The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Problem

"There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. For indeed it is so, my friend, and the moment you make yourself sincerely responsible for everything and everyone, you will see at once that it is really so, that it is you who are guilty on behalf of all and for all." These words are spoken by the Elder of the Orthodox monastery where we first meet our hero, Alyosha Fyodorovich Karamazov.

The Brothers Karamazov is full of insights that are easy to agree with. The reader of Freud can spot the "subject supposed to enjoy" in the perverse father Fyodor Pavlovich, the reader of René Girard can spot "mediated desire" on almost every page, the reader of Mikhail Bakhtin need not hunt very long for the "multi-voicedness" of the narrative technique, which consists mostly in open-ended ranting (especially in the trial scene that take up nearly 100 pages of such). The reader of Nietzsche will find abundant ressentiment. And the biographical reader of Dostoevsky finds unlimited recurrence of his cherished themes, anecdotes, and contemporary context. This is like a checklist.

But The Brothers Karamazov in so many places presents us with a hard saying like the one above. Who can hear it?

Again: "Each of us is undoubtedly guilty on behalf of all and for all on earth, not only because of the common guilt of the world, but personally, each one of us, for all people and for each person on this earth."

We would not be very good readers of novels if this maxim was something we could either accept or reject on its own. How does it work in this book? And how does this book work?

What does it mean to be guilty on behalf of others? How can I be responsible for the sins of other men? This is very abstract and theological. But it is also the main dynamic of the murder of Fyodor Pavlovich and the trial which take up hundreds of pages of the work: Ivan and Dmitri have not killed their father, not literally, and yet they are guilty. The difficult and demanding moral epigrams of the novel are not abstract and un-plotted bits of Christian ideology, but are in fact summaries of the central murder plot.

Some Statements

Zosima's brother, dying:

"Mother, don't weep, my dear," he would say, "I still have a long time to live, a long time to rejoice with you, and life, life is gladsome, joyful!"

"Ah, my dear, what sort of gladness is there for you, if you burn with fever all night and cough as if your lungs were about to burst?"

"Mama," he answered her, "do not weep, life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we do not want to know it, and if we did want to know it, tomorrow there would be paradise the world over." 

"Life is paradise" is seemingly the worst description of the Dostoevskyan world, with its petty, grimy enmities, infectious gossip, and hysterical mediocrities. Zosima's mother parries the claim that life is paradise by pointing out that it just obviously is not: how can it be when you, my son, are wracked with illness, spitting up blood, and in the sleepless grip of fever? Didn't Christ cure the lepers in the New Testament? And here you are, uncured, raving. Ergo, we are left to ourselves, anything beyond this is a fantasy that obviously can't (or hasn't) come down to help you. 

"How can it be," she said, "that you are the most guilty before everyone? There are murderers and robbers, and how have you managed to sin so that you should accuse yourself most of all?"

"I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it pains me. And how could we have lived before, getting angry and not knowing anything?" Thus he awoke every day with more and more tenderness, rejoicing and all atremble with love.

"I do not know how to explain it to you, but I feel it so strongly that it pains me." The explanation is not going to be a theological statement, but instead the story of the Karamazov brothers. 

"In order to make the world over anew, people themselves must turn onto a different path... For everyone now strives most of all to separate his person, wishing to experience the fullness of life within himself, and yet what comes of all his efforts is not the fullness of life but full suicide, for instead of the fullness of self-definition, they fall into complete isolation. For all men in our age are separated into units, each seeks seclusion in his own hole, each withdraws from the others, hides himself, and hides what he has, and ends by pushing people away from himself… He is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and his acquired privileges perish. Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity."

Marxist thinkers in the 20th century (Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson, Alain Badiou) have argued for the importance of Utopia, of the Messianic: of the necessity of finding the future inscribed already in the wreck of the present, our salvation and future community in the defeats of the past. Alain Badiou's reading of Saint Paul has seen the crucifixion and resurrection as an Event that "is" nowhere and yet structures everything and makes us into "subjects," actors rather than assigned places. The transcendental is not out there; the transcendental (Christ's truth, the Logos) only is insofar as embodied, made flesh. And this holds true for the resurrection, too. The truth has not "ascended" and abandoned us, it is something we have to make, through human action and community. As Hegel says, "The in-itself is not an unrealized abstract universal that lacks an existence"—far from being a flitting, spectral half-reality, the True is in fact what is most actual and concrete. (Brecht: "Truth is concrete.")

Hegel identified the divide in Christian subjectivity between the fallible, sinful creature we are and the immortal, eternal essence of God, and called it "unhappy consciousness": there is no possibility of union with the unchangeable; religious life organized this way is a pathetic farce. Dostoevsky shares with all of the thinkers just named a total reversal of this perspective. "Life is paradise." It is only that "we have arranged everything in the world so repugnantly that to do [the right thing, to stop sinning] was nearly impossible."

Utopia, the Second Coming, the Event, Paradise: we have to stop pushing these things away into a glorious future that can never come about, and instead recognize them and pledge ourselves to the truth in the ugly, mundane, and self-evidently not perfect.

We can see now why nothing disgusted Dostoevsky more than two central tenets of what he identified as atheism and socialism:

1. Man's nature will be changed; life itself will be changed; we have only to arrange things so that we will be made good, by circumstances. (socialism)
2. There is no God. (atheism)

In ordinary thinking, these two ideas have precious little to do with each other. But the force of Dostoevsky's thought is that the right-here-ness of salvation, of dropping to one's knees this very instant and begging forgiveness. God is right here when I change my nature: that is all that Dostoevsky is saying. The transformation of the world is not something that comes first, or on schedule. History cannot be appealed to any more than God, as the guarantor of the actions that will make a new world.

The Plot of The Brothers Karamazov

Dmitri's motives (which he admits all too freely) for killing his father are sexual jealousy, financial acrimony over his inheritance, and a passionate and changeful mind that veers into scandal and abuse--just like Fyodor Pavlovich. Of course, motives themselves do not add up to committing a crime.

Ivan's "guilt" is more complex, in that he has apparently abetted the real murderer by absenting himself on the day of the crime, having been tipped off. Ivan had wished "precisely for Dmitri to kill father, and the sooner the better"; it is Ivan who had something to gain (his brother's inheritance and fiancée) by getting Dmitri out of the way. He is tormented by the hallucinated appearance of the devil, and by repeated, semi-compulsive visits to the real murderer. Ivan's brother Alyosha pleads with him:

"I know only one thing... It was not you who killed father... You've told yourself several times that you were the murderer... You've accused yourself and confessed to yourself... You are mistaken, the murderer was not you.... God has sent me to tell you that!... I've spoken this word to you for the whole of your life: it was not you!"

Ivan's position is indeed Satanic, but it is not only the Gospels' Satan that he invokes, namely he who tempts Christ in the desert. There is also the Satan of Job, another materialist, who believes that God created the universe "in accordance with Euclidean geometry." 

"I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was 'with God,' who himself is God, and so on... It's not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God's, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept." 

The confession that discloses the identity of the real killer, which retrospectively shows the intricate committing of the crime and the elaborate frame-up,  does not only illuminate the "facts of the case," does not only clear away the ambiguous (not to say raving) indications of guilt which land Dmitri in Siberia for the murder of his father. Beyond this judicial knowledge, in the figure of the despised, uncanny Smerdyakov the brothers recognize themselves and their own Oedipal imbrications. If the rousing ending of the novel unites the brothers, gives them a new purpose and pledges them to concern and help, it is starting from this recognition of identity with Smerdyakov. Smerdyakov is a grotesque parody of faith: "As a child he was fond of hanging cats and then burying them with ceremony. He would put on a sheet, which served him as a vestment, chant, and swing something over the dead cat as if it were a censer." He utters the greatest blasphemy imaginable: "I'd have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all."

That is to say, while none of the brothers did kill their father, their identification is with a vanishing and hateful position. The recognition of how "we are all Smerdyakov" is simultaneously a dissolution of that place (he commits suicide) and a struggle against this identity, born out of the nadir of their implication in his filthy cynicism and resentment.

Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Master and Margarita is one of those novels, like Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, or George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, containing two stories which barely intersect. One of the pleasures of the multi-plot Victorian novel (and War and Peace is like this, too) is to see widely divergent points brought together in a final vortex of connectivity. The kind of novel I am talking about refuses this: the hemispheres only just meet, like the fleeting touch of dance partners in, well, a Tolstoy novel.

Master and Margarita might really be said to have three narratives: the “Satan comes to town” story, which for the most part reads like a combination of Gogol’s Dead Souls and a sort of Don Quixote in reverse; the love story between the author Master and the unhappily married Margarita; and the story of Pontius Pilate, which is the subject of Master’s novel, but is narrated variously through Satan, a burned manuscript of said novel, and a madman’s drugged hallucination. 

It seems axiomatic to me that we can’t say anything about the work as a whole without knowing how to put these parts together. Well, that is, unless we want to say that the book is a “satirical condemnation of Stalinist terror,” decide that this is worth our time to learn, and leave it at that.

Not that I am sure the novel *is* worth our time. The coordination of the different strands is uneven, many of the characters do not even rise to one-dimensionality, it abounds in clichéd and uninteresting depictions of greed and vice, and the ending is not of a sort that we are used to (since in the tradition of Gogol, Sterne, whose novels don’t really “conclude” but just break off).

 The translation I read links me to a website (greatbooks.org) with “discussion questions” which are not at all fatuous. Here are the most interesting.

• Why does Woland come to Moscow?

At an aesthetic level, this can be answered with reference to Georg Lukács’ typology, in The Theory of the Novel, of Sterne, Cervantes, and Gogol as novels of “abstract idealism,” namely “the demonism of the narrowing of the soul… forgets the existence of any distance between ideal and idea… Reality does not satisfy this a priori demand, thinks that reality is bewitched by evil demons… the complete absence of an inner problematic.” This is only to refer the problem to one of literary theory, but it is almost a literal paraphrase of Woland’s mission: the demonic but non-psychological mania to bewitch reality, to bring it into line with a monomaniacal directive. This is also the plot of Don Quixote.

But Woland arrives in Moscow first to answer an argument about the existence of God between the editor Berlioz and the poet Homeless, in chapter 1. He poses them the following question: “If there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?… [and how can man govern himself when he] cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?” And the entire action of this part of the novel is Woland’s repeated demonstration that the bureaucratic “governance” that man has set up for himself is a fragile, vain farce–a proliferation of little frauds and petty grievances. The key to this part of the novel, then, is that Woland’s mission is not to “enchant” but to disenchant, to unmask, to expose… Do I need to tell you that the devil is subversive?

• When Woland sees Margarita’s compassion for Pilate, why does he tell her, “Everything will turn out right, the world is built on that”? 

What we learn from reading Paradise Lost, Faust, The Merchant of Venice, and the Bible’s Job, is that the devil is a liar. Woland says, “Don’t trouble yourself here,” and she immediately does trouble herself about Pilate’s fate. But again I have a Lukács answer: against the strivings of the demonic, “outside reality remains quite untouched.” Moscow is a bit burnt-up, but not really altered by the end of the book. That “everything will turn out right” is an acknowledgement (as we see in this scene) of his own (final) impotence, as we had seen before, when Woland addresses Matthew Levi:

You uttered your words as if you don’t acknowledge shadows, or evil either. Kindly consider the question: what would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if shadows disappeared from it? Shadows are cast by objects and people.

Satan is “real” only in this sense. “Everything will turn out all right” in the sense that magical diamonds will turn into worthless sardine labels…

• Why is the story of Pontius Pilate presented as not only written by the master, but also told by Woland, dreamed by Ivan, and read by Margarita? 

A better question perhaps would be what the story of Master and Margarita has to do with the Woland plot. For me it is the weakest part of the book. Ivan is the character who most nearly experiences the Stalinist paranoiac institution as a mirror of the Pilate story, but… Margarita? Of course she represents THE virtue of the book, given that “There is no greater vice than cowardice”–but am I alone in feeling that the novel would be strengthened by dropping both Master and Margarita? (Evidently these were the last pieces to be added, over various drafts.) If Master is guilty vis-a-vis Margarita, or himself, this is too lightly sketched-in to stand up to the overwhelming magic of the Pilate and Woland sections.

Child of God by Cormac McCarthy

Evidently James Franco is making a film adaptation of this 1973 novel about a cross-dressing, squirrel-eating, necrophilia-practicing, cave-dwelling sociopath lurking up in the hills. I cannot see the future, but prepare to see a sharp spike in the Google Ngram for "Child of God, unflinching portrayal of evil." It is the first and almost the only thing to say about the book. The back of my edition mixes things up, with "unstinting realism." McCarthy did not flinch and he did not stint, we can say this much.

This is a family website, so I can't quote too much of Lester Ballard's comings and goings, but for instance:

She was too heavy for him. He paused halfway up the ladder with one hand on the top rung and the other around the dead girl's waist where she dangled in the ripped and rudely sutured nightgown and then he descended again. He tried holding her around the neck. He got no farther. He sat on the floor with her, his breath exploding whitely in the cold of the room. Then he went out to the barn again.

He came in with some old lengths of plowline and sat before the fire and pieced them. Then he went in and fitted the rope about the waist of the pale cadaver and ascended the ladder with the other end. She rose slumpshouldered from the floor with her hair all down and began to bump slowly up the ladder. Half-way up she paused, dangling. Then she began to rise again.  

In Homer's Odyssey, when Odysseus has finished slaughtering the suitors, he identifies the disloyal servant women--"the suitors' sluts"-- and hangs them, in an image of horrible violence:

He cast a ship's cable over a cross-beam, and pulled it fast around their necks, then hauled them up so high they could not put their feet to any stay. This was done the way you would catch a thrush or a dove, making her way to her roosts, as she would with struggling pinions beat her tender body against the ground. That bed is sour to her. So strived these women, their heads hanging in a row, a wretched death. A little time they sprawled, their feet twitching, but not long. 

As Simone Weil has noted, for Homer's hero to restrain himself here, having felt "the intoxication of force," to show mercy "would require superhuman virtue, which is as rare as dignity in weakness." We do not find it in The Odyssey or The Iliad. However, "such a heaping-up of violent deeds would have a frigid effect, were it not for the note of incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard."

You will have noticed the similarities in these images, but note also Homer's registering of the cruelty of the struggling dove, cut off from her children, flailing desperately and full of hurt confusion. "That bed is sour to her." Does Homer extend this past his simile, from the birds to the dying women? He does not say that Odysseus is wrong to execute these women, but who can see these little fluttering kicks and be unmoved?

Does Child of God offer any such "moment of grace," anything "to make us feel with sharp regret what it is that violence has killed and will kill again"? Or is it a mere heaping-up of violent deeds and the disgusting, sociopathic macabre?

What would we need in a scene like this?

Lester hauled forth the half froze robin from his shirt and held it out. It turned its head. Its eye flicked.

Looky here, Billy, said the woman.

It didn't look. A hugeheaded bald and slobbering primate that inhabited the lower reaches of the house, familiar of the warped floorboards and the holes tacked up with foodtins hammered flat, a consort of roaches and great hairy spiders in their season, perenially benastied and afflicted with a nameless crud.

Here's ye a playpretty.

The robin started across the floor, its wings awobble like lateen sails. It spied the . . . what? child? child, and veered off  toward a corner. The child's dull eyes followed. It stirred into sluggish motion.

Anyways, the child tries to eat the bird's legs off. Later, Lester sets the house on fire with the child still inside. And my question is: is it enough (for what?) to just show these things? Ought McCarthy, additionally, step in to say... something?

You will again have noticed the similarities to Homer in the image I have chosen. But McCarthy reports no "sour bed" for the tormented robin. All we hear is: "The bird floundered on the floor."

When Homer has Odysseus's dog, Argos, wasted by the twenty years of his master's absence, tick-ridden, beaten and ignored, stagger to its feet, "He wagged his tail and flattened his ears, though no longer strong enough to crawl to his master. Odysseus turned his face aside and hiding it from Eumaeus wiped away a tear." And the dog dies, already lying on the dung heap. And I am not made of stone, and so I wipe away a tear also. To be alive is to be ignored, in pain, subject to great loss, and Argos in all of this is a recapitulation of Odysseus's woes.

I believe that McCarthy has written a worthwhile and humane book. As in The Iliad, "no reticence veils the step from life to death": the scenes of perverted, insane harm are all reported with the same impressionistic transparency as the narration brings to the treeline or a brook. As with Shakespeare's porter in Macbeth, there is a grim anti-social comedy and fantastically foul language, in a number of brief and absurd interactions. It is not merely a serial killer chase or a titillating account of deviant acts.

Child of God is a tone, a vision, an hour and a quality of light. It is somewhere between monologue and world. McCarthy does not even attempt here the one thing that Faulkner found irresistible about similar men as Lester Ballard: the way the past stalks us. But, in a similar image to The Odyssey's Argos, McCarthy does flash out the ubiquity of open wounds, running sores, and lingering waste which gets tangled up with "life" construed as youth, power, sex, having one's way, stacking up our gains. It is a confusion we are warned not to make.

He always had the best dogs. I remember a dog he had one time named Suzie he said was a hellatious bird dog. He let her out of the trunk and I looked at her and I said: I don't believe Suzie's feelin too good. He looked at her and felt her nose and all. Said she looked all right to him. I told him, said: I just don't believe she's real well today. We set out and hunted all afternoon and killed one bird. Started walkin back to the car and he says to me, Bill says: You know, it's funny you noticin old Suzie was not feelin good today. The way you spotted it. I said: Well, Suzie was sick today. He said yes, she was. I said: Suzie was sick yesterday. Suzie has always been sick. Suzie will always be sick. Suzie is a sick dog. [End of chapter]

Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Demons is a novel of frantic self-destruction at the level of an entire town. The consuming tragedy that seizes the populace results in the deaths of nine (!) major characters, and yet it is impossible to precisely locate the blame. In fact there is no innocence here, nor any place outside of the corrosive madness that has descended. Dostoevsky's novel is a portrait of this diffuse culpability and the inner corruption of the spirit that could explode into so much terror.

In one sense, Demons is Dostoevsky's most "political" novel, in that it depicts the extremes of Russian ideological currents coming into contact, relentlessly criticizing each other, and emitting in terroristic violence fomented by a radical cell. On another level, it is a picture of a generational divide, like Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The "fathers," the Romantic, Westernized, and "literary" dissidents, cannot recognize their ideals in the crude, dogmatic ravings of their militant sons. 

"It's our same idea, precisely ours; we, we were the first to plant it, to nurture it, to prepare it--and what new could they say on their own after us! But, God, how it's all perverted, distorted, mutilated! ... Are these the conclusions we strove for? Who can recognize the initial thought here?"

This picture of revulsion and opposition is misleading, however. Dostoevsky's point is not how distant the nihilists and materialists are, but how every aspect of Russian life has been infected by their premises and is co-implicated by their logic. The novel is about the sick spiritual soil on which such an unholy weed could spring up. The "fathers" who don't recognize the ideas of the "sons" are therefore utterly self-deceiving. Although it is possible to identify the historical "originals" of the political events and ideological tracts that Dostoevsky dropped into the novel--Joseph Frank's biography pinpoints the sources for almost everything in the novel--the specifics of ideology here disappear into a spiritual condemnation, both "fathers and sons" representing a moral sickness to be expelled. If there is a political point, it is to hold up the unholy, Iago-like figure of Pyotr Stepanovich to the "beautiful souls" who, horrified, innocently disavow his actions when they come to light.

As with the reading of the raising of Lazarus in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky includes here a reading from the Gospels which is unmistakably central to the novel's meaning. It is an explication of the title, Demons. The passage (which is also the novel's epigraph) is the one where Christ expels a horde of demons from a man, who then enter a herd of swine, and rush into a lake to drown. [Luke 8:32-6]. The pompous, pretentious Stepan Trofimovich, whose life has been lived as a "reproach incarnate" to his fatherland, and is now on a Quixotic last mission to the authentic people, provides this explication:

"You see, it's exactly like our Russia. These demons who come out of a sick man and enter into swine--it's all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in our great and dear sick man, in our Russia, for centuries, for centuries! Oui, cette Russie que j'aimais toujours. But a great will and a great thought will descend to her from on high, as upon that insane demoniac, and out will come these demons, all the uncleanness, all the abomination that is festering on the surface... and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine! And perhaps they already have! It is us, us and them, and Petrusha [his son Pyotr Stepanovich].. et les autres avec lui, and I, perhaps, first, at the head, and we will rush, insane and raging, from the cliff down into the sea, and all be drowned, and good riddance to us, because that's the most we're fit for. But the sick man will be healed.

The enigmatic center of this possession is Nikolai Stavrogin, a strikingly handsome and reserved, but cruel, almost insanely sadistic monster. He is a "great idle force being spent deliberately on abomination," on cold-blooded, self-maiming depravity.

The plot of Demons is the gradual escalation of these rifts into delirious catastrophe. Dostoevsky's plots don't work through "incident" or "character development," but are just the emergence and amplification of all the latent positions and differences at the beginning of the novel. The classic Balzac plot is a "rise and fall," in a Flaubert novel "things turn sour," in a Dickens novel "long-lost" identities are recognized (and perhaps rejected) and alternate families formed, in a George Eliot novel idealistic projects have to be weighed against a compromising reality. A Dostoevsky novel is just the entropy of various initial positions racing each other to reach the highest pitch of disaster.

Not that everything preordained is foreknown. Just as there is a "murder mystery" in The Brothers Karamazov, so in Demons we do not know what Pyotr Stepanovich's conspiratorial ambulations amount to until the last moment. By contrast, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has long ago announced the theory of his murder in a kind of manifesto, and the earliest scenes show him planning the crime. It is anything but a "whodunnit?". The Idiot is less plotted than any book I know: everything is on the table from the outset, and the suspense is in who will dare to put their self-destructive impulses into action first.

There is more Dostoevsky to come, so let me address here just a few points: the sense of scandal in his work; and more particular to Demons, the characters of Kirillov and Stavrogin,

Scandal

In the famous "Grand Inquisitor" passage from The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan cites the ultimate scene of flailing, impotent outrage and escalating provocation: Satan's temptation of Christ in the desert. The synoptic Gospels' account also provides a window into the "polyphonic" nature of frustrated, scandalous discourse, in Satan's citation of Psalms: "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone." 

Characters in Dostoevsky are relentlessly flinging themselves into imprudent, degrading confrontations and making dubious spectacles of their humiliation. Provocation stands on constant call. The key to this trait is given in Notes from the Underground: the underground man's retreat from society and his aching contempt stand in constant need of advertisement, of recognition, of exhibition. Consequently, Dostoevsky's novels sometimes read as one outlandish "scene" after another, an unbroken fever dream.

(This recognition and validation is the entire point of Raskolnikov's crime; he does not have a goal other than to create an objectively recognized deed that would finalize his self-image.)

Scandal in Dostoevsky looks like exposure, confession, the baring of the self, a revealing "slip." It is none of these things. The overwhelming irony of these scenes, however, is that humiliation and the parading of weakness are inevitably self-protective. The terror is that one will be "out in the world," a weak and ineffectual body, beyond all excuses and apologies and exposed to the ravages of time and the indignities of life. The scandalous rant is a buffer, a filibuster. There is always preserved some escape clause, some hope that this part of life (this moment here) won't really "count." Amidst even the most outrageous, disgraceful rants is always included a plea for one's exceptionalism. Better always to be indefinite than finite. Look at the novelist Karmazinov's farewell address at Yulia Mikhailovna's "literary fête":

"Farewell, reader; I do not even much insist that we should part friends: why, indeed, trouble you? Abuse me, even, oh, abuse me as much as you like, if it gives you any pleasure. But it will be best of all if we forget each other forever. And if all of you, readers, should suddenly be so good as to fall on your knees and entreat me with tears: 'Write, oh, write for us, Karmazinov--for the fatherland, for posterity, for the wreaths of laurel'--even then I would answer you, having thanked you, of course, with all courtesy: 'Ah, no, we have had enough of bothering each other, my dear compatriots, merci! It is time we parted ways! Merci, merci, merci.' "

This self-denial, which is being met with boos and catcalls from the crowd and is a disgraceful prelude to the evening's further dissipation, all but begs to be allowed back in the door through which he is at that moment elaborately withdrawing.

The logic of the scandalous discourse--the manifesto, the "scene," the offensive reading, the ill-advised party--is this: anything rather than stoicism and finitude. Rather than face concrete reality: words, words, words. What one is evading, always, is the banality and dependencies and finalities of being in the world with other persons, defenseless against cares. The self-importance of the scandal purports to "hold back" some image of the self which would not be tainted by finitude or need...

Stavrogin
Consider Stavrogin's confession in this light. Dostoevsky was forced to cut this chapter (II, 9), which is now included as an appendix. Stavrogin confesses to the bishop Tikhon the most unholy abominations--raping a young girl who then commits suicide. The bishop promptly locates the defensiveness in Stavrogin's account: "Let them look at me, you say; well, and you yourself, how are you going to look at them? ... You admire your own psychology... what is that if not the proud challenge of a guilty man to his judge?" Stavrogin substitutes his own hatred for the pity of others, and is "in the grip of a desire for martyrdom and self-sacrifice."

Stavrogin is haunted by hallucinations: "he sometimes saw or felt near him some malicious being, scoffing and 'reasonable,' 'in various faces and characters, but one and the same'... 'It's I myself in various aspects and nothing more.'"

This is the central idea of the novel: Stavrogin "in various characters." René Girard writes that Stavrogin is "a magnet for unattached desires," but he cannot accept any of these appearances. The realization of his ideas mocks and torments him.

"I've tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, in order to 'know myself.' This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life... What to apply my strength to--that I have never seen, nor do I see it now... What poured out of me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Or not even negation."

I always say about Dostoevsky that his Christianity has to be thought in terms of accepting the finality and limitedness of the world, and his atheistic characters have to be thought of as refusing it. This is the irony of Dostoevsky's crusade against nineteenth-century "materialism." Stavrogin refuses any action at all, knowing that even negation would be to "know himself." Dostoevsky equates reality with "knowing oneself," while for Stavrogin, the underground man, Raskolnikov, "knowing oneself" is a project of confessional elaboration as a substitute for reality.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

It is easy to get lost in the psychological and moral questions of Crime and Punishment. Let's begin visually, with one of the most arresting details.

After he has murdered the pawnbroker and her sister with an axe, Raskolnikov is dawdling about the apartment with no clear plan as to how to get rid of any evidence or where she has her money hidden.

He stood pensively in the middle of the room. A dark, tormenting thought was rising in him--the thought that he had fallen into madness and was unable at that moment either to reason or to protect himself, and that he was perhaps not doing at all what he should have been doing... "My God! I must run, run away!" he muttered, and rushed into the entryway. But there such horror awaited him as he had surely never experienced before. 

 He stood, looked, and could not believe his eyes: the door, the outside door, from the entryway to the stairs, the same door at which he had rung, and through which he had entered earlier, stood unlatched, even a good hand's breadth-ajar: no lock, no hook the whole time, during the whole time! 

This is described in such a "cinematic" way. You see his face in a reaction shot, before you see the open door. And the sentences are constructed so that the pertinent information "stood unlatched" follows twenty-six words after the subject "the door" is introduced. And the detail itself is the most unnerving, paranoid feeling: that one might have been observed "the whole time."

This paranoid experience of being exposed to the vision of others is the key to the whole novel. From the very first lines of the book, shame and visibility are in play. Going down the stairs from his garret, he avoids his landlady, wincing with cowardice at the very prospect of meeting her. And throughout, we are told that “He was least of all disposed at that moment to come face-to-face with anyone in the whole world, whoever it might be. All his bile rose up in him.”  Or again: “It seemed to him that at that moment he had cut himself off, as with scissors, from everyone and everything.”

The novel concerns the cowardice of trying to separate oneself from other people. Raskolnikov continually tries to "guarantee" (by his rudeness, his self-destruction, his sarcasm, his philosophy) that he will be spared the real, mundane, socially-bound, embarrassing, gross reality of life. It's not that he can "transcend" real life--he can't even face it! He is like a child who is too shy to ask the waiter for a refill of his Coke: and he confuses this with the most profound superiority.

His friend Razumikhin tells him: "The first thing you do in any circumstances is try not to resemble a human being." It is as though Raskolnikov's real cowardice is not his shrinking from the murder, his convulsions of guilt--rather, it is his antipathy towards the minor cares and substantial reality of social existence. He is impatient. What Raskolnikov is really terrified of is not that he will the multitudinous seas incarnadine. His real fear is of "petty," "vulgar" life--of getting tangled up in other persons at all. What he wants to be delivered from--to prove to himself that he is beyond, somehow--is just the real grind of affections and dependencies. And all of his nausea towards what is defective and impermanent around him is only, as it were, the fastidiousness of childhood! Not to get messy... "Had it been possible to go somewhere that minute and remain utterly alone, even for the whole of his life, he would have counted himself happy."

He mistakenly views the suffering in the world as demanding (as a response) definite, authoritative, world-historical solutions that would “prove” “once-and-for-all” the outlines of an abstract, final “new law” (or “new word”). Implicit in this demand is an idea of leaping outside of time, of somehow achieving a last word on all matters.

‘Where was it,’ Raskolnikov thought as he walked on, ‘where was it that I read about a man condemned to death saying or thinking, an hour before his death, that if he had to live somewhere high up on a cliffside, on a ledge so narrow that there was room only for his two feet--and with the abyss, the ocean, eternal darkness, eternal solitude, eternal storm all around him--and had to stay like that, on a square foot of space, an entire lifetime, a thousand years, an eternity--it would be better to live so than to die right now!’

Raskolnikov considers this lunar, isolated existence to be "life." (And compare with Svidrigailov's even more perverse idea that eternity is just a village bathhouse filled with spiders...) But this impatience and desire to telescope everything to its logical conclusion, is just what Christianity never meant for Dostoevsky. Raskolnikov's mistake is to think that God's presence would absolve anyone of trouble/mess/difficulty, that Christianity is “easy” and equally categorical. This is the meaning of the quotation, “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted,” from The Brothers Karamazov.

Raskolnikov's is an abstraction that doesn't want to “touch down” in the messiness of quotidian life. The investigator Porfiry is always taunting him with not being able to endure questioning, of (basically) trying to confess to anyone whoever just to get it over with. It is this impatience that is the key to Raskolnikov's character. He commits the murder in order to find out already what kind of person he is, to make this some objective fact, to leap over once and for all. He keeps "trying, so to speak, to make everyone talk the sooner and thus put an end to it all at once”

The decisive scene in the novel is when Sonya reads the raising of Lazarus passage from the Gospel of John. People will want to read this as Sonya proselytizing Raskolnikov, trying to convert him to Christianity, or just being naively faithful and devoted. It is none of this. The "resurrection scene" in this scene is not the Biblical story. It is what is happening IN LIFE right in front of her. She emphasizes that Christ has lain in the tomb for four days. That is, she emphasizes the time, the endurance, the non-transcendence of days and days of hopelessness. The "redemption of Raskolnikov's soul" is not a metaphysical event of divine salvation. It is occurring in this tiny room, right then.

On the last page, the embrace of the long penal sentence ("seven years, only seven years!") is a sign of embracing temporality, of patience with cares and insufficiencies... whereas the crime, the leap into abstractions and out of human cares, was an attempt to escape temporality.

The irony of the novel is that it is the atheist Raskolnikov who is obsessed with "eternity," and with a perspective of unchangeable truth that he can leap into, from out of worldly time. And it is the Christian, Sonya, who is pledged to the language of "four days" and "seven years," i.e. is committed not to the transcendental but to the world in front of her.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

What does it mean that Dostoevsky was a Christian? And how is it that we are able to "forgive" him for  this, and to go on reading him? It does seem that, for all the continual chatter about the incompatibility of religion and science ("reason"), an even more pronounced schism is between religion and culture. Christianity is simply not to be taken seriously, to the point where proclaiming oneself an atheist is seen as sufficient evidence for being a thinking person. Christian "literature" is shelved separately from real literature in bookstores.

If we go on reading Dostoevsky, it is because his Christianity is surely of its time and culture, vaguely regrettable, perhaps "aesthetic" rather than fundamentalist at its root, and something we should overlook. Most of all, these beliefs are to be understood as something we know all about already: "Dostoevsky's Christianity" is a description jotted down in lecture, next to the dates of his birth, death, and publication of his major works.

Here is a website that considers Dostoevsky's isolated statements, biography, and crude summaries of his work from the point of view of a monolithic Russian Orthodoxy. This seems to me exactly the wrong approach, and a most un-Dostoevskyan approach. Nonetheless, there is a great deal of truth in noting that while Dostoevsky's "presentation of God, Christ, and sin are generally aligned with the theological thought of Christian orthodoxy," on the subject of salvation, "Dostoevsky is considerably less than a student of the New Testament could wish," as "Dostoevsky almost seemed to embrace an in-this-life purgatory."

I think there is a danger in representing, as these quotations from his biographer Joseph Frank do, Christianity as something Dostoevsky has whittled down to a necessary, but problematic tenet: "Dostoevsky was to say…that the problem of the existence of God had tormented him all his life; but this only confirms that it was always emotionally impossible for him ever to accept a world that had no relation to a God of any kind." or, "Dostoevsky to be a believing Christian in his own way, inwardly striving to accept the essential dogmas of the divinity of Christ, personal immortality, the Second Coming, and the Resurrection."

It seems rather to me that Dostoevsky, in his art, is not preserving a last outpost of Christianity, one that might "tip over" into doubt and rejection, such that his novels stage this siege of faith--not at all. Rather, Dostoevsky's Christianity is simply NOT a "problem of the existence of God," "of the divinity of Christ, personal immortality, the Second coming, and the Resurrection." Dostoevsky's Christianity is not weakened by these subtractions, it is not tenuous or vulnerable because it lacks definite answers to these metaphysical questions. 

There is a quote by Wittgenstein that gets at some of what Dostoyevsky is doing: 

Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For "consciousness of sin" is a real even tand so are despair and salvation through faith. 

Christianity in Dostoevsky's novels is a "dialogic" and contested space between characters, involving their personalities and situations--rather than a deus ex machina or cop-out. Dostoevsky is hardly recommending a satisfied bourgeois existence of religious prescriptions and church-going: in Crime and Punishment, almost the only Christian presence is the prostitute Sonya. No one gets their ticket to salvation stamped by faith in an afterlife or through remitting sins by confession.(You will notice that confessing-sin is one of the great pastimes in his novels; confession does not score points with God here.) 

Dostoevsky succinctly lays out his plan for The Idiot:

The main thought of the novel is to depict a positively beautiful individual. There is nothing more difficult than this on earth and especially at present... On earth there is only one positively beautiful person--Christ.  

But in composing the novel, Dostoevsky realizes, in his biographer's words, that "Sanctity is not a literary theme."

A quick summary of the novel would go like this: Prince Myshkin, an epileptic and a dreamer, returns to Russia from a Swiss asylum, so that he comes into the world as an innocent, a stranger, really a pure and celibate soul. "He knows nothing understands nothing, neither people nor sounds, a stranger to everything and a castaway." Immediately he is sucked into the depraved, envious, and hysterical machinations of materialist, ideologically-rent St. Petersburg society, which variously treats him as an embarrassment, a novelty, a sucker, and a threat. But if the prince is a beautiful soul, there is no outlet for it in this world. "All the souls are ulcerous, all the foundations are unstable, all the wellsprings are poisoned." The prince's every intention is misunderstood, every action goes awry, his apologies and his understanding are turned into weapons, "his love does not save, but destroys." He is more like Don Quixote than perhaps any other character in literature (Dostoevsky makes this comparison himself)*: he has no field of action except grotesque misunderstanding and the diversion of his purpose and noble character into their opposites. The novel ends with one of the darkest, most unnerving scenes in world literature: Myshkin shares a repulsive nocturnal vigil with the murderer of the desperate, self-defeating woman they both love. They are found in the morning:

Meanwhile it had grown quite light; he finally lay down on the pillows, as if quite strengthless now and in despair, and pressed his face to the pale and motionless face of Rogozhin; tears flowed from his eyes onto Rogozhin's cheeks, but perhaps by then he no longer felt his own tears and knew nothing about them... In any case, when, after many hours, the door opened and people came in, they found the murderer totally unconscious and delirious. The prince was sitting motionless on the bed beside him, and each time the sick man had a burst of shouting or raving, he quietly hastened to pass his trembling hand over his hair and cheeks, as if caressing and soothing him. But he no longer understood anything of what they asked him about, and did not recognize the people who came in and surrounded him.

* In his diary entries on Don Quixote, Dostoevsky treats the delusional knight with utter seriousness. Against the romantic idea of Don Quixote's "impossible dream" which casts a rosy, ennobling glow over the banal, disenchanted world-- Dostoevsky sees in Don Quixote the "needless ruination" of a great and "realist" mind. That is to say, we all read the novel as a series of mistakes, illusions, misreadings by this character, but Dostoevsky (quite remarkably) analyzes Don Quixote's intensity of soul, the mechanics of his conviction, that is to say the inner idea, considered independently of his miscues. 

Myshkin is similarly unable to decode reality, and is imprisoned within his impotence and a perspective incommensurable with the "mimetic desire" (Girard) of those around him. "The laws of social life were not written for him," says Mochulsky. Here too we find the needless ruination of a beautiful spirit. 

At first appearance, then, the novel is a simple thought experiment. "Q: What if a totally good, innocent person were to arrive in the world? A: The madness of the world would rise up against him, defeat him, destroy his idea of beauty, and pervert everything around him until he went insane." And this is plainly how things stand. Myshkin is a Christ-figure with no salvation to distribute, who does not rise again, who is scorned and punished for his goodness, who accomplishes no positive acts. (Joseph Frank remarks that Raskolnikov has more "good works" to his credit than Myshkin). And the forces at work against him are just as plainly the corrosive anti-values of materialism which threaten to pull him in: "He had the feeling that if he remained here just a few more days, he would certainly be drawn into this world irretrievably, and this world would henceforth be his lot."

Like Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground, The Idiot is thoroughly penetrated by a paranoid sense of exposure and observation. In Crime and Punishment, this has a double sense: on one hand, Raskolnikov, being guilty, is obsessed by the threat of discovery and suspicion. On the other hand, his crime itself has an "audience" in the sense of being meant to confirm objectively Raskolnikov's transcendence of mundane reality by "stepping over." Raskolnikov cannot bear to be seen by his landlady, to whom he owes rent, but at the same time is exposing his deeds and resolve to the supposed judgement of the world spirit.

In The Idiot, the collapsing and exposing power of vision is rendered in modes of physical experience: 

[Dostoevsky's new form of the "inobjective body"] is given in certain modes of experience: sickness, for instance, is as much subjective as objective; so is violence, and so is life with others, the "invasive" presence of the other (hence the privileged place Dostoevsky gives to doorways and thresholds, to sudden entrances and unexpected meetings)... The novel, broadly speaking, is an exploration of what it means to be flesh.

Characters are haunted by a need and fear to be seen, to be judged, and at the same time to shamefully conceal themselves, to lie, to be thrown into capricious and unpredictable frenzies that seemingly exist only to frustrate a rational observer (and are maddening for the reader). Thus, for Rogozhin, "the need for an interlocutor seemed more mechanical than moral; somehow more from distraction than from simple-heartedness; from anxiety, from agitation." 

Suffering is on display, it is an invitation to be discussed and seen: "Among the Japanese, an offended man supposedly goes to the offender and says to him: 'You have offended me, for that I have come to rip my belly open before your eyes,' and with those words he actually rips his belly open before his offender's eyes, no doubt feeling an extreme satisfaction, as if he had indeed revenged himself."

Keeping this in mind, let us turn to what almost everyone agrees to be the decisive motif in the novel, Holbein's painting of Christ taken down from the cross. From Ippolit's "explanation":

This picture portrays Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters are usually in the habit of portraying Christ, both on the cross and taken down from the cross, as still having a shade of extraordinary beauty in his face; they seek to preserve this beauty for him even in his most horrible suffering. But in Rogozhin's picture there is not a word about beauty; this is in the fullest sense the corpse of a man who had endured infinite suffering before the cross, wounds, torture, beating by the guards, beating by the people as he carried the cross and fell down under it, and had finally suffered on the cross for six hours.... In the picture this face is horribly hurt by blows, open, the eyes crossed; the large, open whites have a sort of deathly, glassy shine. But strangely, when you look at the corpse of this tortured man, a particular and curious question arises: if all his disciples, his chief future apostles, if the women who followed him and stood by the cross, if all those who believed in him and worshipped him had seen a corpse like that (and it was bound to be exactly like that), how could they believe, looking at such a corpse, that this sufferer would resurrect? 

This is spoken by the atheist Ippolit (actually a somewhat insufferable character), who is one of Dostoevsky's "underground men." Atheism has a special place in Dostoevsky, as usually the murderers and suicides are proclaimed atheists. Atheism, by the way, has nothing to do with "not believing in God." 

[Rogozhin, the prince says,] doesn't believe in God. Only one thing struck me: it was as if that was not at all what he was talking about all the while, and it struck me precisely because before, too, however many unbelievers I've met, however many books I've read on the subject, it has always seemed that they were talking or writing books that were not at all about that, though it looked as if it was about that... The essence of religious feeling doesn't fit in with any reasoning, with any crimes and trespasses, or with any atheisms; there's something else here that's not that, and it will eternally be not that; there's something in it that atheisms will eternally glance off, and they will eternally be talking not about that. 

Back to our Christ. The other image in the novel that is really the same thing is the story, taken from Dostoevsky's own life, of a man sentenced to be executed, who is spared at the last second. How will this person live afterward? Will they be "resurrected" or will this encounter with death and hopelessness dissolve back into the quotidian cares and pushing of life? 

Let me wrap all this up. The person to-be-resurrected in the Holbein picture is not Christ but the viewer (the apostles, not shown, but also the viewer of the painting). The body of Christ is a mangled piece of human flesh, but not-asserting its divine, teleological fate is the "truly Christian" act. To be placed in front of a suffering mortal is not (as it is for Rogozhin) the moment to LOSE FAITH. This is what Christianity shows us: pained, powerless, matter that is nonetheless trying to "live beautifully" and failing, being defeated. 

The greatest blasphemy is the idea that Christ "set himself up," that his betrayal and execution are of no concern to him, that he was still going to get off the hook by being resurrected. Dostoevsky resolutely rejects this. This is the idea of a Rogozhin who stands defiantly "in full view and it seemed that he deliberately wanted to be in view. He stood like an accuser and a judge." Christ is not like Rogozhin. His death is not something performed-for-the-gaze-of-the-other. 

In Dostoevsky's novels, we run away from each other and from ourselves, we me make ourselves sick, we wallow in shame, we flee into explanations that degrade us (materialism), we worship unhappiness (our own and others'). Dostoevsky's Christianity is hard to hold onto--that's the point--but it asks of us to attend to the pain of others, to not perversely "win" within our own downfalls, to allow ourselves to be forgiven. (This last is what we do not do.) At its most challenging, The Idiot has Myshkin ask (just before falling into  an epileptic fit), "Is it really possible to be unhappy?" This is not an empirical question. There are executioners. We do not have to be our own. 

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion--what kind of titles are these? A fun game can be played by trying to turn other novels into Jane Austen Titles: The Guermantes Way becomes Precocity, Don Quixote becomes Fancy and Fallacy. A few titles can stay just how they are: Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, True Grit, Elective Affinities, etc. These are already "Austenian."

It has been remarked that every novel could plausibly be titled Lost Illusions, and this is particularly true of Austen's work. The romanticism of sensibility, the autonomy of pride, the reflexive self-valuation of prejudice, and the pragmatism of persuasion--all are so many illusions to be lost. (It has been remarked that the two main characters of Pride and Prejudice think that they are the actors in the novel Dignity and Perception.)

But then, has anyone ever stood up from a Jane Austen novel and, clapping their hands, felt the title to represent a lesson learned? "From now on, I will be less easily persuaded [sensible, prejudiced]--that's settled." [But there are novels that we put down having decided to change our lives.] Austen seems rather to be evaluative: the only way to enjoy her novels is as affirmations of values we already share.

I have always been appalled when anyone has expressed a nostalgia for Austen's world. It seems to me rather like a circle of hell: socially impoverished, ignorant, narrow, dominated by idle chatter and petty envy, a kind of barely-subdued Hobbesian war of all against all. Malice is everywhere; solitude is forever besieged.

The law that we must refer to Jane Austen as "witty" reminds me that we never apply that adjective to someone we like. It is impossible that Austen would like all of her readers back, so to speak. What her titles announce is not that the books are "love stories," but that they are records of mistakes, mortifications. Elizabeth Bennet is mistaken about nearly everything (Catherine Moreland, too). Emma Woodhouse progressively isolates herself from the good will of the community she lords over. Anne Elliot has fucked everything up years before her novel begins.

Anne Elliot is shuffled around England like so much leased furniture, ignored by her immediate family, broken-hearted and regretfully withdrawn from the one passion of her life, alone in nearly all of her judgments. No one can even be bothered to recollect her past, which they stomp over in careless gossip. Here is a passage where insensitive, amnesiac, mindless social speculation treads down the one defining regret of Anne's life. It is only after this passage that we learn that Wentworth (the curate's brother) is Anne's former fiancé, and can put back into her thoughts the precise agony of overhearing this frivolity and being herself the only one with the right word.

"'[The new tenant] is sister to a gentleman who did live amongst us once; she told me so herself: sister to the gentleman who lived a few years back at Monkford. Bless me! what was his name? At this moment I cannot recollect his name, though I have heard it so lately. Penelope, my dear, can you help me to the name of the gentleman who lived at Monkford: Mrs Croft's brother?' 

But Mrs Clay was talking so eagerly with Miss Elliot, that she did not hear the appeal. 

'I have no conception whom you can mean, Shepherd; I remember no gentleman resident at Monkford since the time of old Governor Trent.' 

'Bless me! how very odd! I shall forget my own name soon, I suppose. A name that I am so very well acquainted with; knew the gentleman so well by sight; seen him a hundred times; came to consult me once, I remember, about a trespass of one of his neighbours; farmer's man breaking into his orchard; wall torn down; apples stolen; caught in the fact; and afterwards, contrary to my judgement, submitted to an amicable compromise. Very odd indeed!' 

After waiting another moment-- 

'You mean Mr Wentworth, I suppose?' said Anne. 

Mr Shepherd was all gratitude. 'Wentworth was the very name! Mr Wentworth was the very man. He had the curacy of Monkford, you know, Sir Walter, some time back, for two or three years. Came there about the year 1805, I take it. You remember him, I am sure.' 

'Wentworth? Oh! ay,--Mr Wentworth, the curate of Monkford. You misled me by the term gentleman. I thought you were speaking of some man of property: Mr Wentworth was nobody, I remember; quite unconnected; nothing to do with the Strafford family. One wonders how the names of many of our nobility become so common.' 

There is nothing to decode here, no brilliant close-reading is possible. It simply has not been worth the time of the others to enter into, to recall, the central event of another person's existence. And this is all Austen is, is showing us these facts about selfhood.

Being a self in Austen is not something that one will be thanked for; it requires "resources for solitude," i.e. interests and concerns that have been forged in privacy; some compass of taste and decency not to be pulled out of deep currents by a moment's distraction; and, tautologically perhaps, being a self is a case of "like recognizing like." The vapid, pointless non-entities that rattle their jaws through the entire Austen corpus, may be morally evaluated on entirely other standards--but put two serious-minded fans of Byron in a room together, and they will find each out and recognize their value over the others.

As in the world, having a personality is something with infinite pitfalls (not only pride, prejudice, and sensibility--or Emma's insensitivity--the Crawfords, Wickham, and William Elliot are more or less charming sociopaths), something that by and large socially we have to do without (the workplace is a great testimony to the rarity of personalities). Austen's task is to work out all the permutations of having-a-personality, being-a-self, which (I repeat) is far from a moral value, indeed usually collides with morality at some point. The question is how to be a self with duration, depth, and self-reflection while surrounded by an incessant, unperceiving din of clichés and misinformation. How to be recognized (in a Hegelian way, by another one like me)? How to not tip over into solipsistic megalomania? And finally, how do we live with the inane, the careless, the tasteless?

To recap: Austen's world is not an idealized "period piece" or decorative stage for the unfolding of romance. It is a howling bestiary, or a bawling nursery of self-enforcedly one-dimensional mental infants, in which love and friendship are just names for the rare collision with another real, substantial self.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Like "The Window," the celebrated first section of To the Lighthouse, Solzhenitsyn's novella walks us through a single day of inconsequential yet highly detailed activity. Laying bricks, waiting in line, being counted at roll call, hiding tools and spoons from the guards... busy work. None of it could possibly add up to anything. And yet Ivan Denisovich Shukhov is riveted to these mundane, dysfunctional concerns from before dawn until just before sleep. The free moment is hoarded like so many crusts of bread: "Shukhov never overslept reveille. He always got up at once, for the next ninety minutes, until they assembled for work, belonged to him, not to the authorities." By contrast, the empty activity in Woolf's novel is performed inattentively, always serving as an instance for reflection, for diving into oneself. Knitting a stocking is only a cover for contemplating the fragility of our knowledge of other persons, the glimpses of our hidden selves that dart and vanish like wisps.

The "story" is crowded with paths not taken on this particular day, but which will be taken the next day, the next year. The squad will get sent out to work at the (colder) new settlement; this day, they dodge that fate. Another day, Shukhov's bread will get stolen; this day, it is still in his bunk when he returns. What suspense there is resides in these moments, potential turning-points where discovery, betrayal, or a brutal tenure in the guardhouse, threaten. But this is a story of "many strokes of luck," "A day without a dark cloud. Almost a happy day." No decisions are made, no plans laid, none of Aristotle's reversals and recognitions.

In an essay on Solzhenitsyn, Georg Lukács compares One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich to Hemingway's The Old Man in the Sea and Conrad's Typhoon, as novellas which can only present a restricted scope of life and time. In Hemingway, everything is touched with the aura of the universal, every struggle, every wrinkle, every loyalty stands for something more than just that thing: Struggle, Age, Loyalty. Conrad's novella, while also a "trial at sea," does not give us an allegory of the human condition. It is a character study and an adventure yarn.

Solzhenitsyn's book is much closer to the latter. "No trace of symbolism is to be found in Solzhenitsyn's presentation," says Lukács. "[Solzhenitsyn has given us] a microcosm of everyday life as a whole under Stalin. He has achieved this by grappling imaginatively with the question of what demands that age made on human beings; who succeeded in remaining human and preserving his dignity and integrity as a man; who was able to stand firm and how was this achieved; in what characters the substance of humanity was left intact or was twisted, shattered, destroyed..."

Indeed, the book is not titled A Day in the Life of a Prison Camp, but is concerned with an individual, suffering person. What do we think of this Ivan Denisovich? It is not enough to say that he is an "everyman," a representative of the person who kept his head down during the Stalinist era and who survived--because that is not a "person" but an ideology. It is equally no use to write, as does Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the Introduction to my edition, "To what extent is Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitsyn himself? To a great extent, but he, unlike Ivan Denisovich, created a record from his experiences."

Unlike the characters of Stalinist "socialist realism," which Lukács tells us were "puppets contrived for the purpose" of providing "glosses on official directives," who "could not be allowed to have any past, [but] only official dossiers," Solzhenitsyn is presumed to have given us here a set of living, breathing figures, emerging from a historical word, surviving in the midst of complicated demands on their being and consciousness.

I confess that my taste is for characters who are self-conscious articulators of their experience, who soliloquize, debate, and grapple: Antigone, Hamlet, Don Quixote, Heathcliff, Raskolnikov, Isabel Archer, Socrates, Tristram Shandy. Shukhov is much more like a Robinson Crusoe. The most riveting passages in the novella are when someone else is talking: the squad leader Tiurin about his past life, the filmmaker Tsezar about Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, and finally Alyosha the Baptist about prayer.

It is hard to show a character without delving into his thoughts, without putting him into conversation with others, without showing a decisive moment in his life, without showing him over time. Solzhenitsyn needlessly handicaps himself (take as a contrast the prison camp film The Human Condition, which over and over climaxes in heightened moments of moral choice). In the most successful pages of the book dealing strictly with work, the reader follows breathlessly the necessities and spatial reasoning of Shukhov as he sizes up a problem (Robinson Crusoe can also be fascinating).

What are Shukhov's values? Not confrontation, criticism, ambition, nostalgia, the purchasing of comfort, camaraderie, or the hope of a projected future. It is easy to define him negatively like that. But this is Solzhenitsyn's method:

"Now he didn't know either whether he wanted freedom or not. At first he'd longed for it. Every night he'd counted the days of his stretch--how many had passed, how many were coming. And then he'd grown bored with counting. And then it became clear that men like him wouldn't ever be allowed to return home, that they'd be exiled. And whether his life would be any better there than here--who could tell? Freedom meant one thing to him---home. But they wouldn't let him go home."

This is by a wide margin the longest passage where Ivan thinks about the future, and the conflict is abruptly dropped and met with a shrug. After all, this isn't an immediate problem for tomorrow. So even this facet of Ivan's character is a response to the exigencies of his world. Too true, but I still want to say, "He just isn't a compelling or strongly-drawn character."

There is something to be said for aesthetic failures (e.g. the "man without qualities") being elevated to principles of composition. For instance, one doesn't criticize Andy Warhol for the flatness of his colors. I'm sure this blog will meet this issue coming and going. But I also suspect that, even at a mere 139 pages, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a candidate for Dr. Johnson's remark about Paradise Lost, that "None ever wished it longer."

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

It was announced last year that Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury would be reissued in a color-coded format, with the various timelines and streams of consciousness differentiated and highlighted. I am sure this was a fun task for the editors, but the published version would seem to promise all the fun of a pre-assembled jigsaw puzzle.

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse could be approached in the same way as Faulkner's text (and Joyce in essence begged for this fate): something to be annotated, winnowed, and re-assembled, with a cooing awe that Woolf could take a mundane series of events--children running on the beach, a walk into the village, a boating excursion--and splice them into multiple temporalities and subjectivities.

All the time, our annotator--armed with colored highlighters, timeline charts, and a determination to sort out every utterance and retrospection--must imagine that at the bottom of all of this intricacy lies the work's imbricated, deepest secrets.

On the contrary, the fragmented, subjective style itself already is the meaning of the novel. The prose can be cleanly divided into description, performed action, dialogue, on one hand; and internal consciousness (the "real" action) on the other hand. The soul and the world can be sifted out into different sentences in the same paragraph.

In saying this, one has already arrived at the profundity of Woolf's worldview, as in the observation by Mrs. Ramsay of "the discrepancy--that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing." Self-consciousness for Woolf is what is deepest, most individual, a self-communion, a "free," "invisible" "core" without attachments. Our real being-in-the-world is an inauthentic "apparition." (This is basically Henri Bergson's philosophical dualism: the inner is free, unlimited, creative, temporal; our external lives are confined, determined, and ruled by natural laws.) At the same time, the entire novel is a document of the difficulties in living this way, of accessing this self, of having knowledge of those other selves outside of our own.

Here is a passage about Mr. Ramsay, the moderately successful philosopher who has married an extraordinarily beautiful woman, has eight children, and surrounds himself with adoring pupils, respected scientists and poets, at the Scottish beach house that gives the novel its setting. Notice how Mr. Ramsay's faults (vanity, sensitivity, pompousness) run together with his own painful awareness of them and the central fact of his life, that "he had not done the thing he might have done." His very (trivial, social) dishonesty is couched in (self-lacerating, inner) honesty.

"He turned from the sight of human ignorance and human fate and the sea eating the ground we stand on, which, had he been able to contemplate it fixedly might have led to something; and found consolation in trifles so slight compared with the august theme just now before him that he was disposed to slur that comfort over, to deprecate it, as if to be caught happy in a world of misery was for an honest man the most despicable of crimes. It was true; he was for the most part happy; he had his wife; he had his children; he had promised in six weeks’ time to talk “some nonsense” to the young men of Cardiff about Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the causes of the French Revolution. But this and his pleasure in it, his glory in the phrases he made, in the ardour of youth, in his wife’s beauty, in the tributes that reached him from Swansea, Cardiff, Exeter, Southampton, Kidderminster, Oxford, Cambridge—all had to be deprecated and concealed under the phrase “talking nonsense,” because, in effect, he had not done the thing he might have done. It was a disguise; it was the refuge of a man afraid to own his own feelings, who could not say, This is what I like—this is what I am; and rather pitiable and distasteful to William Bankes and Lily Briscoe, who wondered why such concealments should be necessary; why he needed always praise; why so brave a man in thought should be so timid in life; how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time."

Woolf's writing, like George Eliot's, situates acts and character. Minds are contextualized, their processes of feeling exposed down to the root. Resentment is exculpated, connections drawn. Self-consciousness, just in being one of many ongoing threads, is partial, ridiculous, vain, miscomprehending and miscomprehended.

What is left over from all this, then, other than the cliché that one must "walk a mile in another person's shoes"? (Note here the contrast with a Dostoyevsky novel, where the endless monologue of the central characters only renders them more opaque, more mediated by the desires of others, and framed by the red herring of spurious ideological "context."

What is left over, in Woolf's account, are what she (elsewhere) calls "moments of being."  The spinster-artist Lily Briscoe is struck at several moments by the way that transitory, everyday moments will get transfixed by meaning, dipped into symbolism, estranged from their surroundings and made to stand for more-than-themselves. Here is one such moment of being:

"The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, 'Life stand still here'; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere [the artistic] Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent)--this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape."

This aesthetic, timeless, symbolical eruption of meaning is an escape from the quotidian and corresponds to the invisible core of self that Woolf prizes. Once Lily is "drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people," *then* she can face "this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on here" in the act of painting. Her word is "emergence," or "the thing itself before it had been made anything."

But perhaps the opposite is truer: what’s hard and rare is for us to see things as they really are, as mere physical items in the inventory of the world. For things are always already “more” than themselves. Our first encounters are fundamentally deja-vu. Other people’s words, and other meanings, are attached to everything in advance. Woolf makes things too easy on herself by seeing the symbolic as something rare.

Woolf writes that "intimacy itself is knowledge." Ah, but intimacy is hard. At a certain point, our failures are just who we are. The promises of youth don't take place, resentments set in. The self, in its very form, doesn't find expression in the world. It is hard to be a person without smothering others, reducing their concerns, drawing in upon oneself. Between the messiness of intimacy, of death, of banal getting-through, and the aesthetic, momentary conjuration of "life stand still," stands the entire problem of life.