Buddha's Little Finger 
by 

Victor Pelevin, 

 

Andrew Bromfield (Translator)

 

A Dialectical Comedy

Victor Pelevin has created a dialectical dream-world: two opposing dreams contained within each other, dreamed by the same protagonist. In one, he suffers the traumas and excitements of the Russian Revolution. In the other, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he undergoes therapy for "split false-personalities" and loss of memory. He attempts to find himself, or Russia as the case may be, in both dreams. 

"The Russian people realised very long ago that life is no more than a dream," says one of the characters in Buddha's Little Finger, thus establishing the allegory about Russia half-way through (it would have been far more helpful on page two). The two dream-searches touch on milestones of literature, philosophy, psychology, art, religion, and history, with the occasional empathetic experience of other personal histories thrown in. Complicated? Not half.

In one dream, the educated aesthete, Pyotr, high on cocaine and very bad vodka, gets caught up in the Russian Revolution. By luck and pluck he escapes the Checka secret police and assumes the identity of a sometime friend he has murdered. He embarks on a military train-journey to an indeterminate destination in the East as political commissar in a cloud of socialist, idealist propaganda. Wounded heroically in a battle of which he remembers nothing, he recuperates in a mountain village which is remote from the conflict.
 
Pyotr's revolutionary life takes place in a kind of masquerade in which various roles are being played out. The Master of Ceremonies for this production is Chapaev, part Commander in the Red (or White, depending on circumstances) Army, part sorcerer, part philosopher, part spirit-guide. Chapaev is a master at solipsism as well as dialectics and can argue any point from any angle. He supplies stability and then snatches it away. "What I have always found astounding is the starry sky beneath our feet and Immanuel Kant within us," he says with obvious irony.

The other dream-Pyotr, the one institutionalised and under therapy, can't remember his name much less his past. He is "infected with the bacillus of insanity that has invaded Russia" during the Revolution. He undergoes "turbo-Jungian therapy" in the asylum, an attempt to recover the meaning of lost symbols. He is also injected with drugs that provoke hyper-empathetic responses to the tales his fellow patients tell about themselves in group sessions.

The symbols being recovered include those of the Revolution itself - class, history, consciousness, disciplined thought - which exist in Pyotr's unconscious as reality. But there are quick-fire references to the 'new' world: Nabokov's Lolita, TV soap operas and block-buster movies. Arnold Schwarzenegger, CNN, and Harrier Jump Jets are the featured symbols from another patient. Donald Trump even gets an allusive reference in "You're fired." Remarkable for a book published in the year 2000. Things are somewhat chaotic, but as his psychiatrist observes, "Russia cannot be grasped by logic." 

Therapy is interrupted through a blow by a fellow-patient using a plaster bust of Aristotle. Their argument had been about alternative metaphysical accounts of dreams. This throws Pyotr back into the Revolution on his train to the East. Rationality gives way to mysticism. Chapaev resumes command and continues Pyotr's dialectical education. Oxymorons like "lascivious chastity" abound. Women are goddesses and the source of all evil. G. B. Shaw's syllogistic aphorism about progress depending on the unreasonable man is transformed into one dependant upon scoundrels.

Throughout the book, time is malleable, as is identity, memory and space - that is, all the Kantian categorical certainties. The two dreams leak into one another, confirming that there is one protagonist. But none of the personae, or names, Pyotr adopts as either revolutionary or patient is authentic. Ultimately there is nothing behind the eyes. What sort of person, after all, is possible within the context of Russian history of the last century?

To say that Pyotr's dream-worlds signify the "inner drama of Russia," as one character puts it, verges on the trivial. But what else is there to say? That Russia and its inhabitants are neurotic after their self-inflicted totalitarian nightmare is inevitable. The inevitability arises from the nature of a revolution grounded in rationalist principles, principles which are then further used to rationalise mass killing and incarceration. To admit that faith in rational thought - including its forms in literature, art and history - is just as dangerous and just as anti-human as faith in religion feels like death to an intellectual... or for that matter to a democrat.

Hitting the buffers of human thought - not just in logic but in practice - is bound to dismay anyone. For someone educated in thought itself, philosophy, the continuing trauma in Russia must be acute. Educated residents of the United States - the other rationalist country - are only feeling a tiny fraction of this trauma with the election of Donald Trump. But they share the fear of an authoritarian nostalgia and the basic issues are the same: How did it all go wrong? Can anything about the social world be trusted? Can anything prevent the persistent self-delusion of human beings?

When neither thought nor faith is reliable, one of the few paths left is humour in one form or another. Humour, especially if it's about philosophy, is a risky business. Some might take Pelevin as making a philosophical point through his fictional survey of thought. I don't think this is wise. Such a stance certainly wouldn't help to understand the text, which if anything throws suspicion on all thought, even its own. The point of comedy, I think, is to have a chuckle, in this case at oneself and the unstable character of everything about oneself.