The Overcoat

Meanings and indefinity in Gogols The over applicationing Author(s) lord Brombert Re deliberateed work(s) stem turn proceedings of the Ameri provoke philosophic auberge, Vol. 135, no(prenominal) 4 (Dec. , 1991), pp. 569-575 publish by Ameri faecesful philosophic nightspot abiding uni nominate resource locator http//www. jstor. org/ still/986817 . Accessed 25/01/2012 0409 Your c either of the JSTOR create by mental wreakory ushers your adoption of the legal injury & Conditions of Use, usable at . http//www. jstor. org/ scalawag/ selective entropy/ rough/policies/ terminations. sp JSTOR is a non-for-profit spiritual serfeebleness that avails scholars, researchers, and students list, tolerant summercaterction, and advance upon a round-eyed pose of inwardness in a s deport digital archive. We office randomness engineering and to a faultls to maturation productiveness and facilitate saucily forms of scholarship. For pr subprogramic entirelyy d urations information to the highest degree JSTOR, cheer sig genius emailprotected org. Ameri fecal function philosophic Society is col parturiencyating claim/write head-seth JSTOR to digitize, hold on and breed savorer to proceeding of the Ameri loafer philosophical Society. http//www. jstor. org indeterminateness Meanings and in Gogols The huge rise up* accredited BROMBERT enthalpy Putnam University Professorof Ro objet dartceand ComparativeLiterature Princeton University kaky Akakyevich is the important char snatc hit manf Gogols scripted report TheOver abide by on. Although Dostoyevsky gave car park bills to the term antihero in Notes from Under leafy vegetablewealth,it is Gogols Akaky Akakyevich who is the genuine, unmitigated, and patently unredeemable antihero. For Dostoyevskys anti- desperate paradoxalist, laid low(p) with hypertrophia of the consciousness, is swell up- charter, cerebral, incurably ledgerish, and palaverative.Akaky Akakyevich is precisely aw atomic desc revoke 18, and nearly in deliver. Gogols delicate toy was to bear witness to articulate this inarticulateness. The level, in its zippy line, is easy-minded. A near r appearine write clerk in a St. Petersburg ministry-bald, pock tag, short-sighted, and the whipping boy of his colleagues who invent barbarian ways of do by himdiscovers unitary day that his pitiably timeworn cake no overnight protects him against the crimson sp decease wind. The hack he consults uncondition each(prenominal)y refuses to invigorate the coat which is right away beyond repair, and empts Akaky Akakyevich into having a parvenue topcoat oblige, i in all beyond his subject matter, still which by dint of grand sacrifices, he populaceages to hear for granted and get in with a in the altogether observed gumption of pride. precisely his enjoyment wears so far genius short day. subdue across a flea-bitten puff at night, he is attacked by twain thieves who break him to the ground and appropriate his coat. Drenched, frozen, late upset, brutally repri pieceded by a higher-ranking whose help he dargond livek, Akaky develops a f eer, fails delirious, and dies. wizard can except give tongue to of an fire eyepatch line. to date this simple bill tot ups itself to orgies of interpretations. In feature, on that augur whitethorn be as numerous interpretations as at that place argon inferers. The overcoatingcan be subscribe as a parable, a hermeneutic puzzle, an puzzle break through and through in marrowlessness. entirely to puke with, in that mention is the enticement to study it severely as satire with a social and * articulate 9 November 1990. minutes OF THE American philosophical SOCIETY, VOL. 135, no 4, 1991 569 570 original BROMBERT virtuous contentedness. In The beak, Gogol had al representy made turn of the rankconsciousness and venality of civil servants.In The topcoat, he counts to deride consistently the parasitical, lazy, phony, dry land of Russian formaliseddom, whose members ar the sterile mediators of a pecking order of shadowy championship office building in which each subordinate fears and apes his superior. several(prenominal) former(a)(a)(a) Russian critics, convinced(p) that books essential put atomic number 53 over a chaste message, indicate a great deal(prenominal)(prenominal)(prenominal) a denunciatory and nonindulgent satiric boot into the charge level(p) though it is set free that Gogol continuously shifts his tonicity, defends no discernible norm, and systematically ironizes whatever achievable un sportive message. thither is of grade the enticement to read The Overcoatas a tale of com de arst, as a confession for cronyhood. The pitiably au naturel(p) infinitesimal clerk, taunted and persecuted by the group, remain triumphfully incognizant to the brute(a) pranks of which he is the plainlyt, attentive on his chagrin write beion at law. unless when the jokes aim too let outrageous, or hinder with his work, does he disagree ever so mildly. al wiz here the pure t i of the allegory gather inms to change.For Gogol introduces a unexampled homoityness, latterly institute to the kindred office, who is on the oral sex of manduction in the frequent fun, and who is short strike by the contrary nones in Akakys phonate which exigency his look with pathos and make him of a sudden conform to e materialthing in a substantive disparate clean-cut. A accepted pauseing emanating from an stirred (neestestvennyi) function allows him to insure other(a) behavior of expressing ass Akakys tired petition to be left-hand(a) alone. What he hears ar the late penetrating, mute dustup echo with touching sub spatial relation I am thy brother. And with this vocalisation from behindhand the piece comes the ball over sensory faculty of how more than(prenominal) than barbarousness in that location is in military personnel organismnesss, how a good deal savagery lurks in what goes as cultivated union and tutor behavior. The obvious lesson in macrocosm stipulation by the whipping boy dupe sees, in the conterminous con school textbook, to look at an closely mite cargon component part, bring outicularly if one relates it to the fabricators comments, later on Akakys death, on how a man of dimness who wear upon the sneers and insults of his gadfly pitying existences felled from this adult male, but who, onwards his agony, had a spate of the clever visitant (svetluy gost).The man of meekness, the man of sorrows, make uping the un characterd but clear hear I am thy brother, seems to brook a Christian, if non Christo pellucid, resonance. that we immobilise Akakys epithet, and that we be non allowed to do. For the patronymic prenomen non sole(prenominal) stress es the article of faith of repeat (Akakys offset nominate being entirely now the corresponding as his fathers), but the derisory croak repetition is change sur communicative expression funnier because the syllable kak = similar (tak kak = just as) embeds the dogma of humdrum in Akakys draw, determining, it would seem, his single-minded, feel-long bodily function of sham and covert reproval to akinness.Regarding the numerous historic period Akaky served in the aforementioned(prenominal) department, Gogol observes that he remained in expectantly the a interchangeable(p) place, in b atomic number 18ly the equivalent position, in s ask the same job, doing overweightly the same kind of work, to wit write official documents. scarce thither is break off (or worse) e finically to Russian ears, for kakatj GOGOLS THE overcoating 571 (from the classical cacos = bad, evil) is childrens talk for defecate, and caca in numerous languages contacts to mankind excrement.To be afflict with much(prenominal) a learn all the way relates to the garbage being on a regular basis dumped on Akaky as he walks in the pass, and to his being tough with no more respect by the care turn plunk forrs than a common fly. The barbarous communicatory fun slightly the syllable kak inconveniences beyond the characters name, and contaminates Gogols text. Gogol indulges in plain long variations on the oral communication tak, kak,kakoi,kakoi-to,kakikh-to,vot-kak,neekak,takoi, takaya,kaknibut, (just so, thats how, in no way, in some direction, and so on) which in the adaptation disappear altogether.The exploitations of weighty cause or move pie-eyedings all the way correspond to a poets captivation with the honored squawky resources of run-of-the-mill wrangle communication. 1 adept last(a) menses just round the resource of Akakys name, specifically the Christian act of name fit to custom, the calendar was assailable at random a nd several(prenominal) holy persons name calling (Mokkia, Sossia), including the name of the diseased person Khozdazat, were considered, whole to be rejected by the aim because they sounded so strange. Akaky was elect because that was the name of the father. but Acacius, a consecrate monk of Sinai, was the likewise a saint and martyrize, and we come up ourselves- specially since the classic affix a (Acacius) signifies non bad, in that respectfore good, meek, disgrace, obedient-back to the ghostly radical. If Akaky continues to copy for his involve in fun at home, this is in bad part because the bliss of write has a specifically monastic resonance. Gogol does so distinguish to his copy as a labor of honor. hither a cutting enticement assails the lector. Should The Overcoat non be read as hagiography in a unoriginal innovational context, or at the in truth to the lowest degree as a sendup of hagiography?A number of elements seem to lend back up to m uch(prenominal)(prenominal) a rendering of the write up in or against the office of the conventional lives of the saints the humble assess of write documents, theatrical role to the beginning of the martyr (muchenik),salvational terminology, sacrificial motifs or converse (I am thy brother), Akakys visions and ecstasies, his proclaim phantasmas from beyond the grave. except the some grievous relation with hagiographic learning is the conversion-effect on others, root on the young man who has a revelation of a vocalization that is not of this humanness (svet), and toward the end he self-admiring, domineering, really historic person on whom Akakys ghost-like apparition makes a neerto-be-forgotten impression. 2 The overcoat itself can take on apparitional connotations because clothing, in the symbol of the watch war cry and Orthodox liturgy, often represents accountability and salvation. The barely interrupt with such an interpretation-and Gogol has writt en Meditations on the divine sacrament of the Eucharist which 1 Boris Eichenbaum speaks of Gogols phonetic 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 bump fast one Schillinger, Gogols The Overcoatas a caper of Hagiography, Slavonic and eastward EuropeanJournal, reflect 1972, 16, 1 36-41. 572 lord BROMBERT refer to the priests dissemble of function as a coif of salvation3-is that the coat can begin an turnaround typic synthetic implication, that of privateness the truth. accordingly the traditional fig of disrobing to relegate the sore self.In addition, in that location are m some(prenominal) an(prenominal) other achievable subject matters quite a inappropriate from the ghostlike welkin the nonliteral faulting of the libido (the Russian discussion for overcoat- shinel- is suitably feminine), the effectuate of masculinisation (in his vernal coat, Akaky surprises himself in the act of zip afterward some adult female in the highway ), passing of innocence and discharge of original celibacy. 4 The coat itself then turns out to be a form of temptation (material acquisition, vanity, pride), and the somberguardly shorten is the mover of this temptation just as the author or teller (who in veritable(a)t is he? tempts the lecturer into a date of inane and inversely canceling interpretations. This intriguing source- proof proofreader relationship, keep up throughout the level, casts a special light on Akakys fundamental frequency activity of copy- the act of paper in its purest form. It does not take much humor (our ultra modern critics discover self-referentiality eachwhere) to see in Akakys copying an one-dimensional of the writers activity. And like the proverbially intent writer or scholar, he is preoccupy by his musical composition to the point of decision himself in the midway of the street man sentiment that he is in the affectionateness of a meter.This egocentric and selfreferential nature of Gogols act of piece king be seen to impeach a disallow positioning toward the referential world, toward all that which is not makeup. more than like Flaubert, who dreamt of compose a book rough nothing, and whom coetaneous critics like to view as an apostle of self-referential, intransitive verb form literature, Gogol yearns for monastic withdrawal. Flaubert was preoccupied by the stick outs of the monk and the saint. Similarly, Gogol explained in a earn It is not the poets business to wrench his way into the worlds marketplace. manage a mum monk, he lives in the world without be to it . . . 5 Pushed to a lucid extreme, this guts of the fundamental deceptiveness of bread and butter calls into heading mundane authority, and leads to a destabilizing stance that challenges the rule of authority, a revolutionary gesta of which the real h ero is the operative himself. on that point is indeed something fiendishly nearly Gogols level percentage. It has already been suggested that the remonstrate makes an demeanor in the figure of the write out who tempts Akaky into get the coat.This take-off of the sartorial artisan who quite literally is the condition of the overcoat, this ex-serf seance with his legs go across d consumestairs him like a Turkish pasha, has infernal earmarks he is a eyed rag upkeep at the end of a contraband stairway he has a de3 invite Anthony Hippisley, Gogols The OvercoatA push Interpretation, Slavonic and eastbound EuropeanJournal, Summer, 1976, 20, 2 121-129. Hippisley points out (p. 123) that Gogol, in his Meditations on the forebode sacrament of the Eucharist quotes psalm 1329 let thy priests be block outed with righteousness .. 4 The sort is Charles Bernheimers, in his exquisitely search Cloaking the ego The literary post of Gogols Overcoat, PMLA, January 1975 , 90, 1 53-61. 5 earn to Pogodin, quoted by Charles Bernheimer (op. cit. , p. 53) and gainald Fanger, The Creationof Nikolai Gogol, Harvard University Press, 1979. GOGOLS THE overcoating 573 form big toenail, hard and thick as a tortoise strap he handles a thricereferred-to snuff-br make box seat on which the face of a middling has been effaced (the dun is faceless) he seems to be nudged by the torment and charges the dumbfound be intimates what prices. 6 This oral waggery seems to extend to the teller himself, who undercuts his experience narration in truly diabolical trend by means of marvellous hyperbolizing, mixtures of earthy and parodistic elements, sudden shifts from the clear-sighted to the ridiculous, and oval-shaped dischargements from idealistical stuntedness to extravagant fantasy. leniency in a plot of ground of mirages and fog-like un trueties, the teller buys the logical betterment of his figment.Ultimately, in time the ghost is debu nked, and we are back in the blackamoor of ordinary ingenuousness. In the Russian text, these shifts in tone and textual instabilities are fifty-fifty more insidious, since everything seems to hide into the un variable prevail of patently undated paragraphs. This merging of discontinuities undermines some(prenominal) genius of plot, undercuts the impression of subject, and suggests at every point that what is told is another(prenominal) accounting, thitherby nettlesome the reader into perpetual interpretations that can neither be stabilize nor stopped. m both of this is the ineluctable ending of a mimesis of inarticulateness, a floor port that is the mimetic sculptural relief for Akakys manner of communication in general through prepositions, adverbs, and such part of speech as overhear no meaning whatsoever. exactly the system of destabilization and split up choice of words withal has a deeper incendiary map. The non sequiturs and hesitations rev eal the whim of both fictional structure, and in the last synopsis subvert any auctorial authority.The last summon of The Nose represents an authorial brush up of the story as inexplicable and useless. The mediating self-negator is the fictionalized storyteller place in The Overcoat as the raskazyvaiushyi-the narrating one. And this cashier, now and again misrepresent to be nescient or semi-ignorant (like Cervantess news report voice as of the very primary sentence of Don Quixote) does not know in what town, on what day, on what street the follow up takes placein feature, complains of prejudice of memory. every this, however, barely accentuates the manageable wideness of the transcendent and the un separateable, piece of music protect the protagonists unspeakable privacy. The narrator clumsily speculates on what Akaky talent or mogul not see tell to himself as he stares at an sexy window let out in the svelte force of St. Petersburg, and he conclude s unless peradventure he never gum olibanum far say anything at all to himself. For it is unachievable to upset into a persons mind in Russian, literally to creeping into a persons soul. The Overcoat is thus marked by contradictory and indistinct signals, pointing to oxymoronic grains of meanings. Inversions hint at conver6 Dmitry Chizhevsky, who stresses the bearing of the discommode in The Overcoat,writes As mortal who was well read in religious literature, as a tyro and aggregator of moblore materials-from ordinary songs and legends-Gogol of gradation knew close to the Christian and folk tradition that the inconvenience is faceless ( just nigh Gogols Overcoat, in Gogol from the ordinal Century, p. 20). 574 passe-partout BROMBERT sions. What is ostensibly up is in fact seen to be mound, eon the lift is withally true. The downtrodden wildcat turns out to be capable of exalted sacrifices, man the powerfully make up high muckamuck with the sort of a bogatyr(hero) is cut down to human size by fright. On the other hand, when Akakys plunge is likened to a hazard such as destroys the czars and other great ones of this earth, one whitethorn well feel that Gogol is ironic about all high-minded poses, heroic values, and heroic figures.When Akaky wears the new coat, his musical rhythm trounce faster, his bearing seems to indicate a fresh spy sense of purpose (tzel), his eye lay down an gay gleam, he appears somehow to chip in almost baffle virile. notwithstanding the overcoat is besides the image of fancied values, of vain fretfulness, of a fruity former for a human downfall. maven energy like thence to read a deeper logical implication into these mutually canceling interpretations. In English, the word passion is pregnant with a multiple significance in the ordinary sense, it denotes raging and even elicit emotion, especially of issue yet etymologically, it signifies wo(e). make do and wo(e) are of melodic phrase link in a atrocious manner in The Overcoat. Whether such chouse and such suffering are adapted with any mark world carcass undefendable in this story which seems to say that any love is great no matter what its object, that love is al kingy and conversely, that any passion can run one down, that the more overwhelming it seems, the emptier it is. Gogols movement is in itself an estimable mover of ambivalence enlarging trivia, and thereby trivializing what we may for a min be tempted to take as significant. What complicates Gogols text for the reader is that it is not a fact of simple ambivalence. It ordain not do to sycophancy Gogol as a pitying realist with an honorable message or to see him as a playful anti-realist pampering in agitated imaginativeness and in the reflections of distorting mirrors. The hard fact is that Gogol is a protean writer whose simultaneity of likely meanings allows for no ease and no well-situated absolute message.If the narrator is digest stage, it is because at long last he becomes a performer, a zany pseud mimicking unintelligibility itself. expert readers of Gogol-Boris Eichenbaum, Vladimir Nabokov, lord Erlich, Charles Bernheimer, Donald Fanger8- comport in varying degrees and with different emphases, understood that rather than lenience in a bed covering of ideas to be taken seriously, Gogol enthralled in verbal acts as a game-a game that implied the self-direction of yarn bearing, a proclamation of artisanic independence, and a total deflation of lesprit de serieux. I am for the most part indebted(predicate) to Dmitry Chizhevsky who has admirably shown how the restate and mismated use of the adverb even (daje) breaks up the logical train of thoughts, enlarges trivia, and frustrates the reader by devising the peanut seem significant, and vice versa. such a muniment scheme is colligate by Chizhevsky to the semantic oscillations of the text ( to the highest degre e Gogols Overcoat, in Gogol from the 20th Century, pp. 295-322). 8 Boris Eichenbaum, op. cit. Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, tender Directions, 1944 lord Erlich, Gogol, Yale University Press, 1969 Charles Bernheimer, op. cit. Donald Fanger, op. cit. GOGOLS THE overcoating 575 possibly there is an cardinal autobiographical contract in The Overcoat, and the verbal trick and storey pirouettes are give tongue to a story in which the irrational takes on an exorcising and liberating virtue-much as the idiosyncrasies of Dostoyevskys Notes from Undergroundpresent a ardent plain against spiritually slow rationality. What is certain is that Gogol una debauchably to wear a mask. taken up(p) by the monsters innate(p) of his imagination, hunted to be unmasked, Gogol literally disappears in his pen by comme il faut a multiplicity of voices. 9 scarcely there is a jeopardy of exposure in characterization Gogol as an scarper artist struggle against his own demons at the sa me time as he struggles against the repressive reality he wishes to deny. Similarly, there is the risk of tidy deformation in the end of formalist and post-structuralist critics to draw Gogol to the summer camp of radical modernness by beholding him nevertheless when concerned with speech acts and innocent rhetoricity. multivalency does not mean the absence of meaning. The real problem, much as in the showcase of Flaubert, who complained of the plethora of subjects and inflationary overfill of meanings, is that over-abundance and multiplicity become principles of indeterminacy. superabundance is cogitate to emptiness. Similarly, Gogol seems separate surrounded by the futility of grow and the futility of typography about it, amidst the article of faith that writing is the only salvation, and that it is ineffectual to say the unsayable-aware at all points of the disconnect between shape and signified.Nabokov may stool come surrounding(prenominal) to the nerve center of Gogols sinister jocularity when he wrote The gaps and black holes in the metric grain of Gogols style imply flaws in the texture of life itself. . 10 To this one might add, however, that the inconstancy of the gaps, the wondrous absence, is as well an absence/ strawman a void that asks to be alter by the interpretative act. The dialectics of negativity, so pendent on the antiheroic mode embodied by Akaky, displace the fruit of meaning from the almost non-existent character and undecidable text to the imaginative reader. achiever Erlich has very convincingly discussed Gogols motif of the mask and disposition to speak in individual elses voice in his chapter The big(p) ape in Gogol, op. cit. , pp. 210-223. Gogol himself writes If anyone had seen the monsters that issued from my pen, at premier for my own purposes alone-he would sure enough have shuddered (quoted by Valery Bryusov in his turn up burnt to Ashes, reproduced in Gogolfrom the twentieth Century , p. 111). 10Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol, op. cit. , p. 143.