Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature 9781501307218, 9781501307249, 9781501307232

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
0. Introduction: Nothing and the twentieth century
Odysseus: Outis
Khôra: Socrates: Knowing nothing
Much ado about nothing
Narratives of nothing
1. Theorizing nothing
Zero
Nothing and being: Heidegger and Sartre
Nothing and narrative: Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva
2. Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby
Akaky Akakievich
Bartleby
3. “Working in a Void”: Vladimir Nabokov and the semiotics of nothing
Muzhiks working in a void
The otherworld and loss
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Reality as nothing and the aesthetics of failure
“Signs and Symbols”: Patterning and nothing
4. Samuel Beckett: Immanence, language, nothing
Nothing happens, more than once
Critical approaches to Beckett and nothing
Aesthetics of lessness
Beckettian immanence
Molloy: Questing immanence
Aesthetics of immanent nothing
5. Victor Pelevin’s void and the post-Soviet condition
Pelevin’s postmodernism
Engineering the human soul
Pelevin’s divine absurdity: The void
Nihilistic nothing in Generation “P”
Sacred nothing in Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Conclusion: Nothing as the transcendental signified
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature

Narratives of Nothing in 20th-Century Literature Meghan Vicks

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2017 © Meghan Vicks, 2015 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vicks, Meghan. Narratives of nothing in 20th-century literature / Meghan Vicks. pages cm Summary: "Explores how 20th-century literature gives narrative form to nothing and why nothing is essential to the creation of being, narrative, and other systems of meaning-making"-- Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-5013-0721-8 (hardback) 1. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich, 1899-1977--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989--Criticism and interpretation. 3. Pelevin, Viktor--Criticism and interpretation. 4. Nothing (Philosophy) in literature. 5. Narration (Rhetoric) I. Title. PS3527.A15Z93 2015 813'.54--dc23 2015011128 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0721-8 PB: 978-1-5013-3196-1 ePub: 978-1-5013-0722-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0723-2 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

For Eddie

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix

0 Introduction: Nothing and the twentieth century  1 Odysseus: Outis  3 Khôra: Socrates: Knowing nothing  5 Much ado about nothing  8 Narratives of nothing  25

1 Theorizing nothing  29 Zero  29 Nothing and being: Heidegger and Sartre  38 Nothing and narrative: Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva  47

2 Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby  59 Akaky Akakievich  62 Bartleby  69

3 “Working in a Void”: Vladimir Nabokov and the semiotics of nothing  75 Muzhiks working in a void  75 The otherworld and loss  77 The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Reality as nothing and the   aesthetics of failure  81 “Signs and Symbols”: Patterning and nothing  95

4 Samuel Beckett: Immanence, language, nothing  105 Nothing happens, more than once  105 Critical approaches to Beckett and nothing  107

viii Contents

Aesthetics of lessness  110 Beckettian immanence  112 Molloy: Questing immanence  116 Aesthetics of immanent nothing  130

5 Victor Pelevin’s void and the post-Soviet condition  135 Pelevin’s postmodernism  135 Engineering the human soul  138 Pelevin’s divine absurdity: The void  141 Nihilistic nothing in Generation “P”  143 Sacred nothing in Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of   the Werewolf  157

Conclusion: Nothing as the transcendental signified  171

Bibliography  175 Index  189

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is based on years of research nurtured by a kind of referential mania, and supported by many treasured people along the way. I am grateful to my professors at Middlebury College, including Robert Cohen, Stephen Donadio, and Sergei Davydov, who sparked my initial interest in literary studies, and who shaped my practice of reading in countless ways. I am grateful to Sergei Davydov for his continued support and friendship throughout the years, for inspiring my study of Russian language and literature, and for his comments on the earliest drafts of my essay about Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols.” At the University of Colorado, Boulder, I wrote the first full draft of this project. I would like to thank Alyssa Pelish, Math Trafton, Jim Ross, and Katina Rogers, for their friendship and camaraderie, and for their comments on the earliest versions of this project. Many thanks to Elizabeth Geballe for her humor and insights as I worked on my analysis of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and for journeying with me to Nabokov’s family home in Petersburg despite the unbearably hot train (and the everthreatening draft), to Jason Gutierrez for sharing with me his expertise on filmic explorations of nothing, and to Andrey Tolstoy for his generous and helpful feedback on the first draft of my Nabokov chapter. I would also like to thank Patricia Paige Cronin for her friendship and advice, and for persuading me to take some worthwhile risks. Mark Lipovetsky, Rimgaila Salys, Jeremy Green, Davide Stimilli, and Eric White were a true delight to work with, offering both encouragement and direction, and pushing me to hone and clarify my ways of thinking about nothing. To Rima, thank you especially for your support as I transitioned from graduate student to instructor, for your “real-world” advice, and always for your wit and humor. To Jeremy, conversations with you always helped expand and clarify my ways of thinking; thank you for always taking the time to meet with me. To Eric, thank you for your enthusiasm for this project, for cluing me into the clinamen and chaos. To Davide, thank you for helping me think more carefully about nothing as a kind of fiction. I am especially grateful to my advisor Mark Lipovetsky. Thank you for your steadfast support for now over a decade (!), for introducing me to everyone from Kharms and Prigov to Pelevin and Sorokin, for being a wonderful mentor and a good friend, and for welcoming me as your colleague.

x Acknowledgments

I would also like to thank Tatiana Mikhailova for always cheering me up, teaching me Russian participles (and then years later mentoring me as I taught my first Russian classes), showering me with the most earnest enthusiasm, and helping me to cultivate a darker sense of humor combined with a sincere optimism about many good things. It has been a pleasure to work with Bloomsbury Academic, especially my acquisitions editor Haaris Naqvi and his assistant Mary Al-Sayed. They have offered much patient help as the book was ushered through the production process. I am immeasurably grateful to my parents and siblings, my wonderfully supportive family that loves to joke that I’m “writing about nothing.” Finally, I could not have done this without my husband Eddie McCaffray, who read and reread every part of this manuscript, who helped me whenever I couldn’t figure out how to phrase something or needed to talk through an idea, and whose intelligence, kindness, and humor always sustain and motivate me. I dedicate this book to him.

0 Introduction: Nothing and the twentieth century

What is it about the human condition that allows us to conceive of and question nothing itself, and to create various signifiers of nothing, such as zero? We speak, idiomatically and automatically, every day about nothing—there’s nothing to do, there’s nothing to say—but does nothing exist? Or is existence ontologically antithetical to nothing? What about destruction?—one may ask. Two jet planes crashing into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, causing their collapse: no more towers, no more jet planes, just Ground Zero left in the wake of the attack.1 Is that nothing? Didn’t we say, “There’s nothing left”? Aren’t we now honoring that site with the memorial Reflecting Absence?2

The media first used the name “Ground Zero” on the very evening of the September 11 attacks. It both “implies a kind of nuclear obliteration in which the barren earth is the only thing that remains” and “conveys the idea of a starting point, a tabula rasa” (Marita Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence: Rebuilding Ground Zero,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3 [2004]: 311). 2 In the words of the architects Michael Arad and Peter Walker, “This memorial proposes a space that resonates with the feelings of loss and absence that were generated by the destruction of the World Trade Center and the taking of thousands of lives on September 11, 2001 and February 26, 1993. It is located in a field of trees that is interrupted by two large voids containing recessed pools. The pools and the ramps that surround them encompass the footprints of the twin towers. A cascade of water that describes the perimeter of each square feeds the pools with a continuous stream. They are large voids, open and visible reminders of the absence” (Michael Arad and Peter Walker, “Reflecting Absence,” World Trade Center Site: Memorial Competition, available online: http://www.wtcsitememorial.org/fin7.html [accessed March 5, 2015]) (italics mine). On the subject of the towers’ erasure and absence, Sturken writes, “Their erasure from the skyline was so shocking and complete that there have been constant attempts to reassert them into the empty sky”; and “their absence has spoken more loudly, and with more resonance, than their presence ever could have” (“The Aesthetics of Absence,” 318, 319). 1

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We may say, “There’s nothing left,” but this does not seem accurate upon further examination: the material is all still there, but in another form.3 There is certainly an absence left in the wake of the towers’ collapse, but absence, as we will see, is not nothing. Were it not for human consciousness imagining, expecting, and remembering the towers yet finding them gone, there would be no appearance of an absence, only the appearance of something else (and even this “something else” is up for debate, also perhaps dependent upon human consciousness). There is being before the jet planes hit the towers, and there is being afterwards. There is no nothing. Already we see that there is a significant difference between nothing and absence, even though these are oftentimes used as synonyms in common parlance, and certainly shade into one another through similar characteristics. Unlike nothing, absence traditionally figures in opposition to presence, carries with itself the expectation of a presence, or is distinguished by a presence that has been lost or no longer exists. As such, absence is intimately related to negation: it is a seeming emptiness or void that is generated by the negation of a presence. In The Theory of Absence (1995), Patrick Fuery explores this “relational schema” between absence and presence, which “[leads] to the conceptual figuring of absence and absences only because there is a presence, or a register of presence, to begin with. Absence is seen to be derived from a state of presence, as it is seen as the denial of presence.”4 Fuery suggests that there is a deconstructive structure at work in the traditional binary opposition of absence and presence, demonstrating how absence produces desire, which in turn creates the subject: “one of the most essential sites of subjectivity,” Fuery argues, is “that of the desiring subject determined by absence. This site operates as a repository for different types of absences (including desire) as well as the scene of production and consumption of desire as an absence.”5 In Fuery’s reading, subjectivity and desire become expressions and creations of absence; absence is not simply the loss of a presence, but a component of subject-creation. Still, here we find a mutually informing relationship between absence and presence. When we speak of absence, we are always already speaking of a presence too. Nothing is not absence. In contrast, nothing falls beyond this system of absences and presences, although philosophers debate whether or not nothing precedes or follows negation, absence, and being. Is nothing more

Much has been written about the changing symbolism of the dust left in the wake of the September 11 attacks; see Sturken, “The Aesthetics of Absence,” for an overview of this discussion. For some, explains Sturken, the dust of September 11 “evokes the material presence of the past—a ‘not-going-awayness’ and an imperishability of substance” (314). 4 Patrick Fuery, The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification, and Desire (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995), 1. 5 Fuery, The Theory of Absence, 11. 3

Introduction

3

original than negation, more fundamental than being, or is it an effect of being and negation? The trouble nothing poses when we try to define it is dealt with in Homer’s Odyssey and Plato’s Timaeus; both offer valuable insights into the nature of nothing, insights that find new significance in the twentieth century.

Odysseus: Outis Many ancient and contemporary readers of Homer’s Odyssey have argued that identity is one of the central issues of the epic. George Dimock, for example, suggests that “the whole problem of the Odyssey is for Odysseus to establish his identity.”6 This problem is crystalized in the dilemma of Odysseus’ name, given to him by his grandfather, Autolycus, who himself “odysseused” many times in his life (“‘To odysseus’ [odyssasthai in Greek] is usually said to mean ‘be wroth against,’ ‘hate,’ and to be connected with Latin odisse”).7 Many understand this to mean that Odysseus is the one who receives the world’s odium, but Dimock believes that this positions Odysseus as the one who begets odium in the world—to live up to his name, he must be willing to cause pain, or become trouble itself. Should we recall that Odysseus’ homecoming and revealing of himself spells bloodshed for the suitors, this connection between being Odysseus and causing pain reaches its apotheosis.8 The meaning of Odysseus’ name is further enriched by a near homophone: the name sounds much like the word for “no man” or “no one” (outis) in some ancient Greek dialects—a similarity that comes in handy, of course, when Odysseus is trapped in Polyphemus’ cave. Odysseus as “no one” is further emphasized by his nearly twenty-year absence from home, of which the last years are spent with Kalypso on Ogygia, in a kind of oblivion or no place. Hence, Homer introduces us to his hero as “no one” (outis) rather than as “causing pain” (odysseus) on a literal “no man’s land” or “nowhere.” Writes Dimock, But it adds something, I think, to see life on Ogygia in terms of identity and nonentity. Kalypso is oblivion. Her name suggests cover and concealment, or engulfing; she lives “in the midst of the sea”— the middle of nowhere, as Hermes almost remarks—and the whole struggle of the fifth book, indeed of the entire poem, is not to be

George E. Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus,” The Hudson Review 9, no. 1 (1956): 52. Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus,” 52. 8 Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus,” 57: “‘Trouble’ is perhaps as good a translation of Odysseus’ name as any.” 6 7

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NARRATIVES OF NOTHING IN 20TH-CENTURY LITERATURE

engulfed by that sea … Though she offered immortality, not death—an immortality of security and satisfaction in a charming cave—it is still an immortality of oblivion, of no kleos, of nonentity. Leaving Kalypso is very like leaving the perfect security and satisfaction of the womb; but, as the Cyclops reminds us, the womb is after all a deadly place. In the womb one has no identity, no existence worthy of a name. Nonentity and identity are in fact the poles between which the actors in the poem move … One must odysseus and be odysseused, or else be kalypsoed.9 Especially this reading of Odysseus as “no one” or a kind of nothing has resonated with many thinkers and writers in the twentieth century. For example, Derek Walcott reconceptualizes the Odysseus/“no man” motif as a decolonizing agent in his works.10 Patrice D. Rankine argues that in Ralph Ellison’s novels, Odysseus as “no one” “provides Ellison with a metaphor for the racialized individual’s challenges within American society.”11 And in his study of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), Mark Osteen catalogues the many ways in which Leopold Bloom embodies outis, or a “naught-y boy.”12 However, in the twentieth century, the connection between Odysseus and nothing is perhaps most famously dealt with by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. In Dialectic of Enlightenment,13 Horkheimer and Adorno pinpoint this “no one” as the core of a system that establishes Odysseus’ identity through a recognition of and allegiance to nothing itself, a system that comes to define the relationship between words and things, modern subjectivity, the novel, and the schema of modern mathematics. When Odysseus discovers that “the name Udeis [Outis] can mean either ‘hero’ or ‘nobody,’” a “change occurs in the historical situation of language”14—that is, a shift away from “mythical names” that lack any distinction between signifier and signified, and toward the acknowledgment

Dimock, “The Name of Odysseus,” 58. Emily Greenwood, “Towards a New World Odyssey,” in Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Justine McConnell, “The ‘unread’ Homer: Derek Walcott’s Omeros and The Odyssey: A Stage Version,” in Black Odysseys: The Homeric Odyssey in the African Diaspora Since 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 11 Patrice D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 19. 12 Mark Osteen, The Economy of Ulysses: Making Both Ends Meet (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 133–4, 252–4, 277–8, 419. 13 First published in 1944 as Philosophical Fragments; republished in 1947 as Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. 14 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 47. 9

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Introduction

5

of the gap between things and the words that designate them. It is this gap—this nothing—that cunning (mētis) Odysseus exploits and embraces, and with which he identifies himself in order to save himself. Write Horkheimer and Adorno: Odysseus discovered in words what in fully developed bourgeois society is called formalism: their perennial ability to designate is bought at the cost of distancing themselves from any particular content which fulfills them, so that they refer from a distance to all possible contents, both to nobody and to Odysseus himself … Self-preserving guile [i.e. cunning, mētis] lives on the argument [i.e. the gap, outis] between word and thing. Odysseus’ two contradictory actions in his meeting with Polyphemus, his obedience to his name and his repudiation of it, are really the same thing. He declares allegiance to himself by disowning himself as Nobody; he saves his life by making himself disappear. This adaptation to death through language contains the schema of modern mathematics.15 When Odysseus declares himself to be “no one,” he is not denying his identity (rendering it an absence) but affirming his identity as nothing, as the blank in the system that allows for cunning, play, meaning, identity, and hero to all take place. This is similar, as I demonstrate in the next section, to the workings of khôra, and it is also reminiscent of the “bottomless chessboard” of deconstruction, which I discuss in Chapter 1. In aligning himself with “no one,” Odysseus sows the seeds for the modern novel and, by proxy, modern subjectivity: “Odysseus, like the heroes of all true novels after him, throws himself away, so to speak, in order to win himself … The faculty by which the self survives adventures, throwing itself away in order to preserve itself, is cunning.”16 The modern subject, the hero of the modern novel, establishes an identity via the play—or cunning—that takes place upon an abyss, or upon “no one.” Finally, as I later illustrate in Chapter 1, the parallels between this outis-generated system and modern mathematics are grounded in zero, which operates simultaneously both as a number and not as a number.

Khôra: Socrates: Knowing nothing This ambiguous character of nothing has another important predecessor in the description of khôra in Plato’s Timaeus (c.360 bc), which is taken up for analysis by many twentieth-century thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 47–8. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 38–9.

15 16

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Martin Heidegger, and Julia Kristeva. Timaeus describes the formation of the cosmos, and takes place after Socrates has given an account of the just state. In Timaeus’ preamble, Socrates classifies himself as not belonging to any class in the state—perhaps, it is better to say that he “declassifies” himself, both in the sense of revelation, and in the sense of having no clear social class (he reveals himself as of no place). He allows that he may be somewhat like the poets and Sophists who wander from place to place, and who are a class of imitators. Thus, Socrates perhaps imitates the rootless imitators (i.e. he might reflect those who feign and wander), but ultimately he is not one of them. Derrida argues that Socrates therefore puts himself in a “third genus,”17 and also inserts one of many mises en abyme into the dialogue. The full significance of this does not come into focus until the dialogue reaches its midpoint, where another “third genus” appears—that is, khôra—and we realize the nature of the abyss with which Socrates aligns himself. The arrival of khôra in the middle of Timaeus—a description of the universe’s formation—is also not without significance: its placement suggests that khôra is also central to the very creation of the cosmos. In Platonic thought, two orders are designated: the order of eternal, invisible, unchanging, and intelligible being (eidos), and the order of transitory, visible, changing, and sensible being—or “images of eidos.”18 Timaeus admits, “There is also a third kind which we did not distinguish at the time,”19 and this third kind is khôra. Sometimes Timaeus likens it to an imprint-bearer, and other times he describes it as something like a receptacle, or a nurse or mother, of all generation. It provides the space in which the representations (mimemes) of the eternal forms are engendered; in this manner the sensible cosmos comes into being. But these metaphors—imprint-bearer, receptacle, nurse, mother—threaten to give too clear a form to khôra and thereby change it into a something, when it is more like a non-thing. Derrida leaves “the name khôra sheltered from any translation”20 precisely in order to heighten its ambiguity: it falls outside the two-order system, and even acts somewhat like both orders at once, seesawing between “the double exclusion (neither/nor) and the participation (both this and that).”21 It is an abyss that receives the representations of eternal forms, but here “to receive” should not be understood in any anthropomorphic sense: those representations will not “belong” to khôra; nor will those representations

Jacques Derrida, “Khôra,” translated by Ian McLeod, in The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances, edited by Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 246. 18 Derrida, “Khôra,” 236. 19 Plato, Timaeus, in The Dialogues of Plato, volume 3, translated by Benjamin Jowett (London: Macmillan, 1892), 468. 20 Derrida, “Khôra,” 234. 21 Derrida, “Khôra,” 232. 17

Introduction

7

alter khôra, since khôra has no ontological essence of its own to be altered. It is the nothing that gives space for the reception of representations.22 Derrida suggests that the discourse on khôra halfway through Timaeus opens “a chasm in the middle of the book, a sort of abyss ‘in’ which there is an attempt to think or say this abyssal chasm which would be khôra, the opening of a place ‘in’ which everything would, at the same time, come to take place and be reflected”; it is therefore possible that “a mise en abyme regulates a certain order of composition of the discourse.”23 Hence, abyss-like khôra both gives space for the generation of universe and, by virtue of its central place in the dialogue, gives space for the generation of narrative. The latter is further emphasized by the mise-en-abyme structure of Timaeus, which sets the stage for Timaeus’ account with Critias’ report of a tale he heard when he was about ten years old from his ancestor Critias, who knew the tale from Solon, who in turn learned the tale from an Egyptian priest; to compound this chain of tale-telling, Critias heard this tale on a day of the Apaturia, during which it was customary for boys to recite poetry. As a foreground to Timaeus’ description of the universe, Plato once again places a metaphor of khôra—this time, an endless chain of receptacles in which tales are received. Derrida writes, “Each tale is thus the receptacle of another. There is nothing but receptacles of narrative receptacles, or narrative receptacles of receptacles. Let us not forget that receptacle, place of reception or harboring/lodging (hypodokhè), is the most insistent determination (let us not say ‘essential,’ for reasons which must already be obvious) of khôra.”24 Khôra is therefore the nothing that gives space to all stories (the word), and also to all representations (the world that has come into being). We can now understand what is at stake when Socrates positions himself as a third genus: he wants to imitate khôra! This mimicry is emphasized when he tells his companions he is prepared for a “feast of discourse” and that “no man can be more ready for the promised banquet”25—he becomes a receptacle for stories. The structure of Timaeus therefore enacts an endless chain of reflections between at least two main abysses: one, the discussion of khôra, which as we have seen is the nothing that gives space for the generation of both the universe and stories; and two, the listener Socrates, neither poet nor statesman, but some other ambiguous third genus that receives and imitates—as Derrida puts it, he effaces himself, wants to be like

In “Faith and Knowledge,” translated by Samuel Weber, in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), Jacques Derrida says that khôra “is nothing (no being, nothing present), but not the Nothing which in the anxiety of Dasein would still open the question of being” (59). See Chapter 1 for a discussion of the nothing and Dasein. 23 Derrida, “Khôra,” 242. 24 Derrida, “Khôra,” 251. 25 Plato, Timaeus, 440–1. 22

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khôra: “in thus effacing himself, he situates himself or institutes himself as a receptive addressee, let us say, as a receptacle of all that will henceforth be inscribed.”26 Hence, the discussion of khôra from Plato to Derrida presents a kind of nothing as that which gives space for the generation of the sensible world, as that which provides a receptacle for an endless chain of stories, as a metaphor for Socrates and through him as that which allows for the reception of Western philosophy, and as an “allegory of différance” that illustrates the workings of deconstruction.27 As we will see, nothing’s relationship to being, narrative, and structure is further developed throughout the twentieth century.

Much ado about nothing Nothing itself, as well as the uniquely human capacity to conceive of nothing, became topics of great weight during the long twentieth century. As Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others explored the relationship between being and nothing, this century’s artists and thinkers were increasingly concerned with nothing and its signifiers, and many of the defining cultural movements, scientific discoveries, and major historical events of this time position nothing as a major theme. In reaction to the horrors of the First World War, Dada criticized modern society, bourgeois capitalism, and nationalism, often mournfully exalting the nothing at this culture’s core: proclaims Francis Picabia (“who knows nothing, nothing, nothing”) in his 1920 “DADA Manifesto,” “DADA wants nothing, nothing, nothing, it acts to make the public say: ‘We know nothing, nothing, nothing.’”28 Elsewhere, Picabia declares that Dada is like modern man’s hopes, paradise, idols, political men, heroes, artists, and religions—all nothing.29 Richard Huelsenbeck reiterates Picabia’s sentiment when he reflects, “We displayed our scorn for conventional substance, we proclaimed the loss of any center … [Dada] developed out of nothing into something, but even in somethingness, it never lost the feeling of nothingness.”30 A concern with nothing is also apparent in the late-1920s Derrida, “Khôra,” 247. John D. Caputo, “Khôra: Being Serious with Plato,” in Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 97. 28 Francis Picabia, “DADA Manifesto,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 318. 29 Francis Picabia, “Dada Cannibalistic Manifesto,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 317. 30 Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, edited by Hans J. Kleinschmidt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 71, 79. 26 27

Introduction

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avant-garde collective OBERIU (somewhat like Dada, the word OBERIU is gobbledygook, but with a bit of fudging it stands for the Union of Real Art)—a loose coalition of Leningrad writers that included Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky among others. The oberiuty refused to conform to “good taste,”31 rejected the Romantic notion of the artist as genius (the poet-prophet) and even subverted the figure of the author,32 sought to get at “true reality” by reining in “normative” language and embracing “the poetics of meaninglessness” (bessmyslitza) and alogism,33 experimented with minimalist writing,34 and took inspiration from chinari philosophy that “believed that the present moment was that ‘point zero’ of existence, which, like the zero in the number series, was not nothing (since the continuity of the whole as a series of negative and positive values depended on it), and yet nothing real (since it was neither a negative nor a positive value itself).”35 Both Kharms and Vvedensky demonstrate a clear interest in zeros and circles in their writings, an interest that is perhaps mocked by their colleague Nikolai Oleinikov in his poem “Zeros” (1934?): “When I go, do not crown my tombstone / With an expensive, impractical wreath. / Rather lay with your trembling fingers / A zero upon the heath.”36 Especially Kharms’ writings depict a world where an absurd spectacle rests upon an unstructured and unruly (non)existence; as Adrian Wanner comments, “Kharms seems to mobilize his narratives literally for nothing.”37 Indeed, many Russian avant-garde and early twentieth-century modernist writers, thinkers, and artists (not just the oberiuty) explored zero, nothing, and the void in their works—including Andrei Bely, Roman Jakobson, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Andrei Platonov, to name a few.38

31 Graham Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde: OBERIU—Fact, Fiction, Metafiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1. 32 Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde, 22–74. 33 Eugene Ostashevsky, “Editor’s Introduction,” in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), xxi–xxii. 34 Prior to the establishment of the OBERIU, minimalist writing was already a fixture of the Russian avant-garde. Vasilisk Gnedov’s 1913 “Poem of the End” is one of the most extreme examples of such writing, comprising a blank page with a title, number, and publisher’s seal. This poem was very popular in public readings: “Gnedov would raise his arm and then quickly let it fall in a dramatic gesture, eliciting stormy applause from the audience” (Adrian Wanner, Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003], 132). 35 Roberts, The Last Soviet Avant-Garde, 126. 36 Nikolai Oleinikov, “Zeros,” translated by Eugene Ostashevsky, in OBERIU: An Anthology of Russian Absurdism, edited by Eugene Ostashevsky (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2006), 201. 37 Wanner, Russian Minimalism, 132. 38 For example, Nikolai Firtich explores the zero symbolism in the Russian avant-garde’s discourse, in particular in the works of Bely, Jakobson, Kharms, Kruchenykh, and Malevich

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In the musical field, explorations with silence become increasingly popular in the twentieth century. The most famous example is the work of composer John Cage, who, in 1952, premiered 4′33″, a piece that consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds during which the musician does not play his or her instrument.39 Many have theorized (and some have claimed that Cage himself admitted to this) that the piece was designed to be precisely 273 seconds long in order to create the musical equivalent of temperature’s absolute zero (−273.15˚C)—the physically impossible temperature at which all motion stops.40 Likewise, more than anything 4′33″ makes obvious how difficult it is to actually hear silence—or that silence is an imaginary, not an actual, state—teeming as the world is with ambient sounds; writes Cage, “There are, demonstrably, sounds to be heard and forever, given ears to hear.”41 Still, as imaginary as absolute silence may be, many studies in musicology highlight silence’s relationship to music and, indeed, to language as well: in both, silence plays a vital role. For example, in an essay about the composer Arvo Pärt, Paul Hillier writes, All music emerges from silence, to which sooner or later it must return. At its simplest we may conceive of music as the relationship between sounds and the silence that surrounds them. Yet silence is an imaginary state in which all sounds are absent, akin perhaps to the infinity of time and space that surrounds us. We cannot even hear utter silence, nor can we fully conceive of infinity and eternity.42 (Nikolai Firtich, “Rejecting ‘The Sun of Cheap Appearances’: Journey Beyond ‘Zero’ with Kručenych, Malevič, Belyj, Jakobson and Jean-Luc Godard,” Russian Literature 65 [2009]: 355–78). See also: Andrew Wachtel, “Meaningful Voids: Facelessness in Platonov and Malevich,” in Russian Literature, Modernism and the Visual Arts, edited by Catriona Kelly and Stephen Lovell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Jason Strudler, “Mathematical Rebellion: Zero in the Russian Avant-Garde,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2014. 39 For a description and discussion of the premier of 4′33″, see Kyle Gann, No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4′33″ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 40 Austin Clarkson writes, “when one adds up 4 minutes and 33 seconds, the sum is 273 seconds. Translated into negative degrees of temperature, this happens to be absolute zero on the Kelvin scale (actually −273.2˚C). As substances approach that temperature, molecular motion ceases and they begin to exhibit peculiar properties. Although Cage heard sounds in an anechoic chamber and concluded that silence does not exist, his silent prayer of 273 seconds is a metaphor for a physical state in which matter is maximally ordered, vibratory activity is stilled, and silence is, in principle, absolute” (Austin Clarkson, “The Intent of the Musical Moment: Cage and the Transpersonal,” in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, edited by David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001], 72). 41 John Cage, “Composition as Process,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 23. See also: John Cage, “Lecture on Nothing,” in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1973). 42 Paul Hillier, “Arvo Pärt: Magister Ludi,” The Musical Times 130, no. 1753 (1989): 134.

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Or, as the composer Keith Jarrett puts it, “Silence is the potential from which music can arise. Music is the ‘activity-of-meaning’ that is able to be actualized only because of silence.”43 Silence is thus both an imaginary state and that which makes possible music (an “activity-of-meaning” in sound, narrative in sound). As this study will demonstrate, silence’s relationship to music is very much like zero’s relationship to mathematics, nothing’s relationship to being, and nothing’s relationship to narrative. Silence, zero, and nothing are each an impossible or imaginary state, yet each is necessary to the condition and conditioning of a meaning-making system, be that music, numbers, being, or narrative. Silence, like zero and the nothing it signifies, is a fiction of an original and absolute blankness—a fiction that renders possible, comprehensible, and meaningful the world. In twentieth-century visual arts, too, we find a preoccupation with representing nothing. Kazimir Malevich, beginning around 1914, shows a concern with zero in his Fevralist works that later reaches its zenith in his Suprematist works. As Aleksandra Shatskikh explains, Fevralism’s strategic goal was the total destruction of the dominant rational worldview, which, according to Malevich, had over the centuries merely proved its bankruptcy by creating laws and rules that were quickly declared erroneous, only to be replaced by new laws and rules, and so on ad infinitum. In addition, traditional art, such as is encouraged by “reason,” merely duplicated and imitated reality’s outward features and therefore was not art at all.44 Jason Strudler points out that zero appears in many works of Fevralism, “where it is often associated with the destruction of the frame of the intellect.”45 In Aviator (1915), for example, the human figure bears a zero on his head, signifying the null-ification of reason. The arrow pointing to the zero, and the rays seemingly emerging from it, suggest, according to Strudler, “not one, but multiple perspectives that emerge from zero … confirm[ing] Malevich’s interest in the concept as both the destruction of traditional, rational subjectivity and the creation of a new subjectivity unburdened by the demands of the mind.”46 A bridge between Fevralism and Suprematism is arguably apparent in Malevich’s 1915 sketches of Futurist Strongmen: in contrast to the 1913 Strongmen “who retain their faces,”47 these feature black squares or geometric shapes as faces, as well as zeros Keith Jarrett, Spirits, Album Notes, ECM, 1985. Aleksandra Shatskikh, Black Square: Malevich and the Origin of Suprematism, translated by Marian Schwartz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 5. 45 Strudler, “Mathematical Rebellion,” 100. 46 Strudler, “Mathematical Rebellion,” 105. 47 Strudler, “Mathematical Rebellion,” 107. 43 44

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on their chests. The relationship between zero and Suprematism is further underscored by the fact that one of the earliest manifestations of Malevich’s theory of nonobjective art appears in his plans for a new journal, originally to be called Nul. In a letter of May 29, 1915, Malevich wrote to Mikhail Matiushin: “We are planning to put out a journal and have begun to discuss the how and what of it. Since in it we intend to reduce everything to zero, we have decided to call it Nul. Afterward we ourselves will go beyond zero.”48 Suprematism was publically inaugurated in late 1915 with the 0.10 exhibition, which featured Black Square symbolically displayed in the icon corner as “the icon of our era” (as Malevich later stated in May 1916 “in a letter of reproof to Alexandre Benois”).49 This painting, featuring a black monochrome square surrounded by a white border, casts off the laws of “up and down,” “left and right,” and abandons any representation of reality, opting instead for the depiction of abstract geometrical forms. In his manifesto, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” (1915), Malevich claims, “I have transformed myself in the zero of form.”50 Throughout his life, Malevich painted a number of versions of Black Square, and continued to explore and develop its multiple meanings. In a similar vein, various other developments in twentieth-century abstract art gradually reduced painterly apparatuses and themes (e.g. subject, figure, dimension, line, space, color), in some cases resulting in monochrome paintings—which many perceive as either verging on nothing, or as representing nothing itself. There are Ad Reinhardt’s monochrome paintings (e.g. all blue, all red) and eventually total-black canvases (Reinhardt explained, “black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color”),51 Yves Klein’s blue monochromes, Robert Ryman’s white-on-white canvases, and Mark Rothko’s abstract works.52 A common evaluation of abstract paintings—that they represent nothing via an increasing diminishment of painterly elements—considers

Quoted in Nina Gurianova, “The Supremus ‘Laboratory House’: Reconstructing the Journal (Kazimir Malevich: Suprematism),” Guggenheim Museum, 2012, Kindle edition. 49 Shatskikh, Black Square, 109. 50 Kazimir Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism,” in Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism, revised and enlarged edn, edited by John E. Bowlt (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1988), 118. 51 Ad Reinhardt, “Black as Symbol and Concept,” in Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, edited by Barbara Rose (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 86. 52 See, for example, Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), wherein they discuss how Rothko’s paintings discourage us from seeing (for there is nothing to see). See also: Barbara Novak and Brian O’Doherty, “Rothko’s Dark Paintings: Tragedy and Void,” in Mark Rothko, edited by Jeffrey Weiss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Natalie Kosoi, “Nothingness Made Visible: The Case of Rothko’s Paintings,” Art Journal 64, no. 2 (2005): 20–31. 48

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nothing as the cumulative negation of something. Other critics find in these pieces visualizations of another kind of nothing, not just the nothing that remains once the somethings are erased: as Rothko told Werner Haftmann, his paintings “cover up something similar to this ‘nothingness.’”53 Commenting on this aspect of Rothko’s work, Natalie Kosoi writes, “Rothko’s paintings are masks indeed, but masks that show what they hide: that it is nothingness that lies behind them. This nothingness, which Rothko’s paintings conjure up, is not only a negation and an absence but also what designates the limit of human experience, and as such, it is also what defines and constitutes it.”54 Kosoi’s reading of Rothko’s paintings takes a page from Heidegger’s ideas about the nothing and its relationship to being. She argues that Rothko captures in his paintings the sense of existential anxiety experienced when one is brought face to face with the nothing that is essential to our beings (I discuss Heidegger’s conception of the nothing in Chapter 1).55 This notion of a mask concealing nothing is a tenet of Russian conceptualism and Sots-Art (which I discuss in relation to Pelevin’s work in Chapter 5), and is also a driving idea behind much of the work of Andy Warhol, who, in an oft-quoted interview with Gretchen Berg, famously declared: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”56 Or, as he writes in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), I’m sure I’m going to look in the mirror and see nothing. People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see? … Some critic called me the Nothingness Himself and that didn’t help my sense of existence any. Then I realized that existence itself is nothing and I felt better. But I’m still obsessed with the idea of looking into the mirror and seeing no one, nothing.57 Warhol’s work has been characterized as fixated on nothing, and sometimes as grounded in an acute fear of the void.58 Indeed, when asked (one of Quoted in Anna C. Chave, Mark Rothko: Subjects in Abstraction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 193. 54 Kosoi, “Nothingness Made Visible,” 31. 55 Kosoi, “Nothingness Made Visible,” 30: “Rothko reenacted and represented in his paintings what according to Heidegger we experience when we encounter nothingness.” 56 Andy Warhol, Interview with Gretchen Berg, “Andy Warhol: My True Story,” 1966, in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, edited by Kenneth Goldsmith (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004), 90. 57 Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again) (Orlando: Harvest, 1977), 7. 58 Gary Indiana, Andy Warhol and the Can that Sold the World (New York: Basis Books, 2010), 9. 53

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many times) why he decided to paint the Campbell’s soup can, one of Warhol’s many responses was, “I wanted to paint nothing. I was looking for something that was the essence of nothing, and that was it.”59 Yves Klein associated his blue monochromes with nothingness, and much of his work explores voids. In a 1959 lecture delivered at the Sorbonne, Klein directly addressed these ideas: To the question which is often asked me—why did you choose blue?—I will reply by borrowing yet again from Gaston Bachelard that marvelous passage concerning blue from his book Air and Dreams … “First there is nothing, next there is a depth of nothingness, then a profundity of blue.” Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas other colors are not.60 His blue monochromes later inspired his exhibit featuring “invisible” paintings in a bare room, except for a large empty cabinet. Commented Klein on this project, “My paintings are now invisible and I would like to show them in a clear and positive manner, in my next Parisian exhibition at Iris Clert’s.”61 This exhibition was dubbed The Void (1958), and generated such public interest that thousands of people queued up to see nothing itself (not unlike the emperor’s new clothes?!). After this show, Klein continued to present voids in various forms. Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility (1959–62), for example, involved the sale of invisible paintings and empty space, signified by the exchange of gold for a receipt that documented the ownership of the “immaterial zone.”62 Klein’s 1960 photomontage Leap Into The Void depicts the artist in the act of jumping off a rooftop, arms outspread. His 1962 Victory of Samothrace consists of a plaster cast of the Winged Victory of Samothrace (c.190 bc), which he painted his characteristic blue, synthesizing the statue’s famous incompleteness that suggests a structured absence with Klein’s dimensionless and void-evoking blue. Nothing also appears as an important issue in twentieth-century literary and cultural theory, linguistics, anthropology, and so on. In psychoanalysis,

Quoted in Victor Bockris, Warhol: The Biography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), 154. 60 Yves Klein, “The Evolution of Art towards the Immaterial,” in Art in Theory 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 819. 61 Quoted in David W. Galenson, Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 170. 62 See also: Yves Klein, “Ritual for the Relinquishment of the Immaterial Pictorial Sensitivity Zones,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 59

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for example, nothing manifests in a variety of psychoses. In “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Sigmund Freud defines melancholia as a psychic state in which the ego has voided itself, has transferred its mourning for the loss of another into an internal loss of the self, and has therefore formulated the self into a kind of nothing: “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”63 James S. Grotstein traces the psychoanalytical concept of nothingness, from Freud’s ego defect theory to Melanie Klein’s study on the “infant’s phantasied attacks on the breast”64 to Wilfred Bion’s nothingness/no-thingness distinction65 and beyond, ultimately proposing “nothingness and meaninglessness as the most dreaded nadir of human experience,” since “they constitute the fundamental traumatic state.”66 For psychoanalysis, then, the emergence of nothing in the psyche often undermines its healthy organization, and is therefore something to be treated. However, other fields discover figurations of nothing to be catalysts for creation and meaning, and not necessarily something to be cured or avoided. In “Zero Among the Literary Theorists” (2004), J. Hillis Miller traces zero’s use by linguists and literary theorists, uncovering an often deconstructive quality inherent in nothing’s signifier. For example, Roland Barthes explores the so-called “zero degree,” which threatens the most fundamental foundations of linguistics: that meaning stems from fixed binary oppositions (e.g. good-bad, dark-light, and so on). Building upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Barthes demonstrates how meaning can also be created “out of nothing”: “We have here a pure differential state; the zero degree testifies to the power held by any system of signs, of creating meaning ‘out of nothing’: ‘the language can be content with an opposition of something and nothing.’”67 Miller argues that therefore, “the nothing that is called the ‘zero degree’ has meaning, or generates meaning.”68 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, translated and edited by James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 246. 64 James S. Grotstein, “Nothingness, Meaninglessness, Chaos, and the ‘Black Hole’ I: The Importance of Nothingness, Meaninglessness, and Chaos in Psychoanalysis,” Contemporary Psychoanalysis 26, no. 2 (1990): 271. 65 It is interesting to note that Bion’s thought on no-thingness and nothingness has been studied in relation to Samuel Beckett’s work. Bion was Beckett’s analyst from 1934–5. See, for example: Victoria Stevens, “Nothingness, No-thing, and Nothing in the Work of Wilfred Bion and in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy,” Psychoanalytic Review 92, no. 4 (2005): 607–35. 66 Grotstein, “The Importance of Nothingness, Meaninglessness, and Chaos in Psychoanalysis,” 270. 67 Roland Barthes, Elements of Semiology, translated by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1973), 77. 68 J. Hillis Miller, “Zero among the Literary Theorists,” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 2 (2004): 166. 63

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Maurice Blanchot examines zero as the ultimate aim of discourse, knowledge, and literature.69 In “Man at Point Zero” (1971), Blanchot understands the ethnographer’s study as the quest for “man at point zero”; that is, ethnography is the search for man’s origins, for bare, unaccommodated man (to borrow King Lear’s phrase). But, as Miller puts it, “You cannot get from one back to zero.”70 This pursuit of point-zero man always ends in failure: first of all, because the ethnographer spoils the unspoiled/ untouched/original nature of whatever he studies by virtue of coming into contact with it; and second of all, because origins do not exist (when was the very beginning? And where did the beginning come from? What preceded it? Proverbial chicken-and-egg questions abound). Although doomed to failure, this desire for point-zero man—for the chimerical origin—is, Blanchot suggests, based in a human longing to be made anew, to refresh ourselves, to cleanse society of any and all false myths and ideologies, and in so doing to spiritually and culturally start again, at zero: Why this passion for the origin? This search for first forms, which is analogous to the search for the first man or for the first manifestations of art, which we nonetheless know to be ungraspable, if it is true that in one sense there never was a beginning, not for anything nor at any moment? In the past, the navigator who crossed “the line,” the zero parallel, was under the impression that he found himself at an exceptional moment and at a unique point, a sacred zone, the passage over which symbolized a crucial initiation. An imaginary line, a point that was geographically null, but one that represented, precisely by its nullity, the degree zero toward which one could say that man strives, out of a need to attain an ideal landmark from which, free of himself, of his prejudices, of his myths and gods, he can return with a changed expression in his eyes and a new affirmation.71 This desire to be rid of ideological tenets and tradition’s trappings is also, Blanchot argues, the true aim of the real writer. In an earlier essay, “The Search for Point Zero” (1959), Blanchot puts forward the idea that literature only begins to become literature when it rejects any and all conventions imposed upon it, and ignores dictates regarding the true form and goals of literature. Only when literature is liberated from these conventions can

Miller, “Zero among the Literary Theorists,” 170: “Zero for Blanchot is not a unique generative source within each author. It is an impersonal zero point on the horizon or in the depths, or somewhere out of this world, toward which the literary effort is oriented and which it attempts to reach and speak for, as well as to speak in response to, responsibly.” 70 Miller, “Zero among the Literary Theorists,” 171. 71 Maurice Blanchot, “Man at Point Zero,” in Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 79. 69

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the writer, at last, have the freedom to truly write. However, at this point Blanchot’s own dictate comes in: he argues that the liberated, true writer will devote himself to the “zero point”—the point of literature where even writing is done away with, thus destroying the temple of writing that has made sacred and necessary this very action, writerly conventions, and the written word. That is, writing is literature’s final convention, which the writer must break free of if he is to truly write. The true writer, therefore, will ultimately turn to silence. Says Blanchot: to write is to enter a templum that imposes on us, independently of the language that is ours by right of birth and by physical destiny, a certain number of uses, an implicit religion, a rumor that changes beforehand all that we can say, that charges it with intentions that are all the more effective since they are not avowed; to write is first of all to want to destroy the temple before building it; it is at least, before passing over its threshold, to question the constraints of such a place, the original sin that formed the decision to enclose ourselves in it. To write is finally to refuse to pass over the threshold, to refuse to “write.” … To write without “writing,” to bring literature to that point of absence where it disappears, where we no longer have to dread its secrets, which are lies, that is “the degree zero of writing,” the neutrality that every writer seeks, deliberately or without realizing it, and which leads some of them to silence.72 The true writer will eventually reject even writing, for this is neither in his control nor does it articulate his own language. He will refuse to write, as his truest written act; in Miller’s words, “The more faithful to his or her vocation or calling the writer is, the more certain he or she is to end in silence, as for example Arthur Rimbaud did. If any writer ever gets to the zero point we shall never hear of it.”73 Or, as Blanchot reiterates elsewhere, “The poet is he who hears a language which makes nothing heard.”74 Reader-response criticism represents another approach to literature that often concerns textual nothings and zero. This approach highlights the gaps inherent in language, and the blanks existing in all narratives. Such gaps and blanks, on the one hand, demonstrate how language and narrative are always incomplete, can never fully say what they mean to; here, I am reminded of William Faulkner’s Addie, who laments, “I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say

Blanchot, “Search for Point Zero,” 206, 207. Miller, “Zero among the Literary Theorists,” 175. 74 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, translated by Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 51. 72 73

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at.”75 On the other hand, these gaps and blanks depend upon the reader to supply whatever is missing. As Wolfgang Iser argues in The Implied Reader (1972), they are necessary in any narrative, for they render the reader an active participant in the text. The indeterminacy caused by the narrative’s blanks implies the reader, who is called to synthesize meaning. Thus nothing operates as a catalyst for meaning. Later, as Miller observes, Iser focused his research on zero. In the essay “Auktorialität: Die Nullstelle des Diskurses” (Authoritality: The Zero Point of Discourse, 2003), Iser employs the mathematical zero as the signifier of “the authorial instance”; zero becomes “the generative source of a literary or philosophical text.”76 What began as an exploration of the blanks inherent in narrative became a theory of zero as the origin of the text: nothing is not merely a part of narrative, it is the prerequisite for narrative to be. In addition to the avant-garde writers discussed earlier in this chapter, many other writers of the long twentieth century make nothing itself their subject, attempt to give narrative form to nothing, or write narratives conditioned by nothing. The work of Henry James is considered by many to be preoccupied with nothing, placing nothing center stage in the form of main characters who never make appearances, obsessions with loss that transform into shrines to nothing, and the psychological and supernatural effects of nothing. For example, Rolland Munro argues that in The Ambassadors (1903), “for the first time in the history of the novel” James makes it so that “an entirely absent person [becomes] the dominant figure of the book.”77 Mrs. Newsome, who spurs the narrative thread of the novel, nevertheless appears not a single time in the text: “she is made present only through the thought and action of her ambassadors.”78 From this perspective, the novel demonstrates how nothing conditions narrative. J. Hillis Miller, as many before him, reads James’ “The Altar of the Dead” (1895) as an “allegory of one avatar of the zero, death.”79 Miller also discusses Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (1939),80 as well as George

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 171. Miller, “Zero among the Literary Theorists,” 170. 77 Rolland Munro, “Punctualizing Identity: Time and the Demanding Relation,” Sociology 38, no. 2 (2004): 306–7. 78 Rolland Munro, “Zero and Literature: Introduction,” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 2 (2004): 101. 79 J. Hillis Miller, “The History of 0,” Journal for Cultural Research 8, no. 2 (2004): 132. For additional analysis on zero in James’ “The Altar of the Dead,” see: Andrzej Warminski, “Reading Over Endless Histories: Henry James’s ‘Altar of the Dead,’” Yale French Studies, no. 74 (1988): 261–84; and Sigi Jöttkandt, “Lighting a Candle to Infinity: ‘The Altar of the Dead,’” in Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). 80 “The literary revolution participated in, and to some degree initiated by, James Joyce might be defined as the displacement of the grounding of literature in some solid extra-linguistic 75 76

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Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2),81 as literature “in which the zero functions in a truly rhetorical way.”82 The works of Jorge Luis Borges play with Zeno’s paradoxes, infinity, and zero, deconstructing the boundary between reality and text. As Floyd Merrell writes, “Borges’ metaphysical writings leave one with the premonition that there is no comfortable demarcation between sacred texts, the abstract disciplines and everyday life. Rather, they are all interdependent and interrelated, at the instant of their emerging from ‘emptiness’ or ‘nothingness’ to their implication of ‘everythingness.’”83 Georges Perec can also be regarded as an author of nothing, employing constraints that bore holes into language and narrative. His novel A Void (La Disparition, 1969), written without the letter “e,” “generates a ubiquitous play of Nothing across the page on many levels … [O]ne is always looking at how something has not been written, to a void using the letter.”84 Perec’s play with palindromes, and the work of palindrome poets such as Oskar Pastior, also make manifest nothing: Palindromes eventuate into Nothing through their circular, self-consuming nature, the iconic image for which is the gnostic Ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail. As a figure of simultaneous doing and undoing, the palindrome stands as a means of poising language between being and nonbeing—palindromic language operates in a virtual dimension of erasure rather than an actual one of representation.85 Joan Didion has spoken of her work as exploring the “broken center,” and in her novel Play It As It Lays (1970), the protagonist Maria encounters a nothing at her own fractured core. David J. Geherin writes that the novel “testifies on every page to this eloquence of the void as Didion relentlessly explores the emotional shock of the encounter with absurdity. The refrain ‘Maria said nothing’ is repeated with increasing persistence throughout

logos: God, the One, or the materiality of the external world. These grounds are, in Joyce’s work, replaced by a groundless, endlessly proliferating, self-canceling, self-regenerating play of signifiers. Finnegans Wake, it might be argued, is the result of a principled and brilliantly inventive exploitation of this mode of writing. At least twice Joyce explicitly uses the zero or the nought to signify this pulling out of the rug from underneath the literary text” (Miller, “The History of 0,” 129–30). This is also, as I demonstrate in Chapter 1, reminiscent of deconstruction and Derrida’s “bottomless chessboard.” 81 “The most explicit use of the zero as an allegory of allegory that I know, however, is, surprisingly enough, to be found in George Eliot’s Middlemarch” (Miller, “The History of 0,” 136). 82 Miller, “The History of 0,” 129. 83 Floyd Merrell, “Borges: Between Zero and Infinity,” Journal of Romance Studies 7, no. 3 (2007): 87–8. 84 Paul Harris, “Nothing: A User’s Manual,” SubStance 35, no. 2 (2006): 14. 85 Harris, “Nothing,” 12.

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the novel until it takes on the characteristics of a ritual chant.”86 Stanisław Lem’s collection A Perfect Vacuum (Doskonała próżnia, 1971) features reviews of sixteen non-existent works (perhaps, even, impossible-to-write books) and one existing one—that is, Lem’s review of A Perfect Vacuum, a book “about nothing.”87 Thomas Pynchon’s work draws inspiration from mathematical concepts and paradoxes; his recurring theme of entropy beckons zero as a magnetic point toward which all existence strives and goes.88 In Donald Barthelme’s “Nothing: A Preliminary Account” (1973), an attempt is undertaken to arrive at an explanation of what nothing is by listing everything nothing is not. Such a task is revealed to be impossible, no matter how encyclopedic is the list of “nothing is not”: “Nothing is what keeps us waiting (forever).”89 However, Barthelme goes on to celebrate this failure to write nothing, as it keeps before one the promise of meaning: “How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely and that the task will remain always before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail.”90 Nothing is not a nailed-down phenomenon, but something whose very un-nailed-down-ness enables the proliferation of infinite phenomena, promises endless potential meaning. A similar take on nothing is found in the fiction of Paul Auster, whose narratives feature detective stories in which nothing is discovered. This refashioning of the detective story with a private eye (or, private “I”) who uncovers nothing deconstructs the detective genre’s arrival at a unified and entire truth: “The virtue of a text with nothing to it lies in calling us on to the case and then forcing us to reassess, in the face of stubborn darkness, our methods of bringing ‘the truth’ to light.”91 Ultimately, what this small sampling of writers suggests is that from the modern crisis of tradition to the postmodern loss of grand narratives, nothing has become an increasingly dominant motif in the twentieth century’s literary landscape. At the same time, it may be said that many defining historical events and scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century are also marked by

David J. Geherin, “Nothingness and Beyond: Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays,” Critique 16, no. 1 (1974): 66. 87 Stanisław Lem, A Perfect Vacuum, translated by Michael Kandel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 6. 88 See, for example: Alan J. Friedman and Manfred Puetz, “Science as Metaphor: Thomas Pynchon and Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 15, no. 3 (1974): 345–59; and David Seed, “Order in Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Entropy,’” The Journal of Narrative Technique 11, no. 2 (1981): 135–53. 89 Donald Barthelme, “Nothing: A Preliminary Account,” in Sixty Stories (New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 241. 90 Barthelme, “Nothing,” 242. 91 William G. Little, “Nothing to Go on: Paul Auster’s City of Glass,” Contemporary Literature 38, no. 1 (1997): 161. 86

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nothing itself. The century’s first years witness Ernest Rutherford’s discovery that the atom is mostly empty, the effects of which impacted not only scientific but also artistic and philosophical communities. Arthur Eddington, lecturing in 1927, describes the monumental impact of Rutherford’s discovery as follows: When we compare the universe as it is now supposed to be with the universe as we had ordinarily preconceived it, the most arresting change is not the rearrangement of space and time by Einstein but the dissolution of all that we regard as most solid into tiny specks floating in void. That gives an abrupt jar to those who think that things are more or less what they seem. The revelation by modern physics of the void within the atom is more disturbing than the revelation by astronomy of the immense void of interstellar space. The atom is as porous as the solar system. If we eliminated all the unfilled space in a man’s body and collected his protons and electrons into one mass, the man would be reduced to a speck just visible with a magnifying glass.92 The notion of the porous atom was widely discussed in literary and generalinterest journals of the time, and there is evidence that it influenced some modernist literary experimentation, including that of Virginia Woolf. Both the narrative form and the subject of many of Woolf’s works draw inspiration from Rutherford’s discovery. For example, Michael Whitworth suggests, “The new-found porosity of matter is alluded to by Woolf in The Years and Between the Acts: as the Pargiters are freed from their Victorian inheritance, things seem to lose their ‘hardness,’ and even ‘the chair with gilt claws’ seems ‘porous.’”93 And David Bradshaw writes, “Just as Woolf condemned the materialism of Galsworthy, Wells and Bennett, so her alternative approach to fiction accorded with the latest discoveries about the porosity of the atom, and all the tensions that To the Lighthouse explores between the real and the phantom, the vague and the material, Victorians and moderns are embodied in the lighthouse itself.”94 The calamities of the world wars—horrifying outcomes of Western Enlightenment thinking—left in their wake huge cultural voids: the

Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World: Gifford Lectures (1927) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928), 1–2. 93 Michael H. Whitworth, “Virginia Woolf, Modernism and Modernity,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2nd edn, edited by Susan Sellers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 113. 94 David Bradshaw, “‘The Purest Ecstasy’: Virginia Woolf and the Sea,” in Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside, edited by Lara Feigel and Alexandra Harris (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009), 110. 92

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revelation of previously held truths to be folly (that is, the exposure of truths as non-existent), the near erasure of entire populations (that is, the industrial production of monumental absences), and the incapability of language to express the experience (that is, the unsayability of trauma). Each of these—the non-existence of truth, monumental absences, unsayable trauma—have been explored at great length in the scholarship of the world wars, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These themes are also widely found in art, film, literature, memoirs, music, and philosophy that concern these events. The New Building of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, for example, designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, features five cavernous, structural voids: [The Voids] have walls of bare concrete, are not heated or air-conditioned, and are largely without artificial light, quite separate from the rest of the building. On the upper levels of the exhibition, the Voids are clearly visible with black exterior walls. The Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman’s steel sculpture “Shalechet” (Fallen Leaves) covers the entire floor of one of the five Voids. [In the words of Daniel Libeskind,] the museum’s Voids refer to “that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: Humanity reduced to ashes.”95 Sara R. Horowitz analyzes the “trope of muteness” in literary responses to the Holocaust: “Muteness expresses not only the difficulty in saying anything meaningful about the Holocaust; it also comes to represent something essential about the nature of the event itself. The radical negativity of the Holocaust ruptures the fabric of history and memory, emptying both narrative and life of meaning.”96 Many have said—some critically, and some approvingly—that Claude Lanzmann’s documentary film Shoah (1985) shows nothing itself: “Despite being dismissed as showing ‘nothing,’ Lanzmann’s film can be read as embodying that very premise—showing us where and how the absent dead haunt our supposed, symbolic connection to history … Lanzmann focuses on those traces of memory and reflection … a hovering nothingness within those voices, faces, and landscapes.”97 The term “Ground Zero” originates with the Manhattan Project, and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also been explored in relation to nothing. In Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’ Hiroshima

Jewish Museum Berlin, “The Libeskind Building,” available online: http://www.jmberlin.de/ main/EN/04-About-The-Museum/01-Architecture/01-libeskind-Building.php (accessed March 5, 2015). 96 Sara R. Horowitz, Voicing the Void: Muteness and Memory in Holocaust Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 38. 97 Daniel Listoe, “Seeing Nothing: Allegory and the Holocaust’s Absent Dead,” SubStance 35, no. 2, (2006): 54. 95

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mon amour (1959), nothing is a dominant theme. The screenplay describes the opening of the film as follows: (… A man’s voice, flat and calm, as if reciting, says:) HE: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. (To be used as often as desired. A woman’s voice, also flat, muffled, monotonous, the voice of someone reciting, replies:) SHE: I saw everything. Everything.98 Many viewers and scholars have taken note of the multifaceted ways in which this nothing reverberates throughout the film, how “seeing nothing” is a way of “seeing Hiroshima.” James Tweedie, for example, writes: The precise significance of this nothingness lies at the heart of the historical, philosophical, and aesthetic program of the film. It underlines the difference between her secondhand experience of Hiroshima and the more direct trauma of this man who survived but whose family perished in the attack, along with the necessary gap between historical and present-tense confrontation with trauma: in retrospect and at a distance, you saw nothing at Hiroshima. It refers to the incapacity of these images to convey the totality of the trauma unleashed under the horrific conditions of the bombing: you saw nothing. It also alludes to the evacuation of all categories of identity, all habitual strategies of organizing and categorizing the material world now in ruins: you saw the collapse of your way of understanding even the most basic aspects of human life; you saw your most precious illusions reduced to ashes; you saw nothing.99 From the Ground Zero of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that reduced “your most precious illusions to ashes,” at the century’s end we arrive at another Ground Zero, the attacks of September 11 that, as Roland Bleiker argues, “precipitated a breach of understanding,”100 overturning and annihilating former truths about American security and foreign enemies, revealing those truths to be false and those enemies to be from non-states, and memorialized with architectural voids. Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima Mon Amour, translated by Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 15. 99 James Tweedie, The Age of New Waves: Art Cinema and the Staging of Globalization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 119. 100 Roland Bleiker, “Art after 9/11,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31, no. 1 (2006): 78. 98

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In short, from the beginning to the end of the long twentieth century, there is nothing. In the 1990s we have Jerry Seinfeld’s tremendously popular sitcom that was, as critics never tired of saying, “about nothing,” while near the century’s beginning we find the comedy of Harry Langdon, celebrated for its doing-nothing-ness: “Whereas other visual comedians did things,” Joanna E. Rapf notes, “Langdon’s trick was to do very little or NOTHING.”101 There is the collapse of the Russian Empire in the second decade of the twentieth century, whereas at the century’s end the Soviet Union “improved so much,” writes Victor Pelevin, “that it ceased to exist.”102 A recent issue of the Slavic Review (Summer 2014) explores the voids left in the wake of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, specifically in contemporary Georgia.103 Friedrich Nietzsche asserts, “What? You search? You would multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? You seek followers? Seek zeros!”104 From Wallace Stevens’ “The Snow Man” (1921): “For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”105 In Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” (1933), the prayer of the older waiter: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”106 Edmond Jabès: “I see a word that advances towards the sea. It is not the word heaven, nor the word earth; it is not even the word salt or seed; but the word Nothing, the word Nothingness. And I tell myself that salt, grain, earth and heaven are in this word.”107 Walter in the Coen brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998): “No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there’s nothing to be afraid of.” To be sure, the twentieth century is marked by much ado about nothing.

Joanna E. Rapf, “Doing Nothing: Harry Langdon and the Performance of Absence,” Film Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2005): 28. 102 Victor Pelevin, Homo Zapiens, translated by Andrew Bromfield (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 3. 103 The issue is titled Ethnographies of Absence in Contemporary Georgia, edited by Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Martin Demant Frederiksen. 104 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 468. 105 Wallace Stevens, “The Snow Man,” in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th edn, volume 2, edited by Nina Baym (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 1166. 106 Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, edited by Joyce Carol Oates (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 299. 107 Quoted in William Frank, “Edmond Jabès, or the Endless Self-Emptying of Language in the Name of God,” Literature and Theology 22, no. 1 (2008): 113. 101

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Narratives of nothing In what follows, I survey some of the twentieth century’s main theories regarding nothing and its signifiers (e.g. zero), laying a foundation for the literary analyses that comprise the bulk of this work. Chapter 1 divides this theoretical survey into three parts: (1) zero’s development in mathematics; (2) nothing’s relationship to being; and (3) nothing’s relationship to narrative. Zero appears as a recurring problem in the history of mathematics, functioning as a kind of paradox: it is both a number and not a number, and often remains exempt from the rules of the very system it makes possible. As such, zero’s relationship to the system of numbers shares striking similarities with nothing’s relationship to being and narrative. Regarding nothing’s relationship to being, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre each position nothing as inseparable from the human condition, as an essential producer of knowable and meaningful existence. Heidegger argues that the question concerning the nothing is the ultimate metaphysical inquiry, and that, in turn, it is the nothing itself that makes the very act of questioning possible, which accordingly enables being that is aware of itself, or Dasein. Sartre questions what it is about man’s condition that allows him to consider and perceive nothingness. He designates man’s essential freedom as that which allows nothingness to come into the world; nothingness is therefore a condition of man. The present study adopts a similar position concerning nothing and its essential relationship to the being of man, but argues that as nothing is to being, it is also to narrative. This relationship between nothing and narrative is, I show, established in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. These theorists demonstrate how nothing itself is necessary in the operations through which perspectives, language, narrative, and meaning all come into existence. Chapter 2 presents a comparative analysis of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby” as prototypical stories that not only give narrative form to nothing (narratives about nothing), but that also feature nothing as a generator of narrative (narratives of nothing). Both “The Overcoat” and “Bartleby” are landmark nineteenth-century texts in their respective Russian and American traditions, and have also become significant works in world literary and philosophical traditions. Both are stories about writing and language, and both feature central characters that can be said to represent nothing. Additionally, these central characters are both scribes who eventually cease writing (what Blanchot might call true writers who have reached the “zero degree of writing”). Thus, as scribes they write nothing, but as embodiments of nothings they demonstrate how nothing inspires narrative. They illustrate what I call narratives of nothing, which indicates the symbiotic relationship between nothing and

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narrative, wherein nothing resides at the forever-differing/deferring center of a semiotic system. This comparative analysis of “The Overcoat” and “Bartleby” sets the stage for the main event: analyses of the work of Vladimir Nabokov (Chapter 3), Samuel Beckett (Chapter 4), and Victor Pelevin (Chapter 5). I have selected texts of these authors that exhibit the relationships between nothing, the creation of narrative meaning or madness, and the nature of reality and the human condition. Many of these texts position words as inseparable from the world, or as that which allows the world to be brought into knowable being. But in so doing, they also show how words are conditioned by a nothing in the system, which enables signification to take place. As such, these texts are concerned with the role of narrative in our lives, and with how nothing is related and even essential to the act of generating narrative and thus human reality. Chapter 3 analyzes the work of Nabokov, who presents reality as something always somewhat fictionalized or incomplete as experienced through human subjectivity—that is, “reality” in quotation marks. Human reality stripped of its quotation marks—or, the real laid bare—is repeatedly depicted as something non-existent, as nothing (e.g. disappearing, neverappearing, or non-existing characters), or with a signifier of nothing (e.g. zero, ciphers, voids, abysses). But this reality that is nothing functions as the heart of a meaning-making system that generates infinite “realities”— our experiential worlds. This nothing incites and compels the occurrence of interpretation, fictionalization, and narrative, thereby producing any and all meaningful existences. It is therefore at the very core of Nabokov’s characteristic patterning that produces meaning (or madness) and, thus, “reality.” In Chapter 4, I turn to Beckett’s narratives, which attempt to arrive at being laid bare through narrative laid bare. Again, we find a symbiotic relationship between the word and the world; being and language go hand in hand. As Beckett’s texts gradually pare down narrative through the principle of the aesthetics of lessness, emptying themselves of traditional literary conventions such as plot, character, temporality, and setting in an attempt to express all that has previously been said in the most reduced form, they more and more seek an immanent nothing that encompasses infinite being—a nothing that expresses everything. This immanent nothing that Beckettian narrative courts is pierced through with a language all its own, therefore suggesting that even the barest of being—and, indeed, non-being—cannot rid itself of language, cannot cease signifying. Chapter 5 examines the work of Victor Pelevin, whose main theme is considered by many to be the voided nature of post-Soviet Russia. On the one hand, Pelevin depicts the void in nihilistic overtones, demonstrating how post-Soviet culture reveals the emptiness and meaninglessness of its preceding Soviet culture, and is itself a giant void unable to overcome the

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loss of meaning. Especially with the influx of capitalism, art and literature have also become obsolete and emptied of all significance other than a cynical market value. Pelevin demonstrates literature’s degraded status by writing novels that function as non-novels, or that refuse to be literature and instead position themselves as consumer goods. But on the other hand, Pelevin explores the positive aspects of the void to illustrate how nothing is not only the crisis of post-Soviet culture, but also, perhaps, the very means to transcend that crisis. Consciousness of the void becomes a method for manipulating and generating new realities and meanings, and also enables the revitalization of literature. As we will see, many of Pelevin’s characters are poets and writers themselves, or are modeled after famous literary characters, taking their existence from literature. Their struggles with the void, their failures and successes, represent the writer’s grappling with the void—and how the void is both the crisis of post-Soviet culture and literature, and its salvation. In these works, while nothing functions as the ground upon which narrative and human existence come into being, it is itself difficult, if not impossible, to capture in words or to experience. It therefore operates as an imaginary and impossible abstraction whose paradoxical function is precisely to allow for existing and possible narratives and being.

1 Theorizing nothing

zero Zero is a paradoxical and controversial sign, and one of its many roles is a signifier of nothing. Here, I sketch the development and evolution of zero as a mathematical concept and sign, its reluctant adoption by medieval Europe, and its status as both a number and not-a-number. This sketch draws parallels between zero and nothing to illustrate how, as zero is necessary to the development of our modern mathematical system, nothing is necessary to the creation of conscious being, as well as to the creation of meaningful narrative. Between 1999 and 2000, three books about the history and concept of zero were published (one might speculate that this was due to the mania surrounding the apocalyptic zero of Y2K): Robert Kaplan’s The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (1999), John D. Barrow’s The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas About the Origins of the Universe (2000), and Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (2000). These three studies give fairly similar accounts of zero’s origin and development, but differ in some important ways. All three discuss zero’s earliest developments between the sixth and third centuries bc by the Babylonians ( ), in pre-Columbian Mayan civilization ( ), and in ninth-century India (• or O); Kaplan makes an additional argument for the possible appearance of zero in Alexandrian Greece (O). These scholars also differ in their accounts of the origin of the Indian zero, which was ultimately adopted by the Arabs and evolved into our present-day zero: Kaplan and Seife argue that its origins can be traced back through Greece to Babylon, while Barrow holds that Indian mathematicians invented zero on their own, not unlike the Mayans.1

For discussions on the Mayan zero, see John D. Barrow, The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Vintage Books,

1

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Sometime between the sixth and third centuries bc, the Babylonians created a sign that served as a placeholder, designating the absence of a number, in their positional system of numbering.2 This sign, often comprising two parallel slanted cuneiform wedges ( ), indicated nothing in this space or column, and was not considered to be a number in its own right. Seife explains that “[The Babylonian zero] did little more than make sure digits fell in the right places; it didn’t really have a numerical value of its own … On its own, it meant … nothing.”3 Barrow also emphasizes that the Babylonian zero was quite different from the zero we know today, and signified only an empty space in an accounting register: “Their zero sign was never written as the answer to a sum like 6–6. It was never used to express an endpoint of an operation where nothing remains. Such an endpoint was always explained in words. Nor did the Babylonian zero find itself entwined with metaphysical notions of nothingness.”4 It is perhaps most accurate to think of the Babylonian zero more as a kind of punctuation mark—like a space or a period, something that clarifies the meaning of signs around it—and less as a number with a meaning of its own. The presence of zero in ancient Greece is doubtful, and most scholars agree that the Greeks had no sign or concept for zero. Barrow, Kaplan, and Seife each explore the curiosity of zero’s lacuna in ancient Greece, and the peculiar phenomenon wherein puns about nothing are readily made (see the episode of Odysseus in Polyphemus’ cave, discussed in Chapter 0), but a numerical nothing is apparently left unthought. Kaplan argues that it was not until Alexander the Great’s conquest of Babylon, then part of the Achaemenid Empire, when Greece encountered any semblance of zero, around 331 bc.5 However, it is not the slanted wedges found thereafter in Greek writings, but the symbol O: where did this O come from, and moreover, what did it mean? The common yet controversial explanation,6 Kaplan explains, “is that ‘O’ came from the Greek omicron, the first letter of ouden: ‘nothing,’ like Odysseus’ name [Outis]; or simply from [ou], ‘not’: like our nought.”7 This O possibly signified the absence of a given measurement (e.g. degrees, minutes), and certainly was not considered to be a number in its own right—again, utilized more as a punctuation 2002), 27–32; Robert Kaplan, The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 80–9; and Charles Seife, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 16–18. 2 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 24–7; Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 11–13; Seife, Zero, 15. 3 Seife, Zero, 15. 4 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 27. 5 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 16–17. 6 Indeed, after giving this explanation, Kaplan admits that Otto Neugebauer, the “leading authority on Greek astronomical texts,” rejects this theory outright (Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 18). 7 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 18.

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mark.8 Further compounding the debate concerning this O’s meaning is the fact that it hardly appears outside of Greek astronomical writings. Writes Seife, “After doing their calculations with Babylonian notation, Greek astronomers usually converted the numbers back into clunky Greek-style numerals—without zero. Zero never worked its way into ancient Western numbers, so it is unlikely that the omicron is the mother of our 0.”9 In short, zero was largely absent in ancient Greece. The questions then arise: why did the Greeks reject zero, or what prevented them from developing it? Seife and Barrow point to Aristotelian philosophy and its dismissal of infinity and the void to explain the Greeks’ rejection of zero, and later, Christian Europe’s long-standing hesitation to adopt zero. According to Seife, The [Aristotelian] universe was contained in a nutshell, ensconced comfortably within the sphere of fixed stars; the cosmos was finite in extent, and entirely filled with matter. There was no infinite; there was no void. There was no infinity; there was no zero. This line of reasoning had another consequence—and this is why Aristotle’s philosophy endured for so many years. His system proved the existence of God. The heavenly spheres are slowly spinning in their places … But something must be causing that motion … This is the prime mover: God. When Christianity swept through the West, it became closely tied to the Aristotelian view of the universe and proof of God’s existence.10 Barrow makes a similar argument: The dominant picture of the natural world that emerged from Greek civilization and wedded itself to the Judaeo-Christian worldview was that of Aristotle … Aristotle’s picture of Nature was extremely influential and his views about the vacuum fashioned the consensus view about it until the Renaissance. He rejected the possibility that a vacuum could exist.11 One important implication of hypotheses such as these is that a culture’s dominant philosophy and self-defining narratives influence and shape what are its supposedly more objective epistemological spheres—for example, mathematics and science. The argument therefore arises that zero’s status in

Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 19. Seife, Zero, 39. 10 Seife, Zero, 46–7. 11 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 64. 8 9

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a given culture becomes a reflection or symptom of that culture’s condition, and has the potential to tell us a great deal about the culture itself. This ambiguous O eventually appeared in India. Kaplan argues that “the first indubitable written appearance of the symbol in India” dates from ad 876,12 but that it likely arrived much earlier via the Greeks when Alexander the Great invaded India or by way of commercial routes from Alexandria.13 In contrast, Barrow suggests that India invented zero independent of Babylonian/Greek influence.14 He claims that before the circle (O), a solid dot (•) punctuated Indian texts, serving to signify something missing or absent, and to act as a placeholder in positional notation. This dot eventually evolved into a hollow oval, and traveled to China.15 These dots had many uses. Kaplan explains that they could stand as a promise to complete an owed task, or as a gap in an inscription, “the dot marking a blank,”16 not unlike ellipses. These dots are perhaps similar to those found in the Torah that are placed above or below words or letters; some scholars suggest they are sometimes “intended to make it seem that the word had not been written. Rather like assigning it the value zero, or taking it off the board.”17 Moving away from the meaning of these dots in relation to words and into the realm of numbers, we find they functioned to signify the placevalue of the numeral to which they were attached. Hence, this zero symbol still did not function as a number (or as a letter), but instead as a modifier, a punctuation mark, or a space between signs. However, what’s perhaps most interesting about the Indian zero is not where it came from, but how it evolved to acquire additional functions and even a meaning and a numerical operation of its own: “Indian mathematicians did more than simply accept zero. They transformed it, changing its role from mere placeholder to number. This reincarnation was what gave zero its power.”18 The first significant development happened when the zero sign—the dot—began to be used to designate an unknown variable, not unlike our use of x in algebraic equations.19 Kaplan suggests that this zero sign therefore came to stand for a kind of receptive vacancy, a symbol of the Indian śūnya: “‘Śūnya’ isn’t so much vacancy, then, as receptivity, a womb-like hollow ready to swell—and indeed it comes from the root śvi, meaning swelling. Its companion ‘kha’ derives from the verb ‘to dig,’ and

Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 41. Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 37. Seife likewise argues that zero arrived in India via Alexander the Great’s invasion in the fourth century bc (Zero, 63). 14 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 32–8. 15 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 34–5. 16 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 55. 17 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 54. 18 Seife, Zero, 66. 19 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 57–8. 12 13



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carries the sense of ‘hole’: something to be filled.”20 Śūnya’s nature as a receptacle, as a womb-like hollow that takes on the characteristics of that which it receives, is reminiscent of Plato’s description of khôra, which I discuss in Chapter 0.21 Thus, this zero sign functions as much more than a placeholder or punctuation, but arguably as a signifier of a receptacle that gives space to allow for becoming—a space of potentiality. As a receptive vacancy that houses an unknown variable, this zero sign is also comparable to the “cipher,” which simultaneously denotes zero, any numerical digit, and a secret message or code. Of course, the Arab word sifr was taken from the Indian śūnya, and in the West, sifr became zephirus (the root for the word zero), and it also became cifra, which evolved into cipher.22 This phenomenon wherein a notion like śūnya—a conceptualization of nothing as that which gives space for things to come into being—informs the development of a mathematical zero sign illustrates the first of two theories that attempt to explain how and why zero dramatically transformed in India from a mere placeholder to a meaningful number. This first theory, as we have seen, credits Indian culture’s multifaceted conceptions of nothing as what complicated and enriched zero as a sign. Seife points out that “Unlike Greece, India never had a fear of the infinite or of the void. Indeed, it embraced them. The void had an important place in the Hindu religion.”23 Similarly, Barrow writes, “Whereas the Babylonian tradition had a one-dimensional approach to the zero symbol, seeing it simply as a sign for a vacant slot in an accountant’s register, the Indian mind saw it as part of a wider philosophical spectrum of meanings for nothingness and the void.”24 Barrow further suggests that one only has to examine the great number of Indian words for zero to appreciate the depth and variety of Indian notions of nothing.25 These words include many that relate to the sky (e.g. abhra, atmosphere; akâsha, ether; nabha, sky/atmosphere; vyoman, sky/space), to holes, voids, or receptacles (e.g. randhra, hole; śūnya), or even to points (e.g. bindu; vindu). These words for zero that also connote the idea of a point perhaps explain why the dot (•) was employed by Indian mathematicians as both a zero placeholder and as an unknown quantity (like x), signifying an empty space of infinite potentiality. As Barrow explains: Bindu is used to describe the most insignificant geometrical object, a single point or a circle shrunk down to its center where it has no finite Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 59. Kaplan also draws the connection between śūnya and khôra (The Nothing That Is, 63–5). 22 Seife, Zero, 73. 23 Seife, Zero, 64. 24 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 36. 25 Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 36–7. 20 21

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extent. Literally, it signifies just a “point,” but it symbolizes the essence of the Universe before it materialized into the solid world of appearances that we experience. It represents the uncreated Universe from which all things can be created. This creative potential was revealed by means of a simple analogy. For, by its motion, a single dot can generate lines, by whose motion can be generated planes, by whose motion can be generated all of three-dimensional space around us. The bindu was the Nothing from which everything could flow.26 In short, this first hypothesis holds that because Indian conceptions of nothing were varied and rich, the development of a richly meaningful mathematical zero in India naturally followed—a number signifying a nothing that was abundantly plentiful, full of the potential x. The second theory that seeks to answer why zero evolved in India from placeholder to meaningful number points to two related ideas: the first, Indian mathematicians’ explorations into how zero functions with other numbers; and the second, the growing abstraction of numbers and of mathematics. Indian mathematicians were the first to explore and describe how zero interacts with other numbers. Such explorations and descriptions, argues Kaplan, changed the face of not only zero, but of the other numbers as well: “These descriptions took the form of laws governing their interactions. The effect of such laws would be not only to bring zero and numbers closer together but to change our understanding of numbers themselves, making an ideal country to which they—and who knows what further species and new landscapes—belonged.”27 Simply put, treating zero like a number, and calculating with it as a number, turned it into a number. But playing with zero also rendered the other numbers more abstract, allowed them to break from geometry—numbers no longer merely designated the quantity or measure of real, empirical things, but also became abstract concepts or even things in their own right: “Like zero, numbers were becoming invisible: no longer descriptive of objects but objects—rarefied objects—themselves.”28 In India, therefore, there was a shift from geometry to an increased abstraction of all numerals, allowing zero to evolve into a number. Seife writes: Unlike the Greeks, the Indians did not see squares in square numbers or the areas of rectangles when they multiplied two different values. Instead, they saw the interplay of numerals—numbers stripped of their geometric significance … [This] freed the Indians from the shortcomings of the Greek system of thought—and their rejection of zero. Barrow, The Book of Nothing, 37. Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 69. 28 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 75. 26 27



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Once numbers shed their geometric significance, mathematicians no longer had to worry about mathematical operations making geometric sense. You can’t remove a three-acre swath from a two-acre field, but nothing prevents you from subtracting three from two. Nowadays we recognize that 2–3 = –1: negative one … Just as 2–3 was now a number, so was 2–2. It was zero. Not just a mere placeholder zero that represents an empty space on the abacus, but zero the number.29 In a word, zero became a number as the mathematical field began to grapple with abstract and imaginary numbers, and not just with numbers that correspond to tangible and visible reality. Indian numerals, including zero, were in Baghdad by the eighth century,30 and eventually evolved into our familiar Arabic numerals. It was probably Arab merchants who introduced zero to China (the “Indian ancestry of the Chinese zero” is widely acknowledged by scholars today),31 and it was likely via Arab channels that zero was brought, along with the other Arabic numerals, to Europe by 970.32 However, it was not until the fourteenth century that zero was widely accepted in Europe as a number.33 Kaplan, like others before him,34 credits the fourteenth century’s growing merchant class and their need for careful recordkeeping as what necessitated the acceptance of zero in Europe, leading to the decline of Roman numerals. Specifically, around 1340 in Italy double-entry bookkeeping was invented, which calculates the difference between one’s credits and debits; if one’s accounts are balanced, this difference is zero.35 Kaplan argues that because of this, zero became “a balance-point between negative and positive amounts,” and “negative numbers [became] as real as their positive counterparts.”36 In Europe, as in India, zero was finally given a stable place on the number line, between one and negative one. Most interestingly, Kaplan further suggests that this reconsideration of zero in relation to positive and negative numbers established a new way of regarding one’s place in the world (in terms of transactions, affect, and effect), and even laid the groundwork for new theories in physics: “Didn’t this new vocabulary lead in time to the framing in physics of its conservation laws: matter, momentum, energy

Seife, Zero, 70. Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 90; Seife, Zero, 71–2. 31 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 91. 32 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 92–3. 33 Seife, Zero, 80–1. 34 Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 7–8. 35 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 110. 36 Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 110. 29 30

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neither created nor destroyed but exchanged—and to such insights as Newton’s Third Law of Motion: for every action there is equal and opposite reaction?”37 It appears that establishing zero as a number instigated reevaluations of (human) being and existence, and of the physical laws. But even as zero was accepted as a number, mathematicians were still troubled by its peculiar qualities. For example, to divide by zero threatens the entire framework of mathematics. Seife argues that “Dividing by zero once—just one time—allows you to prove, mathematically, anything at all in the universe,” and then he delivers a delightful mathematical proof to illustrate this claim, using division-by-zero to show that Winston Churchill was a carrot.38 Here, I’m reminded of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and his desire for caprice, for the charming 2 × 2 = 5,39 and how dividing-by-zero could make his caprice come true. But if these equations are mathematically true, then the entire system of mathematics goes up in smoke. Because of this, the circle is eventually squared, so to speak. It happens that zero comes to enjoy a special status, both as a number (a sign), and as the sign of a number’s absence (a meta-sign): It is this double aspect of zero, as a sign inside the number system and as a meta-sign, a sign-about-signs outside it, that has allowed zero to serve as the site of an ambiguity between an empty character (whose covert mysterious quality survives in the connection between “cyphers” and secret codes), and a character for emptiness, a symbol that signifies nothing.40 As the meta-sign of a number’s absence (as a placeholder), zero helps to generate the full plane of numbers. Zero can also function as a number in its own right, but this sometimes risks, as we have seen, the destruction of the entire system of mathematics. Nevertheless, zero became “the most important tool in mathematics,”41 leading—to give one immodest example—to the development of calculus.42 We may therefore argue that

Kaplan, The Nothing That Is, 110–11. Seife, Zero, 23, 217–19. 39 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1994), 25, 34; Fedor Dostoevskii, Zapiski iz podpol' ia (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka-klassika, 2006), 68, 78. 40 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 13. 41 Seife, Zero, 23. 42 “The inventors of calculus, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, created the most powerful mathematical method ever by dividing by zero and adding an infinite number of zeros together. Both acts were as illogical as adding 1 + 1 to get 3. Calculus, at its core, defied the logic of mathematics. Accepting it was a leap of faith. Scientists took that leap, for calculus is the language of nature. To understand that language completely, science had to conquer the infinite zeros” (Seife, Zero, 106). 37 38



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zero plays a significant role in generating the entire system of modern mathematics by standing outside of the system (by functioning as something other than a number, as a meta-number, as a signifier of absent numbers), and also exists as a number within the system. Still, it can only function as a number within the system sometimes. Zero therefore paradoxically remains outside the system of mathematics, even while generating the system, and sometimes functioning as a number within it. In this respect, zero is similar to the structure’s de-centered center that Derrida discusses in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966). Here, Derrida puts forward the notion of an infinitely slipping center, or “no center,” that gives form to discursive structures—that is, a de-centered center that “was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions [i.e. zeros?!] came into play.”43 This unstructured, always differing and deferring center allows for the meaning-making of its structure, while remaining outside of it. This center is at once intrinsic and external to the system. It appears that as zero is to mathematics, the differing/deferring de-centered center is to the structure (I revisit these ideas later in the present chapter). It also appears that as the paradoxes of zero led to groundbreaking developments in mathematics, zero’s effects also reverberated in other sign systems. In Signifying Nothing (1987), Brian Rotman puts forward the ambitious and well-substantiated hypothesis that the arrival of zero in the West around the thirteenth century “was a major signifying event, both in its own right within the writing of numbers and as the emblem of parallel movements in other sign systems.”44 Rotman explores what happens “when a sign for Nothing,” or “a sign for the absence of other signs,” enters a semiotic system, and uses as three main case studies “zero in the practice of arithmetic, the vanishing point in perspective art, and imaginary money in economic exchange.”45 The introduction of a meta-sign signifying nothing into each of these semiotic systems causes an eruption that generates a new “self-conscious subject of a subject, a meta-subject”: “in mathematics, the invention of algebra by Vieta; in painting, the self-conscious image created by Vermeer and Velasquez; in the text, the invention of the autobiographical written self by Montaigne; in economics, the creation of paper money by gold merchants in London.”46 Rotman’s study makes evident how signifiers of nothing disrupt their semiotic systems, but also become Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in A Postmodern Reader, edited by Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 225. 44 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 1. 45 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 1–2. 46 Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 4. 43

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the very foundations upon which these systems evolve to allow for new meanings, representations, and functions that were previously impossible, unimagined, or non-existent.

Nothing and being: Heidegger and Sartre The philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre represent two of the twentieth century’s leading inquiries into the concept of nothing and its relationship to being. Even though Sartre often draws from Heidegger’s work, he disagrees with certain conclusions Heidegger makes. For Heidegger, human existence (Dasein) only occurs by being held out in the nothing; the nothing’s nihilation compels beings to transcend the whole of being and thereby come into selfhood and freedom, to wonder at the strangeness of themselves and other beings, and thus to inquire. In contrast, for Sartre nothingness only comes into the world through the being of man; at the same time, he argues that many human conducts are essentially dependent upon nothingness. In short, Heidegger’s nothing allows for human being to come into existence, whereas Sartre’s nothingness comes into being through man, defining much of man’s experience of existence. As is already evident, both associate nothing exclusively with the condition of man’s being, albeit in different ways. In the present section, I summarize their main theses to establish some preliminary theoretical foundations for the literary analyses in the coming chapters.

Heidegger and the nothing In his 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?,” Heidegger unfolds his metaphysical inquiry by pointing out that it takes place—as any inquiry does—from the position of Dasein: that is, from the existence that questions,47 or the human condition (“Man—one being among others— ‘pursues science’”).48 Addressing an audience of researchers, teachers, and students, Heidegger further specifies that the very existence of this scholarly community is “determined by science,” which “seek[s] beings themselves in order to make them objects of investigation and to determine their

Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 94. 48 Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 95. 47



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grounds.”49 So man, the existence that questions, pursues science, which in turn pursues beings (including, of course, the being of man) so as to make them into objects of inquiry to reveal their natures. The scientific man defines his pursuit, claiming: “What should be examined are beings only, and besides that—nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings, and beyond that—nothing.”50 Here, Heidegger uncovers a contradiction in this line of thought: the nothing. Perhaps this contradiction is merely rhetorical. Science defines itself as that which wishes to know about beings—and not about nothing; it therefore relies upon the nothing it rejects in order to discern its own essence. Heidegger asks: “What about this nothing? Is it an accident that we talk this way so automatically? Is it only a manner of speaking—and nothing besides?”51 In articulating its own being in language, is science’s rejection of “nothing” no more than a rhetorical device, or must science itself, in its mode of being, also have recourse to the nothing? To answer this question, Heidegger looks for other occurrences of the nothing in human existence (besides the aforementioned idiomatic “nothing” that so ubiquitously peppers our language). He finds that the nothing is revealed in the “fundamental mood of anxiety”: “Anxiety is indeed anxiety in the face of …, but not in the face of this or that thing. Anxiety in the face of … is always anxiety for …, but not for this or that.”52 Here, the all-too-familiar word “nothing” is instead substituted with ellipses; the effect, perhaps, of these ellipses is to defamiliarize the nothing, to make the nothing strange so that we may also recognize and encounter it. This … encountered in anxiety makes us feel “ill at ease,” but we cannot say what it is that causes us to feel this way.53 When the anxiety ends, we say we were anxious because of “nothing.” Here, the rhetorical nothing emerges again, but Heidegger emphasizes that beneath the rhetoric there lurks the literal truth of the matter: “Indeed, the nothing itself—as such—was there.”54 This …, the nothing, that is revealed in anxiety is not a being, nor is it any kind of object that anxiety can be said to “grasp”; rather, “the nothing itself nihilates.”55 This essence of the nothing, nihilation, is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation … Rather, as the repelling gesture toward the retreating whole of beings, it

Heidegger, Heidegger, 51 Heidegger, 52 Heidegger, 53 Heidegger, 54 Heidegger, 55 Heidegger, 49 50

“What “What “What “What “What “What “What

is is is is is is is

Metaphysics?,” Metaphysics?,” Metaphysics?,” Metaphysics?,” Metaphysics?,” Metaphysics?,” Metaphysics?,”

94. 95. 95. 100. 101. 101. 103.

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discloses these beings in their full but heretofore concealed strangeness as what is radically other—with respect to the nothing.56 The nothing’s nihilation repels beings, enables particular beings to slip away from beings as a whole, and thus allows beings to relate to other beings and also to themselves. Without the nothing, there is no nihilation, no way for beings to distinguish themselves from beings as a whole, no way for a being to determine what it is and what it is not. Dasein—as the being that questions other beings, as the being that experiences its existence as estranged and separate from other beings—emerges as it is from the nothing: Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing. Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call “transcendence.” If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom. … For human existence, the nothing makes possible the openedness of beings as such. The nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs.57 In order for human existence, for Dasein, to exist as such—strange from other beings, aware of its own selfhood—the nihilation of the nothing must take place. The nothing, therefore, is the ground upon which beings are revealed to be, come into existence. Once beings exist, via nothing’s nihilation, as this and not that, and in relation to other beings strange from themselves, the experience of selfhood emerges. As the experience of selfhood emerges, and beings contemplate themselves in relation to other beings not themselves (again, nothing’s nihilation enables this experience to be), the occurrence of wonder when faced with the strangeness of other beings develops. It is on the “ground of wonder”—wonder uncovered by the nothing—that the possibility of inquiry, the why?, arises. And it is on this ground of inquiry that the field of science occurs. Here, Heidegger arrives at his answer to science’s understanding of itself as that which inquires only into being, and not into nothing: it turns out that science is only made possible because of the nothing.

Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 103. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 103, 104.

56 57



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Science would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand. But in our inquiry concerning the nothing it has by now become manifest that scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing. It understands itself for what it is only when it does not give up the nothing … Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects of investigation.58 But of course, Heidegger’s answer to science is also his answer to man, for as we have just seen, human existence (Dasein) can only relate to itself and to beings by holding itself out into the nothing. By holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein goes beyond beings as a whole. By going beyond beings as a whole, Dasein transcends being—this, Heidegger concludes, is indeed what is metaphysics: “metaphysics belongs to the ‘nature of man.’ … Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself.”59 In answering the question “What is metaphysics?,” Heidegger reveals that metaphysics is being held out into the nothing, Dasein, the nature of man. Man’s existence, his being-there, occurs always as some sort of “philosophizing” (i.e. “metaphysics getting under way”) that the nothing compels.60 In questioning the nothing, it turns out that we question precisely that which makes us ourselves. In my estimation, Heidegger’s conception of the nothing as that which compels beings to question their own beings and consequently exist also implicates language, interpretation, and narrative as essential gestures of the nothing that allow for human selfhood. These ideas will be considered in full in the last part of this chapter, where I discuss the works of Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva. But for now, I will merely note that the essential questioning that is conditioned by the nothing and that allows man to exist as such necessitates language (a way of posing the question), interpretation (a way of considering the question), and narrative (a way of following the thread between question, interpretation, and answer). The questioning that defines Dasein’s essence can be regarded as a hermeneutic action whereby a being interprets itself or another being, and therefore comes to some kind of knowledge or narrative about itself or others—and all of this takes place upon the ground of nothing. If the nothing opens up beings to questioning and therefore existence, and if we concede that questioning always already entails language, interpretation, and narrative, then it appears that it is through interpretation of being, through our narratives about being that arise by questioning being, that existence occurs.

Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 109. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 109. 60 Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” 110. 58 59

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Sartre and nothingness In part one of Being and Nothingness (1943), entitled “The Problem of Nothingness,” Sartre poses questions concerning the Heideggerian notion of “being-in-the-world,” then takes a step back to examine the oftenunacknowledged functions that are inherent in the “human conduct” of questioning.61 He finds that a “triple non-being conditions every question.”62 The first: questions arise because there is “the non-being of knowing in man”63—that is, man asks a question when he lacks the answer. The second: there exists the possibility that the reply to a question will be negative; for example, answers like “‘Nothing’ or ‘Nobody’ or ‘Never’” are negative replies that indicate the non-being of the being in question.64 The third: all questions imply the existence of a truth that limits the valid answers, a truth that always affirms, “It is thus and not otherwise.”65 The expectation of truth therefore introduces “the non-being of limitation.”66 Sartre concludes that the very act of questioning is “encompassed with nothingness,” and moreover that “[t]he permanent possibility of non-being, outside us and within, conditions our questions about being.”67 Thus, as Sartre positions the act of questioning as a conduct unique to man’s condition,68 and since non-being—as we have just seen—is triply integral to questioning, this investigation into nothingness is likewise an inquiry into the ontology of man. Sartre continues this inquiry into nothingness by questioning the status of its existence: does nothingness exist (does it “have the slightest trace of reality”) outside of human ways of being in the world, or is it always a subjective creation of negative judgments?69 At first glance, it appears the latter is true—that negation, and therefore nothingness, are always the creations of psychic operations: Negation proper (we are told) is unthinkable; it could appear only on the level of an act of judgment by which I should establish a comparison between the result anticipated and the result obtained … As for Nothingness, this would derive its origin from negative judgments; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1992), 34. 62 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 36. 63 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 36. 64 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 35. 65 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 36. 66 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 36. 67 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 36. 68 Questioning, according to Sartre, is one of several human conducts—the “conduct of man in the world” (Being and Nothingness, 34). 69 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 37–8. 61



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it would be a concept establishing the transcendent unity of all these judgments, a propositional function of the type, “X is not.”70 Sartre admits that “non-being always appears within the limits of human expectation,” and that “[t]he world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities”71—but this does not mean that non-beings are merely creations of human subjectivity. Rather, Sartre determines that “non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being,”72 and later he concludes, “The necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunts being.”73 Thus, the human way of being in the world relies upon and is conditioned by nothingness, which makes possible psychic nihilations that in turn create meaning. Man’s ability to recognize destruction, or to point a gun at a target, or to conceive of fragility, all contain the possibility of non-being, a possibility that is revealed and even generated through man’s perception, but that still exists as an objective fact: It is necessary then to recognize that destruction is an essentially human thing and that it is man who destroys his cities through the agency of earthquakes or directly, who destroys his ships through the agency of cyclones or directly. But at the same time it is necessary to acknowledge that destruction supposes a pre-judicative comprehension of nothingness as such and a conduct in the face of nothingness. In addition destruction, although coming into being through man, is an objective fact and not a thought.74 Non-being is revealed in man’s relationship with the world: destruction requires “a witness who can retain the past in some manner and compare it to the present in the form of no longer,”75 while the ability to point a gun at a particular target requires the exclusion of every other target, whereas to acknowledge a being as fragile involves an understanding of that particular being in relation to its potential annihilation. But just because it is man through which non-being is generated does not mean that non-being is no more than an idea. Sartre emphatically asserts this point: that man’s role in this is essential, but that this does not mean that Sartre, Sartre, 72 Sartre, 73 Sartre, 74 Sartre, 75 Sartre, 70 71

Being Being Being Being Being Being

and and and and and and

Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness,

37. 38. 42. 43–4. 40. 39.

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nothingness is not real. While negation and the intuition of non-being may both be unique to the human condition, and are certainly an intrinsic part of man’s meaning-making mechanisms—e.g. asking questions, making judgments, conceptualizing truth, perceiving the world as in flux, fleeting, fragile—nothingness haunts being, and human intuition of this haunting nothingness allows for the above meaning-making functions to take place. An interesting component of Sartre’s thought concerning nothingness is his designation of different levels or degrees of nihilation. His discussion of the “original nihilation” demonstrates how human perception is haunted by nothingness: our sight operates via blind spots, a negating vision that erases and flattens into a totally neutral ground the bulk of what we can possibly see so that we may recognize something as a meaningful and distinct entity. Here, Sartre introduces his famous example of a meeting with Pierre in a cafe to illustrate these points. When we walk into a cafe looking for Pierre, all the other objects in the cafe synthesize into an undifferentiated ground against which one expects Pierre to appear. Their organization into a homogeneous ground is an “original nihilation,” a nihilation that is required should we have any hope of focusing our attention on any particular subject: “the original nihilation of all the figures which appear and are swallowed up in the total neutrality of a ground is the necessary condition for the appearance of the principal figure.”76 It seems to me that Sartre’s notion of “original nihilation” harkens back to Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873); here, we may find parallels between Sartre’s “undifferentiated ground” and Nietzsche’s “surface of things,” as well as between Sartre’s “original nihilation” and Nietzsche’s discussion of “forgetfulness.” About men, Nietzsche writes: “They are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see ‘forms,’”77 and “It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a ‘truth’ … We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual.”78 In other words, for man to be able to perceive a form, his senses must glide over everything that is not the form—he must nihilate, forget, overlook. The human ability to bring into focus a particular form requires a nihilation of everything else from our focus—requires that most being recede into what Sartre calls “an undifferentiated ground.” In both Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s musings on human perception, there is an essential nihilating aspect integral to the function of man’s meaning-making vision. Of course, vision can be read Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” in Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870s, edited and translated by Daniel Breazeale (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1999), 80. 78 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 81, 83. 76 77



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as shorthand for the entire host of senses whereby man comprehends his world, creating intelligible forms and guiding truths. The important point is that a degree of nothingness is intrinsic to this process, the crucial factor that allows this meaning-making to occur. In contrast to an “original nihilation,” a “double nihilation” occurs, for example, when that which one expects to find present is not there—when one plans to meet Pierre in a cafe, and discovers Pierre is absent. All the being in the cafe composes itself into a blank ground upon which one expects to find Pierre, and as it is discovered that Pierre is not there, Pierre becomes a nothingness on this very “ground of nihilation”: This figure which slips constantly between my look and the solid, real objects of the café is precisely a perpetual disappearance; it is Pierre raising himself as nothingness on the ground of the nihilation of the café. So that what is offered to intuition is a flickering of nothingness; it is the nothingness of the ground, the nihilation of which summons and demands the appearance of the figure, and it is the figure—the nothingness which slips as a nothing to the surface of the ground.79 Here, Pierre’s absence, his manifestation as a nothingness in the cafe, is a real event, an objective fact and not a mere judgment. Which leads Sartre to his next question: if nothingness is real and not just a judgment, a “perpetual presence in us and outside of us,” then “where does nothingness come from?”80 To answer this, Sartre examines the nature of the relationship between being and nothingness, asking: are they equal and complementary oppositions? Or, does one precede the other (is one more original)? Rejecting Hegel’s opinion that being and nothingness comprise two equal yet contrary extremes (opposed to one another as thesis and antithesis), Sartre argues that “non-being is not the opposite of being; it is its contradiction. This implies that logically nothingness is subsequent to being since it is being, first posited, then denied.”81 Along these lines, he cautions that it is false to regard nothingness “as an original abyss from which being arose.”82 Rather, nothingness is not, and the not of nothingness is dependent upon the is of being. Whereas being does not require nothingness in order to come into existence, nothingness, conversely, lives a “borrowed existence, as it gets its being from being.”83 This is what Sartre means by his statement

Sartre, Sartre, 81 Sartre, 82 Sartre, 83 Sartre, 79 80

Being Being Being Being Being

and and and and and

Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness,

42. 44. 47. 48. 49.

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“nothingness haunts being,” and by his claim, “Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm.”84 But being-in-itself, as a full positivity, cannot question itself (remember, a triple non-being [i.e. something negative, not positive] is integral to the act of questioning). Therefore, nihilations—founded on nothingness—require a special kind of being in order to become. This special kind of being is man: “Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world.”85 We have already seen that nothingness and negation are exclusive to human reality (e.g. it is man who destroys cities through earthquakes, asks questions, perceives fragility, etc.), but this observation leads to yet another question: what is it about man that allows him to intuit nothingness? That is, what kind of being is man, if through man nothingness is found in the world? Sartre’s answer to this question is human freedom, which he designates as that which precedes the very essence of man, the requisite for the essence of man to come into existence. What we know as “freedom,” he argues, is absolutely impossible to separate from the condition of human reality: “Man does not exist first in order to be free subsequently; there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free.”86 Man’s freedom, for example, allows him to detach himself from the world in order to contemplate being, to question, to doubt, etc. This detachment from the world is precisely nothingness. Freedom is also evident in the “cleavage” (i.e. nothingness) between one’s psychic past and present: “the condition on which human reality can deny all or part of the world is that human reality carry nothingness within itself as the nothing which separates its present from all its past.”87 Moreover, man is capable of being conscious of his own freedom, which manifests in the experience of anguish. One common manifestation of anguish, for example, happens when one realizes that the being I am now is not the being that I will be, and that therefore my future self—which I am currently not—is compelled by nothing in the present: “This freedom which reveals itself to us in anguish can be characterized by the existence of that nothing which insinuates itself between motives and act.”88 In other words, the consciousness of human freedom draws man’s attention to the always potential ineffectiveness of his motives (e.g. there is no guarantee that the present self’s desires and resolutions for the future will actually be realized in the future, for the future self [i.e. the present not self] may lack the motives of the present self). Awareness

Sartre, Sartre, 86 Sartre, 87 Sartre, 88 Sartre, 84 85

Being Being Being Being Being

and and and and and

Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness, Nothingness,

56. 59. 60. 64. 71.



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of freedom therefore manifests as anguish, signifying “that man is always separated by a nothingness from his essence.”89 Hence, it is man’s essential freedom that allows him to perceive nothingness, that brings nothingness into the experience of the world, that allows the not to be attached to the is of being. Nothingness, the ground of all nihilations, is made apparent in human freedom as the gap between our past, present, and future selves, between our motives and our actions, in our destructions, fragilities, and distances, and in the very functioning of our questions and our doubts. In short, man is the being of nothingness, or as Sartre defines man, “this nothingness which I am.”90 The way man is, in the world, is conditioned by how man is not in relation to being. Sartre argues that nothingness cannot come into the world without a being like man, but his analysis also demonstrates that many human conducts that make man what he is (e.g. questioning, destruction, the ability to perceive impermanence or change), as well as the very thing that precedes the essence of man (i.e. freedom) are themselves intrinsically dependent upon nothingness. And these human conducts, along with man’s essential freedom—all fraught with nothingness—are meaning-making structures, creating for example human experience of past, present, and future, the preciousness of fleeting things, the individual and differentiated natures of things, contemplation of one’s being in relation to the world, and so on. Nothingness, then, is exclusive to man’s experience of and ways of being in the world, it is a crucial component of man’s meaning-making mechanisms, and it is also brought into the world via the being of man.

Nothing and narrative: Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva Heidegger designates the nothing as the necessary ground upon which the being of man comes into existence. Sartre stipulates that nothingness only comes into the world through the being of man, but that nothingness, in turn, enables essential human conducts. Along these lines, I propose an essential relationship between nothing and narrative. Narrative, broadly speaking, is any fictional or nonfictional report, from the simplest subjectverb arrangement to the most complex of written, spoken, visual, gestural, sensual, or aural compositions, and any combination of these. Narrative is what Sartre might call another “human conduct,” or what Fredric Jameson defines as “the central function or instance of the human mind” in his aim

Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 72. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 78.

89 90

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to “restructure the problematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of history, and of cultural production, around the all-informing process of narrative.”91 Neuroscience suggests that narrative is hardwired in the human central nervous system, that to “desire narrative reflects a kind of fundamental desire for life and self that finds its source in our neurologic make-up.”92 The appearance of narrative capability in humans “coincides, roughly, with the first memories that are retained by adults of their infancy, a conjunction that has led some to propose that memory itself is dependent on the capacity for narrative.”93 Based on these and similar ideas, the present study takes a minimalist approach to narrative: narrative manifests in the barest moment of human reflection—in the instant when one goes from simply being to reflecting upon being. It happens when any kind of telling takes place, or when any perspective gathers itself to abstract a meaning out of the otherwise infinite muck of existence, or when the “I” emerges and again when later, it grafts itself as distinct from a world of other “I”s. Narrative, in short, is any meaning-making structure. And it is a structure that is built upon nothing. Narrative’s dependence upon nothing is an idea implied by Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism.94 One main idea of Nietzsche’s perspectivism suggests that any perspective is made possible by the action of zeroing in, so to speak: the human capacity to filter out a great percentage of the world and in exchange filter in nothing itself, so as to fashion a contrast against which a comprehensible and meaningful perspective can occur. Men, Nietzsche tells us in “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” “are deeply immersed in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and see ‘forms.’”95 Man therefore lives in a fictionalized reality, a real dreamscape. Our perception and thus experience of the world is always at least a second-hand rendition of the world, a localized and subjective version, and not the world as it truly and objectively is. As we will see, this

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 13. 92 Kay Young and Jeffrey L. Saver, “The Neurology of Narrative,” SubStance 30, no. 1/2 (2001): 80. 93 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3. 94 Songsuk Susan Hahn, in the chapter “Perspectivism,” in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), reminds us that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is not systematically developed in any single work, but instead must be cobbled together from bits and pieces of a variety of his texts, including: “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (1873), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Genealogy of Morals (1887), and perhaps even from The Will to Power (selected excerpts from Nietzsche’s notebooks of the 1880s; first published in 1901). 95 Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” 80. 91



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idea foreshadows Nabokov’s notion of “reality” in quotation marks—that all human “reality” is a storied version of the real. The idea is also readily apparent in Pelevin’s work, which features characters who construct their various realities by controlling their own perceptions and manipulating the visions of others. Nietzsche’s perspectivism—like Nabokov’s “realities” and Pelevin’s world-generating perceptions—presents human reality as an always-already fictionalized experience, for truth is but a “movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms.”96 Man’s fictionalized reality and his subjective truths about the world are brought into being through the mechanics of a nothing in the system that creates perspectives. Nietzsche depicts this nothing as a forgetting that is necessary to construct any perspective, and that moreover is a prerequisite for the very act of thinking. This forgetting not only permits man to fashion his meaningful (albeit, always somehow false or fictionalized) perspectives, but is also required in order for man to believe these perspectives to be true: “Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions … [It is] precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness [man] arrives at his sense of truth.”97 Hence, there is a double-function of forgetting, a twofold nothing, inherent in the construction of man’s perspectives that form his truths. First, man unconsciously employs the act of forgetting in order to construct those metaphors that allow for his understanding and experience of the world: by forgetting, “by overlooking what is individual and actual,”98 man arrives at concepts of things, creating his perspective. Second, it is only by forgetting again that man assuredly believes in the perspective (his “moveable host of metaphors”) that he himself generated by means of forgetting: “only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency.”99 Here, forgetting is figured as a blankness in the system; it turns an entire host and variety of being into a nothing incapable of being perceived, so as to bring into focus a certain story of being, to catch up a thread of meaningful narrative. It can be argued that what Nietzsche depicts as forgetting Heidegger and Sartre later refigure as nothing: the nothing that conditions Dasein (Heidegger), and nothingness that comes into being through man, in turn enabling his various meaningmaking mechanisms (Sartre). As such, Nietzsche’s essay offers forgetting as an early rendition of nothing’s relationship to the construction of perspectives, experience, and hence human reality. Nietzsche’s perspectivism later becomes central to postmodern theories that claim all truths are subjective, individual, localized perceptions of the

Nietzsche, Nietzsche, 98 Nietzsche, 99 Nietzsche, 96 97

“On “On “On “On

Truth Truth Truth Truth

and and and and

Lies Lies Lies Lies

in in in in

a a a a

Nonmoral Nonmoral Nonmoral Nonmoral

Sense,” Sense,” Sense,” Sense,”

84. 84. 83. 86.

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world. It anticipates the delegitimization of grand narratives, as discussed by Jean-François Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1979), and forecasts notions regarding the play of language that creates and recreates meaning absent of signifieds, as theorized by Jacques Derrida in much of his work. According to Derrida, all meaning is derived from the play of signifiers whose tethers to stable signifieds have snapped. In order to take place, the play and resultant proliferation of meaning require nothing. As Derrida told Henri Ronse in his first interview in 1967, “To risk meaning nothing is to start to play.”100 The action “to risk” carries within itself an element of nothing, as it is grounded upon a lack of guarantee that it will prove successful; non-being of guarantee resides at the heart of the risk. Thus, the play of language is instigated by a risk (pierced through with nothing) whose aim is to “mean nothing,” for “meaning nothing” prevents words, concepts, and ideas from being crystalized around one stable meaning, which ceases the play. Variations of this idea are found in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966): “The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum”;101 in Of Grammatology (1967): “One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence”;102 and in “Différance” (1968): “There is no support to be found and no depth to be had for this bottomless chessboard where being is set in play.”103 The “bottomless chessboard” functions as a metaphor for the nothing that comprises the ground upon which the free play of language occurs. The functioning of language, semiotics, interpretation, the production of meaning—these are always played out, emerge, on nothing. If play is started when there is a risk of “meaning nothing,” then play is by definition meaningless—or as Derrida later specifies, play is totally frivolous. In The Archeology of the Frivolous (1973), Derrida discusses this concept of frivolity in relation to play and writing; frivolity— a defining quality of play—is also grounded in nothing. [Frivolity] originates with the sign, or rather with the signifier which, no longer signifying, is no longer a signifier. The empty, void, friable, useless signifier … [T]he sign remains for nothing, an overabundance exchanged without saying anything, like a token, the excessive relief of a defect:

Jacques Derrida, “Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse,” in Positions, translated by Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 14. 101 Derrida, “Structure, Sign, and Play,” 225. 102 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 50. 103 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, revised edn, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 402. 100



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neither merchandise nor money. This frivolity does not accidentally befall the sign. Frivolity is its congenital breach.104 Frivolous play rests upon an empty mark, upon a signifier that connects to no signified, or, in other words, upon a signifier whose signified is nothing. Because of this signified-is-nothing, the free play of language is unleashed. Play, of course, is also at the ever-changing, ever-slipping heart of the carnivalesque, and is an essential characteristic of the perpetually becoming and transgressing grotesque body.105 In Rabelais and His World,106 Mikhail Bakhtin describes the carnival as an event released from fixed structures and official truths; likewise, carnivalesque language is language cut loose from the rigidity of dominant modes of discourse, from the eternal stability of the transcendental signified, and thus allowed to play freely. Because it has been released from official hierarchies and controlling/ limiting universal truths, the world of carnival, as well as carnivalesque language, is endlessly at play: ceaselessly inverted and inverting, collapsing oppositions, instigated and nurtured by a nothing—the non-existence of structure and rule. For example, the comic speech of coq-à-l’âne (“from rooster to ass”), which plays a significant role in Rabelais’ work, is “a genre of intentionally absurd verbal combinations, a form of completely liberated speech that ignores all norms, even those of elementary logic.”107 Bakhtin continues:

Jacques Derrida, The Archeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 118. 105 Many scholars have pointed to certain resonances in the thought of Derrida and Bakhtin. For example, Bakhtin’s dialogism and Derrida’s deconstruction have been shown to be comparable enterprises—both are eminently playful, and are similar in function and effect. See, for instance: Robert Cunliffe, “Bakhtin and Derrida: Drama and the Phoneyness of the Phonè,” in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, edited by Carol Adlam, Rachel Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin, and Alastair Renfrew (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); Dragan Kujundzic, “Laughter as Otherness in Bakhtin and Derrida,” in Bakhtin and Otherness, edited by Robert Barsky and Michael Holquist (Montreal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1990). 106 First published in 1965. Bakhtin wrote the first draft of his study on Rabelais in 1939 as his dissertation at the Gorky Institute of Literature; he was only able to submit the work in 1946, and was finally awarded his degree in 1952. Delays were caused by a combination of war, his work’s “formalistic” nature, and its lack of partinost' (party spirit). Alexander Mihailovic writes that “none of this left any overt mark on Bakhtin’s longest work; the revisions of the dissertation made for the 1965 first edition are quite minor, mostly taking the form of an expansion of certain points and a pruning of the footnotes” (Alexander Mihailovic, Corporeal Words: Mikhail Bakhtin’s Theology of Discourse [Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997], 149). 107 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 422. 104

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What is the artistic and ideological meaning of this genre? First of all, it is a game of words, current expressions (proverbs and adages), and common sequences of terms deprived of their logic and meaning. It is as if words had been released from the shackles of sense, to enjoy a play period of complete freedom and establish unusual relationships among them. True, no new consistent links are formed in most cases, but the brief coexistence of these words, expressions, and objects outside the usual logical conditions discloses their inherent ambivalence. Their multiple meanings and the potentialities that would not manifest themselves in normal conditions are revealed.108 “Terms deprived of their logic and meaning,” words “released from the shackles of sense”—these “enjoy a play period of complete freedom,” thereby establishing “unusual relationships,” bringing to the fore hitherto unrealized potentialities, and revealing the indefinite and forever-ambivalent and (therefore) promising nature of words, expression, and existence. This is the language of carnival. Like Derrida’s play of signifiers upon a “bottomless chessboard,” this language also plays freely upon a non-existing foundation. Carnivalesque language does not take place on solid ground— indeed, it cannot take place there. Instead, it must take place directly upon groundlessness, upon the very void of any kind of official structure. Upon the void, it is allowed true freedom and potentiality to generate without limits. As the site where words are refreshed anew through the free play unleashed by the lack of any limiting structure, the grotesque body of carnival may be understood as the foundationless foundation—the nothing—that gives birth to the corporeal word. Central to the image of the grotesque body is its gaping (gapped) mouth, evocative of an abyss. The grotesque body’s ceaseless becoming moreover underscores its unfinished nature, its own lack of a limiting foundation or controlling center. As such, the grotesque body is the fleshy performative embodiment of the free play of language, generated upon a non-existent foundation. Bakhtin writes, But the most important of all human features for the grotesque is the mouth. It dominates all else. The grotesque face is actually reduced to the gaping mouth [svoditsia, v sushchnosti, k razinutomu rtu]; the other features are only a frame encasing this wide-open bodily abyss [telesnoi bezdny]. The grotesque body, as we have often stressed, is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body.109

Bakhtin, Rabelais, 423. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 317; Mikhail Bakhtin, Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kul' tura Srednevekov' ia i Renessansa (Litres, 2014, PDF e-book).

108 109



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Bakhtin here highlights two main features of the grotesque body. One, the dominating, abyss-like mouth: the gap at the hub of the body, which is merely “a frame” (obramlenie) surrounding this central, all-important abyss. And two, the body’s perpetually becoming and unfinished nature, which exemplifies the endless free play of language that ceaselessly generates, annuls, then generates again new meanings—or here, new bodily forms. The grotesque body is thus the free play of language made flesh: free play (ever-becoming/un-becoming flesh) that frames a dominating abyss (the mouth). Indeed, as Bakhtin points out, the central characters of Rabelais’ The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel (c. 1532–64) take their names from words meaning “throat” and “glutton,” establishing a clear connection between the abyss-like mouth and these central characters upon which Rabelais’ narratives are built. The name Gargantua and its nicknames connote “gluttony, swallowing, devouring, banqueting.”110 Bakhtin further notes, “In Spanish gargantua means the throat. The Provençal tongue has the word ‘gargantuan,’ meaning a glutton. Apparently, Gargantua’s etymology is similar to that of the names of the other heroes: throat, gullet.”111 Likewise, “The etymology of Pantagruel has a similar connotation, the ‘ever-thirsting.’”112 By virtue of the etymology of their names, Gargantua and Pantagruel may be read as giant personified mouths—two gaping nothings, consuming holes, that quite physically nourish and generate their own surrounding and supporting flesh (“the frame”) that in turn supports the very bodily hole that spurs its being. More importantly (for the present purposes), they figure as embodiments of the nothing that produces the narratives about them (i.e. The Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel). As such, carnivalesque language is exhibited in the functioning of the grotesque body. As the grotesque body is in a perpetual state of (un-) becoming, so carnivalesque language comprises forever shuffling signifiers that endlessly (un-)create new meanings. And as the (un-)becoming of the grotesque body is arranged around an abyss-like mouth at its center, so the free play of carnivalesque language is dependent upon the non-existence of any limiting structure or rigid order, upon a nothing that allows for a pure potentiality of meanings to proliferate. The grotesque body is, moreover, the site that produces both words and the world; in particular, the abysslike mouth is the very place where words and world meet. On the one hand, the mouth directly connects the body with the physical world around it—and with its own physicality—through the process of eating. Writes Bakhtin, “The encounter of man with the world, which takes place inside the open, biting, rending, chewing mouth, is one of the most ancient, and

Bakhtin, Rabelais, 459. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 459 n.4. 112 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 460. 110 111

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most important objects of human thought and imagery. Here man tastes the world, introduces it into his body, makes it part of himself.”113 And on the other hand, the mouth is the site of language, the tongue that produces the word that narrates the body in relation to the world, generating the corporeal word. The grotesque body, therefore, illustrates the body consuming and thus uniting with the world, and it also demonstrates the production of the word made flesh. Bakhtin writes: The word is localized in the mouth and in the head (thought); from there it is transferred to the abdomen and is pushed out under the impact of the Harlequin’s head. This traditional gesture of the head ramming the abdomen or the buttocks is essentially topographical. Here once more we have the logic of opposites, the contact of the upper and lower level … Thus the entire mechanism of the word is transferred from the apparatus of speech to the abdomen. An objective analysis of this brief scene discloses the fundamental and essential traits of the grotesque. It reveals a great wealth and fullness of meaning, worked out to the smallest detail. It has at the same time a universal character; it is a miniature satyrical drama of the word, of its material birth, or the drama of the body giving birth to the word.114 This “drama of the body giving birth to the word,” exhibited in the workings of the grotesque body, begins, of course, at the abyss-like mouth, at the nothing that generates the always-becoming and unfinished body (text) that frames it. These notions of a figuration of nothing (the abyss-like mouth; non-existent structures; the condition of being released from rules and order) that conditions carnivalesque language and the grotesque body are admittedly underdeveloped in Bakhtin’s work. That is, the designation of the mouth, for instance, as an embodiment of nothing is not explicitly played out in Bakhtin’s discussion, except for, perhaps, that single moment where Bakhtin describes the mouth as an abyss. However, the work of Julia Kristeva, which draws upon Bakhtin’s, unambiguously teases out this nothing at the heart of carnival and poetic language. Tzvétan Todorov and Kristeva were among the first to introduce Bakhtin’s work to the West in the late 1960s. In “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” (1969), Kristeva presents and develops Bakhtin’s ideas: “Working from Bakhtinian terms such as ‘dialogism’ and ‘carnivalism,’ Kristeva turns them into allusions to the kind of textual play she was later to analyze

Bakhtin, Rabelais, 281. Bakhtin, Rabelais, 309.

113 114



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through concepts such as ‘the semiotic,’ ‘the symbolic,’ and the ‘chora.’”115 In this essay, Kristeva presents the writer, “the very origin of narration,” in terms that recall khôra and that make use of zero: [The writer] becomes an anonymity, an absence, a blank space, thus permitting the structure to exist as such. At the very origin of narration, at the very moment when the writer appears, we experience emptiness … On the basis of this anonymity, this zero where the author is situated, the he/she of the character is born.116 The writer is situated in a “zero-stage,” appearing as a blank space upon which the narrative world and structure can be built. In turn, this rooted-in-zero narrative structure, through the discursive workings of the narrative’s reader, crafts the writer as an author. Like the mathematical zero, a figuration of nothing functions at once as the generator of the system and outside of that system—omitted from the very system it conditions. As Kristeva is quick to specify, “in a literary text, 0 does not exist; emptiness is quickly replaced by a ‘one’ (a he/she, or a proper name) that is really twofold, since it is subject and addressee.”117 It follows that the language produced by writer-at-zero is “poetic language” (similar, as we will see, to carnivalesque language), which Kristeva designates as an “otherness” of language, a language of materiality. For Kristeva, poetic language stands in sharp contrast to language of “transparency” that is used for ordinary communication. In the language of transparency, the word itself is not sensed (the signifier is forgotten) but instead serves as a vessel that houses the signified. In contrast, Kristeva highlights carnival as an example of poetic language. She presents the carnivalesque structure as the meeting of two “texts,” a meeting that reduces these texts to nothing and in so doing revitalizes them, revealing the word’s physicality and flesh. There is thus a similar mechanic here to the one found in the positioning of the writer at zero, which structures both narrative and author: [The carnivalesque structure] is a spectacle, but without a stage; a game, but also a daily undertaking; a signifier, but also a signified. That is, two texts meet, contradict and relativize each other. A carnival participant is both actor and spectator; he loses his sense of individuality, passes through a zero point of carnivalesque activity and splits into a subject of the spectacle and an object of the game. Within the carnival, the subject

Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), 34. Julia Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” in The Kristeva Reader, edited by Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 45. 117 Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 45. 115 116

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is reduced to nothingness, while the structure of the author emerges as anonymity that creates and sees itself created as self and other, as mask and man.118 There is the meeting of word (signifier) with the world (signified) at a zero point—not unlike the meeting of word and world at the abyss-like mouth of the grotesque body. Kristeva’s analysis of nothing in relation to writing appears again in her later study on abjection, which, as I argue in Chapter 5, functions as the dark underbelly of carnival. In Powers of Horror (1980), Kristeva defines nothing as “the maternal phallus”; it is one’s confrontation with this “impossible object” where “writing takes over.”119 The maternal phallus represents an unrealized oxymoron. On the one side, it is the maternal, a primary site and embodiment of the abject.120 And on the other side, there is the phallus—that which structures all knowable and official existence, establishes the subject/object distinction, and reinforces that distinction, again and again, with its laws, order, and hierarchies. The designation of the maternal phallus as nothing exhibits nothing’s double-edged nature: it is that which is required for existence/writing and, simultaneously, it is that which must be thrust aside in order to allow for existence/writing. Kristeva argues that any phobic object (any object of abjection) figures as a “hallucination of nothing” that the writer incessantly harkens back to and endlessly writes from.121 This nothing causes anguish, but “it is anguish that causes us to speak”122—that compels us toward narration. *** These works of Nietzsche, Derrida, Bakhtin, and Kristeva point to a relationship between nothing and narrative, suggesting that nothing is essential to any narrative act. In ascribing this particular, key role to nothing, they echo Heidegger’s and Sartre’s philosophies, which assert a similarly essential role for nothing in relationship to the being of man. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 48–9. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, translated by Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 42. 120 As the abject is that tenuous, archaic, and meaningless state prior to the creation of the subject/object distinction, all that revolting ambiguity that must be “permanently thrust aside in order to live” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3), so the maternal body is a primary location of the abject where beings exist prior to their subject/object split. Kristeva discusses the abjection of the maternal body at length throughout Powers of Horror; in particular, see the sections “Confronting the Maternal” (54–5), and “Those Females Who Can Wreck the Infinite” (157–73). 121 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 42. 122 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 42. 118 119



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Moreover, the zero’s function in the mathematical system is similar to nothing’s vis-à-vis being and narrative. In the following chapters, I will demonstrate how nothing functions as both the signifier and the signified, ultimately arriving at the notion of nothing as the transcendental signified that is infinitely restructured by the very signifiers it generates.

2 Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby

Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (“Shinel',” 1842) and Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (1853) are two of the most important works of nineteenth-century literature. They are each cornerstones in their respective national literary traditions as well as in world literature and philosophy more broadly. And both explore nothing and its relationship to language, paving the way for the twentieth century’s more radical and fleshed out literary and philosophical explorations into nothing and narrative. In an oft-quoted statement that is traditionally attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky, it has been suggested that Russian writers of the mid-nineteenth century and beyond “came out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’” The story has inspired a truly impressive and massive body of scholarly analysis and artistic adaptations. In the nineteenth century, interpretation of the story tended to focus on its sociological and humanitarian aspects by intellectuals such as Vissarion Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky. “Belinsky, an outspoken leader of the liberal wing,” argues Leonard J. Kent, “interpreted Gogol to serve his ends; he insisted that Gogol was a naturalist, a realist; life was in his works; he was a depictor of what was, a staunch benefactor of the much-abused ‘little man.’”1 In the twentieth century, interpretation of “The Overcoat” shifted away from what the story says about society and humanity, and toward a more formalist analysis of the story’s verbal mechanics and devices. Especially the readings of Boris Eichenbaum (“The Structure of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” 1918) and of Andrei Bely (Gogol’s Artistry, 1934) focus more on the story’s language and form. For example, Bely writes, “In ‘The Overcoat’ there are no narrative events whatsoever, only the grating grandiloquence of official documents, which is sung not

Leonard J. Kent, “Introduction,” in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, edited by Leonard J. Kent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), xiii.

1

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by an elder ‘spirit seer’ but by a ‘great corpse.’”2 Vladimir Nabokov’s comments on “The Overcoat” should also be singled out for special attention here: Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift. But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art … When, as in his immortal “The Overcoat,” he really let himself go and pottered happily on the brink of his private abyss, he became the greatest artist that Russia has yet produced.3 Nabokov goes on to argue that “The gaps and black holes in the texture of Gogol’s style imply flaws in the texture of life itself,”4 and that, “His work, as all great literary achievements, is a phenomenon of language and not one of ideas.”5 In the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a dominant line of interpretation increasingly reduces Akaky Akakievich to less a character and more a meaningless verbal unit (i.e. a context-less letter of the alphabet) that searches for significance.6 Thus, in this brief sketch of the story’s interpretive history, we find that Akaky goes from being the “little man” in a story about society’s corruption, to a kind of “petrified pose” in a story whose plot “has only an external significance,”7 and most recently to an alphabetic letter that seeks context and meaning.

Andrei Bely, Gogol’s Artistry, translated by Christopher Colbath (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2009), 21. 3 Vladimir Nabokov, “‘The Overcoat’ (1842),” in Lectures on Russian Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), 54. 4 Nabokov, “‘The Overcoat’ (1842),” 57. 5 Nabokov, “‘The Overcoat’ (1842),” 61. 6 See, for example, Bernheimer: “Akaky actually becomes a text, a text, however, that can be deciphered not as a series of significant signs but only as a succession of discrete letters” (Charles C. Bernheimer, “Cloaking the Self: The Literary Space of Gogol’s ‘Overcoat,’” PMLA 90, no. 1 [1975]: 56); Sloane explores the “ways in which Akakij Akakievič’s name interacts with his verbal profile and the linguistic environments to which he belongs,” ultimately arguing that “Akakij Akakievič … is virtually incapable of speaking, so that the function his mouth ought to perform in the validation of the human spirit is all but nullified. The very sound of his name, repeated in the text with extraordinary frequency, becomes a phonetic icon of this deficiency” (David Sloane, “The Name as Phonetic Icon: A Reconsideration of Onomastic Significance in Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” The Slavic and East European Journal 35, no. 4 [1991]: 475, 485); and Scollins reads Akaky as “an individual alphabetic character,” arguing that the story literalizes “an isolated letter’s search for content, context and, ultimately, significance” (Kathleen Scollins, “Kako sdelan Akakii: Letter as Hero in ‘The Overcoat,’” The Russian Review 71 [2012]: 187). 7 Boris Eichenbaum, “The Structure of Gogol’s ‘The Overcoat,’” translated by Beth Paul and Muriel Nesbitt, Russian Review 22, no. 4 (1963): 382. 2



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Likewise, Melville’s “Bartleby,” while garnering little attention at the time of its initial publication, has since become one of the most cited and analyzed of American short stories, having inspired hundreds of articles and a handful of books devoted to this single work alone. Additionally, “Bartleby” has generated prodigious philosophical commentary in the twentieth century by such thinkers as Giorgio Agamben (“Bartleby, or On Contingency”), Maurice Blanchot (The Writing of the Disaster), Gilles Deleuze (“Bartleby; or, The Formula”), and Jacques Derrida (The Gift of Death), among others. The range of these interpretations is truly monumental, and I will not attempt to cover them all here, as this has already been attempted many times elsewhere.8 Instead, I will focus briefly on those interpretations that align most with the spirit of the present study. Melville’s relationship to his writing has been said to have a khôra-like structure: “He is the receptacle, a crying nurse, a formless instinct that writes itself.”9 Along these lines, Branka Arsič compares Bartleby to a cloud, to the “thought of blankness/whiteness,” “an instinct, a formless figure, or an atmosphere” allowing for antithetical and contradictory readings that taken together negate one another.10 Dieter Meindl reiterates this sentiment: “Could it be that Bartleby, who is presented as a mort vivant in Melville’s tale, in some unimaginable way experiences death? Bartleby, the literary figure, would then signify precisely nothing (or nothingness?)—something that criticism, by seeing everything in him, in a certain fashion has been proving all along.”11 Deleuze reads Bartleby’s immortal “preference not to” as “the growth of a nothingness of the will … Pure patient passivity, as Blanchot would say.”12 Agamben tells us that “As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet.”13 Following Agamben, Ana M. Manzanas and Jesús Benito Sanchez write, “Bartleby does not bring an alternative Law, or a renovated textual or

See, for example: Branka Arsič, Passive Constitutions, Or, 7 1/2 Times Bartleby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007); M. Thomas Inge, ed., Bartleby the Inscrutable: A Collection of Commentary on Herman Melville’s Tale “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Hamden: Anchor, 1979); and Dan McCall, The Silence of Bartleby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 9 Arsič, Passive Constitutions, 9. 10 Arsič, Passive Constitutions, 10. 11 Dieter Meindl, American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996), 64. 12 Gilles Deleuze, “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 71. 13 Giorgio Agamben, “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press: Stanford, 1999), 253–4. 8

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spatial practice in the office. Instead, he un-scribes the pages of the Law, empties out its manuscripts, and potentially allows for a new writing and a new Law. Rather than reviewing or redeeming the writing, with the intention of making it right, Bartleby occupies the spaces of writing with the intention of turning it again into a blank slate, a silent page.”14 This quick sampling of the interpretive histories of “The Overcoat” and “Bartleby” already reveals their kinship: these stories are about writing and language, and center upon ambiguous and absurd characters who appear, at most, little and insignificant, and often as paradigms of nothing. It is for such similarities that Agamben cites Akaky Akakievich as the “polar star” of a “literary constellation” of texts featuring scriveners, of which Bartleby is one star (other lights include Bouvard and Pécuchet, Simon Tanner, Prince Myshkin, and Kafka’s clerks).15 Following this line of thought, I show how Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby both embody the scribe who writes nothing, and the nothing that writes narrative. “The Overcoat” and “Bartleby” follow a similar basic plotline. In the first half of each story, Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby are characterized as nothings who produce a great deal of writing; in the second half of each story, each character stops writing, and therefore becomes a scribe who has ceased writing, or a writer who writes nothing. My analysis will follow this basic plotline, first exploring Akaky Akakievich and Bartleby as creative and affecting nothings, and second examining their transition into writers who write nothing.

Akaky Akakievich It has been noted that the narrator of “The Overcoat” adopts a language of ambiguity that produces a “blurred effect.”16 This is evident especially in the introductory description of Akaky Akakievich, which employs such ambiguous language as to indicate that the character is nearly non-existent. Charles C. Bernheimer, for example, suggests that Akaky “is an individual who is not quite one, a barely definable by-product of certain syntactic rhythms and repetitions.”17 Julian Graffy points out that the first thing we learn about Akaky is that it cannot be said he is remarkable, and that “this

Ana M. Manzanas and Jesús Benito Sanchez, Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture: Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2014), 24–5. 15 Agamben, “Bartleby,” 243. 16 Judith Oloskey Mills, “Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’: The Pathetic Passages Reconsidered,” PMLA 89, no. 5 (1974): 1110. 17 Bernheimer, “Cloaking the Self,” 56. 14



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negation is immediately followed by a sequence of intensifying negatives and diminutives.”18 Writes the narrator, And so, in a certain department there was a certain clerk; a clerk of whom it cannot be said that he was very remarkable; he was short, somewhat pock-marked, with rather reddish hair and rather dim, bleary eyes, with a small bald patch on the top of his head, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks and the sort of complexion which is usually described as hemorrhoidal.19 Here, Akaky is often described in terms of what he is not, a rhetorical operation that suggests he embodies a condition of not, or of not being.20 The narrator repeatedly steers away from applying a definite description to Akaky, using three times the ambiguous neskol'ko (“somewhat,” “rather”). This suggests, first of all, the ambiguity of Akaky himself, the indefiniteness of his character that cannot be transcribed into definite descriptions. But such ambiguous descriptors may also indicate the impossibility of transcribing something that is not entirely there: perhaps the narrator cannot place his pen upon Akaky because there is not much there to place his pen upon. Furthermore, many of the attributes that are positively bestowed upon Akaky are themselves nullifications or negations, functioning as signifiers of something that no longer works or exists (e.g. a bald spot, weak-sighted [podslepovat]). His face’s color is “what is called hemorrhoidal”—a description that immediately (and, I might add, unfortunately) calls to mind something much different than a face, in effect effacing him (keep this note in mind: we will soon encounter yet another faceless face). The emphasis on a certain department and a certain clerk (the indefinite odin is employed) is another type of circumlocution, whereby the narrator attempts to evade his topic, or to speak of his subject by not speaking about it. Of course, such a technique indicates that the topic under (non)discussion is a sensitive matter, but it also suggests that the narrator’s topic may not be there: such dancing around a definite description and description via nullification imply that there is nothing actually to describe, that Akaky is an embodiment of nothing. We may

Julian Graffy, Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (London: Bristol Classical Press, 2000), 85. Nikolai Gogol, “The Overcoat,” in The Complete Tales of Nikolai Gogol, volume 2, edited by Leonard J. Kent (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 305; Nikolai Gogol', “Shinel',” in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii 3 (Moscow: Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1938), 141. 20 Many critics have noted that this is a common technique of negation used by Gogol. For an overview of Gogol’s “aesthetics of absence,” see Sven Spieker, “Introduction: The Presence of Absence in Gogol,” in GØGØL: Exploring Absence, edited by Sven Spieker (Bloomington: Slavica, 1999). 18

19

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take literally the narrator’s words—“it cannot be said [nel' zia skazat' ]”—as indicative of this nothing at the heart of Akaky.21 This notion is further supported by the narrative’s erasure of much of Akaky’s history (e.g. “No one has been able to remember when and how long ago he entered the department, nor who gave him the job”),22 and his quality of living unnoticed (e.g. “The porters … took no more notice of him than if a simple fly had flown across the reception room”).23 Most significantly, Akaky’s worn-out old overcoat—also an embodiment of nothing—serves as a metonym for Akaky himself: like Akaky, the coat is the victim of many office jokes, and has also been deprived of an honorable name (the name “Akaky Akakievich” has scatological connotations, evoking the verb kakat', which is a childish word meaning “to poop”; the overcoat is referred to as a “dressing gown,” kapot, which signifies a women’s garment). Moreover, both are noted for their messily patched/splotched complexions: Akaky’s “somewhat pockmarked [neskol'ko riabovat]” face, and the coat’s clumsy and ugly patches. The most important parallel between Akaky and this coat, however, lies in their shared qualities of nothing. The coat is threadbare, worn, and with many holes—in short, it is nothing, as Akaky’s tailor, Petrovich, repeatedly asserts: “There is nothing to put a patch on [Da zaplatochki ne na chem polozhit' ]. There is nothing for it to hold on to [ukrepit'sia ei ne za chto]; there is a great strain on it; it is not worth calling cloth; it would fly away [razletitsia; scatter in the air] at a breath of wind.”24 Petrovich’s assertion that there’s nothing to put a patch on is reminiscent of the narrator’s inability to put his pen upon Akaky, discussed above. Petrovich cannot fix the coat because there is nothing left to fix, whereas the narrator cannot fix his pen upon Akaky because there is nothing there to describe. Moreover, when Petrovich asserts that Akaky needs a new coat, Akaky’s own nothingness rises before him: “At the word ‘new’ there was a mist before Akaky Akakievich’s eyes, and everything in the room seemed

It may be said that Daniil Kharms presents his own portrait of Akaky in “Blue Notebook #10,” and in so doing gets precisely at this nothing that is Akaky’s essence: “There was a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily” (Daniil Kharms, “Blue Notebook #10,” in Today I Wrote Nothing: Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms, translated by Matvei Yankelevich [New York: Ardis, 2009], 45). The rest of the description continues to erase the redheaded man until it totally un-mans him—“There was nothing!”—and the narrator concludes, “We’d better not talk about him any more” (ibid.). The detail of “redheaded,” combined with the erasure of the person in question, and the note of “it cannot be said,” together call to mind Akaky. See also: Neil Cornwell, “Daniil Kharms as Minimalist-Absurdist,” in The Absurd in Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 172–3. 22 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 306; “Shinel',” 143. 23 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 306; “Shinel',” 143. 24 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 313; “Shinel',” 150. 21



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blurred. He could see nothing clearly but the general with the piece of paper over his face on the lid of Petrovich’s snuffbox.”25 This peculiar vision of the anonymous general is another signifier of nothing, as the general’s face has been pushed through with a finger and pasted over with a square of paper: he has been rendered blank—effaced! Akaky, like the general, is the faceless face; like the old overcoat, he is nothing. In beginning of the story, then, Akaky appears as a cipher, both in the sense of a nonentity or a person of no consequence, and in the sense of a zero—a signifier of nothing, or an empty form. And this cipher is mainly characterized by a mania for copying, for producing an endless chain of signifiers. So completely does Akaky love to copy that his world is literally composed of his copies’ letters and lines. Writes the narrator, “It would be hard to find a man who lived [so much in his work] [kotoryi tak zhil by v svoei dolzhnosti] … To say that he was zealous in his work is not enough; no, he loved his work. In it, in that copying, he found an interesting and pleasant world of his own.”26 Whenever Akaky looks at something he sees on it “his clear, evenly written lines,”27 as though existence is made up of his handwritten copies. Akaky even reflects and embodies the letters he so loves to copy: “certain letters were favorites with him, and when he came to them he was delighted; he chuckled to himself and winked and moved his lips, so that it seemed as though every letter his pen was forming could be read in his face.”28 Here we find a miniature and parodic version of the “word made flesh,” or, to be more precise, the “letter made flesh”—the latter an idea Kathleen Scollins puts forward, proposing that “Akakii’s initials suggest ‘Az – Buki,’ or ‘I am the letter(s).’”29 Scollins further argues that the reverberation of kak in Akaky’s name indicates that he is the letter Kako, which voices “like” or “how,” but also serves as a preposition commonly used to indicate movement toward someone else. However, lacking context, the letter becomes “an empty form”: In short, the letter Kako’s literal meanings, as well as its status as an individual letter—cut off from the chain of signifiers, standing for nothing on its own—are indicative of the hero Akakii’s position: alienated from a meaningful context, he is but a blank reverberation, incapable of signifying anything beyond himself.30

Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 313; “Shinel',” Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 307; “Shinel',” 27 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 308; “Shinel',” 28 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 307; “Shinel',” 29 Scollins, “Letter as Hero,” 194. 30 Scollins, “Letter as Hero,” 189. 25 26

151. 144. 145. 144.

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Here, we should recall that Akaky has been effaced, and that the association with the anonymous general further renders his face a blank sheet. When the letters manifest on his face, it is therefore like they are actually traced on a sheet of paper; his effaced face gives space for the inscription. An interesting parallel here is Derrida’s analysis of Socrates mimicking khôra, which I discuss in Chapter 0 of the present study. Derrida writes: “in thus effacing himself, [Socrates] situates himself or institutes himself as a receptive addressee, let us say, as a receptacle of all that will henceforth be inscribed.”31 But divorced from context, the letters themselves are by and large meaningless. The meaningless nature of the letters is underscored by the fact that Akaky does not seem to register the content of his copies. He can copy, for sure, but any task that goes beyond mere copying—that would require he understand the meaning of the words—is beyond him. Even his own speech reflects this, comprised mostly of “apologies, vague phrases, and meaningless parts of speech which have absolutely no significance whatsoever.”32 Scollins writes, “Like the kako at the core of his name, the prepositions and particles that compose Akakii’s speech are solely relational, dependent on other, absent words for meaning.”33 It is therefore not as though he lives in the narrative world of whatever manuscript he is copying. Rather, his world is composed of letters and lines—these rudimentary parts and tools of writing—and not of narrative itself. He is, in a sense, illiterate. His incarnation of “letters and lines made flesh” signifies writing that is void of meaning. Thus, here is one way we may read Akaky, as introduced by the narrator: as a nothing that gives space for the primary elements of language to arise, that copies an endless chain of text, but that has no relationship to those words and letters beyond their surface. But should we read Akaky not just in relation to his own copying, but also in relation to the people around him, another effect of nothing emerges. This is demonstrated by those characters, the narrator included, who begin to contemplate or take a closer look at Akaky—who attempt to decipher the cipher. In each case, they are profoundly affected by their encounter with him. For example, a young clerk who participates in mocking Akaky is transformed by the experience: And long afterward, during moments of the greatest gaiety, the figure of the humble little clerk with a bald patch on his head appeared before him with his heart-rending words: “Leave me alone! Why do you insult me?” and within those moving words he heard others: “I am your

Derrida, “Khôra,” 247. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 312; “Shinel',” 149. 33 Scollins, “Letter as Hero,” 196. 31 32



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brother.” And the poor young man hid his face in his hands, and many times afterward in his life he shuddered, seeing how much inhumanity there is in man.34 Here, a sense of humanity rises to the fore where before there was none, only the ridicule of an insignificant being. The recurring memory of Akaky has physiological, emotional, and moral effects on the young clerk, causing him to viscerally feel shame and realize the dearth of compassion in the world. In short, Akaky both incites humanity and exposes its lack. He has a similar effect on the “Person of Consequence”: “he even began brooding over poor Akaky Akakievich, and from that time forward, he was almost every day haunted by the image of the poor clerk who had been unable to survive the official reprimand.”35 Sympathy also, at times, wells up in the narrator, whose tone often subtly mocks Akaky, not unlike the mocking of the office clerks. However, his occasional-mocking tone does not undo the fact that he has been compelled to tell this very story, even though, he repeatedly reminds us, much of Akaky’s history has been lost or is indescribable. In other words, Akaky Akakievich, the nothing, inspires narrative, and the narrator is moved to narrate frequently in spite of himself. But the narrator was not the first to tell stories about Akaky; the office clerks also enjoyed inventing their own narratives about him: “The young clerks jeered and made jokes at him to the best of their clerkly wit, and told before his face all sorts of stories of their own invention about him.”36 Akaky clearly inspires storytelling, offering up a blank slate for others to create their own narratives. If Akaky is a blank space, an empty character, or even nothing itself, then how Akaky affects other characters analogously illustrates nothing’s potential effects. Akaky/nothing causes awareness of one’s existence, marking lines between the human and inhuman; after all, the young clerk’s vision is brought to focus on these very lines (“he shuddered, seeing how much inhumanity there is in man [kak mnogo v cheloveke beschelovech'ia]”). And the condition of man goes hand in hand with the compulsion to narrate, a compulsion also inspired by the encounter with Akaky—at the heart of the letter (Kako) there is also the questioning impulse (the kak? or the how?). It is fitting here to recall Heidegger’s description of the nothing as that which provides the ground for beings to become aware of themselves in opposition to other beings, allowing for the human condition, and giving space for the questioning impulse to arise; or Sartre’s discussion of nothingness as essential to the human conduct of

Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 307; “Shinel',” 144. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 331; “Shinel',” 171. 36 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 306; “Shinel',” 143. 34 35

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questioning. At the same time, the narrator universalizes Akaky’s story, insinuating that this tale before us is also a tale about us—a story about a man who encounters “the various disasters strewn along the road of life, not only of titular, but even of privy, actual court, and all other councilors,”37 a narrative about “a creature on whom disease fell as it falls upon the heads of the mighty ones of this world …!”38 We are reminded that the tragedy that befalls Akaky could happen to anyone, that his story is not anomalous, but universal. Hence, if we read Akaky as an embodiment of nothing, then we may also read ourselves this way. The nothing that dwells in Akaky is also the nothing that grounds our own beings letting them come into existence (as Heidegger might argue), or emerging as an expression of our human condition (as Sartre might claim). Halfway through “The Overcoat,” Akaky stops copying. The narrator notes that the evening after his new overcoat’s debut, “He dined in excellent spirits and after dinner wrote nothing, no papers at all [nichego ne pisal, nikakikh bumag]”39—emphasizing twice that Akaky wrote nothing. And after this night, Akaky never again picks up his pen. This twist reveals another manifestation of nothing in the story, one that reinforces its relationship to narrative. Whereas before Akaky gets the new overcoat the story may be read as a tale about nothing (Akaky) and its effects (enables the condition of man, ignites storytelling), after Akaky acquires the new coat the story presents the narrative of a copier (Akaky) who copies nothing. Here Akaky becomes the scribe who has ceased writing, who now literally writes nothing. But as the story demonstrates, to write nothing produces narrative and, indeed, meaning. Once Akaky begins to write nothing, life, for him, expands exponentially: Akaky, for the first time, goes to a party with his colleagues, chases a woman (discovery of eros? romance?!), is robbed (tragedy), searches for the thief and justice (mystery, detective genre), experiences delirium (madness, romanticism), death (again tragedy, romanticism), and the afterlife as a corpse and then later as a ghost (rebirth! resolution! the grotesque! the fantastic!)—all these life (and out-of-life) experiences and genres become his as he writes nothing. Whereas before he lived in a world composed only of the rudimentary parts of language (letters and lines), he now begins to live in narrative. The connection between “writing nothing” and the creation of narrative is found here. Nabokov writes, “The clothing process indulged in by Akaki Akakievich, the making and the putting on of the cloak, is really his disrobing and his gradual reversion to the stark nakedness of his own ghost.”40 Akaky is just

Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 309; “Shinel',” 147. Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 329; “Shinel',” 169. 39 Gogol, “The Overcoat,” 319–20; “Shinel',” 158. 40 Nabokov, “‘The Overcoat’ (1842),” 58. 37 38



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as disrobed in the beginning of the story as he is in the end. As a nothing, Akaky inspires narrative in the world around him. When writing nothing, Akaky himself launches upon a narrative thread that culminates in his transformation into a ghost—a nothing that is highly meaningful. “The Overcoat,” then, traces a circle: from nothing itself as a blank space, the potential ground for storytelling, to nothing itself as meaning, the narrative itself.

Bartleby Turning now to Melville’s “Bartleby,” we find that it has much in common with Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” The narrator of the story, a lawyer who once employed Bartleby as a scrivener, begins with a disclaimer, admitting that not much is known about the subject of his report other than what he saw with his own eyes and a rumor. He writes, “I believe that no materials exist for a full and satisfactory biography of this man. It is an irreparable loss to literature. Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable except from the original sources, and, in his case, those are very small.”41 Here, we should observe that Bartleby’s biography is presented as a lost or erased narrative, “an irreparable loss to literature.” But at the same time, the lawyer’s statement that “Bartleby was one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable” suggests that Bartleby himself is an indecipherable cipher who can only be ascertained via “the original sources”—what could the lawyer mean by this? What would be the original source for a human being, or even for the biography of a person? I propose that the lawyer’s language immediately suggests that Bartleby is something that is read, like a text. However, he is not a primary source. Rather, he is the unreadable trace of a lost origin. This indecipherable cipher, this unreadable text, has compelled the lawyer to write a narrative, which cannot recuperate Bartleby’s biography (an irreparable loss to literature) but that instead situates itself as a new meaningful work inspired, as we shall see, by nothing. The lawyer presents Bartleby as remarkable precisely because little is known about him, and peculiar for his characteristic inaction, silence, stillness, colorlessness—signifiers of nothing. In fact, his description of Bartleby as he first saw him is laced with an aura of nothing: “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 Herman Melville, “Bartleby,” in Bartleby and Benito Cereno (New York: Dover Publications, 1990), 3.

41

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Bartleby.”42 Like Akaky Akakievich, Bartleby is often described via a kind of negative aesthetics: we are frequently told what he lacks, his condition of being manifesting as a kind of being-less-ness. He is motionless (the lawyer later discovers this is indeed Bartleby’s condition, as he rarely eats, never goes anywhere, and soon never does anything); pallid, as if he offers no color or character (throughout he is repeatedly referred to as grey, pale, sedate, and dim, both in appearance and in spirit); and forlorn, deserted once and for all (“he seemed alone, absolutely alone in the universe. A bit of wreck in the mid-Atlantic”).43 Bartleby’s first appearance on the threshold indicates that he resides in the liminal space between two realms. Later passages give clues as to the nature of this liminal space, employing terms such as “ghost,”44 “apparition,”45 “cadaverous,”46 and “haunting”47 to describe Bartleby’s nature and actions. Such terms suggest that Bartleby is aligned with death,48 but they also place him in a realm where distinctions between presence and absence have collapsed. To be sure, for the lawyer Bartleby registers as an oxymoronic existing non-existence. Copious amounts of text have been written about Bartleby’s infamous response, “I would prefer not to,” to the lawyer’s requests. Derrida, for example, observes, Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” takes on the responsibility of a response without response. It evokes the future without either predicting or promising; it utters nothing fixed, determinable, positive, or negative. The modality of this repeated utterance that says nothing, promises nothing, neither refuses or accepts anything, the tense of this singularly insignificant statement reminds one of a nonlanguage or a secret language.49 And Deleuze writes, “Without a doubt, the formula [‘I would prefer not to’] is ravaging, devastating, and leaves nothing standing in its wake. Its contagious character is immediately evident: Bartleby ‘ties the tongues’ of others.”50 Indeed “I would prefer not to” operates as a kind of zeroed statement, combining the conditional “would,” the deconstructed will of Melville, “Bartleby,” 9. Melville, “Bartleby,” 21. 44 Melville, “Bartleby,” 14, 27. 45 Melville, “Bartleby,” 16, 27. 46 Melville, “Bartleby,” 16, 19, 24. 47 Melville, “Bartleby,” 29. 48 See, for example, Meindl, “Bartleby and Death,” in American Fiction and the Metaphysics of the Grotesque. 49 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 74–5. 50 Deleuze, “Bartleby,” 70. 42 43



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“to prefer,” and a negation (“not to”). “To prefer” is not a wholly positive statement of one’s will, but is rather a statement of one’s ideal will that may not necessarily be realized. Furthermore, the carrying out of the preferred action is often dependent upon the agency of something or someone other than the self who has the preference. The combination of “to prefer” with the negation “not to” creates a statement of will that is, in effect, a non-statement, or a statement of a totally ambiguous, aggressively neutral will (that is to say, no will). The addition of the subjunctive “would” lends an always-already suspension or erasure to the preference not to, putting it into a quantum state: ultimately, the preference not to may or may not exist. Hence, “I would prefer not to” amounts to a statement of nothing. Finally, Bartleby’s rumored past employment at the Dead Letter Office—a kind of “erasing machine,” writes Arsič51—also associates him with nothing. The lawyer imagines Bartleby sorting through dead letters: messages that were never delivered to the intended recipient. In my reading, dead letters are symbols of meaning reduced to zero, or of the impossibility of transferring meaning from one subject to another. The lawyer insinuates that this work affected Bartleby in such a way that he too became a kind of dead letter—an emblem of potential meaningfulness, but proving indecipherable, exemplifying naught: “Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men? … On errands of life, these letters speed to death.”52 In short, Bartleby appears as an absent presence, as a figure whose defining quality is his lack of qualities, whose distinguishing actions are his non-actions, and whose meaning, like the dead letters, promises significance but never delivers. Like Akaky Akakievich, Bartleby’s only active characteristic in the beginning of the story is his devotion to copying, which is depicted as a kind of unquenchable obsession: At first, Bartleby did an extraordinary quantity of writing. As if long famishing for something to copy, he seemed to gorge himself on my documents. There was no pause for digestion. He ran a day and night line, copying by sunlight and by candlelight. I should have been quite delighted with his application, had he been cheerfully industrious. But he wrote on silently, palely, mechanically.53 Again, as in “The Overcoat,” we are presented with a figure whose two main qualities are nothing and copying. Here, Bartleby embodies the nothing that writes, as if his life is equated with the act of copying and nothing besides. He functions like an automaton, “mechanically” the Arsič, Passive Constitutions, 126. Melville, “Bartleby,” 34. 53 Melville, “Bartleby,” 9. 51 52

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lawyer tells us, like a machine and not like a human. He is the nothing that enables the proliferation of writing, and that inspires a great deal of speculation. But he himself is without narrative, pale and silent and absent of character, a blank man about which nothing can be written, other than the lawyer’s and our own perplexed reactions to him. Moreover, while the copies Bartleby generates fit right in with the lawyer’s world—eminently readable handwriting, no blotches to complain about (unlike the copies made by Turkey and Nippers), and fully readable— he himself remains an enigma, as evidenced by the lawyer’s failed attempts to “read” him as he would any other man. The lawyer cannot decipher Bartleby, and therefore does not know how to react to him, or, eventually, even how to fit him into his world. For example, the first time Bartleby tells the lawyer that he “would prefer not to,” the lawyer is utterly confounded precisely because there is no recognizable emotion or posturing in Bartleby’s statement and behavior: “Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience or impertinence in his manner; in other words, had there been anything ordinarily human about him, doubtless I should have violently dismissed him from the premises.”54 But Bartleby is not possible to read for he is without narrative and characteristics. He can generate narrative without putting any limits on its production, writing ceaselessly day and night, because he has no life of his own to live, no narrative of his own to unravel. As such, he operates in the first half of the story as the nothing that produces meaning (copies that fit right in with the lawyer’s world) but is itself meaningless (nobody can read him, decipher his motives or character; he remains an inaccessible text, or a blank page). Once Bartleby stops writing, he becomes from the lawyer’s perspective the scrivener who writes nothing, and, from our perspective, he becomes the nothing that nothings. This has many effects, the first of which is that it inserts chaos and absurdity into the lawyer’s previously knowable world. The lawyer repeatedly tells us that Bartleby “disarmed,”55 “disconcerted,”56 and “unmanned”57 him, causing the lawyer to “stagger in his own plainest faith.”58 By his association with Bartleby, he is “turned into a pillar of salt,”59 “thunderstruck,”60 and feels “disqualified … from churchgoing.”61 In other words, Bartleby causes the lawyer to call into question all those truths upon which his life is structured. This is Bartleby’s

Melville, Melville, 56 Melville, 57 Melville, 58 Melville, 59 Melville, 60 Melville, 61 Melville, 54 55

“Bartleby,” “Bartleby,” “Bartleby,” “Bartleby,” “Bartleby,” “Bartleby,” “Bartleby,” “Bartleby,”

10. 11, 16. 11. 16. 11. 11. 23. 18.



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(and nothing’s) first effect on the existence around him: he destabilizes it, turns what was once decidedly understood and unquestionably accepted into a matter of inquiry, enables questions regarding metaphysics, calls for the why. As Heidegger argues that nothing is that which allows us the finitude and space to call into existence our own beings and therefore to question, so Bartleby as nothing throws into inquiry the lawyer’s perception of his world, causing him to reconsider his place in it. The second effect of Bartleby is a derivative of the first: he inspires the lawyer to reassess his responsibility to others, and to meditate upon the condition of humanity. Writes the lawyer, “For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before I had never experienced aught but a not unpleasing sadness. The bond of common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam.”62 Catalyzed by Bartleby, the lawyer’s growing experience of humanity is accompanied by melancholy, as if the two go hand in hand. The lawyer’s final lamentation—“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!”63—reiterates this kinship between Bartleby and humanity, both of which give rise to melancholy. As discussed in Chapter 0, Freud hypothesizes a link between melancholy and nothing in “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud characterizes melancholy as the empty ego, as the presence of nothing in the subject’s psychic conception of itself. Along these lines, the growing feeling of melancholy within the lawyer indicates that he is not merely experiencing the loss of another (Bartleby), which would only inspire mourning, but that he is also experiencing an emptiness within himself. Nothing materializes in his own being, not just in his office in the form of a placid scrivener. The third effect of Bartleby upon the lawyer is that he compels this self-described “unambitious”64 man to pick up his pen and write. Bartleby—an indecipherable cipher, the unreadable nothing—therefore generates narrative. Additionally, Bartleby inspires the lawyer to engage in ceaseless interpretation: this is evident in the lawyer’s repeated attempts to “read” and meaningfully “analyze” Bartleby, who eschews and obliterates any pat interpretation that seeks to resolve him into a single correct meaning. He thwarts the lawyer’s various interpretive systems that would neatly settle the problem of Bartleby once and for all, and would put an end to the interpretive impulse. Instead, the impenetrable and unreadable nature of Bartleby only increases the lawyer’s desire to interpret, raising the stakes from the problem of Bartleby to the problem of humanity, and the lawyer’s place in it.

Melville, “Bartleby,” 17. Melville, “Bartleby,” 34. 64 Melville, “Bartleby,” 3. 62 63

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As a paradigm of nothing—as a cipher that won’t be deciphered to find an acceptable place in the system—Bartleby disrupts the lawyer’s routine (so familiar and systematic that it requires no interpretation), and defamiliarizes it. In his routine made strange by Bartleby, the lawyer comes to question the very truths that once structured his world. Through this questioning, an awareness of himself in relation to others emerges. And ultimately this inspires narrative and the interpretative act through which new meanings are infinitely born. *** Taken together, Gogol’s “The Overcoat” and Melville’s “Bartleby” illustrate nothing’s relationship to narrative, interpretation, and human existence. They also function as allegories of the writer who writes nothing. As such, these two stories together serve as an important backdrop to the writings of Nabokov, Beckett, and Pelevin, which also explore the relationship between nothing, the creation of narrative, the interpretive impulse, and human existence.

3 “Working in a Void”: Vladimir Nabokov and the semiotics of nothing

Muzhiks working in a void In Speak, Memory (1966), Vladimir Nabokov makes a statement that I find key to an understanding of his artistic methodology: There is also keen pleasure (and, after all, what else should the pursuit of science produce?) in meeting the riddle of the initial blossoming of man’s mind by postulating a voluptuous pause in the growth of the rest of nature, a lolling and loafing which allowed first of all the formation of Homo poeticus—without which sapiens could not have been evolved.1 Here, Nabokov indicates a twofold theme that is prevalent in his work. The first aspect of this theme is well known to Nabokov scholars: that is, Nabokov’s insistence on the interdependence of human reality (Homo sapiens) and art or fiction (Homo poeticus). “Reality,” wrote Nabokov in his afterword to Lolita (1955), is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.”2 In Transparent Things (1972), as well as elsewhere in his writings, this idea is reiterated: “We have shown our need for quotation marks (‘reality,’ ‘dream’).”3 This notion that Homo poeticus is a prerequisite stage in the evolution of Homo sapiens corresponds to a

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 298. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” in Lolita, edited, with preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel Jr. (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 312. 3 Vladimir Nabokov, Transparent Things (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 93. 1 2

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conception of “reality” in quotation marks: the poet (Homo poeticus) is necessary for the creation of the human being (Homo sapiens) or human “reality.” The second aspect of this twofold theme, however, has largely gone unnoticed by Nabokov’s readers: this is that “voluptuous pause” that allows for the formation of Homo poeticus, which in turn enables the existence of Homo sapiens. In a lecture on Nikolai Gogol, Nabokov once again draws a connection between artistic creation and lolling, loafing, and voluptuously pausing. While analyzing the opening of Dead Souls (Mertvye dushi, 1842) in which two muzhiks pontificate upon the wheels of Chichikov’s britzka, Nabokov declares: [The muzhiks] impersonate the remarkable creative faculty of Russians, so beautifully disclosed by Gogol’s own inspiration, of working in a void. Fancy is fertile only when it is futile. The speculation of the two muzhiks is based on nothing tangible and leads to no material results; but philosophy and poetry are born that way.4 The muzhiks’ “speculation” that is “based on nothing tangible” is a staple of Gogol’s specific artistic genius,5 but it is also more universal than Gogol, at least in Nabokov’s view: it is, in fact, what gives birth to “philosophy and poetry.” I propose that the “voluptuous pause” of Speak, Memory is analogous to the void in which the muzhiks work to generate fertile fancy out of futility, and moreover that it is just one of many figurations of a bountiful nothing found in Nabokov’s oeuvre. It is a pure blankness of action and being that does not eliminate or limit existence, but rather permits infinite potential “realities” to come into being. This nothing appears as the essential element that allows for artistry (Homo poeticus) to take place, subsequently generating the wor(l)d or human “reality” (Homo sapiens), in many of Nabokov’s writings. In what follows, I examine the role of nothing in the work of Nabokov, putting forward two main theses. The first, that nothing Vladimir Nabokov, “Dead Souls (1842),” in Lectures on Russian Literature, edited by Fredson Bowers (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1981), 18–19. 5 Nabokov, of course, was not the first or the last to comment on the role of nothing in Gogol’s work. As Sven Spieker argues, “Gogol immortalized his infatuation with zero in the bizarre signature he placed under one of his first published works. It consists of four empty circles that can be read either as the four o’s of his full name (Nikolaj V. Gogol-Jankowskij), or as zero numbers (‘0000’)” (“Introduction,” 6–7). Andrei Bely was especially interested in the Os that proliferate throughout Gogol’s narratives, reading in Gogol’s predilection for Os a concern with nothingness and absence. See: Andrei Bely, Gogol’s Artistry; Gary Saul Morson, “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation: Nonsense and Prosaics,” in Essays on Gogol: Logos and the Russian Word, edited by Susanne Fusso and Priscilla Meyer (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992); and Sven Spieker, ed., GØGØL: Exploring Absence (Bloomington: Slavica, 1999). 4



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is, in fact, reality without quotation marks (the real laid bare). And the second, that nothing is at the heart of Nabokovian patterning, the defining activity of the artist and the madman that creates all “realities.” I begin by surveying the scholarship that lays the foundation for analyzing nothing in Nabokov’s work. I then put forward close readings of two texts: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and “Signs and Symbols” (1948). The Real Life of Sebastian Knight establishes a relationship between nothing and reality (without quotation marks), while “Signs and Symbols” demonstrates how nothing inspires the patterning that generates meaningful “realities.” Ultimately, I aim to show that in Nabokov’s work, nothing plays an essential role in artistic creation, and by proxy, in creating all human “realities.”

The otherworld and loss Critical discussion regarding the otherworld and the creative function of loss in Nabokov’s work lays the groundwork for examining nothing and its role in his narratives. Regarding the otherworld, in Worlds in Regression (1985) D. Barton Johnson examines how “Many, if not all, of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels contain more than one world in varying degrees of presence.”6 According to Johnson, this theme stems from Russian Symbolism, which had an early impact on Nabokov’s aesthetic and philosophical views. Two principal ideas of the Symbolists—one, that “another, more real world” exists beyond the limits of human intelligence; and two, “That art reveals the truth of that higher order beyond our shadow world”7—are at the core of Nabokov’s aesthetic cosmology, which Johnson describes as a “two world” model.8 This “two world” model gains credence through a now widely quoted assertion Véra Nabokov makes about Nabokov’s “principal theme” in her foreword to a 1979 publication of his poems. She reveals this theme to be potustoronnost', which means on-that-side-ness, and is translated as “the hereafter” or “the beyond.” In Nabokov’s Otherworld (1991), Vladimir Alexandrov redefines potustoronnost' as the “otherworld,” and puts forward the notion that an intuition of a transcendent other realm resides at the core of Nabokov’s art. This belief in a transcendent other realm that patterns the world leads Nabokov, Alexandrov argues, to redefine “nature” and “artifice” as synonyms.9 D. Barton Johnson, Worlds in Regression: Some Novels of Vladimir Nabokov (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1985), 1. 7 Johnson, Worlds in Regression, 3. 8 Johnson, Worlds in Regression, 1. 9 Vladimir E. Alexandrov, Nabokov’s Otherworld (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 17. 6

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Among the many figurations of the otherworld found throughout Nabokov’s works, a few are associated with the notion of nothing or one of its signifiers (e.g. zero, gaps, abysses, etc.). For example, critics have pointed to lakes as otherworldly realms or liminal zones where one may pass from our world to the otherworld, and repeatedly Nabokov marks his lakes as zeros. Maxim D. Shrayer identifies the lake as one of the main elements of an “otherworldly landscape” in Nabokov’s short story “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (“Oblako, ozero, bashnia,” 1937; tr. 1941); Shrayer points to the “unusual expression” of the water as evidence of the lake’s capacity for “communication between the protagonist and the otherworld.”10 Likewise, Priscilla Meyer highlights three motifs associated with the otherworld, and one is “a lake or sea.”11 Hazel Shade (whose name, Meyer points out, derives from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake” [1810]) is a liminal character, suspended “between the human world and the spirit world, as well as between human being and poem.”12 Hazel commits suicide by drowning in one of three lakes (named Omega, Ozero, and Zero), relinquishing her liminal status and crossing over into the otherworld. The significance of the lakes’ names in relation to the otherworld is noted by Meyer: “the subject of Shade’s 999-line poem, Hazel’s suicide and the possibility of another world, is emblematized by the three Os or zeros—the lakes’ three names represent alphabet, lake, and number in that order, indicating the boundary between this world and the otherworld, its infinitude and unknowability.”13 Andrew Field also finds significance in the zero built into these three lakes’ names: In fact, there is only one lake, or ozero (the Russian word for lake), which corresponds to the glass between Shade and Kinbote, and hence is neatly set between the other two O-ish obeli (Omega and Zero), which signify the two possibilities after death, nothing and everything— omega, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, is a symbol for infinity.14 The wordplay inherent in the Russian word for lake (ozero = 0/zero) establishes the possibility that all of Nabokov’s lakes are signifiers of nothing, in addition to markers of otherworldy realms.

Maxim D. Shrayer, “‘Cloud, Castle, Lake’ and the Problem of Entering the Otherworld in Nabokov’s Short Fiction,” Nabokov Studies 1 (1994): 142. 11 Priscilla Meyer, “Nabokov and the Spirits: Dolorous Haze—Hazel Shade,” in Nabokov’s World, edited by Jane Grayson, Priscilla Meyer, and Arnold McMillin (London: Macmillan, 2001). Available online: http://works.bepress.com/pmeyer/18, 1–23 (accessed March 5, 2015), 6. 12 Meyer, “Nabokov and the Spirits,” 13. 13 Meyer, “Nabokov and the Spirits,” 13. 14 Andrew Field, VN: The Life and Art of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Crown, 1986), 345. 10



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These observations regarding lakes in Nabokov’s works raise the question: what is the significance of associating the otherworld with zero, a signifier of nothing? On the one hand, the notion that the otherworld resides beyond the limits of human perception supposes that when humans encounter the otherworld, they encounter something that cannot fully register in their system of perception. Hence the otherworld might appear as a kind of nothing, as a zero or o-zero. It remains unknown and evasive, signifying “infinitude and unknowability,” to reiterate Meyer. Along these same lines, as the otherworld is understood to be a transcendent realm and “more real” than our world, this suggests that what is real (without quotation marks) also cannot be registered in human perception, and thus appears as nothing (I fully develop this idea in my analysis of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). On the other hand, connecting the zero with the otherworld indicates that in order to access the otherworld, one must decipher the o-zero. In Nabokov’s works those with artistic sensibilities often intuit the otherworld by discovering, piecing together, and deciphering ciphers of the otherworld that are patterned throughout their own world. By reading and interpreting those lakes-ozeros-ciphers, they therefore, to echo Shrayer, enable “communication between the protagonist and the otherworld,” creating meaning in human existence (I fully develop this idea in the section on “Signs and Symbols”). Stephen H. Blackwell also suggests that the appearance of nothing signifies the otherworld in his study on the meaning of gaps and discontinuities in Nabokov’s creative and scientific work. Blackwell reconsiders otherworldliness as the “‘not-yet-known,’ or the ‘unknowable’—the limitations and lapses of human mind.”15 Recalling one of Nabokov’s most quoted aphorisms—“Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with the assistance of creative fancy,”16 which, once again, brings to mind the idea of “reality” in quotation marks—Blackwell asks “what about the things it doesn’t grasp?”17 He answers that for Nabokov, what remains ungrasped are answers to those ultimate questions (the meaning of life, the capital-T Truth, etc.). Understanding that there exist ungrasped phenomena, and detecting gaps in one’s perception of the world, allow for the possible existence of an invisible, incomprehensible, and transcendent otherworld. Blackwell argues that “The question finally becomes whether one can perceive, even indirectly, gaps and tears in reality’s texture. Science usually points away from its own blind spots; Nabokov wanted instead to celebrate them as places to seek intimations of deeper realities.”18 The appearance of Stephen H. Blackwell, The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov’s Art and the Worlds of Science (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009), 179. 16 Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 154. 17 Blackwell, The Quill and the Scalpel, 167. 18 Blackwell, The Quill and the Scalpel, 168. 15

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nothing in the texture of “reality” indicates, as Blackwell puts it, a “deeper reality”—a reality without claw-like quotes. Nabokov scholarship that focuses on loss as a creative force also provides important groundwork for a study of nothing in Nabokov’s work. Julian Connolly identifies an early stage in Nabokov’s oeuvre in which an obsession with an absent other affects certain characters to such an extent that the absence colors and even, at times, takes over their worlds: “In the first phase he often focuses on protagonists who are absorbed with an absent other—a lost love, a dead child, a missing spouse. This absorption with the other has a pervasive quality, and it can create an emotional or psychological filter through which the entire world is perceived.”19 The theme of loss also recalls formative biographical details from Nabokov’s life: loss of country, estate, father, brother, extended family, and later, a “private tragedy”—his surrendering of the Russian language. Such incredible loss perhaps explains Nabokov’s urgent fixation with memory, as demonstrated not only in his autobiography Speak, Memory and personal letters, but also in his fictional writings. In his works, memory takes on creative power: it not only resurrects pieces of the past, but also causes the past to be experienced in a more meaningful way than it was initially lived by drawing together seemingly discordant and unconnected past experiences into a harmonious whole. Nabokov defines this “supreme achievement of memory” in Speak, Memory as “the masterly use it makes of innate harmonies when gathering to its fold the suspended and wandering tonalities of the past.”20 But loss not only makes memory all the more necessary, precious, and powerful; it also functions as a creative impetus. Michael Wood suggests that Nabokov’s experience of loss becomes a catalyst for new language, that Nabokov was able to create an exquisite, unprecedented English style by losing his Russian: What matters, surely, is that Nabokov in the meantime had found, through his very loss [of Russian], a fabulous, freaky, singing, acrobatic, unheard-of English which (probably) made even his most marvelous Russian seem poor, and therefore meant that the terrible decision of his early years in America had been right, that the second language could flower for him only at the cost of the first; had to become itself a new first language, a language to write in.21

Julian W. Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 3. 20 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 170. 21 Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5. 19



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While loss and nothing are not synonymous (as I discuss in Chapter 0, the former indicates an existence that is absent or missing, whereas the latter implies non-existence that is not defined in opposition to any kind of presence), loss’ ability to spark creativity sets the stage for examining the role of nothing in Nabokov’s works. Indeed, what is lost and what never existed become difficult to distinguish from one another, especially in Nabokov’s later writings. Consider the case of Zembla in Pale Fire (1962): was Kinbote’s story of Zembla eliminated from Shade’s poem (loss), or was it never there in the first place (nothing)? Likewise, is Kinbote exiled from Zembla (loss), or does Zembla not exist (nothing)? In both cases, either a loss or nothing inspires imagination and creativity, creating Kinbote’s “reality.”

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Reality as nothing and the aesthetics of failure Given Nabokov’s well-known statements on “reality,” some of which have been quoted at the beginning of this chapter, the title of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight immediately poses a kind of riddle: it apparently promises a real life stripped of those claw-like quotation marks. But for Nabokov, what is real (without quotation marks) is evasive, unsayable, difficult (if not impossible) to know, and perhaps no more than a pipe dream. “Reality is a very subjective affair,” says Nabokov in Strong Opinions (1973), You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless. So that we live surrounded by more or less ghostly objects.22 Hence, it may even be argued that the title immediately sets the novel up to fail, to be forever collapsing beneath false bottoms. As Michael Wood puts it, the title “looks like a trap, a joke on all those who are rash enough to believe they know what it means.”23 In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the narrator V seeks to learn the real life of “one thing”—that is, of course, Sebastian Knight, his deceased half-brother. In his quest to know the real Sebastian, V repeatedly fails, and

22 23

Nabokov, Strong Opinions, 11. Wood, The Magician’s Doubts, 29.

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the real Sebastian therefore remains a ghost. These facts, along with the very title of the novel and its promise of the real life, immediately suggest two preliminary readings. One, that the real life of Sebastian Knight is impossible to tell, if not entirely non-existent. Or two, that the real life of Sebastian Knight is in fact what comprises the contents of the novel (e.g. secondhand accounts, excerpts from his writings, critical takedowns of Mr. Goodman’s biography, V’s and others’ memories, etc.); this indicates that the only real life that exists is always at least once-removed, a retelling, a reflection. The novel, I believe, affirms both of these readings. In what follows I submit my own humble opinion to Nabokov’s strong one to make the case that through V’s search, Nabokov engages in a sustained exploration of the problem of reality, ultimately concluding that the real life (without quotes) is non-existent, a nothing, and so it follows that failures to perfectly capture the real life—that is, approximations, reflections, and interpretations—generate what is considered to be and what therefore functions as the real life or our most meaningful “reality.” It turns out that the real life of Sebastian Knight is a multitude of reflections, and what is reflected is nothing. In the novel, Sebastian functions as a blind spot, a nothing around which the narrative circulates, and from which the narrative is spun. The novel can thus be read as a story about nothing, and as an allegory of nothing’s creative powers that produce the storied world or “reality.” The problem of capturing or knowing the real Sebastian is first of all compounded by the novel’s failure to definitively answer an important question: what does V mean by real? What V means by real is never explicitly defined and changes from situation to situation, but we can piece together an approximate understanding from passages in which V expresses a desire for something real, a feeling of lacking access to the real Sebastian, or even when he corrects the fallacies he perceives in Mr. Goodman’s biography The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight. For example, V states that he knows many facts about Sebastian’s life, but that these facts don’t tell the real story: “I could perhaps describe the way he walked, or laughed or sneezed, but all this would be no more than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having nothing in common with the essential drama.”24 It is often this “essential drama” that V identifies with the real Sebastian, that he pursues, and that eludes him. For V, such sundry details as gait and other physical mannerisms are not really the real he seeks. Elsewhere, V recounts a conversation he had with Sebastian, after which, “Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: Vintage International, 1992), 16.

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and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.”25 Here, “something real” implies something transcendent, sentimental, or spiritually meaningful—something incorporeal, conveyed via metaphors (“wings and heart”) rather than literal speech. In both of these examples, what is real often escapes V. It is like the otherworld, in that it is incomprehensible, ungraspable, and truer than anything V can sense about Sebastian. Hence, we see that V has a fairly traditional notion of the real: it is the “essential” drama or narrative, the core of something that makes that thing what it is, but that ultimately transcends human ways of knowing. It is this feeling that he always missed the real Sebastian that largely fuels V’s desire to write, as well as a sense that his affection for Sebastian was never fully acknowledged or reciprocated: “Two months had elapsed after Sebastian’s death when this book was started … I cannot help saying that my life-long affection for him, which somehow or other had always been crushed and thwarted, now leapt into new being with such a blaze of emotional strength.”26 Even when Sebastian was alive, V could not access his real life. When V was a child, Sebastian was always “silent and distant” toward him,27 whereas at the end of Sebastian’s life, V chastises himself, “Why had I never visited Sebastian in London? He had invited me once or twice. Why had I kept away from him so stubbornly, when he was the man I admired most of all men?”28 It is therefore not death that separates V from Sebastian’s real life. Rather, Sebastian’s death brings into focus V’s feeling that he never had access to Sebastian’s real life, which compels V to learn and attempt to write this real life story of his brother. The narrative is thus sparked by both a loss (the death of Sebastian), and nothing (V’s never-knowing the real Sebastian, the non-existence of knowing). Even Sebastian himself, in his “most autobiographical work” Lost Property,29 presents what can be regarded as his real self (here dubbed “something very like the selfest of my own self”) as an approximation (“something very like”), residing apart from himself, and shrouded in darkness: “I seem to pass with intangible steps across ghostly lawns and through dancing-halls full of the whine of Hawaiian music and down dear drab little streets with pretty names, until I come to a certain warm hollow where something very like the selfest of my own self sits huddled up in the darkness.”30 That which Sebastian regards as his real life is something he must journey for, something that is cut off from him (perhaps “silent and distant”?), something that even when found remains veiled (“huddled up Nabokov, Nabokov, 27 Nabokov, 28 Nabokov, 29 Nabokov, 30 Nabokov, 25 26

The The The The The The

Real Real Real Real Real Real

Life Life Life Life Life Life

of of of of of of

Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian

Knight, Knight, Knight, Knight, Knight, Knight,

30. 31. 14. 193. 24. 66–7.

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in the darkness”), and that is articulated in the vaguest of terms—in fact, Sebastian’s description of his “selfest of [his] own self” echoes V’s own feelings about his relationship with Sebastian, in that he senses but cannot fully access it. Furthermore, Sebastian’s account of the “selfest of [his] own self” functions as a description that actually describes nothing: the “selfest of [his] own self” is rendered in such vague, hesitant, and self-erasing terms (i.e. “I seem to pass,” “intangible steps,” “ghostly lawns,” “a certain warm hollow,” “something very like the selfest of my own self”) that it could be anything, a blank that allows for infinite possibilities. With this in mind, the meaning of the title of Sebastian’s autobiographical work takes on its full significance: the “selfest of [his] own self” is the ultimate lost property— something that never was. Sebastian’s stepmother also underscores something elusive about the real Sebastian, here termed “he himself”: “I’ve always felt … that I never really knew Sebastian, I knew he obtained good marks at school, read an astonishing number of books, was clean in his habits, insisted on taking a cold bath every morning although his lungs were none too strong,—I knew all this and more, but he himself escaped me.”31 Like V, who can describe how Sebastian “walked, or laughed or sneezed” but feels cut off from his “essential drama,”32 Sebastian’s stepmother knows much about Sebastian, but not Sebastian himself. This feeling that the real Sebastian is unknown and evasive—perhaps non-existent—is most ingeniously portrayed in the portrait painted by Roy Carswell, in which a reflection of Sebastian—and not the real Sebastian himself—is depicted: These eyes and the face itself are painted in such a manner as to convey the impression that they are mirrored Narcissus-like in clear water— with a very slight ripple on the hollow cheek, owing to the presence of a water-spider which has just stopped and is floating backward. A withered leaf has settled on the reflected brow, which is creased as that of a man peering intently. The crumpled dark hair over it is partly suffused by another ripple, but one strand on the temple has caught a glint of humid sunshine … Thus Sebastian peers into a pool at himself.33 V concedes that the portrait is excellent, but that it lacks something. Here, he draws a parallel between Carswell’s portrait and his own incomplete understanding of Sebastian. He believes he will not know the real Sebastian

Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 28–9. Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 16. 33 Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 117. 31 32



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without knowledge of the woman who, as Carswell puts it, “smashed [Sebastian’s] life.” V explains, No, I want to know more. I want to know all. Otherwise he will remain as incomplete as your picture. Oh, it is very good, the likeness is excellent, and I love that floating spider immensely. Especially its clubfooted shadow at the bottom. But the face is only a chance reflection. Any man can look into water.34 This portrait of Sebastian’s reflection in a pool contains a number of elements that are reflected throughout the novel, creating a narrative mise en abyme: reflections of reflections that circle around an abyss—that is, Sebastian. One of the most important elements of the painting that is reflected elsewhere is the spider. Unlike Sebastian, the spider is not painted as a reflection. Instead, in the portrait the spider floats on the water marring Sebastian’s reflection. The spider reappears precisely in the scene when V believes he has located the painting’s missing element, the mysterious woman who “smashed [Sebastian’s] life”: Nina Rechnoy, who is masquerading as Madame Lecerf. V unmasks her with the spider’s reflection. He says in Russian that she has a spider on her neck, and even though there is no spider there and Madame Lecerf (if she is, indeed, Madame Lecerf) does not know Russian, she brushes her neck and declares, “There’s something on my neck, I feel it.” With this, V believes he unmasks Nina Rechnoy. In a sense, he puts the “reflection” of the spider on a person (Nina), inverting the portrait of Sebastian Knight where a spider appears on the reflection of a person (Sebastian). It may seem, therefore, that here V manages to complete the portrait of Sebastian, to fill in the missing piece. But instead, V purposely botches it, mars the reflection so to speak, by leaving before asking her any questions: “What was the use of asking!”35 Whatever knowledge Nina could provide would not bring V any nearer to knowing the real Sebastian, would merely amount to yet another false bottom. Secondly, by portraying a reflection of Sebastian and not Sebastian himself, the portrait reenacts (or reflects) the experience of the real Sebastian always remaining inaccessible. It is as though V longs to get past Sebastian’s reflections and to the very Sebastian that is reflected. But when we consider the notion that any portrait functions as a re-presentation, reflection, or interpretation of a person, it follows that Carswell’s portrait of Sebastian operates as a representation of a reflection of Sebastian, and is therefore at least twice removed from its reflected subject. The real Sebastian exists as

Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 118. Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 172.

34 35

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a doubly absent entity in his own portrait. The portrait therefore illustrates the infinite succession of false bottoms collapsing, mimicking V’s search (and Nabokov’s comments on reality). But a portrait in a novel ostensibly about the real life of Sebastian Knight, a portrait that portrays the novel’s title character as a reflection and not as “he himself,” strongly suggests that the only real life of Sebastian that exists (and that ever existed) is a reflection, always slightly distorted, always somewhat unknown. At the same time, because the portrait features a reflection, it puts its viewers into the position of its reflected subject. Thus, in a way, anyone who stands before the portrait of Sebastian Knight becomes Sebastian Knight. “Any man can look into the water,” remarks V, and indeed, any man can peer into the portrait’s pool, which will reflect him back as Sebastian Knight. The portrait therefore presents a paradox: any man can be Sebastian, but Sebastian himself is not there, and can only be rendered via a reflection. This idea culminates in the final pages of the novel, when V announces a great secret he discovered precisely because he made a monumental failure, landing on yet another false bottom: he mistook another dying man’s light breathing for Sebastian’s. So I did not see Sebastian after all, or at least I did not see him alive. But those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my life as completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoken to me before dying. Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being—not a constant state—that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus—I am Sebastian Knight.36 Once again, Sebastian eludes V, yet this time, V uncovers a secret, and experiences something meaningful and real, “something with wings and a heart.” Furthermore, the secret he discovers does not require that he be in the presence of the flesh-and-blood Sebastian. In fact, it is discovered in the presence of what turns out to be a mistaken Sebastian—a mistake that V recognizes, and that nevertheless does not invalidate the secret he has uncovered. Here, the real Sebastian is found in a misreading, in an interpretation that turns out to be empirically false, in something that represents Sebastian but is not in fact Sebastian—in a reflection, in a failed encounter. What makes this failed encounter differ from all earlier failed

Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 202–3.

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encounters is that this time V stops searching for the real Sebastian prior to or beyond the reflection, and embraces the reflection itself as the real Sebastian. And because the real Sebastian is “not a constant state” but instead is a “manner of being,” it follows that anyone may be Sebastian— anyone may stand before Sebastian’s portrait and become that which the portrait reflects, which is what V does in these final moments (“Thus—I am Sebastian Knight”). Indeed, in the novel’s final lines, reflections usurp that which they are supposed to reflect, and masks become actual faces. V imagines himself performing Sebastian Knight, only to realize that in doing so he has become Sebastian Knight: “try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian’s mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”37 The distinction between what is a reflection and what is reflected, what is a signifier and what is signified, or what is a performance of Sebastian Knight and what is the real Sebastian Knight, has collapsed. What happens here is that V’s conception of a stable, transcendent, pre-signified real is abandoned—this kind of real does not exist, it is nothing, or at best it remains unknown and inaccessible—and in its place an understanding of the real as comprising shifting and infinite reflections takes center stage: this is Nabokov’s “reality” in quotation marks, and this is the only real life that V or any of us can access. Finally, when V comments “perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows,” he embraces precisely what has plagued him throughout the novel: that the real life is ultimately unknowable, non-existent. When V declares himself to be Sebastian in the novel’s finale (or vice versa, or to be some other anonymous and unknown person), we may retroactively perceive certain traits that V and Sebastian have in common. We have already seen how an unmediated, pre-reflected real Sebastian is non-existent and unknown in the novel; careful readers will notice that V presents himself as an unknown and non-existent figure as well. One way he accomplishes this is by admitting he is trying to stay out of the narrative, while undermining this desire by repeatedly drawing attention to the fact that he is doing so. He shows off the template for this trick, in fact, in the very first paragraph of the novel, but with the woman whose diary helps structure the beginning of his account: Sebastian Knight was born on the thirty-first of December, 1899, in the former capital of my country. An old Russian lady who has for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in Paris the diary she had kept in the past … On second thought I

Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 203.

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cannot see any real necessity of complying with her anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Olga Olegovna Orlova—an egg-like alliteration which it would have been a pity to withhold.38 Here, V draws attention to someone who wishes to remain anonymous, but in calling attention to this, renders that anonymity something to contemplate. When on second thought he reveals her name, the fact that he originally planned to withhold it makes it all the more significant. Her name’s three Os evoke the quality of a generative origin in their “egg-like alliteration,” but they may also be read as three zeros, similar to the three lakes in Pale Fire, Omega, Ozero, and Zero. The three Os of the diary keeper’s name parallel the three zeros that Sebastian’s birthday connotes: December 31, 1899, right on the cusp of a new month, a new year, a new century. In the utterly minuscule, nearly non-existent liminal moment precisely between December 31, 1899 and January 1, 1900, we can imagine month, year, and century all being reset at zero. We find yet another zero echoed in the birthplace of Sebastian: a capital that is, in the present time of the narrative, no longer the capital. In this way—by drawing attention to her anonymity and then by revealing her name, which itself points to a zero that is reiterated in the time and place of Sebastian’s birth—V establishes a model for his own anonymity. For some “obscure reason” V would also like to hide his identity, remaining anonymous in the text. He frequently, and obviously, withholds his name. When he recounts conversations in which someone asks for his name, he does not include his response. Other times he employs a circumlocution such as “My name is so-and-so,”39 or quotes Sebastian’s reference to him as V.40 His deliberate attempt to “put into this book as little of [his] own self as possible,”41 and his absence from Mr. Goodman’s biography on Sebastian Knight (“to readers of Goodman’s book I am bound to appear non-existent—a bogus relative, a garrulous impostor”),42 imply that V, like Sebastian, as a real (no quotation marks) life is also evasive, unknown, and ultimately non-existent—and moreover V wants to appear as such. He also presents himself as the narrative’s non-existing author, which suggests that the creative origin or generativesource (another egg-like OOO) of the novel is also non-existent. Hence the novel manifests as a kind of much ado (i.e. infinite reflections, refractions, interpretations, subjective accounts) about nothing (i.e. the real life of Sebastian Knight), generated by a non-existent author (i.e. V). Nabokov, Nabokov, 40 Nabokov, 41 Nabokov, 42 Nabokov, 38 39

The The The The The

Real Real Real Real Real

Life Life Life Life Life

of of of of of

Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian Sebastian

Knight, Knight, Knight, Knight, Knight,

3. 140. 69. 139. 4.



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This notion that The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is a rich narrative of reflections about nothing is substantiated when V draws a parallel between his own project and Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. At one point during an interview, V muses to himself, “For a minute, the object of my coming seemed to me madly absurd. Somehow, too, I remembered Chichikov’s round of weird visits in Gogol’s Dead Souls.”43 This reference to Gogol’s work proposes a kinship between V and Chichikov, as well as a similarity between their respective quests. As V positions himself as non-existent in his narrative, so Chichikov may be read as an embodiment of nothing, as a cipher who other characters interpret in order to discover who he really is (the real life of Chichikov?!).44 And while Chichikov journeys the Russian countryside purchasing dead souls from landowners, V travels through Europe acquiring information about his half-brother; the reference to Chichikov indicates that like purchases of dead souls, the information that V garners about Sebastian amounts to nothing. These parallels take on full significance when we recall Nabokov’s own comments on Gogol and Dead Souls, which I discuss at this chapter’s opening, but which merit repeating here: “[The muzhiks] impersonate the remarkable creative faculty of Russians, so beautifully disclosed by Gogol’s own inspiration, of working in a void. Fancy is fertile only when it is futile. The speculation of the two muzhiks is based on nothing tangible and leads to no material results; but philosophy and poetry are born that way.”45 Speculation based on nothing tangible, on nothing real, driven by a permanent futility, but nevertheless producing along the way fancy, philosophy, and poetry, is an apt description of V’s narrative. In The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, such speculation takes on many forms, including (but not limited to) accounts of Sebastian from people who knew (of) him, excerpts from Sebastian’s own novels and letters, reviews and opinions about Sebastian’s work, Roy Carswell’s portrait, and V’s critical takedowns

Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 141. Chichikov’s characteristic nothingness is perhaps most famously depicted in the opening pages of Dead Souls, wherein the narrator describes Chichikov via negative aesthetics, never positively declaring who or how Chichikov is, but rather relying on “neither this nor that” (ni to … ni drugoe …) constructions to introduce the novel’s strange hero. In “Gogol’s Parables of Explanation,” Gary Saul Morson analyzes the hermeneutic impulse that both the dead souls and Chichikov’s embodied nothingness instigate: “As characters were first invited to evaluate nothing [i.e. dead souls], now they are compelled to interpret it. The two problems are in fact closely related, because to understand the meaning of Chichikov’s purchases of nothing, one would have to know why he wants it. And to know that, perhaps it would be helpful to know who Chichikov is. But because Chichikov is a chameleon who reflects the humors of anyone he is with, he, too [like dead souls], is a void to be interpreted” (216). Because Chichikov offers no defined character, he can be interpreted into anyone, including Napoleon or the limbless Captain Kopeikin. See also the section on Chichikov in Bely, Gogol’s Artistry, 107–16. 45 Nabokov, “Dead Souls (1842),” 18–19. 43 44

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of Mr. Goodman’s biography. All these figure as reflections of Sebastian: in each instance, Sebastian is shown in a figurative mirror of some kind—for example, in the memories of one of Sebastian’s Cambridge friends, or in a “fictitious letter” from Sebastian’s Lost Property46—but the real Sebastian beyond or before the mirror is not there. Moreover, each of these reflections is imperfect, incomplete, and somehow false—“Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale”47—and each reshaping is a kind of reflection that naturally distorts its subject. Still, these imperfect reflections make up the only reality V, or Sebastian, or any of us ever experience; they are in fact what comprise The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. In a sense, Nabokov suggests that we are all muzhiks working in the void of our own real lives; our efforts to understand are ultimately futile, the words we use always fail to settle on our shoulders when the time is right, but these efforts accidentally, miraculously, conjure up our own meaningful, real, and incomplete selves. As V says of the young Sebastian: “Or, perhaps, we shall be nearer the truth in supposing that while Sebastian sat on that fence, his mind was a turmoil of words and fancies, uncomplete fancies and insufficient words, but already he knew that this and only this was the reality of his life.”48 *** Hence, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight puts forward the notion that reality without quotation marks is non-existent, and that there is only “reality,” which is generated through some kind of reflection, contemplation, imagination, subjectivity, fictionalizing. We find this symbiotic connection between reality and nothing elsewhere in Nabokov’s oeuvre, both in works that came before Sebastian Knight, and in works that followed. An early manifestation of this is evident in The Defense (Zashchita Luzhina, 1930; tr. 1964). The chess master Luzhin, with an utterly forgettable face “like a pale spot,”49 absorbs himself in the world of chess. When his wife eventually forbids him from playing, a palpable void is left in Luzhin’s world, “for what else exists in the world besides chess? Fog, the unknown, non-being … [Tuman, neizvestnost', nebytie …]”50 Here, the ellipsis appears when the text needs to articulate nothing, which is a device Nabokov employs elsewhere, as I will soon demonstrate. To combat the Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 112. Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 50. 48 Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 48; italics mine. 49 Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 31; Vladimir Nabokov, Zashchita Luzhina (Olma-Press, 2003), 20. 50 Nabokov, The Defense, 139; Zashchita Luzhina, 69. 46 47



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void of reality, Luzhin constructs a world in which everything is part of a huge, all-encompassing chess game. To the outside world he suffers from a madness that is similar to the referential mania of “Signs and Symbols” (I discuss this fully in the next section). The void inspires his madness, but it is madness that has the power to create worlds, to create “reality.” His death by defenestration at the novel’s end is his full solipsism into the “reality” he created out of nothing. Nabokov also explores these themes in The Eye (Sogliadatai, 1930; tr. 1965). The narrator believes he has committed suicide and is living an existence beyond the grave that amounts to no more than his “leftover” imagination. The narrator becomes obsessed with the mysterious Smurov, desiring to learn all about him, to “unmask” the “original” Smurov, and to “dig up the true Smurov”;51 already we see how this foreshadows V’s attempts to uncover the real Sebastian. When it is revealed to the narrator that he is still very much alive and that he is in fact Smurov, he amends his beliefs: it is not that he is dead (an absence), but that he does not exist (nothing). He explains, “I do not exist [menia net]: there exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me. With every acquaintance I make, the population of phantoms resembling me increases. Somewhere they live, somewhere they multiply. I alone do not exist.”52 It is because an original, real Smurov does not exist that a never-ending yarn of stories about Smurov can be told (like Chichikov, like Sebastian), that an infinite number of images reflecting him can proliferate. His nothingness lets loose Homo poeticus, who generates the various versions of Smurov as a Homo sapiens. Here, we have also stumbled upon an allegory of language’s semantics: the familiar tale of the gap between the signifier and the signified that allows for meaning to exist and proliferate. Smurov is, quite literally, the gap itself, perhaps even nothing as the transcendental signified that “thousands of mirrors reflect,” or that thousands of signifiers signify. He engenders stories by virtue of his non-existence, just as the gaps in language engender meaning. In Invitation to a Beheading (Priglashenie na kazn', 1935–6; tr. 1959), we find another non-existence in Cincinnatus, a young man who sits in a cell and awaits his execution, condemned to death for the crime of “gnostical turpitude.” His crime is “so rare and so unutterable” that it requires linguistic circumlocutions: it is otherwise known as his “translucence” (prozrachnost' ) and “impenetrability” (nepronitsaemost' ).53 These details point to something in Cincinnatus that is incapable of being circumscribed Vladimir Nabokov, The Eye (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 54; Vladimir Nabokov, Sogliadatai (Azbuka-klassika, 2010, PDF e-book). 52 Nabokov, The Eye, 103; Sogliadatai, PDF e-book. 53 Vladimir Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 21, 72; Vladimir Nabokov, Priglashenie na kazn' (Azbuka-klassika, 2010, PDF e-book). 51

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because of its extremity (infinity), or because of its non-existence (nothing). He is a thoroughly ambiguous being, both overwhelmingly present and utterly absent at the same time. This presence combined with absence is particularly apparent when the narrator attempts to describe Cincinnatus: of the light outline of his lips, seemingly not quite fully drawn but touched by a master of masters; of the fluttering movements of his empty, not-yet-shaded-in hands; of the dispersing and again gathering rays in his animated eyes; but even all of this, analyzed and studied, still could not fully explain Cincinnatus: it was as if one side of his being slid into another dimension, as all the complexity of a tree’s foliage passes from shade into radiance, so that you cannot distinguish just where begins the submergence into the shimmer of a different element.54 Cincinnatus is a liminal being, partially residing in his cell and partially residing in another, unknown, otherworldly dimension—a dimension that is registered in terms of gaps and non-existence, or nothing. This accounts for his hazy and ghostly features (e.g. his “not-yet-shaded-in hands,” rays that both disperse and gather in his eyes, lips not-quite-fully drawn). It is this otherworldly, ineffable part of Cincinnatus that is the most real. This becomes evident in various scenes where Cincinnatus strips himself of his presence to dwell in an eternal, free, and unsayable … He stood up and took off the dressing gown, the skullcap, the slippers. He took off the linen trousers and shirt. He took off his head like a toupee, took off his collarbones like shoulder straps, took off his rib cage like a hauberk. He took off his hips and his legs, he took off his arms like gauntlets and threw them in a corner. What was left of him gradually dissolved, hardly coloring the air. At first Cincinnatus simply reveled in the coolness; then, fully immersed in his secret medium, he began freely and happily to …55 In the original Russian text, Nabokov used a dash, which he later changed to an ellipsis in the English translation. Considering Nabokov’s use of ellipses elsewhere in his works, it appears he often uses this punctuation either as a signifier of nothing or of something lost, or when his language reaches its limit of representation. Whether humorously signifying something that no longer exists as in “Ultima Thule” (“To the lady who has lost her right

Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 121; Priglashenie na kazn', PDF e-book. Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 32; Priglashenie na kazn', PDF e-book.

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hand: I kiss your ellipsis [mnogotochie]”),56 or representing trauma that cannot be put into words as in Lolita (“I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face … that look I cannot exactly describe … an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration”),57 the ellipses in Nabokov’s work are often expressions of absence, nothing, and the unsayable. Thus, when Cincinnatus begins “freely and happily to …”, it seems he begins to freely and happily non-exist, at least in his current “reality”—it is a state that his language cannot express. We find this ellipsis reiterated when Cincinnatus describes his process of divestment: I am taking off layer after layer, until at last … [i nakonets …] I do not know how to describe it, but I know this: through the process of gradual divestment I reach the final, indivisible, firm, radiant point, and this point says: I am! like a pearl ring embedded in a shark’s gory fat—O my eternal, my eternal … [moe vernoe, moe vechnoe …] and this point is enough for me—actually nothing more is necessary.58 The ellipses in the above passage may be read not as moments when the thought is cut off or suspended, but as the only way Cincinnatus can express the state that he comes to embody. It is a state that does not exist in the “reality” he occupies, therefore manifesting as a nothing synonymous with his eternal and his true. In the chapter “Ultima Thule” of his unfinished Russian novel Solus Rex (1939–40), Nabokov explores this theme in a scene that he eventually gives to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, specifically to Sebastian’s final novel The Doubting Asphodel. This chapter tells the story of Ilya Falter, who is struck by lightning and, as a result, has “accidentally solved ‘the riddle of the universe.’”59 The narrator begs Falter to tell him this “Truth with a capital T that comprises in itself the explanation and the proof of all possible mental affirmations,”60 but Falter refuses the narrator’s entreaties, claiming that the information would crush him as it has others. However, on his deathbed, Falter sends the narrator a message, in which it appears he has conveyed this ultimate truth, only to black out those lines that contain the answer. As in Sebastian’s The Doubtful Asphodel, the real truth is

Vladimir Nabokov, “Ultima Thule,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 500; Solus Rex, available online: http://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/ ultima.txt (accessed 15 March 2015). 57 Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 283. 58 Nabokov, Invitation to a Beheading, 90; Priglashenie na kazn', PDF e-book. 59 Nabokov, “Ultima Thule,” 509; Solus Rex. 60 Nabokov, “Ultima Thule,” 515; Solus Rex. 56

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brought to the lip of a deathbed, only to be taken into darkness and silence at the last moment. Or is it? Can it not be that the blacked-out answer is the capital-T Truth of which Falter speaks? That “no answer” or a figuration of nothing is indeed the answer to the riddle of existence? The repetition of this scene in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight testifies to its significance in Nabokov’s work. When Nabokov directly approaches reality without quotation marks, or Truth with a capital T, he delivers silence and blackness, forever false bottoms—renderings of nothing. These renderings of nothing could of course be read as Nabokov taunting his readers, but I think they are something more, his way of answering the puzzle: the real life, the capital-T Truth—these do not exist outside of imagination, reflection, interpretation. Otherwise, they are nothing. Another way that Nabokov suggests the non-existence of reality without quotation marks is by writing characters who turn out to be impossible, should careful readers decipher the full range of details about them. One of the best examples of this is found in Pnin (1957), whose narrator writes from the perspective of omniscience even though he is merely an acquaintance of Pnin. Moreover, Pnin considers the narrator to be a “dreadful inventor,”61 a person who perhaps lies about Pnin’s life. The narrator’s unreliability is corroborated by many contradictions and plotholes in the text.62 The narrative, then, repeatedly draws attention to itself as a fabrication and falsehood; if we have been careful readers, we cannot believe what we have been told about Pnin. And should we, adopting V’s quest for the real life, try to determine the real life of Pnin, we encounter a never-ending series of false bottoms—a narrative that repeatedly erases the reality of Pnin by virtue of its inconsistencies, falsities, and contradictions—until finally, Pnin flees the text for another, Pale Fire. Pnin becomes an impossible character, not unlike the “impossible butterfly” that graces a book cover among Sebastian’s belongings in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.63 We find this connection between nothing and reality in Ada (1969) as well. Often, characters relate reality to various emblems of nothing. For instance, “so struck was [Demon] by the wonder of that brief abyss of absolute reality between two bogus fulgurations of fabricated life.”64 In Ada’s own words, “In ‘real’ life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void—unless we be artists ourselves, naturally.”65 And in the words of

Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 185. See, for example, David H. Richter, “Narrative Entrapment in Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols,’” Papers on Language and Literature 20 (1984): 424–7. 63 Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 37. 64 Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 12. 65 Nabokov, Ada, 426. 61 62



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Lucette, “I’m like Dolores—when she says she’s ‘only a picture painted on air.’”66 In each instance, the person in question connects his or her essential nature or reality with a figuration of nothing—abyss, void, or air. These examples, while by no means comprising an exhaustive list, point to a pattern laced throughout Nabokov’s work in which reality laid bare appears as a gap in the field of representation or as a non-existence in the plane of being. We create our various, infinite, and meaningful “realities” upon this very gap, via the referential mania this nothing inspires.

“Signs and Symbols”: Patterning and nothing In “Signs and Symbols,” an émigré couple try to help their adolescent son who suffers from “referential mania,” a disease that causes one to perceive and create meaningful patterns out of signs and symbols that do not exist in the eyes of those not afflicted by referential mania. In evaluating the many potential signs and symbols laced throughout the story (e.g. birds, trees, playing cards, jellies, etc.), scholars have put forward myriad interpretations that attempt to explain: signs and symbols of what? My interpretation uncovers a zero at the core of referential mania, proposing that the signs and symbols are of nothing. Furthermore, I have found that variations of referential mania are present in many of Nabokov’s works. These variations are always some kind of patterning (and therefore, meaning-making) mechanism that works via nothing. The following discussion first demonstrates how nothing appears and functions in “Signs and Symbols,” and then turns to a close analysis of referential mania and the role nothing plays in its operation. Finally, I introduce analogues of referential mania found in Nabokov’s other works, demonstrating how nothing often resides at the heart of the patterning that creates both meaning and madness in his narratives. The plot of “Signs and Symbols” strings together a series of canceled happenings, thwarted wills, and almost incidents that always end at nothing—a naught-ward narrative. Most basically, the story covers one day made up of a chain of nullified actions: an émigré couple want to bring a birthday present to their mentally ill son, but are turned away because the boy attempted to commit suicide earlier that day, and their presence may further trouble him; later that night, the husband makes plans to take his son out of the sanitarium, but is interrupted by three telephone calls; the first two telephone calls are wrong numbers, and the phone rings a third time just as the narrative closes, “sign-ing” the finale with a call that is never picked up, and thus ending on a hole in the plot. Even minor Nabokov, Ada, 464.

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events are marked by nullification. For instance, the underground train loses its “life current” as the couple are on their way to the sanitarium;67 the husband wants to unlock his door, but realizes that his wife has taken the key with her; he wants to sleep, but cannot. These zeroed events that comprise the story indicate, first of all, that canceled happenings are still creative material. This idea is substantiated when we compare the structure of the naught-ward narrative in “Signs and Symbols” to similar plotlines elsewhere in Nabokov’s work, which also operate via a kind of erasure. For example, the narrative line of Pnin is composed of a string of averted incidents. The narrative repeatedly sets up Pnin for some sort of mishap or tragedy, or braces its readers for some kind of disaster, all of which are always avoided in the end. David H. Richter dubs this narrative device “the interrupted pratfall,” and explains: “Pnin, like Lolita, is constructed around a single device of narrative entrapment—arousal and frustration—which is played out, like variations on a theme, again and again.”68 An “interrupted pratfall” is another way of describing a “foiled” plot; of course, “to foil” means to bring a scheme or effort to naught. Such naught-ward plots repeatedly return to a lodestone nothing, but in doing so generate narrative. We find an earlier version of this in Mary (Mashen'ka, 1926; tr. 1970), whose main narrative thread is constructed upon Ganin’s all-consuming desire to see Mary after years of separation, only to culminate with his decision not to meet Mary at the train station after all. At the very beginning of Mary’s action, attention is drawn to a sign on the door to the toilet: “two crimson noughts [dva puntsovykh nulia] deprived of the rightful digits with which they had once denoted two Sundays on Herr Dorn’s desk calendar.”69 These zeros foreshadow the ultimate direction of the plot: a reunion that will not happen, or an occurrence of nothing. However, we may also say that these are the very noughts that propel the narrative forward. Their association with Sunday is significant in this regard: the action of the novel begins on a Sunday and ends on the following Saturday. Sunday is, of course, the day of the “voluptuous pause,” mentioned at the opening of this chapter. As Nabokov comments in Speak, Memory: “Toilers of the world, disband! Old books are wrong. The world was made on a Sunday.”70 Mary is the narrative world created by those Sunday noughts, which propel the narrative toward its finale wherein Ganin realizes that other than his remembered image of Mary, “no Mary existed, nor could exist.”71 This

Vladimir Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” in The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 598. 68 Richter, “Narrative Entrapment,” 420. 69 Vladimir Nabokov, Mary (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 6; Vladimir Nabokov, Mashen' ka (Azbuka-Attikus, 2013, PDF e-book). 70 Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 298. 71 Nabokov, Mary, 114; Mashen'ka, PDF e-book. 67



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realization releases Ganin from his imprisoning preoccupation with the past, and launches him on a spontaneous adventure, to the sea. In a similar way, then, the presence of a naught-ward narrative in “Signs and Symbols” signifies a nothing at work in the text. Nothing and nullification also characterize the central characters: a triad of husband, wife, and son, who all remain unnamed in the story. Their anonymity is heightened by the fact that other, minor characters are given names: for instance, Mrs. Sol, the next-door neighbor who is only mentioned in a parenthetical aside; the psychiatrist, Herman Brink, who writes of their son’s disease in a scientific journal; a stranger on the bus who resembles an old friend Rebecca Borisovna; or even Charlie, the person that the mistaken caller repeatedly asks for; as well as many others (e.g. Aunt Rosa, Dr. Solov, Elsa). It appears that the story is blatantly peppered with many named minor characters in order to construct a sharp dichotomy against the anonymous central characters. Hence, readers begin to experience the central characters’ names as obvious blanks: we wonder why they remain anonymous when minor characters are given names, and the non-existence of their names in the text therefore becomes something to contemplate and experience (similar to V’s anonymity, discussed above). Moreover, it is named absences—characters who never actually appear in the narrative—that define through contrast the unnamed central characters. Here, for example, is how the story describes husband and wife: Her drab gray hair was done anyhow. She wore cheap black dresses. Unlike other women of her age (such as Mrs. Sol, their next-door neighbor, whose face was all pink and mauve with paint and whose hat was a cluster of brookside flowers), she presented a naked white countenance to the fault-finding light of spring days. Her husband, who in the old country had been a fairly successful businessman, was now wholly dependent on his brother Isaac, a real American of almost forty years standing. They seldom saw him and had nicknamed him “the Prince.”72 In this passage, husband and wife are described in terms that tell us more about who they are not, than about who they are. The wife is unlike women of her age, is anything but Mrs. Sol, who is characterized with an overabundance of bright colors and clustered flowers that resonates in her name, and whose excess is even more firmly established by the run-on sentence in which she is animated. In short, the wife is not. Likewise, the husband is characterized by what he used to be but no longer is (a sort of characterization by erasure), and also by his dependence upon his brother who is, significantly, doubly named (Isaac and “the Prince”) and established

Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” 598.

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in his new country. Those attributes that are given to the wife—“drab gray hair,” “cheap black dresses,” “naked white countenance”—together imply a being that is ghostly, insipid, and deathlike, which further imbues the wife with a connotation of nothingness. As for the husband’s appearance, other passages underscore his toothless mouth, the silence that seems to accompany him wherever he goes, and his preference for “the old overcoat with astrakhan collar,”73 which perhaps subtly associates him with one of the most famous nonentities of Russian literature, Akaky Akakievich of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (see Chapter 2 of the present study). In sum, husband and wife appear as nothings that have taken center stage. But their son—the figure that is the narrative’s catalyzing core—is even more of a nonentity than his parents. He never makes an appearance; in his stead stands the discussion of his illness. His disease, referential mania, is distinguished by a perception of highly conspired and meaningful patterns and phenomena that are, to the sane eye, not there: In these very rare cases the patient imagines that everything happening around him is a veiled reference to his personality and existence. He excludes real people from the conspiracy—because he considers himself to be so much more intelligent than other men. Phenomenal nature shadows him wherever he goes. Clouds in the staring sky transmit to one another, by means of slow signs, incredibly detailed information regarding him. His inmost thoughts are discussed at nightfall, in manual alphabet, by darkly gesticulating trees. Pebbles or stains or sun flecks form patterns representing in some awful way messages which he must interpret. Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.74 The term “cipher” denotes (1) a code or secret message and (2) zero, and both of these meanings are at play in referential mania. On the one hand, the son perceives the world as riddled with cryptograms, which drives him to crack their codes to uncover their hidden meaning. With this definition, we might rewrite the above sentence in the following way: Everything is a cryptogram, and he is the theme of the cryptogram’s message. On the other hand, to crack the code—that is, to decipher the cipher—is to reveal the cipher, the zero, that is the secret. Using this definition, we may once again retranslate the sentence: Everything is a zero (a signifier of nothing), and he is the theme of the zero—that is, nothing. Hence, the son is the nothing that the ciphers/zeros signify, the nothing that catalyzes not only the text (the story is, after all, about him), but also the world around him (the world of the story very much reflects the vision produced by his mania, as will be

Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” 601. Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” 599; italics mine.

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discussed below). He is the nothing that generates both word (narrative) and world (human “reality”). “Signs and Symbols,” then, is the story of the world produced by the son’s referential mania: thus the “zeroing” of the plot, and the anonymity and ambiguity of the central characters, both of which are symptoms of a world that has nothing as its theme and creative force. The dual nature of the cipher helps us to understand the mechanics of the son’s referential mania, and also provides a possible explanation for the paranoia and fear that accompany this illness. His suicidal desire to “tear a hole in his world and escape”75 may be read as a longing for the ultimate decoding of those ciphers that signify “the ultimate truth of his being.”76 Because those ciphers of which he is the theme both comprise the world and signify nothing, in realizing the hidden message of the world that he fundamentally is, he consequently wants to become nothing—to wholly fulfill the message of the decoded cipher.77 This idea comes to a brilliant point in the final scene of the story, when the phone rings for a second time. The wife tells the young voice on the other end of the line, “You have the incorrect number. I will tell you what you are doing: you are turning the letter O instead of the zero.”78 It is through the wife’s kind advice that Nabokov directs his own “callers”— his readers—to turn to the zero. This is a directive that has been ignored, undervalued, and disputed by many critics of “Signs and Symbols.”79 For instance, Larry R. Andrews reads the zero as both a “death omen,” and as a “‘veiled reference’ to the ‘cipher’ of the referential mania.”80 But for

Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” 599. Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” 600. 77 It is also worth mentioning here another interpretation of the boy’s illness, which points to a trauma in the story that cannot be directly articulated due to its unsayable and indescribable nature. John Hagopian argues that the malignant forces that plague the boy are very much a real part of his world: “The family’s history [aunts exterminated in concentration camps, suicidal cousins, bullies at school], fully justifies the feeling that they live in a malevolent universe” (John Hagopian, “Decoding Nabokov’s ‘Signs and Symbols,’” Studies in Short Fiction 18, no. 2 [1981]: 118). Likewise, Leona Toker says, “The specific mental malady of this young man is a morbidly condensed expression of the Jewish experience in Europe at the time of the Holocaust” (Leona Toker, “‘Signs and Symbols’ in and out of Contexts,” in A Small Alpine Form: Studies in Nabokov’s Short Fiction, edited by Charles Nicol and Gennady Barabtarlo [New York: Garland Publishing, 1993], 175). The story therefore contains a hidden background of trauma that is too unspeakable to be represented in language. Instead of the trauma, the ciphers are found in its place. When the narrative ends in the middle of the third phone call, silence takes the place of language, signifying trauma. 78 Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols,” 602. 79 For an impressive collection of articles on “Signs and Symbols,” see: Yuri Leving, ed., Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov’s Puzzles, Codes, “Signs and Symbols” (New York: Continuum, 2012); henceforth: Leving, ed., Anatomy. 80 Larry R. Andrews, “Deciphering ‘Signs and Symbols,’” in Leving ed., Anatomy, 293. 75 76

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Andrews, it is merely one of many manifestations of the son’s mania: “The zero is thus a part of the son’s mania, and all the numbers seem to be a part of the code used by the hostile forces.”81 William Carroll also takes note of the zero, but draws from it an inconclusive reading: “Nabokov has placed us in the position of the boy here—is the O a letter or a number? Does it matter? Is this confusion a cipher—a clue to a hidden meaning? Or is it just null, a zero, without substance? It could be either.”82 A common interpretive strategy has been to decode a fixed and finite meaning that finds the son dead at the story’s conclusion. Critics have searched for secret messages in the patterns of numbers, images, and objects peppered throughout the narrative,83 have hypothesized a hidden significance behind the labels of the jelly jars,84 have ignored the zero in favor of the letter O as a signifier of “omen,”85 and have checked the first letters of every word or line to see what meaningful words they may form.86 (And who, as Carroll first asked, has referential mania?87 I will revisit this question.) By drawing the mistaken caller’s attention to zero, the wife points us to the nothing that zero signifies. It is, in fact, nothing that allows for the patterning of referential mania to take place. It is the gap in the system, and the non-existence of an absolute significance, that enables the proliferation of meaning-making patterns. As I discuss in Chapter 1, this is an idea that touches a deep chord in various theories concerning systems that construct the knowable world. For instance, the zero’s place in the schema of modern Andrews, “Deciphering ‘Signs and Symbols,’” 293. William Carroll, “Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols’: Narrative Strategies,” in Leving ed., Anatomy, 247. 83 In Leving ed., Anatomy, see: Pekka Tammi, “Cards”; Maria-Ruxanda Bontila, “Photographs”; Larry R. Andrews, “Trees and Birds”; Andrés Romero Jódar, “Telephone.” 84 In Leving ed., Anatomy, see: Carol M. Dole, “Five Known Jars”; Gennady Barabtarlo, “Five Missing Jars”; Joanna Trzeciak, “The Last Jar.” 85 Alexander Dolinin has interpreted the wife’s directive to the caller as a summons to examine the placement of the letter O on the phone: “While the woman converts a digit into the letter O, the reader can (and must) go backwards and find out what ‘cipher’ the girl ‘is turning.’ With the help of a telephone, this riddle is easily solved: instead of the ‘empty’ zero, the girl dials six, which on the telephone dial corresponds to three letters—M, N, and O. I don’t think that the shadow of OMEN in this combination is just a coincidence, because if we look at the numerical value of letter O as a cipher, the girl’s mistake becomes literally ominous (in the meaning of ‘having the significance of an omen’)” (Alexander Dolinin, “The Signs and Symbols in Nabokov’s ‘Signs and Symbols,’” in Leving ed., Anatomy, 265). 86 See Dole, “Five Known Jars.” 87 Carroll writes, “‘Referential mania’ is a critical disease all readers of fiction suffer from … Over-reading is another, milder form of referential mania, and Nabokov has insured, through his rhetorical strategy, that the reader will succumb to the same mania that afflicts the boy” (“Pnin and ‘Signs and Symbols,’” 245). Paul J. Rosenzweig enlarges upon this idea: “At some time during the reader’s floundering attempt to find meaning, he may notice when rereading the description of the son’s condition that he is reading a description of his very own state” (Paul J. Rosenzweig, “The Importance of Reader Response,” in Leving ed., Anatomy, 161). 81 82



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mathematics, or the nothing that grounds Dasein, or the bottomless chessboard that unleashes the play of signifiers—in each case, the nothing in the system is required for the very creation of structures that grant meaning and existence. Referential mania is another version of this idea: nothing conditions the patterning that produces meaningful words and worlds. Variations of referential mania abound throughout Nabokov’s work, and their main characteristics are usually the same: patterning that produces some kind of “reality,” and that is catalyzed by nothing. An early rendition is found in The Defense. Luzhin, as many critics have noted, exhibits a mania similar to the son’s in “Signs and Symbols.” He perceives signs and symbols in the world around him that indicate he is ensnared in a life-sized chess game, which consumes him entirely: “The only thing that really interested him was the complex, cunning game in which he somehow had become enmeshed. Helplessly and sullenly he sought for signs of the chess repetition, still wondering toward what it was tending.”88 Luzhin’s perception of patterns is at once his gift and his madness. It allows him to expertly control the chessboard and ingeniously solve its puzzles to create a beautiful and ordered realm that contrasts his spontaneous and chaotic existence. But it can also be said that his perception controls him, renders him a pawn, and reduces all to the imagined movements and fantastical intrigues that happen along sixty-four non-existent squares. Like the son in “Signs and Symbols,” Luzhin’s mania spins a “reality” derived from something that is not there. In Pale Fire (1962), referential mania takes the form of the ingenious madness of Charles Kinbote. When Kinbote acquires John Shade’s final work, he expects that it will depict his own real life as King of Zembla. Despite the fact that Shade’s poem presents something quite different, Kinbote creates a long and detailed analysis in which he demonstrates that the poem is indeed about Zembla, and about his own exile from that land. Reading patterns in nothing, he builds up a world. In Ada, referential mania appears in the madness of Aqua and other Terra-believers, who are “afloat in infinite non-thingness.”89 These characters feel as though Anti-Terra is unreal, and they therefore envision a truer, Terra realm. Their madness gives shape to Terra, and is described as a patterning mania in which “Man-made objects [lose] their significance or [grow] monstrous connotations.”90 As in referential mania, meaning is reduced to naught, and meaning burgeons to infinity; everything is both meaningless (zero) and meaningful (code) at the same time—ciphers. Moreover, these believers in a terrestrial otherworld—which is likely our

Nabokov, The Defense, 227; Zashchita Luzhina, 109. Nabokov, Ada, 27. 90 Nabokov, Ada, 24. 88 89

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own world, the world of Nabokov’s readers—are attuned to the extratextual realm, as if they occupy a literal space between fiction and reality, between word and world. In Ada, then, Nabokov renders our own reality the ravings of the insane; “reality” is once again in quotation marks. But there is another way in which referential mania appears in Ada: in Ada’s metaphysical system of towers and bridges, which functions by perception of patterns and coincidences in one’s life, patterns which create meaning and “supreme rapture,”91 but are otherwise not there. Like the Terrabelievers, Ada produces meaning through patterning of phenomena that do not exist outside the realm of her perception and imagination. Her towers are creations of her imagination, just as Terra is the collective dream of madmen. Both Ada’s towers and Terra provide a meaning and a pathos that are sorely lacking in Anti-Terra existence; they provide a meaningful “reality” to make up for Anti-Terra’s “non-thingness.” In Transparent Things (1972) Hugh Person, another protagonist “harrowed by coincident symbols,”92 can perceive the histories and stories of objects around him, these “Transparent things, through which the past shines.”93 By the end of the novel, Person’s capacity to see the past—to view those transparent things—has reached its full potential: the past comes to life in the form of his deceased wife’s footsteps, and Person dies in a fiery blaze having resurrected the past in which his wife lives, and erasing a present in which he strangled his wife in her sleep. Person’s perception of the past through transparent things becomes synonymous with a resurrection of the past; his vision that peers through transparent things to find “coincident symbols” recreates a world that takes the place of his current existence. In Look at the Harlequins! (1974), referential mania becomes the play of “looking at the harlequins”: “What harlequins? Where?” “Oh everywhere. All around you. Trees are harlequins, words are harlequins. So are situations and sums. Put two things together—jokes, images—and you get a triple harlequin. Come on! Play! Invent the world! Invent reality!”94 But there is also a darker version of referential mania in this novel: Vadim’s chronic illness, dubbed the “numerical nimbus syndrome” by the specialist Moody, who clarifies “That ‘nimbus’ means nothing”95—one of Moody’s Nabokov, Ada, 74. Nabokov, Transparent Things, 13. 93 Nabokov, Transparent Things, 1. 94 Vladimir Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins! (New York, Vintage International, 1990), 8–9. 95 Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, 15. 91 92



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many inaccuracies, Vadim claims. Still, numerical nimbus syndrome causes Vadim to read a dreadful meaning into the most minutia of things (e.g. dots in the light, heartbeats, blinking eyelashes). His first wife likens his madness to the riddle of “pure space” that in childhood she thought could be signified by a “good clean zero,”96 but that in the end remains impossible to fully know or contemplate. She forbids him from engaging in exercises that exhibit the relativity of existence, that demonstrate how everything loses meaning in the absence of human consciousness. Here, referential mania is split into positive and negative poles: “looking at the harlequins,” the patterning of which generates meaning and “reality”; and “numerical nimbus,” which incites an erasure of signification and a paralysis of being. Finally, there is also a metafictional aspect of referential mania: the reader of the text participates in his or her own kind of referential mania. “Signs and Symbols” provides an excellent illustration of this. Because the end of “Signs and Symbols” is stamped with a yawning hole (the telephone continues to ring as the narrative closes, leaving the reader with no clear indication who is calling), and moreover because it is patterned with multiple numbers and seeming signs and symbols that bait deciphering, careful readers themselves become referential maniacs. What’s more, if we interpret all of the codes to indicate something about the boy, then we legitimate his madness, transforming it into lucid reality: he is indeed trapped in a world in which “everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme,” and his belief of this could be regarded as an awareness of Nabokov’s pen, and of the various readers and critics who pore over his story and continually reinterpret it. His referential mania, then, is otherwise understood as his tuning in to the scratchings of Nabokov’s thick pencil along the page (scratchings that literally shape his existence), and as his reception of the wavelengths of readers’ thoughts (thoughts that give his life meaning). A wormhole is thus opened up between reader and text: our reading of “Signs and Symbols” exacerbates the boy’s attunement to the conspiracy that is constantly hounding him, insinuating a symbiotic relationship between reader and character. If our reading of “Signs and Symbols” is provoking the boy’s referential mania, and if the text is likewise turning us into referential maniacs, always through the double-edged cipher, then who can say what is fiction and what is reality? We have arrived at Nabokov’s “reality” in quotation marks. Referential mania is the moment in which nothing becomes a creative force, and the sign of the creative mind—be it the mind of an artist, or the mind of a madman. It is our ability to create patterns out of nothing that is our

Nabokov, Look at the Harlequins!, 42.

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greatest gift, for this patterning is the source of all human reality, its words and its world. We are, because we are referential maniacs: reading into nothing, working in a void. *** In his foreword to John Shade’s Pale Fire, Charles Kinbote writes: Let me state that without my notes Shade’s text simply has no human reality at all since the human reality of such a poem as his (being too skittish and reticent for an autobiographical work), with the omission of many pithy lines carelessly rejected by him, has to depend entirely on the reality of its author and his surroundings, attachments and so forth, a reality that only my notes can provide. To this statement my dear poet would probably not have subscribed, but, for better or worse, it is the commentator who has the last word.97 Should we pun (as Nabokov often invites us to do) and transform “notes” into “noughts,” we arrive at an admission that signifiers of nothing (those notes/noughts) create and comprise human reality. For better, or for worse, the present commentator has decided that this will be her last word.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 29.

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4 Samuel Beckett: Immanence, language, nothing

If I were in the unenviable position of having to study my work my points of departure would be the “Naught is more real …” and the “Ubi nihil vales …” both already in Murphy and neither very rational. SAMUEL BECKETT, IN A LETTER TO SIGHLE KENNEDY, 1967

Nothing happens, more than once In Samuel Beckett’s work, much is said and done about nothing. For example, Murphy (1938) begins with an inverted figure of speech that delivers nothing itself to the forefront: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”1 The idiom nothing new under the sun is turned inside-out, so that the rhetorical “nothing new” is plucked from the plane of cliché and routine and refreshed anew. Nothing, in effect, becomes a something for the reader to contemplate. This nothing reverberates throughout the novel, most notably during Murphy’s moment of peace: Murphy began to see nothing, that colorlessness which is such a rare postnatal treat, being the absence (to abuse a nice distinction) not of percipere but of percipi. His other senses also found themselves at peace, an unexpected pleasure. Not the numb peace of their own suspension,

1

Samuel Beckett, Murphy (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 1.

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but the positive peace that comes when the somethings give way, or perhaps simply add up, to the Nothing, than which in the guffaw of the Abderite naught is more real.2 Naught is more real than nothing, a formula equating nothing with what is most real, a realm of calm indifference where, as Molloy puts it, “I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be”3 (Molloy 1951)— the zone where consciousness disappears. But in Malone Dies (1951), the seemingly innocuous phrase “Nothing is more real than nothing” frightens Malone who frets over its effect on the whole of language.4 Vivian Mercier famously quipped that in Waiting for Godot (1952), nothing happens, twice. Eric P. Levy suggests that “staring out at nothing” is “the quintessential Beckettian experience.”5 For example, in The Unnamable (1953), the Unnamable’s “very eyes can no longer close as they once could … but must remain forever fixed and staring on the narrow space before them where there is nothing to be seen, 99% of the time”;6 or All That Fall’s (1957) Mr. Slocum, who tells Mrs. Rooney that he is “Gazing straight before me … through the windscreen, into the void.”7 Texts for Nothing (1955) takes its title “from the musical term mesure pour rien, a silent measure at the beginning of a performance, a soundless interval conveying nothing but setting the tempo and so an essential part of the musical whole.”8 We may recall, in this context, John Cage’s silent compositions (see Chapter 0), the consideration they give to silence as an essential element of music, the impossibility of total silence, and the noise and meaning of silence itself. Texts for Nothing, like compositions emptied of sounds, are less stories and more language emptied of stories—vacated of plot and character, voided of all except their own highly ambiguous and disconcerting discourse. There is only the utterance: “Utter, there’s nothing else, utter, void yourself of them, here as always, nothing else”;9 “it’s for

Beckett, Murphy, 246. Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1994): Molloy, 49. 4 “I know those little phrases that seem so innocuous and, once you let them in, pollute the whole of speech. Nothing is more real than nothing” (Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable [New York: Grove Press, 1994]: Malone Dies, 192). 5 Eric P. Levy, Trapped in Thought: A Study of the Beckettian Mentality (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 37. 6 Samuel Beckett, Three Novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Grove Press, 1994): The Unnamable, 301. 7 Samuel Beckett, All That Fall, in The Collected Shorter Plays (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 11. 8 Chris J. Ackerley and Stanley E. Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 562. 9 Samuel Beckett, Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 82. 2 3



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ever the same murmur, flowing unbroken, like a single endless word and therefore meaningless, for it’s the end gives the meaning to words.”10 There are many more such utterances, visions, manifestations, and philosophies of nothing throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, but the task of cataloguing them all here calls to mind the Unnamable’s ceaseless speech—fueled from nowhere, spurred on by the refrain I know nothing, pierced through with exhaustion. In my view, what is at stake in all this nothing is Beckett’s attempt to pare down both being and narrative to their barest of states. Through the aesthetics of lessness, Beckett’s works peel away layers of identity from their characters, and eliminate elements of narrative from their own form. The goal of this diminishment is to arrive upon both being and narrative laid bare—ultimately, to arrive at an immanent plane. As I will demonstrate in this chapter, Beckettian immanence is an infinite nothing that incessantly signifies and murmurs—in a word, the immanent nothing languages.

Critical approaches to Beckett and nothing Beckett’s engagement with nothing is often noted by audiences and readers, has been admitted to by Beckett himself, is continuously explored by scholars, and was even satirized by The Onion as Daniela Caselli points out in her introduction to a recent collection of essays entitled Beckett and Nothing (2010).11 Here, it is not my goal to detail every scholarly approach to nothing in Beckett’s works, but to highlight those that are most relevant to the present study. One common critical approach to nothing in Beckett’s writings borrows from Heidegger’s metaphysics or Sartre’s existentialism. Lance St. John Butler, for example, finds similarities between Beckett’s nothing and Heidegger’s notion that Dasein experiences anxiety when faced with the nothing that grounds being: The application of this to Beckett must be obvious. His fiction in particular abounds with characters terrified of “nothing,” depending on “nothing,” needing “nothing” in a way that makes it quite plain that this nothing is not just a “not something.” And the state of mind of the Beckettian narrator is rarely specific fear of things within-the-world, Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 111. “On April 26, 2006, to mark the occasion of Beckett’s centenary, The Onion published an article under the title ‘Scholars discover 23 blank pages that may as well be lost Samuel Beckett play.’ … [T]hese blank pages are allegedly praised by literary scholar Eric Matheson for ‘the bare-bones structure and bleak repetition of what can only be described as “nothingness”’” (Daniela Caselli, “Introduction,” in Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010], 6).

10 11

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but it is not comfort and freedom from everything like fear either; it is Angst.12 Examining this idea as it appears in Watt (the not-ness of Mr. Knott) and in a smattering of other texts, Butler argues that the ubiquitous nothing in Beckett’s narratives is accompanied by anxiety, therefore functioning as “a metaphor for Being-towards the nothingness of freedom, the anxious peering into the ‘depths.’”13 In a later chapter, Butler draws parallels with Sartre’s notion that human consciousness comes into being through nothingness. The attempt to confront one’s consciousness is to confront the essential nothingness that enables consciousness to be—an idea evident in Beckett’s works, Butler claims.14 Indeed, often when the Beckettian “I” attempts to confront itself, it negates its “I” or finds nothing. Proclaims one voice in Texts for Nothing: I’m not in his head, nowhere in his old body, and yet I’m there, for him I’m there, with him, hence all the confusion. That should have been enough for him, to have found me absent, but it’s not, he wants me there, with a form and a world, like him, in spite of him, me who am everything, like him who is nothing. And when he feels me void of existence it’s of his he would have me void, and vice versa, mad, mad, he’s mad.15 “I, of whom I know nothing”16 says the Unnamable; Mouth, of Not I (1972), who does not say “I” throughout the course of her feverish outburst (her refrain, “what? … who? … no! … she!”, underscores her refusal, or inability, to self-associate with “I”).17 John L. Kundert-Gibbs draws connections between Beckett’s nothing, Zen Buddhism’s notions of emptiness and the void, and chaos theory. Both Zen and chaos theory understand the void as chaos that surrounds our knowable order. This chaos, however, does not function in opposition to our well-behaved systems and ordered existence. Rather, it ontologically

Lance St. John Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being: A Study in Ontological Parable (London: Macmillan Press, 1984), 47. 13 Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being, 50. See also: Russell Smith, “It’s Nothing: Beckett and Anxiety,” in Beckett and Nothing: Trying to Understand Beckett, edited by Daniela Caselli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), for a more recent exploration of this theme. 14 Butler, Samuel Beckett and the Meaning of Being, 82. 15 Beckett, Texts for Nothing, 91. 16 Beckett, The Unnamable, 304. 17 Other critics who analyze Beckett’s narratives in relation to Sartre’s notions of nothingness include Ruby Cohn, Back to Beckett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); and David H. Hesla, The Shape of Chaos: An Interpretation of the Art of Samuel Beckett (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1971). 12



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precedes ordered being—the very source of being. The void is “at once nothing and the progenitor of the world.”18 Zen and chaos theory therefore exemplify an alternative paradigm to notions of the void and chaos as nihilistic forces that obliterate the ordered world, instead positing the void and its intrinsic chaos to be positive forces that create. Likewise, Kundert-Gibbs proposes that “The void that infuses [Beckett’s] works is not the terminus to which all spirals down but the source from which patterns of beauty, if not of traditional meaning, spring.”19 Eric P. Levy discovers in Beckett’s writings the void as a kind of mirror. Tracing the motif of “seeing nothing” in Beckett, he argues that when characters see nothing or gaze into the void, they contemplate themselves: “The external void is ultimately a reflection of inner emptiness.”20 Levy further specifies: By definition, the reflection in a mirror is identified with the subject it reflects. By identifying the reflection as its own, the subject confirms a self-image. But the situation obtaining in Beckettian mimesis is not the same as the paradigm just described. For instead of identifying the reflection as its own, here the subject approximates the condition of its own reflection. That is, the subject paradoxically seeks to exchange its own identity for that of its reflection. In other words, the subjective project is to become one’s own reflection, and to be freed from the strains of identity or selfhood outside of the mirror.21 The consequences of “seeing nothing” are ambiguous: sometimes positive, like Murphy’s experience of peace in the face of nothing; and other times negative, troubling the mind (as in Happy Days [1960]), or signifying utterly meaningless endurance: “Whereas in Murphy, Nothing is construed in positive terms as the supreme reality, elsewhere in the Beckettian canon ‘nothing’ (in the lower case) is construed in negative terms as the irrelevance of reality.”22 Levy concludes by underscoring how this tension between the positive and negative consequences of Beckettian nothing cannot be resolved. In Zero’s Neighbour (2007), Hélène Cixous muses upon “the Beckett tongue” or “Beckettese” as language “pushed to the limit, to a crisis point, to excess, to the point of exasperation, sublimation, extra/ex/citation.”23 It

John Leeland Kundert-Gibbs, No-Thing is Left to Tell: Zen/Chaos Theory in the Dramatic Art of Samuel Beckett (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999), 19. 19 Kundert-Gibbs, No-Thing is Left to Tell, 179. 20 Levy, Trapped in Thought, 37. 21 Levy, Trapped in Thought, 39. 22 Levy, Trapped in Thought, 44–5. 23 Hélène Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour: Sam Beckett, translated by Laurent Milesi (Malden: Polity Press, 2010), 11. 18

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is where “The mute line has its say.”24 In Beckett, there is “the breath of nothingness, no, the breath of a nothingness, murmuring what if I didn’t exist?”25 Cixous can love Beckett “for he maintains the being to faint in the vicinity of zero, himself Zero’s Neighbor.”26 She then poses a question and immediately answers it in a way that negates her earlier claim (much like Beckett himself): If Mr. Beckett is Zero’s neighbor, who is Zero? But Beckett may well be Zero. Zero’s neighbor comes and pays him a visit. Zero’s Neighbor tends towards Zero, he never gets there. There always remains a little something, “precious little.” A little something is no mean (no)thing, it is a little nothing, it is never nothing, one gets nearer, the Neighbor goes to Zero’s, the null set.27 Having initially positioned Beckett as zero’s neighbor, she then acknowledges the possibility of Beckett being zero. The two—zero, and zero’s neighbor— pay one another visits, and/or try to pay one another visits. Here, the state is one of simultaneous and/or. Cixous thus places Beckett in two positions at once—as both zero, and/or as that which resides next to zero; he shuttles between zero and the infinite (albeit, “precious little”) space neighboring zero. And zero, we well know, signifies nothing. In what follows, I aim to add my own theory of Beckettian nothing to this already rich scholarly tradition, beginning with a brief discussion of Beckett’s aesthetics of lessness, and how this leads to a consideration of immanence as nothing and the language with which it is bound.

Aesthetics of lessness In his 1948 essay “Painters of Impediment,” Beckett puts forward an idea that is often considered to be key to his artistry: “Fortunately it is not a matter of saying that which has never been said, but of saying again, as often as possible in the most reduced space, what has already been said.”28 The artist’s task is not to produce something original, but to reproduce, to re-iterate and again re-iterate what has already been expressed in an Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour, 12. Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour, 14. 26 Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour, 8. 27 Cixous, Zero’s Neighbour, 9. 28 Samuel Beckett, “Peintres de l’Empêchement,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 133: “Heureusement il ne s’agit pas de dire ce qui n’a pas encore été dit, mais de redire, le plus souvent possible dans l’espace le plus réduit, ce qui a été dit déjà.” 24 25



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increasingly reduced manner, so that later works are more diminished than their predecessors. Should we take Beckett’s statement to its ultimate implication, the goal of the artist is to eventually arrive at a nothing that expresses everything that has been expressed before—a nothing that encompasses infinite expression. The aesthetics of lessness is a defining principle of Beckett’s writings,29 the trajectory of which aims ever closer to nothing, fulfilling, in a way, Molloy’s observation that “the most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”30 Levy notes that “Beckettian art conforms relentlessly to its defining principle [i.e. the aesthetics of lessness] with the result that, in the last works such as ‘Still,’ reductive repetition eventually achieves a mimetic spareness almost beyond expression.”31 But it is not just that Beckett’s later works are much sparser and more ineffable than his earlier works; it seems that for Beckett, the very act of writing lessens. In Malone Dies, we find a fitting emblem for this notion of writing that lessens, drawing ever closer to nothing. Malone composes his final manuscript with a pencil that, he repeatedly reminds us, is constantly growing smaller and smaller as he writes: “So little by little my little pencil dwindles, inevitably, and the day is fast approaching when nothing will remain but a fragment too tiny to hold.”32 Later, Malone describes himself attempting to write with a slender piece of graphite, the wood of his pencil having completely whittled away. Malone also frequently loses the pencil for days at a time. Two of the main attributes of his pencil, then, are its constant diminishment and its frequent disappearance. Through this image of a pencil physically decreasing and sometimes disappearing, the notion of writing is thus related to the idea of lessening toward nothing. Here, I am interested in exploring this notion of the nothing that encompasses everything that has been previously expressed, specifically how it

For more on the increasing diminishment of Beckett’s writings, see for example Eyal Amiran, Wandering and Home: Beckett’s Metaphysical Narrative (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), which discusses Beckett’s “Zenovian regression,” its “infinite reduction, comparative downsizing, guarantee continual being to the reduced self” (12). John L. Kundert-Gibbs views such regression as a kind of progress, showing how “this ostensibly negative drive toward a ground zero where nothing can be said or done is, instead, an essentially positive (better yet, non-negative) movement” (No-Thing is Left to Tell, 18). S. E. Gontarski discusses the “intent of undoing” in Beckett’s works, “a movement toward simplicity, toward the essential, toward the universal” (Stanley E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985], 3), and whose “evolution is finally almost a devolution, the doing an undoing, the movement toward higher and higher levels of abstraction” (ibid., 4). 30 Beckett, Molloy, 32. 31 Levy, Trapped in Thought, 36. 32 Beckett, Malone Dies, 222–3. 29

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relates to writing and language. In this exploration, I find that nothing is immanence in Beckett’s works, and this immanent nothing is wholly tied up with language.

Beckettian immanence In my estimation, Beckettian immanence most closely aligns with Gilles Deleuze’s “plane of immanence,” an idea that stems from Spinoza’s embrace of the univocity of being. Deleuze re-envisions immanence in such a way that it is no longer conceived in opposition to transcendence. Traditionally, immanence refers to a divine force that pervades and dwells in all being, contrasting transcendence, which refers to a divine force beyond the empirical world. Deleuze, however, conceives of immanence as an infinite, undifferentiated plane that rules out transcendence as any kind of meaningful distinction. That is, there is nothing outside or beyond the plane of immanence. Giorgio Agamben points out that Deleuze’s idea of immanence therefore employs a kind of philosophical vertigo: Deleuze describes immanence as always flowing forth (“With a striking etymological figure that displaces the origin of the term ‘immanence’ from manere [‘to remain’] to manare [‘to flow out’], Deleuze returns mobility and life to immanence”),33 and yet always remaining within itself (“Yet this springing forth, far from leaving itself, remains incessantly and vertiginously within itself”).34 Hence, immanence is univocity of being that encompasses an always-differentiating process. In “Immanence: A Life” (1995), Deleuze writes, Absolute immanence is in itself: it is not in something, to something; it does not depend on an object or belong to a subject … We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life.35 The plane of immanence is a strictly impersonal realm, where categories such as subject and object, organic and inorganic, do not operate, or cannot be told apart. Indeed, even the categories of life and death no longer hold meaning.36 There is only “a life.” Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, edited and translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 226. 34 Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” 226. 35 Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life, translated by Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 26, 27. 36 Explaining Deleuze’s notions of “the plane of immanence” and “a life,” Claire Colebrook writes: “Well before composing Anti-Oedipus with Guattari, Deleuze had given strict 33



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Deleuze attempts to clarify what he means by immanence, “a life,” with an illustration from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend: A disreputable man, a rogue, held in contempt by everyone, is found as he lies dying. Suddenly, those taking care of him manifest an eagerness, respect, even love, for his slightest sign of life. Everybody bustles about to save him, to the point where, in his deepest coma, this wicked man himself senses something soft and sweet penetrating him. But to the degree that he comes back to life, his saviors turn colder, and he becomes once again mean and crude. Between his life and his death, there is a moment that is only that of a life playing with death.37 Immanence, a life, is witnessed here in the moment suspended between his life and his death (that is, the man’s individual life and individual death). It is that which, in this example, draws in the people around the dying man, that impersonal life in him that is in all. Deleuze is quick to add that “a life,” immanence, is not confined to a play with death—“we shouldn’t enclose life in the single moment when individual life confronts universal death”38—but is ubiquitous in all. In describing the plane of immanence as “a life,” Deleuze highlights its impersonal nature, the indefinite article signifying its indeterminate character. What is at stake, then, in Deleuze’s conception of immanence is a reconsideration of just what life is. The general trend in Western philosophy conceives of life in opposition to death: life is commonly defined as those functions that resist death, and the Aristotelian “nutritive faculty” has been widely regarded as the principle for bare life. In contrast, Deleuze distinguishes a life as a plane where the categories of subject and object do not exist, and therefore the Aristotelian “nutritive faculty” becomes obsolete. After all, Aristotle points to the nutritive faculty as the operation through which something—a given subject—is alive. To return to Deleuze’s example from Dickens: The life of the individual gives way to an impersonal and yet singular life that releases a pure event freed from the accidents of internal and external life, that is, from the subjectivity and objectivity of what philosophical reasons for rejecting the idea of life as some ultimate foundation from which mind, bodies and language would flow—a life that would be opposed to a death of non-creation, inertia and indifference. Deleuze was insistent that ‘life’ in its more radical sense would already include what we normally take to be death. Deleuze refuses to see deviations, redundancies, destructions, cruelties or contingency as accidents that befall or lie outside life; life and death were aspects of desire or ‘the plane of immanence’” (Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed [London: Continuum, 2006], 3). 37 Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” 28. 38 Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” 29.

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happens: a “Homo tantum” with whom everyone empathizes and who attains a sort of beatitude. It is a haecceity no longer of individuation but of singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil, for it was only the subject that incarnated it in the midst of things that made it good or bad. The life of such individuality fades away in favor of the singular life immanent to a man who no longer has a name, though he can be mistaken for no other. A singular essence, a life.39 Or as Agamben (reading Deleuze) puts it, “The plane of immanence thus functions as a principle of virtual indetermination, in which the vegetative and the animal, the inside and the outside and even the organic and the inorganic, in passing through one another, cannot be told apart.”40 Beckett’s narratives often explore such a plane of immanence where distinctions between human and animal, animal and vegetable, organic and inorganic, life and death, do not exist. The subjects that populate his texts are frequently and increasingly divested of their selves, diminish in human identity to the point where they embody plants or take on the role of dogs or travel as the wind or are no more flesh than mere voices. But as subjects and objects lose their individualities and as immanence itself manifests, a nothing that encompasses the entirety of existence becomes evident. Whereas Deleuze envisions immanence as “a life,” we may say that Beckett imagines immanence as nothing. As discussed earlier, Beckett attempts to articulate, in an increasingly reduced form, all that has been said before; thus, the ultimate goal would be to express nothing, and in so doing say everything. Likewise, a distinctive aspect of Beckettian immanence is its relationship to nothing, and by proxy, its union with infinity. It is pure potentiality: the nothing that can be utterly meaningless, or a nothing that is abundantly plentiful—filled with the possibility for all varieties and intricacies of being.41

Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” 28–9. Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” 233. 41 Here, a few words about the relationship between nothing and infinity should be given. Mathematicians tell us that “The troublesome nature of zero lies with the strange powers of the infinite, and it is possible to understand the infinite by studying zero” (Seife, Zero, 131). A codependence between nothing and infinity also is found in various theologies, wherein the void is figured as a bounteous space, ripe with potential for being. Indeed, the iconography of the void often signifies plentitude and creation: “‘From the ‘O’ to the egg was an obvious step since the egg was the symbol of generation and creation; since, too, it bore the shape of zero, contradictions of all and nothing could be constructed on eggs’; which one can continue through the mystical O of the Kabbalah, the Hollow Crown which served as an icon of ex nihilo creation; the great circle of white light signifying infinity for Traherne; the origin and place of birth—‘nothing’ as slang for vagina in Elizabethan English; to the icon of de-creation and self-annihilation in the shape of the circle made by a snake swallowing its own tail” (Rotman, Signifying Nothing, 59–60). 39 40



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Beckett strives to get at that nothing—but to do so not only entails the giving way of individual lives to a plane where categories of subject and object are meaningless, but also involves a release from language. In the so-called “German Letter of 1937,” Beckett writes to Axel Kaun, expressing his growing intuition that “my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it … As we cannot eliminate language all at once, we should at least leave nothing undone that might contribute to its falling into disrepute. To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through; I cannot imagine a higher goal for a writer today.”42 In that same letter, he writes about how music and art have already abandoned the old ways, and he desires a “literature of the unword.”43 This desire to fill language with holes, to “unword” it, is reiterated by Molloy in a line that seems plucked from a darker version of the very sentiment with which Beckett composed his 1937 letter to Kaun: “you would do better, at least no worse, to obliterate texts than to blacken margins, to fill in the holes of words till all is blank and flat and the whole ghastly business looks like what is, senseless, speechless, issueless misery.”44 Whereas in the “German Letter of 1937,” there is a sense that boring holes in language will uncover something positive, “a whisper of that final music or that silence that underlies All,”45 elsewhere in Beckett’s works the ceasing of language uncovers the immanent and exhaustingly meaningless nothing of the world. My ambition here is not to reconcile these disparities, but to show that this desire to “bore holes in language” so as to “get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it” is another way of seeking out immanence, as Zenovian such an endeavor may be (after all, as the categories of subject and object are non-existent in the plane of immanence, a subjective consciousness of immanence is impossible). And moreover, in his attempt to unword language so as to get at whatever it is that “underlies All,” Beckett uncovers an immanence that never ceases signifying. Indeed, we can say that Beckettian immanence is always languaging. It is fully imbued with language, even despite Beckett’s tearing apart of language’s veil. To be sure, his characters may be capable of ridding themselves of human language, but there is another kind of language that always accompanies them, and that wills all to narration and signification. The world is fully composed of the word; immanence speaks a language of its own. As David Alpaugh comments about the radio drama All That Fall, “Beckett contrasts the timeless language of Arcady with the dying language Samuel Beckett, “German Letter of 1937,” in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, edited by Ruby Cohn (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 171, 172. 43 Beckett, “German Letter of 1937,” 173. 44 Beckett, Molloy, 13. 45 Beckett, “German Letter of 1937,” 172. 42

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of Man, which has become formal and inadequate.”46 The existence of an immanent, timeless language that has nothing to do with human language is indicated many times throughout Beckett’s oeuvre, often through characters and voices who describe themselves as constantly speaking, even though they have abandoned the language of man. Or, for example, as in the case of the Unnamable, there exists a language that is not a product of human consciousness or will, but that is generated by something else, perhaps by the mere fact of being: “I know no more questions and they keep on pouring out of my mouth. I think I know what it is, it’s to prevent the discourse from coming to an end, this futile discourse which is not credited to me and brings me not a syllable nearer silence.”47 In Beckett, there is a language that is not contingent upon human epistemology or subjective consciousness. Instead, a compulsion to narrate seems to be part and parcel of the “underlying All.” Immanence, nothing, carries within itself an obligation to word, despite the unwording of the human language. To sum up, Beckettian immanence manifests as nothing. It is an impersonal and undifferentiated plane that underlies All, animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic. It is like Deleuze’s univocity of being that embodies an always-differentiating process, encompassing infinite being(s). Beckett’s narratives, through the aesthetics of lessness and divestment of character subjectivity, draw ever closer to immanence. The closer Beckett’s characters come to immanence, the more they peer into nothing and see themselves. But even as they unword themselves of human language, it is revealed that this nothing is wholly tied up with another language, forever engaged in some kind of signification. In the next section, I take a closer look at these ideas as they appear in Beckett’s Molloy. Then, in this chapter’s conclusion, I analyze how these notions shape some of the peculiarities of Beckett’s writing.

Molloy: Questing immanence I have singled out Molloy for this close reading because it seems to me that it is precisely here that Beckett launches two characters—Molloy and Moran—on a quest for immanence, uncovering in the process the nothing that is all and that compels language. His later works, increasingly bare, seem to dwell more immediately within the language of this immanence that is nothing. Molloy, therefore, in narrating this approach toward the nothing where Beckett’s later works reside, allows us to better see it, in a David J. Alpaugh, “The Symbolic Structure of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall,” Modern Drama 9, no. 3 (1966): 325. 47 Beckett, The Unnamable, 307. 46



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way. I also, like the novel’s earliest reviewers and like later readers and critics, regard Molloy as a significant literary event, not just within Beckett’s oeuvre, but also in twentieth-century literature. When Molloy was first published in March of 1951, it was almost immediately declared to be a watershed moment in literature, and many of its earliest reviewers spoke of its portrayal of reality stripped bare, of its erased language, and of its nothingness. Among these, Maurice Nadeau (April 1951) described the realm of Molloy as “a vacuum marked with a plus sign” wherein “Beckett settles us in the world of the Nothing where some nothings which are men move about for nothing,”48 and Beckett as “champion of the Nothing exalted to the height of the Whole.”49 Georges Bataille (May 1951) wrote that “there is no narrative more necessary nor more convincing,” praising the novel for its showing “reality in a pure state” in terms that call to mind immanence: Molloy shows us not merely reality, but reality in a pure state: reality at its most indigent and inevitable, the fundamental reality, which is always in front of us but which fear always separates us from, which we refuse to see and which we always strive to avoid being engulfed by, which is consequently known to us only under the elusive form of anguish.50 Bernard Pingaud (September 1951) saw in Molloy a picture of postwar man, or the terrible reality that the war had revealed: “We live in a time of despair, where wrecks are everywhere, and Molloy is a wreck, hardly a man, an absence of a man.”51 “Mr. Beckett,” Pingaud continued, “is undoubtedly obsessed by the idea of death and nothingness; and if we think that this book is a healthy one, it is precisely because death and nothingness are not disguised in it.”52 Even already by August 1951 Nadeau could return to the topic of Molloy and its critical reception to proclaim: Molloy has been hailed both as an “event” and a ne plus ultra of literature. It has been heaped with praise and learned comment, and such diverse meanings have been attributed to it that the more people talk about it the more obscure it seems. One person sees it as a masterpiece of humor, another as an epic of disaster. To some it is silence translated

Maurice Nadeau, “Maurice Nadeau in ‘Combat,’” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (New York: Routledge, 1999), 53. 49 Nadeau, “Maurice Nadeau in ‘Combat,’” 54. 50 Georges Bataille, “Molloy’s Silence,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism, edited by Stanley E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 131. 51 Bernard Pingaud, “Bernard Pingaud in ‘Esprit,’” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman (New York: Routledge, 1999), 67–8. 52 Pingaud, “Bernard Pingaud in ‘Esprit,’” 68. 48

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into words, to others no more than a literary exposition of complexes belonging more properly to psychoanalysis. In fact, everyone sees in it what he wants to see, which is proof at once of the book’s richness and of its ambiguity.53 My own vision of the novel begins with the observation that Molloy is included in the long genealogy of Beckettian characters who have been greatly stripped down (naked, paralyzed, impotent, toothless, amputated, forgotten and forgetting, without memory, without knowledge, desire-less, hunger-less, etc.) and yet are still compelled to write or speak. On a plane of being stripped of its many constructs—physical, cultural, social, etc.— there is still language (not necessarily human language), which places language very close to immanence. As language traffics in universalizing and abstracting signs that attempt to communicate individual and unique entities, operating via signifiers to express the signified, the very placement of language close to immanence—where categories of signifier and signified by definition do not exist—seems a kind of contradiction. Language is generally regarded as a construct; how can it be so close to immanence, which exists prior to and without construct? My reading will suggest that it is this very contradiction that Molloy grapples with and comes to embrace, turning the contradiction into a paradox. The utterly pared-down being (the nothing) who nevertheless cannot still his language exemplifies immanence intimately related to language. The novel comprises two parts. The first is the narrative of Molloy, who describes his quest for his mother. It is suggested that the quest has been completed as he now occupies his mother’s bed, and is compelled to write pages for a man who comes every week. The second segment features the narrative of Moran, who is sent on a journey to find Molloy. Throughout his journey, Moran increasingly comes to resemble Molloy, the very being that he seeks. Likewise, Molloy comes to resemble his mother, as indicated not only by his residing in her bed, but also by his own estimations: “I have taken her place. I must resemble her more and more.”54 These kindred quests through which the seeker more and more resembles and becomes that which he seeks are further distinguished by the character of their journeys’ goals—that is, both Molloy and Ma figure as precursors of subjective being that are themselves largely without subjectivity, very close to the nothing that is all. Ma is arguably closer to nothing than Molloy: after all, she is more dead than Molloy, who seems to be still alive, if we may continue to speak of “life” and “death” in a narrative where there

Quoted in Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman, eds., Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage (New York: Routledge, 1999), 6–7. 54 Beckett, Molloy, 7. 53



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exist “degrees” of death; and she cannot count higher than two, whereas Molloy can still wield a great many numbers. Molloy, as I will demonstrate, therefore appears to occupy a liminal zone between subjective being and the immanent nothing. In short, as both Molloy and Moran come to resemble that which they seek, one can determine that what they seek is in fact their selves; and as both are diminished in their own subjectivities throughout their quests, we may further argue that their selves (which they seek) are in fact a nothing that is immanence—what Deleuze identifies as the “spark of life” in the dying rogue to which all are drawn. Scholars have pointed out that in its portrayal of the quest, Molloy functions as a narrative that undermines traditional motifs of the novel while simultaneously adopting certain novelistic conventions. Ackerley and Gontarski point out that “the narrator issues a readable text that both obliterates the tradition of the novel and reinscribes it, subverting and reasserting the structures of narrative.”55 Among these novelistic traditions that the narrative “obliterates” and then “reinscribes” are the journey, self-discovery, and the detective story. These are deconstructed by the very discovery such novelistic questing reveals, which is nothing. Molloy, then, reads as an allegory of a modern quest to come of age. But here, to come of age involves a divestment of subjectivity rather than a securing of identity, a devolution perhaps, rather than an evolution. As if speaking directly about this predicament of being cast in a coming-of-age narrative, Moran says: And I seemed to see myself aging as swiftly as a day-fly. But the idea of aging was not exactly the one which offered itself to me. And what I saw was more like a crumbling, a frenzied collapsing of all that had always protected me from all I was always condemned to be. Or it was like a kind of clawing towards a light and countenance I could not name, that I had once known and long denied.56 Moran is offered a different kind of aging: not one in which he “comes of age” to establish an identity and take hold of an “I”, but an aging that erodes his “I” and any wisdom, experience, or sense of self contained within that subjectivity. The allegorical quest to find oneself transforms into a quest to divest one of self—arriving at that which one “was always condemned to be,” or that which one “had once known and long denied.” We may say that these—that which one is condemned to be, and the clawing toward an unnamable light that was once known and long since forgotten—represent death and birth, respectively; they figure as the two bookends of the identified self’s “I”. But these categories of death and life

Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 377. Beckett, Molloy, 148.

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are ultimately, as I will demonstrate, too convenient and even misleading, for they cease to carry meaning in Molloy. It might be more accurate, therefore, to understand these limits that precede and follow the subjective “I” as the nothing that is immanence. While Molloy’s depiction of the coming-of-age quest and the search for identity as an undoing of subjectivity deconstructs the tradition of the novel, in doing so it also reenacts an epic paradox: that of Odysseus’ identity, which I discuss briefly in Chapter 0. Gontarski notes that Molloy is preoccupied with both the novelistic and epic traditions: “In Molloy … Beckett continues the variegated development of the epic form, most recently manipulated by Joyce. Molloy, however, is still another development, a contrapuntal epic, played fugally—two epic journeys. It is also a parody of the novel itself.”57 In many ways, Molloy’s meandering journey to his mother corresponds to Odysseus’ journey home, and scholars have collected and analyzed these Homeric elements in Beckett’s novel.58 Molloy, at times, places himself in the position of Odysseus. For example, citing the freedom of nothing philosophized by Arnoldus Geulincx,59 Molloy writes, “I who had loved the image of old Geulincx, dead young, who left me free, on the black boat of Ulysses, to crawl towards the East, along the deck. That is a great measure of freedom, for him who has not the pioneering spirit. And from the poop, poring upon the wave, a sadly rejoicing slave, I follow with my eyes the proud and futile wake.”60 The pun rejoicing/re-Joyce-ing establishes a thread not only with Homer’s epic, but also with Joyce’s masterpiece, the significance of which will be discussed shortly. Molloy also speaks of an Aegean who was once present in his being: “The Aegean, thirsting for heat and light, him I killed, he killed himself, early on, in me.”61 And Odysseus’ shifting identity (or the problem of Odysseus’ identity) seems to echo in the fluid identity Stanley E. Gontarski, “Literary Allusions in Happy Days,” in On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 309. 58 Ruby Cohn, for example, was one of the first to compile a number of ironic comparisons between Molloy and the Odyssey: “Molloy claims to have killed the Aegean in himself, but the ghost of Ulysses shadows him on his odyssey: he is mollified by Circe’s moly rather than using it to ward her off; his Nausicaa woos him in a rubbish dump, a Cyclopean policemen causes him to be fed rather than threatening to eat him; his Penelope is a senile mother rather than a faithful wife; violent though he is, Molloy slays no suitors” (Back to Beckett, 83). See also: K. J. Phillips, “Beckett’s Molloy and The Odyssey,” The International Fiction Review 11, no. 1 (1984): 19–24. 59 Ackerley and Gontarski tell us that “[Beckett] would later tell scholars of his work that Geulincx’s Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (‘Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing’) was one place to begin. That ethical axiom became for [Beckett] the foundation of doubt and humility, the bêtise that underpins his life’s work” (The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 224). 60 Beckett, Molloy, 51. 61 Beckett, Molloy, 30. 57



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of Molloy (who later bleeds into Moran, Malone, and the Unnamable, among others). As discussed in Chapter 0, Homer’s Odyssey presents a hero who, many times throughout the epic, denies or hides his identity as Odysseus. In the episode with Polyphemus, Odysseus adopts a non-identity to survive, telling the Cyclops that he is “no one” or outis.62 The name “Odysseus” contains within it a diminutive “no one”; this epic predecessor of modern man possesses within himself the outis that in fact allows him to be, that grounds his being (his Deleuzian “spark of life”). This, in my view, is the most significant similarity between Molloy and Odysseus—their capacity for nothing, to be no one. Molloy’s journey, which frees him from subjectivity, reveals this outis, this no one (or no subject), this nothing as immanence. Likewise, Beckettian narrative, through its aesthetics of lessness, displays this nothing, this outis, as the immanence that encompasses both the world and the word. It is also in this way that Molloy may represent Beckett’s response to Joyce’s Ulysses: as a stripped down, impoverished, impotent, barren rendition of the Odyssey, to counter Joyce’s Ulysses and its masterful control of knowledge and language. This desire to write “impotence” so as to distinguish himself from Joyce’s “omniscience” is explained by Beckett himself. In a conversation with his biographer James Knowlson, Beckett describes a revelation he had while in his mother’s room: “I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.”63 This position is corroborated by a widely-quoted statement Beckett made in 1956 to New York Times reporter Israel Shenker: With Joyce the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material—perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past. There seems to be a kind of aesthetic axiom that expression is achievement—must be an achievement. My little exploration is that whole zone of being that has

See Chapter 0 of the present study for a fuller discussion of Odysseus as outis. Quoted in John Haynes and James Knowlson, Images of Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 37.

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always been set aside by artists as something unusable—as something by definition incompatible with art.64 This “whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable—as something by definition incompatible with art” is, it seems to me, the object of Molloy’s quest: to discover the outis fundamental to all. By evoking Odysseus’ journey home in Molloy’s wanderings to Ma, Beckett positions Molloy against Joyce’s Ulysses, illustrating the impotence, meaninglessness, and nothingness that coexist with the mastery, meaning, and wholeness in Homer’s epic—journeying toward that nothing that is immanence. So let us, finally, take a closer look at this Molloy, Beckett’s outis. He is an utterly ambiguous being, confessing “even my sense of identity was wrapped in a namelessness often hard to penetrate.”65 His fluid character (if he may be said to have a character) is best defined as liminal. In Molloy’s ever-grey country (which is as much the geography of his mind-body as it is a physical landscape; tellingly, Molly describes himself as the same greyish color as the countryside),66 there are no clearly defined distinctions between traditionally opposing categories. As mentioned earlier, even life and death bleed into one another, ceasing to operate as meaningful distinctions. Molloy wonders, for instance, if his mother died “enough to bury,”67 as if there are gradations of death. Later, Molloy mentions that he has “ceased to live,” and that, “It is in the tranquility of decomposition that I remember the long confused emotion which was my life … To decompose is to live too.”68 Molloy therefore experiences life and death in a way that directly undermines and annihilates our common, (we may say, human) understanding of these categories, at once having “ceased to live” (perhaps as a human subject) but also decomposing, which he regards as a type of living (this is of course true, when we remember that living microorganisms are decomposers). It ultimately seems that life and death overlap in Molloy’s skull-shaped country, no longer functioning as categories in opposition to one another. Additionally, similar to the border between zero and zero’s neighbor discussed by Cixous, the boundary between self and other are blurred in

Beckett, in an interview with Israel Shenker (Israel Shenker, “Israel Shenker in New York Times,” in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, edited by Lawrence Graver and Raymond Federman [New York: Routledge, 2005], 162). 65 Beckett, Molloy, 31. 66 “I was perched higher than the road’s highest point and flattened what is more against a rock the same color as myself, that is grey” (Beckett, Molloy, 10). 67 Beckett, Molloy, 7. 68 Beckett, Molloy, 25. 64



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Molloy’s country: “People pass too, hard to distinguish from yourself.”69 Sleep and waking existence overlap: “For my waking was a kind of sleeping.”70 Molloy’s descriptions of his existence are repeatedly marked as having a threshold quality—in the process of receding to nothing, but not quite having arrived at nothing yet: “All grows dim. A little more and you’ll go blind. It’s in the head. It doesn’t work any more, it says, I don’t work any more. You go dumb as well and sounds fade. The threshold scarcely crossed, that’s how it is.”71 “The threshold scarcely crossed,” implying a position right at the liminal point; existence suspended in-between, occupying ambiguous, no-named mid-zones. Molloy appears to be at the very end of a tether, teetering between subjective being and immanent nothing, and the direction of his passage through this threshold is in the way of that nothing. Suspended in this threshold, he hears the voice of “a world collapsing endlessly.”72 Stripped of toes (from the left or the right foot, he cannot say!) and missing teeth, paralyzed of limb, forgetful of name and objective, blurred of senses, both dead and alive (or perhaps neither), and having abandoned speaking (but still writing!), Molloy is on the cusp of immanence. Even when Molloy attempts to tabulate the most mundane facts about himself, he arrives at an ambiguity suggesting nothing. For example, when Molloy calculates the number of times he farts in a day, he concludes that he rarely passes gas, if at all. I can’t help it, gas escapes from my fundament on the least pretext, it’s hard not to mention it now and then, however great my distaste. One day I counted them. Three hundred and fifteen farts in nineteen hours, or an average of over sixteen farts an hour. After all it’s not excessive. Four farts every fifteen minutes. It’s nothing. Not even one fart every four minutes. It’s unbelievable. Damn it, I hardly fart at all, I should never have mentioned it. Extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself.73 It has been observed that Molloy’s calculations are not correct: he does indeed fart at least one time every four minutes (to be more precise, the figure is 1.105… farts every four minutes).74 But what is most interesting

Beckett, Molloy, 8. Beckett, Molloy, 53. 71 Beckett, Molloy, 8. 72 Beckett, Molloy, 40. 73 Beckett, Molloy, 30. 74 For a brief overview of Beckett’s work and mathematics, see Chris Ackerley, “Samuel Beckett and Mathematics,” available online: http://www.uca.edu.ar/uca/common/grupo17/ files/mathem.pdf (accessed March 5, 2015). 69 70

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from my perspective is that Molloy’s original figure—315 farts in nineteen hours—is demolished by his “know-yourself” exercise whereby he seeks to determine just how often he can actually be described as a subject who farts. For the further he averages the number of times he passes gas in a day—from sixteen farts an hour, to four farts every fifteen minutes, to not even a single fart every four minutes (even taking into account this error)—the closer he arrives at zero. It happens that he can rarely, if ever, be considered a farter, and indeed is never a farter if he repeatedly subdivides the unit of the time by which he takes the average of his total number of farts. Here, Molloy’s calculations exemplify quite delightfully a version of one of Zeno’s most famous paradoxes: that of Achilles and the tortoise. Zeno demonstrates how Achilles, no matter how quickly he runs, can never catch up with the tortoise who has been given a head start. Achilles must first reach the place where the tortoise had begun the race and has since moved away from a certain distance—we’ll call this d1. Then, Achilles must run that new distance (d1) during which the tortoise has moved forward a bit more (d2), and so on ad infinitum. In this way Zeno shows through mathematical proof that Achilles can never catch up with the tortoise: “The Greeks were stumped by the problem, but they did find the source of the trouble: infinity. It is the infinite that lies at the heart of Zeno’s paradox: Zeno had taken continuous motion and divided it into an infinite number of tiny steps.”75 By doing so motion is reduced to zero, becomes, even, impossible. Likewise, by taking a series of farts and dividing them by an increasingly small unit of time, Molloy reduces his flatulence to nothing: extraordinary how mathematics help you to know yourself! We may also say that Molloy’s calculations humorously reenact the aesthetics of lessness that are said by critics to define the trajectory of Beckett’s work—ever courting zero. Many times Molloy describes a kind of fading away of his own subjectivity into an immanent plane—when his individual life peters out and he revels in pure, undifferentiated being. For instance, Molloy in Lousse’s garden: And there was another noise, that of my life become the life of this garden as it rode the earth of deeps and wilderness. Yes, there were times when I forgot not only who I was, but that I was, forgot to be. Then I was no longer that sealed jar to which I owed my being so well preserved, but a wall gave way and I filled with roots and tame stems for example, stakes long since dead and ready for burning, the recess of night and the imminence of dawn, and then the labor of the planet rolling eager into winter, winter would rid it of these contemptible scabs. Or of that winter I was the precarious calm, the thaw of the snows which

Seife, Zero, 42.

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make no difference and all the horrors of it all all over again. But that did not happen to me often, mostly I stayed in my jar which knew neither seasons nor gardens.76 Molloy’s dissipating subjective life is first rendered as a noise, as if it has become sound wave, being borne along the landscape, becoming the garden. As his life “rode the earth,” it also erodes—comes undone from its “I”, becomes one with impersonal being. There is not only a loss of the subjective “I” (“I forgot not only who I was”) but moreover there is a loss of consciousness as a being differentiated from the world (“I forgot to be”), a relinquishing of consciousness of being. It is here that Molloy becomes a misnomer, as there no longer is a Molloy; the use of the pronouns “I” and “he” are also ultimately false, showing the inadequacy of human language and, indeed, human consciousness (as Deleuze confesses) to perfectly articulate and know immanence. For here manifests immanence: walls give way that normally separate self from other, man from plant, organic from inorganic, animate from inanimate, and he enters into a zone of Deleuzian “impersonal yet singular being.” He becomes noise, embodies roots and stems, the night and the dawn, the movement of the planet, the thaws of winter snows. He is no different than all these, and, likewise, all these—the dawn, night, stems, planet’s movement—are no different from him or each other. He occupies the ultimate intimate relationship with being, thoroughly knows these seasons and gardens in the sense that he becomes one with them. In contrast, his being in the sealed jar (where his “I” is composed) “[knows] neither seasons nor gardens” as it remains stranger—other—to those seasons and gardens by virtue of its subjectivity, which necessitates walls, jars, differentiating categories. These moments of immanence are often accompanied by refrains of nothing, zeros, and ciphers. For example: For to know nothing is nothing, not to want to know anything likewise, but to be beyond knowing anything, to know you are beyond knowing anything, that is when peace enters in, to the soul of the incurious seeker. It is then the true division begins, of twenty-two by seven for example, and the pages fill with the true ciphers at last.77 Hugh Kenner has noted that twenty-two divided by seven is a close approximation for Pi, the transcendental number that is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter.78 As an irrational number, Pi’s

Beckett, Molloy, 49. Beckett, Molloy, 64. 78 Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 104–5. 76 77

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decimal representation does not end nor does it settle into any pattern. We can imagine Pi’s decimals forever diminishing, always decreasing to become more precise, and always eluding that preciseness: “As their sum gradually approximates toward the secret of the circle, their importance gradually dwindles toward zero.”79 The “true ciphers”—infinite circles, zeros—produced by the division of twenty-two by seven are emblems of immanence, of that zone where the subjective “I” has dissipated away, where one not only knows nothing but is “beyond knowing anything.” Here, we encounter an infinity that accompanies this nothing, signified by the very semiotics of the cipher that doubly means both “zero” and “code,” cloaking infinite hidden meanings. These “true ciphers” suggest that Beckettian immanence manifests as an infinite nothing that is not a simply negating, nihilistic force, but a sort of plentiful void, pure potentiality of infinite being. The presence of the infinite in nothing is evident, for example, in Moran’s meditations on paralysis: Yes, when you can neither stand nor sit with comfort, you take refuge in the horizontal, like a child in its mother’s lap. You explore it as never before and find it possessed of unsuspected delights. In short it becomes infinite … Such are the advantages of a local and painless paralysis. And it would not surprise me if the great classical paralyses were to offer analogous and perhaps even still more unspeakable satisfactions. To be literally incapable of motion at last, that must be something! My mind swoons when I think of it. And mute into the bargain! And perhaps deaf as a post! And who knows as blind as a bat! And as likely as not your memory a blank! And just enough brain intact to allow you to exult! And to dread death like a regeneration.80 Here, Moran envisions the delights of being divested of movement, spoken language, senses, memory, and consciousness. To become mute, still, silent, empty, nothing augments and details the world: “In short, it becomes infinite,” he swooningly exclaims. Hence, in Molloy immanence is a plane of infinite nothing. It is a plane where being has been stripped away of any and all subjectivity, being that is outis, being without motion, without voice, without sense, without consciousness—the ontology of without, nothing. But it is also infinite, its infinity enabled by virtue of its nothingness, not unlike the symbiotic relationship between Moran’s escalating paralysis (movement reduced to nothing) and his ever-growing, increasingly detailed experience of the world (infinity). To chip away at subjective being so as to arrive at being

Kenner, Samuel Beckett, 105. Beckett, Molloy, 140.

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laid bare and finally immanence is to also arrive at what underlies all, the infinite beings of the world. Indeed, the more Molloy or Moran divest themselves of their own subjectivities to become nothing, the more infinite they become. They become stems, bicycles, sucking stones, waves; in short, they become all that exists. But there is another, equally important aspect of immanence in Molloy and, I would argue, elsewhere in Beckett’s works: that is, language. As pared down as many of Beckett’s characters are, they cannot strip away language. In fact, they are compelled to narrate, sometimes against their will or without any desire to do so, and sometimes (they claim) in a language that is not the language of man. In Molloy, Molloy and Moran hear a voice in the nothing of immanence that utters words that are not from a human language. For instance, by the end of Molloy, Moran has stripped away his previous identity so fully that he has given up on being a man: “I have been a man long enough, I shall not put up with it any more, I shall not try any more.”81 He is, as he resigned himself earlier, “disposed of self,”82 now resembles Molloy more than Moran, has left the lights of his house for the comforts of his garden, and is thus drawing closer to immanence. It is in this bare state of being that Moran begins to hear a peculiar voice that compels him to write: I have spoken of a voice telling me things. I was getting to know it better now, to understand what it wanted. It did not use the words that Moran had been taught when he was little and that he in his turn had taught to his little one. So that at first I did not know what it wanted. But in the end I understood this language. I understood it, I understood it, all wrong perhaps. That is not what matters. It told me to write the report.83 He now speaks of Moran in the third person: he disassociates his “I” from the identity of “Moran,” signifying that he is no longer the subject he once was. This new state of being, released from Moran’s “I”, is attuned to a language that his previous self—the subjective self, the man—could not comprehend. It is not a human language, but a language of unaccommodated and undifferentiated being. This language grows stronger the more he is “disposed of self.” This indicates that even the barest of existence and the most impersonal state of being cannot be divested of language: one can be “disposed of self,” but one cannot be disposed of language. Language, then, is part and parcel of Beckettian immanence: as long as there is the “world,” there is the “word” within it: wor(l)d. The

Beckett, Molloy, 175. Beckett, Molloy, 149. 83 Beckett, Molloy, 175–6. 81 82

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obligation to tell and compulsion to narrate cannot be eradicated, even in Beckett’s barest characters; those without names, without “I”s, without consciousness cannot stop languaging, even when they fervently desire silence. Molloy, of course, spends his time writing pages in his mother’s bed; he says, “What I need now is stories, it took me a long time to know that, and I’m not sure of it.”84 This necessity for stories is compelled by an uncertain knowledge, as though the need for stories has been willed from somewhere strange and other than Molloy. “I listen and the voice is of a world collapsing endlessly,”85 Molloy says elsewhere. It is not the voice of a man, but the voice of a world and all its composite parts. It narrates its own immanence, tells the story of eternal and undifferentiated being that ultimately never moves nor changes: And it says that here nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir, except myself, who do not stir either, when I am there, but see and am seen. Yes, a world at an end, in spite of appearances, its end brought it forth, ending it began, is it clear enough? And I too am at an end, when I am there, my eyes close, my sufferings cease and I end, I wither as the living can not. And if I went on listening to that far whisper, silent long since and which I still hear, I would learn still more, about this.86 When Molloy is in that immanence, he (that is, his subjectivity) is at an end. He “withers as the living can not”—another statement that affirms the meaninglessness of the distinction between life and death. The voice highlights the nothing that comprises all existence: “nothing stirs, has never stirred, will never stir.” It is a voice that is silent and yet whispers, which Molloy always hears, but this does not mean that it is dependent upon or created by Molloy. In fact, Molloy underscores that he has no control over this language, emphasizing that it does not originate in him, but in the world: “But it is not a sound like the other sounds, that you listen to, when you choose, and can sometimes silence, by going away or stopping your ears, no, but it is a sound which begins to rustle in your head, without your knowing how, or why.”87 It is a language bound up with immanence. The immanence of language is perhaps best demonstrated by Moran’s bees, whose “dancing” he interprets as a system of signals and signs. Having spent long hours examining his bees’ movements, Moran determines that they communicate with one another through various rhythms, figures, and heights in their flying, and through changes in the tempo and

Beckett, Beckett, 86 Beckett, 87 Beckett, 84 85

Molloy, Molloy, Molloy, Molloy,

13. 40. 40. 40.



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tone of their humming. Their communication concerns the building of their hive and the production of honey; in other words, their language accompanies the production of their world, is indeed necessary to the construction of their world. Their dance allegorizes the way in which language and the world are codependent, even outside of the human realm: language is part of nature, it is an element of all existence—it is immanent. Moran also, in a way, meditates upon the bees’ dancing as one might contemplate a divine figure, but his reverence for the bees’ movements nobly exceeds his previous human worship of God: And I said, with rapture, Here is something I can study all my life, and never understand … And I admitted with good grace the possibility that this dance was after all no better than the dances of the people of the West, frivolous and meaningless. But for me, sitting near my sun-drenched hives, it would always be a noble thing to contemplate, too noble ever to be sullied by the cogitations of a man like me, exiled in his manhood. And I would never do my bees the wrong I had done my God, to whom I had been taught to ascribe my angers, fears, desires, and even my body.88 He refuses to anthropomorphize the bees, as he did his God. And the nobility of the bees’ dancing does not depend upon whatever meaning it may or may not afford, for Moran exhibits no inkling of a hesitation or disappointment when he admits that the dance may, after all, be meaningless. Since the dance’s nobility is not predicated upon meaning, or upon its becoming a reflection of Moran (as, for example, his God), we must seek out the source of its nobility elsewhere. Its nobility derives from the contemplation it incites (that is, it occupies Moran, presents him an inexhaustible something to endlessly puzzle over), and the fact that it cannot be sullied or altered by the “cogitations of a man.” That is, the bees’ dance represents a system not reliant upon any human arrangement. It is also a symbol of infinity (like Molloy’s knife rest) whose meaning or meaninglessness is without end. In all, the bees’ dance exemplifies the language of immanence—a language not confined to the human realm but essential in and to the world, unlimited in its possible meanings (infinity) and in its own potential meaninglessness (nothing). David Hayman compares the infinite impenetrability of the bees’ dance with the novel Molloy: I have said earlier that Beckett is controversial, that his novels are, like Molloy’s knife-rest, symbols of infinity and sources of infinite

Beckett, Molloy, 169.

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speculation. Molloy may also be described as the unstable mean between the inexplicable object and the equally inexplicable organism, between Molloy’s knife-rest and Moran’s beehive with the “innumerable dance” of the bees.89 Both the character Molloy and the novel Molloy journey toward and, at times, occupy an ambiguous realm where distinctions between the inorganic (the knife-rest) and the organic (the bees’ dance) do not exist. Both the word (Molloy) and the world (Molloy) comprise the same impersonal and undifferentiated plane of immanence that encompasses an infinite number of meanings and beings and yet is itself meaningless and nothing.

Aesthetics of immanent nothing Beckett’s project to “bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it—be it something or nothing—begins to seep through”90 uncovers (or creates) an immanence that is characterized by the paradoxical phenomenon whereby all the somethings add up to nothing, and that is also wholly within language. As Beckettian narrative approaches nothing through its aesthetics of lessness, it draws closer not only to the text laid bare, but also to being laid bare: immanence is at once an undifferentiated and impersonal world and an undifferentiated and impersonal word. Beckettian immanence is a nothing that comprises infinite being, and that carries with it a compulsion to narrate. In this chapter’s conclusion, I examine how this immanent nothing informs many of the noted characteristics of Beckett’s writing, including self-negating statements, a concern with the liminal, assertions of unsayability, the never-ending slippage (or crumbling) of language and identity, and unknowingness. In “The Calmative” (written in 1946; first published in 1955), the postmortem narrator says, “All I say cancels out, I’ll have said nothing.”91 This statement describes many of Beckett’s narratives, distinguished by self-negating statements that cancel themselves out immediately upon being uttered—as if those statements are pierced through with unknowability or illegitimacy, as if the floor upon which those statements are made has already dropped long ago or never existed (cf. Derrida’s bottomless

David Hayman, “Molloy or the Quest for Meaninglessness: A Global Interpretation,” in Samuel Beckett Now: Critical Approaches to His Novels, Poetry, and Plays, edited by Melvin J. Friedman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1970), 156. 90 Beckett, “German Letter of 1937,” 172. 91 Samuel Beckett, “The Calmative,” in Stories and Texts for Nothing (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 28. 89



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chessboard, discussed in Chapter 1), or as if those statements have nothing at their very core. As Asja Szafraniec suggests, “Perhaps the most consistent feature of [Beckett’s] discourse is that it poses or stages its own fundamental questions—questions fundamental to the writing process—and at the same time empties them of any answer.”92 For example, The Unnamable begins with the following self-negating questions that also, in the course of being asked, erase traditional components of narrative, including setting, character, and temporality: “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.”93 The speaker asks questions—where? who? when?, the most basic elements of narrative—in an unquestioning manner; such unquestioning questions nullify themselves. They remove the ontology of questioning from the question, for what is a question that does not ask? A question voided, an un-question. He then “unbelievingly” answers “I”; in the same way as the unquestioning questions, the unbelieving answers are made up of self-elimination. These unquestioning questions and unbelieving answers exemplify the self-negating discourse for which Beckett’s writing is known. Such selfnegating discourse is indicative of immanent nothing writ large (quite literally so) in Beckett’s texts, and enacts the “double-edged semantics” of zero—what Renate Lachmann calls the paradox of “negativity in positivity”: “The zero sign, an iconographic hole surrounding an absence like a ring, or a loop, may be called a para-icon of ‘nothing.’ However, its double-edged semantics, at the same time, reverses this zero into a sign denoting not absence but, on the contrary, plenitude and creation.”94 The closed-loop of the zero sign signifies nothing, but by inscribing nothing it makes nothing present. In a similar manner, Beckett’s self-negating statements at once embody the positive utterance and its negative counterpart. As the Unnamable says of Malone, “He passes, motionless,”95 so these statements operate via the same paradox: they are uttered (they pass), and yet these utterances are stilled, undermined, silenced by their own self-negating, un-speaking and unspeakable uttering (they are motionless). Continues the Unnamable, “Nothing ever troubles me. And yet I am troubled. Nothing has ever changed since I have been here.”96 The Unnamable’s troubled “I”, whose “me” is troubled by nothing, performs the statement that negates the words uttered, the “I” (the subject) who utters them, and even the objective

Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 92. 93 Beckett, The Unnamable, 291. 94 Renate Lachmann, “The Semantic Construction of the Void,” in GØGØL: Exploring Absence: Negativity in 19th-Century Russian Literature, edited by Sven Spieker (Bloomington: Slavica, 1999), 18. 95 Beckett, The Unnamable, 292. 96 Beckett, The Unnamable, 293. 92

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form of the subject (the “me”). That is, the troubled “I” whose “me” is troubled by nothing cancels both ontological states of being or not being troubled. What remains is a blank—no subject, no object—where indeed, “nothing has ever changed.” One of the best-known examples of Beckettian self-negating statements is Moran’s last sentences, which undermine and void his entire narrative: “Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining.”97 This statement, of course, reiterates the first sentences of his narrative, “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows,”98 and in so doing ushers the reader back to those opening utterances, which have been negated by his final statement. Thus, all of Moran’s narrative may be read through a self-erasing lens: his final sentences invite us to negate the report we have just read, to consider it as a text voided, as discourse un-written as it is written—a narrative of nothing. Because the Beckettian world’s immanence is an undifferentiated and infinite nothing, so the Beckettian word mimics this, reflects in its form through self-negating statements the world that is always undoing and always unbecoming, and yet always doing and becoming. Beckett’s narratives are also characterized by their concern with the liminal. When Cixous writes about Beckett as zero’s neighbor (and sometimes as zero itself), she pinpoints the liminal play that grounds Beckett. The to-ing and fro-ing between zero and next-to-zero recalls the seesawing between various opposing categories in which many of Beckett’s characters, like Molloy, are enthralled. They are liminal beings, suspended along multiple thresholds that render ambiguous and obsolete traditional binaries between self and other, man and animal, male and female, life and death, etc. Their liminal state is itself a symptom of nothing, of a structural—if not physical—invisibility that conditions all liminal beings, as Victor Turner suggests.99 But whereas for Turner the liminal condition is central to rites of passage, there is no passage to a new state of being in Beckett’s texts. Rather his characters often exist in a kind of ontological stuckness wherein they move without really moving between first and third person pronouns, death and life, human and inhuman, etc. Such motionless movement of the liminal position mimics immanent nothing as univocity of being (motionlessness) that encompasses an always-differentiating process

Beckett, Molloy, 176. Beckett, Molloy, 92. 99 Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967), 95–6. 97 98



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(movement), and reflects the condition wherein all the somethings (alwaysdifferentiating processes) add up to a singular and impersonal nothing (univocity of being). Of course, one of the most widely discussed liminalities found within Beckett’s oeuvre is the threshold between life and death, or the condition of being “never properly born.”100 This liminality between life and death is a marker of immanence, where categories such as life and death no longer hold meaning. While not confined to the play between life and death (as Deleuze reminds us), immanence is readily perceived here. Along these lines, the prevalence of womb thresholds in Beckett’s narratives is a way of writing immanence. Paul Sheehan discusses the condition of “never properly born” in relation to these womb thresholds in Beckett’s texts. Beckett re-envisions birth as a liminal and endless process, rather than a definitive event—an “undefined, unexplored passage between gestation and parturition.”101 Beckettian space is liminal space, the difference between self and unself. Beckett’s thresholds are not access points or any other marker of transience. They are rather non-spaces of attempted habitation, sites of enforced residence. To borrow one of Maurice Blanchot’s titles, they signify the step not beyond. The invitation to cross the lower limit implied by a threshold is revoked.102 Birth becomes an infinite series of thresholds or a never-ending passageway. There is no crossing of the threshold or definitive end to the state. Instead, these births are “for nothing.” They amount to nothing other than the continual threshold process of birthing itself. Beckett therefore presents being as perpetually unfinished—stuck in the process of becoming. It is, on the one hand, in a constant movement of becoming; yet on the other hand, it is a constant becoming that never passes into the past-tense perfective of having finally crossed a threshold and having become. The constant

The source of this phrase “never properly born” is a 1935 Jung lecture that Beckett attended. In this lecture, “Jung mentioned the little girl who had never really been born, and who by age ten had still not emerged from the archetypal dreams in which children’s dawning consciousness is immersed. This haunted [Beckett]. Many of his protagonists have never really been born; even as old men they are troubled by an unresolved desire for quietude symbolized by a return to the womb; psychic birth, the most fundamental transition, has not been realized, as (SB felt) in his own case” (Ackerley and Gontarski, The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 290). In All That Fall, for example, this lecture and little girl are explicitly mentioned. See also: Paul Sheehan, “Births for Nothing: Beckett’s Ontology of Parturition,” in Beckett after Beckett, edited by Stanley E. Gontarski and Anthony Uhlmann (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). 101 Sheehan, “Births for Nothing,” 181. 102 Sheehan, “Births for Nothing,” 185. 100

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becoming of being, therefore, adds up to the same immanent nothing all being has always been. The idea of “never properly born” presents birth as an infinite process; the essence of being is fundamentally a continual transformation that never ultimately transforms (motionless movement). This, again, is Beckettian immanence—nothing that encompasses infinite being. *** Like the Beckettian character whose identity is suspended in a to-and-fro movement between the self and the other (the “I” and the “he”), so Beckettian writing shuttles between reflecting nothing and producing nothing, between being an effect of immanence and affecting immanence. Meanwhile, the Beckettian character or voice—the outis, without subjectivity, approximating nothing, close to immanence—is often compelled by some undetermined force to some kind of discourse, is himself a writer, or even sometimes claims authorship over Beckett’s texts. Is Beckett, therefore, outis? I ask, unquestioningly. I answer, unknowingly: yes.

5 Victor Pelevin’s void and the post-Soviet condition

The work of Victor Pelevin examines the cultural condition of post-Soviet Russia, frequently playing with the notion that there is a symbiotic relationship between this culture’s emptiness and the declined status of literature within it. Pelevin hyperbolically utilizes postmodern theories to describe and reveal this cultural state, writing novels that enact what I dub “déjà vu postmodernism”— that is, postmodernism that is hyperaware of itself as postmodernism, that winks at itself as it reveals the deconstruction that grounds the world. Déjà vu postmodernism is postmodernism so familiar that it becomes a pseudo-mythologized condition experienced as a rerun. Enacting déjà vu postmodernism, Pelevin’s novels deconstruct themselves as literary art: they function as both literature and not-literature simultaneously, and they depict post-Soviet culture as both created by a void and as essentially nothing itself. These features of Pelevin’s work—literature that continuously dismantles and composes itself as literature, and a cultural condition of emptiness—point to one of his major themes: reality is a void. His novels explore how this empty reality is produced by the postmodern condition and the crises of modernity, examining both the negative and positive aspects of the void.

Pelevin’s postmodernism The development of postmodernism in the West is by now an all-too familiar narrative: the crisis of meaning occasioned by the world wars and by the calculated, industrial terror of modernity’s totalitarian regimes, coupled with the aesthetic dilemma left in the wake of such terror,1 See Theodor W. Adorno’s “Cultural Criticism and Society” (written 1949; first published 1951), wherein he puts forward the oft-quoted and repeatedly discussed claim: “To write

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spurred theories that rejected notions of all-encompassing grand narratives, that delegitimated objective truth, that uncovered deconstruction as the principle of meaning-making structures, that heralded (and lamented) the rise of the spectacle, that embraced a plurality of truths, that facilitated the expansion of emancipatory critical theory (such as post-colonial studies, race studies, gender studies, disability studies, LGBT studies, etc.), that overturned the myths of progress and rationality, and that witnessed the death of God, man, and the author. In contrast, postmodernism in Russia has a more circuitous trajectory and a fiercely debated history. Mikhail Epstein, for example, has suggested that “what is called postmodernism in contemporary Russia is not only a reaction to its Western counterpart but also represents a new developmental stage of the same artistic mentality that generated socialist realism,”2 a mentality that has its roots in a traditional Russian paradigm that goes all the way back to at least the tenth century: The production of reality seems new for Western civilization, but it has been routinely accomplished throughout all of Russian history. Here, ideas have always tended to substitute for reality, beginning, perhaps, with Prince Vladimir, who adopted the idea of Christianity in ad 988 and proceeded to implant it in a vast country, where it had been virtually unknown until that time.3 Epstein goes on to cite many examples from Russian history that illustrate the “simulative character of Russian civilization in which the plan, the preceding concept, is more real than the production brought forth by that plan.”4 According to Epstein, socialist realism, which strove to present reality not as it is but as it ought to be according to socialist principles, was the first, humorless wave of postmodernism. A second wave emerged during the seventies and eighties in the conceptualist works of artists such as Ilya Kabakov and Dmitri Prigov: The first wave of Soviet postmodernism—namely, socialist realism— accomplished the erasure of semantic differences between idea and reality, between the signifier and the signified, while the syntactic

poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981] 34). 2 Mikhail N. Epstein, “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism,” in Re-Entering the Sign: Articulating New Russian Culture, edited by Ellen E. Berry and Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995), 25. 3 Epstein, “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism,” 27. 4 Epstein, “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism,” 28.



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interplay of these signs was aesthetically adopted only by the second wave: conceptualism.5 Other scholars reject this notion that socialist realism was postmodern and that Russian culture—from Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity to Peter the Great’s Westernization to the Bolshevik project—has long been simulative, functioning in ways that we now dub “postmodern.” For example, Mark Lipovetsky points out, If we do not depart from Epstein’s schema, then postmodernism is linked first and foremost with the recognition of simulacra as such, whereas socialist realism is oriented toward a religious faith in the absolute reality of these sets of signifiers. At this point we must ask: From what is this notion of the simulative consciousness of socialist realism derived? Naturally, from today’s—postmodern—experience. Within socialist realist discourse the category of the simulacrum simply does not function.6 An awareness that one exists in a simulative condition is a prerequisite for a postmodern condition; without this awareness, one can still function as a modern. One could also argue that socialist realism derives from a Marxist belief in the deterministic certainty of the coming socialist society, and that therefore socialist realist works aim to bring closer that inevitable future world through their depiction of it, by revealing it—but this is not the same as the proverbial map preceding the territory. What is clear is that something resembling Western postmodernism emerged in certain trends in Russian underground art and literature decades prior to the widespread availability of canonical texts of Western postmodernism in Russia. For example, Andrei Bitov’s Pushkin House (Pushkinskii dom, 1964–71) tells the story of Lyova Odoevtsev who, unlike his peers in the novel, actually “sees the simulative nature of reality.”7 In one memorable scene, after destroying a number of relics in the Pushkin House Museum, Lyova discovers that those apparently sacred and authentic artifacts connected to the life of Russia’s most revered and celebrated poet were themselves fraudulent—copies and forgeries of originals now lost or, perhaps, neverhaving existed (even Pushkin’s death mask is revealed to be a fake! Stacks of copies of the mask, one inside the next, are available in the storeroom). To the reader familiar with postmodernist theories, such a story functions as a fitting

Epstein, “The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism,” 43. Mark Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction: Dialogue with Chaos, edited by Eliot Borenstein (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), 12. 7 Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, 50. 5 6

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allegory of many postmodern ideas. Venedikt Erofeev’s samizdat masterpiece Moscow to the End of the Line (Moskva–Petushki, 1969) is narrated by the drunk, philosophizing, holy fool-esque Venichka, who describes a world where the boundaries between the sacred and the profane have been eliminated, and uncovers a divine absurdity (something akin to an impossibleto-predict hiccup) structuring existence. According to Lipovetsky, Moscow to the End of the Line has influenced “the entire subsequent development of Russian postmodernism and contemporary Russian literature,”8 especially in its handling of chaos, which comes to “signify the higher divine logic.”9 It is precisely from such an awareness of the simulative nature of reality, and from the notion of a divine absurdity structuring existence, that Pelevin’s works take their starting point. This awareness is derived from three sources: Western postmodernism; Russian underground art and literature of the sixties, seventies, and eighties that explore the spectacle of Soviet society but that also suggest, more broadly, all of Russian culture to be a façade covering emptiness; and a variety of non-Western religious thought, in particular Zen Buddhism. Through the combination of these, a kind of palimpsestic awareness of the simulative nature of reality emerges in Pelevin’s works (i.e. déjà vu postmodernism)—an awareness of an awareness of an awareness ad infinitum of the spectacle governed by Pelevin’s version of the divine absurdity: that is, the void.

Engineering the human soul In addition to being structured by a hyperconscious awareness of the simulative nature of Russian reality, Pelevin’s works exhibit a meta-familiarity with an ongoing debate that has preoccupied Russian writers and philosophers since at least the eighteenth century: what should be literature’s role in society? Summarizing this debate, Maurice Friedberg writes: every generation of Russian writers would tackle the problem and stake out a position on the proper relationship between literature and society. The proponents in this ongoing debate disagreed on many substantive points, but they all agreed that literature’s mission is vital to society, that it is a national resource that must be tapped if society is to live up to its true potential.10

Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, 67. Lipovetsky, Russian Postmodernist Fiction, 78. 10 Maurice Friedberg, “Literary Culture,” in Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness, edited by Dmitri N. Shalin (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 239. 8 9



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Russian literature has long enjoyed the reputation as the real keeper of truth. The term “genius” is generously applied to certain Russian writers, who are elevated to a sacred status. Witness the development of the “Pushkin cult” as Pushkin has acquired a kind of holiness that is entrenched in Russian culture even to this day.11 Prior to the fall of the Russian Empire, literature often positioned itself as the valid counterpoint to the official tsarist regime. This tradition of literature as a powerful social force is evident, as Friedberg points out, in the musings of Vasily Rozanov following the 1917 October Revolution; Rozanov wrote that nineteenth-century literature was a monstrously brilliant thing that “killed Russia.”12 Then, there were the futurists who desired to “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard from the Ship of Modernity,”13 and the oberiuty who dismantled the idea of the poet-prophet—but neither without seeking new ways for literature to transform reality. Meanwhile, Soviet writers were, as Stalin put it, “engineers of the human soul.” Through literature, they could create models of the “New Soviet Man” that would lead to the (industrial) production of these men in reality. Such model emulation was inspired, in part, by the work of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose infamous experiments suggested that “not only animals but humans as well could respond to certain signals through the mechanism of the conditioned reflex … Bolsheviks quickly found in it scientific evidence to support their new-man project.”14 Literature gave the name to the post-Stalin period known as the Thaw (Ilya Ehrenburg, Ottepel' [The Thaw], 1954), and provided one of the first pictures of the Soviet Gulag that was openly distributed to the public (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Odin den' Ivana Denisovicha [One Day

See, for example, Nikolai Gogol’s “Neskol'ko slov o Pushkine” (A Few Words about Pushkin), widely anthologized in Russian school textbooks; it remains a central piece for the cult of Pushkin to this day. Helena Goscilo nicely sums up the entrenched nature of the Pushkin cult in Russia: “For Russians, not idolizing Pushkin is tantamount to betraying Russia, abrogating all human values, or involuntarily revealing crass imperviousness to aesthetics. The process of the poet’s canonization, launched by the Pushkin Celebration of 1880, was consolidated in the ensuing 100-odd years by official campaigns orchestrated to capitalize economically and politically on Pushkin’s name and its totem powers … [T]he state ensured that the poet became and remained our Pushkin—a national treasure, not only the fountainhead and acme of Russian art, but the slippery signifier invoked to legitimate whatever ideology dominates at a given moment” (Helena Goscilo, “The Gendered Trinity of Russian Cultural Rhetoric Today—or The Glyph of the H[i]eroine,” in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, edited by Nancy Condee [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995], 81). See also: Marcus Levitt, Russian Literary Politics and the Pushkin Celebration of 1880 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). 12 Friedberg, “Literary Culture,” 239. 13 David Burliuk et al., “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 230. 14 Yinghong Cheng, Creating the “New Man”: From Enlightenment Ideals to Socialist Realities (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 200), 24.

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in the Life of Ivan Denisovich], 1962). In a recent conversation (2010), Alexander Etkind and Mark Lipovetsky discuss post-Soviet literature’s role beyond the realm of literature. Etkind remarks, “I have never much cared for the idea of art for art’s sake. But if literature exists not for itself but for people, then what does it do for them? Really, what? Does it matter what? And if it does matter, then who is to judge?”15 Ultimately, Friedberg aptly sums up the situation: “For better or for worse, Russian writers assumed, and acted upon the assumption, that literature matters, that the fate of Russian literature and the fate of Russian society are intertwined.”16 Pelevin’s work makes explicit, hyperbolic, and literal this intertwining of the fate of literature and the fate of Russia. In the same conversation between Lipovetsky and Etkind mentioned above, Lipovetsky gives an example of this from Pelevin’s novel Empire V (2006). In that novel, Pelevin’s vampire is primarily the vehicle for a tongue that tests and transmits the power of the tongue … Even duels between vampires are poetic tournaments, although with the bloodiest of consequences. It is no wonder that the vampire’s principal disciplines are named “discourse” and “glamour.” These two categories, which are repeatedly parsed in the novel, serve as the crucial mechanisms of control over the human herd.17 The power of the tongue—the poetic word, the discourse of intelligentsia— shapes and guides human reality. This notion is also at work in Pelevin’s first novel, Omon Ra (1992); here, socialist-realist literary classics are literally (and again, violently) used as templates for real life: Boys! Remember the story of the legendary hero Alexei Maresiev, immortalized by Boris Polevoi in his book The Story of a Real Man! The hero our college is named after! He lost both legs in combat. But after losing his legs, he didn’t lose heart, he rose up again on artificial legs and soared into the sky like Icarus to strike at the Nazi scum! … All the flight-training staff and I personally, as assistant flight political instructor, promise that we will make Real Men of you in the shortest possible time!18 They make Real Men of the boys in the shortest possible time by amputating their legs, so they can model the hero Alexei Maresiev. Indeed, in many Mark Lipovetsky and Alexander Etkind, “The Salamander’s Return: The Soviet Catastrophe and the Post-Soviet Novel,” Russian Studies in Literature 46, no. 4 (2010): 6. 16 Friedberg, “Literary Culture,” 239. 17 Lipovetsky and Etkind, “The Salamander’s Return,” 16. 18 Victor Pelevin, Omon Ra, translated by Andrew Bromfield (New York: New Directions Books, 1998), 31–2; Viktor Pelevin, Omon Ra (Moscow: Eksmo, 2007), 40. 15



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of Pelevin’s works we may say that Russian literature itself becomes a character, or that a symbiotic relationship between literature and society is made literal: from Chapaev in Chapaev and Void (1994) to the intelligent Tatarsky in Generation “P” (1999) to Nabokov’s Lolita and Bulgakov’s Sharik in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (2004) to Count T (i.e. Tolstoy) and Dostoevsky in t (2009), and so on. In making Russian literature itself a character in his works, or by literalizing the notion that Russian literature and society are inextricably related (with literature often playing the guiding role in the relationship), Pelevin’s novels enter the ring of this centuries-long debate. While his novels clearly take cues and draw influence from Russian literature, often participating in the polemical “What is to be done?” albeit in their own delightfully warped way (for example, with Che Guevara’s manifesto about the oranus), they are very much aware of the potential terror that can be wrought by literature that strives “to make fairytales reality.” I will argue that Pelevin’s works alleviate this aesthetic dilemma sometimes by denying their status as literary art, and other times by deconstructing themselves in a way that eliminates the hierarchical binary wherein literature arranges society, making instead the word (ideology, literature) and the world equal products of one another. While his works resurrect scores of Russian and Soviet literary and cultural giants, and employ novelistic paradigms and forms (such as polyphony, carnivalization, and abjection), he rewrites their ideological messages to reiterate a new truth, in this case a divine absurdity: the void is reality.

Pelevin’s divine absurdity: The void The void is a paradoxical and multifaceted concept in Pelevin’s work, just as the “P” of Generation “P”19 is ambiguous, suggesting a number of possible meanings. Most obviously, “P” stands for Pepsi, and “Generation P” offers a Russian analogue for Douglas Coupland’s (and, by proxy, the West’s) “Generation X.”20 In Pelevin’s version, “children of the Soviet seventies

The novel has been translated into English both under the title Babylon (London, 2001) and Homo Zapiens (New York, 2002). I will refer to the novel as Generation “P” throughout this chapter, in keeping with the original Russian title. I use the American edition of Andrew Bromfield’s translation of the novel, with my own amendments when needed. The English translation of the novel will be referenced with HZ; the Russian original will be marked with GP. 20 For a comparative analysis of Coupland’s and Pelevin’s novels, see: Sally Dalton-Brown, “The Dialectics of Emptiness: Douglas Coupland’s and Viktor Pelevin’s Tales of Generation X and P,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 42, no. 3 (2006): 239–48. 19

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chose Pepsi in precisely the same way as their parents chose Brezhnev,”21 indicating a generation defined by consumerism (which is equated with propaganda). Pelevin has also said that the “P” stands for the obscene term pizdets.22 To put it mildly, pizdets connotes “the end of everything,” or, to be more literarily crass, a “cuntastrophe.” Hence, “Generation Pizdets” is a generation that risks confronting a vulgar end—“a generation that faces catastrophe,” proposes Pelevin.23 In the novel, Pizdets is the name of the divine dog who sleeps in the north, and whose awakening threatens an apocalypse (i.e. “you get Yeltsin for president, and all that kind of stuff”): “In the ancient chronicles he was indicated by a large letter ‘P’ with two commas.”24 Pelevin has also suggested that the “P” may stand for Putin, but ultimately concedes, “it’s whatever you like.”25 Hence, the “P” has no stable meaning of its own. Which points to still another understanding of the “P”: as Sally Dalton-Brown notes, it may stand for pustota, which means “emptiness” or “void.”26 Pustota is a central theme in Pelevin’s writings, not only obviously emphasized in one of his earliest novels, Chapaev and Pustota, but also recurring throughout his literary oeuvre. Of course, the concept of emptiness also figures predominantly in Pelevin’s study and practice of Buddhism. Thus, the novel’s title may signify a brand-crazed generation defined by consumerism (Pepsi), an apocalyptic generation without meaning or direction (pizdets), and a generation of emptiness (pustota). While these various understandings of the meaning of “P” may seem to contradict one another, I find that they are unified in the concept of nothing that permeates Pelevin’s work. While Pepsi and pizdets represent a nihilistic form of nothing that results from both the strict adherence to and the loss of grand narratives such as Soviet communism and post-Soviet capitalism, pustota represents a creative form of nothing that may provide meaning, beauty, agency, and respite to those mired in the nihilistic nothing of the post-Soviet condition. Ultimately, Pelevin’s work demonstrates how nothing is both the crisis of and the salvation from post-Soviet existence. In what follows, I analyze three of Pelevin’s most famous novels—Chapaev and Void, Generation “P”, and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf—demonstrating how nothing is both a predicament of the post-Soviet world, and the means to transcendence. Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of

Pelevin, HZ, 1; GP, 9. Victor Pelevin, “I Never Was a Hero,” Interview with “The Observer,” The Guardian (April 29, 2000), available online: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/apr/30/fiction (accessed March 5, 2015). 23 Pelevin, “I Never Was a Hero.” 24 Pelevin, HZ, 238; GP, 335. 25 Pelevin, “I Never Was a Hero.” 26 Dalton-Brown, “The Dialectics of Emptiness,” 246 n.12. 21 22



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the Werewolf focus more upon the empowering and freeing condition of nothing, whereas Generation “P” highlights the abject terror and meaninglessness inherent in the nihilistic nothing of a newly post-Soviet society. When we look at the trajectory of these three novels, we find that Pelevin begins by exploring the positive aspects of the void with Chapaev and Void in 1996, then shifts to the nihilistic and pessimist void in 1999’s Generation “P”, then returns to a more optimist treatment of the void in 2004 with The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. I will return to the meaning of this trajectory at this chapter’s conclusion. Finally, all three novels function as narratives produced by the void (narratives of nothing), while indicating how the void grounds and produces reality (narratives about nothing).

Nihilistic nothing in Generation “P” Generation “P” tells the story of Vavilen Tatarsky’s journey from a student who dreams of writing poetry “for eternity,” to a writer of advertisements designed to market Western brands for a Russian mentality, and finally to the regent of his digitized self, who is selected to be the husband of the goddess Ishtar, who is pure (capitalist) desire, and is also known as the popular brand No Name. Tatarsky’s digitized self’s sacrificial function is to appear in various television clips and advertisements, all designed to garner high ratings, to compel consumers to buy and sell, and to therefore keep a never-ending stream of money flowing, which will prevent the goddess’s death—the apocalyptic dog Pizdets—from waking up. As the novel follows Tatarsky’s trajectory from a quite banal poet to the regent for his digitized dummy, it presents a newly post-Soviet Moscow that is simultaneously grappling with the collapse of Soviet society, and with the ushering of capitalism into the place where Soviet ideology once reigned. Pelevin presents this situation in both comic and horrific lights. On the one hand, the replacement of Soviet ideology with capitalism provides ample material for the celebratory and carnivalesque mocking of any ideological system that dictates reality. But on the other hand, the situation reveals the lack of stable meaning and dearth of truth in the world, which causes feelings of horror and abjection in Tatarsky. This shift from one ideology to another and the accompanying influx of ratings-driven media and consumerism blur so greatly the distinctions between high and low culture (high art is used to market cheap goods), between self and object (you are what you buy), between reality and what is seen-on-TV (television is more real than reality), and between politics and entertainment (for-profit media stagemanages political power) that all meaning is reduced to a nihilistic void. It is in this way that nothing takes center stage in the novel’s depiction of post-Soviet Russia. Generation “P” demonstrates how capitalism produces

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a nihilistic nothing, rendering its subjects empty vessels through which to channel money (which is, of course, another type of nothing), and reducing all meaning and truth to a consumer rating or a price-tag. We witness capitalism creating a nihilistic nothing in many of the advertisements that are described in Generation “P”. Take, for example, Pugin’s advertisement for Gap clothing stores in Moscow: Anton Chekhov is half-dressed with his naked legs splayed, creating the outline of a gap; this outline is repeated without Chekhov, evoking the image of an hourglass whose sand has almost all fallen to the bottom. The advertisement’s text, written in English, reads: RUSSIA WAS ALWAYS NOTORIOUS FOR THE GAP BETWEEN CULTURE AND CIVILIZATION. NOW THERE IS NO MORE CULTURE, NO MORE CIVILIZATION. THE ONLY THING THAT REMAINS IS THE GAP. THE WAY THEY SEE YOU27 The image of a pants-less Chekhov implies the degradation (literally, the bringing down to the lower-bodily stratum) of a symbol of Russian literary culture, which, as discussed earlier, traditionally understood itself as vital to guiding society—to closing the gap between cultural ideals and lived experience in civilization. Note also that time is running out for Chekhov, as indicated by the shadow of the hourglass created by the reiteration of his bare legs’ outline. The advertisement therefore suggests that Russian literature’s project to eliminate the gap between culture and civilization has run out of time; indeed, all that remains is the gap that once divided the two. The only thing left to be done is for this degraded, pants-less symbol to cover up this gap by improving his image (i.e. the way he is seen): he must purchase a pair of brand-name jeans. Such covering up of nothing with an image takes a page from Moscow conceptualism of the seventies and eighties (especially the work of Ilya Kabakov), which I discuss in greater detail later in this chapter. Finally, the advertisement’s turn on the pun— the Gap (the store) and the gap (a figuration of nothingness)—suggests, on the one hand, that nothing remains but the Gap (that is, consumerism), and on the other hand, that nothing remains but the gap (that is, nothing itself). The products of capitalism—consumerism and nothing—become synonymous, even indistinguishable—especially as consumerism (the Gap) is used to mask the nothing (the gap) that remains after culture and civilization disappear. Throughout Generation “P” Tatarsky creates many similar advertisements that employ high art to market brand names—transforming art into

27 Pelevin, HZ, 63. In the original Russian version of the novel, the advertisement is written in English, so as to take advantage of the play of words (Pelevin, GP, 95).



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a tool of capitalism. Toward the end of the novel, works of art themselves are quite literally reduced to nothing more than a price and a description of what has been purchased: a new wave of art called “monetaristic minimalism” has been invented in Russia. Tatarsky tours a Spanish collection of this new wave of art, which displays certificates of purchase for works of great artists such as Goya, Picasso, and Velasquez: “And this one?” [Tatarsky] asked, indicating the next sheet of paper with a text and seal. “Oh,” said Alla, “that’s the pride of our collection. It’s a Goya—the Maja with a fan in the garden. Acquired from a certain small museum in Castile. Once again Oppenheim and Radler certify the price—eight and a half million. Astonishing.”28 In Russia, art has been reduced or “minimalized” to a single measurement— how much one pays for it. Furthermore, nobody seems to know or care where the actual artworks are presently located, and it may even be the case that the pieces represented by the certificates of purchase do not actually exist. To be sure, descriptions are given of paintings and sculptures that are reminiscent of real artworks by Goya, Picasso, and Velasquez. However, the descriptions do not perfectly match up with existing pieces. It appears that what is described are artworks that seem like they very well could exist (they have characteristics of well-known works by Goya, Picasso, and Velasquez), but in fact do not. Hence, the artworks only exist as certificates of purchase, and beyond those certificates there are no actual artworks. Nothing has once again been masked by a valuable description and a price—by an image. In post-Soviet Russia, art is only as valuable as its monetary worth; indeed, it only exists as such. The utilization of art for consumerist ends mimics the ideological shift from Soviet communism to post-Soviet capitalism. Such shifts—art to marketing, communism to capitalism—blur the lines between traditional binary oppositions and destabilize previously held truths. In this particular case, the result is that nothing, literally, remains: “the gap is all that’s left.” Nothing is generated all the more by the very functions of capitalism, which, as Pelevin demonstrates, reduces all to its monetary worth. In the case of art, as we have just seen, the work for sale does not even have to exist as long as its certificate of sale—the image of its monetary worth—does. Moreover, this craze of “monetaristic minimalism” is not limited to art. We see a version of it in the novel’s depiction of the post-Soviet condition of man (or, as I like to call it, the “New Post-Soviet Man”). In Generation “P” Pelevin presents man as existing in a kind of distorted version of a Buddhist

Pelevin, HZ, 232; GP, 326.

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worldview: man no longer perceives himself as separate from the objects around him, many of which market themselves as expressions of his “self.” Illustrative of this new condition is “The Path to Your Self,” a store that sells items that exhibit one’s personal rebellions and beliefs; that is, the store sells one’s image—who one will become. “The Path to Your Self” is effectively the unofficial name of every store and brand Tatarsky encounters, from Gap to Reebok, all of which promise “your self” in exchange for purchasing their products. You are what you buy becomes material reality in Generation “P”, just as art is reduced to a record of its purchase. As such, man is no longer able to distinguish himself from the spectacle surrounding him, which includes advertisements, branding, media, and television. He no longer perceives a difference between the reality that is the material world, and the reality that is the material world as seen on television. A devolution has taken place, from Homo sapiens to Homo zapiens (from TV “zapping”), and Homo zapiens exist in a “collective non-existence,” in “unreality”: But it is not merely unreal (this word is in effect applicable to everything in the human world). There are no words to describe the degree of its unreality. It is a heaping of one unreality upon another, a castle constructed of air, the foundations of which stand upon a profound abyss … The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: “There, that is Homo Zapiens.” HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.29 The condition (or, to be more precise, the “non-condition”) of Homo zapiens is reminiscent of “monetaristic minimalism.” As works of art have been replaced by certificates of purchase and may not even exist beyond those records, so Homo sapiens have become Homo zapiens: that is, men that are merely a conglomeration of images and brands, amassed upon a “heaping of one unreality upon another”—in other words, they are images of images covering up nothing (like Chekhov and his Gap jeans). There is nothing that can be regarded as a subject sitting in the house watching television; instead, the Homo zapiens “subject” has aligned his consciousness with ratings-driven and commercial-fueled television to become a remotely controlled television program. But it is not just art and man that have become images masking nothing in post-Soviet society; all of existence is now one all-encompassing and

29

Pelevin, HZ, 80, 82; GP, 119, 121.



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all-consuming void, otherwise known as oranus. Each individual Homo zapiens equals a single cell of oranus, whose existence requires a continuous flow of money streaming through its cells. To ensure that money is constantly exchanged between each of its cells, oranus has developed a central nervous system known as the media, whose never-ceasing advertisements fuel the Homo zapiens’ desires to buy and sell. Oranus therefore generates the consumerist impulses that compel Homo zapiens to purchase their identities and experiences (and in this way, to come into being). Besides perpetuating a stream of money, oranus has no other characteristic or function. It itself is nothing, a conveyor of emptiness. Oranus has neither ears, nor nose, nor eyes, nor mind. And of course, it is far from being the embodiment of evil or the spawn of hell that many representatives of the religious business would have it be. In itself it wishes for nothing, since it is simply incapable of wishing in the abstract. It is an inane polyp, devoid of emotion or intention, which ingests and eliminates emptiness.30 This depiction of oranus crystalizes the notion that pustota/emptiness is the nature of all things: it is the product of capitalism, the essence of man, the status of art, and the only truth and reality in the novel’s post-Soviet world. Generation “P”, therefore, diagnoses post-Soviet culture much in the same way as Western theorists have characterized the postmodern condition. For example, the devolution of man from Homo sapiens to Homo zapiens recalls the vanishing of the subject in postmodernism, an idea that has been discussed by Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, and Jameson, to name a few. Of course, Pelevin’s novel also calls to mind Baudrillard’s ideas on the simulative nature of reality, and the novel’s depiction of the crisis of meaning occasioned by capitalism calls to mind the work of Jameson, among others. However, as Sofya Khagi has wisely pointed out, Pelevin figures these postmodern notions quite literally, not just as a metaphor: as we have already seen, art is no longer displayed in galleries, and humans can no longer be said to exist. Writes Khagi, “If Baudrillard still leaves room for a metaphorical reading of his provocative thesis about the Gulf War, with some provisional ‘reality’ beyond the virtual warfare presented for the benefit of the populace, then Pelevin’s politicians are literally disembodied.”31 But by making literal postmodern metaphors, the novel winks at itself as a postmodernist text and exhibits a hyperawareness of its postmodern

Pelevin, HZ, 84; GP, 126. Sofya Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens: Viktor Pelevin’s Consumer Dystopia,” The Russian Review 67 (2008): 563.

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themes, lending them an aura of an already-played out familiarity. At the same time, it is essential to note that Pelevin’s brand of postmodernism draws not only from the Western tradition, but also from Russian conceptualism. In particular, the emptiness ubiquitous in the novel’s depiction of postSoviet Russia takes a page directly from what can be regarded as Russian postmodernism. For example, Pelevin makes clear nods to Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s Sots-Art (coined as a play on Andy Warhol’s Pop Art), which hyperbolically displays the imagery of socialist realism to reveal the emptiness behind it. In Generation “P” Sots-Art almost parades itself at times, waves its own banner, in descriptions like the following: Above the desk, at the spot where a portrait of the leader [vozhd' ] would have hung in Soviet times, there was a picture in a heavy round frame. The colored rectangle set at the center of a white field was hard to make out from the door, but Tatarsky recognized it from its colors—he had one just like it on his baseball shirt. It was a standard label with the American flag and the words: “Made in the USA. One size fits all.” Mounted on another wall was an uncompromising installation consisting of a line of fifteen tin cans with a portrait of Andy Warhol on a typical salt-pork label.32 However, while one of the motivations of Warhol’s Pop Art is to replace the reality of an object with its sign or brand name, in Sots-Art specifically and in Russian conceptualism more generally the goal is to reveal the emptiness masked by the sign. As Ilya Kabakov, one of the leading Moscow conceptualists, writes: In contrast with the West, the principle of “one thing instead of another” does not exist and is not in force, most of all because in this binomial the definitive, clear second element, this “another,” does not exist. It is as if in our country it has been taken out of the equation, it is simply not there … This contiguity, closeness, touchingness, contact with nothing, emptiness makes up, we feel, the basic peculiarity of “Russian conceptualism.”33 Epstein reiterates Kabakov’s view when he describes conceptualist poetry as “the poetry of crossed-out words, words that cancel themselves out at the

Pelevin, HZ, 149; GP, 215. Ilya Kabakov, Zhizn' mukh / Das Leben der Fliegen / Life of Flies (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1992), 247. Quoted in Mikhail N. Epstein, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, translated by Anesa Miller-Pogacar (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 200.

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moment of utterance, as if devoid of meaning … They present a riddle of self-manifest emptiness.”34 The influence of Russian conceptualism in Generation “P” is evident in their shared exposure of emptiness behind the image, the word, and the world. Pelevin’s description of the void in post-Soviet society also feels cut from the same cloth as Alexander Genis’ metaphor for the postSoviet condition: a “cored onion,” signifying a culture with many layers surrounding an absent center. Here, in the 1990s … we may draw on a new metaphor, signaling the emergence of a new cultural paradigm, born of the emptiness or nothingness that was perceived as fatal to the earlier paradigm … In the paradigm of the onion, the emptiness at the center is not a cemetery but a source of meaning. This is the cosmic zero point, around which being germinates. This emptiness, which is both everything and nothing, is the focus of the world. The world is made possible only because of the emptiness at its center. It structures being, bestows form on things, and allows things to function.35 As we will see, Genis’ optimistic view of nothingness as the ultimate potentiality or as a creative force is present in a handful of Pelevin’s novels, including Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf. However, this optimism is absent in Generation “P”. Instead, as Pelevin literalizes postmodern metaphors from both the Western and Russian traditions, the novel pivots back and forth between carnivalesque carousing and abject horror, ultimately offering neither meaning nor salvation from meaninglessness. Much of the novel’s imagery seems plucked from the aesthetic arsenal of the carnivalesque, described by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World. As we have already seen, in Generation “P” the sacred (e.g. art, literature, religion, truth) is everywhere combined with the profane (e.g. consumer goods, alcohol, drugs, sex); the degradation of the sacred is, of course, one of the chief elements of grotesque realism, a literary mode of the carnival.36 Furthermore, the novel depicts a world where the spectacle has taken the

Mikhail N. Epstein, “Like a Corpse in the Desert: Dehumanization in the New Moscow Poetry,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 136. 35 Alexander Genis, “Onions and Cabbages: Paradigms of Contemporary Culture,” in Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 411. 36 “The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 19–20). 34

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place of reality. This is another important motif of the carnivalesque: a spectacle without spectators, wherein everyone participates in a sweeping performance that has become the world.37 The power and authority of the spectacle culminates at the novel’s end, when Tatarsky’s 3-D double becomes the husband of Ishtar and Tatarsky himself serves as the regent of his double. But this motif is also emphasized throughout the novel in subtle ways. For instance, when Morkovin takes Tatarsky to Draft Podium, he shows him an expensive Silicon Graphics computer equipped with a Soft Image program that cost twice as much as the computer itself; the images are valued more than the material machine that displays them. Another time, Tatarsky meets a client who “looked remarkably like the image [obraz] that had taken shape in Tatarsky’s mind following the previous day’s conversation.”38 It is implied that his mind’s image of the client shapes the client’s fleshy appearance. Or when Tatarsky peruses LSD stamps featuring images that dictate the nature of the high: “the most important thing is the drawing … Your mind remembers it; and when the acid reaches it, everything follows a set path.”39 These stamps also recall Venichka’s cocktails in Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line, noted for its carnivalesque motifs. Venichka’s cocktails produce a variety of experiences depending on their precise recipes: “Balsam of Canaan” incites vulgarity and dark forces, while “Bitches’ Brew”—transcendence.40 Another carnivalesque motif at work in Generation “P” can be seen in the parodic imitations of official figures that have actually usurped their official counterparts, reminiscent of the jester’s replacement of the king during carnival.41 Pelevin literalizes this motif in a delightfully wicked manner, particularly in the novel’s depiction of Boris Yeltsin: the real Yeltsin has been dead for many years, but his digital dummy continues to serve as president. The Yeltsin dummy’s jester-like antics—perpetual drunkenness, stumbling over important heads of state, continual mess-making—are the results of the combined efforts of advertisers and television executives who strive to secure high ratings. Finally, the novel’s oranus is analogous to the collective and unfinished grotesque body of the carnival tradition. “Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 7). 38 Pelevin, HZ, 13; GP, 28. 39 Pelevin, HZ, 57; GP, 88. 40 Venedikt Erofeev, Moscow to the End of the Line, translated by H. William Tjalsma (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 66–71; Venedikt Erofeev, Moskva–Petushki (Moscow: Vagrius, 2002), 71–7. 41 “Another essential element was a reversal of the hierarchic levels: the jester was proclaimed king, a clownish abbot, bishop, or archbishop was elected at the ‘feast of fools,’ and in the churches directly under the pope’s jurisdiction a mock pontiff was even chosen” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 81). 37



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But whereas the grotesque body is temporary, only existing for the period of carnival, the oranus is a seemingly permanent fixture in Generation “P”. And whereas the carnival, as described by Bakhtin, celebrates and demonstrates a second life of the people that exists beyond officialdom, in Generation “P” there is no “two-world condition.”42 Rather, there is only a one-world condition: oranus. In this condition, the carnival transforms into its dark twin, the abject, which resides in the realm where distinctions (and therefore, the meaning generated by distinctions) have completely disappeared—or never existed. In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva defines the abject as something akin to absolute otherness, or “the jettisoned object.”43 The abject is that impossible and unthinkable ambiguity that resides outside of any and all systems of meaning, in “the place where meaning collapses.”44 It is “A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, or a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.”45 In Generation “P” the nothing that grounds the post-Soviet condition provokes the experience of abjection in characters who come close to apprehending that nothing. Once Tatarsky no longer believes in eternity—that is, the capital-T Truth he dreams of laboring for in his literary endeavors, and which collapses along with the Soviet Union—he finds himself in a present saturated by a sinister ambiguity and meaninglessness: It was a very strange world. Externally it had not changed too much, except perhaps that there were more paupers on the streets, but everything in his surroundings—the houses, the trees, the benches on the streets—had somehow suddenly grown old and decrepit [opustilos' ]. It wasn’t possible to say that the essential nature of the world had changed, either, because now it no longer had any essential nature. A frighteningly vague uncertainty dominated everything.46 Here, the non-existent essential nature of the world (or, nothing) is accompanied by a “frighteningly vague uncertainty [strashnovataia neopredelennost' ],” reminiscent of the abject. This symbiotic relationship between nothing and the abject is reiterated in a later passage that describes how the Soviet grand narrative has been replaced by a putrid uncertainty: “Lenin’s statues were gradually carted out of town on military trucks … but Bakhtin, Rabelais, 6. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 44 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 45 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 46 Pelevin, HZ, 6; GP, 18. 42 43

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his presence was merely replaced by a frightening murky grayness [seraia strashnovatost' ] in which the Soviet soul simply continued rotting until it collapsed inwards on itself.”47 The abject that stalks the nothing at the heart of the post-Soviet condition threatens those characters, including Tatarsky, who recognize it. As Kristeva explains that the abject must be “permanently thrust aside in order to live,”48 so Generation “P” illustrates how awareness of the meaninglessness and emptiness of the world must be repeatedly kept at bay, oftentimes through drugs and self-inflicted pain. For example, when Tatarsky begins to realize that nothing—only oranus—is actually grounding and controlling the world, Morkovin saves him from that thought by tearing off a small patch of Tatarsky’s skin. Tatarsky “sens[es] that the pain had thrown him back from the edge of a deep, dark abyss.”49 The dark abyss (propast') represents the annihilating realization of nothing itself. Suffering, drug-induced hallucinations, shopping, and earning money therefore become methods for constructing at least the appearance of borders (and therefore, the appearance of a self and of a truth) in an otherwise borderless, abject, and empty world where the deaths of the self and of truth have transpired. A certain irony emerges when we consider the role both carnival and the abject play in the creation of meaning out of chaotic systems. One of the most important ideas in Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World concerns not only the renewal of the world and human relationships during carnival,50 but also the rebirth of the word, as represented, for example, in the Italian commedia dell’arte: We specify that it is the word that is born, and we stress this fact: a highly spiritual act is degraded and uncrowned by the transfer to the material bodily level of childbirth, realistically represented. But thanks to degradation the word is renewed; one might say reborn.51 Carnival degrades the sacred act of naming and creating language, bringing the word down to the lower, material bodily level (i.e. the corporeal word) in order to rejuvenate it, and by proxy the world, with a richness of novel meanings. Likewise, the abject, Kristeva tells us, is closely (and even, perhaps, necessarily) tied to the production of art and religion: Pelevin, HZ, 19; GP, 36. In the Russian original, the word vozhd' is used rather than explicitly naming Lenin or any other Soviet leader. 48 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. 49 Pelevin, HZ, 175; GP, 251–2. 50 “[Carnival] is a special condition of the entire world, of the world’s revival and renewal, in which all take part … People were, so to speak, reborn for new, purely human relations. These truly human relations were not only a fruit of imagination or abstract thought; they were experienced. The utopian ideal and the realistic merged in this carnival experience, unique of its kind” (Bakhtin, Rabelais, 6, 10). 51 Bakhtin, Rabelais, 309. 47



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The various means of purifying the abject—the various catharses—make up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion. Seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience, which is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies, appears as the essential component of religiosity.52 Kristeva makes the case that great modern literature investigates the abject, the place where boundaries do not exist, where we are brought face to face with an archaic and tenuous place that precedes the development of linguistic, social, or psychological binaries such as self/other or subject/ object. The transcendental project, says Kristeva, is really our effort to smooth over the fractures of meaning associated with the abject: On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its socio-historical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.53 The abject conditions, even necessitates, the aesthetic or religious project that allows for transcendence. For both Bakhtin and Kristeva, then, the chaotic moment generates a creative impulse that produces meaning. But in Generation “P”, no transcendence or meaning is derived from oranus, which, as we have seen, functions in the mode of both the carnivalesque and the abject. Or, the only meaning produced—consumerism, capitalism—is empty. Moreover, Pelevin’s use of the carnivalesque and the abject in such a way that they no longer generate meaning or renew the world gains an additional layer of significance when we consider the various ways in which Generation “P” positions itself as a cynical consumer product, as literature that is “not-literature,” and as a failed attempt of the dying intelligentsia to save society through literature. It appears that in Generation “P” Pelevin engages directly in the debate regarding Russian literature’s role in society, and decides that it has also been degraded to nothing. Many excellent studies have shown how the novel operates as a parable for the decline of the intelligentsia and the end of the sacred literary word in post-Soviet Russia. Lyudmila Parts, for instance, demonstrates how the transformation of the intelligentsia is embodied in Tatarsky: he begins as a fledgling intelligent, an idealistic student who after reading Pasternak aspires to be a great poet, then transforms into a cynical writer of advertisements,

Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 17. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 207.

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and by the novel’s end has involuntarily climbed to the highest rank of a mysterious system that manipulates reality through television in order to make money. If, as Parts argues, Tatarsky does indeed represent the status of the intelligentsia in post-Soviet society, then Pelevin presents the intelligentsia as having perversely fulfilled its timeless mission—to guide society in service of the masses—by actually creating and controlling reality through television, and profiting from this. This suggests that the intelligentsia has also, like the Soviet Union, “improved so much that it ceased to exist.”54 Here, we should recall that Tatarsky’s background has much in common with Pelevin’s personal history. Like his hero, Pelevin was born in the sixties, studied engineering, and was briefly enrolled at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow.55 By bestowing upon Tatarsky his own biographical details, Pelevin signals his own status as a member of the degraded intelligentsia who no longer writes literature, suggesting that Generation “P” has more in common with Tatarsky’s cynical advertisements than with Russian literary classics. It appears that the very emptying of literature is not only depicted in Generation “P”, but also perhaps embodied in its very form. In Parts’ view, “the degradation of the word accompanies and precipitates the degradation of its carrier, the intelligentsia.”56 She argues that the degradation of the “eternal [Russian] word” happens when it becomes a “tool of commerce”; in so doing it de-mythologizes the intelligentsia by leaving it “without the basic element of its identity.”57 Such degradation of the Russian word is readily evident in the repeated intrusion of English puns and discourse in the text. The novel’s Russian title, for example, exemplifies this intrusion by its use of the English word “generation” (not pokolenie) with the Cyrillic letter Π, and most of Tatarsky’s advertisements are written in both English and Russian, oftentimes relying upon an understanding of the puns produced by the presence of the English words. As such, much of the meaning generated by the advertisements is not accessible to those who rely solely upon Russian. This confusion of languages also echoes the mythological subtext of the novel, which concerns the tower of Babel. As in the biblical tale, post-Soviet Russian Logos (i.e. Word) has undergone a linguistic fall from grace (becoming logos; i.e. symbols of commercial enterprises), and meaning is now difficult to convey to those who cling solely to the Russian language, or perhaps meaning (the eternal/sacred Russian word) ceases to exist. But even those who are fluent in both English

Pelevin, HZ, 3; GP, 14. See also: Sofya Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens,” 570–1. She points out many biographical and stylistic similarities between Tatarsky and Pelevin, and makes a case for the novel as an intensely self-referential text. 56 Lyudmila Parts, “Degradation of the Word or the Adventures of an Intelligent in Viktor Pelevin’s Generation Π,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 46 (2004): 441. 57 Parts, “Degradation of the Word,” 441. 54 55



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and Russian derive a meaning that is ultimately meaningless, for all boils down to the same message: “buy” or “sell.” In the novel’s confusion of languages and in its degradation of the sacred Russian word, it appears that Pelevin once again gestures toward the carnivalesque—whose play of signifiers and uncrowning of the eternal word produce an infinite range of new meaning—only to show how in the post-Soviet condition, carnival no longer inspires the same rejuvenating effects. Additional evidence of the disappearance of literature in post-Soviet culture is the increasing infrequency of literary references in advertisements. Whereas in the beginning of the novel Tatarsky often employs allusions to Russian literature to advertise products, toward the end of the novel he disapproves of this procedure. For instance, in an ad for Gucci he replaces Pushkin (the father of Russian literature) with a “new Russian,” explaining, “It’s time to have done with literary history and think about our real clientele.”58 Tatarsky’s second advertisement for the Gap abandons Chekhov and instead features Morkovin’s 3-D double dressed up as a new Russian shopping in the Gap, while Tatarsky’s 3-D double, wearing an army uniform, is seen “hurling a brick at the reinforced glass [of the shop window] and yelling: ‘Afghanistan was heavier’ (slogan [in English]: ‘Enjoy the Gap’).”59 The earlier advertisement’s emphasis on literary culture is transformed in the second ad into a focus on the economic gap between the rich and the poor, and an invitation to enjoy the benefits of income inequality. Literary culture is no longer a selling point. Furthermore, the form of Generation “P” mimics the process of watching television, once again indicating that it is less akin to literature and something more like the TV shows created by the Institute of Apiculture, which are primarily designed to achieve high ratings and to therefore sell expensive commercial slots. Stephen Hutchings points out that the main narrative thread is interspersed with descriptions of advertisements, and therefore “resembles a televisual anti-novel”; hence, “Pelevin enacts the end of literature” in Generation “P”.60 One of the covers for the novel’s first edition (published by Vagrius) also reiterates the notion that Generation “P” is not literature, but rather a crass consumer product. Foregrounding Che Guevara wearing a beret that bears the Nike swoosh, with a background composed of tiled Coke logos to Che’s right versus tiled Pepsi logos on his left (together comprising a commercialized yin-yang), the cover image suggests that the novel is “a visually packaged commercial product, rather than a product of the spirit.”61 Especially the Pelevin, HZ, 160; GP, 231. Pelevin, HZ, 250; GP, 350. 60 Stephen Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age: The Word as Image (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 177. 61 Hutchings, Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age, 177. 58 59

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yin-yang of Coke and Pepsi insinuates that the opposing forces giving rise to the natural and spiritual worlds are the ebb and flow of consumerism. Moreover, Coke and Pepsi function in the novel as metonyms for Western capitalism and Soviet communism respectively, with the former taking the place of the latter in the course of the narrative. Such a shift from Pepsi to Coke, however, essentially amounts to no shift at all—merely the replacement of one brown liquid for another. Likewise, the shift from Soviet ideology to capitalism is an exchange of one meaningless ideological system for another. But the Che-wearing-Nike edition was not the only edition of Generation “P” that was published by Vagrius during the first year of the novel’s release. As Khagi points out, “To appeal to the widest target group, both ‘high cultural’ and ‘pulp’ editions of the novel were issued.”62 In effect, Pelevin adopts the theory of “positioning,” described in the novel, to market his own work: goods must be “positioned” in such a way as to manipulate the minds of the target group. The Che edition represents the “mass market” positioning, while the “high cultural” edition features an image of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Tower of Babel. Additionally, when the first English translation of the novel was released, it was published as Babylon in the UK, and as Homo Zapiens in the US. These different titles perhaps reflect attempts to position the novel according to the perceived tastes of its given consumer. Ultimately, the commercial packaging of Generation “P”, coupled with the degradation of Russian literature depicted in the novel’s narrative, put forward the notion that literature itself has witnessed its end point, and has, like post-Soviet culture, become empty. In all, Generation “P” embodies in its very form the story it narrates: that of “voided writing.” It does so by marketing itself like a consumer product (which the text establishes as inherently empty), by reading as a television show interrupted by commercials (which functions to deny the novel’s status as literary art), by dismantling aesthetic systems that traditionally produce meaning (e.g. carnival and abjection), and by featuring a protagonist whose history reflects Pelevin’s, which implies that Tatarsky’s journey from meaningful literature to meaningless commercialism is also the author’s. Generation “P” tells the story of the post-Soviet void: art has collapsed into nothing (literature has been replaced by advertisements; in “monetaristic minimalism,” art is usurped by a certificate of purchase), the human subject no longer exists (Homo sapiens have become Homo zapiens), and the post-Soviet cultural condition is a “non-condition” (oranus is the figuration of an all-encompassing void, comprising the entire world). When Tatarsky is asked to write the Russian idea, to put into writing the Russian identity, the very fact that he comes up with nothing

Khagi, “From Homo Sovieticus to Homo Zapiens,” 571.

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exemplifies the truth of the situation, as well as when Azadovsky asks him if he believes in anything, and Tatarsky responds “no.” And at the novel’s end, when Tatarsky is brought to the Golden Room to embark upon the final ritual of becoming digitized, he enters at the time 0:00—signifying that the intelligent has finally and completely arrived at zero. While we might be tempted to read the novel as a dystopian critique of capitalism, the novel’s own consumerist form empties it both of its ability to satirize and of Russian literature’s traditional role in championing ideals that society strives to realize. Generation “P” ultimately paints a pessimistic portrait of the post-Soviet world and the void, and echoes many well-known anxieties concerning the postmodern condition—in a world where everything is empty, how can one avoid nihilism? Generation “P” brilliantly diagnoses the state, but offers no remedy for this angst.

Sacred nothing in Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf In many of his works, Pelevin presents worlds that contain parallel yet contrasting realities. We witness a version of this in Generation “P”, which juxtaposes post-Soviet culture with ancient Babylonian myths, merging the two opposing worlds via the void (oranus) that structures them both. By setting up these coexistences that are seemingly at odds with one another, reminiscent of Borgesian “gardens of forking paths,”63 Pelevin’s writings explore the nature of reality itself, asking: What is is? His answer, as given in Generation “P”, is usually nothing, void, emptiness. However this nothing is not always so nihilistic or accompanied by such pessimism as in Generation “P”. For necessary to the existence of these multiple realities is the very nothing that resides at their centers, grounding the essence of each individual reality or being. The idea therefore emerges that nothing itself is a creative force, the crucial element for anything to exist at all, and a means to freedom. It is in this way that Pelevin’s preoccupation with the void takes on a positive aspect, becoming a means to transcend the nihilism of the nothing portrayed in Generation “P”. Nothing becomes the only true state of being, the force that allows for existence, and is therefore sacred. It becomes, finally, the transcendental signified in some of Pelevin’s works. Pelevin alludes to Borges’ famous garden in the preface to Chapaev and Void, which is written by the fictional Urgan Jambon Tulku VII. Here, the fictional editor suggests an alternative title for the text, “The Garden of the Divergent Petkas,” which is in reference to the novel’s hero who exists in at least two separate realities. A complete comparative analysis of Pelevin and Borges lies outside the scope of the present project.

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Bifurcated realities generated by a void is a theme central to Pelevin’s Chapaev and Void (Chapaev i Pustota, 1996).64 Like Generation “P”, the novel has been translated into English under two different titles: The Clay Machine Gun (UK) and Buddha’s Little Finger (US). The hero of the novel, whose last name is Pustota (Void, in English), is also variously known as Peter Null in the UK edition, and as Pyotr Voyd in the US edition (I will refer to him by his diminutive Petka throughout this chapter). Thus, while readers in the UK read about Null in The Clay Machine Gun, readers in the US read the story of Voyd in Buddha’s Little Finger. These diverging translations embody one of the main ideas of the novel: alternative realities that simultaneously coexist in the same single entity. And as Voyd/Null is the central character upon which these narratives are built, this indicates that these divergent narratives and the realities they depict are also generated by the void. The publication of the same novel under two different titles therefore functions as a kind of publishing performance art that pushes the idea of bifurcated realities beyond the narrative confines of Chapaev and Void and into the actual world of Pelevin’s readers. When we place the US and UK editions side by side, they together form visual and material representations of the novel’s most significant symbol: the clay machine gun (UK), which is also Buddha’s little finger (US); likewise, Peter Null (UK) is Pyotr Voyd (US). At the core of both Voyd/Null and Buddha’s little finger/ clay machine gun is the void of reality. As we discover in the course of the novel, when one shoots/points the gun/finger at something, that something’s true nature is revealed to be nothing itself; that is, it disappears. Thus, the image of the gun/finger represents the bifurcated realities that comprise the world depicted in Chapaev and Void, and moreover symbolizes the emptiness that is this world’s essence: after all, when one holds a mirror up to the gun/finger, therefore allowing the gun/finger to shoot/ point to itself, the gun/finger also disappears. These realities therefore only seemingly exist, they are only the appearance of realities (or “realities”), and beneath them there is nothing. As Petka puts it, existence is “A golden label on an empty bottle … A shop where everything is displayed in a magnificently arranged window-setting, but that tiny, tender, narrow little room behind it … Yes, that room is empty [pusto].”65 His familial name, Pustota (Void/Voyd/Null), draws Petka’s statements full circle: existence is empty (pusto) as there is a void behind its appearance, but at the same time, behind that appearance in that tender, narrow room, there is Pusto[ta] (that I refer to the novel as Chapaev and Void throughout this chapter, and use the American edition of Andrew Bromfield’s translation for quotes from the text. The English translation of the novel will be referenced with BLF (for Victor Pelevin, Buddha’s Little Finger, translated by Andrew Bromfield [New York: Penguin Books, 1999]); the Russian original will be marked with CiP (for Viktor Pelevin, Chapaev i Pustota [Moscow: Vagrius, 1996]). 65 Pelevin, BLF, 287; CiP, 344. 64



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is, Petka!). Petka’s statement at once affirms and erases his own being, and establishes him simultaneously as both the creator and the created of his world, as both the signified and the signifier, thereby illustrating Pelevin’s notion of the void as the transcendental signified generating the world, and the world, in turn, regenerating the very void that generates it. As Pelevin himself has stated, Chapaev and Void is “the first novel in world literature, whose action takes place in absolute emptiness [v absoliutnoi pustote].”66 In Chapaev and Void the hero exists in at least two main realities at once: as the now-legendary poet-turned-Bolshevik Petka, who was the sidekick of the Bolshevik commander Vasily Chapaev (1887–1919) during the Russian Civil War; and as a patient in a post-Soviet Russian madhouse. Additionally, assisted by drug-fueled hypnosis, Petka experiences the alternative existences and inner lives of the other patients in his ward. Often, the leap from Petka’s consciousness to that of another patient’s is made without warning or explanation, just as Petka’s switching back and forth between his 1919 and 1991 existences is as fluid as falling asleep and waking up. Hence, the distinctions between reality and dreams, and between the self and the other, dissolve. Reality takes on dreamlike contours, and the self shades into the other. On the one hand, the novel presents this waking-sleep existence as the direct result of the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the doctor Timur Timurovich explains Petka’s madness as the collapse of his human psyche, caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union: “When established connections in the real world collapse, the same thing happens in the human psyche.”67 Some critics, following the reasoning of Petka’s doctor, interpret the novel as the story about a Homo Sovieticus who finds himself voided once the Soviet Union has ceased to exist.68 On the other hand, this explanation is revealed to be inadequate and near-sighted in the course of the novel, which demonstrates how the distinctions between fantasy and reality have always been chimeras. Petka’s two existences each take place during periods of extreme change in Russia: just after the Russian Revolution, which witnessed the replacement of tsarism with communism; and immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, which occasioned the end of communism and the rise of capitalism. The disappearance of the Soviet Union, then, is not an anomalous or unique historical event in which “established connections to the real world” collapsed; it is, rather, one of at least two such events represented in the novel, and moreover functions as merely one of countless expressions of reality’s collapse—of reality revealed Viktor Pelevin, “Kogda ia pishu, ia dvigaius' na oshchup',” available online: http://pelevin. nov.ru/interview/o-jap/1.html (accessed March 6, 2015). 67 Pelevin, BLF, 33; CiP, 46. 68 See, for example, Audun J. Mørch, “Reality as Myth: Pelevin’s Čapaev i Pustota,” ScandoSlavica 51 (2005): 61–79. 66

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to be empty—throughout the novel’s entire course. In Chapaev and Void, then, Pelevin purposely brings the loss of reality out of a specifically postSoviet context in order to demonstrate how behind the appearance of any reality there has always been nothing. This notion of bifurcated realities and the nothing behind them is embodied most strikingly in Petka. Petka’s alleged madness—which, according to his doctor, causes him to produce alternative existences—is itself described as a symptom of nothing. As another patient explains to him, “Your surname is Voyd … and your madness is caused by your denying the existence of your own personality and replacing it with another, totally invented one.”69 It is significant that Petka cannot remember his own surname, and must be told by the other patients that it is Pustota (Void/Voyd/Null). This inability to remember his family name that is itself a signifier of nothing points to an essential nothing present in Petka, which the novel increasingly reveals to be the only true existence. Petka’s psychosis, then, falls in the tradition of countless literary madmen and fools whose perceived insanity is actually wisdom, and whose madness is an expression of the truth. Its most significant literary predecessor is found in Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which the fool famously tells his soon-to-beinsane king, “Now thou art an O without a figure. I am better
than thou art now: I am a fool, thou art nothing.”70 Lear’s madness manifests when his bloated, all-powerful identity is reduced to nothing, a situation the fool repeatedly explains to him in ciphers and riddles. It is also in his own madness that Lear deciphers the truth of what he is and what he has done, becoming in the process a less-performative version of the “wise fool.” Likewise, Petka’s madness is the expression of his empty (pusto) identity, signified by his surname Void (Pustota). But whereas Lear’s madness is a result of the recent change of his status from a king complete with the most significant and powerful of earthy identities to a bare “unaccommodated man” whose identity is no more significant or meaningful than a “forked” animal’s,71 Petka’s madness—or zero state of identity—has always been. And as we will see, Petka’s insanity and the nothing that enables it become forms of enlightenment in Chapaev and Void. The novel’s other main character, Chapaev, is also a signifier of nothing and bifurcated realities. Vasily Chapaev was a Red Army commander immortalized in Soviet propaganda. In Dmitry Furmanov’s now-legendary account of Chapaev, and in the notorious film based on Furmanov’s book, Chapaev is depicted as an uneducated yet courageous peasant who is brought into correct socialist “consciousness” by the commissar Klychkov,

Pelevin, BLF, 89; CiP, 113. William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Stephen Orgel (New York: Penguin, 1999), 29. 71 Shakespeare, King Lear, 76. 69 70



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a representative of the Party.72 In contrast, in Chapaev and Void Chapaev appears as an educated philosopher who pontificates endlessly upon emptiness and Buddhism. Pelevin has, in effect, reversed the situation: Chapaev now educates the commissar Petka. By rewriting Chapaev as a philosopher of emptiness instead of a mouthpiece for socialist ideology, Pelevin equates the two, suggesting that socialist ideology is empty as well. Hence, this condition of emptiness transcends the specific experience of post-Soviet Russia and is eventually revealed to be the nature of all existence in Chapaev and Void. Consciousness of this emptiness—or the nothing behind the appearance of reality—therefore becomes the expression of enlightenment and the means to freedom. When confined to the post-Soviet experience, existential emptiness is the cause of insanity, as demonstrated by Petka’s living in a madhouse, or it is the cause of nihilism, as witnessed in Generation “P”. But when removed from a specific “reality,” or when a single “reality” isn’t clung to as the only reality, emptiness allows for freewill and control over one’s existence. We see both sides of this—an expression of insanity in a specific “reality,” versus an expression of creation from a universal standpoint—many times throughout the novel. For example, the notes in Petka’s patient file establish him as a madman who spouts meaningless nonsense. But when we consider Petka outside of a post-Soviet context, he appears as an enlightened seer or artist: The patient says there is no one capable of thinking “on his wavelength.” Believes he can see and feel things unattainable to “laymen.” For instance, in the folds of a curtain or tablecloth, the patterns of wallpaper etc. he distinguishes lines, shapes and forms which express “the beauty of life.” According to his words, this is his “golden joy,” that is, the reason for which he daily repeats the “involuntary heroism of existence.”73 Petka’s madness, (again, a symptom of nothing), generates “the beauty of life,” his “golden joy”; this is something quite different from the meaningless and inescapable consumerism produced by the void in Generation “P”. Instead, this so-called “madness” produced by the nothing that is essential to Petka’s being (Pustota/Void) brings the highest aesthetic meaning into his world—beauty. As such, Petka’s madness is similar to referential mania, which, as I discuss in Chapter 3 on Nabokov, is characterized by

See, for example, Dmitry Furmanov’s novel Chapaev (1923), and the Vasilyev brothers’ famous film of the same name (1934). For an excellent discussion of the Chapaev myth in socialist realism, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd edn (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 84–9; for analysis of the myth in Soviet film and culture, see Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society: From the Revolution to the Death of Stalin (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 155–61. 73 Pelevin, BLF, 104; CiP, 130. 72

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a perception of patterns and phenomena that are, to the rational and sane eye, not there. For Nabokov, referential mania is the system artists and madmen employ to make meaning in a world where meaning otherwise does not exist; the nothing at the core of referential mania allows for the creation of meaning (for better or for worse). Likewise, Petka sees and feels things that are, to the layperson’s eye, not there. These patterns that he perceives, however, bring beauty and meaning to his existence. From the perspective of Timur Timurovich, who represents rationality in the post-Soviet condition, Petka’s vision signifies that he is insane; after all, Petka believes he is living in a Soviet world, which is not possible in Timur Timurovich’s post-Soviet existence. But from Petka’s standpoint—and also, I would argue, from Pelevin’s—his vision brings agency, meaning, and beauty into his life. Petka, and by proxy Chapaev and Void, is able to do what literature in Generation “P” is no longer capable of: create aesthetic beauty and meaning. Nothing as a creative force is an idea articulated by many characters in the novel, and not just in Petka and Chapaev’s conversations. For instance, the patient Serdyuk, during a hypnotic trance, has a conversation with a Japanese businessman who tells him many times and through many different metaphors that nothing generates existence. “In the depths of the Russian soul lies the same gaping void we find deep in the soul of Japan. And from this very void the world comes into being, constantly, with every second.”74 The metaphor of the onion is also employed in the novel to represent the nothing at the core of existence, not unlike how Alexander Genis, as discussed earlier, utilizes the metaphor of the onion to describe the post-Soviet condition. Genis equates the “cosmic zero” at the onion’s core, “around which being generates,” with Taoist notions of “creative emptiness”: “The ‘onion paradigm’ has much in common with the motifs of [Lao-tse’s] Tao-te Ching,” he writes, and goes on to explain how “in the ‘onion paradigm’ chaos is the seed of the world, the ‘creative nothingness’ of [Ilya] Prigogine, from which cosmos is born.”75 In Chapaev and Void, onions replace potatoes in one of the most famous episodes from the Chapaev mythology: the scene in which Chapaev uses potatoes to map out his military strategy against the White Army. In recounting this episode, Petka repeatedly draws attention to the fact that onions instead of potatoes were used. Moreover, the military map transforms into a map of consciousness. “it was a metaphorical map of consciousness, not a plan of military positions at all. And they were not potatoes, but onions.” “Onions?”

Pelevin, BLF, 168–9; CiP, 205. Genis, “Onions and Cabbages,” 411, 412.

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“Yes, onions. Although for a number of highly personal reasons I would have given a great deal for them to have been potatoes instead.”76 These onions placed on Chapaev’s “map of consciousness” figure much like the “cored onion” Genis describes. Chapaev’s onion, which stands for Petka (which is why Petka has such personal feelings about it), has many layers surrounding a void. It is this void—or Pustota/Void—that represents Petka’s consciousness, and from which the various layers of existence come to be. Genis’ ruminations on the “cored onion” well describe the workings of nothing in this novel: “In the ‘onion paradigm,’ art is a form of magic. It is a mechanism for the production of reality. We live in the world invented by it.”77 Petka’s art, his “mechanism for the production of reality,” is his dual nature as both insane and enlightened—his bifurcated reality produced by the nothing that is his consciousness, his “I”, his Pustota/Void. It is through this art that he not only creates his worlds, but more importantly grants them meaning and beauty. *** In The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (Sviashchennaia kniga oborotnia, 2004),78 Pelevin revisits the theme of bifurcated realities and the generative void, but he more acutely explores how the realization of the empty nature of reality can become a source of creativity and power. Whereas in Chapaev and Void, the enlightened/insane Petka does not completely understand why he exists simultaneously in two separate realities and for the most part must be taught the nature and power of the void, in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, the werefox A Hu-Li is fully aware of the character and power of nothing, and uses this knowledge to control the world around her. And whereas Petka is more or less powerless in both of his realities, and cannot even decide which reality he wants to occupy (at least, not until the novel’s finale), A Hu-Li’s existence as a shape-shifting were-creature signifies her corporeal and physiological embodiment of this enlightenment—that is, her control over which reality she occupies is so complete that it manifests in her own being as a were-creature. If all “realities” are essentially empty, and if nothing is therefore the only true and stable reality (without quotation marks), it follows that any number of “realities,” even mutually contradicting ones, can exist simultaneously. The figure of a were-creature personifies this philosophy of Pelevin’s: she can adopt different shapes or

Pelevin, BLF, 313; CiP, 373. Genis, “Onions and Cabbages,” 418. 78 The English translation of the novel will be referenced with SBW; the Russian original will be marked with SKO. 76 77

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“realities,” because she viscerally understands that she has no true stable nature, or that her stable nature is nothing. This shift from Chapaev and Void to The Sacred Book of the Werewolf exhibits a corresponding change in Pelevin’s depiction of the creative void and its production of endlessly bifurcated realities. Many of Pelevin’s novels feature bifurcated existences, and his more recent ones tend to portray this forked nature in hybrid creatures. Heroes of the novels following Generation “P” often include beings who corporeally embody a bifurcated nature (such as were-creatures and vampires), whereas the heroes of his earlier novels simultaneously exist in two or more realms or in two different forms, but are not themselves hybrid beings. For example, the heroes of Pelevin’s earliest novels—Omon of Omon Ra (1992), the cast of insects/humans in The Life of Insects (1993), Petka of Chapaev and Void—each exist simultaneously in opposing realities. In Omon Ra, Pelevin creates a bifurcated world by literalizing socialist realist principles: there is the world as it really is (e.g. Omon pedals through an abandoned subway tunnel), and then there is the world as it ought to be (e.g. Omon rides along the moon’s surface). The characters in The Life of Insects sometimes live as humans and other times as insects. And Petka, of course, exists both in 1919 Soviet Russia and in 1991 post-Soviet Russia. But none of these early characters have any consistent control over which existence they occupy. In contrast, when we compare the bifurcated realms with the hybrid beings, it appears that the hybrid beings exhibit an increasing agency and control over their worlds. This is especially apparent in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Empire V (2006), and Batman Apollo (2013). A Hu-Li, the heroine of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, is a 2,000year-old werefox from ancient China who appears as a 14-year-old nymphet in contemporary Russia. A Hu-Li describes herself as a modernday Lolita, taking “Lolita’s story very personally and very seriously.”79 Here, we should recall that “Lolita” is how Humbert Humbert perceives the girl Dolores Haze when she is in his arms, fulfilling his fantasy.80 To be sure, “Lolita” is a vision Humbert nurtures to enclose Dolores Haze in his solipsistic world, but it is also a vision that affects real control and power over him, that shapes the way he understands and lives. A Hu-Li has figured out a way to harness this power of the desired image and through it control the perception of others, ultimately controlling and creating reality: “We, the foxes, use transformation of perception. We influence our clients’ perception and make them see what we want them to see. The illusion we

Pelevin, SBW; SKO, 62. “But in my arms she was always Lolita” (Nabokov, Lolita, 9).

79 80



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induce becomes absolutely real for them.”81 She becomes, in effect, her clients’ “Lolitas”: whatever fantasy they desire, and which can therefore wield power over them. In this way, Pelevin rewrites the story of Lolita to give his nymphet heroine—the Dolores Haze/Lolita figure—agency over her world. This is in contrast to Nabokov’s original, wherein Dolores Haze is unwittingly pulled into Humbert’s fantasy world and forced to play a part in his illusion. The important lesson that A Hu-Li takes from Nabokov is the power of perception—after all, Humbert becomes a slave to the fantasy, to his vision, of Lolita. She connects this notion to both Buddhist and Western philosophies: that “‘to exist’ really does mean ‘to be perceived.’”82 Without perception, there is nothing. But because there is nothing, one can perceive anything—and by proxy, exist in any way: as A Hu-Li explains to her werewolf boyfriend, “‘nothing [nichego] can become anything at all.’”83 A Hu-Li mentally and bodily understands this, which is why she exists as a hybrid werefox, and why she can control the perception/existences of those around her. Here, it should be mentioned that many of Pelevin’s works explore the relationship between perception and reality. In The Life of Insects, for example, the insect-human characters do not undergo metamorphoses à la Kafka; rather, as Audun J. Mørch points out, transformation from insect to human and back again “is only in the eye of the beholder.”84 Omon Ra portrays the Soviet regime as constantly orchestrating exquisitely shoddy spectacles that are taken for reality. In the novel, these elaborate and yet clearly phony performances (e.g. the Soviet space program, taking foreign diplomats on extravagant bear hunts) mask a lack of Soviet progress—but the masks they create shape the experience of Soviet reality. In Omon Ra, controlling perception is key to creating a Soviet reality that aligns with Soviet ideology. And, as we have seen, in Generation “P” controlling perception is a central operation of the consumerism that literally creates post-Soviet reality. But in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, Pelevin plucks the act of manipulating perception from the banal practices of Soviet mythmaking and consumerist identity-crafting and instead employs it to emancipate the human spirit from these nihilistic abysses. This requires a paradoxical embrace of nothing. Whereas the werefox employs transformation of perception (she makes others see what she wants them to see), the werewolf uses perception of transformation to create illusions that he believes in so strongly that they become reality: “[Werewolves] create an illusion, not for

Pelevin, SBW, 227; Pelevin, SBW, 226; 83 Pelevin, SBW, 310; 84 Mørch, “Reality as 81 82

SKO, 261. SKO, 260. SKO, 355. Myth,” 61.

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others, but for themselves. And they believe in it so strongly that the illusion ceases to be an illusion.”85 These methods of reality creation via perception are both dependent upon nothing—or, the “super-werewolf,” the nothing that is everything: The super-werewolf becomes you, me, this bag of apples, this cup, this crate—everything that you look at in turn … The super-werewolf can’t be caught by the tail. Because it doesn’t have a body … It’s simply a void [pustota] that can be filled with anything. Nothing can stick to this void. Nothing can touch it or stain it, because you only have to take away what it’s been filled with, and it will be the same as it was before.86 Pustota (void) allows for an infinite number of existences (“you, me, this bag of apples, this cup, this crate”) to come into being through the act of perception (what “you look at in turn”). A Hu-Li connects the notion of perception with creation. Perception ceases to be the discovery of the world, or if it is, then there is only nothing to discover: “The super-werewolf can’t be caught by the tail. Because it doesn’t have a body.” Instead, perception is the creation of the world. The void or super-werewolf that comprises all of existence grants vision an active, producing power. This shift from discovery of meaning to the production of meaning mimics, of course, the shift from modern to postmodern notions regarding the nature of truth— that is, whether truth immanently, essentially, or transcendentally exists as something to be discovered (the modern view), or, on the contrary, if truth is something that is always created, performed, seen: “whatever you look at in turn” becomes what exists (the postmodern view). Nothing, therefore, becomes the highest state of being. To become the super-werewolf—to look into oneself and find nothing—is a means of transcendence: a way to overcome the threat of nihilism; to move beyond the limits of language, “the root from which infinite human stupidity grows”;87 and to break free from a world that puppet-masters human beings. As A Hu-Li writes about humankind, he must “grasp how he creates the world and in what way he imposes the illusion on himself.”88 The trick is to reconfigure one’s perception of nothing, to cease viewing nothing as a tragedy (e.g. the non-existence of eternal meaning as mourned by Tatarsky in Generation “P”, or Petka’s madness as diagnosed by the post-Soviet world) and instead realize the creative potentiality that nothing affords. This realization must abandon any mind-body split; it must happen

Pelevin, Pelevin, 87 Pelevin, 88 Pelevin, 85 86

SBW, SBW, SBW, SBW,

228; 310, 314; 332;

SKO, 262. 311; SKO, 355, 356. SKO, 359. SKO, 380.



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both mentally and physically. To truly and wholly understand that nothing is reality, and that perception therefore produces “reality,” is to become a shape-shifter like A Hu-Li. A Hu-Li’s understanding of this philosophy is so complete that it corporeally affects her own being: throughout the novel she controls the perceptions of those around her, until she decides, at the end, to disappear and thus really know herself. As reality is the void/pustota, true knowledge is nothing. Nothing therefore represents a productive and creative force in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, even though there still exists a consumerist and nihilistic emptiness ubiquitous in the novel’s depiction of post-Soviet Russia. In fact, the destructive and meaningless emptiness of Generation “P” is embodied in the other main were-creature of the novel, the werewolf Alexander, an FSB officer who is a principal figure in Russia’s oil exploits, and with whom A Hu-Li engages in romantic “tailechery.” A Hu-Li gives Alexander the pet name “Shurik,” which recalls the stray dog Sharik from Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (Sobach'e serdtse, 1925). This nickname indeed suits Alexander for many reasons. First, one of Alexander’s predecessors was Comrade Sharikov, “The one Bulgakov wrote about in A Dog’s Heart,” A Hu Li surmises.89 In Bulgakov’s satire, Sharik undergoes surgery to take on human form, becoming a physical embodiment of the idea of the “New Soviet Man.” Hence, the parallels between Pelevin’s Shurik and Bulgakov’s Sharik are not limited to their shape-shifting from canine to man: they are also united in their belief that they represent the pinnacle of the species and herald a coming utopia. Alexander claims that he is the super-werewolf, misunderstanding the concept and ignoring A Hu-Li’s repeated explanations that the super-werewolf is a metaphor for the nothing that is everything. Like Bulgakov’s Sharik, Alexander operates as a “New Man” central to his corrupted regime’s success (in this case, their destructive oil exploits), living up to his Bulgakovian predecessor’s example: annoyingly narcissistic, self-assured in his own greatness and righteousness, socially destructive and perverse, wholly worthy of satire. So narcissistically does Alexander believe in the reality of his own perceptions that he solipsizes the world (not unlike Humbert Humbert?), reduces it to his own being, and moreover considers himself to be the singular embodiment of the ultimate truth: the super-werewolf. The nihilistic nothing Alexander embodies is straightforwardly established when he becomes the hound Pizdets: that same five-legged dog from Generation “P” (that perhaps lends its initial “P” to the novel’s title), and that represents Pelevin, SBW, 324. Bromfield’s translation quoted here makes explicit what is only implied in the Russian: that Comrade Sharikov is the same Sharik depicted in Bulgakov’s work. Mikhalich explains to A Hu-Li that Alexander has been spending his time studying the past experience of his werewolf predecessors, including Comrade Sharikov. A Hu-Li draws the connection with Bulgakov’s Sharik, but is cut off from overtly stating it (SKO, 371).

89

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the apocalypse—a nihilistic nothing that Tatarsky suspects is already awake and on the attack in post-Soviet Russia. When A Hu-Li explains to Alexander who he is, she makes a clear nod to Pelevin’s earlier work: “I read somewhere [i.e. in Generation “P”] about a dog like you with five legs. The Dog Pizdets. He sleeps up among the eternal snows, and when enemies descend on Russia in their hordes, he wakes up and … He kind of happens to them. Like shit happens, you know.”90 Alexander takes this information, along with the information A Hu-Li tells him about the super-werewolf, and leaves for a few days in order to “happen to” a number of people, making them disappear. He also brings this information to the FSB, and later asserts that no one else can become the super-werewolf. He uses his perception of transformation enabled by the void to make others disappear, not unlike his KGB predecessors: “The country needs purging,”91 his messenger Mikhalich tells A Hu-Li. And he also uses his powers to tap into oil reserves in order to fuel Russia’s economy (think: oranus). In a scene that alludes to a familiar Russian folktale about Burenushka, the little red cow, Alexander draws oil from a cow’s skull. In the original tale, Burenushka operates as a surrogate mother to Tsarevna Maria who is abused by her stepmother: the cow helps to feed and clothe her. In Pelevin’s version, however, all that remains of the nurturing cow is her skull, which is held together by metal plates and rods—a kind of disintegrating cyborg-skeleton. And if the cow feeds and clothes Maria, the skull fuels Russia’s oil economy. To this end, the were-creatures take turns howling at the skull, asking it to bring forth oil. Witnessing this ritual, A Hu-Li experiences meaning reduced to naught, but at the same time her own lamentations are themselves a meaningful gesture: I felt as if the cow was looking at me with its empty eye sockets. And then, through the binoculars, I saw a tear well up on the edge of one of those sockets … Alexander carried on howling, but I couldn’t make out the meaning any more. Perhaps there no longer was any—the howling had turned into weeping … for ourselves and for our impossible country, for our pitiful life, stupid death and sacred hundred dollars a barrel.92 She is pulled into the ritual by the nostalgia and mourning that the cow skull inspires in her. But it turns out that her genuine lamentation is cynically exploited by Alexander, who credits it with drawing forth oil from the skull. Alexander explains that the entire ritual is an act. The lamentation A Hu-Li witnessed in the others was a lie, a ploy to stir emotions only to produce oil

Pelevin, SBW, 280; SKO, 322. Pelevin, SBW, 327; SKO, 374. 92 Pelevin, SBW, 219–20; SKO, 252–3. 90 91



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(i.e. we may say it merely keeps the oranus going). Because she can create out of the void, whereas he has become a pure force of destruction, he therefore manipulates A Hu-Li to serve his own ends. By the end of the novel Alexander has given himself completely over to the destructive nothing of his predecessor Comrade Sharikov and of the apocalyptic canine Pizdets. He is buried in the archives (residing in a kind of death, not unlike Pizdets who guards the house of the dead), researching how to better employ the super-werewolf so as to “happen to” (make disappear, purge) enemies of the Russian state. In contrast, A Hu-Li decides to fully embrace the productive void in a final transformation—reaching the highest state of enlightenment by becoming nothing itself. Through her transformation into nothing, she leaves behind in a Moscow park the manuscript of the novel, along with remnants of clothing and a partially melted bicycle. In the end, the manuscript we hold in our hands is the manuscript of the disappeared subject A Hu-Li, or the personal narrative of nothing. *** Mark Lipovetsky has argued that since the late 1990s, a prominent trend in various branches of Russian postmodernism has been to “restore the reality which had been destroyed by the aggression of simulacra.”93 In my estimation, Pelevin’s works fulfill this formula by granting this “lack of reality” the utmost meaning. Pelevin mythologizes the void. He makes nothing the very place where meaning may arise. As a concept in Pelevin’s work, the void cannot be encapsulated by a single meaning. In all three novels explored here, the void is reality (it is both immanence and transcendence), but its own characteristics are just as varied and infinite as the “realities” it enables. It is both the predicament and salvation of post-Soviet culture: it is the depressing world of Tatarsky, the freedom for Petka to choose to live in early Soviet Russia, and the power for A Hu-Li to create and control the world around her. In Generation “P”, the void is horrifying in its banality, reduces all to meaninglessness, creates inertia, and empties culture. The void also destroys literature, or if it does not destroy literature, it allows for the perverse and total fulfillment of Russian literature’s traditional duty to society: members of the intelligentsia now literally manipulate reality with the single goal of making money. As we have seen, the novel performs the annihilation of literature in its very form by positioning itself as a cynical consumer good. In contrast, in Chapaev and Void and The Sacred Book of the Werewolf,

Mark Lipovetsky, “Russian Literary Postmodernism in the 1990s,” The Slavonic and East European Review 79, no. 1 (2001): 12.

93

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the void may be a creative force, allowing for freedom and the possibility of meaning. Here, the void is also connected to the revival of literature. Chapaev and Void recuperates the Chapaev myth from socialist realism to present what claims to be the true story about Chapaev, excising Soviet ideology from the myth and replacing it with philosophy about the void. The Sacred Book of the Werewolf ends with the production of literature when A Hu-Li finally transforms into the void. Thus, Pelevin first explores the positive and productive potentials of the void in 1996 with Chapaev, and then takes a pessimistic turn in 1999 with the nihilistic void of Generation. After a long pause, he produces the Sacred Book in 2004, returning to the productive void—indeed, a sacred void that is the transcendental signified, the super-werewolf.

Conclusion: Nothing as the transcendental signified

When Odysseus declares himself outis, he both plays on the gap between signifier and signified to allow for new potential meanings, and he identifies with the gap, with the nothing in the system, to save himself. Socrates positions himself as khôra, the ambiguous receptacle, another kind of nothing that gives space for the generation of the sensible world, but that also receives discourse, all that would be inscribed. This, perhaps, gives new meaning to the idea that Socrates’ wisdom lies in his “knowing nothing.” The development of zero in mathematics once more tells the story of a signifier of nothing expanding exponentially the potential meanings and operations of a system; this happens again when the vanishing point is invented in art, and when imaginary money is created in economic exchange. The discovery that the atom is almost entirely empty space indicates that our physical world comprises mostly nothing, reminding one of Marx’s “all that is solid melts into air.” Physicists are in general agreement that “the quantum vacuum is where everything that we now know came from, even the matrix of space and time.”1 For Heidegger, the nothing is the necessary ground upon which human consciousness comes into existence, and for Sartre, nothingness enables many human conducts, including the ability to inquire, to perceive change, to imagine, and to wonder. Nietzsche shows how forgetting and overlooking—operations of nothing—create abstract thought, meaningful perspectives; Derrida, how nothing, a “bottomless chessboard,” unleashes the free play of signification; Bakhtin, how the abyss-like mouth merges word and world in the grotesque body releasing the free play of language from the limits of reason and the world from the official order; and Kristeva, how the writer is located at nothing, and how nothing incites narrative. This study has focused on nothing’s relationship to narrative, proposing that nothing is, in fact, essential to the creation of any narrative. The works of Nabokov, Beckett, and Pelevin attest to this idea, together

Frank Close, Nothing: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 106.

1

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illustrating how nothing is related to language, narrative, meaning, and even existence—especially as human existence cannot be separated from language, fictioning, and narration. Nabokov’s work, which designates fiction as inseparable from human reality (“reality”), figures nothing as the very element that enables patterning (meaning-making) to take place—a system known as “referential mania.” The operation of referential mania, (e.g. connecting the dots between various events, images, and themes of one’s life), creates a web of “realities,” and ignites one’s awareness of any and all meaningful “realities.” For Nabokov, these possible “realities” are as varied as the number of referential maniacs—artists, poets, madmen, criminals, and, ultimately, readers who create meaning by seeing patterns that may or may not be there (is the cipher a code, or a zero? It is both). Signifiers of nothing abound in Nabokov’s works: noughts inscribed on bathroom walls, Kinbote’s notes/noughts, “voluptuous pauses,” lakes or ozeros (0-zeros), ciphers, never-appearing/non-existent/disappearing characters, trauma that eschews representation, plots that repeatedly arrive at nothing (interrupted pratfalls), Botkin that slant anagrams nikto (nobody, another version of outis)—these are samples of Nabokov’s zeros that compel narrative, and hence “reality.” Beckett’s work seeks out immanence through the aesthetics of lessness, arriving at an immanent nothing that encompasses all (human, animal, plant, mineral, animate, inanimate, etc.), as well as all signification. Immanent nothing therefore lies at the heart of all being and all nonbeing, and is the pulse of all narrative. To be, and, indeed, to not to be, always necessitates to signify. All narrates, and not necessarily in the language of man. Beckett’s characters—utterly pared-down creatures, lacking subjectivity and diminished in being’s accoutrements much like Beckett’s texts are divested of traditional literary devices and narrative elements—often tell us that they no longer speak in the language of man and yet are still obligated to speak, or sometimes hear a voice that is not human language. The world around them languages as well: the construction of the beehive rests upon the language of the bees; gardens murmur, doors murmur, murmurs murmur, “the murmurs are coming” and “you must say words.”2 Nothing is therefore immanent in Beckettian words and world, which together comprise an indivisible, mutually dependent relationship. This study has shown how both Nabokov and Beckett, in their own subtle ways, position nothing as the truest form of reality, or as the real laid bare. By the time we reach the work of Pelevin, the status of nothing as reality is made explicit. For Pelevin, the void is synonymous with reality—it is reality’s true form. Pelevin’s novels repeatedly put forward the

2

Beckett, The Unnamable, 414.

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question of reality itself (what is is?), and return to the same answer: is is void. At the same time, Pelevin’s works exhibit, first of all, a self-awareness regarding their own lineage of Russian literature (which was long the keeper of sacred truth in Russia), and second of all, a hyper-awareness of their status as postmodernist fiction. Acknowledging the legacy of Russian literature’s relationship to society and its potential demise in the post-Soviet condition, and hyperbolically drawing from the arsenals of Western and Russian postmodernism as well as Eastern religious thought to emphasize the simulative nature of reality and its potential discontents (everything is relative, all is a performance, so everything is meaningless!), Pelevin’s novels present the void as the truest reality. In the wake of what some have viewed as the emptying of Russian literary logos of meaning, Pelevin’s works present emptiness—the void—as meaning itself. As such, by presenting the void as the truest reality, Pelevin’s novels recuperate literature’s ability to convey meaning, even as they sometimes refuse, in their form and function, to be literature. As such, nothing becomes the transcendental signified in the twentieth century. It was with this end in mind that Nabokov, Beckett, and Pelevin in particular were chosen for the central focus of this study. Nothing comes to occupy the place of the transcendental signified through a kind of dialectic that first focuses on the signifiers or “realities” generated by nothing (Nabokov), then focuses on nothing itself as the signified or immanence (Beckett), and finally arrives at nothing as both the signifier and the signified, mutually informing one another (Pelevin). Nabokov’s work demonstrates how the proliferation of meaning, (the generation of countless signifiers and their ever-shifting, meaning-making patterns), is the effect of the subject who reads into nothing (e.g. V, the son in “Signs and Symbols,” Kinbote etc.). Nabokov’s narratives concentrate on these signifiers, or “realities,” as the realm where human meaning resides. To search for the signified itself is to search for nothing that is, indeed, the truest reality, but that cannot be registered by human ways of knowing. For Nabokov, human meaning does not begin to happen until one moves away from the signified (i.e. nothing, the real life) and toward those signifiers of nothing (i.e. zeros, the reflections of the real life, or “realities”). So his works embrace endless signification, infinite reflections. They reveal and revel in those infinite and subjective varieties of nothing’s signifiers, and not in nothing itself. In contrast, Beckett attempts to shut down signification in order to get at the real thing—that is, nothing—laid bare. He is interested in the immanent nothing that comprises all, and therefore attempts to strip his subjects of their subjectivities in order to grasp their essential, unaccommodated being. Beckett’s work therefore represents a shift in comparison with Nabokov’s: instead of an embrace of endless signification, and in place of an emphasis on those signifiers of nothing, Beckett focuses on nothing as the signified,

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as immanence. In doing so, of course, he unearths a seeming paradox: language (a structure of signifiers) is intimately part of immanence (the signified). While this paradox plagues Beckett’s many characters who want to but cannot cease narrating and therefore cease signification, in the work of Pelevin, this paradox is fully embraced. Here, nothing is eventually welcomed as the transcendental signified that is, at the same time, all signifiers. That is, nothing as the transcendental signified grants Pelevin’s characters’ various perceptions (i.e. signifiers of nothing) the power to control and generate their worlds, thereby recreating objective reality, and remaking their very own transcendental signified. Nothing as the transcendental signified is therefore the ever-deferring generator of a system of signifiers that perpetually recreate their own original transcendental signified. Because of this, nothing as the transcendental signified is an infinite nothing that constantly transforms depending on its own signifiers’ significations. The origin—nothing as the transcendental signified—paradoxically becomes the realization of its own signifiers, is constructed by its own signifiers. Pelevin’s void is simultaneously the word and the world; the signified as nothing and signifiers of nothing become, in effect, synonyms. For Nabokov, Beckett, and Pelevin, nothing generates the world that is wholly tied up in the word. Of course, should we try to examine nothing (as they do), to look at nothing laid bare, we find that it does not exist in the purest sense—not as an absence, a loss of something that once was, but as a never-was and never-will-be. Nothing is therefore the ultimate fiction: that unreal and untrue story that renders the world meaningful, experiential, comprehensible—in a word, narratable. Here, we should recall that for Nabokov, Beckett, and Pelevin, nothing is also the truest or most real reality. Consequently, this ultimate fiction is also the ultimate truth. It happens that existence and narrative, being and language, world and word, are grounded in and nurtured by this most powerful and universal of all fictions: that is, nothing.

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INDEX

9/11 (September 11) 1–2, 23 abject(ion) 56, 151–3 in Generation “P” (Victor Pelevin) 141, 143, 149, 151–3, 156 see also carnival(esque); Kristeva, Julia absence compared to nothing 2–3 definition of 2 absolute zero 10 Adorno, Theodor W. 4–5, 135 n.1 Agamben, Giorgio “Absolute Immanence” 112, 114 “Bartleby, or On Contingency” 61–2 Akaky Akakievich (Nikolai Gogol: “The Overcoat”) 59–60, 62–9 Bartleby (Herman Melville: “Bartleby”), compared to 25, 62, 70, 71 as cipher 65–6 khôra, compared to 66 as “letter made flesh” 65–6 as “meaningless verbal unit” 60 redheaded man (Daniil Kharms), compared to 64 n.21 as “a scribe who writes nothing” 25, 62, 68 “the zero degree of writing” (Maurice Blanchot) and 25 see also Gogol, Nikolai: “The Overcoat” Alexander the Great 30, 32 Aristotle nutritive faculty 113 rejection of infinity and vacuums/ voids 31–2

atom, empty space of 21 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 22–3 Auster, Paul 20 Bakhtin, Mikhail 25, 41, 51–5, 56, 149–51, 152–3, 171 Derrida, Jacques and 51 n.105, 52 Rabelais and His World 51–4, 149–51, 152–3 see also carnival(esque); grotesque body Barthelme, Donald: “Nothing: A Preliminary Account” 20 Barthes, Roland 15 Bartleby 59, 61–2, 69–74 Akaky Akakievich (Nikolai Gogol: “The Overcoat”) compared to 25, 62, 70, 71 as cloud 61 copying, relationship to 71–2 death, relationship to 61, 70, 71 effects of 72–4 as indecipherable cipher/unreadable text 69, 71, 72–4 liminal nature of 70 preference not to 61, 70–2 as pure potentiality (Giorgio Agamben) 61–2 as writing tablet 61–2 see also “Bartleby”: Herman Melville “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (Herman Melville) 59, 61–2, 69–74 Agamben, Giorgio and 61–2 Blanchot, Maurice and 25, 61 Dead Letter Office 71

190 Index

Deleuze, Gilles and 61, 70 Derrida, Jacques and 61, 70 interpretive history of 61–2 see also Bartleby; Melville, Herman Bataille, Georges 117 Baudrillard, Jean 147 Beckett, Samuel 26, 74, 105–34, 171–4 aesthetics of impoverishment/ impotence 121–2 aesthetics of lessness 26, 107, 110–12, 116, 121, 124, 130, 172 All That Fall 106, 115–16, 133 n.100 Bion, Wilfred and 15 n.65 Buddhism and 108–9 “Calmative, The” 130 chaos theory and 108–9 cipher 125–6 “German Letter of 1937” 115, 130 Geulincx, Arnoldus and 120 Happy Days 109 Heidegger, Martin and 107–8 Joyce, James and 120–2 Kennedy, Sighle, letter to 105 the liminal and 119, 122–3, 132–4 literature of the unword 115–16 Malone Dies 106, 111, 121, 131 Molloy 106, 111, 115, 116–30, 132 see also Odysseus, outis Murphy 105–6, 109 “never properly born” and “womb thresholds” 133–4 Not I 108 “Painters of Impediment” 110–11 Sartre, Jean-Paul and 107–8 self-negating discourse 130–2 “staring out at nothing” 106, 109 Texts for Nothing 106–7, 108 Unnamable, The 106–7, 108, 116, 121, 131–2, 172 Waiting for Godot 106 Watt 108 as zero’s neighbor (Hélène Cixous) 109–10, 122–3, 132 see also Cage, John; immanence; Zeno of Elea

Belinsky, Vissarion 59 Bely, Andrei 9, 59–60, 76 n.5 Bion, Wilfred Beckett, Samuel and 15 n.65 nothingness/no-thingness distinction 15 Bitov, Andrei: Pushkin House 137–8 Blanchot, Maurice Beckettian thresholds and 133 “the degree zero of writing” 16–17, 25 “Man at Point Zero” 16 “Search for Point Zero, The” 16–17 Writing of Disaster, The 61 Borges, Jorge Luis 19, 157 Buddhism Beckett, Samuel and 108–9 Pelevin, Victor and 138, 142, 161 Bulgakov, Mikhail: Heart of a Dog 141, 167 Cage, John 4'33" 10–11 Texts for Nothing (Samuel Beckett) and 106–7 carnival(esque) 51–6 the abject, compared to 56, 143, 149, 151–3, 156 in Generation “P” (Victor Pelevin) 143, 149–53, 155, 156 see also Bakhtin, Mikhail; Kristeva, Julia Chapaev, Vasily 159, 160–1 Chekhov, Anton 60, 144, 146, 155 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai 59 chinari philosophy 9 cipher 26, 33, 65, 98 Akaky Akakievich (Nikolai Gogol: “The Overcoat”) as 65–6 Bartleby (Herman Melville: “Bartleby”) as 69, 71, 72–4 Beckett, Samuel and 125–6 Chichikov (Nikolai Gogol: Dead Souls) as 89 Nabokov, Vladimir and 79, 98–104, 172 Cixous, Hélène 109–10, 122–3, 132

Index

Coen, Joel and Ethan Coen: The Big Lebowski 24 conceptualism (Russian) 136–7, 144, 148–9 Coupland, Douglas 141 Dada 8–9 Deleuze, Gilles “Bartleby; or, The Formula” 61, 70 “Immanence: A Life” 112–14, 116, 119, 121, 125, 133 Derrida, Jacques 5–8, 19 n.80, 25, 37, 41, 50–1, 52, 56, 61, 66, 70, 130–1, 147, 171 Archeology of the Frivolous, The 50–1 Bakhtin, Mikhail and 51 n.105, 52 “bottomless chessboard” 5, 19 n.80, 50, 52, 101, 130–1, 171 “Différance” 50 interview with Henri Ronse 50 “Khôra” 5–8, 66 Of Grammatology 50 “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” 37, 50 Dickens, Charles: Our Mutual Friend 113–14 Didion, Joan: Play It As It Lays 19–20 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 36, 59, 139, 141 Duras, Marguerite 22–3 Ehrenburg, Ilya 139 Eichenbaum, Boris 59, 60 Eliot, George: Middlemarch 18–19 Ellison, Ralph 4 Epstein, Mikhail 136–7, 148–9 Erofeev, Venedikt: Moscow to the End of the Line 138, 150 Etkind, Alexander 140 Foucault, Michel 147 Freud, Sigmund ego-defect theory 15 “Mourning and Melancholia” 15, 73 Furmanov, Dmitry 160–1

191

Genis, Alexander 149, 162–3 Geulincx, Arnoldus 120 Gogol, Nikolai 25, 59–60, 62–9, 74, 76, 89, 98 Dead Souls 76, 89 interest in Os and zeros 76 n.5 see also Akaky Akakievich; cipher; “Overcoat, The” grotesque body 51, 52–4, 56, 150–1, 171 see also Bakhtin, Mikhail; carnival(esque); Kristeva, Julia Ground Zero 1, 22, 23 Gulag 139 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 45 Heidegger, Martin 6, 8, 25, 38–41, 42, 47, 49, 56, 67–8, 73, 107–8, 171 anxiety 7 n.22, 13, 39, 107–8 Beckett, Samuel and 107–8 Dasein 7 n.22, 25, 38, 40–1, 49, 101, 107 nihilation 38, 39–40 the nothing 13, 25, 38–41, 47, 49, 67–8, 73, 107–8, 171 “nothing” (rhetorical) 39 Rothko, Mark and 13 “What is Metaphysics?” 38–41 Hemingway, Ernest: “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” 24 Hiroshima mon amour 22–3 Holocaust 22, 99 n.77 Homer see Odysseus Huelsenbeck, Richard 8 Kafka, Franz 62, 165 imaginary money 37, 171 immanence aesthetics of (Samuel Beckett) 130–4 Agamben, Giorgio and 112, 114 Beckett, Samuel and 107, 110, 112–16, 172–4 Deleuze, Gilles and 112–14, 116, 119, 121, 125, 133 in Molloy (Samuel Beckett) 116–30

192 Index

infinity 10, 31, 33, 114 n.41, 124, 126–7 intelligentsia 140, 153–5, 157, 169 Iser, Wolfgang “Auktorialität: Die Nullstelle des Diskurses” 18 Implied Reader, The 17–18 Jabès, Edmond 24 James, Henry “Altar of the Dead, The” 18 Ambassadors, The 18 Jameson, Fredric 47–8, 147 Jewish Museum, Berlin 22 Joyce, James Beckett, Samuel and 120–2 Finnegans Wake 18–19 Ulysses 4, 18–19, 120–2 Jung, Carl 133 n.100 Kabakov, Ilya 136, 144, 148–9 Kadishman, Menashe: “Shalechet” 22 Kaun, Axel 115 Kharms, Daniil 9 “Blue Notebook #10” 64 n.21 khôra 5–8 Akaky Akakievich and 66 as “allegory of différance” 8 Dasein (Martin Heidegger), compared to 7 n.22 Derrida’s, Jacques discussion of 5–8, 66 Melville, Herman and 61 as nothing 5–8, 171 Odysseus (outis), compared to 5 in Plato’s Timaeus 5–8, 33, 66, 171 Socrates as 6–8, 66, 171 śūnya, compared to 32–3 writer’s origin, compared to (Julia Kristeva) 55 zero and 33, 55 Klein, Melanie 15 Klein, Yves 12, 14 blue monochromes 12, 14 Leap Into The Void 14 Victory of Samothrace 14 Void, The exhibition 14

Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility 14 Knowlson, James 121 Komar, Vitaly 148 Kristeva, Julia 6, 25, 41, 54–6, 151–3, 171 anguish 56 Bakhtin, Mikhail and 54–6 “hallucination of nothing” 56 khôra 55 “the maternal phallus” 56 “poetic language” (e.g. carnivalesque) 55–6 Powers of Horror 56, 151–3 “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” 54–6 writer-at-zero 55–6 see also abject(ion) Langdon, Harry 24 Lanzmann, Claude: Shoah 22 Lem, Stanisław: A Perfect Vacuum 20 Libeskind, Daniel 22 liminal 132 Lipovetsky, Mark 137, 138, 140, 169 Lyotard, Jean-François 50 Malevich, Kazimir 0.10 exhibition 12 Aviator 11 Black Square 12 Fevralism 11 “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism” 12 Futurist Strongmen (1913 vs. 1915) 11–12 Nul 12 Suprematism 11–12 zero 11–12 Maresiev, Alexei 140 Melamid, Alexander 148 melancholia 15, 73 Mercier, Vivian 106 Miller, J. Hillis “History of 0, The” 18–19 “Zero Among the Literary Theorists” 15–18 modernity, crisis of 21–3, 135–6

Index

Nabokov, Véra 77 Nabokov, Vladimir 26, 49, 60, 68–9, 74, 75–104, 141, 161–2, 164–5, 171–2, 173, 174 Ada 94–5, 101–2 cipher 79, 98–104, 172 “Cloud, Castle, Lake” 78 on Dead Souls (Nikolai Gogol) 76, 89 Defense, The 90–1, 101 ellipsis, symbolism of 90, 92–3 Eye, The 91 Invitation to a Beheading 91–3 Lolita 75, 93, 96, 141, 164–5, 167 Look at the Harlequins! 102–3 loss, creative power of 77, 80–1 Mary 96–7 memory, creative power of 80 otherworld 77–80, 83, 92, 101–2 on “Overcoat, The” (Nikolai Gogol) 60, 68 Pale Fire 78, 81, 88, 94, 101, 104, 172, 173 see also outis patterning 26, 77, 79, 95–104, 162, 172, 173 Pnin 94, 96 Real Life of Sebastian Knight, The 77, 79, 81–90, 93–4 “reality” vs. reality 26, 49, 75–7, 79–80, 81–95, 102, 103 referential mania 91, 95, 98–104, 161–2, 172 Russian Symbolism and 77 “Signs and Symbols” 77, 79, 91, 95–104, 173 Speak, Memory 75, 76, 80, 96 Strong Opinions 79, 81 Transparent Things 75, 102 “Ultima Thule” 92–4 Nadeau, Maurice 117–18 narrative anguish and 56 definition of 47–8 free play of language, and 50–4 Jameson, Fredric and 47–8 neuroscience and 48 “origin of narration” (Julia Kristeva) 55–6

193

perspectivism and 48–50 New Soviet Man 139, 145, 167 see also socialist realism Newton, Isaac 36 Nietzsche, Friedrich 24, 25, 41, 44–5, 48–50, 56, 171 forgetfulness 44, 49, 171 “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” 44–5, 48–9 perspectivism 44–5, 48–50, 171 nothing abject, relationship to 56, 151–2 avant-garde and 8–9 being, relationship to 2–3, 8, 11, 13, 25–7, 38–47, 49, 56, 68, 74, 103–4, 114, 125–6, 171–2 ethnography and 16–17 free play of signifiers and 50–4 khôra and 5–8 linguistics and 15 literary theory and 15–18 as “the maternal phallus” (Julia Kristeva) 56 music and 10–11 narrative, relationship to 25–7, 47–57, 171–4 Odysseus and 3–5 palindromic language and 19 psychoanalysis and 14–15 the visual arts and 11–14 OBERIU (Union of Real Art) 8–9, 139 October Revolution 139 Odysseus 3–5, 30, 120–2, 171 in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno) 4–5 identity 3–5, 120–1 Molloy (Samuel Beckett), relationship to 120–2 name, meaning of 3–5, 30, 121 Odyssey (Homer) see Odysseus see also outis Oleinikov, Nikolai: “Zeros” 9 omicron 30–1 outis 3–5, 30, 121–2, 126, 134, 171, 172 Beckett, Samuel as 134

194 Index

Bloom, Leopold (James Joyce: Ulysses) as 4 Botkin (Vladimir Nabokov: Pale Fire) as 172 Ellison, Ralph and 4 as gap between signifier and signified 4–5, 171 Molloy (Samuel Beckett: Molloy) as 121–2, 126 Odysseus and 3–5, 30, 121, 122, 171 Walcott, Derek and 4 “Overcoat, The” 25–6, 59–60, 62–9, 71, 74, 98 Belinsky, Vissarion and 59 Bely, Andrei and 59–60 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai and 59 Dostoevsky, Fyodor and 59 Eichenbaum, Boris and 59–60 interpretive history of 59–60 language of ambiguity 62–4 Nabokov, Vladimir and 60 see also Akaky Akakievich; Gogol, Nikolai palindromic language 19 Pastior, Oskar 19 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich 139 Pelevin, Victor 13, 24, 26–7, 49, 74, 135–70, 171, 172–3, 174 A Hu-Li, compared to Lolita 164–5 Batman Apollo 164 bifurcated realities 157–8, 160, 163–4 Buddha’s little finger/clay machine gun 158 Buddhism 138, 142, 161 capitalism/consumerism, critique of 142, 143–7, 153, 155–7, 161, 165, 167 Chapaev and Void 141, 142–3, 149, 157–64, 169–70 Empire V 140, 164 Erofeev, Venedikt and 150 Generation “P” 141–58, 161, 162, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169–70 Homo zapiens (vs. Homo sapiens) 146–7

Life of Insects, The 164, 165 literature’s role in Russian society, and 138–40, 141, 144, 153–7 “monetaristic minimalism” 145–6, 156 Omon Ra 140, 164, 165 oranus 141, 146–7, 150–1, 152, 153, 156, 157, 168, 169 perception and reality creation 164–7, 174 Petka’s madness, compared to referential mania 161–2 Russian identity/soul as void 149, 156–7, 162 Sacred Book of the Werewolf, The 141, 142–3, 149, 163–70 Soviet Union, disappearance of 24, 151–2, 154, 159–60 super-werewolf 166–70 t 141 void as divine/sacred absurdity 138, 141–2, 157, 169–70 see also abject(ion); carnival(esque); conceptualism (Russian) Perec, Georges palindromes 19 Void, A 19 Peter the Great 137 Pi 125–6 Picabia, Francis 8 Pingaud, Bernard 117 Polevoi, Boris 140 Pop Art 148 postmodernism 20, 49–50, 135–8, 147–9, 157, 166, 169–70, 173 Russian 136–8, 148–9, 169, 173 Prigov, Dmitri 136 Pushkin, Alexander 60, 139, 155 Pynchon, Thomas 20 Rabelais, François see Bakhtin, Mikhail; carnival(esque); grotesque body reader-response criticism 17–18 Reflecting Absence (National September 11 Memorial) 1 Reinhardt, Ad 12 Resnais, Alain 22–3

Index

Ronse, Henri 50 Rothko, Mark 12–13 Rozanov, Vasily 139 Rutherford, Ernest 21 Ryman, Robert 12 Sartre, Jean-Paul 8, 25, 38, 42–7, 49, 56, 67–8, 107–8, 171 anguish 46–7 Beckett, Samuel and 107–8 “double nihilation” 45 freedom 25, 46–7 negation, the negative judgment 42–4, 46 nothingness 25, 38, 42–7, 49, 67–8, 107–8, 171 “original nihilation” 44–5 Saussure, Ferdinand de 15 Scott, Walter: “The Lady of the Lake” 78 Seinfeld, Jerry 24 Shakespeare, William: King Lear 16, 160 Shenker, Israel 121–2 silence as “imaginary state” 10–11 music and 10–11 trauma (the unsayable) and 22–3 the “true writer” (Maurice Blanchot) and 16–17 “trope of muteness” 22 “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” 139 socialist realism 136–7, 140–1, 148, 160–1, 164, 170 see also New Soviet Man; Sots-Art Solzhenitsyn, Alexander 139 Sots-Art 13, 148 Spinoza, Baruch 112 Stalin, Joseph 139 Stevens, Wallace: “The Snow Man” 24 śūnya 32–3 Thaw, the 139 Todorov, Tzvétan 54 Tolstoy, Leo 60, 139, 141 trauma of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 22–3

195

of the Holocaust 21–2 in Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) 93 psychoanalysis and 15 in “Signs and Symbols (Vladimir Nabokov) 99 n.77 unsayable/un-representable nature of 21–3, 93, 99 n.77, 172 Turner, Victor 132 vacuum 31, 171 vanishing point 37, 171 Vladimir I 136, 137 Vvedensky, Alexander 9 Walcott, Derek 4 Warhol, Andy 13–14, 148 Woolf, Virginia 21 Zeno of Elea Achilles and the tortoise, paradox of 124 Borges, Jorge Luis and 19 Molloy (Samuel Beckett) and 124 “Zenovian regression” of Samuel Beckett’s works 111 n.29 Zero Arabic culture and 29, 33, 35 Aristotelian philosophy and 31 Babylonian culture and 29–30, 33 chinari philosophy and 9 Chinese culture and 32, 35 decentered center (Jacques Derrida), compared to 37 development of 25, 29–38, 171 division by 36 “double-edged semantics” of the zero sign 131 ellipsis, compared to 32 Greek culture and 29, 30–2, 33, 34 imaginary money, compared to 37 Indian culture and 29, 32–5 infinity, relationship to 114 n.41, 126 khôra and 33, 55 Malevich, Kazimir and 9 n.38, 11–12 Mayan culture and 29 medieval Europe and 29, 31, 35–6, 37–8

196 Index

as a meta-sign 36–8 as a number 32–6 OBERIU and 8–9 outis, compared to 5, 30 paradox of 25, 29, 36–8 as a placeholder 30, 32, 33, 36 as a receptive vacancy 32–4

as a sign of unknown variable 32–4 śūnya and 32–3 vanishing point, compared to 37 Western rejection of 31–2, 34 see also cipher “zero degree” (Roland Barthes) 15, 25