The Stalin Problem

Lenin of course had started to take into the Party, or to make sympathetic to the Party, many specialists, doctors, professional men in general, the fact is that many people with low qualifications went up to chairs of faculties or departments, in the institute that were being created right and left. They needed people to fill the vacant posts that were created by these institutes. Part of the old professionals had emigrated or part had been repressed. Some people who had no qualifications or almost no qualifications received very high positions. It must be said that very few of the old intellectuals went over to the Soviets or Communists because of ideology. It is very difficult, just impossible to say exactly what a man actually feels in his heart. You can judge a man only by his actions, what he does and how he does it. Therefore almost all believed that many of these people did not like the Soviets. Actually they behavedlike Soviets or Communists and therefore climbed up very rapidly. In 1930 the six points of Stalin were a turning point and it was decided by the Party to create their new Soviet cadres. There had been purge of cadres in 1924, and in 193o a second purge followed. Both purges, as to the loyalty of these people were under the supervision of the party. The loyalty of these people could be challenged by either one or a combination of the three following agencies: The GPU, or through complaints which could be mailed to the party, or complaints which could be dropped into a special complaints box, or at the assembly where these persons were discussed. Someone could get up and accuse somebody of not being a good Soviet citizen and this person would then be accused of being harmful.
- Harvard Refugee Interview Project, Schedule B, Vol. 21, Case 40

The Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System is a uniquely fascinating body of documents, although, strangely enough, it is virtually unknown outside of a shrinking group of specialists. On the most basic level, the project consisted of a large-scale attempt to interview hundreds of Soviet citizens who had either fled the USSR during or after the war or had been left behind by the retreating wave of German occupation. The result was not the litany of misfortunes borne and evils suffered that one might expect from a Cold War research effort. Instead, it was a pile of conflicting and contradictory human stories that--while certainly leaving the reader with no pleasant impression of the Soviet Union--revealed a much more comprehensible and complex society than the Western reader would have had any reason to expect. The Russians, it turned out, not only "loved their children too" but also hated their better-paid neighbors--and that with as much vigor as any American suburbanite.

Most readers, of course, never saw the interviews. What they saw was a respectable-sized monograph crammed full of tables and entitled The Soviet Citizen. From a contemporary vantage point, this text has value mostly as a curiosity. Its Parsonian assumptions and preoccupations render it quite boring even for the academic reader. Of course, it's hard to deny the value of this kind of research, even when it has little historical staying power. But what makes it problematic is the way it concealed the rich substance of the narrative sources underneath. Despite the deliberate history-blindness of the interviewers and the questions, we can certainly poke and prod at the texts they produced to figure out the mindsets that drove their subjects as representatives of the Stalin era--it's just that we still haven't tried very hard.

One overriding quality distinguishes these transcripts from the prodigious Jewish personal literature that was popularized in the United States in the wake of the Holocaust. Where Anne Frank and Primo Levi are very much aware that they are the subjects (or, rather, objects) of a campaign of extermination, this seemingly obvious fact escapes the Russians completely. They feel themselves victimized as peasants, as workers, or as Party members, but they never make the intellectual leap to a total notion of state terror orchestrated by Stalin against something called "the Soviet people"--or even, for that matter, the Ukrainians. It is important that this inability or unwillingness to conceptualize oneself in this way did not come from a overly-limited sense of historical perspective or myopia. As recent work on the Soviet Union has shown, even non-intellectuals living under Stalin displayed an exceptional sense of the grandeur and historical significance of the events they were experiencing. The Great October Revolution, with all the appropriate capital letters, was comprehensible to them; the Great Stalinist Terror was not.

The endless debate over who was worse, Hitler or Stalin, will probably always be with us. It's hard to resolve it in a satisfying way: neither Zizek's nostalgic socialism nor the body-count approach of most liberal thinkers is at all appealing. (Why shouldn't we consider how many people were born as well?) These interviews, though they of course discuss much more than that, help us see one way out of the dilemma. The Holocaust was, on its own terms, one thing; the Stalinist terror was a whole complex of things, none of which could be judged unambiguously. From the peasants' perspective, what happened to the Party members in 1937 was either well-deserved or unworthy of notice in comparison to their own plight from 1929 onwards. From the perspective of many Party members, the peasants, while undoubtedly oppressed and put-upon, were a recalcitrant, reactionary mass that largely deserved its fate.

It is in this sense that the events of the Stalin period were, and remain, much more challenging to received ideas than the Holocaust was. The evil of the Holocaust is a matter of consensus for the victims and, nowadays, even the perpetrators. (The success of Holocaust denial within the larger ecosystem of extreme-right thought is symptomatic of this development.) By contrast, few things frustrate liberal critics of Russia more than the country's apparent refusal to repudiate or even to distance itself emotionally from the heritage of the Stalin era. For contemporary as well as past Russians, there is no need or even possibility of using sophisticated theoretical arguments to prove the link between modernity and mass terror. The two are intertwined so thoroughly that the ability to judge them as a whole disappears--and the link no longer functions as the decisive evidence for a postmodern case against modernity. History, in this case, has fragmented the exhibits of the case beyond recognition.

[I'm going to be posting four times a month, as opposed to six, from now on. Grad school is finally taking its toll. Also, here are a few newish translations of Mayakovsky.]

Dunces

To be honest, I wept not for my father but for the children. On the way home, we passed by a corner of Bolshoi Prospekt, where last winter I'd had a little breakdown for the stupidest of reasons. I had seen a dozen kindergarten pupils trying to cross the boulevard, each bundled in a jaunty collection of misshapen coats, their shapkas falling off their tiny heads, their feet encased in monstrous hand-me-down galoshes. A boy and a girl, one at the front and one in the back, held aloft giant red flags to warn motorists they were deigning to cross. A young, pretty teacher was on hand to help them ambulate in the right direction. Who knows why--primordial memory, a sudden reprise of my stunted conscience, a big man's evolutionary compassion for anything small--but I wept for the children that day.

Diminutive, cherubic, Slavic, they stood by the teeming Bolshoi Prospekt with those idiotic red flags, their puffy faces producing small steam clouds that looked like little child-thoughts struggling in the monumental cold. The cars kept passing them, the rich man's Audi and the poor man's Lada. No one would pause to let them past. As we waited for the light to change, I opened my window and leaned out, blinking like a great Northern turtle in the chill, trying to read their faces. Were those smiles I saw? Delicate new teeth, wisps of blond hair peering out from the fortress of their hats, and grateful, unmistakable grins accompanied by disciplined Petersburg children's laughter. Only the schoolteacher--silent, straight, proud in the way only a Russian woman who makes US$30 a month could be--seemed cognizant of the collective future that awaited her charges.
-Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan

I have an unhealthy relationship with contemporary fiction. Normally I avoid it, although I pretend to have read the books in conversation and somehow feel free to make fun of them anyway. I clutch my boring old classics to myself like a shield whenever some well-intentioned person recommends me something by Lethem or McCarthy. When I find a contemporary-fiction book in a used bookstore, though, I have to buy it. I grab it in my greasy little hands and devour it the same day, relishing simultaneously the fact that it's not as good as I was afraid it would be and the fact that it's so much more fun to read than whatever I claim to like. I'm not proud.

In this case, though, I barely got any relishing in before I was overcome by nausea. When I'd slogged through Bykov's ZhD earlier this summer, I diverted myself with a reverie about how a book so virulently hateful and ridiculous could never be published in a "normal country." ("Normal country" appears to be a purely Russian phrase that means something like "whatever one imagines the civilized world beyond the Russian border to be like." Russia can never be a "normal country," which should be obvious given the definition but produces wailing and gnashing of teeth whenever it's brought up in public.) Americans are sensitive, and American Jews especially so--surely nothing edgier than Woody Allen could fly with that crowd.

I was wrong. As it turns out,  Absurdistan is the ZhD for the American market, except instead of Bykov the cardboard Jewish fascist it's written by Shteyngart the giggling Jewish minstrel. This plotless piece of authorial self-indulgence consists entirely of a parade of stereotype-jokes about Russians, Central Asians, and Jews, half of which are so obvious as to be offensive in a profound Kantian kind of way and the other half of which make no sense whatsoever and have zero relationship to reality. Shteyngart appears to believe that the fact that he is a Russian Jewish immigrant makes him an automatic expert on all three cultures and a sublime comic satirist to boot. But he is not so much Woody Allen--hell, not so much Yakov Smirnoff--as he is Carlos Mencia. Like Mencia, the distinguishing feature of his jokes is that they could have easily been written by a bleary-eyed white scriptwriter with a racist streak. At no point do the scattered moments of schmaltz and fake "genuine emotion" redeem the sorry spectacle, and Shteyngart's annoying insistence on bringing in the self-mocking author-proxy "Jerry Shteynfarb" just makes the whole thing look desperate.

Worst of all, the story is constructed, in some perverse way, as an allusion to A Confederacy of Dunces: the soon-to-be-redeemed protagonist is a fat, ugly guy with a bad personality and off-putting sexual habits. But Shteyngart seems to have misunderstood the point of Ignatius J. Reilly entirely. Reilly was such a powerful character because he was simultaneously repulsive, pitiful, and sublimely majestic; Shteyngart tries to go for the repulsive by putting in plenty of Russian-transliterated dick jokes, but evidently has too little talent for the other two components. Misha is more annoying than pitiful, and majestic isn't anywhere on this book's radar.

Absurdistan, for better or for worse, seems to represent the logical endpoint of "immigrant lit" as a genre. Cutesy morals about the importance of culture and family, in fiction as in college admission essays, no longer satisfy the market; neither do narcissistic ruminations on the theme of Where Do I Belong. What we're left with is minstrelsy. The author dresses up in his national costume and hops around on stage for the benefit of a public that doesn't get his inside jokes or care about the people under the makeup. As a designated representative of his assigned minority group, he is their passport to a world of edgy jokes that none of them would ever repeat in public but that they are more than happy to laugh at. Should we criticize this? After all, taking the whole thing too seriously is an equally annoying affectation. I can only propose that we avoid it when it leads to books that are as bad as this.

Gentlemen and Scholars

It was from this tradition that Fredson Bowers's Principles of Bibliographical Description emerged in 1949. Bowers's great book was a creative synthesis, consolidating what had gone before and adding to it. Every statement in the book presupposes the value of descriptive bibliography as a branch of historical scholarship and affirms the importance, for the study of the past, of placing on record the details that characterize the various objects called books. As Bowers says at the outset, a descriptive bibliography treats a series of books "so that the relations of their texts are clarified and the method of publication of all forms of each individual volume is determined" (p. 16, in italics); a bibliography aims "to present all the evidence about a book which can be determined by analytical bibliography applied to a material object" (p. 34). His book provides a model both for thinking about the subject at large and for handling the multitude of individual situations that can arise: it is the central document of its field, and not likely to be supplanted.

Its arrival on the scene was not greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm, however, and the misgivings it aroused in some people are profoundly significant for understanding the peculiarly divided history of the field. The key illustration is perhaps offered by the March 1953 meeting of the Bibliographical Society in London, where Geoffrey Keynes delivered an address, "Religio Bibliographici," summing up his "aims and beliefs as an amateur." One might have expected Keynes, as the author (at that time) of eight acclaimed bibliographies and the president of the society that had fostered the growth of scholarly bibliography, to welcome Bowers's book; instead, he held it responsible for a "shadow which seems in recent years to have descended over our amiable bibliographical discipline." The publication of the Principles, he said, "brought home to our consciousness the fact that what we had thought in our innocence was a pleasant, if sometimes exacting, pastime, was in fact a prime example of 'pure scholarship,' to be pursued with the mind of a detective, the spiritual temperature of an iceberg, and the precision of a machine" (p. 374). Although Keynes did wish to contribute to "the sum of knowledge" (p. 391), he did not, strangely enough, seem to understand that any bibliographer, amateur or professional, with such an aim must strive to work at the highest level of precision and rigorous thinking -- nor did he see that this approach does not exclude humanity from the work.
- G. Thomas Tanselle, "A Description of Descriptive Bibliography"

Over the past year I have become increasingly interested in the history of the book--a relatively young academic discipline which focuses on books and other printed (and manuscript!) materials from the point of view of their production, manufacturing, distribution, and so on, ignoring their content as much as possible. The work being done in this area is so remarkably fresh and interesting that it is almost enough to overcome my typical cynicism about my field. Where else can you talk to experts on Ottoman miscellanies and nineteenth-century academic databases and still have productive discussions about method and interpretation?  Even better, the field has increasingly positioned itself as, for lack of a better phrase, "after theory," and thus it has evaded much of the boring jibberjabber that has surrounded Big Theory and its demise. The genetic code of book history includes many more stuffy old bibliographers, librarians, and paleographers than German philosophers, and that makes it somehow comforting.

One of the things I like most about the field is the resolute way in which it avoids book fetishism. For book historians, the book is not a symbol of all that's good and literary in the world, it is a shifting and historically-contingent form whose development has always been accompanied by complaints and crises. As a result, they do not hesitate to ask serious questions about the potential of the Internet and electronic books--and they don't automatically assume that the book is headed for an apocalyptic Wall-E-esque demise. Like any other medium, the electronic book can be manipulated, played with, marked up, invested with emotional significance; what matters is how it does this.

The divide within bibliography Tanselle hints at above--between gentleman-amateurs and scientifically-minded professionals--is currently being replicated, it seems to me, within the culture of book readers as a whole. Primarily the debate is about electronic media and digitization. It's not that this is a question of seriousness per se: people who fetishize printed books are often very serious readers and scholars, and the objections that have been raised about the archival survivability of digital media cannot be ignored. The difference seems to be of another kind: book-fetishists and digital-media enthusiasts belong to two distinct intellectual traditions. The former are linked to the gentleman-bibliographers, to seventeenth-century virtuosi, and to Walter Benjamin's obsessive-compulsive book collector; the latter can trace their genealogies to John Milton, John Adams, and Marshall McLuhan.

If I had to summarize the distinction, I would put it this way. The first group treats the book as an icon, a sacred object whose function and meaning is its representational connection to some kind of abstract notion of "culture." The second treats it as a metonymy for an entire imagined network of circulation of ideas and information. When the second group starts talking about abandoning the book as a form or dissecting it with scientific detachment, the first responds with incredulity and incomprehension, because it cannot imagine another type of object substituting for their icon. The second group is equally unable to understand the first, because for them, the book has no meaning in itself--since it can only be conceptualized in the context of a network of exchange, any attempt to treat it as being valuable on its own terms would negate its fundamental essence. The two sides are unable to understand each other, and this seems to be why most Internet debates about this subject are unable to escape descending into senseless blabber.

Book history, at least in theory, has the potential to help us overcome this divide. Naturally a scientific or scientistic approach to the history of the book cannot be sufficient, because book culture (a fundamental focus of the field), even the microhistory of individual books and volumes, includes intellectual and affective dimensions that it will not capture. But because book history is already so familiar with the boundaries between media, and with the ways they can be challenged and blurred, it is particularly well-placed to demonstrate to us that the book as a form is not a coherent concept that can easily be encircled by wagons. Both sides are wrong, as often happens--and the future of the humanities will depend on who realizes it first.

Malory and After

The jousting went all day and into the dusk, the hooves of the great warhorses pounding down the lists until the field was a ragged wasteland of torn earth. A dozen times Jeyne and Sansa cried out in unison as riders crashed together, lances exploding into splinters while the commons screamed for their favorites. Jeyne covered her eyes whenever a man fell, like a frightened little girl, but Sansa was made of sterner stuff. A great lady knew how to behave at tournaments. Even Septa Mordane noted her composure and nodded in approval.

The Kingslayer rode brilliantly. He overthrew Ser Andar Royce and the Marcher Bryce Caron as easily as if he were riding at rings, and then took a hard-fought match from white-haired Barristan Selmy, who had won his first two tilts against men thirty and forty years his junior.

Sandor Clegane and his immense brother, Ser Gregor the Mountain, seemed unstoppable as well, riding down one foe after the next in ferocious style. The most terrifying moment of the day came during Ser Gregor's second joust, when his lance rode up and struck a young knight from the Vale under the gorget with such force that it drove through his throat, killing him instantly. The youth fell not ten feet from where Sansa was seated. The point of Ser Gregor's lance had snapped off in his neck, and his life's blood flowed out in slow pulses, each weaker than the one before. His armor was shiny new, a bright streak of fire ran down his outstretched arm, as the steel caught the light. Then the sun went behind a cloud, and it was gone. His cloak was blue, the color of the sky on a clear summer's day, trimmed with a border of crescent moons, but as his blood seeped into it, the cloth darkened and the moons turned red, one by one.

- George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

If Glen Cook's Black Company series aimed to rearrange the content of fantasy, George R. R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire aims to rearrange its form. Both are, in their own ways, technically excellent productions, although we will have to see if the second half of Martin's series ends up sliding into marasmus. In any case, Martin's work deserves to be taken seriously by students of literature, and not simply as a standout example of "genre."

I want to develop and argue for this claim, but I should clarify that I don't mean it as a judgment of quality. Song is a captivating series, but I have trouble figuring out if it is a good one--and of course it's too early to tell. What I mean is that Martin's work shares a set of fundamental concerns with postwar literature (including what has come to be called "literary fiction"), and addresses them in a novel and serious way.

Let's, however, begin with Cervantes. Don Quixote is frequently called the first postmodern novel, not entirely in jest. This is not simply because Cervantes plays around with metatextual interventions and formalist tricks; to a large extent it is because the novel is usually read as providing a "postmodern" answer to its central question, which is the relationship between narrative and identity. In this reading, the narrator's skepticism about Don Quixote is treated as a transparent smokescreen for the book's sympathy for him. He's a hero because he does not hesitate to embrace a narrative convention as a framework for his identity, which highlights the arbitrariness of subjectivity and so on.

This view was embraced in the literature of the '60s because of the freedom it seemed to offer. The most classic example is the second chapter of John Barth's The End of the Road, in which the hero (rescued from a bout of apathetic paralysis) is encouraged to embrace "mythotherapy" as a cure. This involves embracing arbitrariness as an identity-shaping practice, of which the central element is the adoption of a narrative cliche (the Hero, the Wise Man, etc.) as a foundation for subjectivity. Form, for Barth and most other "postmodern" writers, is a gateway to liberation.

But Don Quixote can also be read differently: the narrator insists over and over that we are to take it as a warning against taking narrative and form too seriously. This is the path taken by Martin, who has written a modern-day Don Quixote without any ambiguity about its position in this debate. The central problem in A Song of Ice and Fire is the corruption worked by myths of chivalry and knightly valor in the real world. Even the fantasy setting is an echo of his Spanish predecessor's: instead of wise kings and damsels in distress, Martin's Westeros is defined by child rape, wanton butchery, and class oppression. Even if his characters escape their trials with some notion of honor intact--and not all do--it is a kind of honor that is pragmatic enough to recognize its own imminent failure. But most of the time, the characters that try their hardest to be knights-errant end up artfully murdered, subverted, or broken.

The result is a group of characters who are far more complex than Tolkien's, and, in fact, than most of the protagonists of contemporary literary fiction. That is not what's interesting, however. The real virtue of Martin's work is its ability to produce an interpretive community (found, for instance, in the series's online forums) that is intensely focused on the phenomenological experience of reading formalist fantasy. Anyone who reads Martin with any degree of attention and experience with standard fantasy immediately becomes aware of a split personality: one reader-self wants to take the book as a standard fantasy novel, to sympathize with the obvious protagonists and root against the bad guys, and the other works against the grain, identifying and thinking through the ways the typical fantasy tropes are subverted. It is like reading a Don Quixote in which the windmills are really giants, but the Man of La Mancha is a deluded fool regardless. Martin's fans spend much of their time puzzling out the confrontations between these selves.

As the book's fanbase proves, one need not be a Yale Deconstructionist to participate in this style of reading, and that has helped to contribute to an entire avalanche of online textual criticsm (crystallizing around Martin and other fantasy writers, but also, say, the TV shows of Joss Whedon), which has produced such monuments of Internet culture as TVTropes.org. Academic critics may dismiss it, occasionally even for valid reasons--but it is no less an heir to Shklovsky for all that. And this, in short, is why I think Martin deserves to be studied: he has not only recovered the psychologism of the Jamesian modern novel in a remarkably hostile genre ghetto, but he has also helped point the way forward for interpretation. The genre ghetto of literary fiction, I suspect, has a dimmer future.