The Scrivener De-Scribed: Logos and Originals in Nineteenth-Century Copyist

Fiction

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in

the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Sara Ceilidh Orr, B.A., M.A.

Graduate Program in Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

The Ohio State University

2014

Dissertation Committee:

Alexander Burry, Advisor

Angela Brintlinger

Helena Goscilo

Sara Ceilidh Orr

2014

Abstract

This dissertation examines works of copyist fiction by Gogol, Melville, Dostoevsky,

Dickens, and Flaubert. I argue that, through their exploration of copies and originals, these authors anticipate questions about the nature of language and literature posed a century later in post-structuralist texts like Derrida's The Double Session and

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. Rather than a simple sociological exposition of the plight of the little man, copyist fiction is a reaction to a world destabilized by the absence of an authoritative text (Logos), and the act of copying is presented variously as a search for Logos, a new language of immediacy that replaces Logos, and an abolition of meaning. In the process, copyist texts interrogate the relationship between language and the human subject, the physicality of writing, and the limits of mimetic art as (potentially) a type of copying.

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of Robert J. Orr

iii

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I would like to thank Alexander Burry for his patient direction of the project and for helping me to become a better writer. Heartfelt thanks also to the members of my committee, Angela Brintlinger and Helena Goscilo, for their painstaking reading and editing and their innumerable valuable suggestions; to Jessie

Labov, who worked with me through the project‘s formative years; and to Irene Delic, for her feedback on the earliest plans. I owe a great deal also to colleagues who let me run various aspects of the project by them: special thanks to Lauren Ressue, for countless conversations, input on the linguistics elements, and formatting expertise; to

Marina Pashkova, for her help with Saussure; to Robert Mulcahy, for his early reading of the chapter on Melville; to Will Britt and Erin Stackle, for consultations on

Heidegger; to Ryan Miller, for the conversation that inspired the dissertation; to

Michael Dennis, for his translation of Demorest; and to all of the members of the

Slavic Literature and Culture Forum, whose generosity and enthusiasm for literature carried me through these years. The earliest version of this project was undertaken under the direction of Thomas Epstein at Boston College, and his guidance then has inspired everything I have done since. Finally, all my thanks to my family, without whose support this would never have been possible.

Vita

2001 ...... Northmont High School

2005 ...... B.A., Boston College

2007-2008 ...... Distinguished University Fellowship

2008-2011 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate,

Slavic and East European Languages and

Cultures, The Ohio State University

2011-2012 ...... Distinguished University Fellowship

2009 ...... M.A. Slavic and East European

Languages and Cultures

2012-present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate,

Slavic and East European Languages and

Cultures, The Ohio State University

Fields of Study

Major Field: Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita...... v

Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1

A History of Copying: From Westminster Abbey to Wall Street ...... 5

Copyists and Authors ...... 17

Copyists and Readers: Parricide and the Death of the Author ...... 23

Mimesis and the Status of the Copy ...... 25

Logos in the Twentieth-Century: The Copy as Original? ...... 31

Chapter 2: Gogol ...... 46

―The Overcoat‖ ...... 48

Logos and the Copyist ...... 48

Scribe Without Scripture ...... 51

A World without Logos ...... 58

―The Overcoat‖ and Copying ...... 69

―The Diary of a Madman‖...... 71

Authors and Order...... 71

Empty Thrones, Empty Signs ...... 80

Copyists, Authors, and the Lost Logos ...... 83

Chapter 3: Dostoevsky ...... 86

The Dostoevskian Copy Clerk ...... 88

Copying in Dostoevsky‘s Early Works ...... 92

Mimetic Art and Mediation ...... 94

The Idiot ...... 98

Myshkin as Copyist ...... 102

Myshkin as calligrapher ...... 105

Logos in The Idiot: Images and Likeness ...... 111

Conclusions ...... 123

Chapter 4: Melville ...... 124

Bartleby the Unnameable ...... 130

Copyists and Names ...... 138

Bartleby's Language...... 149

Chapter 5: Flaubert ...... 157

vii

The Copyist Pair: Repetition in Search of Difference ...... 162

Bouvard and Pécuchet's Copying: Repetition that Abolishes Difference ...... 174

Towards an Aesthetics of Difference ...... 185

Conclusion...... 190

Conclusion: The Work of Copying in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ...... 194

Bibliography ...... 203

viii

Chapter 1: Introduction

―A blessed purpose, a praiseworthy zeal, to preach to men with the hand, to set tongues free with one‘s fingers and in silence to give mankind salvation and to fight with pen and ink against the unlawful snares of the devil.‖ –Cassiodorus, Institutions Book I

―For man must strive, and striving he must err.‖ –Goethe, Faust Part I

"You write well; but can you write correctly without a book?"

"I can write from dictation in French, Latin, and Spanish."

"Correctly?"

"Yes, sir, if the dictation is done properly, for it is the business of the one who dictates to see that everything is correct."—Casanova, History of My Life

In the pages of nineteenth-century literature, one encounters with remarkable frequency the shabby, ink-smeared figure of the scrivener or copy clerk. So populous are their ranks and so mysterious their stories, that it is surprising the copyist has eluded systematic study for so long. While certain individual works focusing on a copyist protagonist, such as Melville's ―Bartleby the Scrivener‖ and Gogol's ―The

Overcoat,‖ have received a lot of attention in their own right, there have been few

attempts to view copyist fiction as a category or movement with its own characteristic

themes, motifs, and plots. I attempt to begin to remedy this omission by focusing on

the copyist fiction of four authors spanning the mid- to late nineteenth century. Taking

works by Gogol, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Flaubert as case studies in copyist

behavior, I uncover common copyist traits and place the image of the copyist in a

historical, philosophical, and literary context in which the peculiarities of copyist

fiction are revealed in their full prescience and import.

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, figures as notable and diverse as Nikolai

Gogol,1 Charles Dickens, Stendhal, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bret Harte,

Nikolai Leskov, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Gustave Flaubert found something worthy

of interest in the figure of the copy clerk. Nor do scribes and scriveners disappear

from world literature as their real life counterparts are replaced by typists, computers,

scanners, and Xerox machines. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, James

Joyce, Henry James, Evgenii Zamiatin, Iurii Tynianov, Jorge Luis Borges, V.S.

Naipaul, Italo Calvino, and Umberto Eco all tell stories of copyists and copying. What

is it about these lowly clerks, copying out manuscripts longhand in law offices and

government departments, that merits the attention of the literary giants of several

continents? There is, of course, an element of social reality in the profusion of copyist

tales. As populations shifted towards urban centers and governments became more

1 Note on transliteration: I am using the Library of Congress system without diacritics to transliterate Russian words and names. For a few authors whose names are already well known to English-speaking audiences in a slightly different transliteration, such as Dostoevsky and Gogol, I use the more familiar form. 2

bureaucratic and paper-heavy, the number of copy clerks naturally increased. Writers

responded to changing social conditions, finding a protagonist for depictions of urban

poverty and class upheaval in the image of the low-ranking civil servant crushed

beneath the wheels of bureaucracy. In Russia, for example, the 'poor clerk' or

'malen‟kii chelovek' ('little man') became a recognized literary type in the fiction of

the 1800s. Such was the rage for depicting starving, shabby civil servants that poor

clerk tales quickly grew to contain meta-commentary on their commonest devices. In

Dostoevsky's Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846), the copyist Makar Devushkin reads a

poor clerk tale (Gogol's ―The Overcoat‖ [Shinel', 1842]) and reacts with indignation

at seeing the humiliating details of his poverty on display for the edification of the

populace.

The copyist fits nicely into such portraits of abasement and suffering, given the

low status and humiliating restrictions of his position.2 Not only do copyists tend to be

poorly compensated, with few prospects for advancement, but they are not even

afforded the dignity of expressing themselves in their own words. They exist only to

reproduce as exactly as possible what someone above them has already written. Their

dismal living conditions and the unglamorous nature of their work make copyists

natural protagonists for champions of social justice.

2 Note on the use of the masculine pronoun: So far I have found no female copyist protagonists. There is a minor female character in Charles Dickens' Bleak House who takes dictation for her mother, a copyist of paintings in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaia's The Boarding School Girl (Pansionerka), and a typist who serves as a foil for the male copyist protagonist in James Joyce's ―Counterparts,‖ but copying in the 19th century was predominantly male profession. (Anna Grigor'evna Snitkina, who began working as a stenographer for Dostoevsky in 1866 and later married him, was among the first women in Russia to receive professional secretarial training.) Women did copy documents, especially in the private sphere, and memoirs or stories about salon culture, for example, might prove a better source of female copyists. 3

To view copyist fiction as merely a subset of the poor clerk tale, however, would be to miss the unique philosophical, metaliterary, and stylistic contributions of copyist works. There is an element of social critique in most copyist tales, but that is only one strand and not necessarily a dominant one. One does not feel sorry for Bartleby because he is a clerk, for example, but because of something mysterious that sets him outside of human language and alienates him from his fellow scriveners. In other words, while the social reality of nineteenth-century copyists cannot be separated from their image in the literature of the period, the degree to which a copyist work is concerned with social issues in no way determines the degree to which that work belongs to the broader category of copyist fiction. The category is better defined by the way in which the representation of an act of copying becomes an interrogation of language and literature.

Copyist fiction constitutes a philosophical turn within literature, a moment of literature reflecting on how language works, on the relationship between humanity and language and between human language and the world, and on how the latter relationship is embodied by the literary text. In its concern with originals as a source of meaning and truth, copyist fiction anticipates problems that would be worked out by the post-structuralists almost a century later. Writing on the cusp of modernism, the authors recognize some of the same problems and instabilities that later twentieth- century writers use to overturn earlier ideas about truth, representation, identity, and difference. This is not to say that the ideas found in copyist fiction are the same as those of the post-structuralists, nor that all copyist works take an identical approach to

4 these topics. Rather, they anticipate some of the questions post-structuralism will address. The trajectory of copyist fiction across the latter half of the nineteenth century veers away from Logos as a source of transcendent authority and truth towards a worldview rooted in unstable human language, with contentious meanings, arbitrary signs, and a discourse rooted in difference, rather than in identity. One consistency across the copyist works examined here is that their investigations of language and order are rooted in the uneasy relationships between copies (and copyists) and their originals.

A History of Copying: From Westminster Abbey to Wall Street

Copying is an ancient profession with lengthy and often inseparable sacred and secular histories. Largely the province of slaves or freedmen in antiquity, copying was incorporated into monastic discipline not long after the rise of monasticism in the fourth century A.D. In the 5th century, Melania the Younger engaged in daily copying

―apparently as an act of humility‖ and as a means to educate the nuns (Parkes 6), and the practice quickly spread, as did the desire for monastic discipline and theological libraries. The cloistered scribes coexisted with, rather than replacing, their secular counterparts, however, and with much overlap in the types of texts copied by each. In

Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes, Oxford historian and paleographer M.B. Parkes shows that, in medieval England, a vast amount of scribal activity took place both inside and outside of monastery walls, as cloistered and secular scribes reproduced—at times in collaboration—a diverse assortment of

religious, legal, historical, and private documents. He describes the labor of three

broad categories of scribes, cloistered scribes, secular clergy, and lay or

―professional‖ scribes, most of whom could have copied both religious and secular

texts. Cloistered scribes focused especially on service books and patristic texts, but

also copied ―scientific and historical texts‖3 (15) and monastery documents and

records, including cartularies4 and chronicles (15-16).5 There are also records of

monks in the early Middle Ages copying works by classical authors such as Cicero,

when commissioned (6). Outside, the secular (non-cloistered) clergy, too, copied

service books and patristic texts, but also rental agreements (38), devotionals, and any

texts that they needed for their own scholarship. Meanwhile, lay scribes connected

with the book trade6 in centers such as London or Oxford worked for booksellers,

from their own homes, or as itinerant scribes, housed by their employers for the

duration of the commissioned work. Such commissions might be private but also

came from monastic centers: Parkes notes that ―from the end of the eleventh century

some monasteries employed scribes from outside the community to supplement the

production of books by the monks, in order to augment their collections. These

imported scribes were provided with food, and accommodation where they could

3 Parkes gives the example of the scribal community at Worcester in the twelfth century. 4 A cartulary is ―a register contaning copies of the evidences of the corporate rights of the community‖ (16). 5 This list is based on twelfth century activities but seems fairly representative of monastic scribal activity from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries. See Parkes for a more detailed account of projects undertaken by specific monasteries at specific times. Parkes also addresses the image, popular today, of the scriptorium as a physical space in which a group of monks or nuns gathered to copy documents together. Though a few such places did exist, at St. Alban's and Westminster Abbey, for example, Parkes finds much more evidence that the majority of scribes worked primarily in their cells, or, in later centuries, at carrells in the cloisters where they could be supervised (8-9, 23-4). 6 Scribes in the book trade would have worked on religious and devotional texts, but also on literary texts (such as Canterbury Tales) and legal and historical documents. 6

work without being disturbed, and without disruption to the horarium of the

community‖ (39). Nor was collaboration between religious and lay scribes always

unidirectional: clergy at times participated in community projects, including portions

of the Domesday survey in the eleventh century (13). Even the careers of clerks

attached to the court and the royal exchequer display a blending of the secular and the

sacred, as some of them were ordained priests (33), while others copied religious texts

on the side. Parkes gives the example of James le Palmer, Clerk of the 'Great Rolls,'

who (in addition to authoring his own work) copied ―William of Nottingham's

commentary on the Harmony of the Gospels by Clement of Llanthony, and part of a

collection of devotional and pastoral texts‖ (42-43).7

The nineteenth-century copyist is the product of this tradition, but he has been

demoted in status. Now in service solely of human rather than divine law, the copyist

is a symbol not of devotion and literacy, but of the crushing apparatus of bureaucracy.

In Bleak House, for example, the scrivener Nemo's ad seeking copy work appears

amidst heaps of court-related refuse in the window of Krook's shop:

There were a great many ink bottles. There was a little tottering bench of shabby

old volumes outside the door, labelled "Law Books, all at 9d." Some of the

inscriptions I have enumerated were written in law-hand, like the papers I had

seen in Kenge and Carboy's office and the letters I had so long received from the

firm. Among them was one, in the same writing, having nothing to do with the

business of the shop, but announcing that a respectable man aged forty-five

7 This is to say nothing of literate individuals who in the later Middle Ages copied texts for their own use rather than purchasing them. See Parkes 42-43. 7

wanted engrossing or copying to execute with neatness and dispatch: Address to

Nemo, care of Mr. Krook, within. There were several second-hand bags, blue

and red, hanging up. A little way within the shop-door lay heaps of old crackled

parchment scrolls and discoloured and dog's-eared law-papers. […] One had

only to fancy, as Richard whispered to Ada and me while we all stood looking

in, that yonder bones in a corner, piled together and picked very clean, were the

bones of clients, to make the picture complete. (Ch. 5)

Here the copyist and his ―law-hand‖ are part of the ponderous and excessive

apparatus of the courts that crushes their petitioners, many of whom live besmeared

with ink and surrounded by similar stacks of musty documents. Even where sacred

imagery endures, interwoven with the secular, it often serves as a reminder of the fall

of the copyist from the status of his medieval predecessor.8

In the secular societies of nineteenth-century Russia, Europe, and America,

copyist fiction draws its protagonists from the growing number of clerks and low-

ranking civil servants employed to make handwritten copies of letters and documents.

Often attached to law or government offices, they produce the multiple reproductions

necessary for transacting official business: copies of letters for official files and

archives, duplicate documents for the multiple parties involved in law cases, identical

memos for distribution to several government departments, etc. In fiction, the

emphasis is generally on how, not what, a copyist copies, a strategy that both reveals

8 For example, Akakii Akakievich demonstrates monk-like devotion to his work, though he is employed by a government department, and Myshkin can write in both military and monastic hands. Poprishchin, who actually goes to his employer's house to sharpen his pens, shows traces of the days of the scribe as household retainer or slave, while Bouvard and Pécuchet finally establish themselves as self-employed, lay copyists, though not before investigating theological mysteries. 8 thematic concerns with the act of copying itself and dismisses as trivial the memoranda of paper-bound bureaucracies. The job requirements are minimal.

Basically, one must be able to write neatly without blotting the page, though sloppy copy clerks are abundant in fiction. Farrington in James Joyce's ―Counterparts‖ purposely skips paragraphs in his haste to get to the pub, and his work is peppered with errors. The clerks in ―Bartleby, the Scrivener‖ blot their work when seized by drink and indigestion, while the long-suffering Caddy Jellyby of Bleak House, forced to serve as her mother's amanuensis, winds up inky from head to toe: ―She would not sit down, but stood by the fire dipping her inky middle finger in the egg-cup, which contained vinegar, and smearing it over the ink stains on her face, frowning the whole time and looking very gloomy‖ (Ch. 5). The position also requires meticulous attention to detail but no analysis or creativity, as the copyist's goal is usually not to alter the text in any way. As such, it is mechanical and submissive work, mere transcription of what someone else has composed.

Some establishments employ clerks whose sole task is to reproduce documents, like the scriveners in ―Bartleby.‖ In other offices, the work of copying is one of multiple duties that devolve on a low-level clerk or apprentice. For example,

Poprishchin in Gogol's ―Diary of a Madman‖ performs tasks ranging from sharpening the director‘s pens to writing abstracts, and Akakii Akakievich is offered a promotion that involves not merely transcribing documents but making minor changes to them.

(The responsibility paralyzes him.) The terminology used to describe copyists is as flexible as the position itself. In English, ―scrivener‖ and ―copy clerk‖ denote a

position in which copying is the primary function, but the more general ―clerk‖ may

also describe a copyist, especially one given multiple duties. The Russian

―perepishchik‖ literally means ―copyist,‖ but in nineteenth-century fiction the word

―chinovnik,‖ (―civil servant‖ or ―clerk‖) is much more prevalent.9 Flaubert uses the

specific term ―copiste‖ to describe Bouvard and Pécuchet until they resign from their

official positions, though one of his working titles for the novel called them simply

―commis‖ (―clerks‖). In deciding which literary characters to include as copyists in

this volume, I have focused less on terminology than on the prominence and thematic

significance of representations of the act of copying within the fictional work.

Just as it can be a job in itself or a side task, copying is for some an entire career

and for others merely a stepping stone. David Copperfield, Stendhal's Julien Sorel,

and Somerset Maugham's Philip Carey all do some entry-level copying as they enter

new professions, Sorel as a private secretary and Carey as an accountant's articled

clerk. For these young men at the beginning of their careers, copying is a

demonstration of literacy, a test of diligence, and a source of income as they are

trained in more demanding work. As social strata become more permeable, copying

serves as a gateway, a compromise between meritocracy and breeding. The

impoverished but respectable (educated, presentable) may advance, while the rough

and illiterate are screened out of the emerging swath of white-collar professions.

Souls less talented and less fortunate than David Copperfield, however, never

complete this entrance exam, and for them the station of copy clerk becomes a sort of

9 The Russian terms kantsliarist, podkantsliarist, kopeist, and pisar‟ could also technically designate clerks who do some copying, the difference being that they designate civil service ranks so low that they do not appear on Peter the Great‘s Table of Ranks. (See Shore 17 for more about copyist ranks.) 10 purgatory, binding them to a system in which they will never advance. These career copyists, especially, such as Akakii Akakievich and Makar Devushkin, capture the imagination in their perpetual enslavement (joyous or burdensome) to other people's texts and in the incredible passivity their work requires.

The labors of the law copyist thus differ from those of the monastic scribe in three key ways. Though, as noted above, there are a number of copyists and scribes who are not ―pure‖ cases, in that they engage in multiple types of work and with a variety of originals, it is worth looking at these differences as potential sources of tension for copyists caught somewhere between the poles of purely secular and purely religious copying. For the sake of argument, let us consider the most limited nineteenth-century copyist, one who does nothing but copy, alongside a prototypical cloistered scribe copying sacred texts. The monastic scribe has the following important things that law copyists generally lack:

1. An important mission, with corresponding responsibility. If copying began as a

work of humility, it quickly grew to be regarded as a powerful spiritual action, as

Parkes describes:

In the sixth century Cassiodorus saw the scribe as a warrior fighting with pen and

ink against the fraudulent wiles of the devil, since Satan receives a wound from

each word a scribe writes. For Alcuin in the ninth century the labor of the scribe

was more praiseworthy than that of the vine-grower, since the one ministered to

the soul, whereas the other catered for the belly. Looking forward into the twelfth

century, Peter the Venerable (abbot of Cluny 1122-56) perceived copying as a

form of prayer offered with the hands instead of the mouth, and in 1127 Guigo,

prior of La Grande Chartreuse regarded copying as fulfilling a pastoral role which

would obtain the kind of spiritual reward to be gained from the cure of souls. (13)

This sense of striving and spiritual battle is generally absent from nineteenth-century copyist tales (though one might think of Turkey, from ―Bartleby, The Scrivener,‖ claiming of his work, ―In the morning I but marshal and deploy my columns; but in the afternoon I put myself at their head and gallantly charge the foe‖ (7)). Perhaps one of the last indicators of the copyist's sense of mission is his reaction to error.

Compare, for example, Akakii Akakievich, the devoted ascetic, who (almost) crosses himself after nearly making an error, with Farrington from Joyce's ―Counterparts,‖ who, sneaking out to drink, deliberately omits two letters from the file he is copying and hopes that no one will notice.

2. A role as a scholar and editor. The fight against error and misreading is not entirely passive on the copyist's part, either. Medieval scribes made crucial choices about which scripts to use, the layout of a document, punctuation, abbreviations, decoration, and anything else that might ensure the clearest and most accurate transmission of the contents of the text to the reader. (Parkes calls this set of choices, intended to bridge the gap between the scribe and a reader removed from him in space and time, ―the grammar of legibility‖). This means that scribes were actively reading, evaluating, and interpreting the source text, and the design of the copy must be regarded as an act of creativity and scholarship outside the scope of the labors of

the law copyist.

3. A supremely authoritative text. Here again it may be impossible to draw a

complete distinction between monks, who copied not only the scriptures but also

service books, commentaries, and histories, and law copyists, whose work has its own

claim to authority, inasmuch as religious and legal authority in the nineteenth century

are not entirely separable. Nonetheless, the devotion to truth that justifies the

monastic scribe's submission and fidelity would appear anachronistic and misplaced

if applied to the jargon and legal detritus of the nineteenth century, where worshipers

at the temple of the law must appear pharisaic or grotesque.

Since the law copyist's job does require fidelity and devotion, though, career copyists must negotiate this radical passivity without a transcendent text to sustain them. At the root of most works of copyist fiction is the question of how the copyist reacts to the restrictions of his task, namely, to being forbidden to deviate from the precise wording of the original. Some copyists, like Akakii Akakievich, thrive on the simplicity and submissiveness of the task, and others, such as Nemo in Bleak House, seek anonymity or penance in the surrender of their own voices and wills. Poprishchin rebels against the limitations and humiliations of his office, while dreams of life as an author but works as a copyist to support the woman he loves.

Mr. Dick in David Copperfield embodies the split between humility and the desire to serve, on one hand, and eruptions of creativity and ego, on the other. His longing to work is frustrated by a peculiar affliction, namely, the tendency to become carried away by his past sufferings and begin writing a Memorial in which his own trials get

13 somehow mixed up with those of King Charles I. Despite his best efforts, the

Memorial gets mixed up in every document he writes. This impediment is at last overcome by the introduction of a second writing desk that allows Mr. Dick to work on two competing texts at once:

On a table by the window in Buckingham Street, we set out the work Traddles

procured for him—which was to make, I forget how many copies of a legal

document about some right of way—and on another table we spread the last

unfinished original of the great Memorial. Our instructions to Mr. Dick were that

he should copy exactly what he had before him, without the least departure from

the original; and that when he felt it necessary to make the slightest allusion to

King Charles the First, he should fly to the Memorial. We exhorted him to be

resolute in this, and left my aunt to observe him. My aunt reported to us,

afterwards, that, at first, he was like a man playing the kettle-drums, and

constantly divided his attentions between the two; but that, finding this confuse

and fatigue him [sic], and having his copy there, plainly before his eyes, he soon

sat at it in an orderly business-like manner, and postponed the Memorial to a

more convenient time. (519-520)

In this rare case, the stability of being bound to someone else's original actually proves therapeutic to Mr. Dick, as it calms the obsession with past injustices that has paralyzed him and fractured his identity.

Whether a mark of humility or humiliation, the work of copying seems somehow counter to the spirit of modernity. It might be very well for a medieval scribe, a figure

14 we will remark on in more detail below, to devote himself to painstaking and unquestioning reproduction of a text. Such an action is the product of a worldview in which there might be an absolutely authoritative Word or text, a standard of truth worthy of the scribe's devotion. Nineteenth-century copyists inherit a much more precarious relationship with textuality. They come from a tradition of Hamlets and

Don Quixotes, of Faustian striving, with its corollary of error. Individuals are free

(and forced) to determine their own narratives, and all texts are fragmentary.

Language is fallen, no longer firmly rooted in a divine Logos. Speech and writing constantly interrogate the limits of words, testing to see how they fare in new contexts, pushing the boundaries of their definitions through innovative use. To work as a copyist, however, is to refrain from these risky, even violent games of language and meaning. At the same time, it is to give up authorship, self-assertion, and interaction.

A cluster of recurring characteristics marks the way in which the radical passivity of fictional copyists extends into other areas of their lives. Especially those copyists who do nothing to rebel display a general lack of vitality, as if their failure to assert themselves linguistically makes their very existence tenuous and renders them not quite present, not quite encounterable. Akakii Akakievich and Bartleby are particularly spectral, but most scriveners exhibit at least a handful of these common characteristics: timidity, pallor (often leading to comparison with paper), lack of appetite, lack of virility (either no sexual desire or inability to consummate a relationship), extreme reticence (or speech impediments), and a tendency to fade from

15 reality. The last of these is not only related to copyists' propensity to waste away

(Akakii Akakievich dies in a fever, Bartleby starves to death, and Nemo succumbs to an opium addiction), but also to their habit of either turning into ghosts (Akakii

Akakievich haunts Saint Petersburg as chinovnik-mertvets, 'clerk-corpse') or being described during their lives in ghostly or deathly imagery. Bartleby, for example, is always described as ―pallid‖ and is prone to ―dead wall reveries.‖ There is something unstable and insubstantial about a copy clerk. Poor Iakov Petrovich Goliadkin, in The

Double,is easily replaced at his office by an interloper with the same name, and

Poprishchin's reality disintegrates into a sludge of unmoored and meaningless titles, dates, and toponyms. Either their linguistic precariousness unseats them metaphysically, as well, or their already tenuous claims on existence predestine them for the uncreative, unassertive task of copying. (Judith Butler, who suggests that ―it is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of the body first becomes possible‖ (5), might recognize in these copyists a physical vulnerability that stems from their odd positioning in discourse.)

Each of the following chapters explores problems of language and originals as they occur in the copyist fiction of a particular author, sketching a rough trajectory of copyist concerns from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century. I have selected works in which the image of copying plays a central thematic or structural role— hence, for example, the decision not to give Bleak House its own chapter, as I felt the copying motif, though prevalent, is secondary to Dickens‘ larger critique of the law courts. Here, however, is a general overview of the ways in which copyist fiction's

interrogation of the concept of an authoritative original anticipates post-structuralist

concerns. At its center is an eroding concept of Logos as transcendent original and the

new models of authority and meaning that arrive to take its place.

The subsequent chapters are arranged so that the first two, on Gogol and

Dostoevsky, present the transcendent original as a concept that still has currency,

though the original (or Logos) proves to be inaccessible. The latter two, on Melville

and Flaubert, avoid Logos-based understandings of language and knowledge, seeking

meaning instead in immanence and in difference. As the philosophical starting points

of these copyist works shift, one broad structural element remains consistent. The

relationships between copyists and originals and copyists and authors continually

provoke investigations into the location of authority (for which we might also

substitute 'meaning' or 'truth'). The trajectory of these nineteenth-century copyist

works anticipates a shift evident in the writings of key post-structuralists and

especially in Derrida's program of deconstruction, one that locates meaning in the text

itself and not in external referents and refuses to privilege original over copy, or

signified over signifier, as the location of presence and truth.

Copyists and Authors

To my knowledge, the only other comprehensive study of copyist fiction as a

distinct group is a 1980 doctoral dissertation by Rima Shore entitled Scrivener

Fiction: The Copyist and His Craft in Nineteenth Century Fiction.10In this work,

10 See Scrivener Fiction for extensive lists of copyist fiction in world and Russian literature. 17

Shore examines the metaliterary aspects of copyist fiction, focusing especially on the

relationships between copyists and authors or authority figures. Two key concepts

from her reading, the distinction between ―writing‖ and ―scription‖ and the idea that

the copyist can be a subversive figure wresting control from writers/superiors can be

extended to advance the present discussion of copying and the location of authority.

Shore suggests that the presence of both a copyist and an author in a fictional

work allows processes subsumed under the broad term ―writing‖ to be discussed in

isolation. (The author in question may be the actual author of the work or a fictional

writer or boss/superior who appears as a character in the work.) She reserves the term

―writing‖ for the act of composition, or ―generating a literary text‖ (2). The

―mechanical act of putting pen to paper‖ that is the copyist's domain she labels

―scription‖ (5). An author writing in his own hand does both, but the presence of a

copyist serves as a reminder that the processes are distinct.11

The concept of scription reminds the reader that a certain distance exists between

an author and the physical text that s/he produces. Shore extends her metafictional

reading to examine the vulnerabilities in the process of composing a text, difficulties

springing from the author's imperfect control over language and, perhaps as a

11 Some, of course, might argue that scription (the physical act) is an integral part of composition. For example, in his Vospominaniia o N. V. Gogole, as cited in Dmitry Chizhevsky‘s ―About Gogol‘s Overcoat,‖ Nikolai Berg reports Gogol‘s habit of copying out his own works by hand again and again. ―In the process you will notice that, as your style gains power and your sentences take on polish and refinement, your hand will also seem to grow stronger: the letters will be set down more firmly and decisively,‖ Gogol purportedly says. ―This process must be repeated, I think, eight times. […] Only after the eighth rewrite—and always in my own hand—does the work take on a final artistic finish and become a pearl of creation‖ (in Maguire 298). But, then, Dostoevsky dictated many of his best-known works to a stenographer. Shore points out that he stops writing about copyists, with the obvious exception of Myshkin, when he stops writing out his own manuscripts. 18 consequence, over the characters themselves. ―How can a fictional text elude the control of the person who has created it?‖ Shore asks:

When we are speaking of a finished text—an inevitable sequence of words long

ago fixed in

an author's complete works—the idea seems rather dubious. But when we think

of the text as a process, the fact that the tale deals with the issue of control over a

character and over his language should not surprise us. For the task of realizing a

text, or commanding or controlling the fiction—and the language which

communicates the fiction—is no simple matter. Language may not cooperate

fully with one's creative designs; the text as it emerges on paper—separate from

the author—may not be precisely what the author has conceptualized or

imagined. (134)

As an example, she reads ―The Overcoat‖ as a struggle between Akakii Akakievich and the Important Person for control over the coat, ―the word,‖ ―language,‖ and, ultimately, the work itself (137-138). Emphasizing Akakii Akakievich's two- dimensionality, his pallor, and his frequent associations with white paper (and white snow), she suggests that conflicts between copyists and their employers often stand in in copyist fiction for conflicts between authors and characters for control of language and plot. The common plot line of the copyist who rebels either by copying poorly or by ceasing to copy (Shore lists ―The Overcoat,‖ ―Diary of a Madman,‖ The Double,

―Bartleby,‖ Leskov's ―The White Eagle,‖ Bouvard and Pécuchet, and ―Counterparts‖ as examples) is thus the dramatization of the struggle of the author to exert authorial

19 authority over the text.

In the context of copyist fiction, the employer/author is the source of authoritative

(if not transcendent) originals, so Shore's depiction of the author fighting for control over his text already suggests limitations to the traditionally assumed authority of the original. If we return for a moment to the idea of ―scription,‖ though, we discover another way in which the presence of a fictional copyist reveals a vulnerability of the original document. Isolating the mechanical aspect of writing allows for discussion of writing as a physical act, one that is subject to physical forces, limitations, and mistakes. The text is vulnerable as a material object, not only as language.

In ―On Linguistic Vulnerability,‖ the first chapter of Excitable Speech, Judith

Butler discusses the body's vulnerability to language and vice versa. Citing Shoshana

Felman's The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two

Languages, Butler reviews the way in which language production depends on the body, whose actions ―are never fully consciously directed or volitional‖ (10). ―[T]hat unknowing body,‖ she writes, again in reference to Felman's analysis, ―marks the limit of intentionality in the speech act. The speech act says more, or says differently, than it means to say‖ (ibid.). Though Butler writes primarily about speech, copyist fiction exposes the similar vulnerability of the act of writing. The author or copyist, like the speaker, is not in perfect control of the production of his or her language, nor can s/he guarantee the safety and inviolability of the text once it has been produced.

The possibility of blots, smudges, illegible handwriting, and error poses a double threat to the original text. First, however carefully the author composes a text, s/he

20 depends on the skill and attention of another person, a perhaps unknown copyist (or an entire office of unknown copyists) for its proliferation. If the author's own draft is blotted and messy, and the copyist cannot read it, a slightly different text will be passed on to the reader. Second, if the copyist is imprecise, an altered document may go into circulation still bearing the full authority of the author's name. For this reason, ancient and medieval texts are full of warnings and even curses aimed at careless copyists. Saint Irenaeus commanded:

"You who will transcribe this book, I charge you, in the name of our Lord Jesus

Christ and of His glorious Second Coming, in which He will come to judge the

living and dead, compare what you have copied against the original and correct

it carefully. Furthermore, transcribe this adjuration and place it in the copy." (De

Viris illustribus 35)

When the original is not a literary text but a legal or government document, an edict, a will, transcribed testimony, an official memo, etc., the same potential for error makes the authority of the law dependent for survival on the hand (and mood) of the lowly civil servants who copy it, and, in so doing, allow it to be read by and thus command the fullest possible audience.

In the case of copyist errors and alterations, the original at least preserves its authority as the 'true' version against which all subsequent copies may be corrected.

Proofreading copies by comparing them with the original occurs frequently in copyist fiction, most notably in ―Bartleby,‖ where the title scrivener shocks his employer by refusing to read and correct his own copy. ―It is, of course,‖ the narrator opines, ―an

21 indispensable part of a scrivener's business to verify the accuracy of his copy word by word. Where there are two or more scriveners in an office, they assist each other in this examination, one reading from the copy, the other holding the original. It is a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair‖ (12). Comparison with the original also comes up in ―Counterparts‖ when the clerk Farrington mistakenly writes ―Bernard Bernard‖ instead of ―Bernard Bodley,‖ a lovely mistake in which the text begins to copy itself, because his attention keeps wandering from the original document.

In ―The Golden Pot,‖ however, E.T.A. Hoffmann describes a more unsettling type of error. In his tale, the Student Anselmus is hired by the Archivarius Lindhorst to copy mysterious manuscripts in languages he cannot read. After proving himself on less important manuscripts, he is ushered into a chamber of rare documents, where he is admonished as follows:

[T]he hardest is still ahead; and that is the transcribing or rather painting of

certain works, written in a peculiar character; I keep them in this room, and they

can only be copied on the spot. You will, therefore, in the future, work here; but I

must recommend to you the greatest foresight and attention; a false stroke, or,

which may Heaven forfend, a blot let fall on the original, will plunge you into

misfortune. (43)

An error in copying could ruin Anselmus‘s luck, but that is not the only implication.

Hoffmann‘s story is one of the only copyist tales to address the possibility of the original itself being damaged in the act of copying. Though the Archivarius

Lindhorst‘s manuscript may be powerful enough to protect itself against corruption,

22 the implication is that a careless copyist might actually alter an original document, thereby permanently diminishing its authority and truth. Moreover, such injury to a rare and probably magical document as the one in Hoffman‘s tale approaches sacrilege, exposing a potential vulnerability of even a transcendent original to the banal dribblings of a careless pen. Such violability of both sacred and secular originals suggests an inherent limitation, or potential for limitation, of the original, since the copyist has the power to diminish its authority in the act of copying.

Copyists and Readers: Parricide and the Death of the Author

Shore suggests another metaliterary function of the copyist, one that goes further towards challenging the concept of a stable original. She interprets the copyist as a proxy for the reader, who, while reading the author‘s text, is likewise subject to the author‘s creation and its rules. ―When we read,‖ writes Shore, ―we, like the clerk, are in the employ of an author; we are subject to the whims of his imagination, to his arbitrary rule. We are for a time expected to share the experiences of a fictional character whose existence is far from pleasant‖ (158).

Shore then subverts this paradigm of authorial control by focusing on the agency of the reader and of her role in making the text signify by reading it. Suggesting that there are in fact as many texts as there are readers, Shore writes, ―Copying—and reading—invariably result in a text distinct from the original‖ (178). That is, the original text that the author writes, pure and free from external assumptions, associations, and attention, is never the reader‘s text. One might argue, given the

limits of the author‘s control of the writing process, as discussed above, that such a

―pure‖ texts never exists. The reader has a constitutive role in the formation of the

text as it is read. This limitation on the absolute authority of the author is reminiscent

of Roland Barthes‘ declaration that the [external, extratextual] author is dead.

Shore claims this constitutive power for the copyist, as well. She suggests that

there is an Oedipal motif underlying the rebellion of scriveners against their

employers (and characters against their authors). Moreover, there is a sense in which

even the actions of a faithful copyist are parricidal, in that the production of the copy

displaces the original. In support of this, Shore cite‘s Edward Said‘s Beginnings, in

which he writes:

Once again we must talk of the text‘s preserving and displacing functions. For in

an unmistakable way the presence of a text-as-copy displaces (and by virtue of

similarity preserves a memory of displacing) some original—an idea, or an

implicit priority, or an intransitive power, or an uncopied autograph. To put pen

to a text is to begin the movement away from the original; it is to enter the world

of text-as-beginning as copy and as parricide.

Said‘s vision of textuality here is similar to Derrida‘s concept of writing as différance,

discussed below, in which each act of writing is marked by difference and

deferment.12 Whether or not the copyist actively reads the text, then, Shore suggests

that the very act of copying is a challenge to the authority of the original.

12 For another discussion of copyists and paternity issues, see Noël Valis‘s ―The Perfect Copy: Clarín's Su único hijo and the Flaubertian Connection.‖ 24

Mimesis and the Status of the Copy

This susceptibility of the original goes beyond the idea of copying as limitation/distortion present in classical critiques of mimetic art. At this juncture it will be useful to say a bit about the history of mimetic art, of art conceived as an aesthetic 'copying' from life, in order to contextualize copyist fiction and its specific critiques of the concept of authoritative original within the already complex position of the original in historical discussions of the mimetic function of art. Besides, the simulacrum of a copyist's copy alongside an author's (mimetic) 'copy' invites an examination of the restrictions of the artist's copying in comparison with the scrivener's.

The term ―mimesis‖ must be used cautiously, as it means slightly different things to a great number of different theorists. In The Mirror and the Lamp, M. H. Abrams uses ―mimetic‖ as a general category for literary theories that focus on the relationship of the literary work to the universe, as opposed to the audience

(―pragmatic theories‖) or the author (―expressive theories‖). The term ―universe‖ serves as a ―more neutral and comprehensive‖ stand-in for ―nature,‖ broad enough to include ―people and actions, ideas and feelings, material things and events, or super- sensible essences‖ (6).)

Mimetic theories, and the accompanying questions about the authority of the literary work, date back at least to Plato's Republic, in which the work of the artist is described as a ―representation‖ of ―apparition‖ or appearance rather than ―truth,‖ and

as much more limited than the skill of the craftsman (364).13 This is because a

craftsman, for example, a shoe-maker, shapes his wares in accordance to some ideal

of the shoe, and only afterwards can the artist copy this shoe into a sculpture or

painting.14 Thus the artist works with a model that is already at one remove from the

ideal, diminishing the capacity of his work to contain and reveal truth. (Furthermore,

he only reproduces part of the shoe, showing certain sides of it in a painting, or

sculpting only the outside, perhaps, and losing all of the functionality of the ideal.)

Aristotle's conception of writing places it at a similar distance from truth, in this case

one specific to that medium, rather than to all of art.15 He sees writing as a distillation

of the idea, our most immediate form of understanding, which is best expressed

instantly through speech to a present interlocutor, but may be set down in writing

when need be. Since speech is already an imperfect transmission of the idea, writing,

which is an imperfect capturing of speech intended for a reader who is farther from

the moment of inspiration and probably from the thinker, is an even less complete

embodiment of the thought. (We will see below how Derrida and the post-

structuralists take issue with this idea.)

In the intervening centuries, the status of literature fluctuates, as do ideas about

the proper model for a literary work, humanity's access to truth, and the advantages to

having a copy that is similar, but not identical, to its original. (This is to say nothing

of shifting preferences for certain genres and literary forms.) If truth moves from the

13 In Book III of the Republic Plato makes a distinction between mimesis and diegesis, or, very roughly speaking, between the art of the image and the art of narrative. In Book X, which contains the passage described above, he speaks only about mimesis. 14 The Republic, Book X. 15 See De Interpretatione. 26 realm of the transcendent or ideal into the physical world, literature is at one less remove than it is in Plato's world. If one seeks knowledge of human perception of the world, rather than external, objective truth, then literature shifts again in relation to both universe and audience. If one aims for a social truth, an accurate reporting of case studies of suffering and injustice, then certain literary works approach the truth claims of an eye-witness account. Furthermore, not all authors (or even most) claim the revelation of truth as their primary aim, or flawless copying as their method.

Entertainment may be drawn from exaggeration, improvisation, fantasy; social statements made through the distorted copies of parodic and satirical literature. In these cases, the work is rooted in some sort of copying from the universe but depends for effect on strategic divergence from that model.

In fact, it could be argued that the value of a literary text as a copy is derived not only from its fidelity to its immediate model, but from two other sources: its copying of literary models, and the differences it introduces as it copies (similarity with a difference). From these two sources, the literary copy perhaps turns ostensible limits

(such as necessary differences in perspective and scope from the original) into advantages, and solves some of the problems with authority mentioned above.

Copying from literary models, the basis of the Dionysian imitatio, became one of the most important components of composition only a few generations after Plato. It accompanied the growth of the art of rhetoric, closely related to literary art, and its focus on impressing and convincing an audience, what Abrams would call the pragmatic function of literature. The Dionysian imitatio is an ancient method of

composition which involves taking previous literary works as a model and using

established forms and styles to express new content. It is extremely relevant to the

discussion of copyist fiction for two related reasons. First, it complicates the idea of a

work of art as a direct copy from life, suggesting that a literary work ought to be, in

part, a copy of earlier literary works. This blurs the distinction between the author's

copy and the law copyist's, making both dependent, though to different degrees, on

written models. The narrator in ―The Overcoat‖ plays with this sort of expectation—

that he will adhere to certain formal conventions currently in vogue. Introducing the

tailor Petrovich, he writes, ―Of this tailor, of course, not much should be said, but

since there exists a rule that the character of every person in a story be well

delineated, there‘s no help for it, let us have Petrovich here as well‖ (400). Second,

the method suggests that the form and style of a work of art are not immediately

dictated by the model (the universe), but are inherited from the literary tradition. (The

literary tradition being a possible part of the ―universe‖ that an artwork is copying, a

question arises about the degree to which rules of style, the social order, and the

natural order—including the true or Ideal—mirror and depend on one another. That is,

to what degree are literary conventions ―copied‖ from the universe, and thus an

organic part of a faithful imitation.) Depending on how harmoniously the author finds

literary conventions to coexist with his models in the world, composition may be a

complex negotiation of several competing originals.16

The consideration of literary forms and styles moves us to the idea of difference

16 See Auerbach's discussion of the classical doctrine of ―distinct separation of styles,‖ variously interpreted or rejected in later centuries. 28 as a positive element in mimetic art. That is to say that the way in which the copy differs from the original may, in the case of literature, be the source of a work's unique value. There are a number of different opinions as to how this works. One advantage is that of order. Consider, for example, a Shakespearean tragedy, in which the worst vices of man, the chaos of nature, and the cruelty of fate destroy characters and drive them mad—but in five carefully contained acts, at times in blank verse.

Thus the audience experiences horrors in an aestheticized form, contained, and ordered for maximum effect and efficient processing. Subjects otherwise too horrible can be broached within the bounds of form without permanently disordering the universe or the audience. (The order preserved by form may be social, mental or moral, as well as aesthetic.) Stylistic boundaries also protect against a type of demiurgic, second creation: a copying so exact, it becomes ghastly, demonic, uncanny. Gogol‘s ―The Portrait‖ (―Portret”) contains an example of this sort of demonic copying. A sinister moneylender hires an artist to paint his portrait before his death. The artist agrees, because he needs a model so that he can paint the devil in a work of art commissioned by a church. Despite the revulsion and distress the moneylender‘s features produce, the artist perseveres, seeking a mechanical detachment from his subject:

[H]e resolved to pursue every inconspicuous trait and expression with literal

precision. First of all he set to work on the eyes. There was so much power in

those eyes that it seemed impossible even to think of conveying them exactly as

they were in nature. However, he determined at all costs to search out the least

detail and nuance in them, to grasp their mystery… (385)

What he creates is a haunted portrait, somehow infused with the spirit of the moneylender, that brings misfortune to all of its owners. In addition to protecting against such soulless, demiurgic copying, the difference introduced in the creative process makes the work of art appealing, persuasive, and interesting as an aesthetic object. Thus limitations in size and perspective, which could have been to the copy's disadvantage (the sheer size of the original makes it impossible to render ―faithfully‖ without some intense formal maneuvering), become a key element in what makes makes art art.

Before leaving the topic of perspective, we should consider its role in Auerbach's

Mimesis, a series of detailed studies of the ways in which Western literature has approached realism and the idea of the faithful copy. Auerbach's analyses reveal the great extent to which the copy, far from a simple mirroring of nature, is shaped by the artist's perception. The content and structure of a literary work depend on the artist's worldview and what is possible for him or her to conceive. For example, Tacitus, living in an age concerned with ethics and personal fate, records different details from those of today‘s historiographer, who is interested in mapping historical forces. One could then pose the following question: is this a matter of world view limiting the aspects of the original that are reproduced, even the scope of what the artist takes as his original, or are the characteristics of the artist's world view in fact part of his original, so that Tacitus is copying from a world utterly lost to us?

Copyist fiction certainly raises questions about the ambiguous nature of mimetic

30 art, and of the literary text as copy and original, reflecting the aesthetic investigations of its time. As we have already seen, though, its interrogation of the concept of an authoritative original goes far beyond a simple contrast between the writer's creative

―copying,‖ which produces its own sort of original, and the mechanical copying of the scrivener. By demonstrating that even the latter, uncreative action challenges the authority of the original, by questioning whether Logos as a transcendent original is an accessible source of truth, and by linking the existence and fate of the copyist to his language use, copyist works join metafiction to metaphysics, making the question of the original central to human language, knowledge, and existence.

From Akakii Akakievich's blind devotion to an original that he does not read or evaluate to Bouvard and Pécuchet's ravenous copying, which engulfs and inscribes its original, nineteenth-century copyists destabilize the concept of Logos and its role in all aspects of Western culture, becoming seismographs of an upheaval that will be thoroughly recognized and explored only a century after them.

Logos in the Twentieth-Century: The Copy as Original?

This section looks at Derrida's reading of Plato's Philebus and Phaedrus as a collapse of the copy/original binary, providing an endpoint for the destabilization identified in copyist fiction. This collapse can serve as a point of entry into Derrida's entire critique of Western metaphysics as logocentric, which addresses a number of other linguistic and philosophical concerns raised by copyist tales. Establishing the relationship of the copy/original collapse with Derrida's critique of logocentrism and

31 the ―metaphysics of presence,‖ I show how his deconstruction of the presence/absence binary and his related reevaluation of the status of writing (relative to speech) are both anticipated by copyist fiction. Finally, I look briefly at post- structuralism as a reevaluation of difference, focusing on Deleuze's Difference and

Repetition and Derrida's ―The Double Session,‖ establishing a context for the shifting status of difference as it is represented in the copyist works examined in the chapters to follow.

In Dissemination (1972), Derrida reveals hidden complexities in historical western understandings of the concepts of mimesis and representation (and thus of writing, and language, and truth...) by rereading two Platonic dialogues: Philebus in

―The Double Session‖ and Phaedrus in ―Plato's Pharmacy.‖ My aim here is not to give a full exposition of either reading, as if such an undertaking were even possible, but to sketch briefly the way in which, in ―The Double Session,‖ Derrida's critique of

Platonism—a term in which he encompasses ―the whole history of Western philosophy, including the anti-Platonisms that regularly feed into it‖ (191)—suggests an interpenetration and indistinguishability of copy and original. Derrida's reading of

Platonic mimesis incorporates and expands upon the instabilities of the copy/original relationship thematized in nineteenth-century copyist fiction.

One might note in passing that, perhaps not by chance, both ―Plato's Pharmacy‖ and ―The Double Session‖ contain references to scribes. ―The Double Session‖ takes up a metaphor suggested by Socrates in Philebus of an ―internal scribe‖ recording experiences (memory and sensation) in the soul. ―Plato's Pharmacy‖ discusses a myth

about the invention of writing by Theuth, related to Thoth, the Egyptian god of

writing (and scribes). There is also a discussion of a sort of inverse copyist from

Phaedrus, the logographer:

The logographer [Derrida writes], in a strict sense, is a ghost writer who

composes speeches for use by litigants, speeches which he himself does not

pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speak, in person, and which produce

their effects in his absence. In writing what he does not speak, what he would

never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the

written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist: the man of

non-presence and non-truth (68).

While I will not pause here to discuss exactly how much of this description might

apply to the copyist as well (and it is hard to imagine a figure more worthy than

Akakii Akakievich or Bartleby of being called a ghost writer ―in a strict sense‖),

clearly copyist issues of who speaks/writes whose words, who controls a text, and the

distance between text and audience are of concern to both Plato and Derrida.

―The Double Session‖ engages Plato's views on mimesis and writing as outlined

in the section above—at least, his views on metaphorical writing and metaphorical

books.17 ―The Double Session‖ is concerned with two corners: the corner ―between

literature and truth‖ and the corner created by the physical juxtaposition of an excerpt

from Philebus and Mallarmé's ―Mimique‖ on the same page. Corners and folds are a

central image as a place where two things meet in a somewhat ambiguous

17 ―We recall that, on another plane, outside these metaphors, Plato always asserts that in their literal sense painting and writing are totally incapable of any intuition of the thing itself, since they only deal in copies, and in copies of copies‖ (190). 33

relationship, where the boundary between them is unclear and the exact nature of their

interaction is veiled in (or, more accurately, is the undetermined blank of) white

space. (The juxtaposition also suggests doubling or imitation, some kind of mutual

constitution or derivation, between the two texts.) Between Plato and Mallarmé,

Derrida writes, ―a whole history has taken place,‖ one that, ―if it has any meaning, is

governed in its entirety by the value of truth, and by a certain relation […] between

literature and truth‖ (183). It might also, he suggests, be considered the ―history of

literature‖ (ibid.). Plato and Mallarmé serve as endpoints for this history of the

relationship between literature and truth, a history organized by ―a certain

interpretation of mimēsis‖ (ibid.). One may surmise that this history includes attempts

to locate authority and truth—I purposely do not write Logos here, to avoid confusion

with the specific sense in which Derrida uses the term—and that it is marked, in fact,

by the sufferings and strivings of fictional copy clerks.18

At the Platonic end is the metaphorical book of the soul. The image of the book

comes from a conversation between Socrates and Protarchus about how our thoughts

are represented to ourselves. ―It seems to me,‖ says Socrates, ―that at such times our

soul is like a book‖:

[…] It appears to me that the conjunction of memory with sensations, together

with the feelings consequent upon memory and sensation, may be said as it were

18 One might then read copyist fiction as presaging the end of the history of literature, as it flourishes especially in the decades leading up to Mallarmé's ―Mimique.‖ The text was published in three versions: the first, without the title ―Mimique,‖ in La Revue indépendante in 1886; the second, also untitled, in Pages in 1891; and the third, with the title, in Divigations in 1897. For a more extensive textual history, see Barbara Johnson's comparison of the versions in her 1981 translation: Dissemination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. 196-197, note 20. 34

to write words in our souls. And when this experience writes what is true, the

result is that true opinion and true assertions spring up in us, while when the

internal scribe that I have suggested writes what is false, we get the opposite sort

of opinions and assertions. (175)

Of this book Derrida makes several observations, including that ―the truth of the book is decidable‖ and that ―the value of the book (true/false) is not intrinsic to it‖ (185).

That is, the value of the book comes from the value of the discourse it reproduces, a more immediate ―inner speech‖ set down by the scribe of the soul. The image is that of a copy that derives all of its worth from the original and that may be verified

(proofread) against an external model with greater authority. Derrida quickly confounds the notion that Plato is presenting so straightforward a view of

(metaphoric) mimesis, noting the complex interplay of image and text set up by the introduction of an ―inner illustrator‖ to illuminate the soul-scribe's manuscript. Still, even in metaphor, there is a clear privileging of the original and of its first presentation as ―inner speech.‖

Juxtaposed with the book and its external model is Mallarmé's ―Mimique.‖

―Mimique‖ describes a scene from the mimodrama ―Pierrot Murderer of his Wife,‖ in which Pierrot mimes his recent murder of Columbine, whom he has tickled to death.

Derrida reads the mime's performance as imitation without an original and

―Mimique‖ itself as creating a network of allusions without origin, so that the text is a double experiment in reference without referent.

The scene of ―Mimique‖ comes from a booklet recounting the mimodrama. The

35 booklet and Mallarmé's text, though, are only two links in an immense chain of imitations and references converging back upon an action that never actually occurred: the murder of Columbine. Not only is the mime recounting the story through imitation, but he is imitating Pierrot retelling (and reliving) something that happened in his own past. (The drama is set after the murder, though it includes a reenactment in which the mime plays both Pierrot and Columbine.) The contents of the mimodrama are then set down in a booklet composed after a performance by one of the audience members. Mallarmé reads the second edition of this booklet and writes his own text about the performance and the mime.

The mime's performance thus precedes its script and reenacts something that never occurred. Derrida describes it as imitation without an original, though whether the word ―imitation‖ thus pertains is called into question. ―There is no imitation,‖ he write. ―The Mime imitates nothing. And to begin with, he doesn't imitate. There is nothing prior to the writing of his gestures‖ (194). Similarly, the mime ―is not subject to the authority of any book‖ (195). That is to say, there is no more authoritative text against which his performance of/as Pierrot may be judged as true, accurate, precise.

At the same time, Derrida seconds Mallarmé's insistence that there is mimicry in the scene: the mime is not producing truth or originating the story of Pierrot. Derrida points to the line from ―Mimique‖ that reads, ―That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror‖ (206, original emphasis). In the mimicry of the mime, there is still difference, as from a prior source, or the other half of a double, or an image in the mirror. It is simply that

such a source, or double, or mirror image, does not exist in connection with the

mime's performance. The sense of mimicry of/relation to another in the mime's

performance ―is a difference without reference, or rather a reference without a

referent, […] a ghost that is the phantom of no flesh, wandering about without a past,

without any death, birth, or presence‖ (206).19 Unlike Plato's book of the soul, the

writing of the mime is a writing that is not dictated and cannot be proofread, that

keeps a sense of distance from an other without having an external, identifiable point

of origin. (And Derrida does refer to what the mime does as writing—and being

written, like an empty page—thus completing the parallel between ―Mimique‖ and

Philebus. Both are about writing without describing an act of writing as one generally

conceives of it, without an act of scription, though not, especially in ―Mimique,‖

without an acknowledgement of the physicality of writing.) Derrida retains the sense

of reference and difference that characterizes writing in Philebus and simply removes

the original: ―In the beginning of this mime was neither the deed nor the word‖ (198).

Similarly, the network of reference and allusion in ―Mimique‖ cannot be traced

back to an origin. Derrida points to an epigraph in the booklet about the mimodrama

that binds it into an even broader web of intertextuality. The epigraph (―The story of

Pierrot who tickled his wife,/ And thus made her laughingly give up her life‖ (203)) is

from Theophile Gautier's Harlequinade Pierrot Posthume. Gautier's text, in turn, links

―Mimique‖ to the vast tradition of the comedia dell' arte. ―Mimique‖ is thus opened

through intertextuality to a play of influence, reference, and allusion that can never be

closed by the location of an end (or beginning) point.

19 The description fits Bartleby nicely. 37

In terms of copyist fiction and its inquiries into the authority of the original, ―The

Double Session‖ might be interpreted as suggesting a copy without an original, retaining a sense of distance and difference (the copyist as intermediary), but no longer dependent for value and authenticity on a prior, external source. It is not so much that authority or truth moves from being located in an outside original to being inscribed within the copy, but that the copy ceases to have a clearly distinguishable inside and outside. (What moves into the Mallarmean text is ―the process of truth,‖ no longer a negotiation between the internal and external (207).) This happens to an extent, as we will see, in Bouvard and Pécuchet, as the fictional copyists begin to copy works of non-fiction and even other works by Flaubert, opening the boundaries of the novel so that real and fiction and original and copy are no longer stable binaries. (One could assign as a retroactive epigraph to Bouvard and Pécuchet the famous opening sentence of Dissemination: ―This, therefore, will not have been a book‖ (3).)

So far we have turned to Derrida's texts in Dissemination to locate an end point

(or at least a milestone) of the crisis of the original played out in copyist fiction. That is, we have followed copyist concerns into ―The Double Session.‖ If we now do the opposite, and read a few central and well-known ideas from Derrida's earliest major writings back into copyist fiction, they prove an excellent framework for the discussion of some of the more mysterious behaviors and motifs associated with nineteenth-century scriveners. In fact, the most passive copy clerks, such as Bartleby

and Akakii Akakievich, appear to be anticipatory illustrations or tests of certain

concepts from Derrida's work. Certainly neither his critique of logocentrism and its

binaries nor his concept of différance would entirely shock Melville or Flaubert.

Perhaps this convergence is not surprising, since all of these authors work from a

reexamination of writing and what the act of writing reveals about language and truth.

In 1967 Derrida published three major works, Of Grammatology, Speech and

Phenomena, and Writing and Difference. Together they challenge some fundamental

concepts of western philosophy, which Derrida refers to, as a whole, as a

―metaphysics of presence.‖ In other words, as Arthur Bradley writes, the western

tradition ―seeks to establish an essential foundation for reality, and, in his [Derrida's]

view, that foundation is something called presence‖ (6). Bradley elaborates:

From the spatial presence of something we can see, hear or touch, through the

temporal presence of the 'here and now' in which we live, up to and including the

absence of some presence that has been lost (such as an Edenic state of nature)

or which may be achieved in the future (such as the return of God), western

thought consistently comes to the same conclusion: what is most real, true, or

important is what is most present. (6, original emphasis)

This leads to what Derrida terms ―logocentrism,‖ a mode of thinking based on

binaries in which one element of the pair is privileged as more present, authoritative,

or true. In Of Grammatology,20Derrida challenges the logocentric privileging of

speech over writing, founded on the idea of speech as more pure and immediate,

closer to the original thought, and more temporally present to the speaker and

20 Derrida coins the term ―grammatology‖ to mean a science of writing (as opposed to speech). 39

interlocutor. Derrida challenges logocentric ideas not in order to flip the binaries,

which would merely lead to a new logocentrism with its values reversed, but to

expose the inherent instabilities in concepts that have been taken as foundational.

Bradley writes, ―Derrida argues that every apparently pure, stable or self-identical

presence is nothing more than an effect generated by a prior series of differences:

nothing is every purely or simply 'there'‖ (7).21 Hence Derrida's attention to writing,

where these differences and distances are already evident and accepted: all of

language can be reconceived as writing when one acknowledges the otherness and

difference that is, in Derrida's view, a part of every linguistic act.

The figure of the copyist is an excellent reminder of the otherness and differences

inherent within writing (and so, according to Derrida, in all of language). The copyist

is another link in the chain that distances author from audience, a set of unknown

hands that leave their mark on the physical manuscript. As his intervention, if he is a

good copyist, should be practically invisible, he becomes a symbol as well of the way

in which these differences are often hidden or ignored, and copyist fiction becomes an

exposé of our assumptions about meaning and authority.

21 Of course, we have seen a demonstration of exactly this in the handling of the copy/original or thing/imitation binary in ―The Double Session.‖ As noted above, Derrida finds ambiguity in Plato's discussion of writing in Philebus, not only in Mallarmé's text. In ―The Double Session,‖ the fusion of opposites enacted by the mime takes place in the ―hymen,‖ a word Derrida borrows from Mallarmé and uses in its double sense of membrane (separating) and marriage (joining). The hymen is what lies between—intre (―between‖) and the phonetically similar antre (―cave‖) are two key terms in the text, just as the entire essay begins with the white space placed between Plato's text and Mallarmé's. ―'Hymen',‖ Derrida writes, ―[...] is first of all a sign of fusion. […] Within this fusion, there is no longer any distance between desire (the awaiting of a full presence designed to fulfill it, to carry it out) and the fulfillment of presence, between distance and non-distance; there is no longer any difference between desire and satisfaction. It is not only the difference (between desire and fulfillment) that is abolished, but also the difference between difference and non-difference‖ (209). As for copies and originals, the (con)fusion that takes place in the hymen ―eliminates the exteriority or anteriority, the independence, of the imitated, the signified, or the thing‖ (210). 40

At the same time, the liminality of the copyist makes him an example of the ambiguity underlying concepts of presence and absence. The copyist achieves an odd status of semi-presence both within the text and, often, in the rest of his life. In the text, he is present but non-contributing, the physical creator of the document who nonetheless has little role (except through error) in the reader's experience of the text.

Through the physical fact of paper and ink he lingers in a text that is not his own, a trace of the other, of a second, undetectable writing that leaves its mark only in the characteristics of the hand in which it is set down. Descriptions of handwriting abound in copyist fiction. Only in this one aesthetic element is the presence of the copyist inscribed within the document, and only in this single element is he allowed to leave a mark of his existence and his labor. The handwriting itself is liminal, external to the composition, yet not purely material in the way that the paper and ink are. It is a marker of presence in which the copyist, however, remains essentially unencounterable, an extra figure in the discourse who has no dialogic role.

The physical positioning of the copyist in his workspace mirrors his semi- presence in the text. The writer of a document may be physically present to a copy clerk in the office, either as he composes or when he delivers the document to be copied. Alternately, he might use an intermediary. Akakii Akakievich, for example, gets his documents from the chief clerk‘s assistant, who is probably not the original author. In either case, the physical proximity of the copyist to the writer is carefully controlled. When they are allowed to work near their employers, they often occupy liminal spaces. Bartleby's employer places the copyist within his own office but

―procure[s] a high green folding screen which might entirely remove Bartleby from my sight, but not remove him from my voice. In this manner, privacy and society were conjoined‖ (12). Bartleby is thus kept semi-present, a status reinforced when the narrator later thinks, of Bartleby, ―I never feel so private as when I know you are here‖ (35). In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge keeps his copy clerk similarly distant but accessible: ―The door of Scrooge‘s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk‘s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal‖ (Stave 1). In this sense, the copyist is semi-present to the author as well as to the readers.

Perhaps the same ambiguity of presence/non-presence explains the uncomfortable imagery of copyists' bodies, as well. As mentioned above, they are often ghostlike, and ascetic in their appetites for both sex and food. They seldom assert their physical presence either through conversation or contact. Akakii Akakievich even forgets that he is physically present on the street instead of in a text. He blunders off course and gets garbage dumped on him while caught up in a vision of his own handwritten lines.

In keeping with the tenuous nature of their physical presence, copyists tend to be uneasily embodied. Their physical forms are often embarrassing, limiting, or zombie- like, as if they do not quite fully inhabit their own forms. For example, for all his ascetic bliss and the spiritual rapture of his copying, Akakii Akakievich has a rather ungainly person: ―short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat red-haired, even with a somewhat nearsighted look, slightly bald in front, with wrinkles in both cheeks and a

42 complexion that is known as hemorrhoidal…‖ (394). Ironically, when his corpse

(supposedly) walks after his death, he is much stronger, bolder, and more effective than when he was alive. The life/death binary is not unambiguous for copy clerks.

Meanwhile, Vasia in Dostoevsky's ―Slaboe serdtse‖ (―A Weak Heart‖) is hindered by the limitations of his body. He is too small and too weak to finish his copying assignment on time, though he longs to do so to express his gratitude to his employer.

When he tries to sit up all night, he ends up in a death-like trance. In this stupor, he forgets to fill his pen, and ends up writing for pages without any ink. As his physical strength wanes, he also fails to assert a physical presence in the document he is copying, for his handwriting is reduced to mere scratches. The chapter on Dostoevsky deals in more detail with the crises of scale that his early copyists face, and how their mental and moral capacities far outstrip their physical and social capabilities.

As another sign of their semi-presence and their resultant blurring of the death/life binary, fictional copyists often leave their corpses in the pages of their stories.

Bartleby leaves a pale shell of himself in the grass of the jail, though he has already been described as ―pallid‖ and death-like throughout the story. Akakii Akakievich leaves behind a body that is then reanimated for a short career. The meagerness of his remains, before they begin haunting, is suggested by the mention of the other tiny physical traces he leaves behind: ―goose quills,‖ ―three pairs of socks,‖ ―two or three buttons,‖ and, of course, ―a stack of white official paper‖ (419). Finally, Nemo in

Bleak House is presented to the reader only after his death.As Shore points out, ―He

[Nemo] is literally absent throughout the fiction, though we know of his past by

hearsay. More precisely, only his corpse appears in the novel; he is already lifeless

when we meet him‖ (95).

The body of the copyist after death functions in a way similar to his handwriting.

The corpse has a physical presence but cannot be encountered and interacted with the

way a living person can. It is simultaneously a sign of the incomplete presence of a

human being and a physical excess, present where it is no longer needed, just as,

through his handwriting, the copyist becomes a silent extra in discourse. These bodies

may be signs of protest: their owners have been squeezed out of a livable position in

society, leaving behind a sign of their elimination for the living to deal with. In this

regard, the copyist's corpse functions like Bartleby's silent presence, his continued

occupancy of the office long after he has refused to do any work. As we will see in the

Melville chapter, this occupation has frequently been read as an act of protest.

Alternately, the empty bodies might be failures of incarnation, impartial realizations

of some lost or obscure original. The chapter on Dostoevsky discusses copying in

connection with incarnation and iconography, so I will just note here that Christ

imagery occurs with surprising regularity in copyist fiction, even associated with

those copyists who are not particularly Christ-like. Though Myshkin is the obvious

example of a calligrapher-Christ, Iakov Petrovich Goliadkin, in The Double, is

betrayed by a Judas-like kiss, ―Bartleby‖ is awash in Gospel imagery,22 and Makar

Devushkin and Vasia strive for an ideal of self-sacrifice they are too limited to realize.

Recalling the description of incarnation in the first chapter of John, ―The Word

became flesh and made his dwelling among us‖ (John 1:14), the image of failed or

22 See, for example, The White Monk, in which F.D. Reeve interprets Bartleby as a Christ figure. 44

partial incarnation seems particularly appropriate to copyist investigations of the

presence and transcendent authority of Logos (and to post-structuralist destabilizing

of logocentrism).

A final way in which copyist fiction anticipates post-structuralist concerns is in its

handling of the concept of difference. A changing role for difference is vital not only

to Derrida but to basically all post-structuralists, who were reacting to Saussure's

Course in General Linguistics, which treats language as differential instead of

referential. Deleuze's 1968 work Difference and Repetition questions the privileging

of identity over difference in Western thought and seeks a way of discussing

difference that does not reduce it to mere non-identity.23 ―The primacy of identity,‖ he

writes, ―however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought

is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities […]. The modern

world is one of simulacra‖ (xix). In the chapter on Flaubert, I look at the way in

which difference has gone from being erroneous or sinful (as when Akakii Akakievich

almost crosses himself after almost making a mistake in his copying) to being an

essential ground for meaning.

These are the general intersections and correspondences between copyist fiction

and post-structuralist concerns. The chapters that follow examine how they play out in

the works of individual authors, exploring the approach of each work to the

copyist/original dilemma and examining the repercussions of each copyist's choice to

copy passively or to rebel.

23 Not incidentally, Deleuze writes about copyists at least twice. He discusses Borges's short story ―Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote‖ in Difference and Repetition and also has an excellent article on Bartleby that I discuss in the Melville chapter. 45

Chapter 2: Gogol

―I am, in a large measure, the self-same prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs; I punctuate myself.‖

―From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. ‖ –Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

Nikolai Gogol's ―The Overcoat‖ (1842) tells the story of the most famous copyist,

and one of the poorest of poor clerks, in all of Russian literature. Only Bartleby rivals

Akakii Akakievich for the role of the archetypal scrivener in Western culture. ―The

Overcoat‖ is a foundational text in the Russian prose tradition of the nineteenth

century. In addition to its broadly influential style and subject matter, it inspired direct

responses from writers ranging from Gogol's contemporaries (Dostoevsky's Poor

Folk, 1844-5) well into the Soviet era. Boris Vakhtin's The Sheepskin Coat

(Dublënka) (1979) and Vladimir Voinovich's The Fur Hat (Shapka) (1988) are two

examples of late-twentieth-century children of ―The Overcoat.‖ The immediate

impact and subsequent legacy of Gogol's copyist povest'24spawned the often-cited

phrase, famously mis-attributed to Dostoevsky, ―My vse vyshli iz gogolevskoi

shineli‖ (―We‘ve all come from under Gogol's overcoat‖).

Aside from Gogol's early and prominent position in the canon of scrivener

24 Lengthy short story or short novella. 46 fiction, I devote my first chapter to him because his copyist stories develop the theme of the lost original and, through it, examine the uncertain role of Logos as a source of transcendent truth. Because they are overtly concerned with Logos, they serve as an excellent point of entry to the critique of originals and logocentric conceptions of truth that frame the broader arc of the copyist tradition. Gogol's copyists identify the crisis that later scrivener fiction reacts to, whether or not its authors fall directly under his influence. In addition, Akakii Akakievich lives like a parodic version of a monk or hermit, directly inviting comparison with the ideal of the medieval scribe copying a divine original. ―The Overcoat‖ dramatizes the downfall of the copyist from the medieval servant of the Word to the modern civil servant, attendant to petty bureaucrats and their ―words, words, words....‖

―The Overcoat‖ and its complement, ―Diary of a Madman‖ (Zapiski sumasshedshego, 1835), depict two copy clerks whose relationships with their originals place them at opposite ends of the creativity-passivity spectrum. Akakii

Akakievich accepts any original handed to him without question and copies it exactly.

By treating ordinary texts as if they were transcendent or divine, he inadvertently calls into question the existence of any kind of authoritative master text. As his faith in an authoritative original proves unfounded, Akakii Akakievich's surroundings become increasingly fantastic, language ceases to work as it should, and disorder and abysses reveal themselves at the heart of the city and its social order. In contrast, Poprishchin rebels against copying and convention to the point of incoherence. As he strives to become an author, and then a king, he is increasingly disillusioned by the same

arbitrariness and capriciousness of language that haunt ―The Overcoat.‖ Poprishchin's

descent into madness becomes a critique of authorship and authority figures. His

attempt to compose and order his own text reveals that, not only is there no suitable

master text for a nineteenth-century man to live by, but there may not be a divine

Author capable of writing one, either.

―The Overcoat‖

Logos and the Copyist

The word ―logos‖ has accumulated a cluster of related meanings over its history.

Before reading Gogol's copyist fiction as an exploration of missing or inaccessible

Logos, I want to clarify how I use the term, when I capitalize it, and what the

historical role of Logos has to do with Gogolian copies and originals.

In use in Greek philosophy since the time of Heraclitus (c. 500 B.C.), logos can

mean reason, order, speech, word, proportion, or worth.25 In the Christian tradition it

refers to Christ (as the Word become flesh in John 1:14), to the creation of the world,

which is spoken into being in Genesis 1, and to God's word as revealed to humankind

in the scriptures. In these senses it is a transcendent, authoritative Word sent into the

physical world. In some of its Greek contexts, too, logos takes on a meaning of high-

level order and universality. Jacques Derrida claims that the entire history of Western

philosophy has ―always assigned the origin of truth to the logos‖ (Of Grammatology

3). When I write Logos with a capital L, it is to capture its nature as a source of

transcendent truth, higher and more stable than individual experience, which is the

25 ―Logos,‖ The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. 48 sense in which I think its absence is particularly crucial to Gogol‘s texts. As such, it is an authoritative source of meaning and order. (Exactly how completely and by what means humanity has access to this source is a much more divisive question.)

Logos thus functions for humanity in a way that is comparable to the role of an original document for a copyist. The original serves as the standard against which the copyist's work is measured and corrected, with any difference being interpreted as a defect in the copy. Similarly, Logos, whether as divine law, pure reason, or a similar source of ultimate order, serves as a universal reference against which ideas, perceptions, and behaviors may be verified.

The major difference between Logos as transcendent original and the copy clerk's original is that the authority of the latter is situational, while that of the former is inherent. Let us take the case of Farrington in James Joyce‘s ―Counterparts,‖ who is copying a file full of letters. A client's letter to a law firm is authoritative from the clerk's perspective not because the client's statement is necessarily true, but because of a legal imperative to preserve it unchanged. The letter in such a case has authority only relative to the copy—only, in fact, because it is copied. Logos, on the other hand, simply by its nature is authoritative. The difference between a medieval scribe copying a sacred text and a copyist comes down to a matter of capitalization: Logos versus logos, Word versus word, Law versus law.

The problem for Akakii Akakievich is that he cannot tell the two apart. This is not entirely his fault. The status of Logos in Western culture changes significantly in the centuries between the scribe and the copy clerk. During the Enlightenment, Logos is

displaced through a double shift in worldview: towards human reason (lowercase

logos) and perception as a source of knowledge, and towards an exploration of doubt

that refuses to root certainty in external ideals. By the time copyist fiction becomes

prevalent in the mid-nineteenth century, the presence of transcendent authority can no

longer be assumed. At the same time, just as Christianity remains a significant part of

nineteenth-century culture and thought, the idea of the divine Word endures. Logos

now competes, however, with numerous other sources of knowledge,26 and coexists

with the idea that there may not be an ultimate source of truth.27

Once Logos is cast into doubt, though, its lowercase instantiations have no

external origin or guarantor. Reason may run mad, as it does with Poprishchin, words

cavort in glossolalia, and everyday systems of order lose their shape. Written at a time

when the idea of Logos still has cultural currency but has lost intellectual primacy,

"The Overcoat" reveals the precarious existence of a society that may not be rooted in

Logos, and also the modern temptation to assume foundations that can no longer be

26 For Derrida, all still types of ―presence.‖ 27 Correspondingly, long before copyist fiction becomes a recognizable category, the literary devices of the embedded text, the text fragment,and the palimpsest come into use to illustrate the leveling out of Logos: it is now one of many possible narratives, rather than the master text of existence. Consider, for example, two foundational texts of modernity singled out by Turgenev as indicative of the problem of nineteenth-century morality: Hamlet and Don Quixote. In his 1860 speech, Turgenev chooses Hamlet and Don Quixote as the two types that represent humanity's responses to the ideal. Though he uses them to exemplify, respectively, doubt (and selfishness) and faith (and generosity), both characters have complex relationships with text, and with the idea of the ideal as master text. In fact, both works, in different ways, anticipate the absence of Logos that Gogol addresses in "The Overcoat," making the latter work's investigation of the lost original part of a canon of modern uncertainty. Hamlet, for whom all texts threaten to become merely "words, words, words" (Act II scene ii), experiences the paralyzing possibility that there is no infallible authority: not the king, who may be murdered; nor the texts of his education, interrupted; nor revelation from beyond the grave, forbidden and suspect. Don Quixote finds a master text to live by, in the face of "the wisdom of the world." Nonetheless, he is choosing one from the overabundance of entwined, embedded, and fragmentary texts that compose the novel--a work whose own boundaries prove vulnerable to theft and augmentation, completing a picture of textual multiplicity and instability. In each work, then, the search for a master text is about human striving and choice, and the desire for such a text is accompanied by the threat of madness. 50

taken for granted. Though the leveling out of Logos with other texts began centuries

before it was written, ―The Overcoat‖ reveals the dangerous complacency of using the

still-familiar concept of Logos to avoid radical reevaluation of social structures,

morality, and the coherence of the world.

Scribe Without Scripture

Of all of the nineteenth-century scriveners, Akakii Akakievich bears the most

resemblance to a medieval scribe. His humble devotion to his copying, and the

asceticism of the rest of his life, are such that the descriptions of his labor might be

taken from the life of a saint. ―It would hardly be possible to find a man who lived so

much in his work,‖ the narrator explains. ―It is not enough to say that he served

zealously—no, he served with love. There, in that copying, he saw some varied and

pleasant world of his own‖ (397).28 For love of copying, Akakii Akakievich does not

notice his extreme poverty, the flies in his thin soup, or the mockery of his coworkers,

who find his shabbiness and shyness absurd. Until the new overcoat awakens him to

new desires, he lives as if cloistered, preferring solitude and copying to the pleasures

of drinking and card games. In the evenings he copies at home just as he has copied at

work all day.

In his reverence for his originals, too, Akakii Akakievich approaches his work

more like a scribe copying scripture than like a civil servant. He is as vigilant against

alteration and error as if he were preserving the Word of God, and not merely a

28 ―Мало сказать: он служил ревностно, нет, он служил с любовью. Там, в этом переписываньи, ему виделся какой-то свой разнообразный и приятный мир‖ (144). 51

bureaucratic memo. It is not in his nature to change the slightest detail of a given text.

When offered a promotion that requires ―changing the heading [of a document] and

changing some verbs from first to third person,‖ Akakii Akakievich breaks out in a

sweat and begs, ―No, better let me copy something‖ (397)29. Later, he (almost)

crosses himself when he almost makes a mistake. By this gesture, Akakii Akakievich

demonstrates a connection between error and sin that belongs to the medieval

tradition of Cassiodorus‘s scribe as holy warrior. If error is sinful, faithful copying is

by extension virtuous. Akakii Akakievich even uses a colloquialism that allows,

perhaps not consciously on his part, for the idea that his originals are sent by the

divine. The narrator describes Akakii Akakievich falling asleep each night wondering,

―What would God send him to copy tomorrow?‖ (399).30

Though his humble joy in such simple and low-paying work should be admirable

from a Christian/Medieval perspective, Akakii Akakievich's devotion to his originals

creates problems in a nineteenth-century context. He is absurd in a way that a

medieval scribe would not be, and his humility leaves him exposed to the particular

cruelties of Petersburg and its inhabitants. This vulnerablity allows the plotline

surrounding the titular coat to play out: his copying work does not protect him against

the cold as his clothes wear out, and his loyal service earns him no succor when his

coat is snatched. More importantly, though, the narrator never lets the reader forget

the incongruity of Akakii Akakievich's behavior. While the copyist may escape into

reveries, we see him as a comic, or pitiable, would-be saint. Gogol's narrator delights

29 ―[Н]ет, лучше дайте я перепишу что-нибудь‖ (145). 30 ―Что-то бог пошлет переписывать завтра‖ (147). 52

in juxtaposing Akakii Akakievich's humility with the humiliating and banal details of

everyday life. For example:

[T]here was always something stuck to his uniform: a wisp of straw or a

bit of thread; moreover, he had a special knack, as he walked in the street,

of getting under a window at the precise moment when some sort of trash

was being thrown out of it, and, as a result, he was eternally carrying

around melon or watermelon rinds and other such rubbish on his hat [...].

(398)31

Noting Gogol's delight in incongruities and mixed registers, John Schillinger

reads ―The Overcoat‖ as a ―travesty of hagiography.‖ He suggests that Akakii

Akakievich's life may be drawn from the life of St. Acacius of Sinai, and that Gogol's

retelling continually deflates the expectations of the hagiographic tradition. Akakii

Akakievich suffers like the saint, but not for any particular convictions, and his

thoughts are ―introverted and inconsequential,‖ while a saint's should be ―lofty‖ (39).

I think there is more substance to Akakii Akakievich's resemblance to a medieval

monk (if not quite to a saint) than Schiller gives him credit for. For example, he

writes, ―In his clothing Akakij Akakievič resembles a monk. Yet travesty is in

evidence here also, since he did not neglect his clothing for ascetic reasons. His

tattered clothes simply reflect his meager salary, which in turn reflects his

capabilities‖ (39). While the state of his clothing may indeed reflect his penury,

31 ―И всегда что-нибудь да прилипало к его вицемундиру: или сенца кусочек, или какая-нибудь ниточка; к тому же он имел особенное искусство, ходя по улице, поспевать под окно именно в то же самое время, когда из него выбрасывали всякую дрянь, и оттого вечно уносил на своей шляпе арбузные и дынные корки и тому подобный вздор‖ (145).

Akakii Akakievich's ability to devote himself to his texts to such a degree that he does

not notice his circumstances contains the seeds of a genuine resemblance to the

medieval spirit. That is, though he is not a scribe, his imitation of a scribe is rooted in

the behavioral, not merely in the circumstantial. (Chizhevskii, on the other hand,

would argue that the mix of aspiration and trivia reveal the devil and his banal evil at

work.)32 At the same time, I agree with Schiller's analysis that the ultimate effect is

one of travesty. The reader cannot for a moment forget the problematic and

incongruous nature of Akakii Akakievich's copying.

Of course, the major reason that his devotion to his originals appears parodic is

that Akakii Akakievich does not pay any attention to the type of texts that he is

copying. He unquestioningly accepts whatever original comes his way and does not

even look up to verify the source. He accepts documents blindly, ―looking only at the

papers, without regarding the one who put them there or whether he had the right to

do so‖ (396).33 In other words, he does nothing to verify the authority of the originals,

but is happy to assume that they are sent (through some departmental intermediary)

from God.

Moreover, it is unclear on what level he is capable of reading his originals. The

documents he copies in his free time are those ―addressed to some new or important

person‖ (398).34 He is interested in names, not in content or style. His great love is the

letter, not the word—perhaps he does not bother to read words at all, aside from those

impressive names. The narrator describes Akakii Akakievich's delight in the alphabet

32 See ―About 'The Overcoat'‖ 320. 33 ―[П]осмотрев только на бумагу, не глядя кто ему подложил и имел ли на то право‖ (143). 34 ―[П]о адресу к какому-нибудь новому или важному лицу‖ (146). 54

thus: ―[C]ertain letters were his favorites, and when he came to one of them, he was

beside himself: he chuckled and winked and helped out with his lips, so that it seemed

one could read on his face every letter his pen traced‖ (397).35 He enjoys texts as a

copyist, not a reader, would, and thus not with the same type of appreciation the

scribe has for a sacred original.

Mikhail Epshtein defends Akakii Akakievich's love of letters and his secular

originals. He suggests that precisely the humble status of the letter redounds to its

lover's credit:

In the hierarchy of things [Epshtein writes], the letter might occupy the last

place—its body is the least substantial, insomuch as the letter is a sign, and

even more contingent and less self-sufficient in its physical being than the

majority of other types of signs (graphic, iconic, figurative). […] To love

letters, to give oneself entirely to forming them perfectly, to have a passion

for them—is that not to love 'the least of these,' that is, to adhere to the

legacy of self-effacing, charitable love that approaches the medieval

worldview? (4)

There is a special humility in being devoted to the letter as the fragile vessel of

meaning in which it itself does not exactly participate. The letter, in Epshtein's

reading, becomes the equivalent of the copyist's handwriting in the text, a necessary

shell, but not a part of the compositional process. Or, like the copyist himself, the

letter is a servant of the text, and the lover of the letter makes himself the lowliest

35 ―[Н]екоторые буквы были фавориты, до которых если он добирался, то был сам не свой: и посмеивался, и подмигивал, и помогал губами, так что в лице его, казалось, можно было прочесть всякую букву, которую выводило перо его‖ (144). 55

servant of the original. Nor does it matter to Epshtein that the texts Akakii Akakievich

copies have little worth in themselves. In fact, he finds that the ―tragic collision

between the love of letters and the insignificance (nichtozhestvo) of their contents‖

adds to that love ―a gentle and almost heroic tenacity‖ (5).

The problem is that it is never clear that Akakii Akakievich's love for letters is a

choice or that he understands that a text could be anything more. The descriptions of

his copying, though full of a scribe's love and joy, also betray a blind acceptance. He

does not look to see who hands him the documents, and at no point in the narrative

are any kind of contents described. In addition, visions of his own handwriting lead

him to wander into the middle of the street:

But Akakii Akakievich, even if he looked at something, saw in everything

his own neat lines, written in an even hand, and only when a horse's

muzzle, coming out of nowhere, placed itself on his shoulder and blew real

wind from its nostrils onto his cheek—only then would he notice that he

was not in the middle of a line, but rather in the middle of the street.

(398)36

It is hard to accept the optimism of Epshtein's reading, and especially to reconcile it

with a clerk who returns as a coat-stealing phantom after death. The narrative does

hint at this sort of humility and reverence, but never in an unqualified, unproblematic

way.

36 ―Но Акакий Акакиевич если и глядел на что, то видел на всем свои чистые, ровным почерком выписанные строки, и только разве если, неизвестно откуда взявшись, лошадная морда помещалась ему на плечо и напускала ноздрями целый ветер в щеку, тогда толька замечал он, что он не на середине строки, а скорее на средине улицы‖ (145). 56

In fact, Akakii Akakievich's ignorance of the texts to which he devotes himself points toward a larger crisis stemming from a lack of authoritative originals. The image of the scribe without scripture calls into question the presence and accessibility of Logos as an authentic master text, one that would give order to the world and coherence to human interactions. Is Akakii Akakievich merely choosing the wrong texts, or is he making do with the only type of text available? In other words, Akakii

Akakievich's behavior poses the questions of whether or not there is a ―text‖ (a source or revelation of Logos) that can have the same comprehensive authority for nineteenth-century man that the Gospels would have held for a medieval monk. In

Gogol's Petersburg, it appears that the answer is no: the disorienting cityscape only heightens the reader's awareness of the lack of horizon, thus making ―The Overcoat,‖ in essence, a story about a missing foundational text.

To create a world without a master text, Gogol carefully refrains from providing the reader with any framework for moral or other orientation. Donald Fanger calls

―The Overcoat‖ ―normless, lacking any single implied basis for judgment‖ (154).The narrator's word may or may not be reliable: his knowledge of events is at times impressive, as when he recounts the scene of Akakii Akakievich's birth and christening, and at others unexpectedly limited. (―[I]t's really impossible,‖ the narrator admits, ―to get inside a man's soul and learn all he thinks‖ (411), but less than a page later he is able to explain with confidence, ―Akakii Akakievich was somewhat embarrassed, yet being a pure-hearted man, he could not help rejoicing to see how

everyone praised his overcoat‖ (ibid.).)37 His colloquial style and penchant for gossip

offer the reader endless entertainment but little orientation. The narrative itself is

similarly disorienting. Elements of multiple genres swirl in uneasy suspension:

hagiography, folklore, realism, the fantastic. Hints at possible moral readings are

deftly undercut. The demonic Petrovich, whose deformed big toe, smoky house, and

constant cursing all associate him with the devil, does nothing conclusively evil. The

admirable young co-worker, touched by Akakii Akakievich's outburst, disappears

from the story perhaps a tenth of the way in, having done nothing but utter his

sentimental moral. How one ought to feel about Akakii Akakievich himself is

increasingly problematized over the course of the narrative, especially by his return as

an avenging ghost. One could interpret him as a saint who yields to temptation, a

malen'kii chelovek destroyed by cold-hearted bureaucrats, a recluse awakening to the

world too late, or long-suffering soul who wreaks supernatural revenge on his

tormentors. Each reading is supportable to a certain degree; none appears definitive.

The story's careful evasion of moral and factual certainty serves to remind the reader

of the lack of an authoritative account: without Logos to root them, stories dance at

the whims of their tellers, performing odd linguistic arabesques. Gogol's narrative

strategy mirrors the central image of the scribe without scripture, in that it calls

attention to the absence of Logos.

A World without Logos

37 ―[В]едь нельзя же залезть в душу человеку и узнать всѐ, что он ни думает. [...] Акакий Акакиевич хотя было отчасти и сконфузился, но будучи человеком чистосердечным, но мог не порадоваться, видя, как все похвалили шинель‖ (159-160). 58

―The Overcoat‖ thus becomes a tale of disillusionment, of faith in a foundation

that never reveals itself. Without a source of moral orientation, that which ought to be

admirable appears parodic, skewed. What ought to be holy becomes distorted and

questionable, in keeping with the absurdity of the story. The ―pleasant, multifarious

world‖ that Akakii Akakievich glimpses through his copying may be a delusion rather

than a revelation; the moral awakening of his coworker, who hears a call to universal

brotherhood, reads as pastiche. Within the world of the story, the lack of accessible

Logos has severe linguistic, social, and metaphysical effects.

We can know Gogol's conception of Logos only apophatically from this text, in

which Logos overtly does not appear.38 The problems that Akakii Akakievich

encounters suggest areas in which his lost master text might have played an

ameliorating role. Such is the case with Akakii Akakievich's great difficulties with

speech and human interaction. He is almost incapable of speaking coherently or using

language on his own behalf. When compelled to, he ―express[es] himself mostly with

prepositions, adverbs, and finally such particles as have decidedly no meaning‖

38 What Gogol thought about Logos outside of the text of ―The Overcoat‖ is not perfectly clear and probably shifted over the course of his career, as did his views on religion and on art. He is certainly interested in art that builds towards the divine and transcendent: See his depiction of Christian and demonic types of painting in ―The Portrait,‖ or the history of his incomplete divine comedy, of which Dead Souls, the only existent text, is the Inferno. Mann describes Gogol's poetics as ―striv[ing] to realize the transition from the temporal to the eternal, from the individual to the universally human, from the travestied and caricatured to the catastrophic, and finally, from fragmentation and chaos to unity and harmony‖ (86). Fanger, similarly, calls ―The Overcoat‖ and Dead Souls “comic poems tending to transcendance [sic]” (161). See also Michael Weiskopf's ―The Bird Troika and the Chariot of the Soul: Plato and Gogol‖ for a discussion of the influence Plato's philosophy, including his concept of logos, on Gogol's aesthetics. He suggests that Gogol's actual reading of Plato combines with a ―Christian Neoplatonic concept of the resurrecting Logos in its Romantic form‖ to give rise to the ―infinite song‖ of the road in Dead Souls (140). 59

(402).39 In other words, he chooses those parts of speech that derive meaning from

being paired with other words. (While, obviously, all words gain meaning from

context, a noun is far more likely to stand without a preposition than a preposition

without a noun.) He also relies heavily on ellipsis. For example, he approaches his

tailor for repairs by explaining, ―I've come to you, Petrovich, sort of...‖ and trailing

off (402). (―A ia vot k tebe, Petrovich, togo...‖ (149).)Akakii Akakievich's speech does

not convey meaning in itself so much as it forms a frame for text that is not there.40

Just as in his copying he changes nothing and merely inscribes the text in neat letters,

in conversation he utters as little as possible and leaves room for another text to come

through.41 It appears that he has faith42 not only in the documents he copies but also in

the existence of some external force that lends coherence and comprehension to

39 ―Акакий Акакиевич изъяснялся большею частью предлогами, наречиями и, наконец, тамими частицами, которые решительно не имеют никакого значения‖ (149). 40 Jan Van Der Eng compares Akakii Akakievich's speech to that of a child and finds it to be deceptively expressive. ―In short, he uses the language of a child which does not take the trouble to finish its sentences‖ Van Der Eng writes (79), noting further, ―...he often talks like a child, repeating the same meaningless particles, while expressing something very precise‖ (84). While there certainly is something childlike about Akakii Akakievich, it is difficult to agree that his language is ―precise.‖ If he speaks like a child, perhaps he resembles most a pre-verbal infant, babbling to elicit language from an interlocutor. 41 Akakii Akakievich's copyist language of ellipses and particles has a counterpart in the language of the narrator. Though the narrator approaches the opposite extreme of garrulousness, his excessive words begin to undermine one another, qualifying and contradicting one another, and his long, fluid sentences often end far from where the reader might have expected, based on their beginnings. At the same time, there are copyist qualities to the narrative. Chizhevskii suggests that Gogol ―does to some degree make his narrator's diction resemble that of his heroes,‖ in this case by using, ―in place of words which modify substantives in an expressive and meaningful way, […] qualifiers that have no meaning whatsoever‖ (300). In addition to mimicking the emptiness of the copyist's language, the narrator's diction has certain mimetic and repetitive tendencies. ―Even more,‖ writes Eikhenbaum, ―this skaz has a tendency not simply to narrate, not simply to talk, but also to reproduce words with an emphasis on mimetic and articulated sounds‖ (272-273). The narrative thus copies itself, playing with the acoustic characteristics of words and echoing them in a system of ―sound-semantics‖ that functions independently of plot and ―concrete meaning‖ (ibid.). Meanwhile Gogol, in distinction from his narrator, becomes a sort of anti-copyist, constructing a text around the silence and uneventfulness of the protagonist's life. 42 I say ―has faith‖ because, despite his reticence, he clearly has a strategy for haggling with Petrovich that he believes will succeed. Because of this, his stuttering may not be mere shyness but a sort of copyist language. 60

interpersonal communication: another instantiation of Logos, perhaps, grounding

human language. Akakii Akakievich has limited success with his communications, but

his voice fails him in the key instant when he is being robbed and he cannot shout

across the square to the sentry box. He is subsequently verbally destroyed by the

important person (znachitel‟noe litso), so the climax of the story reveals his reliance

on this mysterious other text to be inadequate in protecting him from harm.

There is one moment in the story, however, when ―other words‖ do come through

Akakii Akakievich's speech. It happens at a moment when he is forced to take notice

of his coworkers,43 and even speak to them, because they are ―jostl[ing] his arm‖ in a

way that interferes with his copying work. As, elsewhere, even the potential of error is

enough to make him almost (!) cross himself, here it is enough to provoke him to cry

out:

Only when the joke was really unbearable, when they jostled his arm, interfering

with what he was doing, would he say, ―Let me be. Why do you offend me?‖ And

there was something strange in the words and in the voice in which they were

uttered. Something sounded in it so conducive to pity that one recently appointed

young man who, following the example of the others, had first allowed himself to

43 A related role for Logos in human communication is suggested by Akakii Akakievich's utter avoidance of social interaction. It appears that he only even notices other people in cases of extreme need. As noted, he does not look up when his superiors bring him new assignments. He is oblivious to his coworkers except when they physically imperil his copying. His devotion to copying keeps him utterly aloof from human companionship. Perhaps in his aloofness, too, he is waiting on a master text, an ideal form of companionship or love. Just as God formed Eve after seeing that Adam was alone, Akakii Akakievich, too, has the prospect of being rewarded for his diligence with the perfect partner: his new overcoat, which he looks forward to as a ―pleasant companion,‖ feeling ―as if he were married‖ when he thinks of it (406). (Many have noted that the word shinel', ―overcoat,‖ is feminine in Russian.) If so, his loss of the coat on the very day it arrives is another betrayal of his faith in Logos, not just in the benevolence of his superiors. 61

make fun of him, suddenly stopped as if transfixed, and from then on everything

seemed changed before him and acquired a different look. Some unnatural power

pushed him away from his comrades, whose acquaintance he had made thinking

them decent, well-mannered men. And long afterwards, in moments of the

greatest merriment, there would rise before him the figure of the little clerk with

the balding brow, uttering his penetrating words: ―Let me be. Why do you offend

me?‖--and in these penetrating words rang other words: ―I am your brother.‖ And

the poor young man would bury his face in his hands, and many a time in his life

he shuddered to see how much inhumanity there is in man, how much savage

coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners, and God! even in a man

the world regards as noble and honorable. (397)44

The incident, famously interpreted by Vissarion Belinskii to be the moral of the

story, constitute one of the most debated passages in ―The Overcoat.‖ Though that

reading has been rejected by later critics, such as Boris Eikhenbaum, many

contemporary interpretations still single the passage out as being striking, the entrance

of a different or higher voice into the text. For our purposes, the question is whether

44 Tолько если уж слишком была невыносима шутка, когда толкали его под руку, мешая заниматься своим делом, он произносил: "Оставьте меня, зачем вы меня обижаете?" И что-то странное заключалось в словах и в голосе, с каким они были произнесены. В нем слышалось что-то такое преклоняющее на жалость, что один молодой человек, недавно определившийся, который, по примеру других, позволил было себе посмеяться над ним, вдруг остановился, как будто пронзенный, и с тех пор как будто все переменилось перед ним и показалось в другом виде. Какая-то неестественная сила оттолкнула его от товарищей, с которыми он познакомился, приняв их за приличных, светских людей. И долго потом, среди самых веселых минут, представлялся ему низенький чиновник с лысинкою на лбу, с своими проникающими словами: "Оставьте меня, зачем вы меня обижаете?" - и в этих проникающих словах эвенели другие слова: "Я брат твой". И закрывал себя рукою бедный молодой человек, и много раз содрогался он потом на веку своем, видя, как много в человеке бесчеловечья, как много скрыто свирепой грубости в утонченной, образованной светскости, и, боже! даже в том человеке, которого свет признает благородным и честным... (143-144) 62 or not this other voice is the authoritative original (Logos) that Akakii Akakievich has consistently believed it. I maintain that it is not, but that the passage certainly provokes the reader to expect the presence of Logos, just as Akakii Akakievich does.

It is certainly tempting to think that the young coworker experiences a revelation of a transcendent text of brotherhood and understanding. Iurii Mann does read this passage as the sudden illumination of the text by something like Logos. He recognizes the moment when the young coworker ―stop[s] as if transfixed‖ as one of many instances of ―petrification‖ that run throughout Gogol's works. Petrification, Mann writes, occurs when something shocking causes a character to freeze, to be

―temporarily removed […] from the course of time‖ (76). The shock can be something supernatural and demonic, as when Chartkov in ―The Portrait‖ ―freezes at the sight of the userer-devil coming out of the picture frame‖ (76). It can also be something good, beautiful, or divine: Chartkov also freezes in front of a beautiful painting. Mann suggests that the moment when the young man in ―The Overcoat‖ is suddenly transfixed is an instance of the latter. It stems from ―the participation of a higher force, which places its stamp on feminine beauty and art and Christian compassion alike. But this is a good and divine force‖ (77). In this reading, the other voice Akakii Akakievich counts on essentially is Logos speaking through his broken speech.

Other critics agree that the passage prompts the readers to look for a higher voice without claiming that Logos is actually present to them or to the young coworker.

Eikhenbaum sees the passage as being stylistically distinct in a disorienting way, but

63 he does not read it as a more authoritative or transcendent voice. Instead, he sees it as another Gogolian juxtaposition, an ―unexpected intrusion‖ of the ―sentimental and melodramatic‖ into a ―general style that is based on word-play‖ (282). As such, it adds complexity to the text without being any kind of key. ―The result,‖ he writes, ―is a grotesque, in which the mimicry of laughter alternates with the mimicry of sorrow—both creating the impression of being a performance, with a pre-established order of gestures and intonations‖ (284). The effect, appropriately for a copyist work, is not in the presence of Logos but in complementary imitations, sustaining the fluidity and ambiguity of the text while suggesting a distant (unreachable) original.

Donald Fanger reads the scene as an example of Gogol's comedy prompting the reader towards something ―high‖ or ―transcendent‖ without ever transgressing itself:

―[T]he comic discourse never slips to mere instrumentality […], but in its very authority turns problematic, prompting reflections in the reader that inevitably leave the text behind and that can never, no matter how often he returns to the text, find more than the original teasing cue‖ (162).

There are several problems with reading the ―I am your brother‖ scene as a brief revelation of Logos. On the level of plot, it seems too small a reward for Akakii

Akakievich's service, since he still dies betrayed and suffering. (In a saint's life, this would not be a problem, but in such a hybrid text one roots for the retrieval of the coat over martyrdom.) Thematically, one cannot help but note that the scene also exposes the dangers of faith in inauthentic originals. The young man is disillusioned when he realizes that the models he is copying, the men whose behavior he has

64 imitated, are not worthy of his adherence. He learns to see inhumanity beneath the veneer of decency--a missing text of genuine human nature? If this is the work of

Logos, than the original makes a brief appearance only so that its absence elsewhere may be more keenly felt.

It is also possible that the phrase ―I am your brother‖ is itself a type of copying, a borrowing from the type of narrative the young man wished he lived in, an insight of the type of which he would like to imagine himself capable. Indeed, in the disorienting surroundings of the rest of the text, juxtaposed with a splashily sneezing ghost, this passage could sound like pastiche. ―For all its pathos and its Christian sentiment,‖ writes Chizhevskii, ―this idea smacks of a truism‖ (296). In that case, it becomes a type of inauthentic original that tempts the reader, who would also like to assume the presence of Logos underlying human language and texts. Alternately, the phrase could be the pure play of language itself, Akakii Akakievich's words writhing and taking on new meanings all their own as soon as they have left his mouth. The lack of Logos as an anchor perhaps facilitates such language games, leaving a blank for the cavorting of frivolous words. In short, the ambiguity of the ―I am your brother‖ passage only reinforces the instability of unmoored language and text. The

―other words‖ imitate what Logos might do, but without the force and recognizable authority of the real thing.

The absence of Logos affects the functioning of the state, as well. Another significant instance of disillusionment, this time of the protagonist, is the miscarriage of justice that Akakii Akakievich suffers at the hands of the Petersburg bureaucracy,

specifically the ―certain important person.‖ Having served the state zealously for his

entire life, Akakii Akakievich is rewarded not only with the rejection of his plea for

help in getting the overcoat back, but with a tirade that literally bowls him over, so

that he is ―carried out [of the house] almost motionless‖ (418).45 The shock of the

reprimand, and the chill he catches without his coat, proves fatal, and he dies in a

tirade of blasphemy against ―Your Excellency‖ (419).

In a world without access to Logos, the state must expand its authority to maintain

a semblance of order, even though that authority has been stripped of its foundations.

After all, the Enlightenment was accompanied by a series of revolutions that

challenged previous notions about the source of rulers' authority, including the idea

that the power to govern comes from the governed, not from a higher external order.

Significantly, ―The Overcoat‖ is set in Saint Petersburg, the city at the heart of Peter

I's eighteenth-century democratizing reforms, now haunted by specters of degraded

civil servants. The failure of the state to protect its loyal servant demonstrates the

shortcomings of a secular institution forced to fill the place vacated by a higher

authority.

A key indication that something is amiss in the functioning of the state apparatus

may be found in Gogol's depiction of what might be termed ―social copying.‖ This is

the phenomenon of mass imitation, by which each civil servant simply imitates the

one above him whose rank he wishes to fill. The important person to whom Akakii

Akakievich appeals for help is the prime example of social copying in the narrative.

His speech and actions are structured entirely around demonstrating and enhancing

45 ―[Е]го вынесли почти без движения‖ (167). 66

the importance of his position, which he does by terrorizing his subordinates and

insisting on ―strictness, strictness, and—strictness‖ (415).46 (The words begin to copy

themselves.) By ―strictness,‖ he means that everyone must stand on ceremony, and

the most exacting protocol must be observed: ―[H]e introduced the custom of lower

clerks meeting him on the stairs when he came to the office; of no one daring to come

to him directly, but everything going in the strictest order: a collegiate registrar should

report to a provincial secretary, a provincial secretary to a titular or whatever else, and

in this fashion the case should reach him‖ (415).47 All of this is done to cover up an

abyss: his importance is entirely relative, deriving from the fact that he outranks

certain people, and limited by the fact that he is of lower rank than others. There is

nothing of inherent value in his position. In fact, the narrator reports, ―What precisely

the post of the important person was, and in what it consisted, remains unknown‖

(ibid.).48 It is very likely that the important person himself does not know, so he relies

on the signs and external trappings of power to obscure the fact that his importance is

founded on nothing.

The important person without a role thus becomes a double for the scribe without

scripture. Gogol even describes the former's plight in language suggestive of copying.

―Thus everything in holy Russia is infected with imitation,‖ the narrator proclaims,

46 ―Строгость, строгость и—строгость‖ (164). 47 ―Завел, чтобы низшие чиновники встречали его еще на лестнице, когда он приходил в дольжность; чтобы к нему являться прямо никто не смел, а чтоб шло всѐ порядком строжайшим: коллежский регистратор докладывал бы губернскому секретарю, губернский секретарь— титулярному, или какому приходилось другому, и чтобы уже таким образом доходило до него‖(164). 48 ―Какая именно и в чем состояла должность значительного лица, это осталось до сих пор неизвестным‖ (ibid.). 67

―and each one mimics and apes his superior‖ (ibid.). 49 Like Akakii Akakievich, the

important person has trouble speaking for himself. With those of lower ranks he

―remain[s] eternally in the same silent state, only uttering some monosyllabic sounds

from time to time,‖ because he fears that to drop formalities and engage in

conversation would compromise his rank (416).50 Both men have been deprived of a

universal text of brotherhood, the text that makes human communication and

interaction possible.

Unlike Akakii Akakievich, who preserves blind and mistaken faith in Logos for

most of the story, the Important Person is clearly aware that something is wrong. He

acts to hide the gaps left by the missing text, while Akakii Akakievich does not notice

them. This is clear both because his problems start when he attains the rank of general

and because he copies social signs against his inner inclination, being ―a kind man at

heart‖ with ―a strong desire to join in some interesting conversation‖ (416).51

Furthermore, his paralyzing fear of compromising his rank could only stem from the

realization that his position is precarious, that the table of ranks has come unmoored

from whatever might have made it meaningful. (One might argue that, in copying

military ranks into the civil service, Peter I created a bureaucracy that was unmoored

from its inception.) In this lies the crucial difference between social copying and

Akakii Akakievich's faithful labors: social copyists imitate status markers to preserve

49 ―Так уж на святой Руси всѐ задержано подражанием, всякой дразнит и корчит своего начаьника‖ (ibid.). 50 ―Он оставался вечно в одном и том же молчаливом состоянии, прознося только изредка какие- то односложные звуки‖ (165). 51 ―Он был в душе добрый человек‖; ―сильное желание присоединиться к какому-нибудь интересному разговору‖ (ibid.). 68 ranks they know are empty, while Akakii Akakievich devotes himself blindly to the idea of a God-given text. The former hides the abyss that the latter cannot see.

A final consequence of the absence of Logos is that Petersburg has become a haunted city, open to incursions of the fantastic. Such is only logical, as there is no authoritative text against which to verify what is real and what is not. Akakii

Akakievich's posthumous adventures as chinovnik-mertvets (―clerk-dead man,‖ a walking corpse) seem an especially fitting end for him, since his misplaced faith in

Logos left him little more than a phantom in life. Without Logos to speak through them and redeem them, the copyist's utter passivity, his reluctance to interact with others, his inability to speak for himself, all render him basically imperceptible, barely, in a certain sense, existent. Through radical devotion to copying, he has made himself into nothing more than a conduit for text (remember the letters appearing on his face as he writes them). His texts are empty, and so he, too, is empty, spectral. In a city of social copyists, it is no surprise that he is not the only ghost.

“The Overcoat” and Copying

Having examined the way that copying in ―The Overcoat‖ reveals the absence of an authoritative original, let us conclude with a brief discussion of what that work contributes to nineteenth-century conceptions of the copyist. One interesting effect of the missing original is that, in addition to destabilizing everything, it forces the reader to try evaluate the act of copying in itself, rather than in reference to an original.

Accordingly, we get a description of Akakii Akakievich‘s penmanship (―neat lines

written in an even hand‖ (398)), and we learn that he ―make[s] not a single error in his

copy‖ (396),52 but we know almost nothing about what he copies. Even the name of

the department he works for is concealed.

Having said much about the act of copying and little about what is copied, Gogol

poses the question of whether or not copying has value in itself. This obviously

subverts the traditional model, in which the copy is evaluated in reference to its

original. In fact, ―The Overcoat‖ sets up several scenarios in which items which

usually have value only in reference to something else must be assessed in

themselves. Is it really possible to worship letters independently of words? What do

we do with a mustachioed ghost who cannot be matched to any living character? Here

are phantoms of the Derridean mime, acts of copying or inscription made independent

from external referent, but without the vital, self-generating play of the mime's

writing.

Similarly, the social copyists, who imitate one another, form a network of

simulacra, or copies of copies. They are copies, potentially, without originals, for

what they copy is convention, a social text accrued from the most prototypical events

of common experience. The concept of the common will be relevant to the discussion

in the following section on ―Diary of a Madman,‖ and later to the chapter on Bartleby.

What is important here is that between the social copyists and Akakii Akakievich's

concealed original, Gogol moves copying a step away from the traditional model and

towards the twentieth-century conceptualizations of Derrida and Deleuze, for whom

the copy need not be preceded chronologically by an original.

52 ―[О] он не делал ни одной ошибки в письме‖ (143). 70

―The Diary of a Madman‖

―The Diary of a Madman,‖ published in 1835, features a copy clerk who is far more aware of the world outside of his documents than is Akakii Akakievich. Poprishchin is familiar with ambition, composition, love, relationships—all of the teeming life that fills the streets that Akakii Akakievich cannot see. His consciousness of the world does not save him from disillusionment, however. Poprishchin is a copyist enamored of the idea of the author, of a man who can see the essences of things and call them by the correct names. This is paralleled by his belief, within the realm of social copying, of the general or director who recognizes and rewards merit. His realization that there is no infallible author, and that anyone can write, causes Poprishchin to go mad, or, rather, to recognize the madness that surrounds him. ―The Diary of a Madman‖ thus parallels the trajectory of disillusionment and disintegration caused by the increasingly obvious absence of Logos in ―The Overcoat.‖ In this case, the story is narrated by the bewildered copyist himself, as he strives and fails to put his thoughts and impressions in order through his diary.

Authors and Order

Though Poprishchin's world view is rooted in a certain concept of order, the copy clerk is himself disorderly in the extreme. This is the striking and fundamental

difference between Poprishchin and Akakii Akakievich. The two copyists, diarist and

monk, share a number of superficial similarities. Both are approaching middle age:

Poprishchin is forty-two, ―the age at which service just seriously begins‖ (284),53 and

Akakii Akakievich has worked enough years for a superior to recognize his ―long

service‖ (397).54 Both are titular councillors55 of unfortunately comical appearance;

they even wear similarly shabby, old-fashioned overcoats. These ungainly exteriors,

however, cloak in one case blind devotion, in the other, rebellion.

The two clerks‘ approaches to copying exemplify fundamental differences in their

character. Akakii Akakievich, as we have seen, prizes clarity and accuracy. Moreover,

he lives to copy, and asks nothing else from life until the need for a new coat arises.

Poprishchin, on the other hand, is a lazy, hasty, careless, and discontented copy clerk.

When ―The Diary of a Madman‖ opens, he has overslept and considers not going to

work. Part of his reluctance stems from the fact that he is often reprimanded at work,

and he recalls the frequent admonition of his section chief, who says, ―Why is it that

you've got such a hotchpotch in your head, brother? You rush about frantically, you

sometimes confuse a case so much the devil himself couldn't sort it out, you start the

title in lowercase, forget the date or number‖ (279).56 To make such mistakes would

be impossible, of course, for Akakii Akakievich, who cannot even make alterations

when they are authorized by his superiors.

53 ―время такое, в которое, по-настоящему, только что начинается служба‖ (198). 54 ―долг[ая] служб[а]‖ (144) 55 Akakii Akakievich is an ―eternal titular councillor.‖ 56 ―Что это у тебя, братец, в голове всегда ералаш такой? Ты иной раз метаешься как угорелый, дело подчас так спутаешь, что сам сатана не разберет, в титуле поставишь маленькую букву, не выставишь ни числа, ни номера‖ (193). 72

Poprishchin's poor performance as a copy clerk is due in part to the fact that he is

not content to spend his career copying. He has greater ambitions, dreams of upward

mobility and of a general's daughter. He also positions himself as an author and

literary critic. ―The Diary of a Madman‖ is Gogol's only first-person narrative, and

the fact that Poprishchin writes his own story is even more striking when contrasted

with Akakii Akakievich's ellipses and silences. Rima Shore points out that

Poprishchin's diary does involve a certain amount of copying, such as of the dogs'

correspondence and the poem he mistakes for Pushkin. Still, he both reads and

composes, far exceeding Akakii Akakievich's literary abilities. In his role as clerk,

too, he has responsibilities that would confound Akakii Akakievich. He reads and

collates papers, writes abstracts, and signs his name. (He also has the bizarrely

symbolic task of sharpening the director's pens.)

What makes ―The Diary of a Madman‖ a copyist tale, and a counterpart to ―The

Overcoat,‖ is that Poprishchin's madness, and his assumption of the identity of

Ferdinand VIII, is framed specifically as a rebellion against copying. ―I didn't go to

the office...To hell with it! No, friends, you won't lure me there now; I'm not going to

copy your vile papers!‖ (294).57 Of course, there are many things about being a titular

councillor that drive Poprishchin to this point: he is tired of wearing unfashionable

clothes, of being sneered at by lackeys, of being over-looked, or worse, laughed at by

the director's daughter. Still, there is something about the act of copying documents

that especially incenses him, as evidenced both by the explicit statement above and by

57 ―В департмент не жодил. Чорт с ним! Нет, приятели, теперь не замините меня; я не стану переписывать гадких бумаг ваших‖ (208). 73

his continuous presentation of himself as author and critic by nature, including

repeated shows of contempt for the office, his superiors, and his job.

At the same time, Poprishchin is very interested in certain ideas of order. He

appreciates the dogs' letters for their accurate spelling and correct punctuation, a

commendation that one might expect from a clerk, not from a literary critic. He is also

very sensitive to the way in which behavior and intelligence correspond, or at least

ought to correspond, with rank. For example, he dislikes being at the mercy of a

treasurer who is beaten by his own cook, a humiliation out of keeping with the air of

authority the treasurer adopts at work:

What a creature! For him to hand out money a month ahead—Lord God, the Last

Judgment would come sooner! Even if you beg on your life, even if you're

destitute—he won't hand out anything, the hoary devil! Yet at home his own cook

slaps him in the face. The whole world knows it. (279)58

Poprishchin is also quick to believe, with little evidence beyond rank, that the director

is a man of tremendous merit. ―[S]uch importance shines in his eyes!‖ he enthuses.

―[…] Yes, there's no comparison with our kind!‖ (282).59 Poprishchin's interactions

with the director are limited to looking at the books in his study and exchanging

occasional curt remarks about the weather, but he is utterly convinced that the director

is a superior being, simply by virtue of being a director.

The type of order that Poprishchin cares about could thus be described as an

58 Вот еще создание! Чтобы он выдал когда-нибудь вперед за месяц деньги — господи боже мой, да скорее Страшный суд придет. Проси, хоть тресни, хоть будь в разнужде, — не выдаст, седой черт. А на квартире собственная кухарка бьет его по щекам. Это всему свету известно. (193) 59 ―Фу, какая важность сияет в глазах! [...] Да, не нашему брату чета‖ (196). 74

appropriate correlation between rank and merit, or between appearance and essence.

In other words, he believes in the table of ranks, in its promise to promote the worthy

to a position of appropriate authority. Those who have attained a high rank (the

director) must have done so because of their inherent worth, while the less competent

figures who only slightly outrank Poprishchin (the treasurer and the section chief) he

scorns as unworthies whom he will soon pass up. This is a fluid, authorial order as

opposed to the static copyist order based on the identity of copy and original.

Meritocracy depends on high-ranking figures (generals and directors) who are capable

of recognizing and rewarding merit, of actively bringing form (rank) and content

(worth) into line. Promotion is an active rewriting of the social order that ensures its

continued accuracy, a perpetual aligning of signifier and signified.

Poprishchin thus believes that his own merit will soon be rewarded and

recognized. He appreciates those who recognize his potential, which he (mistakenly)

believes the director does, as deserving of their positions as writers of the social order.

The section chief, who calls Poprishchin ―a zero,‖ clearly does not possess a degree of

perspicacity commensurate with leadership, so Poprishchin despises him and expects

to surpass him: ―Wait, friend! we too will become a colonel and, God willing, maybe

something even higher‖ (284).60 Poprishchin's literary aspirations, according to his

own system, are signs of his fitness for promotion. The excellent taste that he (thinks

he) demonstrates by loving the theater (unlike his fellow clerks, ―clods‖ who will go

60 ―Погоди, приятель! будем и мы полковником, а, может быть, если бог даст, то чем-нибудь и побольше‖ (198). 75

―only if you give them a free ticket‖ (284))61 is an indication that he, too, can assess

merit, and his attempts at authorship are also exercises in ordering.

Unfortunately, these exercises go terribly awry. All of Poprishchin‘s attempts at

ordering, first as author and later as king, end in destruction and chaos. His diary

begins with carefully ordered dates but ends in nonsense.62 When he tries to create a

royal mantle, symbolic of his role as a preserver of political order, he only shreds his

civil service uniform. Even simply meditating on politics leads him to

―absentmindedly [throw] two plates on the floor, which procee[d] to break‖ (293).63

His attempts to be a husband or suitor (another ordering, creative role) are stymied by

the simplest tasks: he cannot even pick up Sophie's handkerchief without ―rush[ing]

headlong, slipp[ing] on the cursed parquet, and almost smash[ing] [his] nose‖ (282).

64Poprishchin's assessment of his own capabilities wholly erroneous, but his idealized

vision of the civil service collapses, anyway, before he is forced to confront the

possibility of his own incompetence.

Two blows to his faith in the Petrine meritocracy push Poprishchin over the edge,

landing him in the asylum. The first is his discovery that Sophie, the director's

daughter, is in love with a kammerjunker and may be lost to him before his patiently

awaited promotion comes. (The fact that he discovers this by reading letters between

Sophie's lap dog and another dog adds to the crisis, as will be discussed below.) The

61 ―свиньи;‖ ―разве уже дашь ему билет даром‖ (199). 62 See Richard Peace, ―The Logic of Madness,‖ and Richard Gustafson, ―The Suffering Usurper: Gogol''s Diary of a Madman‖ for discussions of the method behind the diarist's madness. 63 ―И точно, я две тарелки, кажется, в рассеянности бросил на пол, которые тут же расшиблись‖ (207). 64 ―Я кинулся со всех ног, подскользнулся на пролклятом паркете и чуть-чуть не расклеил носа‖ (197). 76

discovery throws Poprishchin's ideas about rank into chaos. For the first time he

directly scorns the highest ranks: ―I want to be a general simply to see how they'll

fawn and perform courtly tricks and equivocations, and then to tell them I spit on

them both‖ (292).65 He also begins to doubt that rank does correspond to any kind of

inherent worth:

So what if he's a kammerjunker. It's nothing more than a dignity; it's not anything

visible that you can take in your hands. He's not going to have a third eye on his

forehead because he's a kammerjunker. His nose isn't made of gold, it's the same

as mine or anybody else's; he doesn't eat with it, he smells; he doesn't cough, he

sneezes. Several times already I've tried to figure out where all these differences

come from. What makes me a titular councillor, and why on earth am I a titular

councillor? (292)66

As he begins to lose faith that his own qualities will be rewarded, Poprishchin begins

to question the merits of high-ranking officials. Not only is he skeptical of the

kammerjunker's inherent value, he also begins to doubt the director, deciding that he

is ―a Mason,‖ a ―man of great ambition‖ who ―pretends to be this and that‖ (293).67

Poprishchin does not explicitly describe the foundations of his skepticism, aside from

claiming that the director uses a masonic handshake, but the director's authorial gaze

65 ―Нет, хотел быть генералом для того только, чтобы увидеть, как они будут увиваться и делать все эти разные придворные штуки и экивоки, и потом сказать им, что я плюю на вас обоих‖ (205). 66 Что ж из того, что он камер-юнкер. Ведь это больше ничего кроме достоинство; не какая-нибудь вещь видимая, которую бы можно взять в руки. Ведь через того, что камер-юнкер, не прибавиться третий глаз на лбу. Ведь у него же нос не из золота сделан, а так же, как и у меня, как и у всякого; ведь он им нюхает, а не ест, чихает, а не кашляет. Я несколько раз уже хотел добраться, отчего происходят все эти разности. Отчего я титулярный советник и с какой стати я титулярный советник? (206) 67 ―Масон,‖ ―большой честолюбец,‖ ―прикидывается таким и эдаким‖ (206). 77

(from Poprishchin's perspective) has failed twice: by detecting something

extraordinary in the kammerjunker, and by overlooking the virtues of the copy clerk.

As Poprishchin begins to question the merits of directors and generals, he also

revisits the question of his own humble rank. He has always been interested in

appearances, believing that they are both signs of merit and the only thing temporarily

holding him back. Now he begins to suspect that appearances and medals (empty

signs) are all there is to rank. Rather than acting as indicators of inner qualities, they

are significant only in themselves. It is thus useless for Poprishchin to demonstrate his

qualities and capabilities, if indeed he has them. The only things that make him a

titular councilor are fate, an empty label, and an easily shredded uniform. The

―authors‖ of the current social order either cannot see through appearance to judge

peoples‘ essences or have understood that there is nothing but appearance to perceive.

It is at this point of crisis that Poprishchin reads in the newspaper that the Spanish

throne is vacant, a circumstance that deals a second blow to his crumbling worldview.

Of course, this is perfect fuel for an unhappy civil servant wondering whether he

might actually be ―some sort of count or general and only seem to be a titular

councillor‖ (292),68 but the empty throne is emblematic of a still greater crisis. The

idea of a position without a specific occupant, especially a position of such power,

confounds Poprishchin. ―This seems terribly strange to me,‖ he writes (293). ―How

can a throne be vacant? […] There should be a king on a throne. But, they say, there is

no king. It cannot be that there was no king. A state cannot be without a king‖

68 ―Может быть я какой-нибудь граф или генерал, а только так кажусь титулярным советником?‖ (206). 78

(ibid.).69 It is immediately after his encounter with this conundrum that the dates in

Poprishchin's diary depart from any recognizable measure of time and that he himself

crosses the line from disillusionment to delusion.

The problem with a throne without a king is that it violates the unity of status and

essence on which Poprishchin's idea of order is based. If the throne, symbolizing the

role of the king, can exist in the absence of a royal-blooded, noble monarch, then any

rank can be an empty signifier, not dependent on its holder for meaning. In other

words, does the king gain his authority from the throne, or the throne from the king?

Moreover, the king should be the ultimate author and orderer, the very head of the

social structure. He is the person who ensures coherence, promotion based on nobility

and character. Who, then, selects a ruler to fill an empty throne? And, if such a power

exists, why has it allowed the Spanish throne to go empty?70

69 ―Мне кахется это чрезвычайно странным.Как же может быть престол упразднен? [...] На престоле должен быть король. Да, говорят, нет короля‖ (206-207). 70 Edyta Bojanowska writes about Gogol's intentions to publish a fourth edition of The Government Inspector in 1846, the proceeds of which would have been donated to low-ranking civil servants. The planned edition would have included Gogol's ―Denouement‖ to the play, which contains a speech that ―transforms the Christian cosmos into an ideal government bureaucracy,‖ one that looks very much like Poprishchin's understanding of state and rank. Bojanowska cites a passage in which the First Actor declares: ―I am not some empty buffoon, dedicated to the amusement of empty people, but an upright civil servant of the great divine state [velikogo Bozh'ego gosudarstva] […] Together, we will show the whole world that in the Russian land all that exists strives to serve that which all that exists on the earth should serve, and strives there, up high! Toward the supreme [verkhovnoi] eternal beauty!‖ (PSS 4, 132-133, in Bojanowska 209)

In this addendum, which reflects a crisis in his ideas about art, Gogol actually borrows an ideal of a divine, Logocentric bureaucracy from his delusional scriveners, as if Russia's salvific destiny was to become not a New Jerusalem but a new, redeemed Petersburg, with God as the apex of the Table of Ranks. 79

Empty Thrones, Empty Signs

Through his obsession with appearance and rank, Poprishchin inadvertently exposes the fact that there is nothing beneath them. Appearance does not correspond to essence; a uniform may be filled by anyone. Rather than freeing Poprishchin to alter his image and advance through the ranks, this realization utterly disorients him. All of his assumptions about his position in the world, the table of ranks, societal structures in general, and even language itself have been overturned.

This glimpse of chaos beneath a veneer of order suggests an alternate reading of

Poprishchin's tendency to disorder his surroundings. Perhaps it is not that he alone is chaotic and mad, but that reality itself is not orderly. Poprishchin's disillusionment with appearances and titles points to a broader problem by exposing the arbitrary nature of signs, from medals and clothing to words and signatures. The breakdown of

Poprishchin's diary suggests the limitations of all of the devices humanity employs to order our perceptions of reality. Names, dates and toponyms prove meaningless, indistinguishable. To glimpse such a reality is indeed to be mad.

The latter half of Poprishchin's diary affords numerous examples of the disintegration of language and signs. Key among them is the unraveling of the signifier ―Spain.‖ Spain enters Poprishchin's diary after he reads a newspaper article about the Spanish succession, at which point he recognizes it as a geographic and political entity. It quickly becomes his name for the madhouse where he is taken after realizing that he is Ferdinand VIII, heir to the Spanish throne. (This realization, according to his logic, should sustain the order of the world in two ways: first by

bringing Poprishchin into a role commensurate with his merits, and second by

remedying the paradox of the throne without a king.) At this point, immersed in

delusion, Poprishchin is probably not consciously applying the same toponym to two

distinct locations. The reader is aware of a dissonance the narrator has not yet

perceived.

Once in ―Spain,‖ though, Poprishchin slowly becomes aware of the

capriciousness of signifiers. ―I discovered,‖ he reports, ―that China and Spain are

absolutely one and the same land, and it is only out of ignorance that they are

considered separate countries. I advise everyone purposely to write Spain on a piece

of paper, and it will come out China‖ (297).71 Writing, the medium through which

Poprishchin once wished to impose order, now reveals to him the secret games that

language plays with reality. Somehow, a word that should signify only one country

has begun to name a second, as well. Poprishchin reconciles this problem with his

faith in language by ascribing the dilemma to general ―ignorance‖ of geography. If

―Spain‖ comes out ―China‖ when written, the two must in fact be the same place. He

thus tries to preserve the validity of referential naming by ignoring physical/spatial

details, not a surprising maneuver given that he has already traveled across Europe

without leaving Petersburg.

Spain gains for Poprishchin a further, less comprehensible meaning when he

discovers that ―every rooster has its Spain‖ and that ―it's located under his feathers‖

71 ―Я открыл, что Китай и Испания совершенно одна и та же земля, и только по невежеству считают их за разные государства. Я советую всем нарочно написать на бумаге Испания, то и выйдет Китай‖ (211-212). 81

(299).72 Now, rather than referring to a second geographical location, ―Spain‖

signifies something entirely different. What, exactly, is known only to Poprishchin,

though it is frequently interpreted to have sexual connotations.

Poprishchin's evolving use of the word the word ―Spain‖ matches the shifting

significance of titles, medals, and signs of rank charted across the pages of his diary.

Just as ―general‖ and ―director‖ designate roles that anyone can pop in and out of,

without possessing any especially fitting characteristics, so ―Spain‖ moves from a

term designating a single, specific location to one that might signify anything on a

whim. As Poprishchin becomes overwhelmed by the deceptive fluidity of words, his

language shifts away from the standard and predictable and becomes increasingly

idiosyncratic, even incomprehensible.

The same crisis of language and labeling underlies the increasingly bizarre

headings that begin Poprishchin's later diary entries. Without a system of reference in

which each word designates only one distinct thing, giving a precise date becomes

impossible. What quality of this specific month makes it January and not ―Martober,‖

and how is this February distinct from the February of the year 349?73 When

Poprishchin writes, ―Date none. The day had no date‖ (296),74 he is not merely

rebelling against the petty tyranny of the section chief but expressing the arbitrariness

of dating conventions. We designate days with dates because of our need to

distinguish them from one another, not in recognition of the essence or significance of

72 ―у всякого петуха есть Испания, что она у него находиться под перьями‖ (213) 73 In this scenario, the language of the rooster is more successful. The rooster crow always marks the break of day, but it does not try to distinguish one particular day from another. It is a temporal orderer rather than an arbitrary designation. 74 ―Никоторого числа. День был без числа‖ (210). 82 any particular day. Similarly, we promote generals because the system calls for generals, not (in practice) because they are particularly suited to the post. (One could just as easily be stuck with the title of titular councillor.) ―Madness,‖ in the sense of a lack of non-arbitrary ordering, thus underlies not only Petersburg society but far more basic concepts of language and time.

Copyists, Authors, and the Lost Logos

One key place where Poprishchin observes the breakdown of language, time, and social order is in the devaluing of literature and writing. The diarist returns constantly to questions of originality and style and of Russian versus foreign literatures. Here, as in everything else, he has a strict expectation of order and rank. Certain languages, such as French and German, he is convinced are more learned than others. Moreover, he avows that ―only a gentleman [dvorianin] can write correctly‖ (281), making his own literary endeavors a clear effort at upward mobility. When Poprishchin discovers that dogs can talk, he is surprised but able to rationalize; the realization that they can write floors him:

I confess, I was very surprised to hear her [Medzhi] speak in human language. But

later, when I'd thought it over, I ceased to be surprised. Actually, there have

already been many such examples in the world. […] I was much more surprised

when Medzhi said, ―I wrote you, Fidèle. It must be that Polkan didn't deliver my

letter.‖ May my salary be withheld! Never yet in my life have I heard of a dog

being able to write. Only a gentlemen can write correctly. (ibid.)75

The dogs‘ correspondence is, in fact, the first blow to Poprishchin's views of the

social and literary order, and his discovery of their letters instigates his unraveling.76

It is a challenge to the exclusivity of authorship.

Further challenges to the privilege and authority of the author emerge.

Because anyone (man or animal) can write, written accounts can be fallible. Slander,

jealousy, and outright error become possible. For instance, Poprishchin is sure that

Medzhi's descriptions of him as ―a turtle in a sack‖ with ―hair […] like hay‖ are

mistaken, at best (291),77 and at worst the machinations of his enemy, the section

chief. As the ideal of the author becomes less reliable and less noble, the picture of

literary composition in ―The Diary of a Madman‖ degrades into a portrait of

subjective and self-serving scribbling. Its instability is in line with what the reader

might expect based on the capricious polysemy of language in Poprishchin's universe,

exemplified in the antics of the word ―Spain.‖78

―The Diary of a Madman‖ thus exposes through its commentary on composition

the same underlying chaos revealed by the act of copying in ―The Overcoat.‖ The life

of the Gogolian copyist, whether he opts for faithful service or strives for authorship,

points to the absence of any authoritative source of order. Where Akakii Akakievich‘s

75 Признаюсь, я очень удивился, услышав ее говорящею по-человечески. Но после, когда я сообразил всѐ это хорошенко, то тогда же перестал удивляться. Действительно, на свете уже случилось множество подобных примеров. [...] Но, признаюсь, я горазда более удивился, когда Меджи сказала: „Я писала к тебе, Фидель; верно Полкан не принес письма моего!‖ Да чтоб я не получил жалованья! Я еще в жизни не слыхивал, чтобы собака могла писать. Правильно писать может только дворянин. (195) 76 (That is, if one overlooks the degree of unraveling already necessary to hear dogs talk.) 77 ―Совершенная черепаха в мешке...‖ (204). 78 Most of his concerns about style are copyist concerns. 84

missing text leaves humanity without a standard for assessing virtue or truth,

Poprishchin‘s unreliable author illustrates that there is no one capable of creating a

new order, or a new text, either. Both stories converge on the concept of missing or

inaccessible Logos, the term encompassing Word and ratio (reason, here extended to

the authorial ability to make sense, to unite signifier and signified). In each case, the

absence of foundational Logos manifests as a revelation of demonic or fantastic

elements lurking among the every-day: Akakii Akakievich‘s Petersburg is filled with

ghosts. Poprishchin‘s city (and speech)79 has been infiltrated by the devil, ―hiding in

[a nobleman‘s] tailcoat‖ or ―standing behind his back‖ (295).80 ―The Overcoat‖ and

―The Diary of a Madman‖ thus constitute complementary portraits of a modern world

rendered instable, fragmentary, murky with doubt. It is a world of phantoms and

madmen, of copies and no originals.

79 Much like Petrovich‘s constant swearing in ―The Overcoat.‖ It is also interesting to note that, though Poprishchin is far more loquacious, his speech is occasionally infiltrated by ellipses, just like Akakii Akakievich‘s. In Poprishchin‘s case, this usually accompanies thoughts of the director‘s daughter, which are also marked by the refrain ―[N]ever mind, never mind. Silence.‖ (―Nichego, nichego. Molchanie,‖ which is literally, ―Nothing, nothing. Silence.‖) 80 ―за спиною;‖ ―в звезду‖ (209). 85

Chapter 3: Dostoevsky

―[А] росчерк—это наиопаснейшая вещь!‖ --PrinceMyshkin

―Что, грех переписывать, что ли?‖ 81 --Makar Devushkin

Only a few years after the publication of Gogol's ―The Overcoat,‖ Dostoevsky

begins his own literary career with a series of copyist tales. In Poor Folk (Bednye

liudi, 1846), The Double (Dvoinik, 1846), and ―A Weak Heart‖ (―Slaboe serdtse,‖

1848) he responds directly to Gogol's copyist tales, appropriating and reworking the

image of the copy clerk. These early stories leave behind the search for Logos as a

transcendent original. They are concerned primarily with the smallness and weakness

of the copyist, out of proportion with his desire to love and to protect the ones he

loves, and with his awareness of his fatal limitations. The problem of copies and

originals reemerges, however, in connection with mimetic art and with language as a

medium. Instead of seeking a divine text and an authoritative author, Dostoevsky's

copyists desire to read and inscribe the human soul. They want to know and be known

by the people they love. In this sense, they explore the possibility of unmediated

presence, though weakness and self-criticism defeat their striving for closeness with

others. Just as in Gogol's texts, there are insurmountable obstacles to communion and

understanding, though in Dostoevsky's copyist fiction these are connected with the

81 ―A flourish is a very dangerous thing!‖ ―What, is it a sin to copy?‖ 86 lowliness and subservience of the copy clerk's lives, rather than owing to the absence of a transcendent original.

Twenty years later, Dostoevsky returns to the image of the copy clerk in The Idiot

(1868), a novel quite explicitly concerned with transcendent Logos and divine revelation. The protagonist of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, is a calligrapher who copies not only texts but even the handwriting of their author. His calligraphy suggests new creative potential for copying through its capacity to make the original author present.

Myshkin's copying thus becomes part of the novel's investigation of Christian art as an aesthetics of making present the original, echoing Dostoevsky's exploration of iconography and incarnation. Like the Prince himself, who, in his Christ-like qualities, creates an expectation of revelation and salvation that he never fulfills,

Myshkin's calligraphy as copy-art suggests copying as a way of reconciling fallen humanity with its divine original but fails to affect this reconciliation. The act of copying thus becomes part of the novel's narrative strategy of opening itself to an original that does not appear, thereby engaging the problematics of Christian faith from within the boundaries of chronos and physical embodiment. In Myshkin, the themes of limitation and mediation from Dostoevsky's earlier copyist works are united with the Gogolian copyist's concern about Logos. The result is a novel that does not anticipate the fusion of copy with original that is the twentienth-century endpoint of the trajectory of copyist fiction. Instead, it posits an alternative in artistic copying that makes the original present and distinct, and then erases that alternative.

Through the failure of calligraphy, icon-painting, and incarnation to make Logos

87 present, The Idiot offers an apophatic model for Christian art, one in which the copy inscribes the absence of the original.

The Dostoevskian Copy Clerk

After Nikolai Nekrasov read an early copy of Dostoevsky‘s Poor Folk, he proclaimed, ―A new Gogol has appeared‖ (Fanger 152). Dostoevsky in his early copyist works explicitly responds to and polemicizes with Gogol, creating a new type of copyist protagonist endowed with the awareness and interiority that Akakii

Akakievich lacks. These early copyists are more human and more literate than

Gogol's, and far more ambitious than Akakii Akakievich, but they are still too weak, too small, unable to assert themselves in the way that they wish to. Their self- awareness is thus not just a humane critique of Gogol's copyist caricatures but a torment, as the effects of absent Logos become sources of humiliation and identity crises.

Each of Dostoevsky's early copyist works revolves around a failure of strength. In

Poor Folk, Makar Devushkin cannot provide for Varvara well enough to keep her from marrying Bykov, nor does he manage to begin a romantic relationship with her, despite her apparent affection for him and her repeated requests that he visit. In The

Double, Iakov Petrovich Goliadkin is replaced at work by a double who bears his own name, essentially a better version of himself. Finally, in ―A Weak Heart,‖ Vasia proves both physically and mentally too weak to finish the copying assignment his patron has given him, and he goes mad from his own horror at his failure. Dostoevsky's early

copyists thus clearly share key characteristics with Akakii Akakivich: they have

trouble asserting themselves at the office and in personal relationships, and, especially

in the case of Goliadkin, even existentially. They are reserved and lack some kind of

vital force. One sees again the tendency of the copy clerk to be only semi-present.

These failures in strength have a different impact in Dostoevsky's copyist fiction

than in Gogol's, however, because Dostoevsky's copy clerks are otherwise so much

more capable and self-aware. After all, Akakii Akakievich can hardly utter a coherent

sentence, while Devushkin is a letter-writer and even an aspiring literary critic, eager

to give his opinion on Pushkin and Gogol. That he is naïve as both a reader and a

writer does not negate the fact that his relationship with language is drastically more

creative and competent than Akakii Akakievich's. Furthermore, both Devushkin and

Vasia are involved in genuine relationships with women, something utterly

unthinkable for Gogol's copy clerks.82 It is true that both relationships are

problematic. Devushkin keeps Varvara at a distance. Perhaps from diffidence, perhaps

out of pride in his own writing, he prefers letters to visits, but the relationship is real

and requited, unlike Poprishchin's fantasies about the director's daughter. Varvara

82 Goliadkin resembles Poprishchin in his alienation and his delusions about his social possibilities, and there are a number of plot similarities between the The Double and ―Diary of a Madman.‖ The Double has also been compared with ―The Nose‖ (for example, by Al'fred Bem) and with Dead Souls. The Double is subtitled ―A Petersburg Poem,‖ (―Петербургская поэма‖), which echoes Gogol‘s labeling of the novel Dead Souls as a poem. (Poema in Russian indicates a long, usually narrative or epic poem, like Faust or Pushkin's Ruslan i Liudmila.) This was not the original subtitle but one added by Dostoevsky in the 1860s. The final scene of The Double, with Goliadkin in the carriage in an unknown forest, echoes the end of Dead Souls (Chichikov speeding along in his apocalyptic troika) and also the conclusion of ―Diary of a Madman,‖ when Poprishchin imagines soaring above Russia in a carriage. Furthermore, Goliadkin does not share the characteristics that Dostoevsky gives to Devushkin, Vasia, and Myshkin. He is self-conscious but not as fully self-aware as Dostoevsky‘s other copyists, he is not trying to sacrifice himself for someone else, and he has a Gogolian infatuation with exteriors instead of a genuine friendship or relationship. (In this case, the exterior belongs to Klara Olsuf'evna, the daughter of his former patron.) 89

writes to him, worries about him, and asks to see him. Whether or not she is in love

with him, she appears genuinely to value his friendship.83 She writes to him as to

someone capable of understanding and caring for her: ―These are things that

communicate themselves to the heart only with difficulty, and to communicate them

to others is even harder. But you, perhaps, will understand me. […] Yesterday you

really looked into my eyes in order to read in them what I was feeling…‖ (45).84 This

capacity to read someone else‘s feelings and thoughts recurs as an important element

in ―A Weak Heart‖ and The Idiot.

The capabilities and ambitions of Dostoevsky's copyists only serve to make their

failures more painful. While Akakii Akakievich is consoled by the vision of his own

handwriting, Dostoevsky's copyists must confront the bleakness of their realities and

the humiliations of their own shortcomings. For example, Devushkin writes the

following description of his office: ―When I looked around me a bit later, everything

was just the same as before—grey and dingy. The same blotches of ink, the same

desks and papers, and I, too, the same‖ (10). A literate copyist who reads ―The

Overcoat,‖ Devushkin is fully aware of how the poor clerk and the malen‟kii chelovek

are perceived, and self-consciousness pricks him into a defense of copying. ―I mean,

I know that the copying I do is not much of a job,‖ he writes, ―yet even so I am proud

of it: I work in the sweat of my brow. So what is wrong that I earn my living by

83 Readers of the curtain scene have tended interpret it to mean that Devushkin reads too much into the relationship, but Varvara offers to keep using the signal. For an excellent reexamination of the relationship between Devushkin and Varvara, see John Lyles, ―Makar Devushkin as Eligible Bachelor? – A Reexamination of Varenka's Relationship with Devushkin in Dostoevsky's Poor Folk,” Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 65 (3), Fall 2012. 84 ―...смотрели мне в глаза, чтоб прочитать в них то, что я чувствую...‖ (123). 90

copying? Is copying a sin?‖ (47).85 His pride and ambition make his awareness of his

low status, and of his inability to protect Varvara, unbearable.

Vasia, too, suffers all the more for his capacity to love and his awareness of his

own shortcomings. Vasia has not one but three successful relationships: with his

patron, the benevolent and fatherly Iulian Mastakovich; with his fiancée, Liza; and

with his close friend, a fellow copyist named Arkadii. This is a stunning social

success for a copyist, on par with the friendship between Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Somehow, though, it is precisely this embarrassment of riches that undoes Vasia.

Because he cannot keep himself from visiting Liza, he falls behind on a huge copying

assignment that Iulian Mastakovich gives him. Though he tries to sit up all night to

finish copying, Vasia is physically and mentally too weak. Arkadii finds him in a

daze, copying without ink, covering pages and pages with nothing but the scratchings

of a dry quill and exulting that at last he has found a way to ―quicken [his] pen‖

(―Наконец, я ускорил перо‖) (554). Vasia‘s inability to finish the commission on

time drives him mad. He is institutionalized, and Liza eventually marries someone

else.

Viewed objectively, Vasia‘s lateness with the copying job should not have

precipitated a crisis. Iulian Mastakovich is a sympathetic employer who would almost

certainly have given Vasia extra time to complete the document. The work, according

to him, was ―unimportant‖ and ―not urgent‖ (―nevazhnoe‖ and ―ne speshnoe‖) (558).

For Vasia, however, copying is an expression of his love for Liza, whom he will

support through his labor, and of his gratitude to Iulian Mastakovich. Failing to

85 ―Что, грех переписывать, что ли?‖ 91

complete the job thus dishonors his tenderest feelings. ―I have never been ungrateful,‖

he explains to Arkadii. ―But if I am not able to express everything that I feel, then it is

as if... It ends up, Arkadii, just as if I really were ungrateful, and that is killing me‖

(539).86 The copying failure is, for him, a moral failure as well, and he expresses his

torment in the language of religious guilt: ―My sin, my sin!‖ (555).87 Unable to

forgive himself for his shortcomings, Vasia goes mad, as Arkadii tries to explain to

Iulian Mastakovich and his guests, ―out of gratitude‖ (ot blagodarnosti) (46). This

blend of the desire for love and unity with excruciating awareness of one's own short-

comings is Dostoevsky‘s key addition to the copyist figure he inherits from Gogol.

Copying in Dostoevsky‟s Early Works

Copying itself becomes tied to this crisis of weakness and ambition in several

ways in Dostoevksy's early fiction. First, for Devushkin and Vasia, copying is the site

of their humiliation. It is through copying work that they intend to provide for their

loved ones and thus through failures in copying that they prove incapable. Devushkin

hits a particularly low point when he makes an error and is reprimanded by his

superior. Second, copying is linked to a crisis of identity and self-expression that

afflicts all three of Dostoevsky's early copy clerks. Devushkin, Goliadkin, and Vasia

each have a stronger, more viable double in their texts. For Devushkin it is the

romantic rival Bykov, who wins Varvara, and perhaps the hack writer Ratiazaev, as

86 ―Я никогда не был неблагодарен […] Но если я не в состоянии высказать всего, что я чувствую, то оно как будто бы... Оно, Аркадий, выдет как будто я и в самом деле неблагодарен, а это меня убивает.‖ 87 ―Мой грех, мой грех!‖ 92 well, whose literary successes, if mediocre, serve as a foil for Devushkin's copying.

Goliadkin is doubled by Goliadkin, junior (mladshii), and Vasia is paired with the stronger and more stable Arkadii. In each case, the double threatens to supplant the copyist in some respect, challenging their inability to assert themselves properly.

Even Arkadii, who is Vasia's friend, is presented as a potential romantic rival for Liza.

The potential for doubling is tied to their identity as copyists, a role that assumes the presence of an other who is the source of the text. ―The very presence of a fictional copyist in a text,‖ Shore writes, ―suggests that a fictional author is lurking in the vicinity; otherwise, there would be nothing be to copy‖ (10-11). Though we have seen that there may be copies without originals, or that copy and original may blend, certainly the idea of the other, at least, is a perpetual shadow over the nineteenth- century copyist.

―A Weak Heart‖ further demonstrates that a copyist's weakness may imperil the message he strives to convey. Though his biggest failure is his inability to express his gratitude through copying, there is another key moment when Vasia's physical vulnerability detracts from an important message. This is when he wishes to share the news of his engagement with Arkadii. The latter has no idea that Vasia wants to tell him something so important. In a playful mood, he begins to tease Vasia, wrestles with him, and even carries him around like a baby, making Vasia reveal his news from a humiliating and undignified position. After getting angry and even bursting into tears, he explains to Arkadii, ―I come to you with such joy, with rapture in my soul, and suddenly I‘m supposed to express all the joy of my heart, all of that rapture while

floundering around on the bed, losing dignity...‖ (18).88 Unable to control the physical

circumstances of his speech, Vasia cannot control the genre in which he is living or

keep what is solemn and sacred to him from becoming part of a comic scene. Like

Akakii Akakievich, he experiences generic dislocation, though in Vasia‘s case the

problem seems to stem not from an absent original but from an authorial failing. That

is, he does not depend on Logos to complete his communications, but neither is he up

to handling the task himself.

Mimetic Art and Mediation

Finally, copying and identity crises raise questions about writing and language as

a medium of expression in Dostoevsky's early copyist works, and particularly

questions about writing as a vehicle for the type of immediate and full knowledge of

the other that Dostoevsky‘s copyists want of their loved ones. Because The Idiot also

explores the limits of mimetic art, and of writing as a form of self-revelation, it is

worth looking briefly at what the early copyists think about authorship. Devushkin‘s

views are by far the most developed. For all his admiration of authorship, they turn

out to be quite idealistic and naive: a copyist's view of literature. Devushkin believes

in the possibility of unmediated knowledge and communication, and in the

transparency of the author. His assumptions about literature and transparency are

expressed through his numerous references to style. Though he is constantly

critiquing and improving his own style, he seems to view literary style as ultimately

88 ―Я иду к тебе с такою радостью, с восторгом душевным, и вдруг всю радость сердца, весь этот восторг я должен был открыть, барахтаясь поперек кровати, теряя достоинство...‖ 94 something to impress and entertain, and not as part of the expressive content of a piece of writing. Significantly, Devushkin discusses style more in connection with the second-rate Rataziaev than with writers such as Gogol' and Pushkin. Style for him occupies the same position as an overcoat: It is wonderful to have, and it buys recognition and respect, but it is not essential. Thus he laments to Varvara early in the novel, ―Of course, I have no literary style, I mean, I know that I have none, curse it; that is why I have not succeeded in rising in the service and why even now, my darling, I write to you in this plain manner, with no frills, just as the thoughts come into my heart‖ (47). Later, writing an account of a terrible incident at the office, he insists, ―I shall tell you without regard for style, just as the Good Lord puts words into my head‖ (106). Here, his description of the act of composition is very close to Akakii

Akakievich's patient anticipation of ―what [...] God [would] send him to copy tomorrow‖ (397). An incident occurs, and he sits down to relate it without deliberately shaping the narrative. The phrase ―just as the Good Lord puts words into my head‖ suggests that the narrative is not even mediated by his subconscious, but by a sort of divine inspiration, so that in authorship as in copying Devushkin is merely a conduit.

His description of what professional authors do is comparable to, if slightly more complex than, Akakii Akakievich‘s. As his enthusiasm for Russian literature waxes,

Devushkin writes to Varvara an enraptured, if not very original, explanation of artistic prose: ―Literature is a picture, or rather in a certain sense both a picture and a mirror; it is an expression of emotion, a subtle form of criticism, a dialectic lesson and a

document‖ (52). Here he acknowledges both the mimetic aspect of art and its

expressive and didactic components. When he responds to reading Pushkin and

Gogol, however, he responds mainly to their mimetic accomplishments. He is upset

by the cruel accuracy of Gogol's copyist tale, while of Pushkin's ―The Stationmaster‖

he exclaims, ―[I]t is lifelike, it is alive!‖ (63). He even feels that Pushkin is writing a

work he himself might have written, as if he (Devushkin) had ―taken my own heart,

exactly as it is, and turned it inside out so that people could see what was in it‖ (62).

In the image of turning his heart inside out we glimpse again his desire for

unmediated expression and understanding without mistakes.

Vasia also wants unity with the people he loves. He and Liza even invite Arkadii

to live with them after their marriage, enthusing, ―The three of us will be like one

person!‖ (534). Arkadii, similarly, hates being shut out of Vasia‘s thoughts while the

latter is copying. He is always badgering Vasia and trying to reassure him, frantic to

figure out what is bothering his friend: ―Vasia! What‘s wrong with you? What are

you doing? Why are you looking at me like that?‖ (538).89 Their friendship is rooted

in shared confidences, but Vasia is often silent and unreadable, unwilling to burden

his friend with the true scope of his problems. His own sense of guilt and inadequacy

becomes an impediment to closeness.

Because Vasia is more reticent than Makar Devushkin, his relationship with

language as a medium of self-expression is quite different. Instead of writing letters

and experimenting with style, Vasia tries to open his soul to his friends through the act

of copying. He treats language as a deed instead of a medium, offering a gift of words

89 ―Вася! что с тобой? что ты? чего ты так смотришь?‖ 96 independent of their meanings. It is the act of copying, and not anything about the original, that becomes his medium of communication. When he cannot copy in proportion with his gratitude and love, he is removed from society and from his friends.

Myshkin inherits these crises of scale and expression when Dostoevsky returns to the image of copying two decades later in The Idiot. In fact, the divide between

Myshkin‘s capacity for vision and emotion, and his lapses into confusion and ineffectiveness is even more jarring since, when he is at his best, he is so remarkable.

The Prince never entirely escapes the limitations of his copyist heritage. The following speech to the Epanchins and their guests in Pavlovsk reveals how keenly he feels his own shortcomings, which he describes exactly as a crisis of proportion:

There are certain ideas, there are lofty ideas, which I ought not to start

talking about, because I‘ll certainly make everyone laugh; Prince Shch.

has just reminded me of that very thing...My gestures are inappropriate, I

have no sense of measure; my words are wrong, they don‘t correspond to

my thoughts, and that is humiliating for the thoughts. And therefore I have

no right... (342)

Though Myshkin can be quite eloquent, here he describes the same inadequacy that

Devushkin and Vasia feel in relation to their most treasured thoughts and emotions. In

Myshkin‘s case, some of his difficulties with expression come from a lifetime of isolation and illness, battling severe epilepsy that often leaves him without language or memory. In the following section, we will see how the copyist elements in his

character interact with his Christ-like traits, which make people expect him to reveal a

vision of Logos.

The Idiot

The problem of Myshkin's character is itself a problem of the accessibility of Logos.

In a January 1868 letter to his niece, Sof‘ia Ivanovna, Dostoevsky describes his plan

to write a novel about a ―positively beautiful man‖ (polozhitel‘no prekrasnyi

chelovek, sometimes also translated ―perfectly good man‖) (Pevear xi). In his notes

on Part Two of the novel, he several times refers to Myshkin as ―Prince Christ.‖90 In

the novel itself, Myshkin has a number of Christ-like traits. Victor Terras writes:

[Myshkin] is pure in mind and a virgin. He is attracted to children. He

pities Marie, a ―fallen woman,‖ and meets with the hostility of self-

righteous local authorities, the pastor and the schoolmaster. The many

blatant biblical echoes in the tale of Marie (the parable of the prodigal son,

the washing of feet, the Mary Magdalene theme) enhance Myshkin‘s

Christ-like image. (76-77)

Myshkin‘s turning of the other cheek to Gania‘s slap, his mildness, coupled with

perspicacity, his story of the braying donkey, reminiscent of Christ‘s entry into

Jerusalem, his obsession with executions, and many other images reinforce the

association. Ultimately, however, Myshkin does not save or heal anyone. He cannot

prevent Nastasia Filippovna‘s suicidal marriage to Rogozhin, he injures Aglaia, and

he does not halt the novel‘s trajectory towards violence. How does one interpret a

90 See the Notebooks for The Idiot, 201, 205. 98 figure so Christ-like but ineffective? Elizabeth Dalton writes, ―[A] disturbingly contradictory mixture of incapacity and saintliness, Myshkin is one of the most mysterious characters in all of literature‖ (86).

Commentators on the novel have come to various conclusions about Myshkin's

Christ-like promise, especially in Part One, and the darkness of the novel's end. Terras notes Myshkin‘s resemblance to the ―kenotic Christ of the Eastern church, Christ who has divested Himself of all His glory and may appear in the hypostasis of a humble beggar‖ (76). He acknowledges, though, that Myshkin is an ―apparent failure‖ (77).

Murray Krieger calls Myshkin a ―half-saint,‖ and Rowan Williams suggests viewing the Prince not as Christ but as an unfallen man arrived from Paradise. All of these readings address the split between Myshkin‘s capacity for compassion, generosity, and vision and his lapses into confusion, embarrassment, illness, and general ineffectiveness. In other words, they explain the smallness that limits him despite the beauty of his nature, and the ever-lurking threat that his goodness will slip into absurdity.

Michael Holquist interprets the interplay of Myshkin‘s power and powerlessness as dramatizing a key question about the biblical Christ. He writes, ―Christian thinkers very early on had to meet the objection that while Christ's coming may have altered the state of mankind's spiritual life, no change was apparent in the historical world‖

(130). One possible answer is to assume that Christ did not in fact triumph over death, that even he, for all his goodness, fell prey to the physicality of nature. Such is the message that Ippolit sees in the reproduction of Holbein‘s ―Christ in the Tomb,‖

which becomes one of the central visual images of the novel. Myshkin‘s own

ineffectiveness would thus be not a failed imitatio Christi but the failure of faithful

imitation as a path to salvation. Holquist writes, ―The possibility that Christ's moment

of execution was final, that it did not result in resurrection and thus did not insure the

sequence of imitatio Christi for other men—as it seemed to do for Raskolnikov, for

instance—is the primary metaphysical dilemma of The Idiot‖ (128). Such is also the

unacknowledged dilemma of works such as Renan‘s Life of Jesus (Vie de Jésus,

1863), which portrayed a non-divine, non-miraculous Christ. Renan‘s Christ is one of

Dostoevsky‘s sources for Myshkin.91

Mikhail Epshtein finds in Myshkin‘s apparent limitation a link to Akakii

Akakievich and to the tradition of Russian copyist fiction. In his reading, Myshkin is

not a Christ figure but the highest point humanity can reach, holy but not perfect.

Ever a generous reader of copyists, Epshtein finds optimism even in their limitаtions,

suggesting that Akakii Akakievich reveals that man at his smallest is still imbued with

divine purpose. He writes, ―Even in Akakii Akakievich there is a height of purpose..

Even in Prince Myshkin the sacred song is incomplete... Thus are the limits of

humanity described: one great in smallness, the other small in greatness. A person can

neither fall lower than his greatness nor rise higher than his own smallness‖ (9).92

These ideas can be reframed as questions about Logos. If Myshkin were Christ,

91 See Liza Knapp‘s ―Introduction to The Idiot, Part 2‖ in Dostoevsky‟s The Idiot: A Critical Companion, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998 for a discussion of Renan and other intertexts. 92 «Даже и в Акакии Акакиевиче есть высота предназначения... Даже и в князе Мышкине есть неполнота сверепения... Этим обозначены пределы человеческого: один велик в малом, другой мал в великом. Человек не может опуститься ниже своего величия и не может подняться выше собственной малости.» 100 he would be the divine Word inscribed in a literary text. If he is not, what is he? An image of the divine, the closest possible imitation, or a failed representation? His limits become a test both of how nearly humanity can approach the image of its creator and to what extent Logos can enter the pages of a human text, becoming present and perceptible in a fallen, physical world. At the moment when Logos enters a text, hypothetically, we return from the age of the copyist to the world of the scribe and his authoritative original, an association Myshkin makes when he copies the signature of the Abbot Pafnuty.

Dostoevsky himself framed his creation of Myshkin as a problem of incarnation, likening the portrayal of a perfectly beautiful man in literature to the incarnation of

Christ. In the same letter to Sof‘ia Ivanovna, he writes:

The main idea of the novel is to portray a positively beautiful man. There

is nothing more difficult in the world and especially now. All of the

writers, not only ours, but even all European writers, who have merely

attempted to portray the positively beautiful, have always given up.

Because the task is immeasurable. [...] There is only one perfectly

beautiful person—Christ—so that the appearance of this immeasurably,

infinitely beautiful person is, of course, already an infinite miracle. (That

is the sense of the whole Gospel of John: it finds the whole miracle in the

incarnation alone, in the manifestation of the beautiful alone.) (Pevear xi)

The Idiot is thus an experiment with Logos as infinite beauty that is doomed by its very nature to fail.

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In this context, the copying scene in The Idiot doubles Dostoevsky's act of

creation, as do the novel‘s failed icons. I argue below that Myshkin makes the authors

whose handwriting he copies stand forth even more clearly in his copy than they do in

their original texts. His copying thus makes the original present, much in the way that

Myshkin himself, were Dostoevsky to succeed in making him perfectly beautiful,

would be a new incarnation, making Logos present in the work of art. Myshkin‘s

copying is much more deliberate and artistic than Akakii Akakievich‘s, creating a

better parallel between the problems of Logos in literary creation and Christian art.

For this reason, even though it is not conventionally read as a copyist tale and there is

only a single scene of copying, The Idiot is a return to Dostoevsky's early interest in

copyists, and the passage in which Myshkin demonstrates his calligraphy serves as a

companion to the much more widely discussed problems of incarnation and

iconography in the novel. The Idiot thus combines Dostoevsky‘s career-long interest

in copying and copy clerks with his concern in his later novels about incarnation,

redemption, and eternal life.

Myshkin as Copyist

Though Myshkin‘s calligraphic talents are mentioned only in Part One, and he

never follows through on his desire to become a copy clerk, their inclusion in the

novel is nevertheless extremely important. Dostoevsky's decision to make Myshkin a

calligrapher dates back to the very first plan of the novel, written in autumn of 1867.93

93 For a detailed description of the evolution of Dostoevsky‘s plans for the novel, see Edward Wasiolek‘s Introduction to his translation of the Notebooks for The Idiot. Wasiolek also notes that ―calligraphy was 102

He writes that his protagonist, not yet Myshkin and not yet a ―positively beautiful

man‖ will have ―fine penmanship‖ (32). The parenthetical phrase ―(his handwriting)‖

occurs twice more in the following pages, with no elaboration. Though never

mentioned again, the idea that the hero will have good handwriting survives sweeping

revisions, including a major reworking of the protagonist's character.

Dostoevsky left no notes to explain the importance of Myshkin's handwriting, but

the positioning of the calligraphy passage within the novel lends it special

significance. First, copying serves as a bridge for Myshkin between Switzerland and

Petersburg, an important link, as the journey is equated within the novel with a return

from idiocy to coherence or an entry from paradise into historical time. Myshkin

arrives in Petersburg an outsider in Swiss gaiters, with no role in the social hierarchies

of the city. He has no place: even Lebedev, the society know-it-all, has never heard of

a Prince Myshkin. Myshkin is such an odd, alien figure that, when he appears without

money or connections on the Epanchins' doorstep, the General does not know how to

help him or whether he should receive the Prince at all. Myshkin's excellent

handwriting solves the problem by suggesting a place for him in the civil service.

―There's a career here,‖ the General enthuses, looking over a sample of Myshkin's

calligraphy. ―Do you know, Prince, which person we'll have you write documents to?

I could offer you thirty-five roubles a month straight off, from the first step‖ (34).94

Myshkin's handwriting is the commodity that the General knows how to deal with.

a special interest of Dostoevsky, and in the manuscript pages there are numerous calligraphic designs and doodles of human faces, Gothic church windows, and so forth‖ (32, note 3). 94 ―[В]едь тут карьера. Вы знаете, князь, к какому лицу мы теперь вам бумаги писать дадим? Да вам прямо можно тридцать пять в месяц положить, с первого шагу‖ (30). 103

Suddenly he can envision exactly where Myshkin will work and exactly how much money his abilities are worth.

As soon as Myshkin's calligraphy renders him comprehensible, the General springs into action, offering him a loan of twenty-five rubles, a place to stay, and an invitation to lunch with his family. This is not to say that handwriting alone spurs the

General to help the Prince, whom he has begun to like anyway for his open and gentle character. Instead, Myshkin's writing provides the General with a way in which to be of aid and to fit Myshkin into Petersburg society. Though Myshkin's inheritance obviates the need for him actually to serve as a copy clerk, the connections he has made with the Epanchin family and through his lodgings with Gania set into motion the events of the rest of the novel.

Copying is also introduced alongside several vitally important themes, including beauty, execution, and destructive love. In the chapters immediately preceding and following his interview with the General, Myshkin discusses an execution he witnessed in Lyons with the Epanchins' lackey and the General's wife and daughters.

The condemned man he describes is the first in a series of dead or doomed figures in the novel: the consumptive Ippolit, Holbein's Christ, Nastasia Filippovna compelled onto Rogozhin's knife. The seeds of the Nastasia Filippovna/Myshkin/Aglaia love triangle are planted through acts of copying, as well. Myshkin sees Nastasia

Filippovna's portrait for the first time as he is handing his calligraphy sample to the general, and one of his first interactions with Aglaia involves inscribing a message meant for Gania in her album. Furthermore, all of these themes are presented in the

104 context of mimetic art, strengthening their connection with calligraphy as copying with an additional aesthetic element. A photograph of Nastasia Filippovna captures the beauty that impresses Myshkin, the condemned man's face is discussed as a subject for one of Adelaida Epanchina's paintings, and Myshkin breaks off in the midst of his preparations for copying to exclaim over a landscape of Switzerland he is sure was painted ―from nature‖ (―s natury‖) (25). Thus despite its comparative brevity, the calligraphy passage is thematically connected with many central elements in the novel.

Myshkin as calligrapher

What makes Myshkin unique among copyist protagonists is that he is a copyist of handwriting.As a calligrapher, he reproduces scripts and invents new variations. To demonstrate his ―excellent‖ (―prevoskhodnyi‖) handwriting for General Epanchin,

Myshkin writes in five distinctive hands, including those of a medieval Russian abbot, a French public scrivener, a Russian military scrivener, and a French traveling salesman. He also provides commentary on the position and character of the writers who originated each script. If Akakii Akakievich is a lover of letters, Myshkin may be said to be a lover of scripts. He, too, is much less interested in the content of a text than in the aesthetics of reproducing it.

Myshkin disappears entirely in his calligraphy. By copying handwriting as well as text, he surrenders the single feature that usually identifies a copyist. Akakii

Akakievich, for all his humility, is still visible in his ―neat lines, written in an even

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hand‖ (398),95 distinct from those of the civil servant who replaces him, who copies

―not in a straight hand but much more obliquely and slantwise‖ (420).96 Similarly,

Arkadii laments to Vasia that he cannot help with the documents because his writing

will give him away: ―Why don‘t we have identical handwriting?‖97 Myshkin

surrenders this last vestige of visibility in an act of kenotic emptying, withdrawing

from the page so that the character of another scribe may appear.

Were Akakii Akakievich to perform such a feat, he would risk ceasing to exist

altogether, so little is he able to assert his being or leave a mark outside of his copying

work. For Myshkin there is no such danger, because, even more than Vasia or Makar

Devushkin, he thrives on social interaction. His only goal in coming to see the

Epanchins, he explains to the general, is ―the pleasure of acquaintance‖ (udovolstvi[e]

poznakomit‘sia) (22) and because he is in need of ―good people‖ (khoroshie liudi)

(23). In conversation with the Epanchin women, he reveals himself to have been a

keen observer of his fellow patients in Switzerland, a friend to the village children,

and the protector of the shunned invalid Marie. He arrives in Petersburg eager to

converse with whomever he meets, to read faces, and perhaps even to teach. In

keeping with his love of human interaction, Myshkin's copying is not a solitary labor.

It is a performance in which he both demonstrates various scripts and interprets them

for his audience. His exposition is interactive, full of invitations and instructions to

his audience: ―you will agree,‖ ―you notice,‖ ―Look‖ (34) (―soglasites‘ sami,‖

―zamechaete,‖ ―Vzglianite‖ (29)).

95 «чистые, ровным почерком выписанные» 96 «уже не таким прямым почерком, а гораздо наклоннее и косее» 97 «Зачем это у нас не одинаковый почерк?» 106

His unparalleled fidelity (to script as well as text) ought to make Myshkin the most passive, least creative of copyists, but such is not the case. General Epanchin hails him as an artist, and not without reason. Myshkin exhibits a strong awareness of the aesthetic qualities of each script and the effect that formal properties of a script have on the reader. He analyzes the character of each hand, revealing the original writer through the traces of his pen:

Then here I‘ve written in a different script: it‘s the big, round French script

of the last century; some letters are even written differently; it‘s a

marketplace script, a public scrivener‘s script, borrowed from their

samples (I had one)—you must agree, it‘s not without virtue. Look at these

round d‘s and a‘s. I‘ve transposed the French characters into Russian

letters, which is very difficult, but it came out well. Here‘s another

beautiful and original script, this phrase here: ‗Zeal overcometh all.‘ This

is a Russian script—a scrivener‘s, or military scrivener‘s, if you wish. It‘s

an example of an official address to an important person, also a rounded

script, nice and black, the writing is black, but remarkably tasteful. A

calligrapher wouldn‘t have permitted these flourishes, or, better to say,

these attempts at flourishes, these unfinished half-tails here—you notice—

but on the whole, you see, it adds up to his character, and, really, the whole

military scrivener‘s soul is peeking out of it: he‘d like to break loose, his

talent yearns for it, but his military collar is tightly hooked, and discipline

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shows in the writing—lovely! (32)98

Like the medieval scribes constructing a ―grammar of legibility,‖ Myshkin is sensitive

to the character and proper contexts of each script. A calligrapher of his caliber need

not strive only for transparency. He could actually contribute to the document by

selecting the script most suited to its content. Moreover, his analysis of various hands

reveals the way in which, even unconsciously, even against his will, the scrivener

inscribes himself in the document he is copying. Here is further justification for

calling Myshkin ―khudozhnik.‖ Through his own work, he makes present the soul of

another, the original writer. Thus he exhibits an artistic vision where Akakii

Akakievich yields his own vision to the specter of handwritten lines. Myshkin's

ability to disappear into his work becomes a negative capability through which he

may draw forth the image of an earlier author or scribe. Finally, his ability to alter his

originals, even adapting a French script to Russian letters, shows an aptitude for work

far beyond the purview of the copy clerk. He is the Pushkin of copyists, drawing

scripts from every country and tradition and showing the spirit of the originals all the

more clearly through their Russian variants.99

98 Потом я вот тут написал другим шрифтом: это круглый крупный французский шрифт прошлого столетия, иные буквы даже иначе писались, шрифт площадной, шрифт публичных писцов, заимствованный с ихобразчиков (у меня был один), --согласитесь сами, что он не без достоинств. Взгляните на эти круглые д, а. Я перевел французский характер в русские буквы, что очень трудно, а вышло удачно. Вот и еще прекрасный и оригинальный шрифт, вот эта фраза: ―Усердие всѐ превозмогает‖. Это шрифт русский, писарский или, если хотите, военно- писарский. Так пишется казенная бумага к важному лицу, тоже круглый шрифт, славный, черный шрифт, черно написано, но с замечательным вкусом. Каллиграф не допустил бы этих росчерков, или, лучше сказать, этих попыток расчеркнуться, вот этих недоконченных полухвостиков,--замечаете,--а в целом, посмотрите, оно составляет ведь характер, и, право, вся тут военно-писарская душа проглянула: разгуляться бы и хотелось, и талант просится, да воротник военный туго на крючок стянут, дисциплина и в почерке вышла, прелесть! (29) 99 In Dostoevsky‘s famous 1880 speech at the unveiling of the Pushkin monument in Moscow, Dostoevsky praised Pushkin‘s ability to identify with and fully render heroes of every nationality. 108

Myshkin's copying of handwriting is related to his capacity to read and share

others‘ feelings and thoughts. Like Dostoevsky's earlier copyists, he frequently tries to

understand people's behavior and figure out their motivations. Myshkin is a more

skillful reader of faces and actions than either Devushkin or Vasia, and his insights

repeatedly astound those characters who would dismiss him as ―simple,‖ ―naive,‖ ―an

idiot.‖ For example, when Lizaveta Prokof‘evna and her daughters ask Myshkin what

he has read in their faces, his answer pleases them so much that Lizaveta Prokof‘evna

declares that they, not he, have ―been made fools of‖ by the examination (76).100

Similarly, the very first time he meets Nastasia Filippovna, Myshkin reprimands her

for not behaving like herself. ―And you‘re not even ashamed!‖ he exclaims. ―You

can't be the way you pretended to be right now! It's not possible!‖ (117). Nastasia

Filippovna herself confirms that Myshkin ―guessed right, in fact, I'm not like that‖

(ibid.).101

It is not only that Myshkin can read people, but that he is aware of their suffering

and desires to share it with them. He has a great capacity for compassion in its

etymological sense of ―suffering with‖ another person. For example, when Gania

slaps Myshkin in Part One, Myshkin responds by ―bur[ying] his face in his hands‖

and telling Gania, ―Oh, how ashamed you'll be of what you've done!‖ (116). It is not

merely his own suffering but his anticipation of Gania's shame that upsets Myshkin.

Later, in Part Two, he is eager to trade crosses with Rogozhin even in the midst of his

suspicions that Rogozhin intends to harm him. The exchange of crosses, which

100 ―Вот мы и в дурах!‖ (64). 101 ―А вам и не стыдно! Разве вы такая, какою теперь представлялись. Да может ли это быть!‖ (99). ―Я ведь и в самом деле не такая, он угадал‖ (100). 109

Myshkin reads as a sign of brotherhood, connotes a sharing of burdens, as it does for

Sonia and Raskol'nikov in Crime and Punishment.

In Myshkin's compassion there is a hint of something Christ-like, especially in his willingness to bear another person's suffering. There is something vital in it, too, an active element of vision and identification that links his compassion with his calligraphic work. Compassion here is associated with reading, gaining knowledge, actively participating: all of the things that Gogol's copyists cannot do and

Dostoevsky's long to. Copying, in its sense of compassion and mirrored experience, is not only a method of gaining knowledge but perhaps even of helping the sufferer. At worst it is a form of understanding and love; at its greatest, in Christ's compassionate bearing of guilt, it is a redemptive act. Because suffering, and especially innocent suffering, has such an important place in The Idiot, as in much of Dostoevsky's work,

Myshkin's compassion, like his calligraphy, appears to be far more powerful than the copy clerk's traditional work. The aesthetic element of Myshkin's calligraphy, which recalls the enigmatic line "Красота спасѐт мир" (―Beauty will save the world‖), may also be part of a Christ-like nature. Myshkin's ability to adapt scripts and create new ones, and to make aesthetic judgments, goes beyond a passive appreciation for beauty, just as his interest in others' sufferings appears to be more than just a passive sympathy.

Whatever the role of Myshkin's incredible compassion, it is not enough to save

Nastasia Filippovna, Aglaia, or Rogozhin from self-destruction. In fact, scenes of compassion show Myshkin at his best and worst: from his triumph in the Epanchin's

110 drawing room and with Burdovsky and the nihilists to his mute, ineffective caresses of the murder Rogozhin, whose violence he ultimately does not prevent. In other words, such scenes capture Myshkin at both his most Christ-like and his most disappointing, just as his calligraphy ties him to the images of both artist and copy clerk. Again and again in The Idiot, copying (both calligraphy and compassion) is depicted as a potentially creative, even salvific act, only to accomplish little more than it would in the hands of one of Gogol's scriveners.

Logos in The Idiot: Images and Likeness

In The Idiot, more than in his early copyist works, Dostoevsky investigates the same question of a missing or inaccessible Logos that Gogol's copyists expose. Here, the themes of Logos and copying intersect in Myshkin's ability to see the author of the original in the handwriting of the copy. The presence of the original in the copy points the reader toward major questions of Christian aesthetics: glimpsing God in his creation, revealing the divine more fully through the medium of fallen nature. Just as

Gogol's bureaucratic texts point toward an absence of scripture, Myshkin's success at revealing the original in the copy on one level raises an implicit question of whether or not he can do so on a higher level, making something divine stand forth in the human just as he makes the writer visible in his writing. The Idiot thus poses dual questions about the presence of Logos and the possibility of inscribing Logos within an artistic text. In the process, it suggests a role for a calligrapher-Christ in the reconciliation of humankind, as the fallen image of God, with its original.

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The absence of Logos makes itself felt on many levels in The Idiot. The

Petersburg in which Myshkin arrives at the beginning of the novel is a city of scandal,

parody and lies, a city with a fraught relationship to originals. An authoritative word

is hard to come by, and news spreads largely through gossip and mysterious sources.

―Of course,‖ the narrator notes at one point, ―it was strange that news of this sort

could travel and become known so quickly,‖ and elsewhere he explains how ―the

rumors [about Myshkin‘s inheritance] […] managed to be shrouded in the darkness of

ignorance‖ (181, 180).102 The table of ranks, which functioned as a pseudo-Logos in

―The Overcoat,‖ is disintegrating as upward mobility loses its basis in social copying.

Classes mix: General Epanchin sits down with Ferdyshchenko at Nastasia

Filippovna‘s nameday fête, while social climbers such as Ptitsyn quietly haul

themselves up from the gutters. Beautiful youngest daughters are spurned for kept

women and their capital, and shabby atheists terrorize millionaires.

Furthermore, the novel and, especially, the character of Myshkin himself question

whether there is anything eternal, anything outside of time or beyond the grasp of

devouring nature. The novel is structured around the expectation of revelation.

Myshkin‘s ―glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness‖ in the moment before

his fits, the dramatic unsealing of Ippolit‘s ―Necessary Explanation,‖ the general

sense of impending apocalypse, of events unfolding in ―vortex time,‖103 all create

102 ―странно, что такого рода известия могли так скоро доходить и узнаваться‖ (151). ―Мало-помалу и распространившиеся было по городу слухи успели покрыться мраком неизвестности‖ (150). 103 ―Vortex time‖ is a term coined by Gary Saul Morson in Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time to describe the sense in Dostoevsky‘s work that everything is being drawn faster and faster towards catastrophe. For more on the apocalyptic elements in The Idiot, see Gary Rosenshield, ―Chaos, Apocalypse, The Laws of Nature: Autonomy and ‗Unity‘ in Dostoevskii‘s The Idiot,‖ Slavic Review 112 anticipation that some truth is about to be revealed. More than anything, the character of Myshkin, the Christ-like Prince who is quickly labeled ―teacher‖ and

―philosopher,‖ seems as though he ought to be a bearer of Logos. His charisma and his sheer otherness create the expectation that he will do something great: save the world, change the world, speak the ―new word‖ for which Dostoevsky‘s characters are always waiting.

Myshkin's performance in the calligraphy passage adds to the sense that he has the potential to make Logos present. Because he can read the character of the author in his originals, instead of transcribing them mechanically, his copying actually makes certain contents of the original more visible. Furthermore, unlike a copy clerk,

Myshkin works from his memory of the original, not from a copy that is physically present, so that his calligraphy makes the unseen manifest to his audience. In this sense, even when he is reproducing a script exactly, he shares an inner vision with his audience much in the way that an artist combines personal vision with the mimetic elements of art. In fact, one could argue that the author of the original is actually more visible in Myshkin‘s calligraphic copy than in his own document, because Myshkin has noticed and revealed him in the features of his script.

Of course, this is only possible because of Myshkin‘s description of each hand, which adds an element not present in the work of a copy clerk. Narrative and image supplement one another in the calligraphy passage, as they do in Plato‘s Philebus, where scribe and illustrator work together to record experiences in the book of the

50:4 (1991), 879-89; Robert Hollander, ―The Apocalyptic Framework of Dostoevsky‘s The Idiot,‖ Mosaic VII/2 (1974), 123-39; and W. M. Leatherbarrow, ―Apocalyptic Imagery in The Idiot and The Devils.‖ Dostoevsky Studies 3 (1982), 43-51. 113 soul. Myshkin‘s description of his calligraphy, which completes the work of revealing the author by making his traces noticeable, also recalls his desire for Adelaida to paint a picture based on his narrative of the execution in Lyons. In each case there is a sense that a double mimetic act is necessary to approach the unmediated experience of the original. That is, a second act of copying actually moves the viewer closer to the original experience instead of farther away from it. Myshkin believes that Adelaida‘s painting based on his narrative will help him contemplate something striking that he cannot put into words, even though she was not even present at the execution.

Similarly, Myshkin‘s description of his own copying helps the audience move back through that copy towards the original hand that is being revealed.

In Derrida‘s reading of Philebus, the work of the scribe and the work of the illustrator are complementary, but both are always at least one degree removed from the ―inner speech‖ that they record. In The Idiot, there is a suggestion of a way in which the act of copying might approach actual revelation of the original. It requires another type of double mimetic act, one that connects mimetic art with a visionary experience of Logos.

The authors Myshkin reveals through his calligraphy are human beings, not transcendent authorities. In Christian theology, though, human beings are themselves depicted as images of God, copies of a divine original. Salvation thus becomes a question of reconciling copy with original, a reconciliation for which a glimpse of the divine image is absolutely essential. The relevant passage reads as follows:

Then God said, ―Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let

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them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the

livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the

ground.‖ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he

created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:22-27)

This harmony is disrupted when man is expelled from Paradise. Theologians have commonly interpreted the after effects of Adam and Eve‘s transgressions by describing fallen man as being still in the image but no longer in the likeness of God.

In his sermons on Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux explains this as a state of still desiring (human desire being an image of God‘s desire), but no longer desiring the same things, so that the currents of divine and human desire no longer flow in the same direction. He also discusses the soul‘s ―capacity for greatness‖ and for ―things eternal‖ (259-260), which not all souls will ultimately ―seek or taste‖ (260). In this rift between the soul's capacity and the behavior that only partially realizes it, one is reminded of the Dostoevskian copyist, whose vision far exceeds his capabilities.

Fallen man is a distorted copy, no longer congruent with its original, yet somehow retaining enough of its form to be ―in the image‖ of the creator still. The drama of salvation thus centers on the reconciliation of copy with original, so that humanity may resume its privileged place in creation.

Both his calligraphic talent and his Christ-like behavior suggest that Myshkin will play a role in returning humanity to likeness with God. What if he could manage not only to bring out the human writer in his copying of handwriting, but also something of the divine original in whose image the writer is made? To do this would be to

115 accomplish two steps of recognizing and re-presenting: discerning traces of the author, inscribed in the mark of his hand, and of the creator, hidden in his rebellious creation, and revealing them both through a mimetic act. Such an accomplishment would have the dual results of providing a glimpse of the divine Image to a world that has lost any moral horizon and, by reminding humanity of its original, perhaps inspiring individuals to strive for a return to harmony with God. Were this to be the result of the calligrapher's vision, it would confirm a view of mimetic art in which the artist‘s production is a movement closer to the ideal, not, as Plato posits in the

Republic, farther away from it.

To the extent to which Myshkin is Christ-like, such a talent is entirely fitting. In the New Testament, Christ comes to reconcile humanity with God, overcoming the alienation of sin and repairing what was wrought by Adam at his fall. For example, in

2 Corinthians 5:19, Paul explains ―that God was reconciling the world to himself in

Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation‖ (NIV). Christ's role is to bring humanity closer to its original. Not only does he remove sin, that crucial deviation from the original, but, as

Logos, he provides humanity with a source of truth, with an authentic Word to follow.

Imitation of Christ can be seen as a striving of the copy (man) to recover its likeness with the original by bringing itself into line with the proper model. The scale and the limitations of the copy do not allow it to return to that likeness on its own; however, in Christ the restoration may be completed. Myshkin's calligraphy, were he to succeed at the double revelation described above, would further coincide with the

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biblical picture of reconciliation because it would simultaneously reveal God and

man, or God in man. In this sense, the calligraphic representation could be viewed as

according with the mission of Christ, who, though God, is also man, uniting original

and copy at the moment of incarnation.

This revelatory and reconciliatory power of art, which is never actually realized

through Myshkin‘s calligraphy, is strikingly similar to Pavel Florenskii‘s theology of

the icon in Iconostasis. To begin with, Florenskii views art in general as the result of

an artistic vision of noumena, or things in themselves, which belong to the heavenly

realm and to the set of transcendent originals encompassed by the term Logos. ―In

creating a work of art,‖ Florenskii writes, ―the psyche or soul of the artist ascends

from the earthly realm to the heavenly; there, free of all images, the soul is fed in

contemplation by the essences of the highest realm‖ (44). A transcendent work of art

is the materialization of this vision as the artist‘s soul returns to the earthly realm.

Myshkin has the potential to be this kind of artist. He is constantly returning from

beyond: from the ―paradise‖ of Switzerland, from the wordlessness and amnesia of

his idiocy, from the brief, bright visions before his epileptic fits. There is also a

moment when he recognizes Nastasia Filippovna from some impossible past: ―It‘s as

if I‘ve also seen you somewhere,‖ he tells her, ―[...] As if I‘ve seen your eyes

somewhere...but that can‘t be! I‘m just...I‘ve never even been here before. Maybe in a

dream...‖ (105).104 He appears in Petersburg—or the fallen world, or historical

time—to deliver a message from outside, though no coherent message comes through.

104 ―Я вас тоже будто видел где-то. [...] Я ваши глаза точно где-то видел...да этого быть не может! Это я так... Я здесь никогда и не был. Может быть, во сне...‖ (90). 117

Florenskii‘s description of art also recalls the model of Christian mimesis described in Gogol‘s ―The Portrait.‖ An elderly artist instructs his son, ―For man, art contains a hint of the divine, heavenly paradise, and this alone makes it higher than all else. […] For artistic creation comes down to earth to pacify and reconcile all people‖

(391). This vision of art is made explicitly in contrast to the demonic, mechanically- precise copying of external features by an artist, which in Gogol‘s story creates a cursed portrait of a diabolical money lender. ―The Portrait‖ thus complements Gogol‘s copyist tales, especially the mindless, destabilizing copying in ―The Overcoat.‖ It is also an important precursor to Dostoevsky‘s earlier copyist works, concerned with mimesis and unmediated copying. The artist‘s description combines the glimpse of

Logos that The Idiot seeks with the brotherhood and unity that Makar Devushkin and

Vasia long for. Significantly for Myshkin, he also views art as an act of reconciliation.

Moreover, Florenskii describes icons as working through human intermediaries and through a double act of vision to reveal Logos. This process again resembles like

Myshkin's calligraphy. ―Iconostasis,‖ Florenskii writes, ―is […] a manifest appearance of heavenly witnesses that includes, first of all, the Mother of God and Christ Himself in the flesh, witnesses who proclaim that which is from the other side of mortal flesh‖

(62). The material part of the iconostasis points those who see it toward ―living witnesses‖ who help the viewer concentrate on developing their ―spiritual sight‖ (63).

These witnesses are holy people who have ―attain[ed] existence beyond this world in the invisible,‖ and who can therefore ―bear witness to the invisible as they bear

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witness to themselves by their holy countenances‖ (61).105 The icon thus directs the

viewer toward the invisible world through the countenance of a saint to whom that

world has already been revealed. If the icon is successful, the viewer will learn to

perceive the invisible and will be able to see beyond the boundary of the physical

world to glimpse Logos.

These living witnesses are people who have already been restored to likeness with

God, the same movement of reconciliation that Myshkin's copying suggests. The

iconostasis depends on the existence of these living witnesses who have ―transformed

their bodies and resurrected their minds‖ (60). Florenskii's theology of icons thus rests

on the idea that individuals can return to likeness with God. He explains the

difference between image and likeness of God as follows: The image of God is the

―essence of the human being‖ (55). That essence is obscured through sin. The essence

of the person is not outwardly expressed, so the image of God is hidden. Likeness

with God, meanwhile, is the ―potentiality to attain spiritual perfection‖ by making our

physical being (body and personality) express its formerly hidden, sacred essence

(52). In copyist language, the saint, a copy, has been reconciled with the Original and

reveals the image of the Original to other copies who have not yet learned to see it

and in whom it is thus still not expressed. The meaning of ―image‖ and ―copy‖ here

is, of course, closer to a work of mimetic art than to copying as scription.

One major difference between the icon and Myshkin's calligraphy is that the icon

105 The face is a crucial part of the icon, expressing the essence of the person. Leslie Johnson‘s article on Myshkin‘s ―susceptibility‖ to faces, and his ethics of face-to-face encounters, makes several connections between the Prince‘s reading of faces and the iconic face. See Johnson, Leslie A. ―The Face of the Other in Idiot.‖ Slavic Review, Vol. 50, No. 5 (Winter, 1991), p. 867-878. 119 painter portrays saints who have already achieved their spiritual potential of likeness with God. Myshkin is interested even in those who have not yet done so. To reveal the divine through the character of the military scrivener, he would have to find the hidden essence, in Florenskii's terms, that the scrivener has not yet learned to express through his physical form. Myshkin's own vision would have to accomplish both levels of reconciliation with the original. In that case, his failure to do so could mean one of two things. Either it is another reminder that he is not Christ, but a Christ-like witness, or it reveals the limit of Christ's role in salvation. Attaining spiritual perfection requires human striving and the will to reconcile, which Christ does not impose. In the latter sense, Myshkin's calligraphy fails to reveal a transcendent image because he is an icon-painter in a world without saints. Or perhaps the failure does not lie with Myshkin at all, but with the irremediably weak spiritual vision of those who view his calligraphic icons.

Of course, these readings import Florenskii's iconography into The Idiot. The novel itself does not suggest a specific goal for Myshkin's calligraphy or an underlying cause for its limitations. For all the reader knows, Myshkin may be the

Akakii Akakievich of iconographers, creating images of any author whose handwriting strikes him instead of seeking out countenances expressing a divine essence. Or perhaps it is Myshkin himself who is the saint, and the novel is the failed icon that does not allow the reader to follow his vision. What seems clear, however, is that the novel repeatedly invites in a transcendent vision that is never made manifest.

In the world of The Idiot, no glimpse beyond the physical, visible world is allowed. If

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there is faith, it must be faith in the face of the brutal physicality of death, the faith of

the disciples in the days before the resurrection, when Christ's body, as in the Holbein

painting, lay cold and mortal in the tomb.

Other critics have noted this failure of icons in the novel to bridge the divide

between the physical and the spiritual worlds. Rowan Williams calls the Holbein

Christ ―a kind of anti-icon, a religious image which is a nonpresence or a presence of

the negative‖ (53). Barbara Fister agrees, noting that the brutal physicality of the

painting is ―quite inconsistent with […] the iconography of the Russian icon.‖106 She

contends that the absence of Logos is part of Dostoevsky's experiment with the limits

of representation. Dostoevsky, according to Fister, ―approaches the threshold of

portraying a truly good man, in terms that are carnivalistic and fully human, but

purposefully stops at that threshold, taking representability to its furthermost reach

without finalizing an image of authority‖ (ibid.) She reads Myshkin and the Holbein

as two parallel depictions of Christ in only the flesh, while the Word escapes from

incarnation.107

Whether The Idiot fails to portray divine beauty or deliberately holds back from

the ―image of authority‖ is unclear. (Dostoevsky writes in 1869 that he did not

express ―even a tenth‖ of what he wanted to in the novel.)108 What the novel in fact

does, however, is just as interesting as what it does not do. Out of partial failures and

106 Fister, Barbara. ―On the Threshold of Representation: The Function of the Holbein Christ in The Idiot.‖ Presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, University of Kentucky, April 1996. https://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/ThresholdofRepresentation.html 107 In contrast, she finds the mute Christ of ―The Grand Inquisitor‖ to be a more traditional depiction, though in the trappings of Western Christianity. 108 Letter to Sof‘ia Ivanovna, 1896. 121 unfulfilled potentials Dostoevsky creates a novel that inscribes the absent, the sought after, that which eludes description. The numerous instances of ekphrastic and apophatic description in the novel, ranging from imagined paintings to Myshkin's diagnosis that atheists ―will eternally be talking not about that‖ (221) (не про то), add up to a narrative formed cell by cell around that which cannot be presented or clearly seen. Like Gogol's unstable Petersburg, such a text forces the reader to experience absence, to search after something that is missing.

The Idiot works not through incarnation or iconicity but by inscription. The novel does not directly present anything, instead binding together a set of questions and crises. Set up to hope for revelations, the reader is left adrift when they do not occur.

Do they fail because Logos is elusive, or because there is no authoritative text to encounter? Is there any glimpse of beauty here, and are we capable of recognizing it?

Just as Myshkin is neither Christ nor exactly not Christ, neither artist nor mere copy clerk, the moral and aesthetic tensions of the novel are irresolvable. Furthermore, it is not merely that nothing is revealed, but that nothing is revealed in a very particular way. The Idiot is more explicit than ―The Overcoat‖ about the type of original that is missing, at least on the level of characters‘ (and cultural) expectations—though those expectations are never validated. We recognize Myshkin as Christ-like, to an extent, and we understand that there ought to be icons, that our hero should see a divine light.

All of these elements, neither upheld nor definitively overturned, collect around a silence that may or may not be nothing: the silence from which Myshkin, an idiot, comes, and to which he retreats, having done—nothing?

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Conclusions

The Idiot continues the exploration of absent Logos begun in Gogol‘s copyist texts. In the process, it suggests new creative potential for copying that reveals the original, even if the original is not divine Logos. Dostoevsky also ties copying, and its metaliterary interrogation of mimetic art, to Orthodox interpretations of iconography and incarnation. The copyist in The Idiot becomes a mediator of presence, rather than semi-present, though his effectiveness as mediator fluctuates.

Furthermore, in all of his copyist fiction, Dostoevsky rejects the extremely passive copyist type represented by Akakii Akakievich and Bartleby. All of his copyists are capable of interaction, love, desire, and vision. Still small and limited, though, the copyist becomes an emblem of fallen man, torn between the desire to do good and the weaknesses that prevent him.

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Chapter 4: Melville

―Nemo!‖ repeats Mr. Tulkinghorn. ―Nemo is Latin for no one.‖ ―It must be English for some one, sir, I think.‖

―Than that he was my lodger for a year and a half and lived—or didn't live—by law- writing, I know no more of him.‖ --Dickens, Bleak House

―Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street‖ first appeared in Putnam‟s

Monthly Magazine magazine in 1853. The narrator of this work of American copyist fiction purports to tell of a few incidents concerning ―a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of‖ (3). He is certainly not exaggerating: Bartleby remains one of the strangest figures, not only among copyists but in all of American literature.

Everything about Bartleby is in question, and nothing can ever be properly resolved:

Where does he come from? Why does he copy, and why does he suddenly, in his own infamous words, ―prefer not to‖ copy anymore? Is he the victim of some mysterious trauma that has torn him out of language, out of brotherhood and community? Is there some recondite knowledge behind his forlorn aspect and his enigmatic words?

Bartleby is a riddle wrapped in an enigma and inscribed in a copyist text. His presence provokes characters and readers alike by being perpetually impenetrable: he is an embodiment of the irresolvable in the text, the inscription of a silence neither 124

significant nor telling but merely there, a silence which must be constantly confronted

but can never be made to speak. Despite, or more likely, because of this insolubility,

the story has been the subject of immense critical attention. It has been read through

lenses as various as theology and disabilities studies and interpreted as commentary

on law, capitalism, and art.109 Bartleby himself has been read as a literary version of

Melville (the most common interpretation), of Thoreau, and of Christ returned; has

been interpreted as a double for the narrator and as a Dostoevskian underground man;

and has been diagnosed with schizophrenia and autism.110 Sources for the text have

been discovered everywhere from the Bible to Bleak House, from the

109 Leo Marx reads Bartleby as ―a writer who forsakes conventional modes because of an irresistible preoccupation with the most baffling philosophical questions‖ (85). Susan Weiner suggests it is a story about art (and law) reproducing truth, in which ―written representation [is] challenged by a new mimetic mode, the mass-produced image‖ (92). For the disabilities studies angle, see―The Cultural Logic of Euthanasia: ‗Sad Fancyings‘ in Herman Melville's ‗Bartleby‘‖ by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson in American Literature, Vol. 76, No. 4, "American Literature" at 75 (Dec., 2004), pp. 777-806 110 There are a number of biographical readings of ―Bartleby,‖ often focusing on Melville as a frustrated artist or an artist at odds with the literary market. Marvin Felheim reviews them in his ―Meaning and Structure in ‗Bartleby‘ (in Inge, Bartleby the Inscrutable. McCall also has a very thorough examination of biographical readings, as well as a survey of critics who have found biblical and Transcendentalist sources for Bartleby. Richard Chase thinks that both the Lawyer and Bartleby are doubles for Melville in some degree. (―A Parable of the Artist.‖ Bartleby the Inscrutable. Ed. M. Thomas Inge. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1979). F. D. Reeve reads Bartleby as ―Christ returned as the least significant man‖ (36). See also Donald M. Fiene‘s Christological reading in ―Bartleby the Christ.‖ American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 7, Part 1 (Summer 1970), 18-23. Kingsley Widmer develops the parallel with Dostoevsky‘s underground man: ―Melville […] parallels Dostoesvky in mocking the doctrine that men find their truest motivation in enlightened self-interest‖ (114). Egbert Oliver is perhaps the first person to read Bartleby as Thoreau in ―A Second Look at Bartleby,‖ College English, 6 (May 1945), 431-439. (See also a vigorous refutation by Alfred Kazin, who argues against the need for a model for Bartleby: ――I do not know who Bartleby was. I have always thought that he was the stranger in the city, in an extreme condition of loneliness, and the story a fable of how we detach ourselves from others to gain a deeper liberty and then find ourselves so walled up by our pride that we can no longer accept the love that is offered us‖ (76). For a reading of Bartleby as a psychological double of the narrator, see Mordecai Marcus, ―Melville‘s Bartleby As a Psychological Double.‖ First published in College English, 23 (February 1962), 365-368 and reprinted in Bartleby the Inscrutable. The autism and schizophrenia readings come from William Sullivan and Newton Arvin. See Sullivan‘s ―Bartleby and Infantile Autism: A Naturalistic Explanation.‖ The Bulletin of the Virginia Association of College English Teachers, 3 (Fall 1979), 43-60; and Arvin‘s Herman Melville. New York: William Sloane, 1950; Viking Compass Books, 1957. Arvin also compares Melville with Gogol. 125

Transcendentalists to Eastern philosophy.111 Some of the most productive readings are

those focused on the limits of interpretation. In The Silence of Bartleby, Dan McCall

cautions against the temptation to ‗solve‘ Bartleby through sources or allegorical

keys. ―[H]ow far can we go with all this?‖ McCall asks. ―And to what purpose? […]

After decades of extremely productive work, 'the Bartleby Industry' has put us in a

rather peculiar position: the more we see of what went into the story, the less we

understand of the story itself‖ (9). McCall cautions against readings that lead away

from, rather than back to, the text and its mysterious lacunae.112 ―When we ask what

is wrong with him,‖ McCall concludes, ―Bartleby will not tell us, the Lawyer cannot

tell us, and the story itself does not tell us. The repeated answer to our question, and

the profoundest, is silence‖ (58). In ―Revisiting The Silence of Bartleby,‖ Douglas

Anderson continues this line of criticism by pointing out that McCall‘s book is not a

challenge to interpret Bartleby‘s silence, which the reader encounters at the limits of

meaning and interpretation. He writes:

Unlike those colleagues who otherwise share his interest in the expressive

possibilities of silence, McCall does not take for granted that the unsayable must

have its own languages, its own strategies of persuasion and standards of

eloquence, its own national inflection. His book does not address Bartleby's

111 For the influence of Bleak House, seeJaffe, David. Bartleby the Scrivener and Bleak House: Melville‟s Debt to Dickens. Mardi Press (1981). Robert Morsberger suggests the influence of Thoreau‘s ―Civil Disobedience‖ on the text in ―I Prefer Not to‘: Melville and the Theme of Withdrawal.‖ University College Quarterly, 10 (January 1965), 24-29. Walter Sutton and H. Bruce Franklin suggest the influence of Buddhism and Hinduism, respectively. (Franklins‘ The Wake of the Gods: Melville‟s Mythology, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963, also examines the influence of Christianity and several other sets of gods from mythology and ancient religions.) 112 In fact, he reprints the text at the end of the book, a reminder that critical endeavor must ultimately lead us back into the text. 126

silence as if it were a singular expression of individual will, a performance of

some special kind, the enactment of a vow, or the fulfillment of a mystical

process. The thesis, in McCall's view, is that there is no thesis. Most of his own

energy—like Bartleby's—is devoted to repeated acts of interpretive refusal.

(483)

When it comes to ―Bartleby,‖ even so-called ‗silence criticism‘ can speak too loudly, as readers reflexively struggle to give words to a vacuum.

In my own reading, I have tried to avoid the temptation of over-interpreting

Bartleby or forcing the profoundly mysterious into the light. Rather than give a complete exposition, of which there can be none, I focus on a few peculiarities of the scrivener and his language that I find especially salient to the figure of the copyist in general. In particular, I discuss personal names and the act of naming, connecting names in ―Bartleby‖ to broader concerns of copyist fiction in three steps. In Part One of this chapter, I read ―Bartleby‖ as a story that is very concerned with accurate naming, and in which Bartleby himself stands out for being unnameable (in a deeper sense than possessing a legal surname). Since names and naming scenes are a common element in Russian copyist fiction as well, Part Two suggests that passive copyists find naming and being named painful, and that they use copying as a language that does not name and thus avoids the violence of inscription. In Part Three

I bring these ideas back to the text of ―Bartleby‖ and analyze the scrivener‘s speech, finding that Bartleby speaks a language that consists neither in naming nor in copying and that collapses the boundaries between speech and silence, and between meaning

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and non-meaning. In doing so, he anticipates the mime in Derrida‘s ―The Double

Session,‖ who creates a blank space, where copy and original, self and other, and

difference and non-difference lose their binary opposition.

The discussion of naming also allows us to place ―Bartleby‖ relative to the Logos-

centered concerns of copying in the previous two chapters. In ―On Language as Such

and the Language of Man,‖ Walter Benjamin writes, ―The theory of proper names is

the theory of the frontier between finite and infinite language‖ (69). In the act of

naming, human language imitates the divine Word and discovers the limits of its own

creative power. Modernism alternately theorizes human language as arbitrary and

conventional or as mythically powerful, creative in a metaphysical sense. Though

logos is still conceptually important, it loses the capital L with which I have marked it

in previous chapters as transcendent authority, because human language and

immanence become more interesting. Thus ―Bartleby,‖ though no less mysterious

than ―The Overcoat‖ and The Idiot, lacks the sense of verticality of those works—

even the desire for verticality. (Myshkin‘s epileptic visions.) Though ―Bartleby,‖ too,

is structured around silence where silence is not expected, it is neither demonic (like

Gogol‘s works) nor apocalyptic (like The Idiot), because the expected is not Christ or

transcendent Word but merely human history, common language, and the

comprehensible patterns of workplace behavior.113 The mystery is in the silence itself,

not what the silence replaces.

Before I begin an examination of names in ―Bartleby,‖ a brief word is in order

113 It is true, however, that, when his expectations of logos in the smaller sense of human language and the ―common‖ (see below) are thwarted, the Lawyer works his way through the traditional higher authorities: references to the law, the Bible, and writers of classical antiquity all flavor his narrative. 128

about the setting of the first non-Russian copyist work to come under examination

here. With the subtitle ―A Story of Wall Street,‖ Melville and his narrator place

―Bartleby‖ in 1850s Manhattan. More particularly, the titular scrivener works for a

Master in Chancery in a modest, second-story office, its windows filled with the walls

of the tall buildings on either side.114 New York has enough in common with Saint

Petersburg at this time that it is not astonishing to meet the second of our case studies

of extremely passive scriveners here. Both are cities with strong cultural ties to

Europe that are located on the periphery, inventing themselves both through and

against the Western cultural tradition. Both are revolutionary cities, New York as part

of an America not yet one hundred years old, and Saint Petersburg created as the new

Russian capital, a rejection of old social structures and traditions. Petersburg is

structured by the table of ranks, a promise of meritocracy that becomes a crushing

weight to those at the bottom of the social order. Wall Street, too, and its John Jacob

Astors, promises endless advancement to the self-made man. They are created cities

that appeal to the self-creating, one shaped by government and promotion and the

other by capitalism and financial deals.

Like Akakii Akakievich, Bartleby lives in a city of the self-created without trying

to create. In a society of social climbers, he has no ambition. As the most passive of

copyists, the two share a number of features. They speak only when they must, and

they generally avoid the company of others. They are pale. They eat very little. In

fact, their lack of vitality is so extraordinary that they are each depicted as walking

corpses. For Akakii Akakievich this happens after his death, when he returns to the

114 For a detailed discussion of the setting of Bartleby, see Elizabeth Hardwick, Bartleby in Manhattan. 129 city as the ―clerk-deadman‖ (чиновник-мертвец). Bartleby, conversely, appears dead before his death. He is surrounded by a cluster of morbid descriptions: ―pallid‖ and

―pallor,‖ with their implictions of ―pall;‖ ―haunt;‖ ―dead wall reveries.‖ Furthermore, the narrator even has a vision of Bartleby‘s ―pale form […] laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet‖ (23). Still, as we will see below, there are crucial differences between the two deathly clerks. Bartleby lacks history, and so his story has none of the hagiographic overtones of Akakii Akakievich‘s. The narrator does call Bartleby‘s screened-off desk his ―hermitage,‖ but Bartleby is not a devoted scribe. He copies diligently only until he decides, mysteriously, to stop, and he shows none of the reverence for the job that characterizes Akakii Akakievich. Bartleby is more composed and more coherent. He speaks in complete, grammatical sentences, though in a strange and unyielding idiom. He is not comically pitiable, like Akakii

Akakievich, but disturbing in his melancholy stillness. The narrator captures this affect in a brief sentence recording his first impression of the scrivener: ―In answer to my advertisement, a motionless young man one morning stood upon my office threshold, the door being open, for it was summer. I can see that figure now—pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn! It was Bartleby‖ (11).

Bartleby the Unnameable

Bartleby‘s name instantly sets him apart from his fellow scriveners. It does not fit into the linguistic and social conventions of the office where he works. Before Bartleby‘s arrival, the office is populated by two copy clerks, Turkey and Nippers, and an office

130 boy, Ginger Nut. Of these rather unusual appellations the narrator observes, ―In truth they were nicknames, mutually conferred upon each other by my three clerks, and were deemed expressive of their respective persons or characters‖ (5). Ginger Nut, for example, is named for the spicy ginger cakes he is in charge of buying and bringing back to the copy clerks. The origins of the nicknames ―Turkey‖ and ―Nippers‖ are left obscure, but one can easily recognize their suitability. ―Turkey‖ fits both the corpulence of the scrivener thus named and his occasional foolishness while in his cups, the comic gravity with which he declares himself ―generous‖ for sealing a document with a ginger nut instead of costing his employer a proper seal. ―Nippers,‖ on the other hand, captures the snappy temper of the second copy clerk, who exhibits

―an occasional nervous testiness and grinning irritability, causing the teeth to audibly grind together over mistakes made in copying‖ (7).

These three nicknames establish a pattern for how naming works in the small community of the Lawyer‘s office. There are two key features: nicknames are

―mutually conferred,‖ i.e., given by other members of the community, and not by a higher, external authority; and nicknames express some aspect of the bearers‘

―persons or characters.‖ Though this aptness in naming is no doubt easier to achieve in a nickname, earned through appearance or behavior, than in a given name, bestowed in infancy, the narrator suggests that given names, too, may be revelatory and iconic. In meditating on his erstwhile patron John Jacob Astor, the Lawyer admits that he loves to pronounce that name, ―for it hath a rounded and orbicular sound to it, and rings like unto bullion‖ (4). To his fancy, the name is phonetically suited to the

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man who bears it, as it echoes with the promise of financial success. In the Lawyer‘s

mind, then, ―John Jacob Astor‖ becomes an act of poetic naming. The name is not an

arbitrary sign that happens to designate a certain individual. Instead, it is specifically

suited to its bearer, revealing something of his character and career.

To the fellowship of Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut is added the recalcitrant

Bartleby. His name stands out from theirs. It is abstract, formal. It is a family name,

though he is without any trace of history or relations. It sets him outside of the casual

physicality and camaraderie of the office nicknames.115 Bartleby, of course, is never

nicknamed. Such an act would familiarize him, draw him into the social circle in a

way that his manner of being forbids.

The scholarship on ―Bartleby‖ suggests several sources and interpretations of the

scrivener‘s name, but none that are simultaneously plausible and meaningful. Dan

McCall provides a short synopsis of readings of Bartleby‘s name:

Consider the name ―Bartleby‖ itself. In the critical commentary we can see

it ―proved‖ to be:

―Bartlemy,‖ from Lamb‘s essay on ―St. Bartholemew.‖

―Barney,‖ from Melville‘s pet name for his son Malcolm.

―Bounderby,‖ from Hard Times. (There is a little problem here, since

―Bartleby, the Scrivener‖ was published in 1853, and Hard Times was

written in 1854).

―Bartle-B,‖ from Priestly‘s Son ―A‖ and Son ―B.‖

―B-ing‖ itself, since Melville wrote B-enito Cerino and B-illy B-udd, as well

115 Even in jail he stands out from the common criminals and is mistaken for a ―gentleman forger‖ (44). 132

as B-artle-By, and was always questioning our essential being.

All of the above? None of the above?

Since it is basically impossible to learn anything of Bartleby‘s interiority through his

(quasi-)presence, his rare speech, and his mysterious conduct, it is not surprising that his name proves equally unrevealing.

The contrast between Bartleby‘s name and his fellow copyists‘ nicknames poses a question about how names work and what might be expected of the relationship between a person and his or her name. Marvin Feldheim has noted the irony that only

Bartleby, the most inscrutable character in the story, has a proper name. He writes,

―We notice at once that the narrator is nameless; the employees have nicknames; for

Bartleby alone is a true name reserved‖ (117). One might note in addition that the first printing of the story, in Putnam‟s in 1953, was anonymous. Only Bartleby has a ‗true‘ name, and yet it is only Bartleby about whom we can discover nothing, either from his name or from any other sources. ―Bartleby was one of those beings,‖ the narrator writes, ―of whom nothing is ascertainable, except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small‖ (3). Only Bartleby has a legal name, and yet it is

Bartleby who has no clear social position, who lurks in other people‘s offices until he is thrown in jail as a last resort of social taxonomy. Moreover, Bartleby‘s ‗true‘ name shows none of the poetic aptness of the other clerks‘, or of John Jacob Astor‘s.

It is clear that having a ‗true‘ name does not mean, on Wall Street, in 1853, what it means in myths and traditions that are still part of the cultural conception of naming.

Here it means a legal name, a name attested by a birth certificate, but in folklore a

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‗true‘ name is something powerful, unique, often secret, something bound to a

person‘s essence. Derrida defines such a ―proper name‖—which he calls part of ―the

original myth of transparent legibility,‖ something that never could have actually

existed—as ―the unique appellation reserved for the presence of a unique being‖ (Of

Grammatology 108). Speaking a mythic name might summon the bearer, give power

over the bearer, reveal the bearer in some way. Such names suppose a close,

symmetrical connection between a linguistic sign and a physical being: one name, one

person, so tightly bound that uttering the name in some sense makes the person

present. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, it is common not to speak or write the true

name of God, out of respect for its holiness. At the same time, superstition often

forbids naming the devil, lest he appear, and it is common in folklore and mythology

for true names to be kept hidden, as they make their bearers vulnerable to obligation

and harm. Speaking Bartleby‘s name, by contrast, does little to reveal or control him.

His name is expressive of his essence only in being as opaque and unrevealing as he

himself is. True, it summons him from his ―hermitage,‖ but it does not compel him to

obey.

As mythic names are no longer being bestowed (for want of the proper authority?

the proper insight?), the narrator‘s scriveners take it into their own hands to form non-

arbitrary connections between signifier and signified through nicknames.116

Nicknaming can thus be viewed as quite a democratic model of language and

meaning, conducted in lower, colloquial registers by the people themselves, who

116 They are making the connections that Poprishchin fails to, though in colloquial rather than literary language. 134 prove themselves capable of getting on without any higher naming authority. Indeed, influence and social structures, as well as names, come largely through what might be termed ―the common‖ in the world of ―Bartleby.‖ The word ―common‖ appears twelve times in the story, often in constructions like ―common usage,‖ ―common sense,‖ and ―common humanity‖ (though also ―common jail,‖ ―common trespasser,‖ etc.). It underlies ideas about correct behavior, facilitates mutual understanding, and serves as a bond, a norm against which people understand their feelings and obligations. In this sense, the common fills many of the functions that Logos is assumed to, but does not, in ―The Overcoat.‖

Bartleby stands outside of the common and confounds it. He cannot be appealed to on the basis of ―common usage‖ (15), which would dictate that he be reasonable and fulfill the typical duties of his office. The common has no power over him, and he does not belong to it. As such, he is incomprehensible to his coworkers, and unpredictable. It is in this sense that he is unnameable, or, more properly, unnicknameable to them. If a nickname reveals something of the essence of the person, Bartleby‘s essence defies access and identification.

Part of the problem is that the common relies on ‗assumption,‘ a philosophy the narrator must reevaluate in response to Bartleby. ―Common usage,‖ for example, rests on an assumption of repeatability, that similar situations will and should be handled in a similar fashion. ―Common sense,‖ too, relies on the predictability derived from experience, just as nicknames depend on a more or less consistent personality and set of behaviors. Bartleby, as the narrator discovers to his chagrin, is ―more a man of

135 preference than assumption‖ (31). Preference is about the individual and the present moment, and it does not carry assumption‘s promise of predictability or mutual comprehension.

A rather comic example of Bartleby‘s defying assumptions, in this case about cause and effect relationships, lies in the way each scrivener is affected by food.

Turkey drinks at lunch and works sloppily in the afternoons, as mentioned above.

Likewise, Nippers is irritable in the mornings because of indigestion, which fades to leave him productive in the afternoons. Their behavior is entirely regular and predictable. ―All of his [Turkey‘s] blots upon my documents,‖ the narrator reports,

―were dropped there after twelve o‘clock, meridian‖ (6). Bartleby, on the other hand, appears to be exempt from such alimentary influences. He is as immune to the properties of his food as he is to all other external forces, as the baffled narrator discovers. Bartleby never leaves the office to dine, but he does send the office boy out each day to buy him ginger nuts. ―He lives, then, on ginger-nuts,‖ the narrator muses:

never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he

never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on

in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living

entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as

one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was

ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then,

had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none. (17)

Unlike his fellow copy clerks, Bartleby is entirely uninfluenced by his food. Even

136

physical necessities yield no clues about his behavior. It is as if he were exempt

altogether from the laws of causality.117

Nor is it merely the case that he avoids an office nickname. Bartleby eludes all

attempts at naming him, including the narrator‘s (or Melville‘s), whose title to the

story is also an act of naming. ―Bartleby, the Scrivener,‖ the title reads, ―A Story of

Wall Street.‖ Both ―scrivener‖ and ―Wall Street‖ are attempts at contextualizing

Bartleby that are not entirely successful. Yes, he is a scrivener, for a little while, until

he gives up copying without any explanation. And yes, the events of the narrator‘s

story take place on Wall Street, but any defining events in Bartleby‘s history (if he has

one) took place somewhere else and are lost before the story even opens. Bartleby is a

copyist who does not copy and a vagrant at his own place of work, eluding definition

at every turn.

Finally, let us not forget that, unlike Akakii Akakievich, whose story opens with

his christening and his mother‘s difficulties in selecting a suitable name, Bartleby has

no scene of naming. Even the narrator‘s discovery of Bartleby‘s name is omitted.

There is no introduction scene, just the syntactically significant sentence, ―It was

Bartleby‖ (11). The presence of the copula (―was‖) in place of an active verb gives the

sense that Bartleby has never undergone an originary naming process. It was Bartleby,

and it had always been Bartleby. Moreover, the pronoun ―it‖ avoids even a directly

117 Bartleby‘s indifference to the spiciness of ginger nuts proves directly related to his status as ‗unnicknameable,‘ for all of the other scriveners‘ nicknames can be taken as references to food. The connection is obvious in the case of Turkey and Ginger Nut‘s names, while Nippers‘ suggests lobster claws. Bartleby can have no nickname because he is somehow removed from the experiences that affect all people, from the physicality of eating and digestion, and from the small daily humiliations of being prey to one‘s flesh. He is outside of physical and psychological cause and effect. 137

naming of the ―young man.‖ Not ―he was Bartleby‖ but ―it was Bartleby‖—it would

hardly be possible to do less naming in giving someone‘s name. Given this

presentation, one hardly interprets the surname (is it one?) as any contradiction to the

idea that Bartleby is unnameable, a gap in language and the common.

Copyists and Names

We have seen that Bartleby eludes the naming powers of the common and his

fellow clerks. In this section, I look more broadly at the relationship between copyists

and names, a generalization suggested by Melville and his narrator, who specifically

place ―Bartleby‖ within the category of copyist fiction.118 Though copying itself is

often an anonymous labor, copyist fiction frequently plays with the fraught

relationship between scrivener protagonists and their names. Given this pervasive

awareness of the potential discomforts of one's own name, I propose to read copying

in this section as a form of language use that abstains from the act of naming. By not

naming, copyists do not participate in the power dynamics and the potential violence

bound up with that act. In the first part of the section, I look at Martin Heidegger's

conception of naming in The Introduction to Metaphysics to explain why naming

might be considered a violent act, and how this potential violence is reflected in

naming scenes in copyist fiction. I also look at certain forms of subjectivity that

118 The narrator opens Bartleby‘s story by placing it in the context of other copyist‘s biographies: ―The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years, has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom, as yet, nothing, that I know of, has been written—I mean the law-copyist, or scriveners. I have known very many of them, professionally and personally, and, if I pleased, could relate divers histories, at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep. But I waive the biographies of all other scriveners, for the life of Bartleby, who was a scrivener, the strangest I ever saw, or heard of‖ (3). 138

namelessness avoids: being subject to law, to an original. In the second part I

investigate problems connected with refusing to name, as naming is often presented

as an essential part of what it is to be human. In the final section, I discuss whether or

not copying can properly be considered not naming, with reference to Judith Butler

and citational speech.

Bartleby is not the only copyist to have problems with his name. Given the

inclination of their profession toward anonymity, copyists in fiction spend a surprising

amount of time being named, denying their names, or living up to the humiliation of

their names. Akakii Akakievich cries when he is christened; Myshkin,119 Devushkin,

and Vasia prove as limited as their diminutive names suggest; and Goliadkin is

betrayed by a name that proves not to be uniquely his. Poprishchin manages to hide

his own name until the final pages of his account, long after we have known him as

Ferdinand VIII, where it slips out in a moment of dialogue in someone else's voice.

Some of this is merely a characteristic of genre, of course. It is quite common in

nineteenth-century fiction for protagonists' names to be significant. Gogol's ―speaking

names‖ (govoriashchie imena)play with sound and etymology to declare something

about his characters. Characters are frequently renamed to signify a break with the

past or the forming of a new allegiance. Such is the case with David (or Trotwood,

Davy, Daisy, etc.) Copperfield, who also finds employment as a copyist in his youth.

Naming and renaming in novels is also a play with power and with legacy, as names

can confer respect or demean, and can be gilded or tarnished through one‘s own and

119 Myshkin does not entirely fit the pattern, because he is proud of his name and his heritage, but he is not a typical copyist, either. 139 one‘s family‘s behaviors. What is notable about the role of names in nineteenth- century Russian copyist fiction is the way in which bearing a name proves uncomfortable or limiting. ―Is it possible to live with a name like Ferdyshchenko?‖ asks a character in The Idiot (93)? The question might better be asked by the naked

(golyi) Goliadkin, surrounded by masks, by would-be suitor Devushkin (from devushka, ‗girl‘), or by poor Vasia, too weak to show his gratitude to his patron, let alone earn the full form of his name. (Limitation is not a problem with Bartleby's name; if anything, the problem with his is that it fails to be limiting. Still, we will see in part three of this chapter that his language use avoids some of the problems of naming that plague the Russian clerks who wear their names so uncomfortably.)

In this sense of limitation we approach what may be the key linguistic crisis of the nineteenth-century copy clerk. It is a crisis observable in all of the works under consideration here, but we see it especially clearly in works such as ―Bartleby‖ that have already moved beyond the assumption of Logos as transcendent authority and are dealing with human language. The crux of the problem is this: Naming is violent.

Copying is a way of using language while abstaining from (violent, originary) acts of naming. But naming is an (the?) essential human act, and refusal to name entails refusal to 1) know objects in the world, 2) bring objects fully into being, and 3) assert one's own existence.

What does it mean to say that naming is violent? After all, giving a name can be an act of recognition, of induction into a group, of knowing something or making it knowable. For Martin Heidegger, naming a being allows that being to come fully into

140 existence, to stand forth against the ―overwhelming sway‖ of Being as recognizable and distinct. Poetic naming, for Heidegger, is part of aletheia, revealing, so to name a being is to help realize it and make it knowable as such.

At the same time, the act of naming draws a boundary and imposes a limit. The nineteenth century has largely set aside the idea of mythic names, which, in accordance with what Walter Benjamin calls ―mystical linguistic theory,‖ require that the ―word‖ be ―simply the essence of the thing‖ (69). Assuming that names are not the ―essence‖ of the named, to name is always to name a being in a certain aspect or in a certain relation. The act of naming is thus always incomplete. For every name given, other potential names and relations are silenced. Thus naming is the act of revealing the named 'as' something, highlighting a certain set of potentials and silencing others. Moreover, because language is an imperfect medium, the linguistic being created in the act of naming and the physical or alinguistic being to which the name corresponds are not completely congruent. The act of naming thus engenders a split subject, entering language and awareness by being named, yet at the cost of being fractured from itself, limited in self-knowledge and in expression.

Furthermore, naming draws a boundary between self and other, between ―A‖ and

―not A.‖ Being named and inaugurated into language can thus mean being awakened to one's own alienation and fragmentation. In terms of Friedrich Nietzsche's Birth of

Tragedy, to be named (and nameable) is perhaps to exist in the phenomenal world, cut off from the ―primal Oneness‖ and thus doomed to suffer and long (unavailingly) for unity. At the same time, giving a name means attempting to find the boundaries (or

141 asymptotes) between what is designated by the name and what is other to it. Naming thus involves, on the one hand, the pain of difference and alienation for the being named, and, on the other, the risk of error, non-meaning, collision with otherness or violation of boundaries.

In ―The Violence of the Letter‖ in Of Grammatology,Derrida identifies an

―originary violence‖ in naming that is part of its belonging to writing (and so to language). Since naming always takes place with language, and language is differential, a name depends for meaning not just on its identity with what it names but on its difference from other names in the system. That is, the name ―Bartleby‖ has an apophatic meaning in that it designates ―not Turkey,‖ ―not Nippers,‖ and ―not

Ginger Nut,‖ but that also means that the more iconic nickname ―Turkey‖ has meaning not just in the way it fits the bearer but in the way it differentiates itself from these other people and names, and is thus not entirely independent of them. ―To name,‖ writes Derrida, ―to give names that it will on occasion be forbidden to pronounce, such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference, in classifying, in suspending the vocative absolute‖ (112).

Naming is violently limiting in the sense of social and power dynamics, as well.

Derrida adds to the originary violence described above a ―reparatory‖ legal/moral violence that demands the concealment of names, and a third type of violence in their transgressive revelation. In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler explains that part of the threat of hate speech comes from its threat to the ―social existence of the body‖: ―[It] is by being interpellated within the terms of language that a certain social existence of

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the body first becomes possible‖ (5). A subsequent act of address (the hate speech)

―recalls and reenacts the formative ones that gave and give existence‖ (ibid.), both

confirming the subject as recognizable and challenging the position in which s/he is

recognized. Naming, as one form of enacting or reenacting this interpellation, thus

sustains or challenges a person‘s ―social existence,‖ role in power dynamics, and

general position in a linguistic community.120

Not having a name would mean simultaneously escaping from a number of power

dynamics and not being able to claim a place within them, being somehow alien and

unrecognizable in society just as Bartleby, unnicknamable, is a rift in the fabric of the

common. The scrivener Nemo in Bleak House is an example of such extreme

displacement. He has given up his name, calling himself, like Ulysses with

Polyphemus, by the Latin word for ―no man.‖ For Nemo, renunciation of his name

means giving up several structures to which it bound him. He escapes from his family

position, as the socially unacknowledgeable lover of Lady Dedlock and father of the

illegitimate Esther Summerson. Clinging to one‘s claims to family and property, in

Bleak House, means being dragged into the grinding apparatus of the law, especially

the court of Chancery, which is the central source of misfortune in the novel. For

Nemo, however, giving up his name means not being able to stand in the role of

father or lover, not being honored as his military service might merit, and ultimately

dying alone of an opium overdose. The scene of his death, in a squalid room above a

rag and bottle shop full of scrap paper and other Chancery detritus, puts him in the

120 Below I argue that Bartleby does not engage in naming acts, but he does on one occasion engage in an act of address. 143

line of wasting copyists, like Akakii Akakievich and Bartleby, who die in poverty

surrounded by symbols of bureaucracy. Moreover, renouncing his name does not free

Nemo entirely from the law. His anonymity forces him to the edges of society, where

he makes his living copying law documents, subsisting on the scraps of the system

that no longer has a place for him. Copying for him is both a last liminal refuge and

the necessary consequence of renouncing his name.121

Copy clerks are removed from the violence of naming both by the relative

anonymity of their profession and by the type of language use it requires. Copyists are

not supposed to name for themselves, to assign or change anyone's position, or to

make any sort of revelation through their writing. The job requires them to be exactly

the opposite of Heidegger's conception of poets: ―The poet,‖ Heidegger writes,

―always speaks as if beings were expressed and addressed for the first time‖ (28). The

copyist, on the other hand, always writes in response to the words of others, because

someone else, someone in authority, has already expressed or addressed something.

One can easily see how a copyist such as Akakii Akakievich, who fears conflicts and

encounters, would be happy to be relieved of the responsibility of naming. (He is

121 See also No Name, Wilkie Collins's 1862 novel which plays on the idea of being nameless under the law, and thus abandoned and dispossessed. This is not to say that true anonymity, true freedom (or exclusion) from law and genealogy is possible. Nemo had a name once and renounced it. He was part of society, held a rank, and left behind a history. Even in hiding he has a (self-erasing) nom-de-plume, allowing him to rent a room and be employed. In ―Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,‖ Althusser describes subjects as being 'always already interpolated' into discourse, rather than waiting for a certain, originary act of hailing in the history of their lives. In the same way, it seems likely that one is born nameable or not, recognizable or not. If it is possible truly to renounce a name by becoming unnameable, it could only be the result of severe trauma—even Bartleby, whatever may have happened to him, retains his name as a cipher. Similarly, naming the unnameable, making it nameable, if possible at all, must be the result of a metaphysical, purely creative linguistic act, perhaps the exact type of violence, of poetic ―breaking up and breaking in‖ that Heidegger describes—though such acts of poetic naming surely still depend on certain recognizable, nameable qualities of the being thus revealed. 144 certainly aware of the power of names. As we have seen, he pays more attention to names than to the people around him, collecting documents addressed to interesting recipients.)

There is one further reason for copyists to avoid the politics of names and naming, and that is the connection between names and cultural concepts of originality.

Copyists are always working from an exemplar, in a dynamic that presupposes fidelity to the original to be the grounds on which the worth of the copy should be judged. The original is thus authoritative on the grounds of being the ―genuine‖ version, the version created with the approval of, and usually by the hand of, the author. Authenticity comes from the presence of the author (cf. the ―aura‖ that distinguishes the presence of the original in Benjamin's ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction‖) and from his or her endorsement of it. Both of these are often tied to names and signatures. Putting one's name to a work is a seal of completion and validity, of authenticity and self-affirmation. In collector culture, signed works are more valuable for this dual mark of presence and approbation.

Furthermore, the author's reputation and authority are transferred via the signature to the work itself, so that a document written by someone well regarded or holding a high rank might be seen as especially authoritative. The value added to the original by the name and signature is generally diminished, rather than augmented, in the act of copying. Any error or change to the words of the reputable first author is traditionally regarded as falsifying, obscuring, and devaluing the work, and a copy in a second hand diminishes the aura of presence of the first copy. Taking name and

145 signature out of the equation, however, equalizes the documents, bringing content and clarity to bear on their evaluation and freeing the (chronologically) second document of some of its obligation to the first.

It is worth noting in this connection that Bartleby's first ―prefer not to‖ is elicited by the narrator's request that he compare one of his copies to the original. Bartleby opts out of proofing copy against original, perhaps because their relationship does not interest him, perhaps because he does not recognize the authority of the original. It is, of course, impossible to guess why precisely he prefers not to, but one cannot ignore that, in a work of copyist fiction, the first act of ―rebellion‖ is against a traditional assessment of copy versus original.

One can easily see why a copyist might not want to participate in the act of naming or in the power structures into which people are named. By limiting their language use to repetition and reinscription, they abstain from the risk and violence of naming and from the privileging of originality and presence bound up with names. At the same time, is it fair to say that copying as a linguistic act is completely separate from naming? Above I have quoted Butler saying that ―the contemporary address recalls and reenacts the formative ones that gave it existence‖ (5). Later in the same essay, she suggests a temporal limitation on the power dynamics set into play through address. This limitation requires that the initial speech act be sustained by repetition for its positioning of the subject in the discourse to endure. ―If such a structure [as the social dynamic set up by hate speech] is dependent upon its enunciation for its continuation,‖ she writes, ―then it is at the site of enunciation that the question of its

146 continuity is to be posed. […] As an invocation, hate speech is an act that recalls prior acts, requiring a future repetition to endure‖ (19-20).

If this is applied to naming, it suggests that the initial act of naming is reenacted and reinforced through further uses of the name. Copying contributes to the physical longevity of the document by allowing it to be circulated more broadly, so that the naming discourse expands to include more readers. It also allows versions of the naming act to be preserved in archives. Not being in a position of power themselves, the copyists do not add the weight of their own authority to the naming act, but they may help renew it, and thus extend or repeat any trauma that was involved in the original naming. (Unlike the case of hate speech, the trauma preserved may be more abstract, such as the originary violence Derrida describes. At the same time, in the case of a government document affecting someone‘s social or legal status, the copyist‘s unquestioning repetition might actually contribute to reestablishing the authority of an oppressive act of naming.) The idea of naming reinforced through repetition obviously applies less to acts such as Heidegger‘s poetic naming, which must be constantly renewed through new, creative understandings of the thing that is named. There the copyist would make no contribution either to revealing or to limiting the object named.

It is not ultimately clear whether the copyist completely refrains from the violence of naming. Perhaps he avoids one type of linguistic limiting by becoming complicit in others, or irritates old wounds to avoid opening new ones. Maybe it is merely a retreat, a blind perpetuation of the status quo. In any case, the act of copying does not

147

require the copyist to be aware that he names or to know whom or what he is naming.

It is at the very least a symbolic alternative to originary, creative acts of naming.

Not naming, however, comes with its own serious problems. Increasingly, the

twentieth and twenty-first centuries have theorized human existence as being in some

fundamental sense linguistic. At the beginning of Excitable Speech Butler asks,

―Could language injure us if we were not, in some sense, linguistic beings, beings

who require language in order to be? Is our vulnerability to language a consequence

of our being constituted within its terms?‖ (1-2). If our existence and our awareness

of existence (of Being) is somehow in and through language, the idea of not naming

or not being named becomes precarious, even impossible.

The importance of naming, specifically, in human language has one of its cultural

roots in the second chapter of Genesis,122 the part of the creation story in which Adam

gives names to the animals. The passage reads:

The Lord God said, ―It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a

helper suitable for him.‖

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and

all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would

name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its

name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and

all the wild animals.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. (Genesis 2: 18-20)

122 See Walter Benjamin's extensive reading of this passage in ―On Language as Such and the Language of Man.‖ 148

Here the role of naming other creatures is given to man. The naming itself may be viewed as an imitation of the creative act through which God speaks the world into existence, or even as a completion of that act. Either way, naming provides a unique and creative role for humanity. ―For to be human means to be a sayer,‖ Heidegger writes (86): to relate to Being through language and interact with beings by naming them poetically. Benjamin writes that ―language as such is the mental being of man,‖ and that it is ―in the name [that] the mental being of man communicates itself to God‖

(65, original emphasis).

Not naming, then, means giving up an essential part of being human. It means not knowing things in themselves, as they are nameable: the image of Akakii

Akakievich's handwriting overlying his vision of daily life and the street. It means not entering into relationships with people in which each party becomes knowable to the other, negotiates with the other, or relates to the other in any recognizable way. It may mean not fully existing, being not-quite-present, as described in Chapter 1, or being merely an animated corpse. If this means not being differentiated or fragmented, being immersed, perhaps, in Lacan's alinguistic real, it is at the very least not existence in the way that we have learned to be conscious of it, not the existence of the human subject. Or, read differently, not naming is refusing the image of the creator by declining to speak a creative word.

Bartleby's Language

149

Faced with a choice between naming and copying (or speech and silence, creativity and passivity), Bartleby chooses neither. In this section, I suggest that he speaks a language that is not based on naming, a deictic language that has meaning only in reference to the present instant. Critics are divided in their analysis of

Bartleby's speech, some focusing on its ultimate impenetrability (such as Douglas

Anderson above), others on the incredible expressiveness of his language. Elizabeth

Hardwick writes, ―Bartleby‘s reduction of language is of an expressiveness literally limitless. Few characters in fiction, if indeed any exist, have been able to say all they wish in so striking, so nearly speechless a manner‖ (218). I argue that, by functioning in between saying and silence, Bartleby models a copyist language of non-naming.

Neither fully comprehensible nor exactly incomprehensible to his coworkers, this copy-language begins to break down other binaries in the story, creating what

Deleuze calls a ―zone of indiscernability‖ in which ―all particularity, all reference is abolished‖ (71). This again recalls Derrida‘s mime, who mimes reference but does not refer to any external source.

The most famous example of Bartleby's language, of course, is the phrase ―I would prefer not to,‖ which he utters multiple times and with several variants. In

―Bartleby; or, The Formula,‖ Deleuze comments on the strangeness of this phrase, which gives an impression of ―agrammaticality‖ and leaves its implied ending

―underdetermined‖ (68-69): prefer not to what? Sometimes, Deleuze notes, Bartleby does give the sentence a concrete ending: ―At present, I would prefer not to be a little reasonable‖ (26). Still, the phrase is never an assertion of a preference (―I am not

150 particular‖), but at most the rejection of a proffered alternative. In terms of this study,

―prefer not to‖ is not a phrase in service of naming, but one that confounds names.

Bartleby is a copyist who ―prefers not to‖ copy. Similarly, he ―prefers not to‖ become a clerk in a drygoods store, though he does not suggest another function or identity for himself.

Bartleby makes only two statements in the entire story that read like assertions rather than negations. Their structure is remarkable in that they are entirely deictic, that is, they convey their meaning through pronouns and in reference to the instant and the context in which they are spoken. There is no act of naming, no poetic identification of referents, and yet the phrases carry the force of revelation, of profound knowledge and accusation. Both are spoken after Bartleby has been removed from the premises of the Lawyer's former office and imprisoned in the

Tombs. The Lawyer comes to visit Bartleby, and calls his name. Bartleby answers:

―I know you,‖ he said, without looking round--―and I want nothing

to say to you.‖

―It was not I who brought you here, Bartleby,‖ said I [the Lawyer],

keenly pained at his implied suspicion. ―And to you, this should not be so

vile a place. Nothing reproachful attaches to you by being here. And, see,

it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here

is the grass.‖

―I know where I am,‖ he replied, but would say nothing more, and

so I left him. (43)

151

Though they operate through what is not said, these two phrases, ―I know you‖ and ―I know where I am,‖ cut through the falsity of the impossible comfort the Lawyer offers. The Lawyer speaks in the language of names, twice repeating ―Bartleby,‖ and then engaging in quasi-Adamic naming: ―[T]here is the sky, here is the grass.‖

Perhaps what is striking about Bartleby's speech here is the pure presence of the language. ―I know you‖: the identification is not marred by an attempt to fix the referent to a being outside of language, outside of the present instant of discourse. ―I who am speaking know you to whom I speak.‖ Bartleby's deictic speech circumvents the problems that both Benjamin and Heidegger identify with human naming.

Benjamin admits that, as language is fallen, naming is imperfect, and it is only through multiple acts of translation that human language traces its way back towards the true naming of Adam in the Garden of Eden, where, uncorrupted by the knowledge of good and evil (alien to naming language), he had genuine knowledge of creatures and creating names. Heidegger realizes that beings must be named and revealed again and again; since they stand forth in different aspects, no single act of poetic naming suffices for all time. ―I know you‖ avoids the violence of inaccurate naming and the pain of incomplete naming, of naming that limits. Yet it is not meaningless. If we cannot write exactly the truth proposition that the phrase expresses, we nevertheless perceive it as a statement. Certainly the Lawyer perceives it as being meaningful, and hears in it an accusation, though this is a reduction of the full power of the phrase. What exactly is Bartleby's speech? An acknowledgement that something has given itself as nameable that yet does not name? Hesitation on the

152 verge of naming, when meaning has opened itself up and yet is not verbalized? The potentiality for full revelation of the perfect name, which then cannot be uttered but perhaps, in this moment, is felt.

Though both depend on silence and the unsaid, Bartleby's language works differently from the stammered prepositions and particles of Akakii Akakievich.

Akakii Akakievich speaks in fragments, in prepositions that are not anchored by nouns and in expressions that simply trail off mid-phrase. His language relies on a second voice to complete it. Bartleby, though taciturn, is composed and articulate when he does speak. He expresses himself in full sentences. His speech presupposes the existence of an interlocuter (in the pronoun 'you'), but it neither requires nor invites another voice. Rather than breaking off because he is inadequate to the task of articulating himself, Bartleby is in control of his language, and one has the sense that he chooses his words deliberately, aware of precisely what he does and does not express. If his speech is enigmatic, it is simply because he prefers not to disclose more. Akakii Akakievich's speech hands the act of naming to a more authoritative voice, but Bartleby's acts despite and through his refusal to name.

Though Bartleby‘s speech (and silence) is unique even among copyists, it is identifiable as a copyist‘s language. It is a copyist's language not only for its avoidance of names but because of the overt play of assertion and silence. We refrain from saying other things so that we may say one; we choose a certain name at the expense of other possibilities, silencing the potential to let the actualized speak.

Similarly, the copyist silences himself to let the text speak, disappears to preserve and

153 promulgate someone else's words. Bartleby's language silences itself in order to speak without limit and speaks to inscribe its own silence, its namelessness.

The divided critical reaction, in which some scholars find Bartleby's silence most salient, whereas others dwell on the ―purity‖ of his expression, suggests that the scrivener's language confounds the binary between silence and speech. It is impossible to say exactly when he ‗means‘ something and what he means. The border between meaning and non-meaning, or between the absence and presence of meaning is breached, just as the absence and presence of copyists themselves, or the role of their handwriting in communicating the content of a document, can never be securely determined.

Bartleby is in general a figure who eludes binaries and reveals their limitations.

The Lawyer's office is structured around oppositions: the employer's room and the employees' room, the black wall and the white wall. (Bartleby's seating destroys the first of these.) Office behavior proceeds in binary cycles: In the morning, Turkey is on and Nippers is off. In the afternoon, Turkey is off and Nippers is on. Bartleby disrupts the predictable routine of the office, but he confounds larger social binaries as well: presence and absence (he stands ignored in the middle of the bustle lost in a ―dead wall reverie‖); public and private (despite his decorum, he sleeps, bathes, shaves in the office); legal and illegal (the Lawyer wonders how to have him arrested precisely for ―refusing to be a vagrant‖); alive and dead (he is pallid, corpse-like, and long before his death the Lawyer envisions him in a winding sheet.) I have noted at several points throughout this chapter that there are similarities between Bartleby and

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Derrida‘s mime in ―The Double Session.‖ Where namelessness confounds borders

and binaries, one recognizes also the operation of the Derridean hymen as the site of

fusion, abolishing the distance between opposites.123

The brilliant syntactical ambiguity of the story‘s final two lines suggest that the

narrator, too, has understood that Bartleby eludes language and categorization. In

contrast with his simplistic naming of Bartleby‘s physical surroundings in the jail, the

narrator‘s final words about the scrivener are a sophisticated act of naming that does

not actually name. ―Ah, Bartleby!‖ the narrator exclaims. ―Ah, humanity!‖ This is

non-deictic reference, unlike Bartleby‘s copyist language, but in its ambiguity the

exclamation avoids limiting (and defining) itself.124 By implying but not specifying a

connection between the sentences, the narrator sets up a play of potential meanings. Is

he equating the two concepts, Bartleby and humanity, and thereby their fates? Is there

a contrast, as if humanity shows its limits by failing to aid or include Bartleby? The

unnameable (Bartleby) and the common (humanity) are juxtaposed without a hint as

to whether we are to read them as synecdoche or binary, as equation or opposition.

The result is an act of naming (Bartleby as humanity, or vice versa) that perpetually

commits and erases itself. It is perhaps as close to Bartleby‘s language as a narrator

123 Bartleby is not exactly like the mime: he is a copyist who does not copy, rather than a copyist who copies nothing. That is, he is not mimicking the act of representation, but his non-naming language similarly draws attention to the limitations of external reference. 124 As in ―The Overcoat,‖ the narrator‘s language mimics the copyist‘s here. In general, the narrator has a cautious and self-effacing style, approaching the conversational tone of Gogolian skaz at times, though with a stricter sense of propriety and a penchant for legal language. The narrator occasionally qualifies his statements almost to the point of self-erasure, though they do not take the absurd, unexpected turns of the Gogolian narrator‘s discourse. For example, scriveners are ―a somewhat singular set of men, of whom, as yet, nothing, that I know of, has ever been written‖ (3, my emphasis). He also uses a very coy double negative when speaking of his own achievement: ―I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor‖ (4). 155 bound to the text of the common can come. The ending of the story, like the silences of the scrivener it inscribes, evokes acts of labeling and identification only to expose their limitation. ―Bartleby‖ is thus a point of connection between broader copyist concerns about naming violence and liminality, and post-structuralist critiques of the limitations of language and of the binary pairs by which we are accustomed to order our conceptions of the world.

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Chapter 5: Flaubert

―Go in for scribnery with the satiety of arthurs.‖ –Joyce, Finnegan's Wake

Bouvard and Pécuchet, Flaubert's final novel, presents a new type of copyist. In contrast with passive, solitary scriveners such as Bartleby and Akakii Akakievich,

Flaubert's come as a pair, thrive on friendship, and are not afraid of social interaction or intellectual debate. They are a little bit like Myshkin in their enthusiasm and the ambiguity of their foolishness, though they are very different character types: caricatures that slowly become sympathetic, touching. They are also, significantly, copyists who give up copying to undertake a quest for knowledge. If Akakii

Akakievich is a medieval scribe bereft of scripture, Bouvard and Pécuchet are the

Enlightenment response to his plight. Discontent with their copying (which they do not mistake for devotion to an authoritative original) Bouvard and Pécuchet set out to discover the truth of the world for themselves. In place of transcendent Logos, they rely on science and reason, at which, sadly, they are not particularly adept. Their failures to uncover a foundational truth plunge them into doubt, and they return to the haven of copying.

Bouvard and Pécuchet is a novel of profound disillusionment. Émile Zola called it

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―an affirmation of the universal stupidity‖ (Nadeau 262).125 Maurice Nadeau

describes the work as a punishment Flaubert inflicts on critics and readers by hurling

them along with his scriveners into an abyss of doubt. ―Its revenge is subtle,‖ Nadeau

writes. ―By insidious inlets it seeps into the reader‘s mind and saps the foundations of

both the commonest and the most grandiose ideas‖ (269). One might describe the

destablizing effects of Gogol's absent Logos similarly, though here it is human

striving that fails to ground reality. Stylistically, too, Flaubert is closer to Gogol than

to Melville or Dostoevsky. The two share a love of lists and of hyper-detailed

descriptions of realia, a flirtation with the grotesque, and an interest in heroes who

walk the line between character and caricature in their absurd behaviors and uneasy

interiority. Christian von Tschilschke compares Bouvard and Pécuchet to Gogol's

1842 masterpiece, Dead Souls, reading them as two ―epics of the trivial‖ (Simonek

135), a genre well-suited to a pair of quixotic copy clerks.

Despite these similarities, Flaubert's thematic and aesthetic approach to copying is

both innovative and uniquely bleak. He uses the figure of the copyist to explore the

interplay of repetition and difference, both as a critique of culture, where he sees

repeated reiterations degrading meaning, and as an aesthetic experiment with the

inscription of irreducible difference. In his handling of difference, Flaubert is the most

modern of the authors included in this study, and the one who most nearly approaches

post-structuralist explorations of the topic. Though an echo of the search for Logos

remains in the French copyists' quest for some kind of foundational truth, Flaubert's

text locates meaning in differentiation, not in identity to an external original. Created

125 ―une affirmation de la sotisse universelle” (Preface to Bouvard et Pécuchet, 8) 158

almost forty years after Akakii Akakievich, Flaubert's copyists take for granted that

their originals are not authoritative, and that truth lies elsewhere.126 They begin where

the investigations of the Gogolian copyists conclude, which may be why Flaubert

spends no time describing their handwriting or their copying habits at the beginning

of the novel. It is not their decision to leave copying that is surprising, but their return

to it decades later. Copying in Flaubert's novel challenges the stability of difference as

a ground for meaning, rather than the accessibility of Logos.

Since the concept of difference will be central to this chapter, I will say a few

words about it before going on. Difference was of significant interest to many of the

major writers associated with post-structuralism, including Derrida, Deleuze, and

Barthes. Each of them reacts to some degree to Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in

General Linguistics, perhaps the most influential twentieth-century work on the role

of difference in language. Saussure's Course was published posthumously in 1916,

based on lectures that he had given between 1906 and 1911. In it, he explains the

inter-relatedness of signs within the same linguistic system, and the role of difference

in delimiting the possible meanings of a sign. Saussure gives the example of

synonymy, in which the precise content of each word in a set of synonyms is limited

through contrast with the other words in the set: ―[S]ynonyms like French redouter

‗dread,‘ craindre ‗fear,‘ and avoir peur ‗be afraid‘ have value only through their

126 Nadeau does suggest that the credulity and naïve enthusiasm that characterize their scholarship comes from their copying work. ―Copyists by profession,‖ he writes, ―they are disposed to believe what they are told, and the printed word has for them a religious force‖ (273). This is true to a certain extent, but the role of copying in their pursuit of truth is limited to a metaphorical sense, to reproducing experiments and desiring to become authors and scientists themselves (a quixotic imitation). They certainly do not see the copying they are employed to do as a path to truth, and they quickly begin to take pleasure in disagreeing with and critiquing the scholarly texts they read. 159

opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors‖ (116).

Similarly, phonemes in a language are ―characterized not, as one might think, by their

own positive quality but simply by the fact that they are distinct. Phonemes are above

all else opposing, relative, and negative identities‖ (119). That is, we find the limit of

possible articulations of a phoneme at the point at which it can no longer be

distinguished from another phoneme in the language, and thus used to differentiate

between words. Difference thus plays a vital role in distinguishing concepts and

sounds in Saussure‘s model of language. ―Their most precise characteristic,‖ he writes

of concepts, ―is being what others are not‖ (117).

Flaubert's novel is structured around the search for these types of defining

differences, for the differences that lend meaning and precision to words. In fact,

Flaubert appears to anticipate Saussure even down to the importance of the

differentiating distinction between sounds. Roselyne Koren and Judith Kauffman note

that Flaubert gives his copyists names that start with /b/ and /p/, two phonemes that

are distinguished by only one feature, that of voicing.127 In place and manner of

articulation they are identical. This single differentiating characteristic points to the

essential but fragile role of difference in the novel, where it is frequently difficult to

determine whether two things, like the title scriveners themselves, can be

differentiated in a meaningful way. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze maintains

that Saussure's Course and current aesthetic experiments with the roles of repetition

and difference can be ―attributed to a generalized anti-Hegelianism‖ (xix), suggesting

a common source for Flaubert, the post-structuralists, and Saussure. We will see

127 For the evolution of the pair‘s names across early drafts, see Demorest Chapter One. 160 below an anti-Hegelian tendency in the depiction of progress (or lack thereof) in

Bouvard and Pécuchet.

Derrida and Deleuze both expand on the idea that language is differential.

Derrida's term différance unites a Saussurian understanding of the interdependence of elements in a linguistic system with the notion that language never quite makes present the thing it describes. That is, language works through difference, and it never completely abolishes difference in the act of meaning or representation. Deleuze searches for a non-negative concept of difference, or an understanding of difference that goes beyond non-identity. In doing so, he draws a distinction that is very significant for copyist fiction, and especially for Flaubert's copyists. In fact, he does so explicitly in reference to Bouvard and Pécuchet. Deleuze differentiates between

―difference‖ and ―the indeterminate.‖ He writes, ―Stupidity (not error) constitutes the greatest weakness of thought, but also the source of its highest power which forces it to think. Such is the prodigious adventure of Bouvard and Pécuchet or the play of sense and nonsense‖ (275). In reading Bouvard and Pécuchet as a struggle between the determinate and indeterminate, or sense and nonsense, Deleuze suggests a new arch-enemy for the copyist. While the scribe's enemy is error (difference), Bouvard and Pécuchet struggle to differentiate themselves against the banal formlessness of stupidity (the indeterminate), both their own and that of the surrounding society.

The sections to follow all deal with difference and determination as they relate to the act of copying in Flaubert's novel. Part One of this chapter explores repetition

(emblematized by copying) as a key structural element of Bouvard and Pécuchet,

161 forcing the reader to hunt for differences that are never fully discernible. Part Two analyzes the two copyists' return to copying at the end of the novel and demonstrates that, in the final chapter and the projected second volume, their copying would have actively destroyed the type of difference necessary to make meaningful distinctions among ideas and objects. Moreover, as they begin to copy the novel from within, they break down boundaries between author and copyist, fiction and non-fiction, and life and art in a way that further imperils defining differences. The final section suggests that Flaubert's use of irony and of competing frameworks for the novel inscribes irresolvable differences, creating an aesthetics of difference in response to the homogenizing copying described in Part Two of the chapter. Through this trajectory,

Flaubert flips the use of copying from the discussion of originals and fidelity to the original to an exploration of difference in an ordering, aesthetic role and casts the act of copying in an actively destructive role not seen in any of the previous copyist works.

The Copyist Pair: Repetition in Search of Difference

A number of difficulties surround Flaubert's final novel, not the least of which is that the work was left incomplete at the time of the author's death in 1880.

The first nine chapters and most of the tenth exist, and they are typically published with Flaubert's notes outlining his plans for the remainder of the text. The author's letters and papers also indicate that the novel was to be only the first volume of a two-

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part work, and much of the scholarship surrounding Bouvard and Pécuchet is devoted

to questions about what the second volume would have contained. The most likely

candidates include the Dictionary of Received Ideas (Dictionnaire des idées reçues), a

satirical collection of platitudes and clichés compiled by Flaubert over the course of

his career, and the ―Album,‖ a sottisier or compilation of stupidities.128

The ten existing chapters follow the misadventures of the title copy clerks from

the moment of their meeting in Paris in 1838. The pair's burgeoning friendship brings

with it discontent with their lives as clerks129 and a desire for education and self-

improvement. When Bouvard receives an unexpected inheritance, they abandon their

copying and retire to the country, where they make forays first into gardening and

agriculture, and then into an entire range of subjects. In ten chapters they dabble in an

astounding and exhausting array of topics, including: chemistry, physiology,

astronomy, geology, archeology, history, literature, grammar, politics, love,

gymnastics, spiritualism, hypnotism, philosophy, theology, mythology, and pedagogy.

Most of the chapters begin with the pair's decision to take up a new line of

investigation and end in disaster. They give up on agriculture when their grain stacks

spontaneously combust, on philosophy when Spinoza nearly drives them to suicide,

and on education when their young pupils prove immoral and intractable. Their lives

become a satirical trial of the Enlightenment's love for natural science and of the

Encyclopedia. Bouvard and Pécuchet begin each new endeavor thirsting for truth,

128 For the most comprehensive study of Flaubert‘s plans for the novel, including its projected second volume, see D. L. Demorest, A Travers les Plans, Manuscrits, et Dossiers du Bouvard et Pécuchet. Raymond Queneau‘s preface to the Dalkey Archive Press edition of Bouvard and Pécuchet contains a concise textual history in English. 129 Bouvard works ―in a business office, Pécuchet at the Naval Ministry‖ (6). 163

bumble through questionable methodologies, lose their way amidst contradictory

scholarly opinions, and end up disillusioned, only to start again in a new field.

Flaubert's notes for Chapters Eleven and Twelve of the novel suggest that the pair

would eventually have despaired of their quest for knowledge and returned to

copying.

A number of questions surrounding the novel are complicated by the absence of a

fully-realized ending. One of the most frequently discussed problems in the early

scholarship on the novel130 is about how to react to Bouvard and Pécuchet themselves.

Are they completely comic characters? Are they idiots? Do they learn anything at all

from their years of reading? Demorest defends the pair‘s courage and friendship,

favoring Guy de Maupassant‘s description of Bouvard and Pécuchet as ―two souls

sufficiently lucid, mediocre and simple‖ (‗deux esprits assez lucides, médiocres et

simples‘)(34). Similarly, it has become common to read the following passage from

Chapter Eight as a turning point for the pair, bringing them closer to their author's

experience and preparing for later chapters in which Bouvard, especially, will become

a mouthpiece for Flaubert's own political and social thought (Queneau xxi): ―Then

their minds developed a piteous faculty, that of perceiving stupidity and being unable

to tolerate it‖ (205). Koren and Kauffmann, on the other hand, caution against reading

too much into this passage, pointing out that the duo are quick to continue in the same

old pattern. ―If the emergence of the ‗pitiable faculty‘ marks a turning point in the

narration,‖ they write, ―it is not […] because the heroes have advanced from stupidity

to lucidity‖ (204).

130 For example, Albert Thibaudet, René Dumesnil, and René Descharmes. See Demorest Chapter One. 164

Flaubert's own comments on the topic are contradictory. In the early stages of writing, he alternates between calling the novel the story of ―deux cloportes‖ (‗two woodlice,‘ also sometimes translated as ‗two nobodies‘) and ―deux gentilshommes‖

(‗two gentlemen‘), titles indicative of the duality of his own thoughts about the pair.

In 1872 he describes the novel as a purging of bile: ―And all this with the sole object of spitting out on to my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me. At last I‘m going to say what I think, exhale my resentment, spew forth my hatred, expectorate my spleen, ejaculate my anger, deterge my indignation…‖ (Nadeau 268). Elsewhere he speaks with more constraint about his heroes. Nadeau write, ―Flaubert saw them

[Bouvard and Pécuchet] as ‗having many feelings and embryonic ideas which they find it hard to express.‘ He adds that ‗by the very fact of their contact with one another, they develop.‘ They are not the same at the end of the novel as at the beginning‖ (272). It is tempting to agree with Nadeau‘s final sentence and to assume that the novel is not merely about two stupid characters being stupid for 300 pages.

Flaubert‘s own statements, however, and (more importantly) the novel itself, remain ambiguous.

Most of these questions come from the structure of the novel and the deliberate

(one must conclude) ambiguity surrounding the development (or not) of its characters.

This being the case, it is likely they would not actually have been resolved in the final chapters. Instead, these questions, which converge around the ideas of repetition and difference, reveal key thematic and aesthetic elements of the novel. From the unusual pairing of two copyists to the incredibly repetitive cycle of their adventures, the novel

165 is structured in such a way that readers continually look for differences and can never be certain they have found any. Through his play with repetition, which may or may not reveal difference, Flaubert engages novelistic conventions, contemporary notions of progress, and his own perception that culture is eroding into a banal morass of bourgeois inanities.

Repetition in search of difference plays out at every level of the text. On the broadest structural level, the way in which the ending of the novel mirrors the opening prompts the reader to look for signs of change. There is, after all, an expectation that the protagonists of a late-nineteenth-century French novel will experience some sort of growth or downfall in morals or circumstance between the beginning of their story and its end. Bouvard and Pécuchet opens as the titular copy clerks, walking along the street from opposite directions, happen to sit down together on the same bench. Their ensuing conversation sparks the friendship that will lead them to give up copying and move to the country together. The close of the novel, according to Flaubert‘s notes for Chapter Twelve, would have returned to the image of the pair—copyists once more—sitting together, this time at a special double desk of their own design: ―End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying‖ (281). The juxtaposition of images provides a symmetrical frame for the novel that invites comparison between the copying careers the pair abandon and their final return to copying: is this a retreat or some kind of apotheosis?

In the end, it is impossible to say for sure either that the pair has changed from the first scene or that they have not. It is certainly true that Bouvard and Pécuchet feel

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different and that they see themselves as now set above the less enlightened residents

of the town. (Their alienation is genuine, whether or not they attribute it to the correct

cause.) And their circumstances have changed materially: they are now landowners

(though they have sold off most of the farm), copying on their own estate, on their

own time, selecting their own texts and arranging and editing them as they please.

Finally, and significantly, in the later copying scene they are sitting together, face to

face, having enshrined their friendship in the invention of the double desk. The pair's

capacity for friendship throughout the novel has provided the strongest evidence that

they are more than the 'vermin' or 'imbeciles' of Flaubert's more spiteful references.

After all, in at least twenty years131 of debate, disappointment, financial worries, and

unhappy love affairs, they never have a seriously alienating quarrel. One could see the

double desk as an image of progress from isolation to companionship, and from

copying for others to copying for themselves.

Yet it is exactly the steadfastness of their friendship, which continues unwavering

from their first meeting at the opening of the novel, that makes the double desk an

unsatisfactory resolution for three hundred pages of exploits.132 Their friendship never

131 For a thorough discussion of the chronology of the novel, see René Descharmes,Autour de Bouvard et Pécuchet : études documentaires et critiques. 132 The question as to whether the pair‘s return to copying is an advancement or a retreat has even entered the textual history of the novel. Flaubert‘s niece, Caroline Commanville, added the words ―comme autrefois” (as before) when she prepared Flaubert‘s notes for the novel‘s posthumous publication. With this amendment, Bouvard and Pécuchet decide to ‗copy as before‘ („copier comme autrefois‘) (see Nadeau 261). The insertion lends a clearer sense of circularity to the novel, something Flaubert would likely have avoided. Barthélemy Maurice‘s 1841 short story ―Les deux Greffiers,‖ a source text for the novel, has a similar but less ambiguous ending. The two clerks of the story‘s title, like Bouvard and Pécuchet, move to the country, which they find less idyllic than their imaginings. During their first winter they get so bored that they take up copying again: ―Thus their last pleasure, their true, their sole pleasure, was to resume, albeit fictitiously, that arid task which, for thirty-eight years, had been the occupation—and perhaps, without their knowledge, the happiness—of their lives‖ (Queneau xxiv). Maurice presents this copying 167

comes under serious threat, so their companionable copying is not the culmination of

a complex relationship but one more iteration of an inevitable pairing. Moreover, their

country farm and its accompanying freedoms are the banal fantasy of every Paris

clerk. Finally, while they have certainly read more and dabbled more than their

neighbors, their studies have not brought much in the way of expertise or skill. What

they have gained from their reading is not any foundational truth but the knowledge

(itself not insignificant) that inquiry will be met with ambiguity and doubt, and that

one must distrust common knowledge and common opinion. In comparing the

copying scenes it is thus impossible to say whether Bouvard and Pécuchet are greatly

changed. They are disillusioned, and they return to old habits, but with the same

haphazard zeal with which they greet every new endeavor.

The second level of repetition in search of difference may be found in the episodic

structure of the novel, which is built around a tension between cyclical repetition and

forward progress. The scriveners' adventures move in cycles: curiosity, investigation,

complication, resignation, and curiosity about something new. The novel consists of a

long sequence of these cycles, rendered in minute detail, including excerpts from the

texts Bouvard and Pécuchet read. What is a reader to make of hundreds of pages of

these episodes, all apparently leading nowhere?133 It is hard not to look for a

trajectory, to imagine that the copyists, for all their folly, are reading their way slowly

towards some sort of epiphany, or that, at the opposite extreme, they are building

as a clear return to the past; Flaubert chooses to avoid any similarly explicit statements about the nature of the pair‘s copying in the final chapters. 133 Flaubert wrote to Zola, ―There are no quotable excerpts, no brilliant scenes, just the same situations over and over‖ (Queneau xiii). 168

towards a final disaster that will ruin them and their farm for good. In his memoirs,

Maxime du Camp recalls Flaubert‘s intention to use this radical repetition to disorient

the reader, writing, ―Je veux produire une telle impression de lassitude et d'ennui,

qu'en lisant ce livre on puisse croire qu'il a été fait par un crétin‖ (Demorest 24). ('I

want to produce such an impression of lassitude and boredom that whoever reads the

book may believe that it was written by a cretin.')134 This statement ties the

unrelievedly repetitive structure of the novel with the author's intention to produce a

work of/about stupidity (bêtise).

As the novel's structure produces and frustrates expectations of progress and

change, the theme of repetition in search of difference becomes a generic problem.

There certainly are categories of fiction in which characters can experience hundreds

of pages of predictably structured adventures without evolving or changing

drastically. See, for example, Mikhail Bakhtin‘s discussion in The Dialogic

Imagination of the ―adventure-time‖ of the Greek romance, in which a series of

adventures and obstacles ―changes nothing in the life of the heroes,‖ but forms ―an

extratemporal hiatus between two moments of biographical time‖ (90). The realist

and naturalist novels prevalent in late-nineteenth-century France, though, require their

protagonists to feel the effects of time and experience. For all the absurdity of the

events he describes, Flaubert's narration, both in tone and in its painstaking attention

to detail, is in the realist vein—or perhaps each episode is a derailing of realist

convention, which persistently reasserts itself through concrete descriptions of the

countryside, the farm, the tavern, etc. Recognizing elements of two disparate genres,

134 Translations from Demorest are my own; translations elsewhere are as cited. 169 the reader is suspended between contradictory sets of expectations, one that demands that Bouvard and Pécuchet learn and age, and another which forbids it.

This duality shapes the representation of time in the novel, producing an uneasy tethering of ahistorical characters to historical events. It is impossible to read Bouvard and Pécuchet without experiencing a certain anxiety about the passage of time. The scriveners‘ lives are mapped out in intervals belonging to two distinct conceptions of time, one based on seasons and the other on years. Sometimes we are given specific historical and temporal reference points: the 1848 revolution, for example, which fuels their interest in politics and social models. The letter in which Bouvard learns of his inheritance is also dated (January 14, 1839). Based on these and other historical indicators, Queneau estimates that the novel spans approximately twenty years. On the other hand, Descharmes, judging from the time required for all of the copyists actions, guesses closer to forty. (There is clearly something odd about the representation of time in a novel that both encourages and frustrates timelines.) By either of these estimates, the copyists must be getting on in years at the end of the novel. In Chapter One they discover that they are both forty-seven, a ―coincidence‖ that ―pleased them but also surprised them: each had thought the other somewhat older‖ (8). This means that, by Queneau's timeline, their adoption of Victor and

Victorine, their climactic speech to the townspeople, and their return to copying all take place when Bouvard and Pécuchet are nearly seventy years old. By Descharmes's estimate, they would be nearly ninety.

Nothing about the passage of time inhibits Bouvard and Pécuchet or checks the

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vigor of their undertakings, however. There is no weighing of years as they decide

which researches to undertake. Instead, they are just as eager as ever to start massive

new projects, educating orphaned children and seeking public office. The reader

experiences some uneasiness, vaguely aware that the pair, though living as if in a

suspension of time, are nonetheless too carefully tied to numbers and dates to escape

the effects of chronos altogether. In spite of this, Bouvard and Pécuchet appear not to

age, and are only concerned with their mortality in a few fleeting instances when a

line of research reminds them of it. For example, when they study geology, Bouvard

is seized with a vertiginous fear that the world might be ending. Similarly, the corpse

of a dog, discovered on one of their walks, prompts their temporary obsession with

death. In each case, though, they quickly shake off their concern and plunge back into

their studies. Their existence partly outside of linear time explains both the pair's folly

(they dream of learning and accomplishment but live in a time scheme that does not

allow for progress) and their charm (they are like children who do not yet

comprehend their finitude).135

The juxtaposition of two models of time allows Flaubert to create a work that

opposes popular notions of progress but does not replace them with an entirely

different model of history. Bouvard and Pécuchet are tethered to their epoch by dates,

by current issues, and by numerous intertexts tying them into a contemporary

discussion. At the same time, the episodic structure of their lives contradicts both

Enlightenment and Romantic/Hegelian views of historical progress to which they

135 Much as Prince Myshkin comes from Switzerland (or Paradise) into historical time in Petersburg, only to return to Switzerland having relapsed into idiocy, Bouvard and Pécuchet come from copying into Faustian striving and return to copying again. 171

ought to be subject. Their exercise of reason and accrual of knowledge do not

improve them noticeably, and the cycle of striving leading to disaster leading to more

striving does not result in any kind of synthesis. They disappoint every expectation of

progress that they raise, yet not unambiguously enough to belong purely to an

ahistorical vision in which progress is not even a consideration. Once again the

novel's repetitive structure fails either to produce a definitive difference or to give up

the possibility of differentiation.

The copyist pair themselves embody another challenge to the concept of

differentiation. They are at once doubles (a type of repetition) and—superficially—

opposites. Both their first meeting, where they appear from opposite directions and

sit down on the same bench, and the final image of them copying at the double desk

capture a sense of the pair as mirror images, congruent but set in contrast with each

other. Bouvard is short and plump; Pécuchet is tall and thin. Bouvard is a sensualist;

Pécuchet is a virgin. Flaubert describes their ―personal tastes‖ as being

―complementary‖:136 ―Bouvard smoked a pipe, was fond of cheese, and had his

espresso daily. Pécuchet took snuff, had only a bit of preserves for dessert, and dipped

a cube of sugar into his coffee. One was confident, rash, and generous; the other

discreet, pensive, frugal‖ (9). They differ as any self-respecting pair of characters

must, but in trivial ways that only serve to emphasize their similarities. (Several

similarities astonish them at their first meeting, include both being copy-clerks—a

realization at which they nearly embrace—and both having inscribed their names

inside of their hats.) In most of their adventures, they act interchangeably.

136 ―De meme leurs goûts particuliers s‘harmonisaient‖ (38). 172

The doubling of the copyists is a repetition that yields only superficial differences.

This in turn raises the question of whether the pair's relationship with other characters

is one of repetition or difference. They think that they have become more enlightened

than the people of Chavignolles, rivaling the doctor, Vaucorbeil, with their medical

advice, Abbé Jeufroy with their religious insights, and the mayor and his deputies

with their political savvy. These professionals, on the other hand, suspect that the pair

are lunatics or at least idiots. The question for the reader, is not which group is right

but whether there is any difference among them at all. When Pécuchet and the Abbé

Jeufroy argue furiously under the same umbrella, pontificating ―belly to belly‖ in the

midst of the deluge (231),137 neither one seems more or less educated or absurd.

Similarly, conversations at the château devolve into the same verbal dueling that

characterizes the scriveners‘ private conversations. No side appears particularly

brilliant, all are reasonably well informed, and the debates are irresolvable. The

inevitable dialogue, in exactly the same narrative style, simply expands to include

more speakers.

As the line between the scriveners and the townspeople blurs, one wonders which

other lines hold. Does the reader remain safely above the follies of the copyist

characters, or does their education into disillusionment, for all its absurdities, mirror

our own? Could we utter a more definitive word than Bouvard and Pécuchet? And

what might be said of their author, who undertook the same eccentric course of study

as his heroes, reportedly reading over 1,500 volumes in preparation for the novel? The

ambiguity of the scriveners' education and character means that no act of

137 ―ventre contre ventre‖ (280) 173 differentiation rests on comfortable ground. Perhaps they are caricatures, but caricature is an art of resemblance as well as distortion.

In the introduction, I mentioned that Bouvard and Pécuchet‘s abandonment of copying can be read as an (unsuccessful) Enlightenment response to the plight of the scribe without scripture. The strong structural role of repetition in the novel, as laid out above, suggests an additional, even more central reason for Flaubert‘s interest in the figure of the copy clerk. The copyist‘s work embodies exactly the tension between repetition and difference that characterizes Flaubert‘s critique of progress. The copyist tries to reproduce a text exactly, but he still makes a document that is physically and temporally distinct. Measuring the space between an original document and an error-free copy is a bit like discussing Bouvard and Pécuchet at the beginning and end of the novel: Of course they are different, technically, but are they different in an important way? Is the trajectory of copying outward, towards a new document, or backward, towards the original? Furthermore, as I argue in the following section, the role of copying in the novel is not merely symbolic, nor is it limited to prompting a search for difference. In his plans for Chapters Eleven and

Twelve, Flaubert depicts copying as an act that actively abolishes difference, and

Bouvard and Pécuchet‘s copying opens the boundaries of the novel so that their abolition of difference is not confined safely within the limits of fiction.

Bouvard and Pécuchet's Copying: Repetition that Abolishes Difference

174

This section examines Bouvard and Pécuchet's copying as an act of repetition that

abolishes difference. By having the pair copy the doctor's letter in Chapter 12 and the

Dictionary (or a similar text) in the projected second volume, Flaubert breaks down

distinctions between subject and object (who is being copied by whom?), author and

copyist, fiction and nonfiction, etc. The pair's copying creates a black hole of

mediocrity that threatens to inscribe everything and everyone within its event horizon,

pulling them inexorably into the bourgeois and the banal. In this sense, Bouvard and

Pécuchet's copying enacts the tendency of culture to settle, through constant self-

reiteration, towards stupidity. Such a vision reflects Flaubert‘s own pessimism about

late-nineteenth-century culture, especially in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.138

Their return to copying is itself a rejection of difference in several senses. They

give up their scientific endeavors, faced with the impossibility of really knowing

anything, of differentiating true from false and progress from pseudo-science. In their

investigations, too many petty differences have proved the enemy of meaningful

differentiation. For example, when they teach botany, their attempts to identify

species of plants are foiled by variations and exceptions:

He [Pécuchet] wote this axiom on the blackboard: ―Every plant has leaves, a

calyx, and a corolla enclosing an ovary or pericarp that contains the seeds.‖

Then he sent his students out to collect plants randomly in the fields.

138 For example, in August of 1870 he writes bitterly to George Sand, ―Behold ‗natural man‘! Make theories! Extol Progress, enlightenment, the good sense of the Masses, and the sweetness of the French people! I assure you that anyone who ventured to preach Peace here would get himself murdered‖ (Letters 155). 175

Victor brought back buttercups, a variety of ranunculus with a yellow flower.

Victorine brought a tuft of grass; he looked in vain for the pericarp.

[…] In their garden were some tuberoses, all without calyxes. ―An oversight!

Most of the Liliaceae don‘t have one.‖

They find X., a rubiaceous that has no calyx. Thus Pécuchet‘s axiom is

incorrect. But they chance upon a spurwort […] and it has a calyx.

Really, now! If even the exceptions weren‘t true, what could you trust?

(255-256).139

Similarly, when the pair try to predict the weather based on the behavior of fleas, they

are foiled by the fact that every flea behaves differently (30). Differences in

specimens make it hard to differentiate species, and difference of opinion among the

scholars they consult makes it impossible for them to tell good advice from bad and

accurate sources from false and outdated ones.

Their return to copying also means that Bouvard and Pécuchet give up their political

and educational ambitions, which reach their peak in the failed lecture to the town. In

doing so, they surrender two visions of difference: a reformist vision of a different,

better society, and the dream of standing out as leaders, set above the crowd by their

139 Il écrivit set axiome sur le tableau: «Toute plant a des feuilles, un calice et une corolla enfermant un ovaire ou péricarpe, qui contient la graine.» Puis il ordonna à ses élèves d‘herboriser au hasard dans la champagne et de cueillir les premières venues. Victor lui rapport des boutons d‘or (sorte de renoncule dont la fleur est jaune), Victorine une touffe de gramens, il y chercha vainement un péricarpe. […] Il y avait dans leur jardin des tubéreuses, toutes sans calice. Il y avait dans leur jardin des tubéreuses, toutes sans calice. —Une étourderie! la plupart des Liliacées en manquent. Mais un hasard fait qu'ils voient une shérarde […]—et elle a un calice. Allons, bon! si les exceptions elles-mêmes ne sont pas vraies, à qui se fier. (307-308) 176

innovative plans. They surrender the desire to be visionaries and authors, giving up on

speaking a new word in order to repeat what has already been said.

Flaubert's plans for Chapters Eleven and Twelve trace the copyists' trajectory

towards a mode of copying that truly abolishes difference. When the pair first returns

to copying, they copy ―haphazardly (au hasard) whatever comes into their hands‖

(280). No doubt the relief of their retreat encourages them to embrace any exemplar

and rest their minds in the work of their hands. (A few lines later Flaubert writes,

―The pleasure they feel in the physical act of copying‖ (ibid.).)140 Before long,

though, the habits of their twenty years as 'scholars' and curators reemerge. ―[S]oon

they feel the need to make some sort of classification...so they copy everything over

in a large business register‖ (ibid.). It is here that the first traces emerge of the

project(s) that would have become the second volume. Flaubert's notes for Chapter

Eleven read thus:

Examples of every style, agricultural, medical, theological, classical,

romantic, periphrasis.

Parallels: Crimes of the common people—of kings—benefits of religion,

crimes of religion.

Howlers (beautés). Write the history of the world in howlers.

Dictionary of accepted ideas. Catalogue of fashionable ideas.

The manuscripts of Marescot's clerk = poetic passages.

Annotations at the

foot of copies.

140 ―Plaisir qu‘il y a dans l‘acte materiel de recopier‖ (Demorest 92). 177

But they are often at pains to catalogue a fact in its correct place, have

bouts of conscience. The difficulties increase the further they advance in their

work. —They continue all the same. (280)141

In their copying one sees a small-scale repetition of the course of their scholarship:

sampling of various sciences, followed by rudimentary but original analysis (the

―parallels‖), leading to feelings of disillusionment and superiority (the ―howlers‖ and

the dictionary). Flaubert's notes even follow the order in which the pair originally

encountered each subject, starting with agriculture, tracing through the natural

sciences to theology and literature, and arriving finally at politics and social critique.

The ―pains,‖ ―difficulties,‖ and ―bouts of conscience‖ the two encounter as their

copying retraces their intellectual journey accompany their return to a flirtation with

difference, inasmuch as difference plays a methodological role in their cataloguing

efforts. When Bouvard and Pécuchet copy ―examples of every style,‖ they undertake

the copyist version of a museum project, similar to the many collections of specimens

that accompanied their various scientific endeavors. The organization of a museum

depends on differentiation, on being able to distinguish among specimens of various

species, artifacts of different ages, minerals of specific types, etc. (Of course, as

Eugene Donato points out, such organization also depends on reliable similitude, an

underlying assumption that a single specimen is like enough to others to stand in

metonymically for the entire species.) If such objects cannot be properly identified

and classified, or differentiated from one another, the basic project of the museum,

141 For the sake of readability, I have placed the French text of the plans for Chapters Eleven and Twelve at the end of the chapter. 178 which Donato describes as relying on ―the notion that ordering and classifying, that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce a representational understanding of the world‖ (223), fails. Bouvard and Pécuchet's copying into their business ledger follows both the specimen-for-species style sampling of a museum and a similar arrangement of 'exhibits' in revealing relationships, the latter becoming the case as the pair start to organize their samples in 'parallels.' Since this necessitates a methodology of differentiation, it is not surprising that their early difficulties with difference return to pain them here.

A moment arrives in the plan for Chapter Twelve, however, in which Bouvard and

Pécuchet appear to renounce difference as a source of meaning or identity altogether.

Their discovery of a letter from town doctor Vaucorbeil reporting on the copyists' mental health triggers a change in their copying, causing it simultaneously to expand in scope and to become much less discriminate. Here is the plan for Chapter Twelve, detailing their discovery of the letter, their new credo in rejection of difference, and the final image of copying with which the novel was to end:

CONCLUSION

One day, they find (in the old papers from the mill) the draft of a letter

from Vaucorbeil to the Prefect.

The prefect has asked whether Bouvard and Pécuchet are dangerously

insane. The doctor's letter is a confidential report explaining that they are just

two harmless imbeciles. They recapitulate their actions and thoughts, which for

the reader should be a critique of the novel.

179

―What shall we do with this?‖—No time for reflection! Let's copy! The

page must be filled, the ―monument‖ completed. All things are equal: good and

evil, beautiful and ugly, insignificant and characteristic. There is no truth in

phenomena.

End with a view of our two heroes leaning over their desk, copying. (281)

The declaration, ―No time for reflection!‖ marks a significant change from their copying in the previous chapter, when they were ―often at pains to catalogue a fact in its correct place‖ (280). Somehow the letter catalyzes their rejection of the museum project. Perhaps a sense of injury makes them decide not to reflect on its disagreeable contents. Alternately, the letter may be the final proof of the plurality of judgment that makes it impossible to distinguish heroes from imbeciles, a last straw that convinces them to abandon the analytic element of their copying. Whatever the case, their final statement (or Flaubert's—the plan progresses from quotation to free indirect discourse until the characters' voices cannot be fully differentiated from the author's) clearly renounces the search for differences on which museum exhibits and their carefully labeled specimens depend: ―All things are equal: good and evil, beautiful and ugly, insignificant and characteristic.‖ The taxonomic projects of Chapters Two through

Nine are at an end, and all phenomena lie equal and undistinguished beneath the copyists' pens.

The copying of the doctor Vaucorbeil's letter is also a point of structural interest in the novel, first as an act of repetition that becomes a critique of the work in which it is inscribed and second as the moment in which Bouvard and Pécuchet become subjects

180 of their own copying. It is not completely clear what Flaubert has in mind when he writes, ―They recapitulate their actions and thoughts, which for the reader should be a critique of the novel.‖ (He is describing the copyists' reaction to the letter, just before they decide, ―No time for reflection! Let's copy!‖) Are they recounting the last decades to one another in defense of their sanity, putting their actions on trial, or merely copying down anecdotes about themselves related in the doctor's letter?

Whatever the case, their ―recapitulation‖ is the third iteration of their adventures in a novel that is already remarkably repetitive, the first being the narrative of the episodes themselves and the second being their copying of materials related to each earlier endeavor.

What seems less ambiguous is that the recapitulation was to be a critique of the novel itself, not simply of the pair's own behavior. It is a critique, after all, ―for the reader,‖ thus presumably adding a new dimension to the work as a whole. Putting a critique of the novel in the mouths of its heroes, who at the beginning of the novel are targets of the author's derision and the reader's amusement, marks a shift in the status of the copyist pair within the work. Without exactly ceasing to be imbeciles, they are allowed to articulate a critique of the very novel in which they are characters, and, by extension, of the author who created them. And this critique is accomplished not by the entry of a new authoritative voice, and not through playful self-reference by

Flaubert, but simply through repetition, and specifically through repetition that refuses to privilege (differentiate) any voice, any author, or any source. It is a small- scale re-inscription of the entire novel by its copyist-heroes, who in effect copy their

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own experience back into the text, creating a narrative simulacrum or a sort of copy

en abŷme.

The result of this copy-critique is a leveling of strata within the novel, or a

collapsing of differences. The pair is not exactly elevated to authorship. Despite

critiquing the work in which they appear, they do so as part of their abdication of the

impossibilities of knowledge and authorship. Nor is it that the authorial voice loses its

authority, though Flaubert himself did write, in his letters, that he felt himself

devolving towards his characters in the process of writing the novel. ―Their stupidity

is mine,‖ he declared in 1875, ―and it‘s killing me‖ (Nadeau 275).142 Instead, the

traditional hierarchy of these relationships is dissolving, completely in keeping with

Bouvard and Pécuchet's declaration that ―all things are equal.‖ Characters (re)write

their own stories. Character and author comment on one another's narratives. The

copy critiques the original, even when it is copied word for word. The copy is (part

of) the original; the two inscribe one another, as would have been even more the case

in the novel's projected second part. Completely in keeping with this general

ambiguity is Bouvard and Pécuchet's decision to copy a letter documenting their own

lives, thus becoming the subject of their own copying work. Copyist and text are no

more distinct than copyist and author or copy and original.

Interestingly, one could argue that the Dictionary of Received Ideas, a major

candidate for the contents of the proposed second volume, is also a work about

differences being abolished through repetition. This structural parallel makes it

142 Jorge Luis Borges writes, ―The fact is that more than five years of coexistence gradually transformed Flaubert into Pécuchet and Bouvard or (more accurately) Pécuchet and Bouvard into Flaubert‖ (387). 182 perhaps even more likely that the two works were intended to form a single whole. As early as 1852, almost twenty years before he began writing Bouvard and Pécuchet,

Flaubert discussed writing a work of fiction that would serve as a preface for the dictionary. He wrote to Louise Colet:

Meanwhile an old idea has come back to me—that of my Dictionary of Accepted

Opinions (do you know what it is?) The preface, especially, greatly excites me (it

would be a book in itself) no law could touch me although I would attack

everything. It would be the historical glorification of everything generally

approved. (Letters 175)

If Bouvard and Pécuchet is the preface he had in mind, as some scholars have speculated, it would mean that Flaubert's plan for a work that would collapse generic boundaries and erode distinctions between author and characters and art and life dates back to around the time of the composition of the Dictionary. Though we cannot know Flaubert's intentions for sure, the similarities between the two works indicate the way in which his critique of the Enlightenment model of knowledge in Bouvard and Pécuchet is conceptually connected with his pessimism about the decline of

French culture as satirized in the Dictionary.

The utility of a dictionary depends on the possibility of differentiating among the words it contains. Like the specimens in a museum, they are distinguished in accordance with certain principles of taxonomy, including in this case usage, etymology, phonetics, and spelling. Ideally, the dictionary is an example of difference in service of meaning, as words are paired (not without some overlap) with

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definitions. In Flaubert's Dictionary, however, words are defined through their clichéd

usage in drawing room conversation. In other words, they are defined in reference to

the context which has rendered them meaningless. For example, ―ACHILLES: Add

'fleet-footed': it makes people think you've read Homer‖ (284), or ―FOUNDATION:

News items are always lacking any‖ (300). These definitions give the most stale, oft-

repeated usages of the word, specifically avoiding any deeper foundation for

meaning. (In fact, they allow one to use a word without having any idea what it

means.) Moreover, they are commonplaces arrived at through parroting, as people

purposely say something unoriginal in order to sound in the know. Such environments

educate people into banality, and the meanings of words degenerate the more they are

repeated in their inane, Dictionary senses.

Bouvard and Pécuchet and the Dictionary thus provide parallel examples of

copying abolishing difference. In the former case, actual copying of documents

dissolves textual boundaries, while in the latter, a form of 'social copying'143 leads to

the degradation of meaning as key words and cultural references devolve into nothing

but signals of membership in the right crowd. Individual signifiers become

interchangeable in a sludge of the banal and bourgeois. (Bourgeois culture itself, of

course, results from the dissolving of traditional class boundaries.) Both works

oppose more optimistic views of scientific and cultural progress: with each iteration,

sense is lost rather than gained.

Joining the two texts as volumes of a single work makes everything and everyone

a potential subject of this stultifying repetition. The Dictionary is a compilation drawn

143 See Chapter 2. 184 from Flaubert‘s world. For the scriveners to compile it makes them observers of and commenters on exactly the same world. Beyond conflating author and characters, the maneuver erases the borders between fiction and non-fiction and between art and life, inscribing all equally. Of course, this potentially includes the readers, who might easily find themselves quoting the dictionary or uttering a careless phrase worthy of a sottisier. Queneau quotes Albert Thibaudet as saying, ―One cannot speak of Bouvard without saying something that might appear in the ‗Dictionary‘ or the ‗Sottisier‟‖

(xviii). Even left unfinished, the novel accomplishes much the same thing. The scope of the copying and the contents of the second volume will never be more definitively defined, and that very openness leaves no limit to what the copyist duo might inscribe.

Towards an Aesthetics of Difference

Bouvard and Pécuchet‘s copying is an example of repetition that destroys difference, but the novel is also an aesthetic experiment in the preservation of difference. In Part One above, I noted that the novel functions simultaneously in two different types of time, one linear and historical, the other—cyclical and ahistorical.

This is only one of several ways in which the novel is stylistically rooted in irresolvable differences. The differences thus inscribed provide a partial aesthetic solution to the problem of cultural degradation through repetition that the scriveners‘ copying enacts.

The idea that meaning breaks down through reiteration clearly problematizes

185 mimetic art, which suddenly runs the risk of obscuring its subject in the act of representing it. Engaging this possibility in Bouvard and Pécuchet is hardly the first time in his career that Flaubert explored the limits of mimesis or challenged the conventions of the realist novel. Victor Brombert describes an ―antirepresentational, antimimetic bias‖ in Flaubert's thought, ―sustained by an early conviction that art and life are distinct, even antagonistic realities, [and] that the former is clearly superior to the latter‖ (103). He cites a letter to Jules Duplan in which Flaubert writes, ―A drawing of a woman looks like a woman, that's all...whereas a woman described in words makes one dream of a thousand women‖ (ibid.). This thought contains both

Flaubert's rejection of art that is 'merely' mimetic and representational and, implicitly, his commitment to differentiation as a product of literary style. It demonstrates the surplus of literary creation, that the description of a woman is not an act of copying in

Bouvard and Pécuchet's sense (copying that despairs of differentiation, copying that destroys difference) but of description as an infusion, a preservation, maybe even a creation of difference. A hazily differentiated description of a woman would not have the force to elicit a thousand dreams, just as the figure of a woman too precisely copied would not have the scope to give them play. Furthermore, a thousand dream women are not so interesting (at least in this context) if they are clones or mannequins, indistinguishable, instead of provocatively individual and encounterable.

What distinguishes authorship from copying here is not merely the fact that the author is not treating a specific woman as a model (or original) to capture (copy) as exactly as possible. (No one would suggest that this is the general process of

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authorship.) It is that he is creating a woman who contains the potential for realization

as a thousand women without committing the type of restrictive metonymic act of

specimen-for-species representation that dooms the museum project to failure.144

Rather than selecting one specimen from an entire species to serve as a prototype,

from which the reader/museum goer is somehow supposed to grasp the whole in all

its variety and ambiguity, the author creates a figure of excessive potentiality, a

specimen that is and contains its species in all of its potential realizations. In place of

repetition that destroys difference, the literary woman is specificity that contains

difference.

For a literary description to create such a super-charged specificity, it must be

rooted in knowledge of the real but go beyond the real to create a surplus. The

language capable of accomplishing such a feat is neither the mythic, one-to-one

naming discussed in the previous chapter nor the metonymic labeling Donato

describes. It may, however, be encapsulated in that famous Flaubertian ideal, le mot

juste, or, exactly the right word. Rooted in thorough knowledge of the subject (though

not foundational knowledge, which Flaubert, for all his own quixotic quests, never

reached), le mot juste differentiates by being exactly suited to what it describes, and it

also allows for a creative surplus by incarnating its subject in a literary form. As such,

le mot juste replaces Logos as a guarantor of meaning, though a finite and immanent

one. Importantly, it does not serve in the role of Logos as an authoritative original or a

standard for comparison of subsequent, copied objects or texts. Instead, it inscribes

144 He plays with exactly this natural scientist‘s approach to characterization in his 1846 feuilleton ―A Lecture on Natural History: Genus Clerk,‖ where he purports to speak ―with the modest confidence of a zoologist‖ about the characteristics and habits of clerkdom (Early Writings 46). 187 the subject within a literary text in a manner that makes it recognizable, encounterable, and vital. In this respect, it counters the deadening repetition of social commonplaces and constitutes a creative act that, while based in knowledge of the real, is not exactly an imitative act. The position of the implied author relative to the copyists and to common idiocy in Bouvard and Pécuchet is so ambiguous that one hesitates to assert that Flaubert makes any attempt to save the author function or extricate himself from the novel's general despair. Nevertheless, his prior aesthetic interests suggest a potential escape route by positing le mot juste as a word against copying.

Let us now look at two examples of ways in which Bouvard and Pécuchet clearly does engage in the preservation of difference, inscribing difference even as the scriveners' copying threatens to abolish it. The first is Flaubert's famous penchant for irony. In ―The Impossible Conclusion,‖ Koren and Kauffman use Bouvard and

Pécuchet to explore irony as a property of an entire work, rather than a single statement. They argue that the questions we have asked above (Are Bouvard and

Pécuchet imbeciles? Do they progress?) are unanswerable and that the novel is characterized by ―emphasis […] placed, in an intense manner, on the coexistence of the contradictory judgments: Bouvard and Pécuchet are stupid versus Bouvard and

Pécuchet are intelligent‖ (204). Drawing on A. Berrendonner's analysis of irony in

Eléments de pragmatique linguistique, they find in such irresolvable juxtapositions a freedom and a final defense against the ridiculous posture in which Bouvard and

Pécuchet so often find themselves, of trying to assert or believe something only to be

188 made ridiculous by that act of reductive idealism. ―The ironic speaker,‖ Koren and

Kauffman write, ―rejects this yoke [of choosing one of two opposing arguments]. He practices a type of non-conformist discursive strategy that accumulates argumentative values. No conclusion is excluded: irony is 'the last refuge of the liberty of the individual'‖ (205; the quotation is from Berrendonner). By constructing a novel around contradictory propositions, Flaubert creates a more complex structure than the simple assertion of belief that his idealistic copyists seek. In doing so, though, he inscribes difference within a form perhaps less vulnerable to deadening repetition, a structural defense against social copyists who would blunt the edge of the wittiest phrase. Irony as the 'last refuge' of individual liberty becomes also the last refuge for difference.

Meanwhile, Donato finds a key juxtaposition of opposites in two models of physics that he believes are present in the novel: Newtonian physics, which expects

―eternal, cyclical, recurring movement‖ and the more recent (1824) model described by the second law of thermodynamics, which states that ―systems move inexorably in a given direction‖ (234-235). The entropic system of the latter model tends towards thermal equilibrium, a process Donato describes as ―abolishing differences‖ (236), because the contrasts between distinct bodies are lost. It is an irreversible process, meaning the system has ―no memory‖—one cannot deduce the original conditions from the present state (235). Furthermore, barring external influences, the system is always at its most entropic, least differentiated state. An epistemology based on the thermodynamic model, therefore, corresponds with the loss of meaning through

189 reiteration depicted in Bouvard and Pécuchet's copying, while Newtonian physics supports the pair's archaeological projects, justifying their search for origins and foundational knowledge. Both the copyists' ideal, knowable world and the mechanism of their disillusionment are inscribed as components in the complex system of the novel, making the work somehow larger than both, engulfing the sources that make it destabilizing, though without controlling or halting them.

These two examples of inscribed oppositions—and one could find many more— indicate that the novel is structured around differences just as it is structured around repetition, though not around the types of difference that would relieve the tension the repetitive elements build. They are differences that force unanswerable questions, not differences that answer them. Still, these differences that do not define may hold their ground against the advances of social copyists, preserving complexity where they cannot preserve clarity. The novel thus simultaneously enacts the degradation of culture and holds its ground as a foil to that process, a monument to the decay that otherwise, like everything else, might slip from view, finding language no longer potent enough to discuss it.

Conclusion

Unlike the other works considered here, Bouvard and Pécuchet depicts copying not as a dangerously passive act but as an actively destructive one. Whatever the intentions of the copyists, indiscriminate repetition leaches meaning out of texts. At the same time, copying proves structurally powerful as a vacuum or black hole that

190 collapses boundaries and distinctions. The traditional liminality of the copyist is inherited by everything that he copies—and Flaubert's copyists are determined to copy everything.

While Flaubert‘s novel is a low point in the valuation of copying, which could not be more demonic even in Gogol's overtly mythic/religious texts, it is perhaps the closest stylistically one can approach to a copyist mode of narration. The sense of doubling, repetition, and maybe-present difference creates the feeling of a copied text, in which the original and copy are simultaneously present, unfolded neither in unity nor in distinction. Both the doubly-authored (or doubly-copied) Dictionary and the self-critiqued, self-copying text are haunted by a sense of dual inscription, in which the hand of the copyist cannot be distinguished from the author's hand. The narrative is given, at some indeterminate point, to its copyists, who take it over without a single extraneous word. The dually inscribed text thus becomes, paradoxically, the closest thing possible to an unmediated copy-voice, making the novel unique as a treatment of copyists that approaches them neither as a null point, a gap around which the narrator builds a text, nor by goading them into rebellious authorship. At the same time, by presenting itself simultaneously as copy and original, Bouvard and Pécuchet closes a gap between the two that has never, in the era of copyist fiction, been sustainable.

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Below are the long extract from the plan for Chapter Eleven and the entire plan for

Chapter Twelve as cited above. The text comes from Demorest (91-93).

XI—Leur copie.

[…] Spécimen de tous les styles, agricole, medical, théologique, classique, romantique, periphrases.

Parallèles—crimes du peuple, des rois, bienfaits de la religion, crimes de la religion.

Beautés… faire l‘histoire universelle en beautés.

Dictionnaire des idées reçues. Catalogue des idées chic.

Les manuscrits du clerc de Marescot—morceaux poétiques.

Annotations en bas des copies. Mais souvent ils sont embarressés pour ranger le fait à sa place, et ont des cas de conscience. Les difficultés augmentent à mesure qu‘ils avancent dans leur travail—ils le continuent cependant. […]

XII—Conclusion.

Un jour ils trouvent (dans les vieux papiers de la manufacture) le brouillon d‘une lettre de Vaucorbeil à M. le Préfet. Le préfet lui avait demandé si Bouvard et Pécuchet n‘étaient pas des fous dangereux. La lettre du docteur est un rapport confidentiel expliquant que ce sont deux imbéciles inoffensifs. En résumant toutes leurs actions et pensées, doit pour le lecteur être la critique du roman.

Qu‘allons-nous en faire? Pas de réflexions! Copions! Il faut que la page s‘emplisse, que «le monument» se complète—égalité de tout, du bien et du mal, du

Beau et du Laid, de l‘insignifiant et du caractéristique. Il n‘y a de vrai que les

192 phénomènes.

Finir par la vue des deux bonshommes penchés sur leur pupître, et copiant.

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Conclusion: The Work of Copying in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

With Flaubert, copyist fiction takes a big step in opening the way for the post- structuralist merging of copy with original. Though much remains to be formulated, explored, and contextualized by the post-structuralists, the fundamental shift away from external Logos is complete. Nineteenth-century copyist fiction reveals the inherent instabilities of the copy/original and copyist/author binaries, challenges

Logos as a stable source of authority and truth, moves meaning and value from external models into the literary, and elevates the role of difference in meaning and identity. Piece by piece and work by work, the body of copyist fiction follows the copyist/original relationship from the Christian ideal of divine revelation, and the

Romantic concept of transcendent artistic vision, all the way to Mallarmé‘s Mime, the work without origin in which binaries fuse.

In the copyist works of the four authors considered here, we find ample evidence that the major significance of copyist fiction lies not in social critique but its interrogation of Platonic mimesis, and especially of writing and language as a medium of mimetic art. Copyist fiction and post-structuralist writings dissect Platonic mimesis at a time when it still has cultural currency, both exposing the instabilities of

Logos-based art and the Western metaphysics of presence and simultaneously serving

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as its final monument, first and last acts in the tragedy of vanishing Logos. Copyist

fiction is thus the beginning of the end, early modernism containing its own

destination, the ultimate monument to and tomb of transcendent vision and the divine

Word. As a body, copyist works both herald sweeping philosophical and cultural

change and perform the crucial experiments that provoke the change. At once a cause

and a symptom of philosophical and artistic revolution, nineteenth-century copyist

fiction proves a prescient and innovative body of work, worthy of recognition as its

own category and historical moment.

In concluding, I will look briefly at two questions that fall largely outside the

scope of the present work, but that are interesting both as avenues for further research

and for their importance in contextualizing copyist fiction and ―The Double Session‖

within literary history. The questions are: What happens to copyist fiction in the

twentieth century, as the profession of copying dies out, and where does the cultural

dialogue surrounding copying and mimesis go after ―The Double Session‖?

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries see a shift in attitude toward copying and

authenticity. The growth of reproductive technologies, new methods of data storage

and retrieval, the spreading influence of the internet, the advent of cloning, and

numerous other innovations shift attention away from the problem of the original and

towards a culture immersed in the copy.145 Post-structuralism anticipates copies

without originals, but computers and mass production make them the norm, and this

sweeping change penetrates into the sphere of art, as well. What lies beyond copyist

145 For the general cultural influences of mass production and copying, see Hillel Schwartz‘s The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1996; and Marcus Boon‘s In Praise of Copying, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 195

fiction is the era of the copy in itself: Elvis impersonators, internet memes, cosplay,

and re-dubbed videos. The concept of the original is not entirely lost and is even the

subject of some anxiety, as evidenced by numerous science-fiction takes on copying

and identity, from the replicants in Blade Runner to the clones of Orphan Black. Still,

in general, art shifts towards an assumption of plurality: limited editions and first

editions still assume multiple printings, and electronic distribution of images and texts

erases traditional notions of the original work. The copy is expected and celebrated,

while the Romantic ideal of artist as solitary genius is replaced by an emerging sense

of artist as copyist, parodist, archivist, or curator. Literary critics like Marjorie Perloff

and Kenneth Goldsmith describe the contemporary author as the disseminator, not the

originator, of texts. Goldsmith suggests the new credo, ―The world is full of texts,

more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.‖146 He continues, ―It seems an

appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an

unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of

it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists.‖ Oversated with

originals, the contemporary writer sorts through them, re-presents them,

reappropriates them through a sort of horizontal copying that celebrates indebtedness

yet does not especially glorify the original.

Of course, the changing role of the original and of authenticity is in part the result

of a shift towards technologies of mass production and reproduction. In his 1936

essay ―The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,‖ Walter Benjamin

146 In Popova. He is rewriting conceptual artist Douglas Huebler‘s statement, ‗The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.‘ 196 suggests that the effect of new technologies for reproducing art, from printing and lithography to photography and film, has been to erode the ―authority of the object,‖ or to jeopardize the privilege of the original. ―The presence of the original,‖ Benjamin writes, ―is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity‖ (220). As the significance of the presence of the original dwindles due to its accessibility through mass reproduction, the art object loses its uniqueness and its privileged status. It is severed from its own physical and temporal history, the sense of ―closeness‖ created by the photograph or lithograph replacing the more mysterious ―aura‖ of the work itself.

Authenticity is replaced by multiplicity, and the value of the work comes from mass exhibition rather than from the authoritative status of the original.

Writing several decades before Derrida, Benjamin is nonetheless looking ahead, beyond the drama of Platonic mimesis that post-structuralism brings to a close.

Though copyists coexist with the printing press and the lithograph, they are not part of the technologies Benjamin describes. They belong to another, manual tradition of reproduction, one still tied to the presence of an original. After all, copyists are themselves people, not machines. For all their trouble asserting their presence, and their tendency toward ghostliness, they have also the function of author-doubles, mimicking creation and vision even when it is unclear that they actually participate in such things. The semi-presence of the copyist, and the unique traces of his handwriting, preserve an idea of the ―aura‖ of the original, just as their vigilance against error preserves a suggestion of its authority. We have seen in the preceding chapters that manual copying challenges the authority and boundaries of the original,

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but nineteenth-century copyist fiction takes place in a world still marked by the ideas

of Logos and of the authoritative original. The copyist points towards but does not yet

inhabit the age of mechanical reproduction.

Twentieth-century copyist fiction largely preserves the idea of the copyist as a

solitary figure instead of a cog in the machinery of reproductive technology. Of

course, one can imagine a passive copyist being subsumed into the machine,

becoming an image from Fritz Lang's Metropolis or Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times,

but fictional copyists on the whole continue to be writers, even as the world changes

around them. Shore notes several shifts in copyist fiction as it moves into the

twentieth century that acknowledge societal changes while preserving the

author/copyist juxtaposition. One is a trend toward female protagonists, as women

enter the workforce and take over many secretarial positions. In such stories, she

observes, dictation and copying become symbols of sexual politics, as in Dorothy

Parker‘s ―Mr. Durant‖ and Brian Moore‘s The Lonely Passion of Judith Herne.147 In

the latter, the title typist rebels by insisting on working, rather than, like Bartleby or

Poprishchin, deciding not to work. The second is the juxtaposition of the scrivener

and the typist, which occurs, for example, in Joyce‘s ―Counterparts.‖148 Here hand

copying and mechanized writing are paired, though the typewriter itself is a fairly

limited and manual means of textual reproduction, and one heavily dependent on the

attentiveness of the operator. In ―Counterparts‖ the pairing reinforces the drudgery of

hand-copying and the low status of the clerks still assigned to an increasingly

147 Scrivener Fiction. pp. 374-375. 148 Scrivener Fiction. p. 370. 198 anachronistic labor.

Works that engage the act of copying more directly find other ways to handle the anachronism. Iurii Tynianov and Umberto Eco set their copyist works in the past:

Tynianov‘s 1927 Lieutenant Kizhe takes place during the reign of Paul I (1796-1801), while Eco‘s The Name of the Rose is set in the library of a medieval monastery. In keeping with the exploration of difference carried out especially by Flaubert and

Deleuze, a number of these twentieth-century copyist works explore the creative potential of alteration and error. Lieutenant Kizhe, in the Gogolian tradition of social copying and linguistic caprice, follows the career of an officer created by a clerk‘s error. Rushing to transcribe a regimental order, an inexperienced clerk accidentally creates the name ―Kizhe‖ out of the last syllable of ―ensigns‖ (“praporshchiki”) and the particle zhe. Once his name has been entered into official paperwork, Lieutentant

Kizhe has an official existence, albeit a non-corporeal one, and so he embarks on a whole career, earning promotions, marrying, and finally being honored with a state funeral. A satire on bureaucracy, the work also suggests the incredible potential of a single slip of the pen to bend reality around the new world it forms.

A similar scenario plays out in Jose Saramago‘s 1989 History of the Siege of

Lisbon. Technically not quite a work of copyist fiction, the novel features a protagonist with enough copyist traits to be productively considered here. It is the story of a proofreader who, after years of painstaking service to the truth (stylistic and historical), spontaneously inserts the word ―not‖ into a text he is proofreading, negating an important event of Portuguese history. This act actually begins to warp

199 history, altering the face of present-day Lisbon, and the copy-editor turns author to explore why his alternate version would have transpired. Again the caprices of the copy affect the integrity of the original, an effect that in this case becomes an exploration both of authorship and of the relationship among the present moment, history, and historical record. The unexpected insertion of the word ―not,‖ an act the proofreader himself does not anticipate or fully understand, also echoes Bartleby‘s perpetual refusals and negations, though it is an instance of authorship, rather than negation through silence and passivity.

Perhaps the most famous twentieth-century copyist work, and the one that best captures the copyist on the verge of Benjamin‘s age of mass production, is Jorge Luis

Borges‘s 1939 short story ―Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.‖ Like the nineteenth-century works, it elides the boundary between copyist and author, but it relies on a twentieth-century sensibility regarding multi-authored texts and re- authored texts. In fact, the presence of two authors, rather than author and copyist, actually reinforces the copy-original boundary that so frequently disappears in copyist fiction.

Pierre Menard is an author who sets out to rewrite Don Quixote: not "to compose another Quixote--which is easy--but the Quixote itself‖ (91). By the narrator‘s description, this not an act of copying at all, but of pure composition that results in an identical text:

Needless to say, he never contemplated a mechanical transcription of the

Quixote; he did not propose to copy it. His admirable intention was to

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produce a few pages which would coincide—word for word and line for

line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes. (ibid.)

To do so, Menard first considers undergoing Cervantes' experiences and forgetting all that is external to them, becoming, in a sense, a copy of the author, but he decides ultimately to arrive at Don Quixote through his own experience. He is partially successful, managing to write ―the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part I of Don

Quixote and a fragment of Chapter XXII‖ (90).

The status of Menard‘s Quixote is baffling. It is not exactly a copy, especially because he does not allow himself to reread the chapters he is writing. In some sense, the work owes its existence to Menard‘s childhood reading of Don Quixote, without which he never could have even conceived of the undertaking. At the same time, the narrator considers the texts to be distinct. ―Menard‘s fragmentary Quixote,‖ he writes,

―is more subtle than Cervantes‘. [...] The Cervantes text and the Menard text are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer‖ (93-4).

The narrator differentiates between the texts based on the historical contexts of their composition, which make certain elements of each text more striking or more clichéd. He also takes into account the biography of each author. For example, he writes, ―The contrast in styles is equally striking. The archaic style of Menard—who is, in addition, not a native speaker of the language in which he writes—is somewhat affected. Not so the style of his precursor, who employs the Spanish of his time with complete naturalness‖ (94).

―Pierre Menard‖ is a step towards the copy-centric culture of mass production and

201 author as archivist, inasmuch as two men producing two ―verbally identical‖ texts both claim the status of author. At the same time, the two Quixotes remain distinct and comparable because they are tied to specific names, places, and times. This, of course, is Benjamin‘s ―aura‖ of the original, not yet swallowed up in this text in which authorship/copying is still an individual, solitary effort. Pierre Menard‘s text does have a retroactive effect on Cervantes‘ text, much in the way that Bouvard and

Pécuchet‘s copying threatens the status of Flaubert‘s original: the narrator ever after reads Don Quixote as a palimpsest, feeling that he recognizes Menard‘s style even in the chapters Menard never wrote (92). At the same time, the fact that the two texts may be compared and differentiated suggests that Menard‘s authorship is more creative and less ambiguous, comparable to Myshkin‘s project if fettered by the absurdity of the concept itself. ―Pierre Menard‖ is a transitional text between nineteenth- and twenty-first century copyist fiction, exploring the creative freedom of the derivative without surrendering some concept of originality and authorial vision.

In the tradition of the nineteenth century, these later copyist works, like the copyist himself, remain liminal, playing with their freedom from the tyranny of the original without vanishing altogether into the amorphousness of mechanical reproduction.

Having liberated the copy from the original, they yet remain entranced with the memory of originality. In this sense, Akakii Akakievich, one of the earliest and most

Romantic copy clerks examined here, still has much in common with his twentieth- century brethren, symbols of a tradition that has collapsed but not entirely been effaced.

202

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