Death, Despondence and Detachment in Isaac Babels Stories - Book Report/Review Example

DEATH, DESPONDENCE AND DETACHMENT IN ISAAC BABEL’S SHORT STORIES Teacher’s “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place.” ---Isaac Babel Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel was born to Jewish parents in Russia in July, 1894. His humble family background and Yiddish roots did not do much to provide him with a joyful childhood in early twentieth century Russia. Having witnessed the anti-Semitic pogroms and mass-exodus aimed at the complete annihilation of the Jewish community at an early age, it is no surprise then that Babel grew up to be a writer of great descriptive detail and vicarious pith in his style of writing. It was this art of projecting fine details through the behaviour, words, and physical descriptions that he turned simple stories into classic masterpieces that would move hearts down the century. However, it was his engagement with the truthful depiction of the heinous acts committed by those in high authority that landed him in trouble with Stalin that eventually led to his execution. In Babel’s life, the loss of life and tenderness of emotion went hand in hand. Most of his literary work carries an understated preoccupation with the theme of ‘death’ and since, this preoccupation formed an indispensable part of his growing years; detachment was an inevitable consequence. His collection of thirty five short stories, by the title ‘Red Cavalry’ is the epitome of violent depictions in his work through his career. This violence and morbid details of death and murder stem from first hand accounts after being a recruit in the 1st Cavalry Army. As he floated through war-affected times, in his personal life, his several marriages and extra-marital affairs began to tell a tale of disillusionment with permanence of any sort. The only permanence that there was, was that of the insecurities of an unstable and ‘always-at-risk’ life that stayed with him for the rest of his life. As Lionel Trilling remarks about Isaac Babel: “He was captivated by the vision of two ways of being, the way of violence and the way of peace, and he was torn between the two” (Trilling, 119) As a writer, Babel always remained in the eye of controversy. The stories from ‘Red Cavalry’ like Crossing the River Zbrucz, My first goose and Salt are all stories with diverse plots and yet are tied together with the element of death in some form. ‘Crossing the River Zbrucz’ or ‘Crossing into Poland’ begins on a morbid note, which casts its shadow over the rest of the narrative. The somber mood of the story is however offset intermittently with an odd Wordsworth-like description at times. “Faint-hearted poverty closed in over my couch. Silence overcame all. Only the moon, clasping in her blue hands her round, bright, carefree face, wandered like a vagrant outside the window.” (Babel, 42) A blanket of sadness looms over the entire story looms but the reader’s heart is made to twist itself into a knot as the end unfolds.” "Good sir," said the Jewess, shaking up the feather bed, "the Poles cut his throat, and he begging them: Kill me in the yard so that my daughter shant see me die. But they did as suited them. He passed away in this room, thinking of me. -- And now I should wish to know," cried the woman with sudden and terrible violence, "I should wish to know where in the whole world you could find another father like my father?"(Babel, 43) A story that had begun with a brush of death, ended on a cold and remorseless amalgam of death, despair and despondence spilling over in the pregnant woman’s words. In another story from the ‘Red Cavalry’, My first Goose; yet again, the story opens with unmoving demands of annihilation by the Commander. Later in the story, as if to add some respite with the description of nature, the author adds “The dying sun, round and yellow as a pumpkin, was giving up its roseate ghost to the skies.” (Babel, 74) This inability to cut away the past and start with renewed vision, actually worked to Babel’s advantage as My first Goose came to be considered as one of his finer stories. Later in the same story, the author, who is the protagonist, vents out his stifled anger and despair on the landlady by killing her pet, much-loved goose. “And turning around I saw somebodys sword lying within reach. A severe-looking goose was waddling about the yard, inoffensively preening its feathers. I overtook it and pressed it to the ground. Its head cracked beneath my boot, cracked and emptied itself. The white neck lay stretched out in the dung, the wings twitched.”(Babel, 75). The use of language that evokes sympathy at the same time for both the killer and the victim highlights Babel’s ability to use language like an ornament to decorate the most horrific narrative. The story does not have a tailored end, done to death by expectation and convention. However, even with an open-ended narrative, Babel managed to bring out the sadness and profound hopelessness in the every character in the story. Interestingly, it is difficult to put one’s finger to a single word, phrase or sentence that evokes such an emotion. The entire fabric is so entwined with a sporadic sprinkle of melancholy. A similar account in the story ‘Salt’ ; that of a Russian lady trying to hitch a ride in a train full of Cossacks, who tries to deceive them by pretending she was carrying a nursing baby in her arms, while it was no more than a ‘pood of salt’. The beginning provides some solace from the merciless killings in the other stories but the end matches up to the rest with a blood-stained justification.” And I dont mind telling you straight that I threw that female citizen down the railway embankment while the train was still going. But she, being big and broad, just sat there awhile, flapped her skirts,…… I had a mind to jump out of the truck and put an end to my life or else put an end to hers. But the Cossacks took pity on me and said: "Give it her with your rifle." So I took my faithful rifle off the wall and washed away that stain from the face of the workers land and the republic.”(Babel, 126). However, every act of ruthlessness and Satanic brutality is justified in the name of War. “And we, the men of the second platoon, swear to you, dear Comrade Editor, and to you, dear comrades in the Editors office, that we will deal mercilessly with all the traitors that are dragging us to the dogs and want to turn everything upside down and cover Russia with nothing but corpses and dead grass.”(Babel, 127) One interesting aspect of Babel’s writings has been the immediate historical connect that it weaves for the reader. Even though one may immediately understand the partly autobiographical nature of Babel’s works, yet it becomes difficult to draw a clear line between the biographical and creative intelligence, juxtaposed against historical reality. Most of the traumatising descriptions in Babel’s work find poetic justification in his part-autobiographical work ‘The Story of my Dovecot’. In this story, all of the injustice and emotional agony that he had to endure because of anti-Semitic discrimination, while he was a child and an adolescent, comes across as a detached point-of view of a child. The emotions that the child is supposed and expected to endure are endured by the reader instead. Since, this story pertains to most harsh realities of his life, the reader comes to understand the source of the despair and detachment and a love for poverty and destitution in most of his stories. Since all of his stories are told from the unbiased perspective of a child, a woman, a cripple, a soldier or an old man; these stories immediately play to the reader-response theory and allow the reader to take charge of the course that his/her emotions shall take. What works to Babel’s advantage is the fact that even if the reader is oblivious of his background, the lead character is always chosen to be a person who himself is in the grip of a ruthless destiny. Thus, the acts are either justified or given the benefit of doubt to be pardoned. In all of Babel’s works, there is an identity issue that pervades and percolates the other inter-linked issues of moral structure, human decadence and alienation from self and society. These themes, as if pre empted by Babel, reflected later in his personal life as the forces that led to his unceremonious elimination from the face of the Earth. Literary sources state thus, “Babel contrasts the vitality of revolution and war against the mystery and decay of the Catholic Church in “Kostel v Novograde” (“The Church at Novograd”) (www.enotes.com). It seems that through Luitov, who was the main narrator in most of the stories in the Red Cavalry, Babel tries to seek redemption from the devilry of warfare that haunts him long after it is over. Even if one were to overlook the overpowering nausea emanating from blood and gore in the Red Cavalry, owing to the nature of the job of the army; the other stories from ‘The Tales of Odessa’ and ‘Stories’ are no less repugnant in terms of harsh realities and their harsher descriptions. In ‘The Sin of Jesus’ , the blatant declaration of Arina and Seryoga’s subsequent response to it, puts a lump in one’s throat and a weight on the heart. “When Seryoga heard this, he took off his belt and beat her like a hero, right on the belly. "Look out there," Arina says to him, "go soft on the belly. Its your stuffing, no one elses." There was no end to the beating, no end to the mans tears and the womans blood, but that is neither here nor there. “(Babel, 246) Even the comic description of Alfred the angel by the Lord himself, does not take away the helplessness with which the Lord answers Arina’s lament. In this story Babel seems to express the destiny of a community that had virtually been ignored and left to die by the Creator Himself. In the end, Arina, after being admonished by the Lord is left to suffer in misery. On realizing His sin and seeking forgiveness, Arina says : "Theres no forgiveness for you, Jesus Christ," she said. "No forgiveness, and never will be."(Babel,250). Here too, the story ends on sadness and a note of doomed hopelessness that seems to grip God and Man alike. The finality of Arina’s words resounds with an apocalyptic boom for the destitute. Even the sanctity of Heaven and the company of angels do not seem to provide any respite to the tarnished and cursed souls that were born to be tormented and deleted by cold, insipid hands. This story also projects the uncaring and two-faced nature of organized religion and how it fails to cater to the basic human need for love and security in a rational world. The frailty of relationships that Babel describes in his stories comes to light in the nature of his own relationships with the women in his life. The death of the angel after being smothered by a woman who is candid about her ‘animal nature’ depicts the death of degradation of values, morality and absence of Divine justice. From his first wife, to his mistress, he was a wanderer who would keep appearing and disappearing in the foreground of their lives as a prop, only to unload his trappings and reload his intellectual stream of thought with more inspiration. Just like the heroes of his stories who used their women to satisfy or purge one human emotion or another, Babel relied on the women of his life to serve as a coaster to his spiritually cold and damp personality. Many of his stories are often suggestive of the political largesse but such undertones are often missed or ignored in the wake of the larger monotone of death and despair. Atrocities at the hands of the powerful, e.g. in the stories ‘The Road’ and ‘Mama, Rimma and Alla’ lead one to believe in the high-handedness of the powerful through the scenes in which a teacher is shot and his genitals chopped off, for an unintended slight as well as the scene of abortion. Despite being accused of cowardice and inflammatory writing by General Buddenyi, Babel has also been lauded by critics for the “use of skaz (imitation of spoken storytelling)” (www.enotes.com). Such a stylistic device gave a much graver shadow to the prevailing emotion of despair, as it built a bridge towards reality, thus establishing creative credibility. Even the use of colours in his stories like black, grey and pastels, added to the heavy mood and funereal setting of the narrative. The use of imagery like the sunset and night-time descriptions of the moon, often added a touch of beauty, but in a manner of sadistic hedonism. In the play ‘Sunset’, mafia boss Benya and his lady love Lvovka’s merciless beating of his father are another pointer to the decaying social fabric of Russia in those times. In the early and mid-twentieth century, the nature of his writings was deemed unfit for public consumption, as they were either rated pornographic or instigating. Many of his works, thus, were either banned or removed from public libraries. It was the remorselessness in his writings that brought him a lot of flak from the Stalin government and thus led to his extermination. The loss of innocence and the depiction of the dark and the deadly in Babel’s works were clearly an insight into the psychological trauma that he went through as a child. The absence of any outlet or expression due to the nature of his racial identity, further led to the destruction of a positive outlook; if one may dare to say that war has any. However, the pent up emotion led to a creative amalgam which may shock the Romantics and hurt the sentiment of the Victorians; however, his creativity had a flavour of truth as well as poetic justice to it. The proximity of Babel’s intellectual outpourings with Maxim Gorky’s, helped him find umbrage in the intellectual Communists vision. However, the depressive and self-destructive nature of his writings drew negative attention to their liaison and Gorky warned him to mend his written word. Thereafter, Babel led a rather mysterious and inconspicuous life and his works also were either relegated to his personal collection or lost in history. As he mentioned once that he had invented a new genre of writing –‘the genre of silence’; it seems that all the stifled screaming and wailing in his stories had taken its toll on his emotional and intellectual sanity and he relegated himself to the sobriety of quietude and peace. Despite the shadows of death, misery, injustice and social degradation in almost all of his works, Babel continues to entice the reader with elements of surprise, beauty of human emotions in the form of love, guilt and sadness. The subjugation of the Jewish community and the atrocities suffered by them came found a profound voice in Babel’s art of imagery and stylistic narrative. Whether it is by means of syntax or by grammatical repose like the one-worded sentence “Period” at the end of the story ‘Chink’ , Babel always manages to create shifty undercurrents of unease and unrest more on account of his writing style than the veracity of the events in his story. Here again, one may reiterate the words with which this essay began that in talking about a period being suitably placed, Babel’s periodical placement of the dagger in his works has left an indelible mark in the face of war-torn Russia. Hence, one may summarise that the presence of the themes of death and despair in his works were a direct projection of his being witness to one of the most inhuman phases in the history of the Russian Jewish community. References Babel, Isaac. Collected Stories, ed. Walter Morison. New York: Criterion Books. 1955, pp 42, 43, 74, 75 Babel, Isaac. Collected Stories, ed. Walter Morison. New York: Criterion Books. 1955, pp 126,127,246,250 Falchikov, Michael. Conflict and Contrast in Isaak Babels "Konarmiya". The Modern Language Review, Vol. 72, No. 1 (Jan., 1977) Trilling, Lionel. Beyond Culture. Isaac Babel. New York: 1968 http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/red-cavalry-isaak-babel http://kirjasto.sci.fi/babel.htm Read More