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This week our assistant editor sat down with Chloë Kitzinger to talk about her book, Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel published by Northwestern University Press in 2021.
CP: My first question today is actually the very same one with which you began your book: What makes some characters seem to be so real?
CK: I think that’s a question with many answers. But I’ll focus on the answer I give in the book: characters in novels seem real because of their positions in the narrative systems they are part of, which unfold and develop through the process of reading. I follow Alex Woloch (The One vs. the Many, 2003) and Fredric Jameson (The Political Unconscious, 1981) in using the term “character-system” to talk about these unfolding narrative interrelationships. Just opening up a realist novel primes us to pay attention to character-systems: who is at or near the center of the story? What descriptions or objects or ideas are associated with each character? What cues do we get about how each character should be imagined? All these cues are part of the information that an absorbed reader continuously gathers. And they have the effect of foregrounding some characters (making them strike the reader as vivid, memorable, complex, autonomous), while sidelining or fragmenting others (making them feel formulaic, unimportant, mechanical, partial). So in other words, the effect of a character’s “life” is something that a novel-reader is ready to experience from the moment she starts reading. Character-systems control and distribute this life-effect, concentrating it in some characters and withholding it from others.
The flip side of this argument is that the more vivid a character is, the more closely that vividness is tied to the experience and moment of reading—again, to the moment of immersion in those unfolding, relational narrative systems. I’ll add that this is the opposite of the way we usually think about characterization. We assume that vivid characters are the most “portable” part of a work of literature, and it’s true that often, when you really love a book or feel that it captures something about reality, the characters are what you remember. But what I’m suggesting is that the felt quality of vividness—the character’s “mimetic life”—is actually embedded in narrative. As soon as you pull the character out from the bounded text, you lose what is most essential to your experience of that character as “alive.”
CP: How and when did you as a reader and a scholar become interested in mimetic character? Is there any novel or character in particular that inspired your exploration of the “illusion of a character’s autonomous ‘life’”? (p. 9)
CK: The way that I became interested in mimetic character was also the way that I became interested in Russian literature: reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I was fascinated by how such a huge, messy, unruly novel could also be so elegantly constructed and tightly organized. Later, I realized that the backbone of this messy-but-ordered narrative was its character-system and that Tolstoy’s philosophy of history—especially, his suspicion of historical “heroes” or protagonists—causes him to manipulate this character-system in extremely unusual ways. Meanwhile, I had also become interested in some of Dostoevsky’s suppressed minor characters—Ganya Ivolgin, Smerdyakov—and in the totally different kind of vividness and messiness that sets apart his novels, especially The Adolescent. So those interests came together in my thinking about the book.
CP: In your book, you develop the concept of “mimetic life.” As I read your book, I kept thinking about the pedagogical potential of this term, which offers so much that is new and exciting to our understanding of readership. How do you imagine this term might impact our students’ conception of their role in the reading process?
CK: For me as a teacher, it is always exciting to encourage students to think about how narratives work—about the specific devices that are driving and shaping their responses to the text. I see the perception of “mimetic life” as one of those visceral responses. So I’m interested in persuading students that our impression of characters’ vividness is neither random nor subjective; it’s intentional, directed by the narrative, and it’s a big part of how realist narratives work upon us as readers. Sometimes, I think my students feel they have to abstract from a novel in order to get to what’s “important” about it (themes, problems, imagery). But actually, all these things are systematically encoded in our most basic, most absorbed experiences of plot and characterization, and by attending to those experiences, we can find out something real about the text. So if anything, I hope that the idea of “mimetic life” might encourage readers to take their intuitive responses to characters seriously and treat them as a key to analytical reading.
CP: I really appreciated that you brought Dostoevsky’s early fiction into your discussion of his works’ realist character-systems. Could you speak a little bit about Dostoevsky’s “preference for indirect characterization” (p. 70) and how this ghostly tendency, as you describe it, has informed the reception of his work?
CK: I have a lot to say about this, because it’s also related to the book project I’m currently working on. In Mimetic Lives, I suggest that we can connect Dostoevsky’s tendency to construct characters indirectly, through thought and dialogue, with his ambition to represent contemporary literary “types” that are still unfolding—as he puts it in his unpublished preface to The Adolescent, “the real man of the Russian majority” (PSS, 30 vols., vol. 16, p. 329). Because these characters are not yet finished and whole enough to be described comprehensively from the outside, Dostoevsky resorts to the device of characterizing them via their “own” words and thoughts. Many of Dostoevsky’s contemporaries received this device as uncanny, ghostly or shadowy, and lacking the solidity of more conventional realist characterization. (I argue in the book that Dostoevsky tended to agree, and that the traces of this insecurity are clear in his later novels.) But the following generation, and particularly influential Russian Symbolist critics like Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Viacheslav Ivanov, saw this kind of characterization differently, as a liberation from the “flesh” of narration and a dramatic, almost miraculously immediate proximity to the reader. I think this fin-de-siècle reading was a crucial stage on the way to the account of Dostoevskian characterization we’re now most familiar with, Mikhail Bakhtin’s idea of the “polyphonic novel.” For Bakhtin as for his Symbolist predecessors, there’s a kind of magic to the incompleteness or non-finalization of Dostoevsky’s characters: it marks a new phase of the novel genre that fully realizes its affinity for the contemporary present. What we tend to minimize is Dostoevsky’s own assumption, encoded into his novels, that this chaotic present-tense flux is reaching toward some final (even apocalyptic) aesthetic harmony or form. I’m interested in how both sides of that impulse to represent the “contemporary” have shaped Dostoevsky’s reception —his footprint in the novel and beyond—for 20th–21st-century readers.
Chloë Kitzinger is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic, Russian, and East European Languages and Literatures at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on narrative and literary theory, Russian realism, and 19th–20th-century novels. She is the author of Mimetic Lives: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Character in the Novel (Northwestern University Press, 2021) and has published essays on Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Andrei Bely, Zora Neale Hurston, and Bakhtinian novel theory, among other topics. Current book projects include ‘Dostoevsky’s Afterlives’ (a study of Dostoevsky’s reception through the prism of Russian Symbolist criticism) and the anthology Seers of Flesh and Spirit: Symbolist Writings on Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, co-edited with Lindsay Ceballos and D. Brian Kim (under advance contract with Amherst College Press). She is a member of the Readers Advisory Board of the North American Dostoevsky Society.
Chloe Papadopoulos is an Assistant Professor (limited-term appointment) in the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University. Her current research focuses on reform-era historical fiction, drama, and the plastic arts, and their contemporary reception in newspapers and the periodical press. Chloe serves on the Readers Advisory Board of the North American Dostoevsky Society and is the Assistant Editor of Bloggers Karamazov.
Bloggers Karamazov 