The Stony Dance: Unity and Gesture in Andrey Bely's Petersburg

Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten Pulsations of the Elemental Body AT THE BEGINNING of the novel, as Dudkin is on his way to deliver the bomb to Nikolai Apollonovich, he stops at a dingy restaurant where a cacophony of voices assaults him with fragments of conversation. It is not an occasion for orderly thought, and yet his brain cannot stop working . “He was thinking, and he wasn’t. His thoughts were thinking themselves” (18). This theme, the self-thinking thought—together with the related theme of cerebral play—runs through the entire novel and appears to provide a sort of linchpin connecting object and subject, world and mind, immanent and transcendent. Aristotle conceived of God as self-thinking thought,1 and so it is no surprise that many of Petersburg’s readers have found in this theme a key to the higher world as Bely conceives it. Maria Carlson, for example, argues that cerebral play refers to “the individual consciousness’ creation and subsequent projection onto the astral plane of thought forms that then assume a palpable reality on the physical plane.”2 Thought, “idle” at first, goes to another (astral) plane, acquires form there, and returns with new significance to “our” world. It is a circular motion; it is thinking itself. Yet as we have seen, Vladimir Alexandrov emphasizes motion in the opposite direction, from transcendent to immanent: self-thinking thoughts, like artistic inspiration, thrust down into individual brains. Who is doing the thinking? Is it natural to concern oneself with agency? After all, the phrase “thought thinking itself” is notable for its subtraction of the thinker. But we might also inquire after the object: What is this self-thinking thought thinking about? Dudkin’s thoughts “produced a picture: tarpaulins, hawsers, herring, sacks crammed full of something” (18), yet this description hardly explains the meaning of those self-thinking thoughts. Are they, as Bely says elsewhere, “idle”? Are they fragmentary, each thought generating an isolated image and then abandoning it? Or do they cohere? We may ask the same questions of a book, which, it seems, is a wonderful example of self-thinking thoughts. Thought it certainly is, or at least contains , yet once it is written it does not require the activity of any particular 148 brain at any particular time. It accepts input—from its author, initially, but also from the knowledge, experience, and thoughts of its readers—and it generates output, in the form of more thoughts, experiences, and even knowledge . It has a curious sort of relation with the world, separate yet connected, self-sufficient yet dependent, complete yet open. That is why it is so difficult even to define—let alone to describe—the meaning and unity of a literary work of art. In 1922, the same year he published the second edition of Petersburg, Bely also published a “sound poem” called Glossalolia. In the preface to that poem, he tries to describe the connection between the “subjective improvisation ” and “fantasy” that guide the verbal and acoustic surface of the poem, and the “nonsubjective root” of his composition. He is, in other words, trying to establish the meaning—or at least the basis for a meaning—of his own “cerebral play.” After all, observing a speaker, seeing his gestures but not hearing the content of his speech in the distance, we can nonetheless determine the content through his gestures, such as “fear,” “delight,” “indignation.” We conclude that the (content of the) speech, inaudible to us, is “something delightful,” or “frightful.” We later find out that the speaker was warning against something, trying to instill in the crowd the fear of something; and we understand that our perception of the gesture corresponded fully to the content that we could not hear.3 Why discuss gesture in the introduction to a piece of experimental verbal art? Because for Bely, wordplay is a sort of gesture, and gesture communicates content. Bely’s example illuminates but does not really solve the problem. It is one thing to identify and perhaps even interpret individual gestures, but in what sense can a complex group of gestures, such as those of our imaginary speaker or—more complex still—of Bely’s own literary works, be said to form a coherent, unified meaning? And what sorts of “meanings” can be communicated in this way? A couple of negative answers present themselves immediately. We might think that gesture is a crude substitute for words, useful only when interlocutors are too distant in...