Dead Souls
gosh do I love this book
Chichikov, a nice guy who today would be an excellently affable golfer and know which whiskeys to order for prospective clients, wants to buy some serfs. Specifically, he wants to buy dead ones—their names alone, perished since the last census. He’ll pay the landowners of the village of N whatever small amount he can get away with offering, and then he’ll—well, something. He’s chased away from N by gossip and rumor, right at the peak of his local fame, and we don’t see him again until—at least a little later in his own life, and much later in Gogol’s. In fact Gogol is dead by the time a reading public sees Chichikov again—the second volume we’re reading is reconstructed from various fragments after the author burned a different (fairer? More final?) copy days before his death. An intended third seems never to have approached existence.
Gogol’s said to have conceived the book on the model of the divine comedy—the first book would show the sins and weaknesses of Chichikov and Russia around him, the second a mixed image of possible progress, and the third some kind of paradise. One wonders what Gogol made of the relative quality of the three parts of Dante’s project, whether he was surprised that his own inferno was the only writeable portion.
As for the purgatory, what we’ve got of volume two is—not as good. It runs on a similar basic model to 1, with Chichikov paying visits of dubious intent to variously typical local aristocrats. Here the visits have greater stakes—Chichikov wants now to really obtain property and capital, not just to arrange sales of dead souls, and though we don’t get every beat there’s the sense that his more material ambitions here expose him to greater harm. He’s possibly made a fake will on behalf of a miserly old woman, and late in volume two is being credibly accused not just of this but of all kinds of things.
There’s an account of fiction, one I’ve often favored, which holds that things like stakes and desire and consequence are really essential terms in the form, things that everywhere enrich whatever we’re doing. Dead Souls complicates this account, for the book is at its best (by a significant margin) in the stakesless period: when it’s doing the joy of purely nominal transaction, and the comedy of cathexis. None of that first volume’s landowners have anything to lose in selling Chichikov their dead peasant souls—it’s sheer profit on their part, cash in hand for names written victimlessly on deeds. But only the first, the somewhat naive Manilov, can accept the windfall—for all the others the form ‘transaction’ summons an entire set of instinctual responses that have nothing at all to do with the particular nothing being discussed. One’s worried she’ll be taken advantage of, two are in different ways anxious to take advantage, one’s simply delighted to make a sale of any kind. Even Manilov—despite a brief, hilarious anxiety about whether this sale is ‘inconsistent with the civil statutes and the further prospects of Russia’(!)—models a profound optimism about the transaction as the site of sociality. He’s eager to sell his dead souls not because he’s performed any economic analysis but because Chichikov has come all the way out to Manilov’s house in the country, because he’s been such a pleasant guy, because as salespeople know the failure to do business would also be a failure of civility.
One—terminally inadequate, I fear—way of naming the comic achievement, then, would be that Gogol manages to shuck the affective structure of this particular uhh smallholder feudocapitalism(?) away from its relationship to any actually existing commodity or advantage. In these scenes Chichikov, of course, has an attachment of some undisclosed kind to the souls being discussed—but the soul-possessors are working from sheer affect, their own coral of assumption and acclimatization to the scene of dealmaking. If comedy—as some claim—is about revealing structures of excess and lack, then here the huge lack of material stakes reveals the astounding excess of emotional investment in the form of the transaction itself. The scenes—each little aristocrat insisting on the fulfillment of their own phantasmagoria of trade just a little too long—are absolutely brilliant.
But there’s tenderness on the other side, too—in the seventh chapter, when Chichikov does in fact begin to reflect on the former (and in some textual sense, continuing) reality of the former soulholders. They all did live, all did have virtues, all died somehow—and Chichikov, despite Gogol’s winking declarations that he’s a bit of a shit, is alone in extending them humanity. Of course perhaps we’re talking here about Gogol, Gogol-as-Chichikov, and that’s part of the joy of those early chapters—that just as they’re built around the razoring satire of the negotiations, what they’re built of is often a breathtaking lyric tenderness about the world surrounding that negotiation. Gogol loves it all—Rus, fields and twilights, lieutenants polishing boots late at night, carriage drivers who are lost, germanophile postmasters, landlords who eat the entire sturgeon before sheepishly fleeing—and his love can’t help pouring through the dramatic ongoingness of the text.
They’re strange interludes—filling, often, the metrical position that backstory or interiority would take in modern work, the moments of informative rest that space and inform the ongoing drama. In Dead Souls what punctuates the story isn’t history or character but instead the narrator’s love for Russia in its absurdity, its profusion of types—its excess and lack. And so the novel as a whole has a shape that might be paradigmatic, not necessarily of all fiction but of a certain strain of fiction: it’s built as a conversation between the satirized lack at the heart of the drama, the need and pettiness and cowardice and human smallness at stake in the plot, and the narrator’s incurable excess, the luminous affection for it anyways. It’s a strain of fiction of which I think we’re bound to approve: a lesson in how to see something broken in the world and love it fiercely nonetheless. Here, without much visibly at stake for the protagonist, the plot too is shucked, reveals itself as form, empty antecedent—only a venue for the writer’s vast love to wrestle with the difficult world.
The stuff is just superb. I mean, really—we’ve had folks (recently!) doing plot, and we’ve had in Rabelais and a couple of other spots folks doing the sheer joy of language and noticing, but in the first volume of Dead Souls I’m (for almost the first time) seeing a writer who’s managing to credibly handle both at once. Saunders writes a lot about Gogol and I’ve not know too much previously about why—but I think that it’s this mixture of the plotted and the joyous that carries both writer’s work. Not just Saunders, though—while it’s easy to think of late-20c maximalism as following in the steps of Joyce, I think it’s equally credible to read Pynchon and Foster Wallace et al as latter Gogols, writers engaged in the attempt to love the world’s texture even as they sobbed at its functions. And not just them—possible too to read our readerly orientation toward voice and character and charm as related in some ways to what Gogol’s achieved here. It remains the case, for authors as for characters, that the most likable thing a textual agent can do is love, as fully and unreservedly as they’re able.
*
As for that second volume. As Chichikov’s stakes are higher so too seem Gogol’s—here, in a story more weighted with actual consequence, he’s obliged to filter the unbridled love of that first volume through questions of the practical. Which landowners are the most intelligent? How indeed do estates become prosperous? What is to be done with discarded fish scales? What impact has corruption had upon the system of imperial bureaucracy? These questions tend toward the political—with Gogol as example we might say that politics is only the question of how best to translate our love into action. A difficult practical question, especially when the love is not of a single person but of land, people, habits, moments, conversations, types, excesses and lacks.
A difficult creative question, too, and I think I suspect its difficulty to be implied in Gogol’s inability to finish the project. There’s tenderness here, to be sure—we open on Tentetnikov, a moving portrait of depression—and also humor, especially when Chichikov (attempting to restore Tentetnikov’s relationship with the general whose daughter T wishes to marry) falsely informs the general that Tentetnikov has not been visiting because he has been too busy working on a multi-volume biography of generals, an idea the general likes very much. But more of the text is made up of somewhat-lumbering accounts of virtue—in schoolmasters and landowners and officials. Here, tasked with representing the good, Gogol’s talents seem a little occluded. I think part of the trouble is that Gogol (correctly) seems to understand virtue as serial, not a single thing done a single time but a longstanding habit of excellence. Where the pettinesses and opportunisms of N’s landowners all marshal themselves into the single conversations about Chichikov’s purchase, Gogol has fewer ideas about how to punctualize decency or goodness—instead, we end up sitting through long summaries of behavior and how it came to be proper.
These summaries, while educational, lack the sharpness or alchemical clarity of the more critical early passages—the love has moved somewhat into the summary, and left the dialogue between excess and lack somewhat more sluggishly agreeable. Here the stakes have risen but the urgency has waned.
And so, failing to read the second volume as saying much about Chichikov, I end up saying something about Gogol. What I have to say is that, really, this is sad as hell. Here was a writer who by his very early thirties had managed to love the world more fully than many of us ever will, and who seems to have spent the next and lastish decade of his life not quite succeeding at the continuation of that love. It must have broken his heart; perhaps it ought to break ours.
Or perhaps it only instructs us as to the problem of positive politics in the novel. For another account is that Gogol continued to love Rus and it’s -ians just as fully the whole rest of his life, but that the politicization of that love proved a somewhat intractable creative problem—and that a writer with his standards for on-the-page sharpness couldn’t quite bear the relative dullness of the good. He’s not the only one: everywhere we find it easy to dramatize 1984s and infernos and other political disasters, everywhere the Utopia novel is a dead end creatively. Why that might be is left as an exercise—for myself, as well as the reader, as well as anyone who hopes that fiction might have any kind of constructive response to incipient fascism in America.
Although perhaps it’s not fiction that has a block: perhaps it’s only the novel. Here I think again of Saunders, who is on the one hand far more interested than Gogol in the hero as a form, and on the other hand more interested in the moment of heroism—the echoing structure of a Saunders story is about an individual’s discovery of resistance or integrity despite the crummy circumstances around him. In this way Saunders inverts an element of Gogol’s equation: in a dim world here it is not the author but the character who discovers their capacity for love, whose love overwhelms a (dramatic rather than narratorial) constraint. Is this more possible in the short story? Does Saunders deserve the amount of room he’s gotten here?
Either way, I love this goddamn book. I love it, and I love the incredibly strange man who made it, and then who struggled vastly to continue making it. In both volumes, I think, we have a stupendous amount to learn from him—every word, every paragraph is evidence of how beautiful and difficult it is to be good, and at once to be good. I end as I began: in simple awe.