Gliadel

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.

Yet aesthetic vision has been suspect, at least since Plato. In his incisive reading of Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, Mark Edmundson identifies an "anti-visual" trend in recent scholarship, countering earlier "uncritical" theorizations of "the experience of seeing as an ideal image for understanding" inclusive of "Lacan's critique of the immersion within the visual world of the Imaginary, Rorty's of philosophical mirror-language, Baudrillard's of media-generated illusion, `the precession of simulacra,' Foucault's of all-surveilling panoptic society, the feminist critique of the male gaze, and Derrida's polemic against the metaphysics of presence" (67-68). Vision has come to be associated not only with insight and creativity, but also with blindness. Given its spatial form, vision seems all the more problematic as it informs temporally bound narrative structure. Hence, for example, Lessing's formidable critique of the visual or imagist poetics of modernity.1

That the nineteenth-century novel was also engaged in this debate concerning the temporal as well as spatial dimensions of vision should come as no surprise. We encounter in these texts complex and constantly revised narrative aesthetics of vision, corresponding with the increasingly rapid shift, almost a flickering, in the understanding of the mechanics and meaning of perception in the still developing sciences of optics and psychology. In the self-critically reflexive painting and novel of early modernity, the creative gaze not only frames but enters into the purview of the work of art. Thus, for example, Hugo's primitive scientific notion of the eye transmitting rays, projecting form and meaning onto its object, operates powerfully in his fictions, while the daguerreotype and photography directly inform naturalist fictions, both instigating and echoing Zola's documentary language and style. The proto-modern nineteenth-century novel motivically and structurally foregrounds vision through the representation of aesthetic self-consciousness. There is a move far beyond the Gothic play of masking and unmasking in the "Realist" layering of lenses. The gaze seen in the fiction penetrates the fictional frame and stands for an aesthetic relation to reality. Even before the emergence of the modern hero who re-enacts the writing of the novel, the gaze of the hero converges with or counters that of authority (literal or literary). In these novels interlocking frames of vision delimit not only the psychological boundaries implicit in where one stands to see and to be seen, but also the creative capacities of narrative ways of looking.

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 Bras 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.2 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.

i. An Opening Glimpse

In the semi-darkness and delirium that frame the final fantastical scene of Dvoinik (The Double, 1846), Dostoevsky's Goliadkin "feels stifled, more and more closely hemmed in, feels that all these eyes fixed on him, are somehow oppressing and crushing him" ("zadykhalsia, on chuvstvoval, chto ego tak tesnit, tesnit; chto vse eti glaza, na nego obrashchennye, kak-to gnetut i daviat ego. . " Polnoe sobranie sochinenii I, 226). Piercing through the misty world of his mind's eye, the gaze of the other is granted powerful agency. The persons who surround him are reduced to howls and "curious eyes star [ing] at him from all sides" ("liubopytnye glaza gliadeli na nego otvsiudu" 227) as he descends the spot lit staircase thick with onlookers to climb into his fateful carriage. His own vision darkens, fails-- "v glazakh potemnela" (227). Indeed, Goliadkin suffers a momentary loss of consciousness under the spotlight of the councilor's "severe and searching gaze" ("Sovetnik gliadel na nego strogim, ispytaiushchim vzgliadom," 226). Yet, paradoxically, in this unequal exchange of gazes the scope of self-consciousness and fictional authority grow. Facing the outwardly blinding light of those gazes, Goliadkin's internal eye perceives underlying realities; if he is crushed, it is by self-realization. For in his mind's eye the expectant gaze of the crowd gives rise to "an endless string of Goliadkins all exactly alike ... bursting noisily in through all the doors of the room" ("emu pokazalos', chto bezdna, tselaia verenitsa sovershenno podobnykh Goliadkinykh s shumom vlamyvaiutsia vo vse dveri komnaty," 227). Exposed by the ineluctable gaze of others, he is face to face with himself, Onto the terrible eyes of the stranger riding with him in the carriage, who outwardly resembles his doctor, Rutenspitz, and whose look freezes Goliadkin with terror ("vzgliad ... oledenel uzhasom gospodina Goliadkina; 227-28), he projects the face of Death. The projection, like the refracted doubling of himself, is both internal and literalized in the external space within the fictive frame. It filters into that frame itself as Goliadkin, together with the narrator, sees in his curious, gleeful, grotesque, green-uniformed double-who, running alongside Goliadkin's carriage, leaps up onto the sideboard and peers into the window-his executioner. The hallucinatory, refracted vision of Dostoevsky's hero, usurping authorial insight, reprises that of Hugo's narrator in Le Dernier jour d'un condamne. As in Hugo's fiction, the hero projects his own damning self-knowledge in response to external stares. Even as Goliadkin's tears blur his external vision, in his final look at the crowd and reflected in the stranger's "fiery eyes" ("ognennye glaza") he perceives a truth about himself that he has long known ("znal vse zaranee," "davno uzhe predchuvstvoval," 227, 229) but could authorize only in the light of this exchanged gaze on the brink of death.

The multiple frames of Dostoevsky's narratives intersect on just such fatal thresholds involving literal and spiritual death. At this liminal juncture interlocking frames of vision fantastically reconfigure the narrative's literal and psychological landscapes, but also re-member the fiction itself. For vision does not figure in Dostoevsky's narratives only on the level of plot; the narrative gaze also shifts from the rationally illumined objective plane on which the realist narrator depicts Goliadkin's pathetic body and mind from the outside to the reflexive, irrational, and fantastically creative vision of the dying consciousness itself. The narrator of The Double sees the pettiness of Goliadkin's work, the wooden awkwardness of his gestures, the stilted incoherence of his words, the dullness of his blocked vision as he pokes his nose out from around the woodpile.3 Goliadkin, too, sees these things about himself. He opens his eyes wide, and, rather than fading into St. Petersburg's famed mist, his piercing vision penetrates fictive reality and frame. As he faces his own death, his vision vies with that of the realist narrator for authority.

Nineteenth-century realist fictions that fix their unflinching objective gaze on the dying body-narratives such as Hugo's Le dernier jour dun condamne (1829), Balzac's Le Pere Goriot (1834-35), Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), and Tolstoy's "Tri smerti" ("Three Deaths," 1859), Anna Karenina (1873-76), and "Smert' Ivana Il'icha" ("The Death of Ivan Il'ich," 1886), among others-also illumine, to varying degrees, the dying consciousness. Looking out from that vantage point, they expose the illusions and irrationality that underlie objective reality. In that light they reconsider realist fictional frames of vision. The frameworks of these fictions are fragmented, divided between external and internal views. A dominant metaphor for this chronotopic disjunction is that of the train or carriage transporting the dead, or dying, subject, already separated from the living. Vision marks boundaries: the entrapped dying person looks out at the world that gazes back at him. In each of these fictions, the perception of the dying hero does not coincide with that of indifferent or curious onlookers, or even with that of an apparently insightful realist narrator. Yet it relies on these other gazes: only in the eyes of another can the hero perceive himself, truly or falsely. The gaze becomes, like the word that occasions self-realization in Bakhtin's theory, dialogic.4 It is interpenetrating and communicative-although, like dialogue, it falters.

The politics and psychology implicit in how the fictional subject sees and is seen translates into a poetics. Framed by discrete authorial visions, the hero varies in the extent and veracity of his reflexive gaze, in his capacity to sustain his vision of the world and himself, in the degree of interpenetration between his own and the framing narrative gaze, and in his ultimate authority to recast the fictional world through his vantage point. Hugo's Le dernier jour dun condamne and Dostoevsky's narratives, not only The Double but also fictions composed as early as "Gospodin Prokharchin" ("Mr. Prokharchin," 1846) and as late as "Bobok" (1873), flesh out the liminal view of an autonomous dying consciousness that is creatively, refractively authoritative. In contrast, the narrators of Balzac's Eugenie Grandet (1833) and Le Pere Goriot objectively watch and overhear the narrowly reflective realizations of the dying consciousness. In Flaubert's Madame Bovary and Tolstoy's narratives, perception on the brink of death is refracted only through the narrator's vision and voice.

ii. Refractive Aesthetic Vision: Hugo to Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky acknowledged his indebtedness to Hugo's Le dernier jour dun condamne for the "fantastical" form of his death-centered "realist" story "Krotkaia" ("The Meek One," 1876). The first-person narrator of "The Meek One" inhabits the compressed interior space of Hugo's condamne. He shares his trenchant eye for detail and echoes his articulate ruminations. He projects his ambiguous, absent reader and, orally rather than in writing, reprises the fantastical immediacy of his recorded thought. However, in Dostoevsky's story the hero's vantage point has shifted from that of a man condemned to that of one anticipating condemnation as the probable, if indirect, executioner of "the meek one. " He literally re-views his crime, so that vision as an event is doubly represented in the fiction -he retrospectively looks at himself and others looking. But his looking is problematic. His gaze is most often opaque, reflective only, incapable of insight. It anticipates and deflects the gaze of others and never looks too profoundly into the self. It is his gaze, albeit brief and immediately averted, during their "terrible duel to death" that compels the meek one to face herself in her unbearable imprisonment, escape from which she finds only in suicide. The narrator shuts his eyes to his own mortality; likewise his speech functions as a defense against it. Like Hugo's condamne, as long as he speaks, he delays death; unlike the condamne, as long as he speaks, he also chooses a kind of blindness. Nevertheless, like Dostoevsky's other fictive subjects, his choice is self-conscious and inherently selfcritical. His speech, a one-sided dialogue, is always conscious of the other, even as it tries to avoid responsibility. Likewise, his gaze is haunted by what it refuses to see. The ambivalent, arbitrary cutting off of his narrative leaves both fictive subject and reader with a surplus of vision, an unresolved interaction between the visual frameworks posited within and by the fictive frame. The subject protests any fixed vision.

Earlier fictions by Dostoevsky more closely approximate the paradoxical vantage point of Hugo's condamne, one in which the self admits guilt even while protesting the inhumanity of the gaze that objectively condemns and ostracizes the guilty man. With their autoscopy refracted through the real or projected gaze of others and, especially, their desire to leave written traces of their viewpoint, the self-consciousness of Dostoevsky's heroes-Devushkin (Bednye liudi [Poor Folk], 1846), Goliadkin, Prokharchin, the underground man (Zapiski iz podpol'ia [Notes from the Underground], 1864) and his successors-reflects the profound influence of Hugo's condamne.

In his introduction to "The Meek One," Dostoevsky emphatically called Hugo's Le dernier jour d'un condamne "the most realistic and the most truthful" of all Hugo's works ("samogo real'neishego i samogo pravdiveishego proizvedeniia iz vsekh im napisannykh," Sochineniia XXIV, 6). In this case, Balzac's narrator's realist apologia "All is true" stands not despite but rather because of the work's "fantastical" form. Realistic in the physiological and psychological detail exposed by the narrator's observant eye-true to what Dostoevsky finds is "always happening in reality" ("Da tak vsegda i byvaet v deistvitel'nosti," 6)-the fiction relies on an improbably and at times impossibly recorded (and coherent) first-person account.5 Paradoxically, only the "unrealistic" frame or vision can penetrate and bear witness to what is real, to what is seen not only on but also from the inside, filtered through the refractive modern consciousness.

Without explicit acknowledgement, Dostoevsky's introduction to "The Meek One" recalls also the authorial and editorial frames of Hugo's novel. As he does in Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky, like Hugo, layers the perspectives through which the reader sees death (actual or spiritual): the first-person narrative is circumscribed by both a realist editorial frame and an authorial frame that acknowledges the fictive nature of the text. As in Hugo's work, interlocking frames refract points of view, not ironically negating them but rather intensifying their spectrum of meanings. Within the core narrative frame, of both works each chapter also reconfigures the narrator through shifting vantage points-the reader sees the condamne through an accretion of kaleidoscopic glimpses circulating in time and space; the underground man is refracted through two longer, but fragmentary, views, one immediate and the other retrospective. In Dostoevsky's fiction there is a final, added lens through which the narrative is filtered: the unfinalized gaze of the hero. In the case of Dostoevsky's comic-pathetic Prokharchin, the open-ended dialogue of the narrative is literally fleshed out in the hero's wink, the wink of a corpse. The underground man's droning on just out of hearing range extends the dialogue beyond the arbitrary fictional frame. Hugo completes the encircling of his narrative with the objective recording of the hour of execution. If the chronicler concludes the condamne's narrative, he does not finalize it. The literal incorporation of collective memory in the condamne's hallucinatory consciousness and narrative-his revivifying visions of his predecessors, emerging from their writing in blood on the walls of his cell-suggests the liveliness of his own inscriptions in the memory of the text. Thus, for Hugo, as for Dostoevsky, there is a dynamic overlapping of visions that inter-illumines each fictional frame.

Vision as a motif is incorporated by the condamne, who is primarily an observer -both of others, particularly of how others look at him in the Paris courtroom, prisons and streets, and of himself as he is refracted in their gazes. His own gaze, generally unsympathetic and indifferent to the Other as such, evokes little sympathy. Nevertheless, his reflections suggest the necessity of such an exchange. The condamne watches himself accrue forms much like Goliadkin later envisions his doubles streaming from every watchful corner of the room. He looks out from the enclosed space of his prison cell, the carriage, and his own consciousness. Indeed, it is his projected gaze, like that of Dostoevsky's Goliadkin and underground man, that renders his space vulnerable to penetrations from a grotesquely leering outside world. Others become all eyes, and their gaze constantly redefines both the literal and psychological space in which the condamne is imprisoned.

The condamne himself observes how the different ways in which others look at him deform or transform, reflect or refract, the reality of his condition, which he can perceive only in light of their gaze. In the objectifying, finalizing gaze "des cu,rieux qui sont venus me voir l'autre jour dans ma loge, et qui me regardaient a distance comme une bete de la menagerie" ("of the curious who came to see me the other day in my cell, and who watched me from a distance as [they would] an animal in the zoo"), the condamne sees himself reduced to a caged animal and a commodity-"Le guichetier a eu cent sous" ("the jailer got [a few] cents," 290). This reflective gaze does not penetrate but simply marks off the parameters of the condamne's prison. It is open to no response as it fixes the condamne's identity from the outside. Such is also the gaze that follows his every move: "il y a nuit et jour un factionnaire de garde Ala porte de mon cachot, et... mes yeux ne peuvent se lever vers la lucarne carree sans rencontrer ses deux yeux fixes toujours ouverts" ("night and day there is a guard posted at the door of my cell, and ... my eyes can never look up at the square slot without meeting his two fixed, ever-open eyes;' 291). These open eyes function like spotlights cast on the condamne, establishing only distance. At the same time, once internalized, this distant gaze is also vulnerable to being objectified. In the condamne's mind's eye, these spectators themselves become spectral, reduced to their illusory frames of vision. They are fixed from the vantage point of the condamne as nameless "curieux" and, like the indifferent spectators at the trial, take on the appearance in his eyes of mere spectres: "Je leur trouvais des airs de fantomes" (281). Thus, the condamne tries to resist paralysis from a closed outside gaze with his own objectifying gaze. From his viewpoint, it is no longer he, but they who become insubstantial. Even as he is fixed in his own view by their gaze, they are projected in his internal vision from the real onto the phantasmagoric plane. The underground man is heir to this paradox of vision.

The condamne, as the underground man after him, seeks also to resist the penetration of the responsive, open gaze that reflects his depths. He repudiates his own insight as hallucination. Thus, he reasons of those haunting visions instigated by the blood traces left by his predecessors on the cell walls,

Je ne suis ni visionnaire, ni superstitieux. Il est probable que ces idees me donnaient un acces de fievre; mais pendant que je revais ainsi, il m'a semble tout a coup que ces noms fatals etaient ecrits avec du feu sur le mur noir; un tintement de plus en plus precipite a eclate dans mes oreilles; une lueur rousse a rempli mes yeux; et puffs ii m'a paru que le cachot etait plein d'hommes, d'hommes etranges qui portaient leur tete dans leur main gauche, et la portaient par la bouche, parce qu'il n'avait pas de chevelure ... (294)

I am neither a visionary, nor a superstitious man. It is likely that these ideas induced a bout of fever; but while I was dreaming like this, it seemed to me all of a sudden that these fatal names were written with fire on the black wall; an increasingly intense clanging resounded in my ears; a reddish light filled my eyes; and then it seemed to me that the cell was full of men, of strange men [each of whom] carried [his] head in [his] left hand, and carried it by the mouth because it had no hair ...

With his emphatic qualifications-"Je ne suis visionnaire," "pendant que je revais," Il' m'a semble," "il m'a paru"-he frames these grotesque phantasms with an apparently rational, objective vision. Recognizing the potential madness arising from an infinite refraction of the self-that creative madness fleshed out by Goliadkin in view of his endless string of projected doubles-he interrupts the narrative of his vision with constant blinks, as it were, and attempts to refocus. Nevertheless, that alternate reality insistently infiltrates his consciousness through his sight. If his cell is retrospectively repopulated by resuscitated predecessors who have become both doubles and interlocutors, they fill his cell only after an infernal light fills his eyes.' Thus, his eyes frame the actual and pathological space he inhabits. Even when he actually closes his eyes, the meaning of those phantasms with severed heads still filters into consciousness through sight: `J'ai ferme les yeux avec horreur, alors j'ai vu plus distinctement" ("I closed my eyes with horror, and then I saw more distinctly," 294). Having lost a personal history, he incorporates a collective memory of the guillotine. He sees himself grotesquely doubled.

The condamne is again faced with a fantastical, penetrating refraction of himself in the infernal vision of the chain gang, watched from the cell to which he has been transferred for a better view. While it is the dehumanizing spectacle of the ritual linking of the convicts to the chain that is introduced by the condamne with the remark `J'ai vu, ces fours passes, une chose hideuse" ("I have seen, these past days, a hideous thing," 295), it is the image of himself in their collective eyes, signifying an infernal communion, which horrifies him to the point of fainting. This reflexive vision is also framed by a presumably objective and realistic viewpoint, that of the "physiological sketch," with its disinterested narrator observing and commenting on social and linguistic particularities.' Yet the realist vision shifts to the phantasmagoric, as spectator and spectacle undergo carnivalesque reversals and interpenetration, in their darkest and most violent manifestations. At first set apart from the tumult, with the objective vantage point of the author who stumbles upon an unfamiliar city scene, the condamne narrator attests: "Tout Bicetre semblait rire, chanter, courir, danser" while "seul, muet dans ce vacarme, seul immobile dans ce tumulte, etonne et attentif, j'ecoutais" ("All Bicetre seemed to laugh, sing, run, dance [while] alone, mute amidst the din, alone immobile in the tumult, astonished and attentive, I listened," 295). He perceives himself set apart even from other spectators. From the condamne's lofty vantage point, far removed from the dehumanizing prison courtyard, the other spectators also appear dehumanized-their faces seemingly cemented into the facade of the prison:

Rien de plus degrade, de plus nu, de plus nu, de plus miserable a l'oeil que cette quadruple facade percee d'une multitude de fenetres grillees auxquelles se tenaient cones, du has en haut, une foule de visages maigres et blames, presses les uns au-dessus des autres, comme les pierres d'un mur, ... C'etaient des prisonniers, spectateurs de la ceremonie en attendant leur jour d'etre acteurs. On eut dit des ames en peine aux soupiraux du purgatoire qui donnent sur l'enfer. (296)

There is nothing more degraded, more naked, more wretched to the eye than that quadruple facade pierced by a multitude of barred windows to which are glued, from bottom to top, thin and pallid faces, pressed one above another, like the stones of a wall.... They were the prisoners, spectators of the ceremony while awaiting their day of being actors. One might have said grieving souls at the windows of purgatory that look out onto hell.

The condamne had already distanced himself from the chain gang in his avowal to his lawyer before sentencing that he would prefer execution to their fate. Yet the presence of other imprisoned spectators, as well as the responsive gaze of the chain gang itself, finally force him also to see himself as spectacle. Behind the seemingly masked faces of the others, erupting in infernal laughter and imprecations ("On eat cru voir des masques de demons. Sur chaque visage parut une grimace"; "One might have believed he was seeing the masks of demons. A grimace adorned each face"), he observes how "tous les yeux flamboyerent, et je fus epouvante de voir tant d'etincelles reparaitre dans cette centre" ("all [those] eyes blazed, and I was horrified to see so many sparks reappear in that center," 297). The spotlights turn so that the distance between him and the stage below disappears. The blaze that appalls him in the eyes of other prisoners paralyzes him when reflected in the eyes of the convicts in the chain gang, and forces him to perceive both them and himself differently. Like the demonic fiery eyes faced by Goliadkin, their gaze sparks a fearful realization of his true position. Through their celebratory gaze, with a carnivalesque glint, the convicts compare themselves with the condamne, virtually crowning him as carnival king. In his eyes, their looks disregard the bounds of the condamne's prison and consciousness: "il me semblait que cette nuee de demons escalait ma miserable cellule" ("it seemed to me that horde of demons was scaling into my wretched cell" 303). When he again averts his gaze, his internal eye faces, even more directly, their "hideous" visages: "il me semblait entendre de plus pres encore les effrayantes voix des formats. Je crus voir leurs tetes hideuses paraitre deja au bord de ma fenetre" ("I seemed to hear from even closer the dreadful voices of the convicts. I thought I saw their hideous faces appearing already at the sill of my window," 303). Close to death and faced with the actual, rather than imaginatively projected, gaze of the other, only a brief loss of consciousness seems capable of veiling the condamne's terrible vision of himself. Indeed, restored to consciousness and his realistic authorial frame, he notes how "la foule s'ecoula. Tout ce spectacle s'evanouit comme un fantasmagorie" ("the crowd dissipated. The entire spectacle faded like a phantasmagoria," 306). His refractive visions are cumulative. He sees himself more clearly in the fantastical vision of these convicts who both appear and peer in through his window frame.

Yet even as he turns to face the internal reality revealed by others' looks, the condamne admits to faltering vision. Though he apprehends the meaning of the priest's upward gaze, he acknowledges "cependant ma vue s'est troublee" ("nevertheless, my vision is clouded," 315). Refractive vision requires a series of turns, of looks. The condamne seems capable of responding only when another looks him in the eye: he responds to his guard only when the guard repeats his question while looking at him (316); he cannot even hear the priest's long speech until the final, futile moment when the priest first seems to see him (338). At the same time, the condamne recognizes his own responsibility in evoking from others certain gazes, even as he condemns those who refuse to see-for example, the priest whose averted look empties his tired words and gestures of both sympathy and significance: "il avait l'air de reciter une lecon deja vingt fois recitee, de repasser un theme, oblitere dans sa memoire a force d'etre su. Pas un regard dans l'oeil, pas un accent dans la voix, pas un geste dans les mains" ("he seemed to be reciting a lesson already recited twenty times, of reviewing a theme, obliterated in his memory by dint of being known. Not a look in the eye, not an accent in his voice, not a gesture in his hands," 338). Only the forgetful, closed eye is fatal. Thus, although the objectifying gaze of the crowd may be unbearable-"C'est une chose insupportable que le poids de tant de regards appuyes sur vous" ("It is an unbearable thing to have the weight of so many eyes leaning on you,' 369)-and the penetrating gaze of his fellow criminal may illumine a terrible truth, both also generate the ability to face himself, to look within. His daughter's estranged gaze is fatally revealing. She sees the condamne as "un monsieur" and her father, already dead, as she declares with "ses grands yeux etonnes" ("her great astonished eyes," 359). "Regarde bien," he begs her, since only in her eyes can he perceive himself as something more than a criminal. Her forgetful gaze cancels out his personal history and turns him towards his death. In so doing, it shapes a narrative executed in light of execution. The condamne projects a corrective vision, "Peut-etre aurais-je encore le temps d'ecrire quelques pages pour [ma petite Marie], afin qu'elle les lise un jour ... il faut qu'elle sache par moi mon histoire ..." ("Perhaps I will still have time to write a few pages for [my little Marie], in order that she read them one day ... she must know my story from me . . . , " 362). But in the novel, that personal memory remains only as an ellipsis, an unwritten chapter;8 the condamne can see himself once again only in light of a collective, retrospective gaze at the guillotine.

An attentive observer, the condamne knows himself in the refracted light of others' eyes. So it is that as he leaves the courthouse and enters the carriage bearing him to his prison cell, in the gaze and words of "deux jeunes fines qui me suivaient avec des yeux avides" ("two young girls who followed me with avid eyes") he first faces his death sentence "--Bon, dit la plus jeune en battant des mains, ce sera dans six semaines!" ("`Well; said the younger, clapping her hands, `it will be in six weeks,'" 281). A realist writing with death-his own death-in view, his vision corresponds to this refracted reality, not inverted but new.

Circling into the core of city and self in the final carriage ride to his execution, the condamne's consciousness is lulled and his vision again veiled: `J'etais devenu machine comme la voiture" ("I had become a machine like the carriage"). Even so, when his "yeux s'etaient fixes machinalement sur l'insciption gravee en grosses lettres au-dessus de la grande porte de Bicetre: Hospice de la Vieillesse" ("eyes had mechanically fixed upon the inscription engraved in large letters above the great door of Bicetre: Hospice for the Aged," 320), he perceives the ironies underlying reality's illusions, as earlier he saw beneath the external order of the chain gang their eyes full of vengeance (306). His perception, the fluidity of which filters into the language and rhythm of narrative, is still qualified by his sense that this is all a dream: "Et la charette allait, allait.... et la populace riait et trepignait dans the boue, et je me laissais alter, comme a leurs reves ceux qui sont endormis" ("And the cart went on and on ... and the populace laughed and stamped in the mud, and I let myself go, as those who are asleep let themselves [go] into their dreams," 370). To his horror, when he finally steps out of the carriage onto the square (from an internal to external vantage point), the reflexive internal frame of his fantastical visions interlocks with the realist frame through which he has observed his fantastical visions objectively from the outside. With the guillotine in the spotlight, surrounded by the mob "qui devait bien voir" ("that must see well," 370), and certain of his role in this grotesque theater, he is momentarily paralyzed. But when he bespeaks his vision, his words, echoing his earlier refrain "J'ai vu une chose hideuse," now have a referent both internal and external:

"Entre les deux lanternes du quai, j'avais vu une chose sinistre.

C'etait la realite"

"Between the two lanterns of the quay, I saw something sinister.

It was reality"

In light of death, he faces himself. Reality coincides with his terrible, reflexive fantastical visions.

The condamne's final gaze, like Goliadkin's, is one of terrifying self-realization. It takes in a truth first glimpsed in the phantasmal projections of others' gazes and unmasked on the threshold of death, a truth which is indeed "une chose hideuse" grotesquely embodied in the "fatal smile" of the condamne's last interlocutor ("il m'a repondu, en souriant fatalement"; "he answered me, smiling fatally," 371). Goliadkin faces a variant of this smile in the "evil, infernal joy [with which] the two eyes [of his judge] blazed" ("zlovesheiu, adskoiu radostiiu blesteli eti dva glaza:' Sochineniia I, 229). Trying to mollify the spectre of Christian Ivanovich, Goliadkin will likewise timidly echo the protests and hopes muttered "faiblement" by the condamne to his illusive judge ("un juge, un commissaire, un magistrat, je ne sais de quelle espece"; "a judge, a commissioner, a magistrate, of what sort I don't know," 371).9 Parodoxically, the implication of Goliadkin's and the condamne's imprecations is that they have at the end of the narrative faced their fates full on. The temporal circularity of the underground man's narrative suggests a similar damning self-knowledge. Significantly, the hero's is the vantage point from which these abruptly broken narratives finally look at death.10 Although the hour of death marks one ending of Hugo's fiction (followed by others, such as the facsimile that reprises speech internal to the condamne's narrative), and the narrator of The Double records Goliadkin's shriek, neither narrative shuts out the profound realization of the hero.

iii. Reflective Aesthetic Vision: Balzac to Tolstoy

While the dying hero in Balzac's, Flaubert's and Tolstoy's fictions also glimpses in the eyes of his spectators the irrationality underlying a masked reality, he is unable to sustain or articulate his vision. On the brink of death, gazes remain averted. There is no refracted, interpenetrating light in the exchanged gaze, but rather a veiled interior illumination, often illusory and fleeting.

In the delirious lucidity that precedes Goriot's final delusion and death, he momentarily faces the irrational truth from which he has averted his eyes all his life. Having lost everything, including his illusions, the old man is left with only a penetrating reflection. Even with this inversion of his reality in view, he recognizes that "Elles auraient demande A me crever les yeux,je leur aurait dit: 'Crevezles!'" ("Had they asked to gouge out my eyes, I would have said to them: 'Gouge them out,'" Le Pere Goriot 261). He sees clearly reflected in Rastignac's eyes the irrationality of his love for his daughters and their role as his executioners: "Elles se sont bien venges de mon affection, elles m'ont tenaille comme des bourreaux" ("They avenged themselves well of my affection; they placed me on the rack like executioners," 259). His vision of a "parricide" (261) in which his daughters are capable "de marcher sur le cadavre de son pere" ("of trampling their father's corpse," 260) reprises exactly what Rastignac has witnessed in "le spectacle de ce lit de mort" ("the spectacle of his deathbed," 254): "cet elegant parricide," "elle etait capable de marcher sur le corps de son pere" ("this elegant parricide," "she was capable of trampling on her father's corpse," 245-46). "Oui,je le vois" ("Yes, I see it," 261), Goriot asserts with a rage that echoes Lear's. But Goriot faces a harsher realization than Lear; Rastignac is an ambivalent stand-in for Cordelia, because he is implicated in Goriot's betrayal. Nevertheless, Rastignac's eyes, speaking a terrible truth, are warmer than the frozen fate Goriot finds, like the condamne, in eyes that are averted or closed to him: "Depuis le jour ou leurs yeux n'ont plus rayonne sur moi, j'ai toujours ete en hiver ici" ("Since the day their eyes stopped shining on me, I have always been in winter here," 260).

In the spectacle reflected in Rastignac's eyes, Balzac also constructs a theatrical objectification. At least momentarily conscious of this theater, Goriot casts himself in the guise of a tragic hero (264). While protesting "je suis gueri si je les vois" ("I will be healed if I see them," 263), he knows je vais mourir sans les voir, mes fines" ("I will die without seeing them, my daughters," 264). Yet he chooses finally to enter blindly into his role, to fuse with it and thus to lose consciousness of himself as actor. His last vision marks a return to delusion. In the final throws of his delirium he mistakes Bianchon and Rastignac for his "anges" ("angels," 269). His dying face is a "masque," and when he opens his eyes for the last time it is only "par l'effet d'une convulsion" ("as an effect of a convulsion," 271)-his look is horrible and blind. Ultimately, like Balzac's pere Grandet, "la mort de cet homme ne contrasta-t-elle point avec sa vie" (Eugenie Grandet 216); his vision in death is as circumscribed and illusory as it was in life. For Goriot the carriage, literally and metaphorically, comes too late. The carriage that follows his funeral procession is empty. Goriot sustains no interior vision.

Dostoevsky found in Balzac's Grandet and Goriot models for Prokharchin and his old "pere" Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov. Prokharchin more comically and pathetically embodies Grandet's avarice and narrowness of vision. Karamazov shares Goriot's insight and, as he peers out the window for his Grushenka, his chosen blindness. Both, like Goriot, project their own vision of themselves. Even as a wooden buffoonish figure, Prokharchin insists on his own authority and vision, polemicizing explicitly with the heroes of Gogol's "Nos" ("The Nose") and "Shinel'" ("The Overcoat"). On the one hand, he is as invisible in death as is Goriot, sharing with him the constantly shifting stage of urban boarding house with its indifferent, perpetually hungry boarders as spectators. On the other hand, the squinting gaze of Prokharchin's corpse hauntingly penetrates characters and narrator, while Goriot's dead eyes are definitively closed (272). Death in Balzac's fiction is seen finally from the outside: filtered both through a compassionate objectivity, as pronounced by the doctor's "quoiqu'il n'y ait aucun espoir, il faut respecter en lui la nature humaine" ("although there is no hope, one must respect human nature in him," 267), and an indifferent one, as in the boarding painter's dinner remark "il parait que nous allons avoir un petit mortorama la haut?" ("it seems as though we're going to have a little deathorama up there?" 272). From the curtailed gaze of the dead hero, the fiction opens out onto Rastignac's view of Paris, both panoramic and penetrating. Yet the narrator suggests the limits of Rastignac's vision. Retreating to a distance, the narrator brings Rastignac's frame of vision into view and prefigures his fate in that view of the city from the city of the dead.

The vision of the dying consciousness in Tolstoy's fictions is striking, like that of Balzac's Goriot, in its flickering illumination and authorial circumscription. Facing death, Tolstoy's heroes suddenly see life as a fantastical illusion. Alternately, they seek refuge in that illusion, averting their gazes from death, or turn towards the inner light of death; but there is no lasting interpenetration or inter-- illumination between the internal and external lights. The outside gaze cannot live in the light of death, and the inward gaze cannot translate death's insight onto the surface of life. So Levin, when he sees his own mortality reflected in the bitter gaze of his dying brother Nikolai, cannot sustain his look. Nikolai also turns away, and neither can express what each has witnessed. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei's visions of light are utterly disengaged from reality. They are neither sparked by nor illumine anyone else's vision. Only the narrator can share his vision of what underlies reality. But for the other characters, Andrei's glance is inscrutable, distant, blank. Indeed, Andrei's apparently most ethical option is to avert his gaze, to close his eyes, not to force on others a light in which they cannot live. For as Jackson notes in his "Ethics of Vision,' in Tolstoy's view man "can only limp toward the light." Jackson observers how Pierre faces his humanity as he looks directly at an execution, exchanging an identifying gaze with the condemned man. However, unlike the Dostoevskian hero who seems unable to avert his gaze from death, Pierre hesitates.11 He focuses his vision only after averting it two times before. Later, when Karataev's dying gaze seeks communion with Pierre's, there is no judgement cast on Pierre's refusal to respond. On the contrary, the narrator seems to approve of his averted eyes. In Tolstoy's fictional cosmos, the gaze at death cannot and should not be sustained, nor the insight of the dying translated into the reality of the living.

Yet there is a significant internal illumination for the dying in Tolstoy's fictions. Tolstoy seems to reprise in "Three Deaths" the scene from Le dernier jour d'un condamne in which the two girls gaze at the condamne getting into his carriage. In Tolstoy's short tale, a stationmaster's daughter Masha and her friend Akyusha peer through the window of a carriage at a dying woman (the first of the three dying persons whose fates Tolstoy recounts, and who are connected through casual encounters12). In their gaze and banter, the dying woman perceives, as did the condamne, the horrid spectacle of her death: "it is clear how terrible [a sight] I have become" ("vidno, ia strashno stala," Rasskazy 198). Despite this realization, and unlike the condamne, she immediately averts her gaze. Not only she but others who are close to her turn away from her gaze with its unbearable recognition of her condition: her husband, servant, and doctor flee into the inn to eat and live. For Tolstoy, life (and sustained narrative) seems incompatible with vision on the brink of death. The dying woman remains isolated in her carriage, and the dialogue between gazes is immediately shut down. Although she knows her fate, even on her deathbed she insists, like Goriot, on closing her eyes to maintain her illusions (204). Ultimately, she too is reduced to an unseeing corpse. Further, her blindness and immobility are ironized by the narrator; though her corpse has an attentive expression, there is no sign of comprehension: "Nothing moved" ("nichto ne dvigalos.'" 205). The narrator questions whether the corpse has even now understood anything (that is, has gained an insight that belongs only to surplus authorial vision). The emptied ritual pronouncements of the priest over this body recall the priest's insignificant words and vacant gaze in Le dernier jour Neither the corpse nor the eyes watching it can project a signifying vision of reality; instead, we find, as Bakhtin notes, the finalizing penetrating gaze of the narrator.13

If, as Bakhtin writes, Tolstoy presents "death as a stage of life ... illuminating that life, as the optimal point for understanding and evaluating that life in its entirety" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 69), on the brink of death the vision of Tolstoy's characters (as opposed to that of his penetrating narrators) is nevertheless fraught with ambivalence. We might consider an instance from Anna Karenina, when the heroine's flickering realizations, like those of the woman in "Three Deaths," are cast into doubt by the narrator's framing vision. As Anna looks out the window of her carriage just before her death, her vision of the world is reversed. People seem to be gliding backwards, uncovering recesses of the self as they recede: "it was as if she saw their story and all the hidden recesses of their soul" ("kak budto videla ikh istopiiu i vse zakoulki ikh dushi, perenesia svet na nikh, X, 361). Her spotlight maintains a distance between her and others, denying them the possibility of seeing her deeply. The narrator suggests that her own visions are projections, similar to the gazes that fail to penetrate her, while both she and the narrator can see that her real horror is veiled to others, that only her trappings-her veil, her lace-are visible (X, 363). Her gaze is opaque, unrevealing. She is equally inscrutable to the young men "shouting with laughter and gazing into her face" ("zagliadyvaia ei v litso i so smekha kricha"), to the boy selling kvas who "didn't take his eyes off her" ("ne spuskal s nee glaz"), and to curious ladies and spectacled gentleman on the platform. At the same time as she knows her true self to remain unseen, she seeks escape from this spectacle of herself.

Although Anna, like the condamne, is haunted by fantastic visions, she also maintains the spotlight between herself and the crippled peasant in whom she foresees her fate. She can make no sense of how her phantasmal projection can surface into reality. That is, no self-realization is contained in the abrupt interpenetration of internal and external worlds. Anna's visions, internally generated, remain internally circumspect. She turns away from outside reflections; to her everything is "repulsive to look at." Indeed, "Why not put out the candle?" The only potentially generative illumination she knows is reflected internally, not by these other blind gazes, but rather in a recollection of her childhood. Such a vision is fatally solipsistic. There is no infusion of oxygen to feed this flickering candle. And its blaze is insufficient to compel Anna's fixed gaze away from the wheels of the train, on which she still feels that she is riding.

Like Anna, Flaubert's Emma Bovary, approaching the moment of her death, looks out a carriage window. Hearing a blind man's chant outside the hirondelle, Emma suffers a hallucinatory vision of the "face hideuse du miserable" ("hideous face of the wretched man," 401). This face reflects her own fate and, in particular, her blindness. Although it is unclear whether at this point she recognizes in the blind man a grotesque double, the narrator certainly perceives in her gaping expression ("beante," 401) and vacant gaze ("ses yeux agrandis regardaient vaguement autour d'elle"; "her widened eyes looked vaguely about her," 391) a reflection of the blind man. On her deathbed, Emma's eyes are open to this horrific vision. But it is a vision she cannot communicate. In the torchlight her mother's "grands yeux" terrify Emma's daughter, who turns away. In the end whatever horrific light Emma perceives is darkened: "ses yeux palissaient comme deux globes de lampe qui s'eteignent" ("her eyes were fading like two globes of a lamp that is going out," 400), just as Anna's "candle" is extinguished "forever." The narrator's pronouncement of Emma's death, as with Anna, finalizes the heroine. Tolstoy's narrator sees Anna's impenetrable, ambivalent "expression-pitiful on the lips and horrible in the fixed open eyes" ("zhalkoe v gubakh i uzhasnoe v ostanovivshikhsia nezakrytykh glazakh, vyrazhenie," X, 378). This expression certainly haunts Vronskii, but not as insight emanating from within or reflected in Anna's own vision. He projects onto that gaze his independent internal reality. The eyes of the dying consciousness are granted neither agency nor authority to transform fictive world or fictional frame. In Tolstoy's death scenes, eyes are shut, permitting no refracted light to animate fictional consciousness.

In the fading light of her death, Emma Bovary fleetingly experiences a surprising exchange of looks: she watches her husband and realizes "il la regardait avec des yeux d'une tendresse comme elle n'en avait jamais vu" (391). Nevertheless, her husband's tender gaze can offer no more sustaining depth of insight than Anna's retrospection. Though Charles stands "pale comme une statue, et les yeux rouges comme des charbons" ("pale as a statue, with eyes as red as coal," 398-99), Flaubert depicts a glinting gaze that cannot penetrate and recast the reality of the dying consciousness (as the fiery gaze does in Hugo's or Dostoevsky's fictions). Ultimately, Emma's vision, like Anna's, is wholly internal, receiving no light from Charles's eyes and offering him no insight. Emma's vision is shared only by the narrator and is potentially ironized from that vantage. In Emma's spectacle of death, as in Goriot's death scene or in Tolstoy's "Three Deaths:' the spectators turn away without comprehension from the gaze of the dying to return to their ordinary fare-food and illusion.

It is such a failure or refusal to see beyond the surface of ordinary life that Tolstoy's narrator exposes in the opening to "The Death of Ivan Il'ich." As the characters gather around Ivan Il'ich's corpse, they are a study in false projections and averted gazes, subjected to the narrator's irony and the ambivalence of the almost seeing corpse. The light (svet) of society (svet) is exposed by the narrator as false. If in his investigation of "The Death of Ivan Il'ich,' Jackson deftly links the "experience of light (svet)," meaning true revelation, with the "experience of the world (svet)," it is nevertheless true that those visions coincide only in being something like opposite ends of a scope. Examining the pity awakened in both Ivan Il'ich and his son by their moment of contact, Jackson generalizes: "To see truly, for Tolstoy, is to know deeply; the act of two people deeply looking at or into each other is, for Tolstoy, an ethical act" (17). However, the contact that evokes Ivan Il'ich's insight is as accidental as Goriot's convulsive grasp of Bianchon and Rastignac as he is dying. The vision instigated by Ivan Il'ich's hand touching his son, like Goriot's vision, results only in an internal, not dialogic, realization, as is already evident in the opening, but chronologically final, scene of the story. Ivan Il'ich's son is indifferent to his vision, solipsistic in his preoccupation with his own sexual awakening. Although there is a communion in Tolstoy's work that is only realized in the interpenetrating gaze-for instance, the spark that animates Pierre's and Natasha's exchanged glances in War and Peace, when Pierre returns from his captivity-such realizations are temporary and do not translate into sustained dialogic communication (verbal or visual). Moreover, this spark between fictional subjects is always missing from that final vision facing death-- as in Natasha's last meeting with Andrei. The gaze of Tolstoy's dying hero ignites only his own consciousness and the ironic vision of the narrator.

In "The Death of Ivan Il'ich," gazes (let alone words) exchanged between the living (Petr Ivanovich and Shvartz, for instance) as well as the living and the dead (Petr Ivanovich and Ivan Il'ich) are burdened with masks and misapprehension. Even the respectively unsentimental and tearful gazes of Ivan Il'ich's servant Gerasim and son Vasya are averted, sideways glances, albeit full of genuine pity. Tolstoy seems to suggest that the sideways gaze is the most ethical insofar as it seeks to spare the dying the indignity Tolstoy perceived in facing one's decaying body through another's eyes. At the same time, the sideways glance obliquely reflects that decay, if the dying man should choose to see. Such a gaze contrasts with those of Ivan Il'ich's brother-in-law or wife Praskovia Fedorovna, for instance, which seek to distort the reflections they register directly. But finally, only Tolstoy's outside narrator sees the dying man clearly through all these oblique and averted gazes. The narrative begins with the corpse as a fact in view of a third-person narrator. This outside perspective is maintained in the recounting of Ivan Il'ich's life until the onset of illness. With death in view, the narrative shifts to the internal visions articulated by interior monologue and free indirect discourse. Increasingly sharing the vantage point of his narrator, Ivan Il'ich begins to see both the sideways and direct but distorting gazes as mirrors, on both metaphysical and physical levels. In life as well as on the verge of death Ivan Il'ich defines himself only through the flattened, mirroring gaze of others. However, until that reflection is illumined by death, he recognizes no distinction between another's gaze and his own-there is no frame for the mirror, no conception of it as such, with its implied distance and distortions. The other's gaze is subsumed by his own flattened expectation. In this sense his reflected vision is internal or projected; the other does not exist outside himself, so that there is no exterior, only interior, reflection.

It is only when he begins to die that Ivan Il'ich distinguishes the distorting reflections in how others envision him and, more significantly, the refractive difference-the autonomy and ethical responsibility-of another's honest gaze. In dying, he is alienated from others, and only at this remove is he able to see the framed reflection: he consciously compares himself to Shvartz, turns from his brother-in-law's horrified eyes to face his wasted body in a mirror, and in his narrative reflections stands ironically outside himself. While he perceives himself both in and distinct from the other, he is no longer subject to the narrator's irony, but rather shares the narrator's point of view. Nevertheless, this new vision is also solipsistic and self-pitying. He gains in substantiality only as those spectators who distort or avert their gaze become more insubstantial. Like the condamne, he can see only those who face him; but, unlike the condamne, he does not respond to them, does not engage them in any dialogue. They do not enter into and refract consciousness. Gerasim, who has heretofore been invisible in his household, becomes visible because he faces Ivan Il'ich. But he is seen only in the physical moment that he sees Ivan Il'ich; the sight of him is external and his vision of Ivan Il'ich is opaque or not even in view. Ivan Il'ich's re-vision of himself, isolated from others, is horrific to the point of insanity. Facing himself dying, Ivan Il'ich turns his body towards the wall, closes his eyes, and begins to howl.

Punctuating his vision, the "U! Uu! U!" (88) of Ivan Il'ich echoes Goriot's suffering "Ah! Ah! Ah!" It articulates the rupture in his self-perception, the moment of being set apart. As Jackson notes, on a phonetic level, this howl marks a movement on the plain of insight from negation ("neuzheli") to confrontation with death ("uzhasno"). Yet Ivan Il'ich's recognition of something sinister in his own death is illumined by and illumines no external reality. Unlike the condamne's vision, it responds to no one; it is irresponsible. Ivan Il'ich's insight is lost in the fictive world and ironized by the fictive frame. His incomprehensible cries compell others to look, but give them no way of understanding what he sees. In this sense, his speech is as closed off as Prince Andrei's silence facing death. Further, the degree to which he himself understands what he sees is ambivalent: Ivan Il'ich recognizes that all was not as it should have been, not seemly, or not as it seemed ("Da, vse bylo ne to"). Yet that realization elicits a bewildered and emphatic phenomenological question in reply to which the narrative offers only silence: "Chto zhe 'to'?" ("What then is 'it'?") The significance of that final illumination is deflected by the ambivalent gaze with which Ivan Il'ich's corpse looks at the world in the beginning of the tale. To others within the fictional frame, that opening gaze remains obscure; the narrator alone does not dismiss it, but he also elucidates its limits.

By the end of the fiction, the narrator compares Ivan Il'ich's illumination to "the sensation one sometimes experiences in a railway carriage when one thinks one is going backwards while one is really going forwards and suddenly becomes aware of the real direction" ("chto byvalo ... v vagone zheleznoi dorogi, kogda dumaesh', chto edesh' veered, a edesh' nazad, i vdrug uznaesh' nastoiashchee napravlenie,' 88). Metaphorically, Ivan Il'ich is also confined in a carriage. The kind of realization this vantage point can offer in Tolstoy's fiction, however, is distinct from that of Hugo's and Dostoevsky's heroes, who recognize a direction in which they have been going all along. Their refractive vision has simply opened up the way for their consciousness to appropriate and redirect narrative vision. The gaze through Ivan Il'ich's carriage window, as with Anna's in her fatal carriage, is unidirectional. It penetrates reality without being penetrated by it. Ivan Il'ich pities the tear-veiled gaze on the outside (in his wife and son's eyes), but cannot communicate to them the light he has experienced in his fantastical falling through the sack. There is no stepping out of the carriage as does the condamne, no glimpse that breaks down the boundaries of the underground. His isolation is complete. Thus, communication between internal and external realities breaks down: his garbled "forgive" ("prosti") becomes "let me through" ("propusti," 88) and alone bespeaks, subconsciously, his vision of escape. The narrative ends with the light he sees, but chronologically circles back to the beginning of the tale where that light ignites no lasting realization from his viewers. His gaze is finalized by Vasya's impure rather than illumined thoughts and Petr Ivanovich's capacity to turn away. Thus, Ivan Il'ich's internal vision is subject to the narrator's ironic viewpoint and incapable of extending beyond a closed narrative circle -the infernal circling and circumlocution of the Dantean schema. Tolstoy's fiction illustrates, motivically and formally, the irresponsible aversion both character and reader may exercise in relation to the truth reflected in the others' gaze. Should the reader also blink, there is no light refracted beyond the fictional frame.

iv. Conclusions

In each of these nineteenth-century realist fictions regarding death, the dying hero's reflexive gaze challenges other ways of seeing reality, self, and social or authorial responsibility. Yet these dying visions are granted different degrees of authority in relation to narrative frames. Although the dying consciousness is represented both as it is seen and as it sees in fictions by Balzac, Flaubert, and Tolstoy, ultimately the dying man's eyes are closed, his delusions and insights minimally refracted, ironized, or even extinguished in the fictional frame. Conversely, in Hugo's and Dostoevsky's works the vision of the dying hero authorizes potential insight for other fictive subjects and revises the realist narrative. The hero's eye forces constant revision, a circling back that re-envisions the fictional world. The reader must respond to the perspective of the hero. As the hero realizes himself, literally, by challenging his narrator's as well as other characters' projections, his vision spirals insightfully beyond the fictional frame. This refractive gaze makes author and reader responsible to revisions; its light intensifies and expands interpretations. Reflective fictions shut down speculation. In his refractory, fragmentary writing, Hugo's condamne bequeaths to the reader a blinking and finally unblinkered eye facing death. It is an eye open to the reader as it translates its complex turns, blinks, and refraction onto the page. Dostoevsky's works incorporate within the fictive world a reader dialogically responsible to the dying hero's gaze. The interpenetrating gaze on the verge of death frames a fiction that is infinitely refractive.

Princeton University

1 Conversely, in his extensive critical survey of The Poetics of the Mind's Eye: Literature and the Psychology of Imagination, Christopher Collins offers several complex spatio-temporal models of verbal imag

ing translated into narrative form by exploring such visual modalities as saccadic movement, depth perception and vergence, retrospection, stored imagery, and introspection. At the mid-Atlantic American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies conference held at Princeton University in March 2000, Sarah Mohler presented an incisive survey of the spatio-temporal dimensions in Collins's modes of the visual. Part of a dissertation investigating visual modalities in Tolstoy's fiction, her paper, "Visual Ethics and Reader Imaging in War and Peace," extended Collins's insights from poetic to prosaic texts.

2 For Bakhtin, the mirror reflection falsifies and flattens the self. Incapable of the depth perception available to a chronotopically rounded human gaze, the mirror fuses internal and external, self and other. The gaze in the mirror is an oblique, naive, stolen glance without the lively capacity for dialogue that exists in the gaze exchanged with another. In a fragmentary paragraph entitled "Chelovek u zerkalo" (man at the mirror), Bakhtin describes "the naivete of fusing oneself and the other in the mirror image ... I do not have a point of view on myself from without. I have no approach to my own inner image" In the mirror, "I do not look at myself `from the inside out' with my own eyes on the world, but rather look at myself with the eyes of the world." For a longer discussion of these points, see Art and Answerability 27-29.

3 These particular images suggest the degree to which Dostoevsky's narrative "emerges from under" Gogol's "Overcoat" ("Shinel'"). Yet Dostoevsky critically complicates Gogol's play with the fictive subject's capacities of perception. Gogol's hero, Akaki Akakievich, blindly walks through St. Petersburg's misty streets, pathetically oblivious to both its sadism and seductions. Eyes opened to his beloved new overcoat, he nevertheless averts his gaze from the thugs who steal it, his erstwhile executioners, since his existence is vested in the pathetic beatific vision of the coat. Both Akaki and his narrator are fraught with unexplained moments of insight and blindness. Their vision fantastically deforms St. Petersburg's landscape. But Akaki's vision ultimately is subsumed by that of the narrator. His averted gaze allows only for a vision that fades into the Petersburg mist. Neither Dostoevsky's narrator, nor his hero, may avert their gaze. Neither may they penetrate the other's consciousness, but rather see themselves more clearly in light of each other's point of view. Tynianov and Bakhtin explore, in terms not of vision but of other aspects of characterization, the humanization and authorial agency of Dostoevsky's parodic and stylized revisions of Gogolian subjects.

4 For Bakhtin, however, the word is privileged over the gaze. It has greater permanence, and, once in the world, the word is alive. It passes from mouth to mouth and as it is re-accented, or double-voiced, it gains new intentions and accrues meaning. Presumably, like human consciousness, the word that has such a capacity to remember also forgets. The word also has the capacity to expand the consciousness of the person who can hear it in various contexts and recall its other meanings. The reflexive gaze, in Bakhtin's work, is rather more limited, relegated to the narrow frame of the mirror. It does not function in Bakhtin's theory as it does in the literature that he reads, as an important part of the communicative code that is capable of penetrating insight.

5 If Dostoevsky foregrounds the fantastical form of his tale in his preface, Hugo goes to great lengths, not only within his preface, but within the fiction itself, to lend it authenticity. The condamne's narrative is increasingly concerned with the conditions of its own writing, and records, in its most improbable moments, how (with what instruments, on what surface, in what space and time, with what frame of mind) it is composed. Writing is the act that apparently delays execution; and the conch-mni records his request for paper and pencil when he is already at the Place de Greve.

6 The fire that the condamne envisions becomes literal in Dostoevsky's tale of Prokharchin. The hero foresees his fate in a fire, first witnessed, then hallucinated. As for the condamne, the boundaries between reality and pathological recollection are blurred; in his comic-pathetic delirium, Prokharchin acts as though he is literally on fire. What he sees is false, but his insight regarding his fate and others' intentions is true. Prokharchin also perceives himself most clearly through the refracting gaze of the other. This is true even in imaginary space: in his delirium, in response to the imagined gaze of another petty clerk, Prokharchin runs through the city with a horde of clerks indistinguishable from himself. He is refractively doubled, like the condamne and Golyadkin, through the other's look.

7 Originating in the Parisian gazette in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the physiological sketch is a quintessentially urban genre describing the physical, social, cultural cityscape, and the city as it informs the internal landscape of consciousness. Foundational physiognomies of the city include Retif de la Bretonne's Les Nuits de Paris, ou le Spectateur nocturne (1788-94), Louis-- Sebastien's Tableau de Paris (1781-88), and Edmond Texier's Tableau de Paris (1852). The Parisian novel from Hugo and Balzac through Proust incorporates the voice and vantagepoint of the chronicler. The narrator in the urban nineteenth-century Russian novel is likewise informed by a coupling of the Russian chronicle tradition with the Parisian physiological sketch, filtering via the feuilleton into the serialized novel.

8 The "editor" explains away the missing chapter: "On n'a pu encore retrouver les feuillets qui se rattachaient a celui-ci. Peut-etre, comme ceux qui suivent semblent l'indiquer, le condamne n'a-t-il pas eu le temps de les ecrire. Il e'tait tard quand cette pensee lui est venue" ("As of yet, it has not been possible to find the pages that were attached to this one. It may be, as [the pages] that follow seem to indicate, that the condemned man did not have time to write them. It was late when the thought [of doing so] came to him," 363). Hugo retrospectively insisted on the necessary anonymity of the condamne for an effective plea against the death penalty.

9 Dostoevsky's Prokharchin also protests his fate by uttering imprecations and envisioning alternate realities, but he is silenced by the parodied, buffoonish Zimoveikin, precursor to other ambivalent authorial figures. The underground man's protests are muted not only by the editor/author's turn away, but also by his own circumlocutions. They continue off the page, it it were.

10 In the more comic-pathetic death of Prokharchin, the sense of the fiction is left open to the corpse's protesting wink. The other (character, narrator, reader) is responsible to the fantastical reality refracted through the hero's autoscopic eyes-a vision as incisive and illumining as any monocular authorial reflection informed by a naturalist aesthetic (with its microscopic dissection and panoramic distension), but originating in a more lively, dialogic refraction in the eyes of others.

11 In The Idiot, for instance, Dostoevsky's Myshkin cannot avert his gaze from an execution.

12 These encounters are not dialogic encounters for the heroes themselves-they enter into dialogue only for the narrator and reader; hence these encounters generate no insight for the heroes. Even within the narrative frame, these tales seem to turn away from each other. That the three deaths lie outside each other's purview only reprises the general impossibility in Tolstoy's fictions for interpenetrating visions, particularly for any exchange between the living and the dying.

13 Although Bakhtin's critique of Tolstoy's "Tri smerti" is generally problematic, he nevertheless aptly observes the narrator's outside, finalizing gaze at death: "All three lives and deaths illuminate one another, but only for the author, who is located outside them and takes advantage of his external position to give them a definitive meaning, to finalize them" (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 70). Only the narrator has the "surplus of vision" that makes the story cohere, and "he does not extend his own point of view on a character to the character's own consciousness ... likewise the character is not able to respond to the author's point of view" (70). Bakhtin does not consider the carriage and the road as forums for dialogic realization in the narrative frame, determined in part by the gaze of the passerby.

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