Alternative Kinships

Economy and Family in Russian Modernism

Jacob Emery

• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781609092108
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria rusa

According to Marx, the family is the primal scene of the division of labor and the "germ" of every exploitative practice. In this insightful study, Jacob Emery examines the Soviet Union's programmatic effort to institute a global siblinghood of the proletariat, revealing how alternative kinships motivate different economic relations and make possible other artistic forms. A time in which literary fiction was continuous with the social fictions that organize the social economy, the early Soviet period magnifies the interaction between the literary imagination and the reproduction of labor onto a historical scale. Narratives dating back to the ancient world feature scenes in which a child looks into a mirror and sees someone else reflected there, typically a parent. In such scenes, two definitions of the aesthetic coincide: art as a fantastic space that shows an alternate reality and art as a mirror that reflects the world as it is. In early Soviet literature, mirror scenes illuminate the intersection of imagination and economy, yielding new relations destined to replace biological kinship—relations based in food, language, or spirit. These metaphorical kinships have explanatory force far beyond their context, providing a vantage point onto, for example, the Gothic literature of the early United States and the science fiction discourses of the postwar period. Alternative Kinships will appeal to scholars of Russian literature, comparative literature, and literary theory, as well as those interested in reconciling formalist and materialist approaches to culture.

CHAPTER ONE

A UNIVERSE AKIN

1. ORIGINARY ECONOMIES

The main character of Andrei Bely’s 1916 novel Petersburg, Nikolai Apollonovich Ableukhov, has his father’s ears—oversized greenish ones that protrude from either side of his head. On a literal plane of reference, of course, this statement is bizarre. The ears are patently Nikolai Apollonovich’s own. Moreover, if we open the floodgates of figurative meaning, then those ears turn out to be implicated in literary as well as paternal genealogies. The elder Ableukhov, a large-eared political functionary with a philandering wife named Anna, has inherited all these qualities from the cuckolded husband in Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. What seems at first to be a stock metaphor of genetic identity in fact refers us beyond biological relations to fictional ones. In the process it asks hard questions about inherited traits, monogamous marriage, and other supposed guarantors of kinship. The pinnacle of Russian avant-garde prose, Petersburg is grounded in tropes of parent-child identity that open the perceived transmission of identity across generations onto theoretical issues of rhetorical exchange and the creative imagination.

Alongside his career as a poet and novelist, Bely was a theorist of symbol and metaphor who blended the Aristotelian categories of figure with the system expounded by the nineteenth-century Russian theorist Aleksandr Potebnia.¹ Bely parses the metaphorical process in his 1910 essay “The Magic of Words,” which provides “the moon-white horn in the sky” as an exemplary trope invoking the crescent moon. For Bely the substitution “indicates (1) the determination of the genus through the species (horn through white horn) and (2) a qualitative distinction between objects (a moonlike horn is qualitatively distinct from any other kind of horn).”² Referring Bely’s own schema back to the metaphor of a child having his father’s ears, we can easily discern both the generalizing movement between species and genus (the epithet “father’s ears” encompasses other large greenish ears, not the father’s alone) and the individuating distinction made between objects (these ears distinguish this child from the children of other fathers, whether their ears are large and greenish or not).

A system of potentially unlimited exchange obtains between these generalizing and individuating tendencies. Metaphor is the essential postulation of identity out of difference; in logical transcription, Bely notes, metaphor would appear simply as A = B.³ A sociological aspect of the process of hereditary identification through a metaphorically grounded system of substitution and exchange is also in play in that, to use Claude Lévi-Strauss’s summation, “every society desires first to reproduce itself; it must thus possess a rule to assign children the same status in the social structure as that of their parents,” whose places they take as their forebears pass away.⁴ Discourses like genetics and law might shy away from examining the figurative basis of systems of equivalence and exchange, but literature revels in it. For Bely, metaphor is the stuff that art is made of. His essay stresses that the “actual substitution of objects (metaphor)” creates “an irreducible unity” that “is the goal of the creative process. . . . We find ourselves standing on the boundary between poetic creation and mythic creation.”⁵ The mythopoetic thrust of his theory, which insists that metaphoric thought creates new entities that are irreducible to any literal synonym, anticipates more modern developments in the philosophy of cognition and involves itself in a larger problematic of personhood.

The interplay between metaphor and family structure plays a prominent role throughout Bely’s writing, but I focus here on his masterpiece, Petersburg.⁶ A unique attempt to conjoin heredity and metaphor into a single complex system, the book’s two major editions, in 1916 and 1922, bracket the Russian Revolution—an event that coincided with a flurry of experiments in both family structure and artistic convention. The novel’s first chapter begins with a wry interrogation of kin identity’s limits. Parodying the eighteenth-century convention of introducing characters in genealogical terms, Bely informs us that “Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov was of venerable stock: he had Adam as his ancestor.”⁷ The statement is funny, to be sure, and on the face of it absurd, but the heredity theme running through the whole novel warns us against discounting its significance. An inventive, stylistically venturesome account of a young man commissioned by a revolutionary group to assassinate his father, a conservative senator, the book is no simple rehashing of the Oedipal scheme but a dense, vertiginous tissue of figurative language. It is also a profound meditation on the nature of hereditary identity, which it holds to be serious and real. One scene in the novel recounts how the senator-father touches the hand of his son, the would-be parricide, and dismisses his instinctive reaction of terror with the thought that his son “was the flesh of his flesh, and to be frightened by one’s own flesh was disgraceful.”⁸ The son too “was sensually absolutely equal to his father: moreover he was often surprised by the circumstance that psychically he did not know where he ended and where in him psychically began this senator, this wearer of sparkling decorations on a gold-embroidered chest.”⁹ The novel never misses an opportunity to point out where father and son share a distinguishing trait (a fondness for watermelon or a susceptibility to indigestion or the habit of talking to himself), and they seem to have trouble telling themselves apart, each at several points mistaking his own reflection for his relative.¹⁰

The characters themselves sense hereditary structures as a transcendental force beyond their own powers of understanding. “When faced with the elegant pirouettes of familial logic, Apollon Apollonovich felt an interminable weight, and he did not know how to express his objections.”¹¹ A full reading of the heredity theme in Petersburg implicates the trope of parent-child identity on every level of the novel’s composition. Bely’s play with sound patterns involves individual phonemes and morphemes in the webs of kinship; the related play with sonic resemblances between words leads us to perceive the book’s constant punning as the revelation of family resemblances on the level of the word; hereditary preoccupations are, as we have already seen, readily identifiable on the level of the sentence; the general movement of the narrative is driven by the tension between parricide and family identity; and the novel’s metafictional admission that it is “spawn” (otrod’e) transforms the book itself, on the highest diegetic level, into the realization of a familial metaphor.¹² After all, according to Petersburg’s author, metaphorical language is the ultimate inheritance—“the one useful legacy we have to leave to our children.”¹³

For the moment, however, I want only to stress that Petersburg grapples continuously with this basic conundrum that parent and child are at once the same in the same flesh, yet somehow horribly, inexplicably different, so different that one of them is capable of killing the other. This paradox involves Petersburg in the basic problems of philosophy as well as in the literary and linguistic operation of metaphor. “To think is to identify,” writes Theodor Adorno, but dialectic thought also entails “the consistent sense of non-identity.”¹⁴ In fact, the book is doubly structured by the kinship theme because the coherent development of its plot is driven by the threat of parricide—the radical division of son and father into subject and object—even as the aesthetic unity of its rhetorical structure is grounded in statements of parent-child identity. When the bomb with which Nikolai Apollonovich is to kill his father explodes harmlessly in the last few pages, the novel fizzles anticlimactically. The tension between familial identity and familial violence defused, the plot has nowhere to go.

All these issues are part and parcel of Bely’s extravagantly metaphorical style, in which words are substituted freely, always referring beyond themselves to the more literal words and meanings that they replace, without obscuring the fact that they have been exchanged for those words and remain different from them. The power of symbolic thought, as Bely writes in a 1910 essay, leads us “out from ourselves, as from an insignificant grain of sand in the desert of existence, to ourselves as Adam Kadmon, as to a universe where I, you, he are all one, where father, mother, and son are all one. . . . And this ‘one’ is the symbol of a mystery that never reveals itself.”¹⁵ Like the opening of Petersburg, if in more mystical than ironical vein, this passage traces individual lineage back to a mystical point of origin for the whole human race. Throughout Bely’s work, kinship identity is representative of a radical potential for universal identity through creative language.

In the conclusion to its brief prologue, the novel ascribes a similar origin to writing itself, which is emblematized by the city of Petersburg as it appears on maps: “two small circles, one set inside the other, with a black dot in the center; and from precisely this mathematical point, which has no dimension, it proclaims forcefully that it exists: from here, from this very point surges the swarm of the printed book; from this invisible point speeds the official circular.”¹⁶ Both literature and law, this passage reminds us, are made of language; both the fiction we are reading and the juridical code that regulates our behavior exist because they say they exist. Where the first words of the narrative name the mythic source of the human family, Adam, the last words of the prologue pinpoint the source of language in this dimensionless dot. Across the threshold of text and paratext, Bely invites us to compare multiplying words with multiplying generations. The germinal point of Petersburg or Petersburg is the novel’s title and hence its first word. Adam too is the source not only of humankind but of language, which he created by inventing names for everything in Eden.¹⁷

This initial juxtaposition is reinforced throughout the novel by passages in which one-dimensional points become sources of language. Nikolai repeatedly thinks of his father, Senator Ableukhov, who is both an ancestor and a writer of laws, as one such central point. The reader is implicated in the image of a central point that is the source both of genetic stock and language because, by tracing the lineage of his characters to the mythic common ancestor of all humankind, Bely makes the problem germane to the entire human family. When readers, who are physical beings, identify with Petersburg’s characters, who are verbal figures, they are caught up in this genealogical descent from a common source.

2. CONCEPTUAL COPULAS

“Blood is a very special fluid,” remarked Bely’s occult mentor Rudolf Steiner in a 1904 lecture, in which he posited a primeval shared identity for the whole of the human race.¹⁸ Anthropologist Robin Fox observes that, while “it is possible to imagine a society that ignored kinship ties altogether and built its social system completely out of other sets of relationships . . . no such society has ever existed.”¹⁹ One of the great tasks of literature—in works as diverse as Herodotus’s Histories, Evgenii Zamiatin’s We, or Georges Perec’s W—has been to imagine alternatives to the consanguineous family, but these imaginings have always been opposed to the prevailing fact that sexual reproduction is also the reproduction of labor and the perpetuation of social categories.²⁰ The need to engender and identify children who will take the place of the living is both a social imperative and a literary preoccupation that stretches back to the advent of written narrative.

Some thinkers have argued that modernism is a break with heredity as much as with the preindustrial past. For Alexis de Tocqueville, democracy “makes every man forget his ancestors” and the defining trait of the modern age is that “the woof of time is every instant broken, and the track of generations effaced.”²¹ However, children continue to filter into the economic class of their parents despite our dreams of social mobility, and modern reproductive technologies may actually reinforce, rather than disturb, ideologies of inherited identity.²² “As repositories of information,” writes Marilyn Strathern of genetic science’s impact on popular notions of kinship, persons related by family ties “are replicas of one another.”²³ Tropes of familial identity remain current in modernist literature in Russia, home to a programmatic effort to redefine kinship for the industrial age, as well as in America, de Tocqueville’s exemplar of democratic modernity. “Is not a brother his brother also, the one blood cut up in lengths? . . . Who’s to say that I’m not my brother’s wife’s husband and that his children were not fathered in my lap? Is it not to his honor that he strikes me as myself?” muses a character in Djuna Barnes’s 1936 decadent novel, Nightwood. With these words, Barnes evokes the same metaphorical matrix of identity and substitution that motivates the biblical tale of Onan, who refuses God’s command to sire a son in his brother’s name.²⁴

The metaphorical operation that is central to kin relations has long been recognized as fundamental to literary study. Aristotle called metaphor the “most important” element of style and defines it as the substitution of a figurative term for a literal one.²⁵ He treats only a very limited set of metaphors, however, and his basic definition has been recast variously as synonymy (lion means Achilles, neither more nor less) and as a mystical overflow of signification (the metaphor is indescribably more than either lion or Achilles, and defies our primitive notion of meaning).²⁶ Some scholars, following Quintillian, hold that metaphors are essentially compressed similes, or some other species of metaphor by analogy. For others, metaphorical language derives its force from an emotional connotation of the metaphorical word. The “controversion theory” pioneered by Monroe Beardsley explains metaphor as the foregrounding of a logical absurdity on an immediately apprehensible level of a text, an aesthetic device that forces the reader to “seek a second level of meaning on which something is being said.”²⁷ What is now called the “interaction theory,” which dates back to classical rhetoric but is now usually cited in reference to the work of Max Black and I. A. Richards, describes metaphor as the interaction between a figurative term, or “vehicle,” and a literal “tenor,” or “what is really being said,” resulting in “a meaning (to be clearly distinguished from the tenor) which is not attainable without their interaction.”²⁸ Finally, since the 1970s broader interest in fields like cybernetics and anthropology has been sparked by the theory of cognitive metaphor, which argues that, while metaphors may be expressed or instantiated in words, “the metaphorical ideas themselves are conceptual matters, matters of thought that underlie the particular words that express them.”²⁹ While each of these theories has a strong point, none of them is entirely satisfactory, and in the meantime most of us use the term happily and indiscriminately in reference to various figures of resemblance, identity, and substitution.

Even if it is alarming to assume that we know metaphor when we see it, as the philistine knows art, some appeal to intuition may be necessary. Metaphor involves both identification and predication, which Paul Ricoeur describes as “the fundamental polarity of language, which on the one hand is rooted in named individuals, and on the other hand predicates qualities, classes, relations and actions that in principle are universal.” Logical operations, Ricoeur contends, are based on this dissymmetry between the individualizing and the abstracting or even universalizing function. Because individuals exist empirically and abstract universals are products of cognition, this dissymmetry is also an ontological contrast between existent and nonexistent entities. “The identifying function always designates individuals that exist (or whose existence is neutralized, as in fiction),” writes Ricoeur, whereas “in having the universal in view, the predicate function concerns the nonexistent. . . . The dissymmetry of the two functions thus also implies the ontological dissymmetry of subject and predicate.”³⁰ Ricoeur uses this distinction to demonstrate that some conflicts between theories of metaphor derive from a misconception of language as operating exclusively in one of these modes. However, the distinction between identification and predication may also help expla...