My Life and Thoughts

The point of departure for my dissertation is the problem of the “time of writing.” Writing a novel is a time-consuming, life-subsuming activity which must be performed in solitude—yet it also demands time-consuming research into human relationships and the nature of real-world experiences. How does the novelist negotiate between the solitary act of writing (the construction of form) and social/ experiential research (the collection of material)? My proposal is that certain kinds of novels and novel-like books contain an internal account of this balance, which can be modeled by, and which is often thematically associated with, a double-entry (credit-debit) account.



Introduction: The Problem of the Time of Writing
Read the whole chapter.

Why does the novel “demand research into human relationships and real-world experiences”? After all, the novel is a fictional form. Why can’t novelists just make things up as they go along?

My answer is that Cervantes in Don Quijote subjects the novelist to certain epistemological rules. According to these rules, the novel can’t simply pull the elements of literary romance out of thin air; he has to provide them with a certain material basis in the sphere of his own observation/ experience. He can’t just decide that his novel is going to have a giant in it, like the giant in Amadís of Gaul; he has to demonstrate the epistemological basis of this giant from something in his own lived experience, i.e., the Manchegan windmills.

A similar point is made by Lukács, who observes that each new novel must traverse anew the “unbridgeable chasm”: the “opposition between essence (Wesen) and life,” “between meaningfulness on the one hand and the events and raw materials of daily existence on the other.”

In the introductory chapter, I present the relationship between the giant and the windmill as a dialectic between imitatio and mimesis. (This is “theory,” but it will be over soon.) Michel Jeanneret has defined imitatio as the replication of pre-existing literary forms (corresponding, the Don Quijote example, to the giants which are “imitated” from the chivalric romance), and mimesis as the physical replication of the real world (corresponding to the depiction of a “real” landscape with windmills, as observed by Cervantes).

What Jeanneret cleverly shows is that imitatio and mimesis are actually mutually dependent. Without mimesis, imitatio is the lifeless replication of mere form; without imitatio, mimesis is the mechanical generation of indigestible data. A description of windmills would be boring without the metaphorical transformation into giants; and the “giant” would just be an empty concept if it wasn’t actually based on a windmill. The novel needs both windmills and giants—both life and literature.

This brings us back to “the problem of the time of writing”: how does the novelist have time to read/ write novels (imitatio), and have experiences (mimesis)? This problem is clearly articulated in Don Quijote, in the conversation between Quijote and the master criminal, Ginés de Pasamonte (in the convoy of galley slaves). Ginés tells Don Quijote that he doesn’t mind going back to the galleys, because it will give him some more time to work on his life story—which he started writing the last time he was in the galleys. In other words, Ginés claims to have “solved” the problem of the time of writing: even though he lives a full, busy life as a famous criminal, he still has time to work on his book, because he is periodically arrested and removed from the world.

Of course, this solution is a joke; it isn’t actually possible to write the story of your life in the king’s galleys, because being a galley slave is already a full-time occupation. Cervantes here is making fun of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, in which the narrator initially claims to be writing the story of his life “from the galleys, where he is sentenced to the oar for the crimes he committed”; you can read about this in more detail in the full chapter (see link above).

However, by offering the parodic solution, Cervantes foregrounds the real solution, within the structure of Don Quijote itself: the “division of labor” between Don Quijote (who represents imitatio and the pure writtenness of the dead chivalric genre), and Sancho Panza (who represents mimesis, and the formlessness of unmediated experience). In the rest of the dissertation, I trace a history of this “division of labor” between the one who acts and the one who writes; the credit/ debit of literary production.



Chapter 1. The Division of Labor: Don Quijote and Sancho Panza

Analyzing the Sancho-Quijote relationship, I argue that Sancho is actually the proto-author of Don Quijote. Of course, Sancho is an illiterate farmer and is not literally the author of any written work; however, he is the only character in the novel to occupy the epistemological position of a potential writer of Don Quijote. During his adventures with Don Quijote, Sancho Panza plays the role of a bookkeeper: both literally, in that he is in charge of Quijote’s finances, and metaliterarily, in that he keeps a running account of the conversion between Don Quijote’s literary delusions (imitatio) and their raw materials (mimesis): “Those aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seem to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.” Whereas Quijote is only able to see one side of the equation at a time—he either sees the giants and denies that they are windmills, or sees only the windmills and claims that a sorcerer has made the giants disappear—Sancho gradually acquires the novelist’s ability to see both the materials and the final product.

One of the larger claims in my dissertation is that the novel is fundamentally a biographical rather than autobiographical form. In the next chapter I present a derivation of the novel as the story of the hero, as told by the hero’s “sidekick”: a figure descended from the comic stock character of the “clever servant.”



Chapter 2. The Liberated Servant: Don Juan, Don Quijote, and the Double Novel

How/ when does the master-servant comedy transform into the hero-sidekick novel? I locate this transformation in early seventeenth-century Spain, with the production of both Don Quijote and the first Don Juan drama: Tirso de Molina’s Trickster of Seville. In these works, the classical (Plautine) master-servant comedy undergoes a striking generic shift: not only does the master not get married, but he actually dies, leaving the servant in a state of metaphysical dread and confusion. The servant then lives on—implicitly, to tell the master’s story (cf. Hamlet’s dying words, to Horatio: “Absent thee from felicity a while, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story”).

It is significant that both Sancho Panza and Catalinón/ Leporello (the servant of Don Juan/ Don Giovanni) are bookkeepers: as Sancho keeps track of the real materials behind Don Quijote’s romantic fantasy, so does Don Juan’s servant keep the quantitative “catalogue” of Don Juan’s romantic conquests: the new work of art is structured like a double-entry account, with the “liberated servant” mediating between the two columns.

Chapter Two is part of another big theoretical claim, that the first “autonomous” novelist is the liberated servant, who writes the story of his master—as, in Hegel’s Master-Servant dialectic, it is the working Servant who achieves autonomy over the static Master. Fascinatingly (and really very strangely), the metaphorical and abstract master-slave relationship, described by Hegel, turns out to be played out quite accurately between actual, literal masters and servants in the territory of the Plautine comedy. If you’re interested in the Hegel discussion, it is also outlined in more detail in the .)



Chapter 3. The Rise of Sidekick Narrative: The Lives of Saints and Boswell’s Johnson

In Chapter Three I offer another look at the hero-sidekick structure of the novel, this time derived from the biographical tradition which begins with the lives of early Christian saints, and reaches its apotheosis in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson: the work which earned Boswell, a professional sidekick-chronicler, his own entry in the OED: “a constant companion or attendant who witnesses and records what a person does.”

The lives of early saints, as written by their disciples, represent again the dialectic between imitatio (the saint’s imitation of Christ) and mimesis (the disciple’s observation of the saint, which has been shown to be extremely minute in detail). I argue that Don Quijote—and, indirectly, the novel form as we know it—would be inconceivable without the early doctrine of imitatio Christi, in which the saint grapples, quite literally, with the problem of how to replicate the transcendent life of Christ within the historical, material, contingent circumstances of his own life. Like a saint (particularly, like St. Ignatius of Loyola), Quijote battles to replicate the transcendent life of Amadís within the circumstances of life in la Mancha; like a disciple, Sancho studies this imitation in terms of its material details.

I construct a genealogy from the lives of saints, through Don Quijote, to Boswell’s Johnson, which I interpret as the exhaustively mimetic biography of a master of imitatio.

I conclude Chapter Three by presenting a typology of “sidekick” novels: narratives in which the life of a literary hero/ master (representing a master discourse of heroic texts: imitatio) is narrated in detail by a prosaic, observant “sidekick.” Examples include the Sherlock Holmes stories (narrated by Holmes’s roommate), Mann’s Doctor Faustus (narrated by Faustus’s schoolfriend), and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (narrated by Gatsby’s next-door neighbor). I identify shared traits between these and other related works; including the division of labor between quantity (sidekick) and quality (master); and the existential crisis and/ or “metaphysical lack” of the sidekick, who must derive the sense of his own life as a “life story” through his relationship with the hero.



Chapter 4. The Double-Plot Novel: Eugene Onegin, Anna Karenina, and Proust’s Recherche

In this concluding chapter, I move to the territory of the traditional “double-plot” novel, which I describe as a form about getting from windmills (lived experience, mimesis) to giants (literature, imitatio).

Pushkin’s Onegin has two narrative strands: the narrator’s life story (mimesis), and Onegin’s romance (imitatio). The narrator’s life story, consisting of youth in Petersburg + exile in Odessa, accounts for (1) his epistemological access to Onegin’s story (the two men belonged to the same Petersburg milieu), and (2) the time of writing (now, the narrator is in exile). In other words, the autobiographical material functions as a bridge to the biographical/ romantic material; the novelist has to be led to “the kind of book he would like to write” by his own life experiences.

In Anna Karenina, the Levin plot and the Anna plot exist in a similar relationship: Tolstoy initially planned to write only the Anna plot, as a French-style “adultery novel”; but the novel didn’t “work” until he added the element of Levin, a landowner who shares Tolstoy’s own sphere of knowledge and experience. Tolstoy has to get to the novel he wants to write, through his own sphere of knowledge. Levin in effect functions as the windmill (it’s not for nothing that he is a gentleman farmer), and Anna functions as the giant, the ossified master who has to perish at the end, outlived by Levin on his farm.

I conclude the dissertation with an analysis of the Swann-Marcel doubling in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. I propose that Proust has written a kind of alternative version of Onegin, in which Swann (the socialite) represents the hero, and Marcel (the neurasthenic) represents the writer—the joke being that the “hero” plays a tiny, dandyish role in the novel, the bulk of which is devoted to the vast, life-consuming apparatus of writing.



Here is a table summarizing the themes of the dissertation.

The conference took place at Tolstoy’s house in Yasnaya Polyana, Russia.  When I was applying for funding, it came to my attention that the Slavic dept gave grants in the sum of either $1000, for presenting at an international conference, or $2500, for international field research.  I had only planned on presenting a paper; but with this added incentive, I spent a good 2–3 hours trying to devise a field research proposal.  Finally I came up with “Tolstoy’s Death: Natural Causes, or Murder?  A Forensic Investigation,” which I was pretty proud of.  Of course the pedants were all like, “But Tolstoy died at age 82, of pneumonia”—when that’s what makes it the perfect crime!

On September 28, I and the other 2007 Rona Jaffe winners were invited to read from our work, for 10 minutes each, at NYU’s Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House.

Inconveniently, my total written output in the previous 18 months consisted of (1) my important scholarly work on graphomania and double-entry bookkeeping; and (2) the first draft of an important article on the California institution of “comedy traffic school,” forthcoming in the New Yorker (you know, when the world is ready for it), and addressing such audience-stimulating topics as traffic law, road safety, and Swedenborgianism.

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The banquet that night lasted until ten or eleven. Entertainment was provided by students from the Lev Tolstoy Accordion Academy: boys aged six to fifteen, already able to play the accordion with all the mannerisms of genial, nostalgic old men. Even the tiniest of boys, playing on the tiniest accordion, smiled knowingly, nodded, and even winked at the audience.

We had to get up very early the next morning, for the last official event of the International Tolstoy Conference: a field trip to Chekhov’s house. It was more of a rest stop than a field trip; Chekhov’s former estate, Melikhovo, lay directly along the three-hour route from Yasnaya Polyana to Moscow. Visiting Chekhov’s house made a certain amount of logistical sense; aesthetically, however, it felt strange. After six days of total devotion to Tolstoy, master of the Russian novel, it seemed odd to breezily drop in on Chekhov—master of the Russian short story, and a very different writer—simply because one happened to be passing through the neighborhood.

Chekhov was nine years old when War and Peace was published. He admired Tolstoy tremendously and longed to meet him; at the same time, the prospect of this meeting filled him with such alarm that he once ran out of a bathhouse in Moscow when he learned that Tolstoy was also there.

Chekhov did not want to meet Tolstoy in the bath; but this was apparently his inescapable destiny. When he finally worked up his nerve to go to Yasnaya Polyana, Chekhov arrived at the exact moment when Tolstoy was headed to the stream for his daily ablutions. Tolstoy insisted that Chekhov join him; Chekhov later recalled that, as he and Tolstoy sat naked in the chin-deep water, Tolstoy’s beard had floated majestically before him.

Despite his dislike of doctors, Tolstoy had been greatly impressed by Chekhov. “He is full of talent and has undoubtedly has a very good heart,” he said. “However, he does not seem to have any very definite attitude toward life.” Chekhov had only a poorly defined attitude towards life, this strange process which brought one eye-to-eye with the floating beard of the greatest crank in world literature.

The awards ceremony for the Rona Jaffe award was held on September 27 at the Lotos Club in New York, not to be confused with the Lotos Club in Prague (“If you have enough money come and you will not be disappointed”). There was an open bar. The novelist Joan Silber gave an interesting speech about “venerability,” and then I think somebody played the saxophone.

I was really happy to meet the other five emerging women writers: Sarah Braunstein, Alma García, Robin Ekiss, Jennifer Grotz, and Holly Goddard Jones. Here is a picture of us (with Joan Silber), all wearing black, as befits the somber brides of Literature.

The shoes I wore to this event (not pictured) were purchased in Boston on the day after Slobodan Milošević was elected President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Now Milošević is dead, and Yugoslavia no longer exists, but I still wear those shoes.

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