Liminal Laughter in Tolstoj's War and Peace: On the Verge of Consciousness
Sharon Lubkemann
Allen
The most capacious consciousnesses in Tolstoj's War and
Peace resound with bursts of childlike and hysterical
laughter. Such laughter unmasks pretension and incorporates
paradox. On the audible plane of articulation, the insignificance of
utterance is juxtaposed only to the meaningfulness of laughter. It
gives voice to truths that otherwise in Tolstoj's fictions are only
mutely acknowledged by the refracted semantics of the body—by
gaze, gesture, smiles (a silent permutation of laughter)—and
interior dialogized monologues, sub-speech genres investigated by
critics such as Vinogradov (O jazyke Tolstogo, 1939) and
Ginzburg (On Psychological Prose, 1971). Yet laughter
cannot be physiologically or fictionally sustained. In Tolstoj's
narrative, it is expressed on the verge of consciousness. It is muted
with the maturation of characters and is absent from the framing
narrative voice.
This paper investigates the carnivalesque physiology and subversive
semantics of laughter in War and Peace. Its typology of
laughter in the novel begins with Pierre's childlike,
forgiveness-asking smile in the novel's opening scene and examines,
among other full and muted expressions of laughter, his hysteria in
captivity, his gently ironic smile after the war, Kutuzov's smile in
his speech to the troops, laughter around the campfire, and
Nata&shachek;a's fully-voiced childish but then muted adult
laughter. Further, it considers the epistemological limits of laughter
in the novel, of laughter which is internally generated and externally
indecipherable, which is not embodied in a buffoon and which is absent
(except for cynical, parodic intonations shared by such
consciousnesses as Andrej's) in the narrative voice. Finally, it
suggests a reading of War and Peace as dark/infernal
comedy, in which only unsustainable laughter can fully incorporate the
unbearable consciousness of an existence that is both grotesque and
sublime.