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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Literary structure provided Gogol with a means to free himself from the restrictive definitions of life. As copying clerk, Akaky inhabits a nearly autonomous world of literal repetition, a world close to the timeless silence out of which fiction is born. He is happy, having next to no individualized desiring self. The acquisition of the overcoat causes Akaky's fall into the diachronic world of difference, a hostile world that overwhelms his recently objectified identity. As his letters demonstrate, Gogol himself feared just such an annihilation by the other. Hence his enigmatic, elusive character and his narrative strategy of hiding behind a multiplicity of constantly shifting masks. The “fantastic ending” of the story fulfills Gogol's most cherished fantasy: to exercise power against the world while remaining unconditioned within the play of literary metamorphoses. In psychological terms, this desire is symptomatic of the schizoid, ontologically insecure individual.
1 “The Structure of Gogol's ‘The Overcoat,‘ ” Russian Review, 22(1963), 393.
2 Gogol (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), p. 222.
3 Gogol had a comparable dread of having his portrait reproduced. He told his mother to hide the one she owned and never allow anyone to copy it (see Letters of Nikolai Gogol, ed. Carl Proffer, Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1967, p. 142; abbreviated henceforth as Letters). And he was outraged when Pogodin allowed a lithograph to be made of his Gogol portrait. “Judge for yourself,” wrote Gogol to a friend, “whether it is useful to exhibit me before the world in a dressing gown, disheveled, with long rumpled hair and moustaches. Can it be you don't know yourself what importance people give to all this ?” (Letters, p. 226).
4 Quoted by Erlich, p. 170. Erlich remarks that Apollon Grigoriev's terming Gogol “an altogether manufactured (sdelannyj) man” suggests “that Gogol was a thoroughly unspontaneous man who barricaded himself behind a set of contrivances, that out of an irrational fear of premature exposure, of rebuff and ridicule, he tended to hide his pathologically vulnerable self behind a screen of rhetoric, a crust of ‘moral make-up’ and thus, ironically, to insure the very misrepresentation which he was so anxious to prevent” (p. 218).
5 On at least one recorded occasion, Gogol amused himself by speaking lines from a play as if they were meant to apply to the situation at hand. I. Panayev records how Gogol, after keeping the company assembled to hear him read waiting by pretending to doze, finally sat down on the sofa, hiccuped three times, and complained aloud of having indigestion. It was not until a bit later, when Gogol actually began to read a manuscript, that the embarrassed hostess realized that his complaint had been the beginning of a dramatic monologue. (See David Magarshack, Gogol: A Life, New York: Grove. 1957, pp. 187–89.)
6 I derive the notions of freeplay and decentering from Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), pp. 247–72.
7 Page numbers in the text refer to 77/e Overcoat and Other Tales of Good and Evil, trans. David Magarshack (New York: Norton, 1965), unless otherwise indicated.
8 “Zur Komposition von Gogol's ‘Mantel,‘ ” Zeitschrift fiir slavische Philologie, 14(1937), 65–67.
9 This name gives rise to some amusingly divergent associations. K. D. Seeman (“Eine Heiligenlegende als Vorbild von Gogol's ‘Mantel,‘ ” Zeitschrift fiir slavische Philologie, 33, 1965, 7–21), following a suggestion first made by Frederik Driessen in Gogol as a Short Story Writer: A Study of His Technique of Composition (The Hague: Mouton, 1965, p. 194), has shown that Gogol probably modeled certain of Akaky's traits, such as his asceticism, his humility, his obedient performance of his duties, on his namesake, a certain 6th-century saint. St. Akaky, having unquestioningly served an evil starets who abused and insulted him, continued to voice his obedience from the grave, thereby causing the starets to repent and reform his life. The other association derives from the cacophonous repetition of k's in the clerk's name. Kaka is Russian baby-talk for feces.
10 Quoted by Walter Lowrie in his introd. to Soren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology (New York: Harper, 1964), pp. 18–19, from an unpublished letter to the reader of Repetition now collected in Vol. iv of Kierkegaard's Papirer.
11 Irving Massey, in a fascinating and suggestive chapter on Gogol in his forthcoming book The Gaping Pig: Aspects of Metamorphosis in Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press), defines the dimension that Akaky seems to discover behind or through words as “divine vision.” He speculates that Akaky's joy in the physical qualities of letters may derive from his use of them as “peep-holes, or chinks through which one can slip into the world beyond language; as though some oddity about their shape revealed their double face, or as if they had swinging doors, which, while pertaining superficially to language, were really meant to lead into the world within.” (Quoted by permission from the MS.)
12 “The Death of the Author,” in The Discontinuous Universe, ed. Sallie Sears and Georgianna Lord (New York: Basic, 1972), p. 7.
13 “Qu'est-ce qu'un auteur ?” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 64 (1969), 78.
14 “Narrative: Quest for Origins and Discovery of the Mausoleum,” Salmagundi, 12 (1970), 63–75.
15 The difference between what Akaky does and what, according to Michel Foucault, all writing does is that Akaky deals primarily with letters while writing employs the slightly more “meaningful” units, words. “For western culture,” claims Foucault, “to write has meant to place oneself from the outset in the virtual space of selfrepresentation and doubling; given that writing signifies not the thing but speech, the linguistic work does nothing other than advance more deeply into that impalpable depth of the mirror, arouse the double of that double which writing already is, discover thus an infinite possibility and impossibility, pursue speech indefinitely, maintain it beyond the death which condemns it, and liberate the trickle of a murmur” (“Le Langage à l'infini,” Tel Quel, 15, 1963, 45–46).
16 In the first version of the story we are told that Akaky “hardly ever cast a glance at himself and even shaved without a mirror” (quoted by Driessen, p. 208).
17 Here I am borrowing terms defined more precisely by Edward Said in his stimulating essay “Molestation and Authority in Narrative Fiction,” in Aspects of Narrative: Selected Papers from the English Institute, ed. J. Hillis Miller (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 47–68.
18 Afterword to Nikolai Gogol, 77ie Diary of a Madman, and Other Stories, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (New York : NAL, 1960), p. 231.
19 Magarshack's translation, which reads “the fantastic turn this otherwise perfectly true story has taken” (p. 268), is clearly inaccurate. Gogol intentionally includes the fantastic within the realm of the true. Vprochem should be translated “nevertheless” not “otherwise.”
20 Vladimir Nabokov, Nikolai Gogol (New York: New Directions, 1944), p. 143.
21 (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev), Masterstvo Gogolia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury, 1934), p. 228. Donald Fanger refers to this passage in his interesting comparative essay “Dickens and Gogol: Energies of the Word,” in Veins of Humor, ed. Harry Levin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), p. 141.
22 The Divided Self (Baltimore: Penguin, 1965). Victor Erlich briefly suggests the relevance to Gogol of Laingian analysis (p. 215, n. 19).
23 Though I cannot pursue this theme here, my remarks imply an existentialist critique of certain structuralist attitudes as motivated by a desire to escape from the dilemmas of moral judgment, personal responsibility, and political commitment.
