Musings on Mortality: From Tolstoy to Primo Levi

By Victor Brombert

“Elegant, beautifully written literary criticism, examining how eight major writers—‘From Tolstoy to Primo Levi’—dealt with death in their fiction.” —The Wall Street Journal

“All art and the love of art,” Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal Musings on Mortality, “allow us to negate our nothingness.” As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed himself in literature. Death can be found everywhere in literature, he saw, but literature itself is on the side of life. With delicacy and penetrating insight, Brombert traces the theme of mortality in the work of a group of modern writers: Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Albert Camus, Giorgio Bassani, J. M. Coetzee, and Primo Levi. Illuminating their views on the meaning of life and the human condition, Brombert ultimately, reveals that by understanding how these authors wrote about mortality, we can grasp the full scope of their literary achievement and vision.

Winner of the Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks award for outstanding literary criticism.

“Suffused with wisdom and argued with the strong hand of a weathered and feeling literary scholar. . . . It is hard to imagine such thematic criticism being done better than here. What a beautiful book.” —Thomas Harrison, author of 1910: The Emancipation of Dissonance

“A brave and eloquent book.” — Peter Brooks, author of Henry James Goes to Paris

“The simplicity and directness of Brombert’s style gives his discussion of the philosophical and aesthetic underpinnings of the works under scrutiny great clarity.” —Publishers Weekly

“Brombert’s eloquently written book is for serious lovers of literature.” —Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226070933

Book preview

PROLOGUE

To Negate Our Nothingness

. . . that death assigned from the day that I was born.

The Iliad

. . . unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress.

W. B. YEATS

In one’s eighties it is perhaps normal to scan the daily obituaries, take note of the average age of the departed, and dream of delaying tactics. The preoccupation may not be new. Ever since the little boy one morning found the lifeless body of his pet canary that only the day before had pecked at his finger through the bars of its cage, he knew that he too was fragile.

A book about mortality is likely to be personal—a truth the author owes his readers. No subject is chosen innocently, least of all one dealing with our mortal condition. The little boy who discovered the dead canary was Vitia, as my Russian-speaking parents affectionately called me. I opened the door of the cage resting on the kitchen table and took the bird in my hand, surprised by its very light weight. Then I shivered and began to sob. Martha, the cook, did her best to console me—the same Martha who had so often told me how during the Great War her soldier husband was killed by shrapnel when he stepped out during a halt on a night march.

The feel of the canary’s stiff, almost weightless body may well be behind my old revulsion at the sight of animal carcasses, my cowardly crossing to the other side of the road when I come across what I suspect to be a decomposing corpse. This revulsion accompanied me throughout World War II. I averted my eyes even when the dead soldier was a member of an SS unit.

The death of the canary was perhaps soon forgotten. Not so the calamity of my sister Nora’s death from a brain tumor at the age of five. I was all of seven. I sobbed, together with my mother, in her bed when she told me. But I began to resent my parents’ grief, torn between self-pity and guilt. Nora’s malady had found me partly indifferent. I had once even given her bouts of nausea as an excuse for coming late to school. With time I understood that my parents would never really recover.

Years later, when they too died—first my mother, then my father after a long and lonely widowhood—I timidly approached their caskets. The marble-like immobility of Mama’s exposed face in the funeral parlor made me think of the tombs and sarcophagi in the Egyptian rooms at the Louvre that so intrigued her and to which she insisted on taking me on many a Sunday. Of my father’s exposed face, I still clearly see the one enlarged pore. And of his burial on a snowy day, with only a few family members in attendance, I periodically relive the sense of desolation and remorse.

The trains I so loved in my childhood, and continue to love in their remembered glory, entered into sinister associations in wartime Europe. Someone very dear to me was deported with her infant child, as was my Aunt Anya, similarly conveyed in a boxcar to the death camp in Auschwitz. They were merely two among anonymous millions. Later I found out about others, former school friends and playmates. Even trains in literature, once I began to be a reader of novels, often revealed a grim reality. In Émile Zola’s The Human Beast the train compartment is the scene of murder and the locomotive a personalized monster, symbol of deadly human passions. In Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, ominous railway images foreshadow the gruesome death of the heroine under the wheels of a train.

So much since childhood prevented me from thinking that I was invulnerable or that I could be reckless with impunity. The overprotected boy learned after each minor illness to value convalescence as a sensuous return to life, when the simplest sensations—the taste of water, scents in the air—revealed themselves as rediscovered pleasures. When our teachers at the lycée asked us to compose various dialogues of the dead—such as imaginary conversations between Pascal and Montaigne or Racine and Voltaire—these remained tedious and abstract school exercises, leaving me unconcerned. Far more troubling was the occasional dialogue I carried on with myself during my adolescent years. Why me? My unreality was early impressed on me when I discovered that I had come very close to nonbeing, had my mother not decided to undergo a delicate operation enabling her to conceive. That too worked both ways, intensifying my delight in being alive. Why me? was turned into, Why not me? And that reminded me once again of my vulnerability. Every wound could be mortal.

The reality of war. On the landing craft, I experienced visceral fear. After Omaha Beach, where I discovered that I decidedly did not have a heroic vocation, I also discovered between the hedgerows of Normandy how repellent the smell of dead cows and dead men can be, how repulsive the sight of half-burned tank drivers finished off by machine-gun bullets, their bodies folded over the turret, or that of gunmen and mechanics who had tried in vain to crawl out of escape hatches—many of them disfigured beyond recognition by fire. There, too, literature had warned me of war’s savagery. In his essay Of Cannibals, which a friend one class ahead of me in school had urged me to read, Montaigne denounces war as a malignant human disease, pointing out that civilized savagery was more barbarous than the barbarity of primitive savages. As for war’s raw ferocity, nothing in fact could outdo Homer’s Iliad, which endlessly describes the butchery of men, how they are hacked to pieces, their bones cracked, their eye sockets cut clear through by spears, how the killer gloats over the felled body of the enemy. And yet how unabated the lust for battle remains despite the yawning gates of Hades.

Back from the war, settled as a student in a rented room next to a funeral parlor, I could hear during the difficult early morning hours the limousines depart, conveying their coffined loads to the town’s periphery. My own thoughts were often even darker than these ceremonial vehicles. But the books I studied rescued me from the grim scenarios I invented, even when their authors spoke of the vanity of existence, of all strivings, of all careers. I was elated by my readings. Much in the same spirit, I later came to appreciate the uplifting nature of certain still lifes, despite the grim symbolic accessories—the hourglass, the skull, the extinguished candle—that characterize these natures mortes. For I began to understand that all art and the love of art allow us, according to André Malraux’s famous pronouncement, to negate our nothingness.

.   .   .

The theme of death stood for me in a special relation to literature. When I was still a boy, my pacifist parents insisted that I read antiwar novels about the world war, urging on me Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (Le feu), and Roland Dorgelès’s Wooden Crosses (Les croix de bois). Not always with the expected results, for in my daydreams I began to envy the frontline experiences of comradeship and acts of courage. But I was deeply disturbed by the accounts of assault waves going over the top to reach the enemy trenches, the horror of artillery barrages, the slow agony of the wounded entangled in the barbed wire of the no-man’s-land.

More poetic exposures to literary representations of death took place in school. One of our provocative young teachers advised us to read Baudelaire, who was at the time still considered an immoral poet and therefore excluded from the school curriculum. We were tipped off to read Une charogne, describing an animal carcass lying in the sun-drenched countryside teeming with worms, as well as the cycle of poems La mort. As for our English teachers, they seemed to have a predilection for Keats’s sonnet When I have thoughts that I may cease to be, in which the poet ultimately stares into nothingness, and for Tennyson’s Tithonus, about a mortal who as the lover of a goddess was granted immortality, though not eternal youth, and in the poem yearns for the mortal condition. It would seem there was no escape. Even later university readings of philosophers led again and again to the daily dying, the cotidie morimur of the Roman Stoic Seneca.

Plato set the tone in the Phaedo when he had Socrates tell his disciples, before drinking the poison hemlock, that true philosophers concern themselves with nothing but dying and death, that philosophy is in fact the study of death. This seemed to me rather excessive. I was more taken with Montaigne, in whose flexible and meandering Essays thoughts of death seemed omnipresent but subject to laws of transition, passage, natural progression, or process. During his early Stoic phase, Montaigne appeared to echo Plato when he entitled one of his essays That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die. But soon he began to prize a seasoned cohabitation with what the flesh is heir to and implicitly affirmed his attachment to life while watching with bemusement his own decline. Pascal, who across a century took up a quarrel with Montaigne, struck a more properly tragic note as in his Pensées he crisply denounced the state of denial in which human beings choose to live, distracted by worldly divertissements so as not to face their mortal condition.

Plato, Montaigne, Pascal—those were the major figures in the philosophical pantheon of my student days. But concurrently, in my literature classes, I came to be moved by poems such as John Donne’s defiant sonnet Death Be Not Proud, which concludes on the paradoxically triumphant note that, for the dead, death shall be no more, that death shall die. I was later even more moved—no doubt because of the association with the horrors of Stalin’s regime—by Anna Akhmatova’s lyric utterances about the regenerative virtues of the poetic logos, the Word that causes death’s defeat. These sounded to me like true declarations of freedom.

Literary musings on mortality had of course their romantic side: the dreamy evocation of cemeteries and ruins, the yearning for a return, the nostalgia or Sehnsucht for eternal rest so eloquently expressed in Hymns to the Night by the German poet Novalis. Such notions of death as a poetic principle of life did not altogether appeal to me. But, as I prepared for teaching a literature belonging largely to the past, I came increasingly to view my teachers and myself as engaged in giving a voice to the dead. And writing itself was implicitly suffused with the theme of mortality, especially narratives and storytelling in general (the example of Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights came to mind) as ways of eluding or delaying the inevitable.

.   .   .

The eight authors discussed here belong to five different linguistic and cultural traditions. One is Russian, another is French (with a partly Algerian background), two are Italian (and also Jewish), two write in English (though one is South African), and two are German writers, one of whom belongs to a Czech-speaking world.

I chose these eight authors keeping in mind the comparative nature of the subject and the variety of perspectives their writings might yield. Some dealt in spiritual or physical terms with the death of an individual (Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych, Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach—though the latter case also involves the symbolic terminal disease of an entire city); others meditated on the death of a collectivity (Giorgio Bassani’s Ferrara Jews), the demise of a whole culture or even civilization (Primo Levi’s depiction of Auschwitz, Albert Camus’s allegorical plague that threatens, in a spiritually suicidal manner, the survival of humane and humanistic values). And there are those—Kafka, Virginia Woolf, J. M. Coetzee—who in addition to some of these topics mused on the darker zones of connivance between literature and death.

From Tolstoy to Primo Levi—the concerns are not the same, and the distance is great. Almost a century separates their writings. The order in which the different authors are here discussed generally respects chronology. In some cases, however, I let myself be guided by underlying themes or thematic developments that stress an increasing preoccupation with sociocultural contexts and a collective drama. It thus seemed appropriate to conclude with the issues raised by the writings—including the science fiction—of Primo Levi.

Tolstoy’s exemplary novella The Death of Ivan Ilych exposes the emptiness and moral death in an ordinary existence, the blindness and selfishness involved in worldly pursuits, until illness and the fear of imminent death reveal to the dying person the vanitas of his life, and death itself is ultimately lived as an illuminating epiphany. Ivan’s joyful last words to himself—Death is finished. It is no more¹—seem to echo with redemptive simplicity the famous line of Donne’s sonnet.

Unlike Tolstoy, who presents the individual fate of his everyman, Ivan, in a generalized spiritual perspective, Thomas Mann from the very beginning sets the undoing of his writer-protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, in the context of a collective European disaster. Aschenbach’s Dionysian transgressive longings lead to his death, but the self-destructive impulses of the aesthete hint at the underlying collective appeal of evil that culminates, in Mann’s late novel Doctor Faustus, in the composer-genius Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with demonic forces emblematizing the orgies of destruction of the German nation (and much of Europe), fatally ill with apocalyptic ideologies.

The writings of Franz Kafka, puzzling because of his radical irony, love of paradox, and simultaneously contradictory meanings, endlessly reenact the inadequacy of existence and a self-willed death-in-life. They establish moreover a necessary link between death and the act of writing, as illustrated to the point of gruesome caricature by the death-inflicting torture apparatus in The Penal Colony—a monstrous printing machine that literally inscribes the death sentence onto the flesh of the victim, foreshadowing in a number of ways the era of extermination camps. Archaic laws and archetypal punitive situations inform Kafka’s most famous stories—The Judgment, The Metamorphosis—as well as his novels The Trial and The Castle. These oneiric fantasies insist on the plague of living, the endless rehearsal of guilt, the sense of failure, the lure of the suicidal impulse. Death is a hoped-for liberation, while reality inflicts on Kafka’s protagonists a death journey in the everlasting present.

With Virginia Woolf, we enter into a deceptively delicate fictional world. For, beneath the exquisite poetic prose revealing a sensibility attuned to the slightest vibrations and fluctuations of emotional states, Woolf’s writings betray turbulent undercurrents of feared violence. Recurrent images of weapons, ferocity, and destruction are no doubt traceable, as in Mrs. Dalloway, to the collective memory of the recent Great War as well as to the author’s growing awareness of a new conflagration that may lead to the collapse of civilization. The elegiac tones that distinguish To the Lighthouse link motifs of insularity and passing time to the sense of the finite nature of all things. Writing itself, a willed defiance of death, is ultimately suspected by Woolf as catastrophe threatens to engulf the world. For even supposedly salvational art, in her worst fears, can be subject as she herself to breakdowns, to the betrayal of all hope, and become the treacherous accomplice of death.

Cemeteries and the nonexistent tombs of Holocaust victims are dominant metaphors in Giorgio Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. His entire work, centered on the fate of Ferrara Jews, a doomed community, can be read as a memorial as well as a poetic resurrection. Bassani stresses the pious operations of memory capable of bringing back to life a posthumously recorded world already filled with a sense of loss. The death of a love, the death of a group, the death of a social class and of a way of life (as in The Heron)—these are the themes of his writings that assign to the poet the task of returning with a message from the world of the dead. But in this futureless context the poet, in his nostalgic allegiance to a life that is no more and to the monuments of the past, also risks allying himself with the world of the defunct, the world of cemeteries.

By contrast, J. M. Coetzee is from the beginning—in Dusklands, in Waiting for the Barbarians—openly concerned with violence, torture, physical humiliation, and the disgrace of dying. His dark imagination, as he himself qualifies it, conjures up scenes that are brutal but that vividly bring home ethical and political issues. Fear and the smell of fear are offered as metaphors for apartheid South Africa viewed as a country of massacres, notably in Age of Iron. But, beyond these historically rooted ethical preoccupations (including the fascist ideology of death), Coetzee’s writings express dismay at any exercise of power, at any assault on the integrity of the flesh and the spirit. The fragility of the human body and the obscenity of death are posited as fundamental truths. But, in his indictment—self-directed by indirection—of literature’s fascination with the violation of the human body, Coetzee ends up conceiving of writing itself as a lethal poison.

In Albert Camus’s world death cannot be defeated, though the struggle against death must go on. The narrator-protagonist of The Plague, a physician, is entirely committed to that struggle while fully aware that the deadly microbe will never disappear. The fatal disease—it is also a moral and political disease—periodically takes on epidemic proportions. All Camus’s work stands in the shadow of death: his father’s death from shrapnel wounds in World War I when he was still an infant, his own tuberculosis, his horror of capital punishment and lifelong fight against the guillotine. All his writings, animated by an essentially lyrical impulse, explicitly or by implication project a hymn to life. Rebelling against all lies (including those of denials), protesting against all forms of

Reviews for Musings on Mortality

[jwhenderson_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Enlightening essays on the theme and nature of death in literature. Spanning some of my favorite authors from Tolstoy to Primo Levi, this collection of essays is engaging and often helpful in considering the enigma of death as depicted in great literature.