Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace by Gary Saul Morson (review)

246Rocky Mountain Review Some of the most interesting parts of Martin's exposition have to do with the conventions of realism, which are often taken to be the "degree zero" of narrative/novelistic writing, and how the nonrealistic conventions of modernist and postmodernist writing have gone hand in hand with the development of specific theoretical postulates about the relationship between fiction and society. Of particular importance is the discussion of reader-based theories of narrative and how narrative is read in ways that transcend the impoverishing distinction between fact and fiction, referentiality and metafiction. Martin includes excellent bibliographic references, along with succinct annotations. Except for the confessed avoidance of a treatment of ideological theories of the novel, Martin provides a solid introduction to the major issues oftheoretical writing about narrative. DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER Arizona State University GARY SAUL MORSON. Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in War and Peace. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987. 322 p. The title of Gary Saul Morson's book announces to the reader a central thesis of its author: that Tolstoy wished to say in War and Peace that the simple, seemingly insignificant, and scarcely noticed events in life are the only ones that can have importance. Since Tolstoy stated this controversial position clearly enough, Morson's restatement of it is not controversial. His contribution to our understanding of War and Peace and of its author lies instead in observations and speculations about the way Tolstoy's belief in causative minimalism shaped his ideas about history, psychology, and narrative form embodied in War and Peace. Morson believes that there is in War and Peace a sustained attack on what he calls "semiotic totalitarianism." In using this term Morson has in mind "all models of human behavior, all 'theories of history' (or psychology) which purport to show that, behind the multiplicity of apparently accidental or random facts of historical life, there is really a set of rules, a system, or a pattern that can explain everything" (84). The received idea of what a novel should be, according to Morson, is one of the tyrannies against which Tolstoy aimed his work, which he refused to call a novel. Morson confirms the view of early critics of War and Peace that the work is highly idiosyncratic, and insists moreover that the idiosyncrasies were carefully planned and executed. "For Tolstoy," writes Morson, "most novels are false because they impose too much order" (143). Thus the fact War and Peace does not seem to have a meaningful point of beginning or ending, and that several major and minor characters disappear without leaving the reader with an understanding of their function in the novel's design, are not, in Morson's view, the incidental effects caused by the great length and complexity of the work. Rather such features of the work are to be understood as a deliberate effrontery to those who would impose their views about compositional order in the novel. An unusual feature ofMorson's book is the large amount of space devoted to Dostoevsky and to Mikhail Bakhtin's writings about Dostoevsky. Morson Book Reviews247 obviously feels that showing the sort of writer Tolstoy was not (i.e., Dostoevsky ) helps one to understand his correct relation to his art. In describing Tolstoy's tendency to include in War and Peace "absolute language," Morson observes that, unlike the chatter and chatty narrators encountered in Dostoevsky's novels, Tolstoy's authorial voice is, as Bakhtin would have it, "nondialogized" (19). Morson suggests, moreover, that War and Peace uses "polyphony of incident" as a structural device, similar to the polyphony of speech Bakhtin finds in Dostoevsky's cast of characters. In his discussion of the critique of history writing found in War and Peace, Morson lays himself open to a charge of over-statement. When he tells us that Tolstoy is attacking all models of human behavior that claim to explain everything, he ignores the inescapable fact that Tolstoy spoke approvingly at various times of models that claimed to explain a great deal. The often cited and very striking similarities between the views of Tolstoy in War and Peace and those of Schopenhauer are not even mentioned by Morson...