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Distended Discourse: Gogol, Jean Paul, and the Poetics of Elaboration
- Northwestern University Press
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Cathy Popkin Distended Discourse: Gogol, Jean Paul, and the Poetics of Elaboration • TO GET TO the point: Gogolloves to elaborate. He seems unwilling to introduce even the most peripheral character without expatiating at length on his trousers, the material from which they were made, where that material was purchased, who is the richest man in that fabric-producing town, what kind of fence this affluent gentleman has built, who paints it, how regularly, whether oilbased paint is used, why or why not, and so on. He regales us with page-long catalogs of carriage types, veritable inventories of food and drink, and extended similes of unsurpassed extravagance. Whatever the point is, Gogol is not one to get straight to it. His prose is distended with details and digressions that threaten to swamp sense and impede narrative progress. This observation is hardly new-it reflects what we have come to recognize as Gogol's style. And ever since the first reviewers of Dead Souls derided Gogol for his compulsive stockpiling of things and his equally pathological deployment of irrelevant detail about them, critics have had to contend with this stylistic peculiarity in one way or another. 1 The morass of minutiae has been read variously as Gogol's commitment to "naturalistic" representation,2 as a clever way of including "all of Russia,"3 as a rich source of humor,4 as an artifact of an earlier attraction to the fantastic,5 as a network of symbols pointing to something greater,6 as a general celebration of "plenitude,"7 as an exhaustive catalog of human vices,8 as a ruse to distract the tsarist censors from his searing social commentary,9 as evidence of a propensity for the carnivalistic,IO as a reflection of widespread linguistic upheaval,l1 and as plain old stylistic excess.12 But whatever explanation or complaint it has occasioned, Gogol's gift of gab has rarely gone unnoticed. Robert Maguire has commented that recent scholarship seems to follow two general critical tendencies to contend with Gogol's char185 Cathy Popkin acteristic excess.!.3 The first, to which Maguire himself subscribes, views each detail as inherently meaningful. Although Gogor's fervor for "data" is seldom regarded any more as an index of his realism,14 his energetic invocation of things and names for things, according to this first point of view, "establishes [them] as ... solid and unforgettable presence[s] and conditions us to regard any small detail as potentially important." The now famous detail of the bronze pin from Tula (VI:7), for instance, teaches us "that we must sharpen our eyes lest we miss important clues."!.5 Reading Gogol, then, becomes a challenge to interpret these abundant "clues," to ferret out these significations and to discern the order and logic in the apparent untidiness , to urge the text to reveal its "secrets."16 Hence many of the ingenious sense-making ventures of current Gogol criticism; hence Carl Proffer's contention that the apparently gratuitous detail of Gogor's similes is actually scrupulously selected and exceedingly pertinent; hence James Woodward's insistence on the absolute expressiveness of each and every element and the coherence of the whole; hence, also, while very different in approach, Daniel Rancour -Laferriere's psychoanalytic attributions." For the orthodox Freudian there are no accidents and no superfluous details. IS As Michel Foucault comments in reference to narrative specificity and another kind of orthodoxy, "for the true believer no detail is unimportant ." It must be seen precisely as a testimony of faith when Vsevolod Setchkarev declares, in awestruck wonder, that in Gogol, "every little episode, every descriptive stroke, every ever-so-tiny detail has a critical significance for the work as a whole."19 But as Naomi Schorr points out, to read in detail in this way is, "however tacitly, to invest the detail with a truth-bearing function, and yet ... the truth value of the detail is anything but assured."20 Or, leaving "truth" aside, we might say that the "significance" or even the "substance" of the details-the solidity and presence averred by Maguire et al.-is anything but assured. If we persist in "sharpening our eyes" on every Gogolian bronze pin that appears only to disappear, we are likely to go blind. Thus, proponents of the second inclination, who might criticize the first as a kind of "semiotic totalitarianism," hesitate to interpret the verbal clutter, even allowing the details to stand as rampant signifiers whose exuberance is quite independent of their well-bracketed...