The Democracy of Minor Characters #1: Oblonsky in Anna Karenina

The Democracy of Minor Characters #1:
"The Character of Stepan Arkadyevitch Oblonsky in Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina :"

[Prefatory Note: The following is from a longer unpublished essay, as all my essays are unpublished, The Democracy of Minor Characters . The essay began with a focus on Tolstoy's use of minor characters in his great novels and proceeded with the contention, that we can imagine a separate novel for all the minor characters in all the great novels of literature. I also made the rather fey suggestion that one might show a Shelleyian progress of minor characters from the 18th through the mid-20th century. It is as if all the world's novels were written by the single hand of humanity and that the real focus of the novels, the key to their actual motifs, and what in fact unifies them all, was the development of the life of minor characters… If the minor characters "live" then the novel feels alive. And then eventually, in some future novel, the once minor character re-emerges, with different clothing, in a different city, at a different time -- perhaps smoking a cigar instead of a pipe, or with nervous little hands instead of nervous little feet -- as a major character in his or her own right. And if the "future novel" is well written it will in turn be populated by more minor characters, that will also inspire future writers, consciously or unconsciously, to repopulate the world of our imaginations. Of course to some extent this also is the work of the theater as we can see for ourselves when the gravediggers with whom Hamlet converses, emerge many years later waiting for Godot.

A sad lament: Up until now all of my essays only meet with the criticism of moths, now posted here on the internet, they only meet the little bytes of "ones" and "zeros." Perhaps this is because I haven't tried hard enough or because my literary essays are largely "appreciative" and militantly anti-theoretical. Still there is more possibility for a reader's eyes to meet my words here than anyplace else. ]

The Opening of "Anna Karenina"
It is curious that the first character we meet in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is Stephen Oblonsky. As we know from the first two paragraphs, "Everything was upset in the Oblonsky's house." The reader is then provided with a brief montage of sentences of the way that the household was upset as a result of the "intrigue" between the husband and a former French governess. Basically we are privy to an establishing shot, which could be a story in-itself, but soon we come to focus upon a person who we might expect would be a major character in the novel.

"On the third day after his quarrel with his wife, Prince Stephen Arkadyevich Oblonsky - Stiva, as he was called in his set in Society - woke up at his usual time, eight o'clock, not in his wife's bed room but on the morocco leather covered sofa in his study. He turned his plump, well-kept body over on the springy sofa as if he wished to have another long sleep, and tightly embracing one of the pillows leant his cheek against it, but then suddenly opened his eyes and sat up."

Stephen is next launched into an enthusiastic attempt to remember a ridiculous and amusing, dream until by habit he reaches for his dressing gown which isn't where his hand autmatically searches for it because he is not sleeping in his own bed. "And then he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping there but in his study, and why. The smile vanished from his face and he frowned."

In fact, everything that we will ever need to know about Stephen is in the first two paragraphs that introduce him -- his wish to prolong his basic bodily pleasures; his need to reside in his desires and avoid the harshness of reality; his comfort in his habits, and his simple assumption that all in his life would be good if he were allowed to go easy in his pursuits, his habits undisturbed by the pain he may cause to others. A careful reader, well adapted to the style of expression of 19th century novels, might well be able to guess from the fact that this portrait is complete in-itself, that Oblonsky is not going to become a major focus of the novel "Anna Karenina."

In fact Oblonsky is a minor character whom Nabokov calls in his "Lectures on Russian Literature" a plot device. Oblonsky gets characters from place to place, in this case, bringing Anna Karenina, his sister, to Moscow, where she will meet her future lover Vronsky. Oblonsky carries messages between the characters, setting off the next movement of the novel, he casually gives other characters information that they need to know, and he conveniently (and rather vehemently) explains the Shcherbatsky family to the reader, where resides one of our major characters Kitty Shcherbatsky, the love interest of the other main character of the novel, Levin. Finally, Stephen provides all of the characters with a connection in Moscow, when they need such a connection for plot purposes, and this is especially true for Stephen's connection with Levin, who is often hidden away on his estate, sulking or in a kind of mystical ecstasy. One can almost think of him as a kind of Polonius - a figure of fun who serves as a shuttle between the characters, moving them from place to place:

"An attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious and meticulous,
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, almost ridiculous -
Almost, at times, the Fool."
T.S Eliot, "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Oblonsky must seem a bit of a busy-buddy, a stage manager, who won't remain off stage. He will "swell a progress, start a scene or two" and make sure the major characters get their proper cues and hit their marks on stage. All of this Nabokov notices in his peculiar way. If one looks closely at the 19th century novel, many have a "stage-manager" of some sort or other. Already in Part 1 of the novel Oblonsky gracefully brings Anna on stage, calling her forth from Petersburg to mend his upset household and place a Band-Aid on his marriage. He also introduces us to Levin who has come to Moscow to see Kitty. He is a very helpful character.

And yet Oblonsky, who is almost a fool, is given psychological exposition in depth. A reader can't put down the novel without feeling that she has experienced a character in full. In spite of variations of time and place, this is a person who might walk into my life, and if I was as attentive as Tolstoy I could recognize Oblonsky standing in front of my eyes. Oblonsky is the nearest person to a friend to the painfully self-conscious and un-self-forgetting Levin. And this seems right. Who else but the easy going and always self-forgetting Stephen, could be so tolerant, and one suspects secretly amused, of Levin's angst and self-loathing?

It is at this point that we can begin to see why this "minor character" can live inside of this novel, and perhaps be the subject of some not-yet written novel, even though he doesn't change one wit from the first page to the last time that we see him being rewarded for all of his services. Oblonsky, who moves about from place to place more than any other character (except for perhaps Anna), remains in complete stasis, always the same. In effect, Stephen Oblonsky and his situation, is the background, the societal norm, from which society would judge the two main characters of the novel, Levin and Anna. Stephen Oblonsky, who is himself unjudgmental, is a measuring rod of society's condemnation of both Anna and Levin's unhappiness. He is basically happy in his dalliances and his unexamined life and in the end he is successful in his career. Simultaneously he is "Tolstoy's" narrative judgment against the kind of society that would make this kind of life its measure of what is good and successful. As well as Oblonsky himself, his marriage, serves as a contrast of the kind of failed marriage and failed amoral character which passes for success and happiness in the world at large. Everything in Part 1 of "Anna Karenina" is an emblematic portrait turned upside down (like Marx's description of ideology as a camera obscura) by the thrill of ironic misrecognition when compared with the rest of the novel. It is as if Stephen is performing a parody of the adultery that will lead to Anna's demise. It is as if Stephen is engaged in the pretense of the moral agony that Levin will go through in order to learn to live with his spouse.

It is as if Stephen can have his cake and eat it too -- a cliche that fits well his attitude toward life. Stephen is "Tolstoy's" insight into the sexual hypocrisy of a society that condemns what Stephen wants but winks at adultery as his adultery, as long as he is "socially correct." It is another irony of the novel that Stephen and Anna are brother and sister, for while Stephen remains "in" society during all of his dalliances, Anna is excluded from proper society for her adultery. Beneath their differences, Stephen's and Anna's sexual longing are the same. Yet Anna wants more than just a dalliance, she wants a heightened reality, which gives meaning to the world. She looks for it in love. Levin looks for it in "religion." Stephen does not look for it at all. What Anna can not share with her brother is the everyday hypocrisy that allows her to do one thing and pretend to do another. This hypocrisy is simply Stephen's easy-going nature. Levin does not share in this hypocrisy, either, as we can see in Levin's conflicted empathy with Anna the one time he meets her late in the novel.

Stephen is constitutionally happy and does not suffer the vengeance of society or of his inner demons that will kill Anna and propel Levin on a painful search. Stephen is what his society accepts without thinking. All of the conflicting desires and inconsistencies of character felt by Anna and Levin are simply not on the schedule of Stephen's easy going habits. Anna and Levin both desire a singular union with one lover within one family, and yet also desire sexual fulfillment and sexual freedom; Anna and Levin both desire to live up to their ideal of a good life and yet know that their personal actions contradict their ideals. Anna and Levin both believe that all of their rage for life and attraction to death, that all that is their beneath the surface of their skin and consciousness, can not be resolved in a way that will lead to good. It does not seem to matter whether that "good" is judged by society's standards, or by their own peculiarly high standards that set them apart from the society that judges them, there is no resolution to their conflict. But Oblonsky is the well-adjusted man who sees none of this.

I hope I have shown that Stephen Oblonsky, even though a minor character, is an important part of "Anna Karenina. The depth of insight into a character who is a lovable hypocrite shows us much about Tolstoy's art. But more than this it provides us with an in-depth experience, in a way that is impossible to define, of psychological and sociological patterns that are more interesting and more profound than all of the psychology and sociology yet invented.

I will end this part of my essay with a slogan that I hope to show is true: The so-called "human sciences" are facets of the ideology of our time. The best novels give us experiences, which reveal our own truths.

Jerry Monaco
Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco

Part 2 of of a series on Anna Karenina is located at
Moral Intentions and Artistic Tensions in Anna Karenina

I am going to post this now without rereading. I will edit later. Reader forgive me for the typos and the syntax.




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Reponse to Post: Unions are blue-collar says the gen-Xer.....

Subject: but how?
Unions are so blue-collar, sez the gen-xer in me. Is there a tradition of unionizing the office workers, the college
graduates? You talk about factory workers, but you don't seem to be talking about me.

(Below is my reponse to a comment made to my post "Election Reflections.")

My short reply to your question is to ask -- What alternative is there? I think the only good choice is to start educating the vast majority of the people who benefit least from the distribution of resources in our society, about their interests in relation to those who own most of the wealth My longer answer is to try to explain why the alternatives of how to educate people are so restricted.

First, perhaps I should make a few premises of my note on the election explicit.

The first premise is that we on the left need grassroots organizations that are independent of the five-percent of U.S. citizens who own and rule the United States. Another premise is that those independent institutions must be long-lasting. The reason for this is that most of the institutions of those who own the wealth in this country are permanent, highly class conscious and always operating to set a political agenda. If we are to develop countervailing institutions our institutions must also be permanent, highly class conscious, and always operating to set a political and social agenda. They must not be groups tied to a single individual and they must have some stable social base. We on the left have a harder job maintaining such organizations than the Generals Motors and Electric. Corporations are powerful and permanent organizations that are always campaigning for their own narrow interests, and are always buying and creating organizations to look out for their own class interests. The huge public relations industry, which also runs our elections, is an industry that caters to the narrow interests of business entities. G.E. can buy a television network and one can be sure that the people who run the network will have approximately the same worldview as the people who run G.E. General Motors and the auto companies, Microsoft and the high-tech companies, can set up lobbying and public relations organizations, that propagate their worldview by simply spending money and modeling their organizations after hierarchical corporate institutions. Our organizations cannot be set up this way. They must always maintain a consensus among its members and must always educate its own membership. In other words our organizations must at least try very hard to be democratic and consensus building. And this is another premise of my comment. Unless our organizations are always educating, organizing and trying to involve people in democratic decision making, at least by building a consensus, they will fail, or eventually be bought off.

Second, the point of my comment on the recent election was to state that those of us who believe in progressive politics must do the hard work of collecting our resources to educate and organize people. The only way to do this is by creating and building standing institutions that look out for the interests of most of us who are excluded from the councils of power. Most of us look at electoral politics, correctly in my view, as irrelevant to our daily lives. My observation is that the only two institutions that are able to maintain some amount of independence from those who own and rule the country are those organized around religion and those organized by employees around the workplace. In practical circumstances that comes down to "church" and "unions." These are simply observations of the structure of our society and what opportunities we may have to participate in institutions that can educate and mobilize all of us who believe in maintaining a world where we can live decent lives, without constant fear of unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger, and lack of medical care, and beyond that, organizations that may help us to build greater opportunities for democracy in industry and social investment. If there are any other institutions that are both independent from the small minority of people that own our society and are relatively permanent I do not know of them. If we can create other kinds of institutions instead of church based or union based institutions which can fill our need to educate and mobilize people around a progressive agenda, I am all for them. But I think that our range of choices are for at least the near future set by the structure of our institutions.

So my first answer to your question is, unless "white collar" workers organize collectively around their workplace and try to educate themselves about the world and their place in it, unless they realize that their interests are not the same as those who own the country, we will fail. As long as white collar workers identify with the interests of their company more than with the interests of their fellow workers they will lose ground as a group. If "white collar" workers, most of whom are no better off than "blue collar" workers, do not realize that it is in their interest to form their own organizations based in the workplace, then they will simply become more and more insecure in their lives, following what ever ruling class agenda that seems best to them, letting other people rule their lives, while they accept the "fact" that the only way to look after themselves, is to adopt the slogan "me first." Unless we work collectively with others who are in similar situations to our own, we will fail. If we don't organize collectively we will leave the field of play to the only group that is self-conscious and has its own organizations, the business classes, the elite producers of culture, and right-wing church groups. We must use the organizational tools that we have and I don't think that there is any alternative to organizing in the kinds of institutions that I have suggested.

I think that the main point of your question actually has very little to do with what is the best method of organization or how to organize or where to organize. The thrust of your question seems to me the idea that unions, etc. are simply old fashion and why should anyone participate in organizations that limit the individual's independence? I think many people who consider themselves middle class have bought into the idea that the only way to be a success is to follow the rules of what ever organization they happen to be in or that somehow they will strike it rich by becoming a "star" or an entrepreneur. All I can do is point out that in places where worker organizations are strong people live better and have more opportunities to live a decent life.

Your basic pessimism that "white collar" workers will not join unions is not easy to answer. In some respects I think that your question is too general to answer in its current form. You ask if there is a tradition of organizing white collar workers. Outside the United States there is such a tradition. Inside the United States the tradition of organizing white collar workers only exists within the public sector. That is an interesting observation for several reasons. One, because the time period for the organization of workers in the public sector was during an historical moment when it was not politically feasible for the people in control of the state to crack down on unionization. In other words white collar workers were organized in the public sector because it was harder to break the union through "legal" means, such as delays of recognition, lay-offs and terminations. But there is another reason why public sector white collar employees were organized. Traditionally, public sector jobs were the first step-up out of marginal working class jobs for first generation college educated sons and daughters of industrial workers with a strong tradition of solidarity in their own right. The teachers who organized the teacher's unions across this country were mostly the sons and daughters of the workers who organized unions in the '30s. So there is an unstated premise to your question that I agree with; tradition matters and what is most important is a tradition of solidarity between people in similar situations. How that tradition is inculcated and developed is another question altogether. I do not have an easy answer to that question. All that I know is that it must be inculcated or else what we love most in our lives will begin to whither away.

Jerry Monaco
New York City
15 November 2004


Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Election Reflections: The task is to educate, organize - but where?

Election Reflections: The task is to organize -- but where?
Originally Written 10 November 2004 --

I have read and heard election comments from many friends and correspondents and, quite frankly, most of them don't make sense to me. Many people are depressed by Bush's re-election. People here in New York City, where 75% of the voters voted for Kerry, look at themselves as somehow different and despised by the rest of the country. I don't understand the reason for the depression and sense of alienation of so many of my friends or why people believe that things are so much different this week than they were last week. I agree that the people who are currently the governing fraction of the ruling regime in the United States are thugs and rightwing authoritarians; we could better serve humanity by putting Bush and his cronies in front of a war-crime tribunal than placing at the head of the governing councils of the most powerful state the world has ever known. Yet, still, I must emphasize that the tasks remain the same today as they were two weeks ago or 4 years ago. And they would be the same tasks that would have remained before us if Kerry had been elected instead of Bush. Kerry, if he had been elected, would have been the same kind of right-wing president that Clinton became, unless a mass movement had appeared that might have changed the ground that Kerry stood upon. The last "liberal" president the United States elected was Richard Nixon. I am no admire of Nixon. He was one of the worse war-criminals of the past century. He was not a liberal because he cared for the health and wealth of those of us at the bottom of society, but simply because he couldn't be the right-wing nut he would have been in different times. There would have been too much of a reaction in society as a whole if he did not continue the same kind of guns and butter programs that were started by Lyndon Johnson.

What most people of the left who write about the election and are depressed by Bush's second term don't accept is that elections in our society are mostly a public relations problem and at best are surface reactions to what is underneath in society as a whole. Equating an "election" with politics, and then thinking that every kind of political organization that doesn't relate to an electoral politics is a distraction from "real" politics, is one of those middle-class doctrines that only shows that most people who become "professional" loose a good proportion of their capacity to think. Perhaps this is because among our middle class "professionals" every kind of politics that is not electoral politics is simply too messy. It stinks of the "mob". The point I want to make for those on the left who are not afraid of the mob is that elections in our country have become more and more divorced from actual politics. It is true that small changes in the councils of power can make a meaningful differences in limited areas, but the real changes only come when there are larger social movements pushing politicians into making concessions to the rest of us. Only larger social movements, which establish long lasting institutions, can change the ground on which the politicians stand. The last report I read in the "Wall Street Journal" stated that approximately 56% of the electorate voted, which means that Bush was elected by approximately 29% of the electorate, which seems to me to generally reflect his support in society as a whole. Also, the approximately 27% of the electorate that voted for Kerry I think accurately reflects the support for the conservatives in the Democratic party. The rest of us may vote in disgust for what ever candidate seems to hurt us least but let us not think that the simple act of voting tells us anything about politics or the general condition of the United States at this moment. The task that is the same today as it was yesterday is that we have to organize and educate and finds ways to act that gives us all something meaningful to do in changing our workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, churches, etc. The best election comments I have read simply state this obvious fact. The right has spent the last forty years organizing grass-roots organizations, turning apolitical church groups into organizations that educate people into a certain worldview and then mobilize them for the purpose of the powerful. Our task is harder. It is not the task of the Democratic party or any other ruling group. We are not mobilizing people for the sake of the powerful. We are mobilizing people for the sake of spreading power and equality throughout our relations. The right-wing Christian organizations can dictate what is good and bad, and what to do about it. We cannot.

But the question we should be thinking about is the basic one of how, where, and what kind of organizations we should build. There are no simple solutions here and no substitutions for the hard work of everyday self-education and activist self-help. Organizations evolve in the course of building them and often we are unable to see what we are making when we begin. Reality surprises. Yet if we are going to help build the kind of society, based on human values of solidarity, human decency, the end of suffering amid abundance, etc -- the society most of us long for, we must have lasting social and educational institutions of our own. I am just stating the obvious. In our society the two sectors that provide stable venues for organizing are the work-place and the various churches. These are the two major choices for places to spend our organizing time. There are of course other choices but the problem with them is that with out outside institutional support human rights organizations, civil rights organizations, etc. are not self-supporting. Unless they are very small and local they quickly become dependent on institutional forces that influence their direction away from grass-roots activism. On the other hand small local organizations rarely develop into the kind of national network we need except in regard to narrow issues -- reproductive rights, environment, Central American Intervention, etc.

There are many "progressive" church organizations in the U.S. so there is no need to reject religious organizations in a dogmatic manner, but it is hard to see that in the long run Church organizations will be the major institutional support for progressive organizing. One reason for this is that a Church organization is by definition concerned with doctrinal issues that can only be called sectarian. Church organizations can help provided a space for progressive political and worker's organization but I doubt that in our society they will be the major institutions of the "left." I may be wrong. I certainly saw a contrary example in Central America in the 1980s. But I think in our society, even the Civil Rights movement of the post war era (which may be taken as a church based progressive movement to a large extent) of necessity became a secular movement when dealing with larger social and economic issues that formed the foundation of racism. I think that this is only saying that our society is so diverse that organizing around progressive social and economic issues is necessarily secular.

Traditionally the most stable support for "left" and "progressive" issues has been workers organizations of various sorts. This is simply a truism. Also the most stable worker's organization have been unions. Here is where we are stalled. We must continue to organize people around their work places and we must continue to educate people on the values of solidarity, etc., but for the moment, for most of us, this is a limited possibility. I do not discount international solidarity groups, civil and human rights groups, etc. We must continue to work to build such organizations. Yet without the institutional support of a strong union movement or of work-place based organizations of some sort, without the education and resources such organizations can provide, there will be no stable progressive organizations that serve the left in the way right-wing church organizations serve the right.

This is where I run into trouble with some of my "liberal" friends and maybe even with some who would label themselves "radical left." There are so many people in their 20s and 30s who simply think that it is either impossible to form a union (they may be accurately judging reality) or believe that unions are a conglomeration of gangsters or that they are stodgy old conservative organizations. There is some truth to these criticism, but when one sees the courageous attempts of mostly African-American workers to form a union in a chicken processing factory in the south and the brutal tactics the owners use to crush such attempts one does know which side to choose in such struggles. So may I suggest that we try to stick our necks out at our own workplaces and try to form groups to talk about these issues? May also suggest that we try to educate our liberal friends on the need for all of us to have more power through organization among wage earners in our work places. Finally, I would like to say that organizing around our workplaces does not only mean trying to organize a union. Who knows what kind of future organizations we can evolve? They may not be unions. But I am at a loss to think of what other kind of stable organizations we can support that will provide a longer term institutional foundation for the "progressive" agenda except for workplace based organizations.

I hope I am only stating the obvious.

Postscript:
Barbara Ehrenreich has a good article on what I would call the infrastructure of the Christian Right in the Nation. It can be found at the Nation's website or at http://www.zmag.org/ZNET.htm . The good point that I wish everyone on the left would contemplate is that "today's right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on "faith" but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients." What I would like to point out is that this kind of self-help has been the foundation of every popular movement of "right" and "left" from ancient Rome to the modern working class movement. The left must find ways to organize self-help that is both democratic and educational or else we will not make progress.

Jerry J. Monaco
New York City
10 November 2004


Shandean Postscripts to Politics, Philosophy & Culture
Hopeful Monsters: Poetry, Fiction, Memories by Jerry Monaco




This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.