Month #3 of 'War and Peace'
On the relationship between the Tolstoyan character and the Tolstoyan chapter
Simon Haisell at
is hosting two readalongs for 2024: one for Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace and the other for Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. I’m participating in both. This post is a stringing together of my notes, observations, and fancies as I read Tolstoy’s bulky novel. It is the third of twelve such planned monthly instalments. Reading these posts doesn’t require you to have any familiarity with War and Peace.The first post can be read here
The second post can be read here
The Tolstoyan Chapter and the Tolstoyan Character
On Feb 29, in my second monthly post about War and Peace, I expressed my admiration of Tolstoy’s decision-making around facets of scene-building—what constitutes a scene or an episode, whose perspective is to be approached when (and when abandoned), and what amount of ‘shared objective time’ must the scene get. I added that no other writer in my reading experience had come remotely close to the Russian master at assorting episodes and doing justice to them at the scale of War and Peace.
Owing to the superlatives implicit in these statements and my general suspicion of such superlatives, I have spent a good amount of March re-evaluating them. I have, I believe, a host of complications—and perhaps rank reversal—to add.
In February I had used the words ‘scene’ and ‘episode’ casually and interchangeably, in the confidence that they would be understood in their most common meanings, and even today, I wish to avoid presenting outright definitions of, or a hierarchy between, these two kinds of unities (created by division, mind)1. I wish to move, for the time being, to a cleaner entity, one provided by the writer himself, and see where that leads us. This clean entity is that of the chapter. To invoke the chapter as a substitute for the scene or the episode has obvious merit, for if the substitution were to hold in the context of War and Peace, it would improve my formulation to: ‘Tolstoy is the best at-scale chapter-builder I have read.’
But this new formulation is prima facie untrue. It doesn’t take an extraordinary reader to note that Tolstoy’s chapter breaks are occasionally close to ad hoc, with chapter length as frequently an operative criterion as any qualitative one. In the readalong, where all of us are asked to read one chapter a day, reports of being ‘unable to stop’ at a chapter break or ‘reading on without realising’ are not uncommon. While this may simply be because of readers’ immersion in the story, there remains the suggestion that the chapters in question are either not satisfying enough in themselves or feel abruptly curtailed, ending—if one were to allow a bit of sentimentality—at points where the heart doesn’t find it proper to sigh.
Thing is: the Tolstoyan chapter cut is not uniformly a temporal forwarding or a temporal forwarding married with a spatial change. Two Tolstoyan operations stand out as exceptions
Rewind and zoom out: There are occasions when after a chapter break the narrative in War and Peace moves slightly backwards in time. This is done as a kind of readjustment in which the larger event is grasped from a different vantage, with a summarising and/or expository attitude that lays out a wider vista, be it of a battleground or a high society party. While said readjustment is clearly in the service of keeping the story tractor chugging or slowly moving focus to another character, there are instances when the cut seems to have been administered only to reduce narrative intensity—to move away from the character whose joy or misery or revelation risks pushing readerly feelings too much.
Splitscreen (or the next best thing in text): There are other times when the ‘meanwhile’ function operates between chapter breaks, ie., Chapter X begins with what was happening simultaneously with the events just narrated in Chapter X-1, just in a different space2. Here it may be appropriate to emphasise the difference between a scene and an episode. The scene indubitably changes in a ‘meanwhile’ operation. But because of its definitive concurrence, it is difficult to see this break as marking a boundary between distinct episodes. We might still be in the same episode.
Note that we have skirted around value, percussion, drama, affect, or any other qualitative aspect that must accompany schematic narrative discontinuations to lace the resulting ‘cut’ with the qualities of a scene or an episode. This is because there is a simpler way to add the complication I seek (I hope that made sense): insofar as the beginnings and ends of a scene or an episode are marked by schematic narrative discontinuations, and insofar as these discontinuations must produce between them a unity, one that is defined both in its arguable extractability from the main and its affective relation to it, it follows that Tolstoyan chapters are not (at least not always) complete scenes or episodes. And if Tolstoyan chapters are not complete scenes or episodes, to call him the best chapter-builder ever is different from calling him the best scene- or episode-builder ever.
In his extraordinary book The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century, the scholar Nicholas Dames says the following about chapters in War and Peace:
For whom could the chapters of War and Peace conceivably be valid experiences? Averaging a little more than 1,200 words, they are usually far too truncated to be scenes in and of themselves, and as subepisodic as any of the chapters in Caxton’s Morte3. Without heads, or any pretense at tabularity or indexicality, their independent existence is reduced to the minimal sign of their number. They are tenuous, brief coagulations of something inevitably fluid, fleeting hallucinations of sameness set within flux. Their hallucination does not deceive the narrative voice’s sober metaphysics. Their fleeting duration does not give his characters any completeness to grasp. It is a between time, deriving from neither the projections of characters nor the overarching design of omniscience, opportunistic and partial, yet therefore full of tactical ingenuity.
The emphasis is mine.
‘The narrative voice’s sober metaphysics’ that Dames refers to is to be located in the essayistic parts of War and Peace. It is best manifested, however, in the failure of Tolstoy’s original plans with the novel: he wanted to narrate ab ovo the story of the Decembrists of 1825 and landed up at a fat novel where action started twenty years prior in 1805 and, you see, never quite managed to reach the Decembrists. ‘There is not and cannot be a beginning to any event, but one event always continuously follows another’—Dames quotes this professorial line from War and Peace to arrive at a key Tolstoyan truth: Division is error. Let me quote from The Chapter:
Division is error […] This is a postulate that is political—skeptical of any claims to the transformative power of particular events or acts […] Nothing changes, unless it was already changing. A battle, an affair, a plan for personal advancement or social amelioration: these have preparations and effects much more diffuse than any beginning and ending. The threshold, rupture, or breach is a retrospective illusion, merely an arbitrarily selected portion of a larger process.
The emphasis is once again mine.
The question, of course, is that if Tolstoy sees everything as a continuity, why does he segment his narrative? Why are there chapters in War and Peace at all?
For practical reasons. Surely that is part of the answer. But Dames finds another, more alluring argument. It is in the Tolstoyan character.
At the beginning of a battle, a young Tolstoyan character may wonder whether this beginning coincides with the beginning of their fantasy of a glorious death. Right after challenging a man for a duel, a young Tolstoyan character might begin to wonder what gave them the strength of feeling to propose such an extreme act. While losing a fortune at a card game, a young Tolstoyan character may try to pinpoint at what stage during the evening their fate changed irrevocably. The young Tolstoyan character is searching for the beginning of their episode inside the episode. Why is this so?
Surely because the Tolstoyan character in War and Peace is young and sees itself as becoming. Consequently, this character is routinely restless to trace the beginning of that becoming just as it is restless for an ultimate end to the process. The process is, in its own way, wary of conclusion (if it needs reminding: these people are in a loooong novel), but it is committed to recur. There is, in that sense, becoming and becoming and becoming… afresh, anew, situation followed by reaction followed by the desire to locate the point where a scintilla from fate or agency lit triggers the definitive transformation.
Dames puts it much better:
Tolstoy’s characters are episodists: they recognize themselves as existing within particular episodes, and those episodes have an intensity, even an autonomy, that swallows longer kinds of diachronic thinking. What concerns them about these episodes, however, is the mystery of the boundary lines that surround the episode in which they locate themselves. Inside an episode, it is hard to imagine any other episode at all, and any narrative that links them seems inaccessible, implausible. Yet somehow “now” emerged out of “before,” and it will later pass into another “before.” How could that have happened, how can it conceivably happen again? Is there a feeling of passing over a threshold, an event horizon or phase transition, and how can one notice it?
So then, notwithstanding the other minor considerations that must inform chapterisation, segmentation in War and Peace is a negotiation between the Tolstoyan character’s internal alertness to change (+ its mystification around said change’s boundaries) and the narrator’s metaphysical stance of temporal continuity. Needless to say, the Tolstoyan chapter often fails to begin where the transitioning Tolstoyan character may locate its transition’s beginning4; likewise and just as frequently, it fails to end where the character may locate the transition as ending. External objective time and wider scopes loom: a scene of private transition is interrupted by a summary of some broader scape of which the transition is but a microscopic part (eg., a character’s near-death experience followed immediately by a description of the broad battle).
Where does this leave my February formulations? Tolstoy is neither the best chapter-builder I have read nor the best creator of scenes or episodes. Was it scale and scope, then, that had swayed me in February and taken me into the territory of superlatives? Perhaps. Or perhaps it was the transition-aware nature of the Tolstoyan character and the regular illustration of this aspect across a large cast.
I’m less sure of why I love War and Peace. Luckily, there are nine more months to go.
The next War and Peace newsletter will reach you on April 30.
The task of defining a ‘scene’ or an ‘episode’ and remarking on the difference between the two requires not much more than going to Aristotle
Note that the chapter break is not the only site for these two operations. They occur in the middle of chapters too. But a chapter break is a significant site for these.
William Caxton’s 1485 printing of Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Subepisodicness aside, Dames grants the chapters in the book “the sheen of having been polished by a printer’s eye and the pleasing jar of having been arranged by a composer’s ear.”
Whether the chapter’s beginning obfuscates the character’s search for a beginning or whether the character’s inability to locate a ‘before’ before a ‘now’ provides for the arbitrariness of the chapter beginnings shall remain a mystery. The same argument holds for ends, too.