Gogol and the fantastic

The independent British-Dutch press, Glagoslav Publications, came out with a new edition of Gogol’s Dikan’ka tales this summer. The collection is advertised online as such:

Step into the magical, vibrant world of Nikolai Gogol’s Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka <….> a land of sun-drenched afternoons and moon-bewitched nights, where ancient folk songs fill the air, mischievous devils haggle for souls, and village laughter mingles with the eerie whispers of water sprites. Why read Evenings today? Experience the joyful, unabashedly fantastical wellspring of one of literature’s most original voices. Discover a captivating insight into Ukrainian culture and its rich folkloric traditions. Simply for the sheer pleasure of robust laughter, genuine wonder, and a cast of characters — human, demonic, and spectral — that will linger long after the final page.

Forgiving the obvious colorations that advertisers must blend to attract buyers, our marketer at Glagoslav is not entirely wrong. Gogol’s debut short story collection is marked by the supernatural on all levels, from most abstract to most specific; the narrative logic, mood, and techniques he selects to tell these tales are suffused with obscurity/negation, and it is this blend of an ominous spirit world and the realistically detailed pictures of Ukrainian life that create a bizarre, exotic flavor of the fantastic.

But what is the fantastic? According to Tzvetan Todorov, the fantastic is an uncanny event which provokes hesitation/uncertainty in a text’s character/its reader. It is defined in relation to the oppositions of real-imaginary, reality-dream, and truth-illusion. As Todorov writes, “in a world which is indeed our own… there occurs an event which cannot be explained by the laws of this same familiar world. The person who experiences the event… is [either] the victim of an illusion of the senses, of a product of the imagination — and the laws of the world then remain what they are; or else the event has indeed taken place, it is an integral part of reality — but then this reality is controlled by laws unknown to us.”

At the end of any story, however, the reader must make a decision and thereby emerge from fantastic obscurity. The fantastic for Todorov, therefore, exists as an evanescent genre which overlaps two others: the uncanny/the marvelous. He distinguishes the purely uncanny as events which may be explained by laws of reason but are nonetheless still disturbing/unexpected. The uncanny is linked to the emotions of the characters themselves and their reactions/attitudes toward the supernatural event, especially horror (which Todorov recognizes as a condition of the fantastic as well). The uncanny is also linked to ancient taboos, for example extremely morbid conditions of cruelty, delight in evil, murder, or, in the case of Gogol’s “Strashnaia mest’,” incest (a popular Gothic theme). The transitory sub-genre of the fantastic-uncanny, then, is defined as “the supernatural explained,” in which the reader permits a rationalization for such events at the end. Either nothing at all has actually occurred and what we imagined we saw was only a result of deranged imagination (we were dreaming; we were mad; or we were under the influence of drugs); or supernatural events indeed occurred but may be explained logically (it was a coincidence; a prearranged apparition; or an illusion of senses). The purely marvelous, on the other hand, emphasizes the presence/nature of the supernatural without implicating one’s attitude toward it. In fact, it provokes no particular reaction in the character or reader. The fantastic-marvelous, then, happens when the supernatural is accepted at the end; this is, according to Todorov, the closest we get to the purely fantastic because events remain unexplained/unrationalized.

According to Todorov, hesitation in the fantastic can concern perception (how to name certain events) or language (how to understand the name itself). I would like to focus on the latter medium as a set of linguistic conventions rendering the obscurity of the events on the page for readers to consume. We see this technique on display not simply in the presence, but in the absurdly abundant accumulation, of certain phrases and particles in a text. Todorov provides us with two stylistic devices of this fantastic ambiguity. First is the use of imperfect tense, which creates distance between the character/narrator. By using interpolated clauses to distance himself from what is “normal,” the narrator signifies that it is not he who thinks this way but the character. We as readers are, then, barred from knowing the narrator’s own position. The second device is modalization, in which the use of certain introductory locutions modify the relation between the speaker and his utterance. Locutions indicate the speaker’s uncertainty of the truth of his utterance, suspending him — and us — in two worlds at once. Compare, for example, the statements “it’s raining outside” and “perhaps it’s raining outside.”

Here, I would like to shift back to Gogol, in which this type of ambiguity surfaces readily, especially in his repeated usage of the phrases “как бы” and “как будто.” Gogol’s characters often do not know, and neither do we, whether they are in fantasy or not. The speculative, imaginative patterning of “как бы” and “какбудто” indicates a shift to an unreal condition, introducing a fantastic and unreal element that underlies all of Gogol’s fiction. Their frequency suggests that they are more than mere textual markers: “как бы” and “какбудто” represent the mode of story-telling itself, becoming the routes into the imaginary for both characters/readers. They foreground questions of perception, doubt, and hesitation, driving us to seek solutions beyond the so-called objective world (which we nonetheless cannot obtain). To Todorov’s list of devices I would also add Gogol’s use of negations. Bely had been the first to note this as a device of Gogol’s prose, especially in “Strashnaia mest’.” The tale is marked by numerous and strategic uses of negating particles, particularly ne and ni, after which, according to Bely in “Masterstvo Gogolia,” “the psychological silhouette of the father is dimpled [выщерблен] by the exclusion of all that is concrete…. who he is in himself [сам в себе] is unknown.” Indeed, Katarina’s renouncement of her father is strung together purely of negating words and particles: “Нет, не называй его отцом моим! Он не отец мне.” Gogol’s strict adherence to using negative formulas as much as possible thus conveys the close connection between negation and obscurity, allowing him to depict something more bizarre than the fantastic story of the fabula itself.

Throughout the tales of this collection Gogol develops the fantastic element by creating gaps and voids on all levels of the text. We may think, for example, of the grotesque ending of “Vecher nakanune,” when Petrus’ memory is finally activated by the sight of the witch, prompting an explosion of uncanny laughter as he succumbs to madness: “‘Вспомнил! Вспомнил!’ — закричал он в страшном веселье.” But this effect of horror is necessarily predicated on the torturous paralysis in which Petrus has been held up to this point, which relied on the lacuna in his mind. By keeping Petrus’ memory from him and leaving in place a tangible but impenetrable gap, Gogol suspends and torments his character in a state of unknowing.

As is well known, Gogol was deeply religious in his habits of thought and worldview. For him the overlapping of the supernatural with the ordinary was simply a fact of life — this even meant that the fantastic was the primary reality, while what was “ordinary” and “routine” was less significant. And, reading Gogol, we are never quite sure if the supernatural is truly present, or only in the mind of those believing in it: was the whole thing only a dream, or was it reality? Where was the truth and where was the fiction? Gogol purposely tells his stories in such a way that indications of one and the other are simultaneously plausible; in fact, he makes it quite clear that elements of the supernatural are occurring, so we don’t dismiss them as merely dreams or illusions. We must understand that these are portrayals of real life; but in the end, we understand nothing but the fact that the whole thing is so utterly nonsensical that it can’t possibly be explained, and yet because it is written so matter-of-factly that this is simply the way it is, we have no choice but to keep reading and allow our imaginations to fill in these impossible chasms in logic.

Gogol’s tales revolve around the fantastic, and in them supernatural events become important in themselves, rather than functioning as mere contrasts to the “real.” Sometimes, the rent in natural law repairs itself; but most often, it only recedes from our immediate vision. Indeed, the divine or demonic is always there and can lunge out at any moment. But the function of the fantastic is not as simple as it seems in Gogol — there are several functions and different readers get different glimpses into its underlying mechanisms. Since Gogol’s works can be read from so many different points of view, then, they assume a fantastic quality of their own, rendering any final judgment or criticism impossible. They themselves become a sort of “zakoldovannoe, prokliatoe mesto,” forever possessed and manifesting themselves to us in infinitely variegated ways.