This paper by Caryl Emerson was presented at the Northwestern University Research Initiative in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought Conference celebrating Gary Saul Morson in April 2024.
The title of this talk is built off a bad piece of word-play. Donna Orwin and Sandy Goldberg opened the conference on Saul’s latest, Wonder Confronts Certainty.
Now I seize the chance to close it on a concept that is far more familiar to me than Certainty, namely, Prosaics.
The idea has had a lot of attention at this conference, so my comments will be in the spirit of a recap and summary.
Prosaics: I was present at its theoretical birth—or rather, grounding—in the late 1980s, in connection with Mikhail Bakhtin.
This was after Saul had launched the word in 1987, in his book on Tolstoy’s War & Peace.
The concept has shape-shifted over the past 40 years—but it has stuck: appearing in the 2023 book as the subtitle of Chapter 10: “Prosaics Hidden in Plain View.”
We might say that Prosaics has become, for Saul, a cardinal virtue akin to justice, fortitude, temperance and prudence.
Most of my talk today will be tracing, if only in bits, its backstory, especially as relevant to the goals of our Northwestern Initiative.
Those years make up a lot of bits, but since the idea accretes (there’s some “imperial creep” to Prosaics)—the story will move pretty fast.
Along the way I take up another idea: Wonder. This is more of a problem.
Prosaics has a recognizable set of attributes, a definition.
But every person finds a different thing wondrous: God, inspiration, the beauties of Nature, Being in Love, Sex, Power, Military Victory.
Wonder is morally quite blank—which Prosaics is not.
So there is some conceptual tension in my title, some possibility of confrontation. Let’s begin there.
Prosaics is both a theory of 19th-century Realist prose, and a theory of the non-heroic: a moral code that celebrates small-scale, step-by-step, mundane and pragmatic kindnesses that build community, as well as knowledge, from the bottom up.
Wonder, on the other hand, suggests (at least to many people) a top-down glimpse of the sublime: big-scale, instantaneous, all-at-once, triggered by what is out-of-the-ordinary, discontinuous, maybe even an antinomy.
There is, to be sure, some overlap, as in this Venn diagram:
And finally: both Prosaics and Wonder foster that most difficult virtue for ambitious, disciplined, successful people, namely, humility.
So: the backstory.
1990. Saul and I identified Prosaics as one of Bakhtin’s three global concepts, together with “unfinalizability” and “dialogue.”
The latter two belonged to Bakhtin, but prosaics was Saul’s neologism for what isn’t lyric/ drama/ or epic… for what doesn’t fit into a classical poetics.
Novelistic prose is a literary form in its own right, and thus more than “fallen poetry or promoted rhetoric.”
Since Bakhtin loved novels and thirsted to make a theory about them, it was easy—and (I think) correct—to foist this term on him.
But even back then, prosaics was more than literary. It was also a “philosophy of the ordinary.”
This linking of the ordinary with the ethical is what the great 19th-c. Realist novel did best—and, Saul has long argued, no one does this more urgently than Leo Tolstoy.
Now Bakhtin wrote a fine book on Dostoevsky in 1929, which he revised in 1963, in which he used Tolstoy largely as his negative example: the prototype of a monologic voice and a finalized, universalizing worldview.
This is true—,but it did not cripple our Prosaics thesis.
In his Dostoevsky book, Bakhtin was interested in the behavior of words far more than in human actions or plots…
…and Bakhtin, it must be said, had always been more of a trickster than a moralist.
In any event, by the mid-1990s Saul had begun to detach prosaics from literary form.
But an aura of Bakhtin continued to cling to the idea.
…In 1994 came Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, with its Chapter Three titled “Interlude: Bakhtin’s Indeterminism.” It was wedged in between the book’s big ideas: foreshadowing, backshadowing, and sideshadowing.
In this new context, Bakhtin’s philosophy is read [and I quote] “as a series of meditations in which aesthetic, ethical, and theological issues are intricately woven together” [p. 82].
That “theological” is a bit of a jolt. It will be several years before theology in Bakhtin gains any traction in the West, and then through excellent books written from within a religious tradition (first Eastern Orthodoxy, then Protestant Christianity, finally Roman Catholicism).
In 1994, Saul does a radical thing: he engages theology not through Divine Grace or the Trinitarian utterance but in more secular fashion—and along one dimension only: does a given narrative dare to open up time?
He begins with William James’s 1884 essay “The Dilemma of Determinism”—specifically, on one of its thought experiments, in which [and I quote James] “God the Creator [is] made subject to the Law of Time.”
This question of God, or the Absolute, as an entity “subject to time” will receive a fascinating expansion in 2013, with excursions into process theology, open theism, theography, and “dialogic theology.”
Back in 2007, however, the approach was through William James.
The result of “subjecting God to time” would be (and this is Saul now) that the Creator, any creator, would become genuinely limited, unable to see the “pattern of the whole picture,” and thus more akin to the prosaic (that is, no longer a poet who “can contemplate in an instant the pattern of a poem” [p. 95].
Echoing Bakhtin, Saul suggests that poetic rhythm imposes too many constraints on time. We live (or should try to live) like those characters in Dostoevsky who “act into an open future” [99].
Novels, Saul says, are not only good personal therapy, they are also superior “forms of thought.”
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No surprise that there was some pushback brewing from inside the literary community,
…especially from those who loved the rigorous patterns of poetry, and appreciated the reliability of semiotic codes.
A forum was published in Slavic and East European Journal in Spring 1997 under the title: The Limits of Prosaics.
The questions were tough:
- Is it really true that vital form is “dead” in the lyric and the epic, and alive only in novels?
(that’s from me)
- Who says that lyric poems can’t be “ordinary” or dialogic?
(That’s from Clare Cavanagh)
- And what about a poet of genius like Pushkin, who defined himself through his creative struggle with social codes and poetic constraints—not by rejecting them, but by devising codes that were more subtle, and constraints that were more demanding?
(That’s from David Bethea)
In an afterword titled “Prosaics Evolving,” Saul responded enthusiastically to the criticism with a mix of confidence, good humor, and modesty.
He granted that every theory has its weaker sides;
…that he himself was never sure where the idea would lead him;
…that he didn’t approve of the “extremist prosaics” that Tolstoy insists on when refusing to admit the importance of Great Men and Great Events.
…and also, Saul said, I love poetry, and Bakhtin did too.
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At the time, I remember asking myself: who is leading here—the thinker or the thought?
Prosaic wisdom is becoming so organic to Saul, so consistent and unfalsifiable, that it can’t be refuted or knocked off balance, it just gets bigger and more accommodating; it practically grows itself.
We’re now up to 2007.
I confess that only last month did I read this book all the way through.
In the 1980s, Saul and I had argued, in print, over Anna Karenina (neither of us had much sympathy for the ‘tragic heroine’ Anna, although for different reasons)—and I didn’t think there would be anything new.
Big mistake.
By 2007, Anna herself had become almost an afterthought.
…even though Tolstoy’s great novel, with its histrionic, melodramatic, non-prosaic, self-destructing heroine, could help us to “see more wisely.”
Prosaics was now a free-standing moral system with a history and a mission, one that explained
- …what had gone wrong with 17th century rationalism,
- …what is incoherent about so-called “social science” and mechanistic theories of mind—and
- …what we should make of theories and disciplines that attempt, awkwardly, to become surrogates for God.
This, to me, was very exciting.
I sensed, in the Anna book, that Saul was repositioning his own voice, launching a philosophical offensive for the humanities.
The priorities were no longer only those of a “strong literary critic”—that is, bold close readings of the devices that great fiction writers use, even though they might be “hidden in plain view.”
Now we’re at the level of mega-ideas, idea-systems, whole epochs.
This was more than a shift in methodology; it had become a mission. And not without risk. For example:
Saul wrote that he hoped to “create a dialogue between Tolstoy’s ideas and some of our own”— a dialogue that will optimally “yield new insights present neither to [Tolstoy] nor to us” [5].
This will “contribute to Tolstoy becoming Tolstoy.”
Such a route to ‘becoming more oneself’ through a dialogic relation with generations of listeners undreamt of by the author is, by the way, one of Bakhtin’s big ideas, which he uttered about Shakespeare.
The words of all great writers, Bakhtin said, contain more wisdom than can be accessed by their own time, and later generations are called on to “liberate them from captivity to their own epoch.”
Bakhtin has been much criticized for this remark, which seems to grant too much license to the imagination of “creative critics”… and sanction far too much free rein with authorial intent.
But Saul was convinced that with careful habits of reading, such dialogues would be responsible.
Then follow his provocative ideas about Anna Karenina the Novel (which have stood the test of time; they appear in his most recent book):
- that Dolly, the long-suffering wife and mother, is Prosaic Good—and Stiva Oblonsky, Anna’s brother, is Prosaic Evil (not active evil, no, of course not, Stiva is a charming, well-meaning fellow, but he is a person with no moral core and with a tremendously effective forgettory);
- that Anna herself is morally a mess—not only emotionally a mess—because of her non-prosaic habits;
- and that Konstantin Levin is Tolstoy’s pet and alter ego, yes, but let that go: he is prosaic wisdom head to toe, because he knows one must work at happiness, which will never be complete.
Saul ends his Anna book on “163 Tolstoyan Conclusions” — a veritable encyclopedia of Prosaics, condensed to aphorisms.
These are not “Tolstoy’s conclusions,” in any footnoted sense.
They are merely “Tolstoyan,”—that is, Tolstoy-like.
Many of them are pure Saul;
…and the last 2 dozen belong to the man who made Tolstoy into his anti-hero—they are pure Bakhtin.
There is some playful self-irony in this list—but surely we’re meant to take it seriously.
Some items can even be mapped on to my Venn diagram from a while back that juxtaposed aspects of PROSAICS and WONDER—except that now these two poles have morphed into whole worldviews:
Small-scale, messy, bottom up versus big-scale, clean, top-down
continuous and ordinary: discontinuous and extraordinary
The left-hand side has now become the best we can hope for from life experience…
And the right has become the red-alert badness of thinking in terms of theory and utopia.
Of course Saul knows that both left- and right- sides are natural impulses of the human creature;
And there are earnest attempts at bringing the two sides closer together:
such as in Conclusion #7: “Even extraordinary moments are largely the product of what happens at ordinary ones …”
or in Conclusion #56: “There exists a prosaic sublime.”
…The voice has now become integrative, authoritative, and urgently pastoral, very much in Tolstoy’s declarative style.
And I think Saul sensed it.
Among those who blurbed the Anna Karenina volume, Frederick Crews also sensed this tone:
“This remarkable book amounts to a thoroughgoing challenge to the entire tenor and purport of Anglophone criticism from the 1970s until now.”
(And while we’re on the UC-Berkeley connection: It should be said that Saul, in his boldness and firmness in the face of what he feels to be intellectual folly, deeply resembles Frederick Crews, as he does that other Berkeley presence, Robert Alter—, and above all, we sense the fearlessness of the late Michael André Bernstein, whose own book Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History reflects their shared commitment to creative time.)
This “thoroughgoing challenge to the entire tenor and purport” of Anglophone literary criticism goes even further in the next book, 2013.
It was commissioned as a collection of already published things, but (in characteristic Morson style) almost everything in it is re-written, expanded, shifted around, and yet belongs recognizably to the same terrain.
…Its title:
Prosaics and Other Provocations. Empathy, Open Time, and the Novel.
“Empathy” is what results from reading novels correctly. “Open Time,” at any given moment, is the freedom we feel when possibilities are more abundant than actualities. Both of these are unalloyed good things.
But Part Three of the book also consecrates a new voice.
Just as Saul had somewhat stylized himself into Tolstoy in parts of the Anna book…
…so here he outsources himself to a pseudonym that he’s used on and off since the 1990s, Alicia Chudo, “Alice the Wonder,” or Miracle.
She contributes a huge chunk of text on a discipline she calls misanthropology—the study of human evil—concluding with a parody, or better a variant, of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, composed in 24 impeccable Onegin stanzas.
This “Alice the Wonder,” or Alice in Wonderland, is dark, clever, and hilarious. But why the pseudonym?
The easy answer (at least to me) is that prosaics needs play.
Over the past two days we’ve heard many testimonies to Saul’s love of play, most eloquently from his daughter Emily Morson.
But any academic who mounts a relentlessly “thoroughgoing challenge” to academic culture (as Crews and Bernstein knew Saul was doing) is bound to be at least a bit grim.
Leo Tolstoy, I think, was also playful in this sense. Dead serious about the rightness of his ideas, and thus not “contingent” at all. But in part for that reason, alert to the fact that dead seriousness does not satisfy, there’s a madcap antic side. Hundreds of eyewitness memoirs on Tolstoy attest to this.
But in Saul’s case there might be another reason.
When Alicia the Wonder confronts Prosaics, she is licensed to say wondrous things that Saul might want others to hear—but that he’s not yet ready to say.
She’s a double—sort of.
Saul has written provocatively on Dostoevsky’s novella The Double—“Me and my Double” in 2015, and, in 2016, “What Is It Like to Be Bats? Paradoxes of The Double.”
These paradoxes resonate only dimly in Alicia Chudo, who fortunately is not wholly her own person.
She is wicked, she won’t trust or believe any side for long, and this radical skepticism about the possibility of human perfectibility is an example of Saul’s passion to amuse and delight… while not denying the darkness.
In a jotting on The Idiot titled “Dostoevsky and Holbein’s ‘Christ and the Tomb’,” Alicia Chudo has this to say:
“When the shaping form, the human image, is lost, so is the soul. Faith can survive agony much more easily than it can survive disgust.” [pp. 169-70]
Chudo, who merely observes, gives us human creatures no leeway, no breaks. She does not hold out a comforting hand, nor help to make the world more sensible or sane.
But she does make it softer and funnier, a soul-shadow for Saul, rather than a time-shadow.
Before leaving this 2013 book, a few words on Part Two, Chapter 3, “The Prosaics of Process,” because of its relevance to all three prongs of our Initiative (philosophy, literature, and religious thought).
To me, this chapter felt again like a quantum leap, not just how to behave in life or how to read fiction, but a whole cosmology.
It’s not only that overt theological questions are raised—
- about natural theology and compatibilism,
- about social scientists taking over the God-function and being congratulated for it, even envied,
- about G. K. Chesterton’s detective Father Brown, and the idea that Biblical wisdom might matter more to the catching of a criminal than the materialist trace so beloved by Sherlock Holmes.
Saul now endorses a larger cosmic binary, one with ancient roots, between products and processes.
The “processural,” pragmatic side of this binary was hinted at in an appreciative blurb of the book by Michael Holquist (who had been both Saul’s teacher, and mine):
“Morson’s provocations elevate sheer common sense to the level of non-absolutist metaphysics.”
That’s a provocative statement and it is intuitively right-on—but I think it’s insufficient. Because the problem with common sense is the same as the problem with Wonder.
Common sense is, in fact, not common, not “held in common,” but highly individualized; for unlike the processes of breathing or eating, it means something different to each person.
So more to the point than common sense, in my view, is a line from a review of Wonder Confronts Certainty—we’re finally there!—in 2024, by Rowan Williams, in the journal First Things.
Morson’s book, Williams wrote, lays out the diverse responses we make when confronted with difference, disagreement, disharmony. We can respond with
“…the wonder that accepts limitation, [or] the hunger for a world in which we are never out of control, never at a loss, never discovering, retelling, or rethinking.”
The implication here is that process—by definition—is wondrous, because it accepts limits… nothing is for certain, even for a moment, without our constant input.
Minute by minute, we can do things. In the distant future, we can do nothing.
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In the decade between the Provocations book in 2013 and Wonder Confronts Certainty last year, the world studied by Russianists took a very bad turn.
The seizure of Crimea, the aggressive union of Russian Church and Russian State, the criminalization of dissent, the cult of Putin, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
It was time for Saul’s prosaic metaphysics to strengthen its political side: primarily its case against the impersonalism and maximalism of the Russian intelligentsia—an argument of Saul’s that is at least a quarter-century old.
In the most recent book, Prosaics appears as Chapter 10, “What don’t we appreciate? Prosaics hidden in plain view.”
Consider the devices and paradoxes that structure Chapters 6-11 of the book’s Part III, “Timeless Questions.”
The rhetorical device is to pit Wonder against the Certainties of the Russian intelligentsia, and its method is wholly apophatic:
What Can’t Theory Account For?
What is Not to Be Done?
Who is Not to Blame?
What Time Isn’t it?
What Don’t We Appreciate?
What Doesn’t It All Mean?
It’s a clever device, because we’re not told what is good and knowable, only what is not—
—and we need only recall what the most dogmatic members of the Russian intelligentsia considered thoroughly knowable and for certain… to see where that took us.
Much of what happens in the world doesn’t have an answer, much less a predictive force.
Sometimes we cannot find a cause.
For me, this modesty, or cognitive humility, has always been the most precious aspect of prosaics.
It belongs to the side of Prosaics that is turned toward Wonder.
We see it in Mikhail Bakhtin, most famously in his discussion of “Great Time” from the 1960s:
We tend to fuss about in the “narrow space” of Small Time, he says, with its “…trivially human attitude toward the future (desire, hope, fear); there is no understanding of evaluative nonpredetermination, unexpectedness, as it were “surprisingness,” absolute innovation, miracle, and so forth.”
Decades earlier, Bakhtin had jotted down a similar idea, in a tattered notebook, during the darkest year of the Second World War, 1943. It sounds like pure Morsonian prosaics:
“A new philosophical wonder before everything is necessary. Everything could have been different.”
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But here is the paradox.
There is another side of Prosaics, which appears as a section in Chapter 10 of Wonder Confronts Certainty. It is subtitled:
“Prosaics resists sudden transformation” [p. 346]
Value comes about through patient and plodding work, Saul insists, not through windfalls, risk-taking, gambles, denials, or wishful thinking (what Saul calls “perhaps-ness” [the Russian авось]).
So:
How is this “resistance to sudden transformation” compatible (if it is) with unexpectedness, philosophical wonder, conversion or “threshold” experiences, Bakhtin’s “miracle”?
I have no problem with Saul’s insistence, in his comments in this chapter on Alyosha Karamazov, that
“…it is the small acts of goodness that are truly miraculous.”
Yes, of course—but that’s too easy a way out of the really inexplicable miracle, or event of faith.
Saul is forever coming close to this boundary… and backing off.
In a wonderful essay in the venue PLOUGH for December 2022, on the topic of “Tolstoy’s Narratives of Faith,” Saul discusses the famous stories and scenes:
Prince Andrei’s dying, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” “Master and Man,” “God Sees the Truth but Waits”…
…and if you know those stories, the great thing is that the person realizes where his life went wrong, is called to a conversion experience, and then… dies.
He escapes his bad story. So no more duties. No more need to think about others. Those difficult interpersonal prosaic virtues no longer require all that hard work.
But in one section of that essay, titled “Beyond Justice,” Saul gets to the core of the boundary that bothers me… when discussing “God Sees the Truth, but Waits.”
We’ve discussed “Death and Story,” “The One Who Calls,” and then, to introduce “God Sees the Truth, but Waits,” there’s the subtitle “Beyond Justice.”
Okay: God waits.
Waits for what?
Justice? No.
As Saul concludes in Tolstoy’s name— justice is not necessary for the meaningful life.
And at that point I want to ask: where, then, is the ground of meaning for the prosaic life?
Not the ground of meaning for one’s bodily death—all those radiant departures experienced by Prince Andrei, Ivan Ilyich, the merchant Brekhunov… but the ground for the life?
And this leads to my parting question, which is where I’ll end.
What I’m after, of course, is the nature of religious or metaphysical wonder, religious commitment, irreversible conversion… so securely lodged in the transcendent that it resists all mundane prosaic tests.
After all, divine revelation, for those who are a party to it, is also a life experience.
In a provocative talk yesterday under the title “Prosaics in the Face of the Apocalyptic: Searching for Hope in Russian Literature,” Denis Zhernokleyev asked us whether Saul’s step-by-step model of life, his “moment-to-moment ethics” (what Denis calls small ethics)…
…had any need at all for larger containers, for totality [целостность], for wholeness?
Plenty of characters whom Saul loves have it:
Sonya Marmeladova in Crime and Punishment, Princess Marya in War and Peace, Alyosha Karamazov—, perhaps even Mary Garth in Middlemarch.
These characters are fully coherent, responsive, vulnerable to suffering—but they are unshakeable in their convictions, regardless of empirical evidence.
Thus they can remain opaque, even to their authors and narrators.
The wonder of the transcendent does not have to depend on Divine conferral, of course.
It is simply something, or somewhere, that is not contingent, not transient, and not dependent on a prosaics of process.
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Can the transcendent, or the Absolute, be reconciled with Saul’s Tolstoyan Conclusion #107:
“Beware of belief systems that can be adopted whole.”
It’s my sense that Tolstoy himself, although a great seeker, would have rejected that conclusion, at least during the final decades of his life.
So: While re-reading 35 years of Saul on Prosaics, I’ve thought a great deal about the relation of the prosaic theory of art and life to “whole belief systems.”
I was reminded afresh how to stand up for an idea, and how to see more wisely through it.
But there still remains, for me, a question about how religious wonder fits in—the wonder of a religious transcendent that is not open to doubt, that is absolutely certain—
…all the more because, for some time, Saul has been publishing provocatively in journals that take such certainty for granted.
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But then I realized that the answer was hidden in plain view, back in Saul’s 1997 “answer to his critics,” Prosaics Evolving.
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…and this, surely, is a marvelous no-lose place for any beloved theory to end up.