Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace' by Gary Saul Morson


Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace'
Title : Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace'
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0804717184
ISBN-10 : 9780804717182
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 336
Publication : First published January 1, 1987

For decades, the formal peculiarities of War and Peace disturbed Russian and Western critics, who attributed both the anomalous structure and the literary power of the book to Tolstoy's "primitive," unruly genius. Using that critical history as a starting point, this volume recaptures the overwhelming sense of strangeness felt by the work's first readers and thereby illuminates Tolstoy's theoretical and narratological concerns. The author demonstrates that the formal peculiarities of War and Peace were deliberate, designed to elude what Tolstoy regarded as the falsifying constraints of all narratives, both novelistic and historical. Developing and challenging the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, Morson explores Tolstoy's account of the work's composition in light of various myths of the creative process. He proposes a theory of "creation by potential" that incorporates Tolstoy's main the "openness" of each historical moment; the role of chance in history and within narrative patterns; and the efficacy of ordinary events, "hidden in plain view," in shaping history and individual psychology. In his reading of Tolstoy, he demonstrates how we read literary works within the "penumbral text" of associated theories of creativity.

Hidden in Plain View: Narrative and Creative Potentials in 'War and Peace' Reviews

  • Leo

    God-tier lit crit. Comprehensible, illuminating, never weird or Freudian. Love you Gary! Couldn't have read War and Peace without you.

  • Emily Andrews

    When I grow up, I would like to be Gary Saul Morson.

  • Greer

    An excellent, maybe definitive, scholarly study of Tolstoy's most complex work. Morson's thesis is that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace as a challenge to (or "serious parody" of) the genres of the novel AND that of historical non-fiction writing. War and Peace tends to be interpreted as either the lawless and artless production of an observational genius (according to 19th-century critics), or as an entirely conventional representative of 19th-century realistic novels (according to contemporary critics). Morson rejects both interpretations, and makes use of Bakhtin, Russian formalism, and Tolstoy's own description of his book in order to create an entirely new reading of the work: that Tolstoy deliberately wrote an anti-novel in order to demonstrate his theory of the indeterminacy of history and psychology.

    I found chapter six the most interesting, in which Morson actually lays out the techniques Tolstoy used to create War and Peace: a serial structure, "stopping" instead of "ending," "creative potentials" instead of "algorithmic" or "inspirational" design, and many more. His description of Tolstoy's creative process is completely original and I haven't ever read anyone else mediate so well between the rational and irrational aspects of artistic production.

  • Daniel Mata Di Giuseppe

    Amazing resource for anyone undertaking War and Peace! Better to read it after you are done reading W&P itself, particularly if you want to experience what Morson calls "polyphony of incident" in full force. Give it a chance!

  • Ravi Nuxoll

    Morson succeeded in greatly enhancing my enjoyment of "War and Peace". If this book has a weakness it is that it could stand to discuss some of the most meaningful passages in the book at greater length than it does.