Why Anna Karenina had to die
Character, criticism, idiots and unprofessionals, and moral philosophy
I decided to take a year out of university before starting a PhD. Partly I wanted a break from the habits of academia, from all the parts of studying at university which aren’t inherent to studying philosophy. There are some perks to this: I don’t have to follow reading lists anymore, for instance, and I can read whatever I want and whenever I want. But when I went back to campus recently to visit some friends, now having left a lot of the habits of academia behind me, I found the experience emotionally strange: I was confused at my temperament in this environment, enough to feel unsure about how much I might be able to readapt to it when my PhD begins.
I felt unprofessional. (I was going to say: ‘I felt like an unprofessional’, like the opposite of ‘a professional’. Is an unprofessional a thing you can be?) I had the feeling that, while I take philosophy as seriously as anyone else studying it academically, I don’t qualify as ‘serious’ in the professional sense; I don’t have the right appearances. In a university, you have philosophical (or literary or artistic or scientific) discussions, but those discussions are all surrounded by certain administrative, bureaucratic, grownup niceties. Before someone gives a talk, some other guy (it’s usually a guy) stands up to say how things are going to be organised, as if they are going to be organised any differently to the past hundred times, as if a scheduled time for talking followed by scheduled time for questions is some new and exotic way of handling things. When the questions come after a talk, most of the time they are methodically and meticulously worded, as if natural conversation is a philosophical minefield; yet, at the same time, all this method and meticulousness often amounts to little more than attempts at point scoring. It reminds me of something Mary Midgley said about her first impression of academic philosophy: how she noticed ‘a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about.’1 After spending just a little time out of university, this is increasingly how the professional side of philosophy appears to me: a ritual of games and niceties. And I am no good at these games at all!
Let me go on a slight tangent to illustrate my point. — In Elif Batuman’s novel The Idiot, the main character, Selin, goes to literature classes but finds them disappointing, leaving her feeling naive:
It was hard to decide on a literature class. Everything the professors said seemed to be somehow beside the point. You wanted to know why Anna had to die, and instead they told you that nineteenth-century Russian landowners felt conflicted about whether they were really a part of Europe. The implication was that it was somehow naive to want to talk about anything interesting, or to think that you would ever know anything important. I wasn’t interested in society, or ancient people’s money troubles, I wanted to know what books really meant. That was how my mother and I had always talked about literature.2
I noticed that quite a few professional critics took The Idiot (especially its title) and its sequel to be a kind of affectionate mockery of Selin, finding that we the readers ‘cringe [at] our own youthful pretensions’ reflected in her.3 I can’t speak for Elif Batuman's intentions, but this was not my experience of the book (or its sequel) at all. Perhaps part of my unprofessionalism is that Selin’s disappointment in university still resonates with me. The disappointment is exactly as she describes it: that everything said amid the games and niceties of academia is ‘somehow beside the point’, and that anything interesting or important is out of place, I guess because it doesn’t quite fit in the rules of the game.
(I really liked the way that the writer Andrea Long Chu expressed this disappointment recently, in an interview with Merve Emre. She recounts her eventual disillusionment with academia: ‘For a period of time, I was like, “Oh, I’ll be an academic and a writer.” I realised that was a bad idea because I could just be a writer, and I didn’t want to do that academic stuff. It often seemed to me the stuff we were talking about in class was not the real stuff. […] We could be on a panel at a conference, and you could ask me [a question]. I would come up with a bullshit answer. Then we would go get a drink at the bar, and then we would have the real conversation, right?’4 This idea—of the real, interesting, and important conversations happening at the bar, is very true in my experience.)
It’s not only the tone of Selin’s disappointment that resonates with me, but the particular kind of scenario which brought it about. She goes to a class, presumably on Russian literature or modern novels, with the question: why did Anna have to die? This, apparently, is the wrong question. I recognise that it defies one of the established rules of (professional) literary criticism, which Terry Eagleton expresses plainly:
One of the most common ways of overlooking the ‘literariness’ of a play or novel is to treat its characters as though they were real people.5
Even though this rule comes from the world of literature and I, I guess, come from the world of philosophy, I find that it stands as a perfect example of what disappoints me about the professional side of (literary, philosophical, artistic) learning. Terry Eagleton gives an illustration of this rule: ‘Hedda Gabler does not exist a second before she steps on stage, and all we shall ever know about her is what Ibsen’s play decides to tell us. There are no other sources of information available.’ I guess that, in asking why Anna had to die, Selin might be accused of treating the novel like it’s something more real than a story Tolstoy wrote down, more than a series of ‘black marks on a page’ (Eagleton’s words). But is this really what she is doing? We would have to think she is really quite stupid to think that a fictional character is a real person. (A quoted review on the front of the UK edition of The Idiot describes it as ‘a novel about being young and stupid’.)
Terry Eagleton says that, outside of Ibsen’s play, there are ‘no other sources of information’ about Hedda Gabler: there is nothing else we can know about her. Is that true? We know from the play that she is a woman, newly married to a man she doesn’t really love, and that this man is an academic in competition with a recovering alcoholic. Don’t our lives, our real lives, teach us enough to make certain guesses about these people? Isn’t that how our imaginations work? Isn’t that how we are able to make these basic descriptions of the characters at all, since such explicit descriptions are (for good reason) rarely given by an author? What I mean is: don’t we know, generally speaking, what people are like? Isn’t that why we’re able to read stories at all?
Of course, we don’t know everything about people. Presumably that is part of why we read, and presumably it is part of what motivates Selin’s question about Anna’s death. I take it to be relevant that Selin identifies her question as the kind to be concerned with ‘what books really meant’, and that she first fell in love with those sorts of question by discussing them with her mother. This is a sign to me of the importance of these questions; a sign that, far from being beside the point, they relate to the importance and relevance of literature to our lives.
‘But Selin is still misguided! To treat characters like real people, and to act like their lives and deaths have real causes, is to make psychological assumptions with no grounding. It is unscientific, and uninformed!’ — In response to this objection, I’m inclined to just repeat the same point. Doesn’t the accusation of armchair psychology underestimate just how much our ordinary, unscientific lives are able to teach us? I remember feeling that a passage from Stanley Cavell vindicated this inclination of mine:
I think that one reason a critic may shun direct contact with characters is that he has been made to believe or assume, by some philosophy or other, that characters are not people, that what can be known about people cannot be known about characters, and in particular that psychology is either not appropriate to the study of these fictional beings or that psychology is the province of psychologists and not to be ventured from the armchairs of literary studies. But is any of this more than the merest assumption; unexamined principles which are part of current academic fashion? For what is the relevant psychology? Of course, to account for the behavior of characters one is going to apply predicates like “is in pain,” “is ironic,” “is jealous,” “is thinking of …” to them. But does that require psychological expertise? No more than to apply these predicates to one’s acquaintances.6
In fact, Elif Batuman’s novels are the best demonstration I have found of this point. Not only does their autofictional status complicate the ‘characters aren’t real’ rule, but the fact that Selin (especially in the sequel, Either/Or) so often turns to literature to help with her own life (mostly without success, I admit) is an illustration of how capable we are of talking and thinking about real life, real acquaintances, in the terms we talk about fictional lives and fictional characters. This is one of many intuitions I have about the closeness of Stanley Cavell’s philosophy and Elif Batuman’s writing. (If I could develop all these intuitions right now, I would be ready to finish a PhD.)
I found an article by Toril Moi from a few years ago, about this rule on the unreality of characters, where Moi quotes from the same Cavell essay.7 What excited me about her essay is that, by looking into the history of this rule about literary criticism, she finds that it arose not only for intellectual reasons, but with a ‘professional agenda’: ‘to promote rigorous professional criticism over amateurish chitchat.’ Moi explains that, in the early twentieth century, literary criticism was new to academia, and so to prove itself as something professional and rigorous, it had to distance itself from the ordinary conversations we might have about books (and, therefore, the kinds of questions that Selin finds interesting and important). So a critic like L.C. Knights, who wrote a book called How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? (which, I guess, might also have been called Why did Anna Karenina Have to Die?), promoted an impersonal and formalistic criticism against ‘traditionalist, feminized, middlebrow sentimentality’. (That word ‘feminized’ stuck out to me as particularly relevant, reminding me of Mary Midgley’s comment about ‘clever young men’ and the underrepresentation of women in philosophy, which gets worse and worse further up the academic ladder.)
I am definitely not opposed to modernism (and nor is Moi). In fact, what first drew me to modernist writers was how much certain characters resonated with me emotionally (first James Joyce’s Gabriel Conroy and Stephen Dedalus, later Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and Thomas Mann’s Tonio Kröger). The formal strangeness of these writers was a vehicle for this resonance; it wasn’t a separable aspect of their books. (And I would note again that all three of the writers I named in parentheses are known to have transcribed real life people into their stories…) What I am opposed to is the idea that it is somehow more serious or more professional or more grownup to talk about books as lifeless things simply because they are fictional: to view them as the cold consequences of an author’s social background, or as mechanical constructions of some method or another. By all means the socio-historical and formal aspects of a book are relevant, but what is most relevant (most important and interesting) of all is that they function as stories, and that they do so by, in some regard, being real.
— That was my tangent. Now I can return to the world of philosophy. Like literary criticism in the early twentieth century, philosophy also finds itself in a defensive position. This is not because it is new to academia—after all, the Academy was founded by Plato—but because it’s part of the nature of philosophy that sections of it get taken over by other disciplines. Biology, psychology, and literary criticism all started out as parts of philosophy. And so philosophers are always trying to prove that they still have some rigorous things to say about the world that couldn’t just be said better by a neuroscientist or a biologist or whatever. Now, just as Toril Moi points out that the taboo of treating characters as ‘real’ is ‘used to sort outsiders from insiders, amateurs from professionals’, I think there are similar taboos in philosophy, though they are less explicit.
We see the taboos at work in what Andrea Long Chu points out, in how different the conversations at conferences are from the conversations at the bar following a conference. Or in what Lorna Finlayson points out, about how ‘nobody really likes going to conferences or reading journal articles, or even finds them very directly helpful’, but how everyone is wary to point this out lest their complaints be taken as ‘breaches of etiquette or signs of professional flakiness.’8 Part of me wants to say that the taboo in philosophy is simply the air of professionalism in general, and that it was a mistake for philosophy to ever become ‘professional’. (One of the ways Cavell praises, or at least describes, Ludwig Wittgenstein is that his writing ‘is not of a character that lends itself to professionalization’.9 He says elsewhere of professional philosophers that, in what I called their games and niceties, ‘they make a desert and call it a clearing.’10) Discussions among professional moral philosophers, for instance, so rarely resemble the ordinary conversations that we have about characters, real or fictional, and whether or not their lives and actions are justified. Suppose that you tried to convince me that Anna Karenina was wrong to kill herself. As unprofessional as our conversation might be, so long as you give me some reasons, aren’t you doing moral philosophy?
A couple of weeks ago I was in a café with my friend who has also studied philosophy. It struck us both that our conversations so often feel philosophical, and that through these conversations we seem to figure something out together about our lives, or about life in general, or the world. And that made me ask: why isn’t the study of philosophy more devoted to making us better at these conversations—that is, helping us direct them more towards the truth, helping us to resonate more with each other, helping us to listen more closely to each other? Why does philosophy becoming professional mean that philosophy becomes separate from these moments? Weren’t some of the earliest philosophical texts—I mean Plato’s dialogues—records of (real or imaginary) conversations with friends? And why does academic philosophy look so different to these conversations?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/28/golden-age-female-philosophy-mary-midgley
Elif Batuman, The Idiot (Vintage, 2017), p. 16. The page numbers are the same in the US edition.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2022/07/21/diary-of-an-adducer-either-or-elif-batuman/
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/01/30/i-want-critic-andrea-long-chu-merve-emre/
Terry Eagleton, How to Read Literature (Yale University Press, 2013), p. 45. Thanks to @h_blaubear on Twitter for finding this quotation!
Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’ in Must we mean what we say? (Cambridge University ‘Press, 1976), p. 268.
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/real-characters-literary-criticism-existential-turn-toril-moi/
Lorna Finlayson, The Political is Political (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), p. 180.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford University Press, 1979), p. xx.
Stanley Cavell, Themes Out of School (University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 199.
‘everything said amid the games and niceties of academia is ‘somehow beside the point’, and that anything interesting or important is out of place, I guess because it doesn’t quite fit in the rules of the game.’
I’m also taking a year off academia while applying for PhD study, and though my field is history I found this piece resonated entirely with my own experience. The rejection of feminised forms of criticism, informal discussion in place of formal structures which no one really gets much out of, the desire to ‘prove’ the value of the humanities by stripping some of their crucial components (especially where scientific subjects are prized). I could go on and am sure you could too. Thank you for such a beautifully articulated piece.
I love this. I have had this debate before about Anna Karenina. I read it and loved the book (and loathed the characters). I eventually summed it up as "A long story about a mentally ill woman in a terminally sick society."
It was her obvious mental illness that was the story. It was not, for me, a love story because healthy love was not possible in that society and with her psyche. I like that you call it a question of moral philosophy, but I am not sure the question of whether she had to die even matters. She died, and the story made her desperation believable - so the story is whether it was a "rational" act or just like so many suicides in real life, the momentarily rational act of an irrational mind.