Gogol's the nose or the devil in the works

Ann Shukman

pp. 64-82

in: Jane Grayson, Faith Wigzell (eds), Nikolay Gogol, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1989

Abstract

If The Nose had been written in French or English, or if, on the other hand, post-structuralism had taken root in Moscow and Leningrad, Gogol's tale might well have become a proof text for deconstructive exegesis. Constructed on a pun, replete with paradoxes, illogicalities, games and mystifications with the reader, the tale is "unreadable" in the sense that it resists any single definitive reading or "univocal" meaning; and indeed, to use deconstructionist terms, it might be argued that it contains within itself, "jostling irreconcilably with one another, both logocentric metaphysics and nihilism".¹ Besides, the central and compounded "absurdity" of the tale — the transformation of Kovalyov's free-roaming nose into the state counsellor Nose, who is then re-transformed back into Kovalyov's nose — not only defies logic and probability, but is also impossible to envisage in the mind's eye; it is a play with words, a paronomasia, a textual joke, as the more linguistically orientated critics have noted. For Roman Jakobson, for instance, the story demonstrated the purely verbal nature of the "realized oxymoron", a figure which has meaning but no object: "Such is Gogol's "Nose" which Kovalyov recognises as a nose even though it shrugs its shoulders, wears full uniform and so on."² Bakhtin too, commenting on Gogol, noted aphoristically that "the word engenders the thing".³

Cited authors

Jakobson Roman

Bachtin Michajl