SHARON LUBKEMANN ALLEN

            REFLECTION/REFRACTION OF THE DYING LIGHT:  NARRATIVE VISION IN
            NINETEENTH-CENTURY RUSSIAN AND FRENCH FICTION

SIGHT MEDIATES AND METONYMICALLY represents the aesthetic refraction of reality in verbal as well as visual arts. The eye performs a literal act of translation. For the body, the eye is both an opening and an organ. The lungs and stomach process what mouth and nose inhale; the eye performs a more complex operation: it filters the world both into the body and into consciousness. Light, color, and form are interpreted rather than digested, refracted through memory. Although both trained and biologically programmed, the eye is more subjective, more selective, than the internal organs. On the threshold between the self and the world, the eye blinks, redirects and refocuses its gaze. Whereas the ear, that other liminal organ, filters sound that it cannot generate, the eye that sees is also the object of perception. In its fictional representations, the eye figures for "I," for the subject's ways of knowing the world. It functions as opaque reflector, transparent frame, transforming prism, passive receptor, active projector, or lens magnifying consciousness.

Seeking to elucidate modes of vision and their narrative consequences in  the nineteenth-century novel, this essay focuses on the particularly luminous, interpenetrating looks emanating from and directed at the dying  consciousness in Russian realist fictions and their French subtexts. Confronted with  death, the eye blinks, opens wide, or grows dim. What and how it sees in this liminal  moment are decisive. The narrative event of death concentrates overlapping  lenses--of a subject both seeing and seen in a revealing light. Death, which explicitly  structures narrative form in modernist fiction (becoming the seminal threshold informing the  aesthetic realization of Proust's and Woolf's self-conscious narrators and, even  earlier, that of Machado de Assis's Brás Cubas), begins to function maieutically for  psychological and aesthetic realization in the mid-nineteenth-century novel. The hero  retrospectively revises and looks beyond the boundaries of not only a fictive life but  also the fictional frame. My investigation counterposes two modes of narrative vision  suggested by fictive looks at death: reflective and refractive.

Both the reflective and refractive gaze imply reflexive light, a  distorted but perhaps insightful vision of the self in relation to the world and vice versa.  Yet reflective light, like that of the mirror, is flat. Its image inverts reality relatively  reliably. Refractive light is far more unpredictable. It fractures light, but in doing so also  sends it off in all directions. Its illumination is prismatic, creative, expansive. Dante's paradiso is  illumined by such light, which becomes in that sphere as expansive as his swelling polyphonic  choir. Indeed, refractive light has the capacity for dialogic realization that Bakhtin  astutely denied to the mirror and interior monologue.  If the reflective gaze in the mirror  is solipsistic, the refractive gaze, even internalized, is shot through with alterior perspectives. Overall, Dostoevsky's heroes, whose interior dialogues are polyphonic, face death  with a refractive gaze; Tolstoy's heroes, much more lonely and trapped by  death's approach, with a reflective gaze. Thus, the aesthetic lenses of nineteenth-century  realism are inverted at their poles, which I have located familiarly in Dostoevsky's  and Tolstoy's fictions. Facing death, the fictive world expands or contracts. Hugo's, Balzac's,  and Flaubert's works lie on the spectrum between Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; the ways in which  Dostoevsky and Tolstoy rework moments and modes of vision from French subtexts thus  mark the distance between reflective and refractive modes of aesthetic vision.