Sorry to stack all these posts up on you in one night, LeBron, but I wrote them while spending about twenty hours at the County swim championships last week, and they had no WiFi there. Then today, at the Conference diving championships, they had WiFi, but I had no computer. go figure.

Because I know you'll ask, Kate finished tenth out of twenty-five in the 10 and under girls. When I congratulated her on her top ten finish, she said, "I was hoping for top eight."

I responded, "You've been diving for five weeks. Chill, my sister."

Nevertheless, part II of the War and Peace post I promised.

Inevitability in Plot and Characterization in War in Peace

Now that we’re beyond love, examined in the preceding post, I can be a bit briefer. As I was reading the story, and found that, miraculously, Rostov and Bolkonsky were thrust together in a meeting, and that, magically, each had their separate face-to-face encounters with Napoleon, which took their differing idolizations of l’Empereur and crushed them with the great man’s human shortcomings, and all other manner of what might be called coincidence or contrivance in order to make characters’ paths intersect, I was struck by the notion that these chance meetings are what Borges would call “inevitabilities,” not accidents.

Why are these potentially contrived incidents inevitable? Because you’re reading a novel, and Tolstoy frequently reminds you that you’re reading a story. He talks to you at times; he frames the incidents within an argument, and later revisits the way the events of the story advance the argument; and he frequently comments on the action as it has been reported in non-fiction texts. As I remind myself to heed Alexsandr Hemon’s advice from Nowhere Man (see an old post about our “need for meaning”) about suspending my skepticism, I enjoy the experience of novel-reading much, much more, because it turns the text from an abstraction written for anyone into a personal communication between the author and me (much the same way that this blog is so enjoyable because of our relationship, LeBron.

I have no idea if that paragraph makes any sense, but between the sun glare on the computer screen and all the distractions that accompany writing about the book at the county swim championships while I watch my daughter get her chops busted about a boy for the first time, I find myself unwilling to parse my own syntax. (Especially in a public place.)

The other thing I like about the plot is its insistence on correcting history. Tolstoy is writing the novel 50-60 years after the events that accounted for the enmity and amity between Napoleon and Alexander, between 1805 and 1813, and the depth and breadth of his research is incredible. He despises the oversimplifications of history (I’ll deal with that in the “Things that appealed to me intellectually” post, rather than a Things I loved about the book” post) and uses the book to give the reality of narration to the abstractions of historical reality. To do this, he needs to know as much about battle plans as salon manners, as much about objets d’art from the beginning of his century as about the differences between the ways Russian historians and French historians account for the same battles. And above all, he has to have a preternatural sense of our shared humanity in order to give all his characters the diverse traits he gives them

While I can see the truth in his male characters because I feel like I have felt parallel thoughts or experienced parallel experiences, I wonder about the truth in his female characters. He gives them significantly more deth and texture than his English contemporary Dickens, and I’ll be amazed if he, as a thirty-five year old man, faithfully got inside the mind of teenage girls in his initial characterizations of Natasha and Sonya. When I talk about depth and texture, I think I’m really comparing Marya to characters like Lucie Mannette or Estella (for Dickens, even the female names are nothing but light). Marya’s self-sacrifice isn’t motivated by the author’s view of women as Purity, but derives from what would have been necessarily (or inevitably), her character, isolated by her looks and her obedience to her father. She experiences tension and she makes choices that aren’t easy for her, and knows that there is a disconnect between what she wants and what she must.

So, LeBron, if any of the women who follow you on Twitter every time you tweet one of my new blog posts read this, please encourage them to respond to my characterization question. Gracias.