A story about story telling

This is a translation of my other post: En berättelse om berättande

I don’t think I’ve had a reading experience like the one I had with Lev Tolstoy’s War and Peace before. (sidenote: The version I have isn’t the one that is most widely known. Tolstoy apparently completely rewrote the book and it is that version that was published in 1867. It wasn’t until 2000 that the original version would be published in Russian as an ordinary novel. I haven’t been able to find it in English, but my copy from 2016 says that work is being done to translate it. The biggest change seems to be that this original version ends around 500 pages earlier. (Tolstoj 2016) ) The end of the book made me reconsider what the entire book was about, but the interesting thing is that it didn’t happen because of a plot twist or any other concrete events that occur. My view of what had happened didn’t change either like how a good plot twist makes you reinterpret the events that had happened before. No, both the reason for and the subject of my new interpretation is the style the book is written in, the state of the characters, and what the narrator chooses to focus on. Most of the events — the countless conversations and gossip, wars that are fought over arbitrary reasons, and romances that spark and fade away — feel pretty meaningless and uninteresting, but after finishing the book I’ve realized there is a meaning behind this meaninglessness. The concrete events are still irrelevant, but the superficiality that the introduction brims with slowly fades away until it is completely discarded towards the end where the narrator scornfully denounces it. It is this change of narration that in hindsight has captivated me.

In the beginning war is presented as something noble, a joviality that grabs the soldiers before battle, a topic of lighthearted conversations and gossip for the nobility, a chance to show one’s genius for the commanding officers. That view wavers when Russia’s invasion of Napoleon in 1805 fails, but it recovers quickly. Life resumes to normalcy. It is however, completely discarded by the narrator hundreds of pages later, during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, where he states that the generals and military geniuses with their grand plans all pretend or delude themselves into thinking that they have control whereas in actuality they are only floating along in the streams of causality, and everybody that support or in some other way tries to show off their own strategies are really only seduced by power and are trying to flatter it. They are all just using this murder at unimaginable scale to further their own interests. The narrators acquired disdain for wars can aptly be summed up with the following quote: “Is there a sin, just one bad side of humanity that hasn’t been incorporated in the military everyday life?”

Similarly to how the narrator changes his attitude towards the war, both of the characters Pierre and prince Andrei go through a journey through style and attitude. In contrast to the older characters Anna Scherer and prince Kuragin, Pierre and prince Kuragin don’t quite fit in the nobility social life, but that is nonetheless where they live. Prince Andrei is too occupied with his career, and Pierre is like a fish in a shallow pond — shackled by his newfound wealth and those who want to abuse it. They both seek a better life but after a 1000 pages they lose it all, but instead of pain they both experience a form of liberation from their shallow lives. Especially prince Andrei mirrors the narrators change of attitude towards the war when he realizes that war is nothing less than a game of fear, a game of making your opponents flee. The rest is just an act.

Anna Scherer and prince Kuragin on the other hand, get left behind by the story. After the same 1000 pages they are still there in their salons without noticing any changes nor do they acknowledge the immense tragedies the wars have been. Among the last appearances of prince Kuragin before the end of the book is his reading aloud of a manifest. The narrator (who earlier didn’t give his own opinion) is careful to point out that the content of the manifest isn’t important, the only thing that is valued by his audience is Kuragin’s performance, the way he reads, the form.

These changes of narration is what I has stayed with me from Tolstoy’s novel, but it wasn’t until the end of the book that these changes become complete and visible. It wasn’t until then that I realized that War and Peace isn’t a story about plot, it’s a story about changes in story telling.

References 🔗︎