Rudin

 Further choices from upstairs have been highly satisfactory. It seems I've read some good books in my time if only I could remember them.

In Turgenev's Rudin, the central character's phrase-mongering and the profundity he is credited with are found to be superficial. I had earlier abandoned A.J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic after the introduction not being able to accuse it of that but having been reminded that however much I like those bits of Sartre, Derrida, Wittgenstein et al, philosophy soon loses me in its language games. For a paperback of its age, its in good condition as a result of how little I looked at it at university and since. As the bible of English Empiricism it is as close to common sense as phiolosophers get but one needs to know what 'analytical' means, what a proposition is and, as I did in a poem 25 years ago, 'I start to doubt what meaning means'. It's absurd that part of my degree was in Philosophy. It's absurd that empiricism should be so abstract. Everything is absurd and I retreated early doors to engage with literature instead. Not that I hold it against Freddie Ayer. I'm sure he and G.E. Moore are on the right side but in the same way as I admire the work of chess players like Jose Capablanca without understanding how they do what they do, I have to take most of that on trust.

Katherine Mansfield's Prelude, in Bliss and Other Stories, is slightly less opaque but still very subtle. The relationships between the mostly female characters are finely delineated as per their position in society counterpointed with their attitudes and personalities. Not much is apparently happening until a revelatory ending in which Beryl sees herself as 'playing a part', perhaps in a similar way to Gabriel Conroy finding himself revealed to himself at the end of The Dead.

I can almost feel an essay suggesting itself on the hollowness inside us as a central theme in literature ranging through Hamlet, the way Larkin's Arundel Tomb undermines its portentous final line, L'Etranger, any number of others and Rudin. 

 

When I first read La Chute by Camus decades ago, I missed the irony which is the main point and one could easily do the same with Rudin if one applied such simple-minded reading to it. He's erudite, charming, intellectual and at least to begin with and in the right circles, convincing. Except that he's clever but empty and, being ungenuine, can't build anything permanent. The ending, appended by Turgenev later, in which he is shot while posturing as a revolutionary, is perhaps almost as gratuitous as he is but we have been beguiled by him in the early chapters and feel robbed, if no longer all that sympathetic. I'm sure we also feel the wiser, though, and the rest of the Turgenev section upstairs are lined up invitingly along with a new addition ordered today. 

 

Never have the books stored up for so many years come in quite so useful. I just go and look around and pick one and am usually impressed. That is what they are there for.