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112 12. Absolutism: Claims about Universal Truth and Morality 12.1. The General Problem of Fictional Authority Where in Anna Karenina, other than the epigraph, is the claim made for an absolute and transcendent ethical norm? Before trying to answer this question , it is worth considering how seriously such claims can even be taken in a work of fiction. A novelistic character’s perception or judgment is usually presented as an individual point of view and thus subject to all the vagaries of personality , bias, and misperception that are commonly assumed to accompany individuality in our culture (errare humanum est). Consequently, the individual viewpoint is always open to question unless it is confirmed by something else in the work, such as the experiences of other important characters, which would suggest that they reflect dominant features of the novel’s fictional world, or by the narrator, assuming that he is sufficiently omniscient, consistent, and plausible to be judged reliable. In short, the validity and verisimilitude of a given character’s or narrator’s views are measured primarily by the criterion of the work’s internal consistency.1 Another way of putting this is that the narrator’s remarks will be accepted as the truth about a given fictional world or as reliable depictions of events in it only if the actions and views of characters do not contradict them. Whether or not the narrator’s and characters’ views are true in the sense of fitting the reader’s understanding of things in the “real” world is an important but secondary consideration with regard to deciding if something is meant to be true within a fictional work. The distance between what readers see as true in their own worlds and what they are willing to accept as the truth of fiction can be quite large. Thus, a man’s transformation into a beetle (“The Metamorphosis,” Franz Kafka), or a bronze statue’s coming to life (Petersburg, Andrei Bely), or a woman’s ascension into the sky (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez) are all readily accepted by many readers as “true” in this sense. Similarly, Pierre’s meeting with Davout in War and Peace, during which Pierre exchanges a look with the French marshal that the narrator characterizes as having “saved him from death” and showed them both that “they are brothers” (vol. 4, pt. 1, chap. 10), must be understood as an event that actually occurred in the sui generis world of that novel for the simple reason that it is presented as real by the narrator and not undermined by Pierre, Davout, or any other character . Some readers may not believe that such looks are possible, and the exceptionally credulous might have to be told that the event never actually occurred because Pierre is an invented character while Davout was an historical personage. But it would be an egregious misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the fictional world in which both characters coexist to claim that Pierre imagined or hallucinated the life-saving look or that it is unimportant in the novel’s hierarchy of meaning. Another example is the willingness of many readers to take at face value Father Zosima’s elevated spiritual position in Brothers Karamazov, which is acknowledged by most of the major, positive characters in the novel. It matters little if one does not personally believe in God, dislikes Zosima’s spirituality, or finds his monastic quietism unacceptable in the face of the social and political inequities widespread in late-nineteenth-century imperial Russia. The fact that Dostoevsky modeled Zosima in part on an actual monk, Paissy Velichkovsky , and an important Russian Orthodox spiritual tradition, and that Zosima happens therefore to be literally verisimilar, is something that most readers do not know or even care about when they are persuaded that Zosima functions as a kind of living saint in the novel.2 Zosima’s status is of course also not undermined by the fact that he occupies only one position in a series of complexly structured dialogic exchanges with Ivan and other characters. These are oppositional, but they are not inconsistent; and the essential role that Zosima plays in the relational meanings that emerge from the dialogues is the warrant of his fictional “reality.” Fictional authority in Anna Karenina is different from these examples because it is largely dualistic, but without being either dialogic or inconsistent . On the one hand, Tolstoy’s typical practice is to portray characters as existing...

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