economic, diplomatic, and sociological explanations, often using the “defamiliarization” technique described by Shklovsky. (See, e.g., Tolstoy’s take on the French Revolution: “At the end of the eighteenth century there were a couple of dozen men in Paris who began to talk about all men being free and equal. This caused people all over France to begin to slash at and drown one another.”)

By the end of the book—Chapter 12 of the Second Epilogue—Tolstoy has gone through every explanation he has heard of for the events of 1805 to 1812, and found them all insufficient to explain why millions of people should get up in the morning and march hundreds of miles to murder some other people they had never met. (“It is incomprehensible that millions of Christian men killed and tortured each other either because Napoleon was ambitious or Alexander was firm, or because England’s policy was astute or the Duke of Oldenburg wronged,” etc.) The conclusion he puts forward, at this point—which many readers don’t remember, and are surprised if you tell them—is that free will is an illusion, which we must intellectually renounce, just as we renounce the feeling that the earth is stationary because we rationally accept the theories of Copernicus and Galileo. It’s literally the last line in the book: “in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce [an illusion of] freedom… and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.”

So OK—that’s one part of the novel.

The other, more famous part is the sweeping narrative about the Rostovs, the Bolkonskys, Pierre Bezukhov, and other persons. In the narrative, you actually see different characters deciding to join the war. E.g. here is Pierre talking to Prince Andrei.

“Well, why are you going to the war?” asked Pierre.

“What for? I don’t know. I must. Besides that I am going…” He paused. “I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!”

The rustle of a woman’s dress was heard in the next room.

The rustling dress belongs to Andrei Bolkonsky’s “adorable” pregnant wife… and the more we learn about this marriage (and his relationship with his father), the clearer it becomes that that’s why he’s joining the war.

Hundreds of pages later, we see Petya Rostov, Natasha’s little brother, tell his parents he wants to join the hussars:

Petya, to whom nobody was paying any attention, came up to his father with a very flushed face, and said in his breaking voice that was now deep and now shrill: “Well Papa, I tell you definitely, and Mama too, it’s as you please, but I say definitely that you must let me enter the army, because I can’t … that is all…” […]

“Come, come!” said [the count]. “Here’s a fine warrior! No! Nonsense! You must study.”

“It’s not nonsense, Papa! Fedya Obolensky is younger than I, and he’s going too. Besides, all the same, I can’t study now when…” Petya stopped short, flushed till he perspired, but still got out the words, “when our Fatherland is in danger.”

The conversation goes on for a while, with Petya asserting his right to do something important and manly, and his parents insisting that he isn’t a man, he’s a child (their child):

“Petya! Be quiet, I tell you!” cried the count with a glance at his wife, who had turned pale and was staring fixedly at her son. […] “Your mother’s milk has hardly dried on your lips and you want to go into the army!”

So… Petya joins the hussars. This is obviously torture for his mom (“The countess did not sleep at night, or when she did fall asleep dreamed that she saw her sons lying dead”). Her new life project is pulling strings to get Petya transferred to regiments where he can stay near home, ideally getting “him appointed to places where he could not possibly take part in a battle.”

This is really painful for Petya—to not be “seen” by his parents; to get special treatment compared to the other soldiers. The next time he comes home on leave, his mother receives him with “passionate tenderness,” but he treats her “coldly” and hangs out with Natasha. The countess is then jealous of Natasha (a recurring problem). At the earliest opportunity, Petya gets back into the war, rides into battle… and immediately gets shot.

The mom survives her grief only thanks to Natasha, who moves into her bedroom and ministers to her day and night for three weeks; by the end, Natasha is exhausted and losing her mind, and obviously marries the first guy who says anything nice to her (Pierre)… and by 1813 (the first epilogue), we see her turned into a psychological copy of her mom. Every time Pierre leaves home, Natasha enters a “constant state of alarm, depression, and irritability,” and compensates by obsessing over her infant son (who is also named Petya): “Natasha resorted to the baby for comfort so often, and fussed over him so much, that she overfed him and he fell ill. She was terrified by his illness, and yet that was just what she needed. While attending to him she bore the anxiety about her husband more easily.” If you look at the dates, it is all too easy to imagine this new Petya, in a panic to escape his mother’s unhappiness, rushing to Poland in 1830 to quash the November Uprising.

And if you look at why different characters in the book fight… I mean sure, there are various reasons. Boris Drubetskoy is obsessed with career advancement; Anatole Kuragin is the kind of dissolute novelistic youth who would have been an officer no matter what (so when there’s a war, he’s in it). But there is always some element of escaping an unbearable family dynamic (see, e.g., Boris’s mom, Anatole’s dad). The only major male character who doesn’t end up enlisting, Pierre, is an orphan.

So one way to read “War and Peace” is as a theory about the relationship between war and family misery: a phenomenon that Tolstoy didn’t view as negotiable, so he ends up characterizing it as a giant invisible lack of free will.

But if you look at Tolstoy’s narratives, including “Anna Karenina” and “The Kreutzer Sonata”—if you look (as Tolstoy himself did, frequently) at his wife, Sofia Andreyevna’s, diaries—one story you see is something like this:

“Young idealistic girls of good family are married off in their teens and, not having access to birth control, immediately start having babies at such a rate that they must soon relinquish all their own personal interests and identity in order to meet the grueling round-the-clock effort to breastfeed the babies, nurse them through illness, mourn the ones that die, and make sure the living children wind up speaking French. These young mothers start to look very different than they did when they got married, causing their husbands to spend more time out of the house. The babies thus become the mothers’ identity; the delightfulness of the babies (when they are delightful) is their only consolation, the babies feel like their only (hard-earned) property; they are not able to not feel this way when the babies get to be teenagers, and thus view the teens’ own interests as sort of an irrelevant addendum to the only real consideration, viz., their physical safety and availability to their mothers. This is so infuriating to the teens that they separate themselves as violently as possible—and for boys, that means joining the army, where they tend to get shot. For girls, it’s “romance” and men. (That is, for boys it’s also “romance” and men—but the romance of battle.) “Romance” is a gendered track that turns the boys into cannon fodder, and the girls into their own thwarted mothers.

“On one side, happy soldiers peacefully making cookies; on the other side, a family arguing violently at dinner”

This isn’t something Tolstoy would or could have written as a theory. He did write his share of theories and manifestos, but they’re really different from his novels and stories. They’re not as good. I think part of it is that his imagination is so granular, so sensitive to special cases, that he seems to be always thinking of exceptions, and reverse-engineering generalizations to try to fit the exceptions. Another part is that, like literally all people, Tolstoy experienced his own identity as defined by social roles and structures (class, gender, property, family, etc.). His rational mind couldn’t totally question the very structures that made it possible for him to hold his ego together and write books to begin with.

This is the thing with personal narrative: it lets you raise questions (and possible answers) that you couldn’t frame with your rational mind. Stories mediate between the conscious and the unconscious; storytelling is one of the most direct ways to transfer unconscious content into other people’s consciousness, so it can eventually become part of reasoned discourse. You can’t do or see or say everything yourself, right now—you’re one person! But, through narrative, you can communicate things you don’t know that you know, to people who live in the future, who can understand things that you don’t know yet. We are those people now, for Tolstoy. And later it will hopefully be someone else, for us.

Well, that’s my answer!, and although I can’t say that that particular student ran out of the office clicking her heels and shouting “Yippee!,” she did seem to be in a slightly different and perhaps slightly less frazzled mental state than when she came in, so I comfort myself that, regardless of what if anything she thought of my thoughts, at least I hopefully created a little bit of space for her to think her own thoughts in. To be honest, in such situations I think it’s less important what exactly you say, and more important that you’re there, sitting upright, capable of more-or-less cheerful engagement with the question (and not spreading the inner mope to college-age people) (subtweet to pedagogic mopesters).

Other than that, I did have one announcement I wanted to share, which is that on May 29 I will be interviewing Miranda July at Pioneerworks for the paperback launch of “All Fours” (“the talk of every group text”), except that by the time I found out there was a link, it was already sold out. But maybe some of you knew about it before I did, and I will see you there!

Lastly… yesterday I spent two incredible hours in the park, revisiting one of my favorite books about “War and Peace”: “Tolstoy in the Sixties” by Boris Eikhenbaum (he means the 1860s). (I am outraged that the Eikhenbaum Tolstoy books are out of print in English, but you can still find used copies of Duffield White’s translations published in the 1980s by noble heroic Ardis.) It was even better than I remembered! So today, as a bonus for paid subscribers I will share some takeaways from my honeymoon in the park with Boris. (I got a little carried away, so it’s 2000 words.)

The grass is never greener… (…than the face of young Tolstoy)

Thanks for reading!