The Bond of the Furthest Apart: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Bresson, and Kafka by Sharon Cameron (review)

Sharon Cameron's book The Bond of the Furthest Apart takes its title from Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer: "The insensible bond, connecting your furthest apart and most different images, is your vision" (qtd in Cameron 6). What renders the bond "insensible," Cameron argues, is our proclivity to see things in terms of categories, distinctions, and oppositions that keep them apart. Her book, like Bresson's cinematography, loosens conventional boundaries as it works to reveal its own "insensible" connections both thematically and structurally.

Structurally, the book thus points to the question of its own inclusivity. The artists at its core, Bresson, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, can be brought together in a conventional way: Bresson adapted work by both writers. True to Bresson's spirit, however, Cameron does not rely on such obvious categories as nineteenth-century Russian prose and film adaptation to defend her constellation of primary texts. Instead she teases out a more tenuous, more originally imagined thread of connections between the filmmaker and the writers. These connections have to do with the non-narrative, non-symbolic impulses (or pulses) of, largely, storytelling texts. Perhaps the starkest outlier is the final chapter on Kafka. The resonance Cameron discovers between his works and the others is more poetically imagined than logically constructed. This is not a criticism.

Cameron makes the usual gestures to convince editors and readers to accept a collection of essays as a book: she states in the first sentence that her various chapters "can be read with an eye to a set of shared concerns, or they can be read separately" (1). They can be read in both of these ways. But a significant part of what makes this interesting as a book is her surprising choice of what to include. Her decisions dramatize one of the book's recurrent concerns: the opposition between inside and outside. Her primary texts variously strain against being bound together, and Cameron happily foregrounds this centrifugal force, pointing out in her first paragraph the clash between the "affectlessness" of Bresson's nonprofessional actors and "the histrionics of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists" (1). Bresson works in a different medium from everyone else. Dostoevsky's investment in Orthodox Christianity runs counter to Cameron's focus on nonteleological, nonredemptive, affective, animal experience. "The Sight of Death in Tolstoy" explicitly points to a critical text about another medium, T.J. Clark's engrossing, idiosyncratic book about two paintings by Nicolas Poussin. And in the stories she chooses to discuss ("At Night," "The Burrow," "Investigations of a Dog," and "The Metamorphosis"), Kafka does not concern himself, like the others, with the empiricism of his characters and their story worlds.

Even the editorial apparatus raises the question of inside and outside. There are sixty-four pages of footnotes for two hundred pages of text. Many footnotes have enough substance and pertinence to fit comfortably in the bodies of the essays. Cumulatively, the notes establish trust in Cameron's command of the critical response to these relatively far-flung works and further explore intricacies of the ethical and ontological questions she addresses to her aesthetic experience.

The achievement of this book, with its motley crew of gifted storytellers, is to extract from their art the imaginative resources to think and perceive, at least momentarily, outside blinkering, enculturated categories and ideas. Cameron taps Spinoza's "The Ethics" to make clear the stakes of her readings: "elucidations of why things happen, of what things are ('good,' 'evil,' 'warm,' 'cold'), and of how they should be valued are no more than 'modes of imagining' what is adventitious to us and 'do not indicate the nature of anything'" (11). Her subtle descriptions goad her readers to let themselves again be bewildered, or astonished, by such classic texts as Au hasard Balthazar, The Idiot, and War and Peace. Informed by contemporary, theoretical questioning of interiority and exteriority, human and animal, and what it means to think...