The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically by David M. Bethea (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically by David M. Bethea Gary Saul Morson David M. Bethea. The Superstitious Muse: Thinking Russian Literature Mythopoetically. Studies in Russian and Slavic Literatures, Cultures and History. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2009. 432 pp. ISBN 978-1-934843-17-8. Cloth. Great poets transform mere words into verbal art. In the process, they may also transmute stories into myths and myths into stories. Poets cast their spell on readers and, when we are lucky, inspire their most discerning critics with a bit of their magic. Magic highlights this collection of David Bethea’s classic essays. Bethea seems to have been enchanted, re-enchanted, and trans-enchanted by Pushkin’s ever-metamorphosing spirit. He is therefore an eerily appropriate guide to this elusive genius. “Let it be said,” Bethea explains, “that given his ‘protean’ genius and the remarkable capaciousness of his imaginative empathy, Pushkin could insert himself, or his ‘textual desire,’ into multiple roles” (231). If we substitute “critical” for “imaginative” in this sentence, the same may be said of Bethea himself. Theory calcifies many critics, who become the tool of their tool, but Bethea takes a different approach. He is fascinated by ideas of thinkers as diverse as Darwin, Gould, Dawkins, Bloom, Bakhtin, Lotman, Jakobson, and many others, but offers neither to endorse nor create any “system of ideas.” Thinkers serve, rather, as a way of raising questions, of getting at something interesting about poem or poet or myth or mythopoesis. For Bethea what is most interesting begins where the system can take us no further. Whether his topic is the shape of the apocalyptic plot in Russian fiction, the strange interconnections among Dante, Florensky, and Lotman, or the role of chance and daring in Pushkin’s History of Pugachev, Bethea tries “to isolate cultural patterns, but then add something important to the strict structural component—how the pattern took on flesh and blood, how it entered into historical and biographical context, how it happened once and then changed” (10). Those of us who were educated when Jakobson was still alive will recall how the fear of Jakobson was the beginning of wisdom. Critics either professed an almost religious allegiance to his genius or, at least, cowered covertly while others did. Above all, one was supposed to take a singular, “sophisticated” delight when Jakobson demonstrated that any sort of human interest in literature was primitive, unscientific, and philistine. Blood in art is not bloody, as Shklovsky said, and I remember Jakobson assuring an audience that, whatever emotional or political themes might seem to [End Page 255] characterize Mayakovsky’s poetry, in fact there was nothing there but verbal play. The Jakobson school generated important tools and challenging readings. I do not doubt that we should be grateful for its existence—and still more grateful that its time is over. It branded every reason anyone might actually want to read literature, and especially Russian literature with its accursed questions, mere “vulgarity.” I remember Victor Erlich remarking that, as there is such a thing as vulgar Marxism, there is also vulgar Formalism. And, let us add, vulgar scientism. Bethea’s fine instincts lead him to reapproach the issues structuralists raised, but to go beyond. He returns to Jakobson’s remarks on “Pushkin and His Sculptural Myth,” brings out the power of Jakobson’s insights and adds more examples, but does so in a decidedly different spirit. “Absolutely everything Jakobson says about texts (poetics and otherwise),” Bethea observes, “is couched in a (meta)language that remains on this side of the scientific divide […] that describes the poetic function at work but will not itself be contaminated by the ‘poetic’” (91). Read Pushkin in this way and there is no Pushkin — no real person, no emotional life, no human struggle. It is for this reason that this sort of analysis abolishes time: the poet’s many works represent variations in logical space on a theme, rather than a person thinking through a problem. “I would argue that this otherwise foundational work [of Jakobson’s] suffers […] from the […] inability to glean in proper perspective the evolution of feeling and the indispensable sequence of emotional logic” (96). However...