The Overcoat

Meanings and Indeterminacy in Gogols The Over sur position Author(s) passkey Brombert Reviewed work(s) Source Proceedings of the Ameri stop philosophic Society, Vol. 135, No. 4 (Dec. , 1991), pp. 569-575 publish by American philosophical Society Stable URL http//www. jstor. org/ immutable/986817 . Accessed 25/01/2012 0409 Your use of the JSTOR archive intimates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http//www. jstor. org/ summon/info/about/policies/terms. sp JSTOR is a non-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate overbold forms of scholarship. For more than information about JSTOR, please cont venture emailprotected org. American Philosophical Society is collaborating waggleh JSTOR to digitize, preserve and ext shoemakers last access to Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. http//www. jstor. org Indeterminacy Meanings and in Gogols The Overcoat*VICTOR BROMBERT Henry Putnam University Professorof Ro spellceand ComparativeLiterature Princeton University kaky Akakyevich is the central characterof Gogols invention TheOvercoat. Although Dostoyevsky gave common currency to the term antihero in Notes from Underground,it is Gogols Akaky Akakyevich who is the genuine, unmitigated, and seemingly unredeemable antihero. For Dostoyevskys anti- imposing paradoxalist, laid low(p) with hypertrophia of the consciousness, is well- check, cerebral, incurably bookish, and talkative.Akaky Akakyevich is hardly awargon, and around in explicate. Gogols artistic wager was to try to articulate this inarticulateness. The tosh, in its plot line, is simple. A most unremarkable copy clerk in a St. Petersburg ministry-bald, pockmarked, short-sighted, and the scapegoat of his colleagues who invent uncouth ways of plaguy himdiscovers one day that his pat hetically threadb ar coat no extended protects him against the fierce winter wind. The trend he consults categorically refuses to repair the coat which is now beyond repair, and empts Akaky Akakyevich into having a new overcoat made, one tout ensemble beyond his federal agency, but which by dint of enormous sacrifices, he pieceages to acquire and demote with a newly discovered sense of pride. But his happiness lasts further one short day. Crossing a deserted quarter at night, he is attacked by two thieves who knock him to the ground and steal his coat. Drenched, frozen, deep upset, brutally reprimanded by a superior whose help he dared seek, Akaky develops a fever, becomes delirious, and dies. angiotensin converting enzyme can hardly speak of an interesting plot line. provided this simple flooring lends itself to orgies of interpretations. In fact, there may be as many interpretations as there are readers. The Overcoatcan be read as a parable, a hermeneutic puzzle, an exe rcise in meaninglessness. But to depress with, there is the temptation to read it dearly as satire with a social and * Read 9 November 1990. PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, VOL. 135, no. 4, 1991 569 570 VICTOR BROMBERT moral depicted object. In The Nose, Gogol had already made fun of the rankconsciousness and venality of courtly servants.In The Overcoat, he seems to deride systematically the parasitical, lazy, phony, instauration of Russian officialdom, whose members are the impotent mediators of a hierarchy of ineffectual power structure in which every subordinate fears and apes his superior. Early Russian critics, convinced that literature essential take in a moral message, read such a denunciatory and corrective satirical intention into the layer veritable(a) though it is gather in that Gogol constantly shifts his tone, defends no apparent norm, and systematically ironizes any possible serious message.There is of course the temptation to read The Ov ercoatas a tale of com fad, as a plea for br separatehood. The pathetically defenseless little clerk, taunted and perse hacked by the group, ashes blissfully oblivious to the cruel pranks of which he is the butt, intent on his lower-ranking copying body process. Only when the jokes become too outrageous, or interfere with his work, does he protest ever so mildly. But here the tone of the story seems to change.For Gogol introduces a young man, recently ap oriented to the analogous office, who is on the bespeak of sharing in the general fun, and who is dead struck by the strange nones in Akakys voice which touch his heart with pity and make him suddenly see everything in a very different wakeful. A rightful(a) revelation emanating from an unnatural (neestestvennyi) power allows him to hear other words fag Akakys banal entreaty to be left alone. What he hears are the late penetrating, unsaid words echoing with poignant significance I am thy brother. And with this voice fro m behind the voice comes the shocked awareness of how much inhumanity there is in human organisms, how much brutality lurks in what goes as civilized society and civilized behavior. The apparent lesson in humanity attached by the scapegoat victim seems, in the immediate con schoolbook, to have an almost religious character, especially if one relates it to the bank clerks comments, after Akakys death, on how a man of meekness who bore the sneers and insults of his fellow human creations disappeared from this world, but who, before his agony, had a vision of the bright visitant (svetluy gost).The man of meekness, the man of sorrows, like the unspoken but clearly heard I am thy brother, seems to have a Christian, if not Christo transparent, resonance. But we forget Akakys name, and that we are not allowed to do. For the patronymic appellation not but stresses the principle of repeat (Akakys early name being exactly the same(p) as his fathers), but the funny sound repetition is eve n funnier because the syllable kak = like (tak kak = just as) embeds the principle of sameness in Akakys name, determining, it would seem, his single- ideaed, life-long activity of copying and implicit condemnation to sameness.Regarding the many years Akaky served in the same department, Gogol observes that he remained in exactly the same place, in exactly the same position, in exactly the same job, doing exactly the same kind of work, to wit copying official documents. But there is better (or worse) especially to Russian ears, for kakatj GOGOLS THE OVERCOAT 571 (from the Greek cacos = bad, evil) is childrens talk for defecate, and caca in many languages pertains to human excrement.To be afflicted with such a name clearly relates to the garbage being regularly dumped on Akaky as he walks in the street, and to his being treated with no more respect by the caretakers than a common fly. The cruel verbal fun around the syllable kak extends beyond the characters name, and contaminate s Gogols schoolbook. Gogol indulges in seemingly timeless variations on the words tak, kak,kakoi,kakoi-to,kakikh-to,vot-kak,neekak,takoi, takaya,kaknibut, (just so, thats how, in no way, somehow, and so on) which in the edition disappear altogether.The exploitations of sound effects or sound meanings clearly meet to a poets fascination with the prestigious cacophonetic resources of ordinary speech. 1 One last point about the choice of Akakys name, specifically the Christian act of christening according to custom, the calendar was opened at random and several(prenominal) saints names (Mokkia, Sossia), including the name of the martyr Khozdazat, were considered, only to be rejected by the mother because they sounded so strange. Akaky was chosen because that was the name of the father.But Acacius, a holy monk of Sinai, was withal a saint and martyr, and we find ourselves-especially since the Greek prefix a (Acacius) signifies not bad, therefore good, meek, humble, obedient-back t o the religious motif. If Akaky continues to copy for his profess amusement at home, this is in large part because the bliss of copying has a specifically monastic resonance. Gogol does indeed refer to his copying as a labor of be intimate. Here a new temptation assails the reader. Should The Overcoatnot be read as hagiography in a banal modern context, or at the very least as a parody of hagiography?A minute of elements seem to lend support to such a reading of the story in or against the perspective of the traditional lives of the saints the humble task of copying documents, reference to the theme of the martyr (muchenik),salvational terminology, sacrificial motifs or communion (I am thy brother), Akakys visions and ecstasies, his consume apparitions from beyond the grave. But the most telling analogy with hagiographic lore is the conversion-effect on others, first on the young man who has a revelation of a voice that is not of this world (svet), and toward the end he self- admiring, domineering, Very Important Person on whom Akakys ghost-like apparition makes a neverto-be-forgotten impression. 2 The overcoat itself can take on religious connotations because clothing, in the symbolism of the Bible and orthodox liturgy, often represents righteousness and salvation. The only job with such an interpretation-and Gogol has written Meditations on the Divine Liturgy which 1 Boris Eichenbaum speaks of Gogols phonic inscriptions and sound-semantics in How The Overcoat is Made, in Gogol from the twentieth Century, ed.Robert A. Maguire, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 280. 2 hold back John Schillinger, Gogols The Overcoatas a Travesty of Hagiography, Slavic and East EuropeanJournal, Spring 1972, 16, 1 36-41. 572 VICTOR BROMBERT refer to the priests robe of righteousness as a garment of salvation3-is that the coat can have an opposite symbolic significance, that of hiding the truth. Hence the traditional plan of disrobing to reveal the naked self.In additi on, there are many other possible meanings quite remote from the religious sphere the metonymic extirpation of the libido (the Russian word for overcoat- shinel- is appropriately feminine), the effects of virilization (in his new coat, Akaky surprises himself in the act of running after some woman in the street ), loss of innocence and loss of original celibacy. 4 The coat itself hence turns out to be a form of temptation (material acquisition, vanity, pride), and the roguish tailor is the agent of this temptation just as the writer or storyteller (who in fact is he? tempts the reader into a succession of vacuous and mutually canceling interpretations. This provocative writer-reader relationship, sustained throughout the narration, casts a special light on Akakys fundamental activity of copying- the act of writing in its purest form. It does not take much imagination (our modern critics discover self-referentiality everywhere) to see in Akakys copying an analogue of the writers activity. And like the proverbially absorbed writer or scholar, he is obsessed by his writing to the point of finding himself in the center of attention of the street date thinking that he is in the middle of a sentence.This self-absorbed and selfreferential nature of Gogols act of writing might be seen to imply a negative attitude toward the referential world, toward all that which is not writing. Much like Flaubert, who dreamt of composing a book about nothing, and whom coeval critics like to view as an apostle of self-referential, intransitive literature, Gogol yearns for monastic withdrawal. Flaubert was haunted by the formulas of the monk and the saint. Similarly, Gogol explained in a letter It is not the poets business to dirt ball his way into the worlds marketplace.Like a silent monk, he lives in the world without belonging to it . . . 5 Pushed to a logical extreme, this sense of the radical asynclitism of life calls into question worldly authority, and leads to a dest abilizing stance that challenges the principle of authority, a subversive gesta of which the real hero is the artist himself. There is indeed something troubleish about Gogols narrative voice. It has already been suggested that the devil makes an appearance in the figure of the tailor who tempts Akaky into buying the coat.This caricature of the sartorial artist who quite literally is the creator of the overcoat, this ex-serf sitting with his legs crossed under him like a Turkish pasha, has diabolical earmarks he is a one-eyed devil living at the end of a black staircase he has a de3 See Anthony Hippisley, Gogols The OvercoatA further Interpretation, Slavic and East EuropeanJournal, Summer, 1976, 20, 2 121-129. Hippisley points out (p. 123) that Gogol, in his Meditations on the Divine Liturgy quotes Psalms 1329 Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness .. 4 The expression is Charles Bernheimers, in his fine bear witness Cloaking the Self The Literary Space of Gogols Overcoat, PMLA, January 1975, 90, 1 53-61. 5 Letter to Pogodin, quoted by Charles Bernheimer (op. cit. , p. 53) and Donald Fanger, The Creationof Nikolai Gogol, Harvard University Press, 1979. GOGOLS THE OVERCOAT 573 formed big toenail, hard and thick as a tortoise shell he handles a thricereferred-to snuff box on which the face of a general has been effaced (the devil is faceless) he seems to be nudged by the devil and charges the devil knows what prices. 6 This verbal joke seems to extend to the narrator himself, who undercuts his own narration in truly diabolical fashion by means of grotesque hyperbolizing, mixtures of realistic and parodistic elements, sudden shifts from the rational to the unlogical, and elliptical displacements from epic slightness to unrestrained fantasy. Indulging in a game of mirages and fog-like uncertainties, the narrator subverts the logical progression of his story.Ultimately, even the ghost is debunked, and we are back in the lightlessness of quotidian cand or. In the Russian text, these shifts in tone and textual instabilities are even more insidious, since everything seems to blur into the undifferentiated flow of seemingly without end paragraphs. This merging of discontinuities undermines any sense of plot, undercuts the notion of subject, and suggests at every point that what is told is another story, thereby teasing the reader into endless interpretations that can uncomplete be stabilized nor stopped.Some of this is the inevitable result of a mimesis of inarticulateness, a narrative style that is the imitative substitute for Akakys mien of communicating in general through prepositions, adverbs, and such parts of speech as have no meaning whatsoever. But the strategy of destabilization and fragmented diction also has a deeper subversive purpose. The non sequiturs and hesitations reveal the arbitrariness of any fictional structure, and in the last analysis subvert any auctorial authority.The concluding page of The Nose represen ts an authorial critique of the story as incomprehensible and useless. The mediating self-negator is the fictionalized narrator identified in The Overcoat as the raskazyvaiushyi-the narrating one. And this narrator, occasionally pretending to be ignorant or semi-ignorant (like Cervantess narrative voice as of the very first sentence of Don Quixote) does not know in what town, on what day, on what street the action takes placein fact, complains of loss of memory.All this, however, only accentuates the possible wideness of the unknowable and the unsayable, while protecting the protagonists sacred privacy. The narrator clumsily speculates on what Akaky might or might not have said to himself as he stares at an erotic window display in the high-class quarter of St. Petersburg, and he concludes But perhaps he never even said anything at all to himself. For it is impossible to delve into a persons mind in Russian, literally to creep into a persons soul. The Overcoat is thus marked by co nflicting and enigmatic signals, pointing to oxymoronic textures of meanings. Inversions hint at conver6 Dmitry Chizhevsky, who stresses the presence of the Devil in The Overcoat,writes As someone who was well read in religious literature, as a connoisseur and collector of folklore materials-from popular songs and legends-Gogol of course knew about the Christian and folk tradition that the Devil is faceless ( nigh Gogols Overcoat, in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, p. 20). 574 VICTOR BROMBERT sions. What is seemingly up is in fact seen to be down, while the reverse is equally true. The downtrodden creature turns out to be capable of heroic sacrifices, while the powerfully constituted VIP with the appearance of a bogatyr(hero) is cut down to human size by fright. On the other hand, when Akakys dusk is likened to a disaster such as destroys the czars and other great ones of this earth, one may well feel that Gogol is ironic about all heroic poses, heroic values, and heroic figures. When Akaky wears the new coat, his pulse beats faster, his bearing seems to indicate a newly discovered sense of purpose (tzel), his eyes have an audacious gleam, he appears somehow to have almost become virile. as yet the overcoat is also the emblem of false values, of trivial passion, of a kooky reason for a human downfall. One might wish therefore to read a deeper significance into these mutually canceling interpretations. In English, the word passion is fraught with a multiple significance in the ordinary sense, it denotes discriminating and even overwhelming emotion, especially of love yet etymologically, it signifies slimy.Love and suffering are of course linked in a grotesque manner in The Overcoat. Whether such love and such suffering are commensurable with any objective reality remains unresolved in this story which seems to say that any love is great no matter what its object, that love is all-powerful and conversely, that any passion can drag one down, that the more intense it seems, the emptier it is. Gogols style is in itself an admirable instrument of ambivalence enlarging trivia, and thereby trivializing what we may for a moment be tempted to take as significant. What complicates Gogols text for the reader is that it is not a case of simple ambivalence. It will not do to praise Gogol as a compassionate realist with an ethical message or to see him as a playful anti-realist indulging in overwrought imagery and in the reflections of distorting mirrors. The hard fact is that Gogol is a variable writer whose simultaneity of possible meanings allows for no respite and no prospering univocal message.If the narrator is center stage, it is because ultimately he becomes a performer, a buffoonish actor mimicking incoherence itself. Intelligent readers of Gogol-Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Nabokov, Victor Erlich, Charles Bernheimer, Donald Fanger8-have in varying degrees and with different emphases, understood that rather than indulging in a junketee r of ideas to be taken seriously, Gogol delighted in verbal acts as a game-a game that implied the autonomy of narrative style, a declaration of artistic independence, and a thorough deflation of lesprit de serieux. I am largely indebted to Dmitry Chizhevsky who has admirably shown how the iterate and incongruous use of the adverb even (daje) breaks up the logical train of thoughts, enlarges trivia, and frustrates the reader by making the insignificant seem significant, and vice versa. Such a narrative strategy is related by Chizhevsky to the semantic oscillations of the text (About Gogols Overcoat, in Gogol from the Twentieth Century, pp. 295-322). 8 Boris Eichenbaum, op. cit. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, New Directions, 1944 Victor Erlich, Gogol, Yale University Press, 1969 Charles Bernheimer, op. cit. Donald Fanger, op. cit. GOGOLS THE OVERCOAT 575 peradventure there is an underlying autobiographic urge in The Overcoat, and the verbal antic and narrative pirouettes are te lling a story in which the irrational takes on an exorcising and liberating virtue-much as the idiosyncrasies of Dostoyevskys Notes from Undergroundpresent a vehement protest against spiritually tedious rationality. What is certain is that Gogol needs to wear a mask.Haunted by the monsters innate(p) of his imagination, afraid to be unmasked, Gogol literally disappears in his writing by decorous a multiplicity of voices. 9 But there is a risk in depicting Gogol as an escape artist struggling against his own demons at the same time as he struggles against the repressive reality he wishes to deny. Similarly, there is the risk of considerable distortion in the determination of formalist and post-structuralist critics to draw Gogol to the camp of radical modernity by seeing him altogether concerned with speech acts and sheer rhetoricity.Polyvalence does not mean the absence of meaning. The real problem, much as in the case of Flaubert, who complained of the plethora of subjects and inflationary overfill of meanings, is that over-abundance and multiplicity become principles of indeterminacy. Excess is related to emptiness. Similarly, Gogol seems torn among the futility of experience and the futility of writing about it, between the conviction that writing is the only salvation, and that it is powerless to say the unsayable-aware at all points of the gulf between word form and signified.Nabokov may have come closest to the heart of Gogols dark playfulness when he wrote The gaps and black holes in the texture of Gogols style imply flaws in the texture of life itself. . 10 To this one might add, however, that the hollowness of the gaps, the howling(a) absence, is also an absence/presence a void that asks to be change by the interpretive act. The dialectics of negativity, so dependent on the antiheroic mode be by Akaky, displace the production of meaning from the almost non-existent character and undecidable text to the creative reader. Victor Erlich has very convincingly discussed Gogols motif of the mask and aspiration to speak in somebody elses voice in his chapter The Great imitator in Gogol, op. cit. , pp. 210-223. Gogol himself writes If anyone had seen the monsters that issued from my pen, at first for my own purposes alone-he would certainly have shuddered (quoted by Valery Bryusov in his essay Burnt to Ashes, reproduced in Gogolfrom the Twentieth Century, p. 111). 10Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, op. cit. , p. 143.