(SKAZIFICATIONS)
Skaz. It’s high time we went into more detail
about the narration and the narrators of Dead Souls. Skaz narration is at the
heart of almost all of Gogol’s fictions. In a wide variety of his works Gogol
uses a skaz narrator, or a series of skaz narrators. The best,
and most famous example of skaz narration is his immortal story “The
Overcoat,” and the best critical explanation of skaz in that story
belongs to Boris Eichenbaum (see above).
In discussing this sort of narrative, the American critic Donald
Fanger treats a different Gogol story, “How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan
Nikiforovich,” which features an underclass and dunderheaded narrator named
Rudy Panko. Here’s Rudy’s typical line of blather: “Ivan Ivanovich has the
unusual gift of talking in a most extraordinary pleasant way. Lord, how he can
talk! The only sensation you can compare with it is when somebody’s hunting for
lice on your scalp or running a finger lightly over your heel. You listen and
listen to him talk—and you just hang your head. It feels good! Just really nice!
Like a nap after taking a bath.” Here’s Fanger: “What this underlines is the
self-sufficient, almost sensual esthetic value of skillful discourse, quite
independent of its content: the principal value of the story itself. Here, to
use the Russian formalist term, is a masterpiece of skaz—a monologue in
the guise of a narration: colloquial, individuated, free from the constraints
of consistency in point of view, permeated with a paradoxical lyricism and an
irony that ranges from blatant to enigmatic—but written, and serving
literary ends” (Fanger, The Creation of Nikolai Gogol, 102-03).
When critics speak of skaz in DS, they cite, most
frequently, the postmaster’s “Tale of Captain Kopeikin” in Ch. 10. Fanger
again: “The matter of DS is so difficult to handle because it is so peculiarly,
materially verbal. The interpolated ‘Tale of Captain Kopeikin’ offers an
extended and crucial example. A masterpiece of skaz (mannered narration
in which the speaker unwittingly vies with his story for attention and vivid
manner overshadows ostensible matter), it consists largely of fillers,
malapropisms and colorfully misdirected hyperbole.” There, parenthetically, is
Fanger’s definition of skaz. Here is Victor Erlich’s (p. 146): “the
mimicry of intonational, lexical, and phraseological mannerisms of a lowbrow
narrator . . . enacts and parodies the pattern of a bumbling, chatty oral
narration.”
“‘After the campaign of 1812, my dear sir’—(thus did the
postmaster begin, despite the fact that the room held not one sir but all of
six sirs)—‘after the campaign of 1812, a certain Captain Kopeikin was demobilized
back from the front along with other wounded men. Whether it was at Krasnoe or
at Leipzig, the fact remains that he had, if you can fancy such a thing, an arm
and a, like, leg blown off. Well then,
at that time none of these, you know like, special provisions regarding the
wounded had yet been made, none whatsoever; any sort of a fund for, like, you
know, invalided soldiers, as you may imagine, was yet to be established, in
some sort of way, some such as that, only considerably, like, later.’
Fanger: “The postmaster’s purpose in telling the story is to
suggest [improbably, ironically, outlandishly, URB] that Chichikov is really
Captain Kopeikin; six pages later the police chief interrupts to point out that
Chichikov has all his limbs—as indeed he could have done after the second
sentence [in skaz narration all is illogical, grotesque, and played for
comic effect, URB]. Had the tale been meant merely to cap the absurd series of
rumors about Chichikov, to demonstrate the absentmindedness of the teller or
the density of the listeners, it might have been cut or summarized when the
censors objected to it as politically inflammatory. Gogol, however, made a
desperate plea for its necessity in terms of form” (Fanger, The Creation of
Nikolai Gogol, 177). The critic goes on to say that the Kopeikin tale
“parodically mirrors the larger text of which it is a part.” In other words,
this skaz narrative is a skaz within a skaz, since you can
make the case that all, or nearly all of the narration of DS is skaz, or
verges on skaz.
“The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” seems to be an exercise in pure
comic absurdity told for laughs. Upon first inspection of the text of DS the
Moscow censors cut this tale, but Gogol, in revising and resubmitting it,
fought hard to have it included. Various critics have offered reasons why Gogol
considered this interpolation so vital to the structure of DS, but their
reasons are not particularly convincing. Before beginning his telling of the
story, the postmaster declares, “Why, really, if one were to tell this story,
it would turn out to be quite the engrossing thing for some writer or other—a
whole, like in some such way, epic poem.” Which is to suggest that the Kopeikin
tale is a kind of microcosm of the macrocosm of Gogol’s “poem,” DS.
The postmaster, Ivan Andreevich, whom the other town officials
always address in macaronic rhyming nonsense as “Ivan Andreich, sprechen sie
deich,” first shows up in the narrative amidst the other bureaucrats in Ch. 1.
He emerges as a more prominent character in Ch. 10, when the officials meet at
the home of the chief of police to discuss the debacle of Chichikov’s dead
souls and the wild gossip connected with it. Most of them had even lost weight
as a result of all their worries over the alarming rumors. The postmaster is an
exception, the only one of the town bureaucrats who remains calm amidst the
tsunami of gossip.
“Everybody there showed signs of wear and tear. The Chairman of
the Administrative Offices [Civil Courts] had lost weight, and the Inspector of
the Board of Health had lost weight, and the Public Prosecutor [soon to drop
dead, URB] had lost weight, and a certain Semion Ivanovich, whose surname was
never mentioned and who wore upon his right index finger a ring that he always
permitted the ladies to examine, well, even he had lost weight.” At the
beginning of the Kopeikin tale, Gogol reveals that there were a total of seven town
officials at the meeting (or six, plus the ghostly Semion Ivanovich?).
Confirmed attendees are the chief of police, the postmaster, the chairman, the
medical inspector, the prosecutor. The sixth would certainly be the governor
(mayor) of the town of N.
The appearance of the enigmatic Semion Ivanovich here—he shows up
nowhere else in the book—is typical of skaz narration throughout the
whole of DS. Although Gogol frequently uses omniscient narration, the narrator describing
this meeting has limited omniscience. Here the skaz narrator,
improbably, has no idea what S.I.’s surname is but knows that he has lost
weight; even more improbably, he possesses the information about the ring,
knows what finger he wears it on, knows that he likes showing it to the ladies.
In Ch. 8, by way of leading us into his narrative of Ch. 10, the
postmaster is described as a reader who dabbles in philosophy. Of the readers
mentioned in the book there are few. At the first-grade level of reading, e.g.,
there is Chichikov’s lackey Petrushka, whose reading skills recall those of another
moron, Akaky Akakievich in “The Overcoat.” But the postmaster’s books include
Young’s Night Thoughts and Eckarthausen’s The Key to the Mysteries of
Nature (for descriptions of these works see Fusso’s notes, p. 153). In
addition, the postmaster is described as a wit, “colorful in his choice of
words, and fond, as he himself put it, of ‘garnishing’ his speech . . . through
a multiplicity of sundry tag-ends and oddments of phrases, such as, ‘my dear
sir’ . . . ‘whatsis name’ . . . ‘you know’ . . . ‘you can just imagine’. . .
some such as this’ . . . ‘relative so to say’ . . . ‘to a certain degree’ and
other suchlike phrases and verbal small change of which he had sackfuls.” The Kopeikin
tale would be considerably shortened, were these superfluous hiccups of phrases
removed. Interesting point: in most definitions of skaz the narrator is
a naïve speaker of low origins, uneducated; Gogol’s most skazified narrators in
his other works fit this pattern. The postmaster, on the other hand, may be
steeped in his own sort of naivety, but he is presented—well yes, ironically—as
an educated man, a thinker.
At one point the postmaster uses the phrase “mozhete
predstavit’ sebe (you can well imagine)” five times on one page. When
Kopeikin goes to the capital city of St. Petersburg to petition the tsar for
help, he thinks in advance how he’ll address the Emperor, and his speech takes
on the same redundancy of style: “And so my Captain Kopeikin decided, my dear
sir, to set off for Petersburg, to petition the Emperor, as to whether there
might not be some kind of monarchial manifesto, thinking, does Kopeikin what he’ll
say, ‘So there you go, this way and
that, to a certain, like, extent so to speak, my life I laid down, spilled
blood . . .’” Skaz narration often has its weird quirks and details. For
example, when Kopeikin arrives in Petersburg he cannot afford lodgings there
and ends up finding “a room in a Revel tavern.” This notwithstanding the fact
that Revel (now known as Tallinn) is far from Petersburg, is, in fact, the
capital of Estonia. Faced with such utter incongruity, translators of Gogol
make sense of it by changing the text. Guerney here has Kopeikin finding a snug
nook “in a low tavern run by a Finn.” Then again, maybe “Revel tavern” was the
term used for a lowlife dive in Gogol’s day.
Failing in his effort to get help from the government, Kopeikin
emerges as the one-armed, one-legged leader of a band of brigands in the south.
Much mangled by the censorship, much rewritten by the author, the Kopeikin tale
survives in three variants. The original ending of the tale—which never made it
into published texts—describes Kopeikin’s fleeing to the U.S.A. From there he
writes an eloquent letter to the Emperor, explaining his situation. Touched by
the brilliance of the style and by the sad tale of an invalid soldier’s fate,
the Emperor magnanimously pardons Kopeikin and his fellow bandits. He gives
orders to establish charitable committees, which will set up aid for wounded
veterans of the War of 1812 (see Smirnova-Chikina, 158-59).
The “Tale of Captain Kopeikin” is clearly a skaz narrative
within a book full of skaz narratives and skaz narrators; it is
usually considered the best example of skaz in DS. But Gogol’s mastery
of skaz narration may be even better exemplified by all of Ch. 9, the
most skazified of all the chapters—and the best lengthy example of how DS is a
book written about writing a book.
See above, “Omnastics Gymnastics,” for the narrator’s faux
anxieties about naming the characters in his novel. We recall that in Ch. 9 we
are introduced to two society ladies from the town of N. One visits the other
for a session of gossip. Some narrator’s tongue is firmly in cheek—where it has
been stuck already for two pages at this point—when he decides to call his
first lady character, the one who receives a visitor, “the lady agreeable in
all respects.” This narrator, we would first assume, is the holder of tongue in
cheek; i.e., were he a savvy, intelligent, worldly narrator he would be. He is
not. Almost immediately, he, the bungling teller of this episode, begins
stumbling around in a fun house of narrative acrobatics.
“Let’s call the lady whom the guest had come to see what she was
almost unanimously called in the town of N: a lady agreeable in all respects.
This appellation she had acquired quite legitimately, since she truly had not
spared any pains to make herself amiable to the utmost degree, even though, of
course, [the weaseling around begins] there could be glimpsed through her
amiability an—ooh, ever so brisk—liveliness of a feminine nature; and even
though, on occasion, pins and needles—ooh, ever so piercing—would poke out
through some pleasant word of hers.” For an entire paragraph the narrator finds
himself having to qualify statements he has just made, and when the qualifying
leads him too far afield—i.e., too far from his assertion that this is “a lady
agreeable in all respects”—he must qualify the qualifying. The point is clearly
implied that there are times when this lady is far from agreeable or amiable,
in fact, rather disagreeable. But to support his main (already unsupportable)
point, the narrator wriggles his way back to what he said at the start: “But
all of this [feisty disagreeableness] was clothed in the most refined social
grace, such as to be found only in a provincial capital. She performed every
move with taste, was even fond of verse, even knew how to hold her head in a
dreamy pose at times, and all and sundry concurred that she was, indeed, a lady
who was agreeable in all respects.”
What, exactly, is going on here, and in much of Ch. 9? We might
recall Nozdryov’s mention of the famous acrobat Fernardi at the fair, tumbling
on and on in endless cartwheels. Here we have Gogol’s turning the narrative
over to one of his skaz narrators. In the middle of a comic novel, this
man puts on a blaze of acrobatics, what amounts to a comedy show, featuring as
main character himself—a rather dim and inept teller of tales. The typical skaz
narrator in Gogol’s works is a dimwitted type who doesn’t really know what he’s
doing. This one certainly does not. He makes short shrift of the second lady,
the visitor, who “has not so complex a character” and is simply “an agreeable
lady.” Then, as he describes the conversation of the two ladies, he unwittingly
puts on his comedy show in the background.
Another way of looking at this narrator would be to consider him a
kind of skomorokh-style puppet, who some other, higher narrator
controls, dangling him by the strings in front of the reader. As the higher
narrator pulls the strings, winking at the reader, the skomorokh,
unaware that he’s a puppet, works his way through the acrobatics, putting on
his slapstick show behind his own narration. Never mind that elsewhere in the
book Gogol has spoken disparagingly of skomorokh-style performance and the sort
of laughter it gives rise to. As so often the case with Gogol, the man simply
is unaware of what some deep creative neuron is doing when he writes his
fiction.
Having already forgotten all his admonitions to himself, about how
he has to be careful in naming and describing characters, the narrator also
forgets his forced conclusion about how agreeable the clearly disagreeable “lady
agreeable in all respects” is. In a spiteful tone of voice she gets in a dig at
the vice-governor’s wife, “Parasha said it was the vice-governor’s wife [coming
on a visit], and I said, ‘Well, the fool has come again to bore me.’” After
this the two ladies spend nearly a whole page discussing ladies’ fashions. In a
passage reeking with irony, the narrator describes women of the upper classes
engaged in frivolous matters. This begins when the hostess compliments the
visitor on what she is wearing: “What a cute little calico print (Kakoj
veselen’kij sitets)!” Gogol has a wonderful feel for how women often speak
to each other, and—notwithstanding the gnashing of teeth expected from modern
ardent feminists who read this passage—the conversation from the early
nineteenth century about fashions is still going on, in almost the exact same
words, between women all over the world.
Soon the two ladies are addressing each other by name and
patronymic. The agreeable lady is Sofya Ivanovna, and the lady agreeable in all
respects is Anna Grigorievna. Oops, in revealing the real names the gauche puppet
narrator has slipped up again, but he goes right on calling his characters “the
lady agreeable in all respects” and “the simply agreeable lady”—as if he has
not noticed that they now have names. At one point he pledges to use no foreign
words “in this, my Russian poem,” but soon the conversation of the two ladies
is sprinkled with French phrases. To top the whole thing off, the public
prosecutor—with his bushy eyebrows and blinking left eye—walks into the drawing
room where the two ladies sit. So now we know not only the names of the
characters, but we realize who Anna Grigorievna (the lady agreeable in all
respects) is: she is the wife of the public prosecutor. This is the crowning
touch on the efforts of the blundering narrator to protect the names and
identities of his characters.
Here I have discussed only the role of the skaz narrator in
Ch. 9—his putting on unawares of a separate comedy show, as a kind of narrating
skomorokh behind the action. But much else in the chapter, especially
the way Gogol begins with the two ladies’ gossip and lets it build into a
crescendo of wild rumors, makes it a tour de force of masterful comic writing.
This is my favorite chapter in the whole novel. In her book of commentaries on
DS, the Soviet writer Smirnova-Chikina—bent on pushing the interpretation of DS
as social and political satire—says not a word about the comic effects sparking
through the scene of the two ladies, not a word about the acrobatics of the maladroit
narrator, his performance in a puppet show as he speaks.
In discussing the point of view of DS, the issue of exactly who is
telling us the story, one runs into a wildly complicated business. The answer
is that in various parts of the book Gogol uses not one narrator, but a huge
variety of narrators. At times it seems that one of these travels around with
Chichikov in the britzka, always close at hand and prepared to report on the
vicissitudes of the protagonist’s life. In Ch. 6, e.g., the Plewshkin chapter,
this could be the narrator who voices the digressive passage at the beginning,
telling of how he used to love arriving, e.g., in a new town, where he looked
at the denizens of that place and, in effect, re-created them as fictional
characters, embellishing them and making them live. This “rider in the britzka”
is close at hand in many other parts of the novel, observing and describing,
e.g., Chichikov’s bargaining with Sobakievich, or the way he barely escapes
being beaten up by Nozdryov.
But here in Ch. 6 we also have another narrator, one who is
totally omniscient, who can not only describe Plewshkin as he appears to
Chichikov, but can also elaborate on his whole past life—telling us in great detail
about his wife and children. The omniscient voice does something similar in
describing the lives of the other main landowner characters, Manilov, say, or
Nozdryov, but not in such expansive detail as with Plewshkin. The kind of
narration here is basically “straight” realism, told without the usual winks
behind the skaz narration at the reader. But straight realism is
something the artist Gogol finds least amenable to his method. “The real plot
(as always with Gogol) lies in the style” (Nabokov, p. 144). “In the twists and
turns of the narrative tone, in the dazzling manipulation of the point of view,
the intricate verbal play” (Erlich, p. 145).
The easiest interpretation of the omniscient narrator in DS would
be to say that this is the author-god of the novel, Nikolai Gogol himself. But
there are grounds for asserting that even with omniscient narration in DS Gogol
may be using more than one omniscient narrator. Or is this really him? The
spate of lyrical digressions in the final chapter may be compared to similar
exalted rhetorical passages in letters Gogol wrote to his friends. They
certainly sound the same. The stuff about the glories of the road or the
promise to write two more volumes that will end with the apotheosis of the
Russian Land. The omniscient narrator here certainly has nothing in common
with, say, the puppet skomorokh of Ch. 9. He’s not a bungler putting on
a puppet show, or is he? For the stuff in the final chapter is not entirely “straight”
either—not like that background description of Plewshkin-Mildewshkin’s past
life.
If we push the idea of DS as almost total skaz to its
limits, even the man voicing those exalted rhetorical passages in Ch. 11, the
man who has spent the whole novel trying to escape it—and finally does at the
very end—even he could be looked upon as one more bizarre skaz narrator
in a book full of skaz narrators. This could be the ultimate irony in an
ironic work of fiction teeming in ironies. This omniscient one not at all a
lowlife naïve character, but an author—who is not exactly Gogol himself, but a
fictionalized, skazified Gogol—whose literary life and religious delusions have
left him deranged, seeking a way to write himself into Glory, to “solve the
enigma of his very existence.” If we accept this interpretation of DS as a
glorious game in toto, one huge piece of skazification, then there’s nothing
puzzling at all about the bravura ending.
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