Trilling II: Anna Karenina

Den kortaste essän i The Opposing Self handlar om Anna Karenina. Det är också den enda av de böcker som behandlas i denna samling som jag har läst.

Till att börja med kommenterar Trilling att många kritiker upplever att Tolstoj (som en ny Homeros) skildrar verkligheten själv, i högre grad än andra författare. Det är naturligtvis naivt att ta en sådan utsaga annat än metaforiskt, men vad är den bokstavliga verkligheten bakom upplevelsen? Varför är Tolstoj normen för realism? Trilling för ett resonemang om Tolstojs stora kärlek till sina karaktärer, i synnerhet Anna, och landar i följande slutsats:

We so happily give our assent to what Tolstoi shows us and so willingly call it reality because we have something to gain from its being reality. For it is the hope of every decent, reasonably honest person to be judged under the aspect of Tolstoi's representation of human nature. Perhaps, indeed, what Tolstoi has done is to constitute as reality the judgement which every decent, reasonably honest person is likely to make of himself - as someone not wholly good and not wholly bad, not heroic yet not without heroism, not splendid yet not without moments of light, not to be comprehended by any formula yet having his principle of being, and managing somehow, and despite conventional notions, to maintain an unexpected dignity.(70)

Vidare skriver Trilling att Tolstoj är en av få författare som har lyckats beskriva hur livet borde vara:

[...] it is a striking fact that, although many writers have been able to tell us of pain in terms of life's possible joy, and although many have represented the attenuation or distortion of human relationships, scarcely any have been able to make actual what the normalities of relationships are. (72

Därefter kommer en vacker formulering av vad känslan av det poetiskt träffande är:

[Psychological analysis of language] is a technique of great usefulness, but there are moments in literature which do not yield the secret of their power to any study of language, because their power does not depend on language but on the moral imagination. [...] And even when the charge of emotion is carried by our sense of the perfect appropriateness of the words that are used [...] we are unable to deal analytically with the language, for it is not psychologically pregnant but only morally right; exactly in this way, we feel, should this person in this situation speak, and only our whole sense of life will explain our gratitude for the words being these and not some others. (72-73)

Slutligen en iakttagelse som är både berättarteknisk och existentiell:

Part of the magic of the book is that it violates our notions of the ratio that should exist between the importance of an event and the amount of space that is given to it. Vronsky's sudden grasp of the fact that he is bound to Anna not by love but by the end of love, a perception that colors all understanding of the relationship of the two lovers, in handled in a few lines; but pages are devoted to Levin's discovery that all his shirts have been packed and that he has no shirt to wear to his wedding. It was the amount of attention given to the shirts that led Matthew Arnold to exclaim that the ook is not to be taken as art byt as life itself, and perhaps as much as anything else this scene suggests the energy of animal intelligence that marks Tolstoi as a novelist. For here we have in sum his awareness that the spirit of man is always at mercy at the actual and the trivial, his passionate sense that the actual and the trivial are of greatest importance, his certainity that they are not of final importance.(74-75)

Jag läste Anna Karenina för (herregud, det är redan) fem år sedan, på uppmaning av Sandra. Jag minns att jag tyckte bra om den, och den hör definitivt till det bästa jag har läst. Jag hade inte så starka känslor för den som jag har för många av mina andra favoriter. Kan den vara värd en omläsning? Det ligger onekligen något intressant att utforska i tanken att Tolstojs perspektiv är man skulle vilja bli bedömd i. Det ligger ganska nära tanken att Tolstoj är den Gud som vi omedvetet hoppas ska möta oss efter döden. Eller, mer ironiskt uttryckt, att han, den ryske reaktionären, är den ende som har uppnått den moraliska kapacitet för vidsynthet som alla liberaler (i amerikansk mening) så gärna skulle vilja ha.