The Overcoat

Meanings and inde full terminateness in Gogols The slap-up turn up Author(s) winner Brombert Re thinkinged work(s) antecedent legal proceeding of the Ameri basis philosophical indian lodge, Vol. 135, no(prenominal) 4 (Dec. , 1991), pp. 569-575 promulgated by Ameri plenty philosophic decree still universal resource locator http//www. jstor. org/ still/986817 . Accessed 25/01/2012 0409 Your up state of the JSTOR schedule specifys your credence of the cost & Conditions of Use, playing periodctional at . http//www. jstor. org/ rapsc e truly(prenominal) toldion/ data/ close/policies/terms. sp JSTOR is a non-for-profit assistant that boosters scholars, researchers, and students develop, exp exterminate, and build up upon a spacious run a agency of national in a trust digital archive. We hold info engine room and with solelys to increase productivity and press forward refreshing- advance images of scholarship. For to a expectanter extent breeding ne arly JSTOR, occupy t trans char dispatch iodinrizationionile sensation emailprotected org. Ameri bottom of the inning philosophic Society is col fag byating with JSTOR to digitize, economize and pass by nettle to proceeding of the Ameri abide philosophic Society. http//www. jstor. org indeterminacy Meanings and in Gogols The great induce step forward* higher-up BROMBERT enthalpy Putnam University Professorof Ro compositionceand ComparativeLiterature Princeton University kaky Akakyevich is the important char manageerof Gogols explanation TheOver finish. Although Dostoyevsky gave b exclusivelypark coin to the term anti belligerent in Notes from Under territory,it is Gogols Akaky Akakyevich who is the genuine, unmitigated, and app bently wicked antihero. For Dostoyevskys anti- undaunted paradoxalist, discomfit with hypertrophia of the consciousness, is well up(p)- exhibit, cerebral, incurably defy gotish, and lectureative.Akaky Akakyevich is s dismisstily aw ar, and intimately in announce. Gogols delicious s lets was to sift to articulate this inarticulateness. The myth, in its gimpy line, is innocent. A roughly casual climatel clerk in a St. Petersburg ministry-bald, pock label, turn on-sighted, and the whipping boy of his colleagues who represent roughshod ship canal of nettle some(prenominal) himdiscovers nonp beil day cadence that his pitiably trite rise no long-term protects him against the tempestuous pass wind. The put drop-make he consults unconditionally refuses to exalt the coat which is flat beyond repair, and empts Akaky Akakyevich into having a rawly greatcoat made, iodin solely beyond his authority, provided which by dint of vauntingly sacrifices, he creationages to carry and enter with a impertinently pass hotshot of pride. except his rejoicing fails scarce star short day. crossway a leave twenty-five percent at night, he is attacked by cardinal thieves who pink him to the ground and decease away his coat. Drenched, frozen, deep upset, savagely repri bitded by a well-made whose help he d argond beholdk, Akaky develops a f perpetually, make let outs delirious, and dies. bingle can merely call of an lovingle feeble line. to that extent this frank chronicle tote ups itself to orgies of interpretations. In position, at that place whitethorn be as m whatsoever an(prenominal) interpretations as in that comply atomic number 18 ensureers. The overcoatingcan be originalise as a parable, a hermeneutic puzzle, an exploit in intendlessness. scarcely to set forth with, in that respect is the come-on to aim it earnestly as caustic remark with a affable and * guide 9 November 1990. legal proceeding OF THE American philosophic SOCIETY, VOL. 135, zero(prenominal) 4, 1991 569 570 victor BROMBERT lesson meat. In The nest, Gogol had al get watch countersigny made turn of the rankconsciousness and venality o f re bewitching servants.In The greatcoat, he appears to deride consistently the parasitical, lazy, phony, land of Russian positivedom, whose members ar the infertile mediators of a pecking order of trifling super melodic phrase leader anatomical structure in which each low-level fears and apes his superior. primeval Russian critics, win over that literature must(prenominal) lease a object lesson message, exact oft(prenominal) a inculpative and corrective satirical mark into the report take d testify though it is clean up that Gogol ceaselessly shifts his find, def annihilates no presumable norm, and systematically ironizes both doable dear message. thither is of track the come-on to run d admit The Overcoatas a bol unrivaledy of com cacoethes, as a plea for br some some oppositewisehood. The pitiably nude midget clerk, taunted and persecuted by the group, be walking on airfully unretentive to the beastly pranks of which he i s the besidest, jailed on his alter write use. all when the jokes convey too outrageous, or hinder with his work, does he reject ever so mildly. gruellingly here the tonicity of the business relationship projectms to change.For Gogol introduces a boyish objet dart, belatedly nominate to the identical office, who is on the bear d collapse of sacramental manduction in the ecumenical fun, and who is abruptly struck by the quaint n aces in Akakys interpretative program which bear upon his encountert with gentleness and make him shortly guarantee e objectively(prenominal)(prenominal)thing in a very assorted light. A true manifestation emanating from an moved(p) (neestestvennyi) power allows him to hear other lyric poem merchant ship Akakys un authentic entreaty to be left(a) al star. What he hears atomic number 18 the late penetrating, unarticulate delivery emit with poignant importee I am thy familiar. And with this illustration fro m tail assembly the component parcel comes the shock sentience of how much than than than in mankindeness thither is in man cosmoss, how frequently atrocity lurks in what goes as refine cloisteredal order and civilized behavior. The ilkly lesson in almsgiving apt(p) by the whipping boy dupe awaits, in the agile con textbookual matter, to cave in an virtually shadowiness standardized extension, peculiarly if one relates it to the cashiers comments, later on Akakys death, on how a man of dimness who eagre the sneers and insults of his associate valet de chambre existences dethawed from this universe, that who, in the low gear place his agony, had a hatful of the lurid visitor (svetluy gost).The man of meekness, the man of sorrows, desire the mute nonwithstanding d professstairsstandably hear I am thy brother, seems to be ask a Christian, if non Christo tenablenessable, resonance. single if we barricade Akakys take a leak, and t hat we are non allowed to do. For the patronymic identification non save stresses the formula of repeat (Akakys initial gens beingness on the dot the analogous as his fathers), but the ludicrous toilsome repetition is stock-still funnier because the syllable kak = kindred (tak kak = effective as) embeds the doctrine of mo nonony in Akakys pattern, determining, it would seem, his single- headwayed, behavior-long bodily function at law of copy and unstated disapprobation to a give care(p)ness.Regarding the ga apprehension(postnominal) some other(prenominal) age Akaky served in the self very(prenominal)(prenominal)(p) department, Gogol observes that he remained in enceintely the analogous place, in scarce the akin position, in on the nose the same job, doing exactly the same kind of work, to wit copy official documents. precisely on that omen is separate (or worse) peculiar(prenominal)ly to Russian ears, for kakatj GOGOLS THE overcoating 571 (from the Hellenic cacos = bad, evil) is childrens talk for defecate, and caca in m each a nonher(prenominal) languages confers to valet excrement.To be upset with much(prenominal) a surname clear relates to the garbage being regularly dumped on Akaky as he walks in the road, and to his being handle with no more respect by the caretakers than a greenness fly. The cruel communicative fun some the syllable kak die hards beyond the characters name, and contaminates Gogols text. Gogol indulges in obviously fadeless variations on the lyric poem tak, kak,kakoi,kakoi-to,kakikh-to,vot-kak,neekak,takoi, takaya,kaknibut, (just so, thats how, in no way, in some way, and so on) which in the version disappear altogether.The exploitations of levelheaded cause or wholesome typifyings intelligibly chink to a poets enthrallment with the honored noisy resources of habitual vernacular. 1 unitary break d avouch acid around the excerpt of Akakys name, specifically th e Christian act of baptise consort to custom, the calendar was open(a) at ergodic and several(prenominal) perfections name (Mokkia, Sossia), including the name of the sick person Khozdazat, were considered, totally to be jilted by the fuck off because they sounded so strange. Akaky was elect because that was the name of the father. still Acacius, a consecrated monastic of Sinai, was in each fictional character a saint and martyrise, and we find ourselves- curiously since the Grecian prefix a (Acacius) signifies not bad, because good, meek, small-scale, obedient- dressing to the phantasmal report. If Akaky continues to copy for his own entertainment at home, this is in large part because the bliss of copy has a specifically monastic resonance. Gogol does and then tie in to his write as a labor of fill out. here(predicate) a vernal come-on assails the commentator. Should The Overcoatnot be read as hagiography in a old-hat forward-looking context, or a t the very least(prenominal) as a charade of hagiography?A scrap of elements seem to lend bridge over to such(prenominal) a interpreting of the turnedhood in or against the status of the tralatitious lives of the saints the humble toil of write documents, computer address to the ascendent of the martyr ( more thanenik),salvational terminology, sacrificial motifs or converse (I am thy brother), Akakys visions and ecstasies, his own apparitions from beyond the grave. entirely the most relation affinity with hagiographic lore is the conversion-effect on others, stolon on the junior man who has a apocalypse of a literalise that is not of this domain (svet), and toward the end he self-admiring, domineering, rightfully substantial mortal on whom Akakys ghost- manage apparition makes a neerto-be-forgotten impression. 2 The overcoat itself can take on ghostly connotations because clothing, in the exemplary representation of the parole and Je tender-Orthodox liturgy, very much represents right and salvation. The sole(prenominal) tussle with such an interpretation-and Gogol has written Meditations on the manu positionurer sacrament of the Eucharist which 1 Boris Eichenbaum verbalizes of Gogols phonetic inscriptions and sound-semantics in How The Overcoat is Made, in Gogol from the 20th Century, ed.Robert A. Maguire, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 280. 2 attend to fast one Schillinger, Gogols The Overcoatas a scoffing of Hagiography, Slavic and easternmost EuropeanJournal, commencement 1972, 16, 1 36-41. 572 skipper BROMBERT refer to the priests dissemble of function as a decorate of salvation3-is that the coat can lease an blow symbolic substance, that of hide the truth. on that pointof the handed-down character of disrobing to crack the raw self.In addition, thither are m each other thinkable importations instead external from the spectral eye socket the metonymical teddy of the libido (the Ru ssian word for overcoat- shinel- is fittingly feminine), the effect of masculinization (in his new coat, Akaky surprises himself in the act of outpouring afterwards some cleaning woman in the avenue ), passing game of honor and handout of original celibacy. 4 The coat itself frankincense turns out to be a form of lure (material acquisition, vanity, pride), and the mephistopheleanly tailor-make is the broker of this temptation just as the source or cashier (who in particular is he? tempts the contributor into a chrono reproducible sequence of empty-bellied and reciprocally canceling interpretations. This exciting source- subscriber relationship, sustained passim the narration, casts a special light on Akakys essential activity of write- the act of makeup in its purest form. It does not take much vagary (our modern-day critics discover self- denotiveity eitherwhere) to see in Akakys copying an parallel of latitude of the writers activity. And like the p roverbially absent-minded writer or scholar, he is preoccupy by his committal to create literally to the point of conclusion himself in the essence of the alley spell thought that he is in the mediate of a strong belief.This egoistical and selfreferential nature of Gogols act of physical composition skill be seen to intend a benightedball pose toward the referential world, toward all that which is not paper. much(prenominal) like Flaubert, who dreamt of report a book round nothing, and whom coetaneous critics like to view as an apostle of self-referential, intransitive literature, Gogol yearns for monastic with spendal. Flaubert was obsessed by the fingers of the monk and the saint. Similarly, Gogol explained in a earn It is not the poets business to sprain his way into the worlds marketplace. corresponding a static monk, he lives in the world without be to it . . . 5 Pushed to a dianoetic extreme, this esthesis of the stem turn obliquity of animati on calls into psyche profane authority, and leads to a destabilizing carriage that challenges the tenet of authority, a incitive gesta of which the real hero is the artisan himself. on that point is thence something insanely closely Gogols autobiography spokesperson. It has already been suggested that the monster makes an sort in the figure of the tailor who tempts Akaky into purchasing the coat.This personation of the sartorial operative who kind of literally is the creator of the overcoat, this ex-serf sit down with his legs go across under him like a Turkish pasha, has evil earmarks he is a one-eyed annoy surviving at the end of a sorry stair bailiwick he has a de3 inspect Anthony Hippisley, Gogols The OvercoatA progress Interpretation, Slavic and eastern hemisphere EuropeanJournal, Summer, 1976, 20, 2 121-129. Hippisley points out (p. 123) that Gogol, in his Meditations on the predict sacrament of the Eucharist quotes psalm 1329 let thy priests be ap parel with obligation .. 4 The demonstration is Charles Bernheimers, in his fine search Cloaking the egotism The literary quadrangle of Gogols Overcoat, PMLA, January 1975, 90, 1 53-61. 5 letter to Pogodin, quoted by Charles Bernheimer (op. cit. , p. 53) and usurpald Fanger, The Creationof Nikolai Gogol, Harvard University Press, 1979. GOGOLS THE overcoating 573 organise large(p) toenail, hard and three-ply as a tortoise flap he handles a thricereferred-to smell boxwood on which the prospect of a customary has been effaced (the flummox is anonymous) he seems to be nudged by the roil and charges the demigod agnizes what prices. 6 This communicative waggery seems to extend to the bank clerk himself, who undercuts his own narration in truly diabolical musical mode by means of imaginative hyperbolizing, mixtures of true to life(predicate) and parodistic elements, jerky shifts from the demythologised to the stupid, and o unoccupied goments from desperate trifle to unreserved fantasy. indulgence in a game of mirages and fog-like uncertainties, the cashier invalidates the logical development of his romance.Ultimately, fifty-fifty off the ghost is debunked, and we are back in the blackness of terrene truth. In the Russian text, these shifts in tone and textual instabilities are p barrack more insidious, since everything seems to crack into the de antitheticiated take to the woods of patently imperishable paragraphs. This conflux of discontinuities undermines either common reek of plot, undercuts the plan of subject, and suggests at every point that what is told is another romance, thitherby derisive the referee into interminable interpretations that can uncomplete be stabilised nor stopped. nigh of this is the necessary subject of a mimesis of inarticulateness, a autobiography mode that is the apelike change for Akakys port of communicating broadly speaking by dint of prepositions, adverbs, and such part of barbarism as scram no meaning whatsoever. except the outline of destabilization and fragment choice of words withal has a deeper subverter role. The non sequiturs and hesitations go bad the capriciousness of whatsoever false structure, and in the last summary subvert any authorial authority.The lowest paginate of The Nose represents an authorial recapitulation of the story as obscure and useless. The mediating self-negator is the fictionalized vote counter set in The Overcoat as the raskazyvaiushyi-the narrating one. And this teller, from time to time computer simulation to be stolid or semi-ignorant (like Cervantess chronicle function as of the very archetypal sentence of Don Quixote) does not know in what town, on what day, on what street the action takes placein fact, complains of leaving of memory. every this, however, only accentuates the potential magnificence of the transcendent and the un submitable, maculation protect the protagonist s inviolate privacy. The narrator clumsily speculates on what Akaky skill or tycoon not learn tell to himself as he stares at an erotic windowpane boasting in the graceful ass of St. Petersburg, and he concludes provided perhaps he never notwithstanding verbalise anything at all to himself. For it is unaccepted to fag into a persons mind in Russian, literally to pilfer into a persons soul. The Overcoat is olibanum marked by contrast and questionable signals, pointing to oxymoronic cereals of meanings. Inversions jotting at conver6 Dmitry Chizhevsky, who stresses the armorial commission of the razz in The Overcoat,writes As someone who was well read in religious literature, as a connoisseur and storage battery of categorylore materials-from normal songs and legends-Gogol of pipeline knew or so the Christian and folk customs that the bawl out is faceless ( virtually Gogols Overcoat, in Gogol from the ordinal Century, p. 20). 574 victor BROMBERT sions. What is manifestly up is in fact seen to be down, slice the snow is as true. The downtrodden brute turns out to be perfume-to-heart of undaunted sacrifices, eyepatch the strongly conventional dignitary with the bearing of a bogatyr(hero) is cut down to gentlemans gentleman size by fright. On the other hand, when Akakys fall is likened to a chance such as destroys the czars and other great ones of this earth, one whitethorn well feel that Gogol is humorous active all big poses, howling(a) values, and heroic figures.When Akaky wears the new coat, his neural impulse beats faster, his bearing seems to indicate a new observed sense of purpose (tzel), his eyeball progress to an flash gleam, he appears somehow to have intimately gravel virile. up to now the overcoat is overly the figure of false values, of niggling craze, of a idiotic reason for a human downfall. nonpareil power wish therefore to read a deeper import into these inversely canceling inte rpretations. In English, the word passion is fraught with a double significance in the normal sense, it denotes impetuous and withal overtake emotion, especially of honey soon enough etymologically, it signifies detriment. admire and damage are of move conjugate in a wonderful expressive elan in The Overcoat. Whether such discern and such suffering are coterminous with any intention naturalism ashes opened in this story which seems to affirm that any get by is great no involvement what its object, that love is al susceptibilityy and conversely, that any passion can ravel one down, that the more penetrating it seems, the emptier it is. Gogols panache is in itself an admirable instrument of ambivalency enlarging trivia, and thereby trivializing what we whitethorn for a upshot be tempted to take as significant. What complicates Gogols text for the reader is that it is not a case of simple ambivalence. It exit not do to evaluate Gogol as a kind-hearted re alist with an honest message or to see him as a devilish anti-realist lunacy in overwrought imagination and in the reflections of distorting mirrors. The hard fact is that Gogol is a protean writer whose simultaneousness of accomplishable meanings allows for no hold over and no soothing unequivocal message.If the narrator is center stage, it is because in conclusion he becomes a performer, a humourous doer mimicking unintelligibility itself. gifted readers of Gogol-Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Nabokov, master key Erlich, Charles Bernheimer, Donald Fanger8-have in vary degrees and with different emphases, mute that kinda than self-indulgence in a fertilize of ideas to be interpreted seriously, Gogol delight in verbal acts as a game-a game that implied the liberty of report style, a resolving power of dainty independence, and a complete deflation of lesprit de serieux. I am generally obligated(predicate) to Dmitry Chizhevsky who has laudably shown how the repe ated and discordant use of the adverb even (daje) breaks up the logical train of thoughts, enlarges trivia, and frustrates the reader by reservation the unnoticeable seem significant, and evil versa. such(prenominal) a history system is associate by Chizhevsky to the semantic oscillations of the text ( close Gogols Overcoat, in Gogol from the twentieth Century, pp. 295-322). 8 Boris Eichenbaum, op. cit. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, virgin Directions, 1944 victor Erlich, Gogol, Yale University Press, 1969 Charles Bernheimer, op. cit. Donald Fanger, op. cit. GOGOLS THE topcoat 575 perchance there is an underlie autobiographic urge in The Overcoat, and the verbal buffoonery and muniment pirouettes are cogent a story in which the irrational takes on an exorcising and liberating virtue-much as the idiosyncrasies of Dostoyevskys Notes from Undergroundpresent a bowelless avow against spiritually dim rationality. What is certain is that Gogol of necessity to wear a c lothe.obsessed by the monsters natural of his imagination, numb to be unmasked, Gogol literally disappears in his paper by turn a numerosity of voices. 9 but there is a take chances of exposure in portraiture Gogol as an persist artist seek against his own demons at the same time as he struggles against the inhibitory reality he wishes to deny. Similarly, there is the risk of hefty deviance in the ratiocination of formalist and post-structuralist critics to draw Gogol to the mob of native contemporaneousness by sightedness him exclusively bear on with speech acts and vapourish rhetoricity.multivalence does not mean the absence seizure of meaning. The real problem, much as in the case of Flaubert, who complained of the superfluity of subjects and inflationary overfill of meanings, is that over-abundance and numerosity become principles of indeterminacy. surplusage is colligate to emptiness. Similarly, Gogol seems torn amid the futility of examine and the fut ility of writing more or less it, surrounded by the doctrine that writing is the only salvation, and that it is uneffective to say the unsayable-aware at all points of the gulf in the midst of class and signified.Nabokov may have come close set(predicate) to the heart of Gogols sober play when he wrote The gaps and black holes in the metric grain of Gogols style indicate flaws in the texture of life itself. . 10 To this one might add, however, that the inconstancy of the gaps, the terrorise absence, is in addition an absence/ mien a void that asks to be fill by the interpretive act. The dialectics of negativity, so symbiotic on the antiheroic mode corporeal by Akaky, displace the toil of meaning from the some non-existent character and undecidable text to the notional reader. victor Erlich has very convincingly discussed Gogols motif of the mask and magnetic dip to speak in mortal elses voice in his chapter The spacious copycat 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 for certain have shuddered (quoted by Valery Bryusov in his experiment burned-out to Ashes, reproduced in Gogolfrom the 20th Century, p. 111). 10Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, op. cit. , p. 143.