Anna Karenina

I caught a rebroadcast of Bill Moyer's discussions with Joseph Campbell the other night on a channel 6 fundraiser, and Campbell said something that seemed to cut straight to the heart of Anna Karenina. "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think what we're seeking is an experience of being alive…so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive." A light bulb went on above my head and Campbell's discussion seemed to provide a skeleton key for the whole novel. Not only did it explain much of Levin's thinking at the end of the book, but I think the pursuit of "an experience of being alive" explains a lot of what happens to Anna, Karenin, and even Vronsky as well.

I might as well admit that I didn't care for Anna, Vronsky or Karenin much at all. I started with a vague notion of Anna and Vronsky having an affair, and that she was eventually driven to suicide under pressure from the drawing room society of 19th century Russian aristocracy. I half way expected to become infatuated with Anna. At the very least I expected to sympathize with her. It didn't happen.

She reminded me of Glen Close in Fatal Attraction. Especially when Anna and Vronsky come back to Russia from Italy, I began to see that she had other issues besides rejection by society. Looking back, it's easy to see the foreshadowing of her breakdown and demise with the hallucinations on the train ride from Moscow where she was being stalked by Vronsky. And hadn't she really stalked Karenin seven years earlier--or was she just being palmed off by her aunt who had taken responsibility for her when Anna was orphaned? (OK, Anna and Stiva are orphans, Karenin is an orphan, Levin and his brothers are orphans, and Vronsky's mother essentially orphaned him when she left his father. Outside of Levin and his older half brother Koznyshev, they are all pretty clueless. What would Herr Freud make of this?) Anna was seeking the "rapture of being alive" first with her coquettish behavior at the Moscow ball and then in being pursued by Vronsky. I guess you could say that she was "following her bliss," but she didn't have the pluck, the integrity, the character to walk that road. She couldn't even make up her mind to keep Serezha, despite her assertions that she must never abandon him. She just fucking fell apart pretty quickly, even becoming a junkie in the end. Is it what happens when the Hero's Journey goes bad?

Karenin, too, had a chance to opt for a more direct experience of authentic life. Tolstoy makes this clear when Karenin first suspects that Anna does not love him: "He now experienced a sensations such as a man might feel, who, while quietly crossing a bridge over an abyss, suddenly sees that bridge is being taken to pieces and that he is facing the abyss. The abyss was real life; the bridge was the artificial life that Karenin had been living." But Karenin, too, draws back from facing life square on. He gives up his autonomy first to Princess Lidia and her spiritualist circle and then to Bezzubov (Beelzebub, you think?). But Tolstoy sets Karenin up as a straw man from the very beginning, and he never becomes much more than a cartoon.

That leaves Vronsky, frat boy fool. I loathed him from the moment that he walked away from Frou-Frou, not fully accepting responsibility for her destruction. Any man that mistreats dogs or horses deserves the lowest rungs of hell. The beginning of his end comes when he gets what he wants and he shags Anna. He never had the imagination to concern himself about what comes next, and was shallow enough to become ensnared by her charms in a two second encounter on the train and then especially at the Moscow ball. He was sure that she was coming on to him, and she was, and he couldn't see past his own dick. But really, it's not his dick so much as the image that he has of himself. He's a role player, very aware of his audience, but he's not good at improv and doesn't have much depth. He plays at the experiences of life, but his lack of authenticity leaves him destroyed in the end.

Coming through the middle of all this, seemingly untouched, is Stiva, Anna's brother, Dolly's husband. He ruins Dolly financially, of course, and he really is a cad: "Oblonsky could never remember that he had a wife and children. He had the tastes of a bachelor and understood no other." Yet, somehow, he turns out to be one of the most likable characters in the book. He is the social glue that holds any group of people together, and he really doesn't take himself all that seriously. If anyone has an experience of being alive, it's Stiva. He just doesn't know how to pay for it.

But it is Levin, of course, whose life provides the most perfect illustration of Campbell's pronouncement. He is constantly searching for the meaning of life: "'Without knowing what I am, and why I am here, it is impossible to live. Yet I cannot know that and therefore I can't live,' he said to himself. 'In an infinity of time and in an infinity of matter, in infinite space, a bubble, a bubble organism, separates itself, and that bubble maintains itself a while and then bursts, and that bubble is--I.'" That could almost be a paraphrase of Spinoza, or Lucretius, or Epicurus. But Levin/Tolstoy cannot stare into that abyss in the face of life's suffering or life's joys. Levin had glimpsed it through his brother's death: "Death would come and end everything, so that it was useless to begin anything and that there was no help for it."

Levin has his nose rubbed in more suffering when Kitty gives birth to their son. Fearful that she is suffering too much and will die, Levin grasps instinctly for God. "'Lore have mercy! Pardon and help us!' He repeated the words that suddenly and unexpectedly sprang to his lips. And he, an unbeliever, repeated those words not with his lips only. At that instant he knew that neither his doubts nor the impossibility of believing with his reason--of which he was conscious--at all prevented his appealing to God. It all flew off like dust. To whom should he appeal, if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love to be?"

While I cannot agree where Tolstoy takes Levin, I can admire how he gets there. Levin is facing depths of experience that eventually strip his reasoning about the meaning of life away from him. Life is too deep and complex to understand--with far too much suffering--and intense joy--so that we must hope for something larger than ourselves to be able to withstand it. "That sorrow and this joy were equally beyond the usual conditions of life. They were like openings in that usual life through which something higher became visible." Tolstoy being Tolstoy, however, he takes his message too far. "But now I say that I know the meaning of my life. It is to live for God, for the soul. And that meaning, in spite of its clearness, is mystic and wonderful. And such is the meaning of all existence." We cannot know the meaning of life except that we give up and have an unquestioning faith in God? I think that Mr. Tolstoy takes himself far too seriously.

Author: Tolstoy, Leo

Date Published: 1877

Length: 872 pp & 33hr 37min

electronic print and May, Nadia

Buffalo Girls

This was another interesting listen to a book that I first read years ago. It was probably among the first four or five McMurtry books that I did read, and I recall not liking it very much. Yet this time the book turned out quite differently from what I remembered and it had some interesting moments and turns that made it quite a bit more enjoyable.

The narrative structure of the book alternates between Calamity Jane's letters to her daughter and various episodes told from different characters' points of view. McMurtry brings in a host of historical figures that lend creedence to the events: Calamity, of course, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickock, Sitting Bull, and Teddy Blue. Other characters may be drawn from real life, but if so, they are not as well known: Dora, Bartles, Jim Ragg, No Ears, Potato Creek Johnny, Doosie. All of them were characters who had escaped out west, but their time had come and gone while they were still alive, so a kind of wistfulness pervades the book as the way of the beaver trapper, the gold prospector, the indian fighter, the indian warriors, the cowboys, and the madame lose meaning. They must adapt to the new west, and most are not very successful. Calamity becomes a drunk, Jim Ragg becomes enamored of the only beaver he can find--at the London zoo, No Ears finds that his knowledge is no longer wanted by the younger members of his tribe, Teddy Blue gives up driving cattle and takes up running a ranch. Only Buffalo Bill seems to thrive as he takes the Wild West Show on the road, parading as entertainment what had been the substance of their lives.

In the end, the book belongs to Calamity, and the final letters to her daughter provide a surprise ending and a final poignancy to the story, underlying much of the bleakness and hopelessness running through the book.

Author: McMurtry, Larry

Date Published: 1990

Length: 9hr 53min

Buckley, Betty