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Chapter Ten Encompassing Humanity IF WAR AND PEACE has a climax, it is the two engagement scenes that lead to the two Rostov marriages-not for what they resolve so much as for what they reveal about the novel's organizing conception. But climactic or not, this tale is not about courtship and marriage. Tolstoy chooses episodes, scenes, incidents, interactions, even fleeting gestures that will allow him to replicate the phoenix design, and ends up with a plot converging on the marriages of four protagonists and the death of a fifth. But that plot doesn't lead, it follows. The novel is really about becoming aware ofthe symbiotic relationship between all opposites-but most importantly between ends and beginnings , life and death. As we saw in the last chapter, Tolstoy'S principle of selection is this phoenix design. By dramatizing its replications, he is rendering his conception ofwhat happens the most-not just to five protagonists but to everyone, everywhere, at any time. The people in this novel are fruitful or barren, thrive or desiccate, depending on whether they eventually realize the limits oftheir own free will and, submitting to necessity, are reborn. To dramatize this as the law of life, Tolstoy creates a whole world around his five protagonists, a sample large enough to constitute a cross section of humanity. And this becomes possible because his protagonists develop quite independently of one another, so that each can introduce us to her or his separate world. In a conventional dramatic novel concerning courtship and marriageturn to PridR and Prejudice once more-the hero and heroine develop through each other. There are bound to be misunderstandings, discoveries, nasty or harmonious complications stemming from conflicts between the perfectly, if paradoxically, matched pair. Quick, playful, dogmatic Elizabeth is convinced that she is justified in disliking haughty, exasperating, yet appreciative Darcy. Before she changes her mind he must either revise or justify his pride and she, in consequence, her prejudice-and every subsidiary character, as well as every event, is chosen primarily to advance that process. In particular, Austen 's other pairings-Jane and Bingley, Lydia and Wickham, Charlotte and Mr. Collins-are there to exacerbate the Elizabeth-Darcy difficulties, and 97 Tolstoy's Phoenix then to provide opportunities for solving them, thereby enlivening the process of their totally interdependent growth as initial dislike dovetails snugly with secret attraction and leads eventually to mature love. Moreover, the maturing of that love, and of the lovers through it, is Jane Austen's subject, as we have known since her wonderfully succinct opening sentence, her donnee: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." The key to her novel's structure is interdependence. Each main character is the direct cause of the other's development and their relationship, with all its nuances and misunderstandings, is what generates the tension. Irony comes from our knowing each protagonist better than either knows the other, but what we know are just those things which, ifthe other knew them, would cement their relationship-for the only obstacles to this happy outcome are the lovers themselves, and therein lies our interest. Anticipation comes from our being aware that whether these two marry depends entirely on whether they want to marry. Since everything is up to them, we are eager to discover how they will handle the unfolding complexities. By contrast, Pierre and Natasha, as well as Nicholas and Princess Mary, develop independently, not through but for one another. Tolstoy'S donnee is not a family of unmarried daughters and single men in possession of a good fortune, but five protagonists, each with a different set of false assumptions about how best to use her or his will. And while vVar and Peace has an unusual number of superficial narrative features in common with Pride and Prejudice,l Tolstoy'S novel (despite Lubbock's fears) is not a double romance but an old-fashioned cautionary tale about hubris-about how his protagonists progress, for the most part independently, from personal arrogance, to sometimes bitter disillusionment, to joyful or at least serene submission to the gods' integrative pattern. That pattern, rather than courtship and marriage , is the novel's focus. Unlike Pride and Prejudice, tension in Tolstoy'S novel is scarcely determined by the way things work out between the paired protagonists. Pierre spends almost the entire novel married to Helene; and Natasha, from the age of seventeen...

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