Tolstoy's Phoenix: From Method to Meaning in War and Peace

Introduction

Introduction HOW DID TOLSTOY do it? How did he so believably narrow the gap between fiction and life? There is hardly a critic (pro or con) since \Var and Peace was first published who has not, one way or another, paid homage to his "verisimilitude,"! to the "unique illusion of reality" he created,2 the "cdebratedlife-likeness of every object and every person in his world,"~ to the point whcre they seem to "inhabit our world, like everybody else,"4 and are brought to life "as if Nature were guiding his pen,",5 so that "you feel the world is writing,"6 that his plot is "simply the unquestioned and unalterable process of life itself,'" with "no hard lines between the life of the book and the life beyond it.'" Lifelikeness is his distinguishing quality, his logo, signature, watermark~the eHcct which, if you don't emphasize it, you must not be talking about \Var and Peace. Yet to ask how he achieves it seems, in some inarguable sense, both irreverent and naive. It is irreverent because one shouldn't mess around with magic. As Lionel Trilling put it, with what can only be described as a joyful consciousness of inadequacy, "there are moments in literature which do not yield the secret of their power to any study of language ... times when the literary critic can do nothing more than point."9 This piety echoes Philip Rahv, that normally sharp-clawed lion ofthe early Partisan Redew: "In the bracing Tolstoyan air, the critic, however addicted to analysis, cannot help doubting his own task," sensing that there is "something presumptuous and even unnatural which requires an almost artificial deliberateness of intention, in the attempt to dissect an art so wonderfully integrated."lo And if, despite such warnings, the sacrilegious attempt is actually made, naiVete must mark its course, for of all writers surely Tolstoy is the least rooted in purely literary soil, the most nourished by broader, deeper sources. "Ifyou take any chapter of Tolstoy's," said Isaac Babel, "you will find great heaps of everything~there is philosophy, death. And you might think that to write like this you need legerdemain, extraordinary technical skill. But all this is submerged in the feeling for the universe by which Tolstoy was guided."11 What Babel called Tolstoy'S "feeling for the universe," others referred to as his "moral quality,"12 his "inclusiveness,"I:] his "religious, moral, and philosophical conceptions."14 George Steiner felt that "awareness of 'how the thing is done' yields only a preliminary insight," for "whatever we may Tolstoy's Phoenix note regarding Tolstoy's poetics is of value principally in that it provides the necessary approach to ... his doctrines ... of experience."].') In the words of Renato Poggioli: "Only by being as opinionated as he was could Tolstoy have written what and how he did."16 While I don't subscribe to Steiner's order ofpriorities, I don't for a moment disagree with Poggioli: Tolstoy's opinions are of the essence. But I'd add that his opinions would be of minor importance were he not so effective a novelist. And no matter how dedicated to what Steiner calls his "doctrines of experience," he could not have written the fiction he did without a powerful "system of devices"17-strategies that in part owe their existence to his strong didactic urge, yet without which he could not have discovered what he thought and felt. For as Mark Schorer has brilliantly demonstrated, technique is not "merely a means [of] organizing material which is 'given'''; it is "the means of exploring and defining the values in an area of experience which, for the first time then, are being given." It is, indeed, "the only means [the writer1has of discovering, exploring, developing his subject, of conveying its meaning, and, finally, of evaluating it."IR If Schorer is right, then my question-How did he do it?-is neither naive nor irreverent. But it is still a slippery one to answer, mving to the complexity and importance of Tolstoy's techniques. By their very integration, his admixture of motion, immediacy, and open-endedness makes critical analysis unwieldy. It's a Catch-22 situation: if War and Peace weren't so lifelike, it would be a lot easier to say how it got to be so lifelike. As John Bayley put it, "Like the current of life itself he is difficult to remember. What was I doing last Thursday week?" We remember best when...