Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

Dead Ends

Thomas Mann writes about the paradox of Anna Karenina as “the greatest society novel in all literature” which is also “an anti-society novel.” Tolstoy prefaces his novel with the Biblical admonition, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, sayeth the Lord.” But Mann wonders where in Tolstoy’s novel the difference can be located between God’s punishment and the fatal constrictions placed on Anna by society: “How far do they coincide in the heart of the socially circumscribed human being?” And indeed the greatness of that novel is the complexity of Tolstoy’s response to Anna’s self-destruction. At no point is she an innocent victim of society; at no point do we not understand and sympathize with her. But this is only to say that Tolstoy is everywhere wrangling with questions of guilt and error. The question of responsibility and error is not absent; it “hovers unanswered over the whole novel.”

Buddenbrooks, another candidate for “greatest society novel” poses similar questions: Do the Buddenbrooks deserve their decline? Does Thomas’s death pay back his unscrupulous dealings with Herr von Maiboom’s estate? Are the sins of the fathers visited upon the sons? Was there some alternate, evasive course of action possible and not taken?

These must be answered in the negative. Mann is not interested in tragic causality, whereby the hero (in Sidney Lumet’s phrase) creates the situation, and the situation strips him down to his essence. In the tragic novels of Thomas Hardy, for instance, every decision is a mistake that reveals the character. His heroes are the sum of their miscalculations, weaknesses, blindness, regrets, and wrong turns. We understand them, but we would (now) do everything differently. Buddenbrooks has no irreversible, fate-sealing moments. In this, it differs from the prototypes of the “decline of a family” genre, Aeschylus’s Oresteia and Sophocles’s Theban plays. The disasters awaiting the House of Atreus and the House of Thebes are built, as Cassandra prophesies: “For in the home a dreadful anger waits. It does not forget and cannot be appeased.”

Buddenbrooks, unlike these tragedies, is both forgiving and forgetful. Forgiving, because catastrophic effects don’t threateningly pile up—they dissipate and fade into background. The family’s decline is inexorable, but not crushing and didactic, as in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart novels or Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The Buddenbrooks are not bankrupted or otherwise “ruined” financially or socially. Forgetful, because the disastrous marriage between Tony Buddenbrook and Bendix Grünlich is not a permanent black mark, as it would be in another novel.  “The years slipped by. The traces of what had befallen Consul Buddenbrook’s daughter grew more and more blurred, both in town and in the family.” Contrast with the tragically memorious Inspector Javert in Les Misérables, or Baron Innstetten in Effie Briest, neither of whom have heard of a statue of limitations. Past sins are eternally valid and actionable for these characters. Not so for Buddenbrooks, which is a record of entropy, lapses, and the wearing effects of time.

This is not just a feature of Buddenbrooks’ world and plot, but its form. The novel is episodic, continually skipping forward, foregoing any effect of concatenation and causality. Sometimes it is “just one thing after another.” A contrast might be helpfully drawn here with Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. The reader of Proust must be especially attentive because, as with a mystery novel, any small detail might come back later. Proust narrates with the eye of the jealous lover. Buddenbrooks is as detailed as you could want, but does not presume much “recall” on the reader’s part. The narrator shares our distracted lapses: “Sometimes we happen to recall someone, think of her, and wonder how she is doing, and suddenly we remember that she is no longer to be found strolling about the streets, that her voice is no longer part of the general chorus, that she has simply vanished from the arena of life and now lies beneath the earth somewhere.”

Nicholas Dames has drawn a distinction between the modernist novel, which we imagine as engaged in “heroic acts of preservation,” and the Victorian novel, in “memory is less a valorized theme than a dilemma or a threat.” In Austen, Dickens, and Trollope, we find rather “the death of memory,” and recollection operates only by a nostalgia that is useful for the present. The goal is “to eliminate the possibility, in psychological terms, of traumatic fixation, and in narratological terms, of the eruption of desultory, chaotic reminiscences.” Life is then conceived as “no longer burdened by the past, a life lived as a coherent tale, summarizable, pointed, and finally memorizable.”

Where does Buddenbrooks fit? Here is a passage following Tony’s divorce:

She was soon enjoying her role of ‘innocent woman afflicted by tragedy’; her wardrobe was dark now, her pretty ash-blond hair was parted and neatly drawn back, just as she had worn it in her youth; and, to compensate for her lack of social pleasures, she found inexhaustible joy and great dignity in the gravity and importance of her new situation and provided the household with her views on marriage, Herr Grünlich, and life and destiny in general.

Tony transforms her own bitter failure into a generic type, an identifiable “role.” She begins to dress the part and perform “experience” as an empty set of gestures. This is recollection only insofar as Tony’s alteration is general and socially recognizable. 

She is assiduous about recording the event of her divorce in the family ledger:

She assumed a serious face and approached [her father], saying, ‘You did enter it in the family records, didn’t you, Father? No? Oh, then surely I should. Please, give me the key to the secretary.’ And right beneath the lines that she had entered after her name four years before, she resolutely and proudly wrote: ‘This marriage was dissolved by law in February of 1850.’

Then she laid down her pen and pondered for a moment. ‘Father,’ she said, ‘I know very well that all this leaves a blot on our family history. Yes, it does—I have given it a great deal of thought. It’s the same as if there were a splotch of ink on this page. But don’t worry, it’s up to me to see that it is erased. I am still young… One can’t spend one’s whole life being the silly goose I once was. Life sweeps one along with it.’

The legal details that Tony firmly presses onto the page immediately are canceled out as so much illegible ink: she sees her entry not as an archive but as a “blot” or “splotch.” And no sooner has she written it than she is striving to have it “erased.”

From this point on, moreover, Tony began to use a certain phrase frequently: ‘After all, life is like that…’ And at the word ‘life’ she would open her eyes wide in a pretty but serious sort of way to indicate what deep insight she now had into human life and human fate. 

Tony’s “deep insight” is a tautology, mere phrase-making and posturing. And yet has she gone through the same experience and made the same error as Sue Bridehead, Dorothea Brooke, Emma Bovary, and Anna Karenina. Still, she does it again a hundred pages later, marrying the doltish Herr Permaneder, and this too comes out badly. She marries her daughter Erika off with no better luck. And yet:

She met all these very adult experiences with something like incredulity, and [...] she experienced them with a child’s gravity and a child’s sense of importance and—most of all—a child’s inner powers to overcome them. She did not understand what she had done to deserve her suffering; for, although she sneered at her mother’s great piety, she shared in it, believing that justice is rewarded on this earth.

In short, Tony’s suffering is short-sighted and spiteful. She registers and savors the wrongs done to her, but only as expletives of scorn and slighted pride:  “Babbit!”  “That Möllendorpf woman, or Hagenström, or Semlinger, or whatever, that Julie, that creature!” Even in being brought low by time, Tony is  “unutterably smug.”

Very late in the novel, Tony comforts her nephew Hanno, a frail and artistic child who has been sent to the seashore for health reasons but has returned with no improvement.

It was Aunt Tony who showed the most ready understanding for Hanno’s yearning for the sea, which was like a wound that slowly scabbed over but would begin to sting and bleed again at the least touch of the rigors of everyday life. She obviously enjoyed listening to his descriptions of life in Travemünde and joined in enthusiastically whenever he wistfully sang its praises.

“Yes, Hanno,” she said, “the true things in life will always be true, and Travemünde is a beautiful spot. Until they lower me in my grave, I will always have happy memories, you know, of the weeks I spent there one summer when I was just a silly young goose. I lived with a family that I liked so much, and they were fond of me, too, it seemed. I was a pretty young thing back then —I’m allowed to say that now that I’m an old lady... Yes, what a wonderfully exciting time I spent with them. I learned so much there, you see, views and opinions and facts that have stood me in good stead all my life, and if other things had not interfered, all sorts of things that just happened—the way they do in life—I could have profited from it even more, even though I was a silly young goose. Do you want to know how stupid I was back then? I wanted some of those pretty colored stars that jellyfish have inside them. So I wrapped a whole bunch of them in my handkerchief and took them home and laid them out neatly in the sun on the balcony, so they would dry up. That way, I thought, only the stars would be left. Right... and when I went back to look, there was just a big wet spot. And it smelled a little like rotting seaweed.”

This brings us to the figure of Hanno. If  Tony “had never once felt the need to swallow a defeat and overcome it in silence... Nothing left unsaid gnawed at her; no unspoken emotions weighed her down. And so she did not have to carry her past around with her,” Hanno seems designed to feel every prick of the world’s torment with heightened sensitivity and tearful, weak endurance. 

Hanno is the anti-Tony. We can see this in the record he makes in the family ledger. If Tony wants to erase the blot made by her marriages, Hanno draws under his own name “two neat, lovely horizontal lines across the bottom,” explaining to his incredulous father that, “I thought... I thought... there wouldn’t be anything more.”

Any reader of novels will recognize in the passage where Tony consoles Hanno a warning about the “wrong” way to make permanent the blissful moments of life. One cannot preserve the lights of youth by setting starfish out to dry. One has to write a novel! So David Copperfield and Remembrance of Things Past teach us. Hanno is the only possible candidate for this task, being a “tenderhearted dreamer” rather than a practical man of business. Hanno is absorbed by a passion for Wagner and Beethoven, but the greatest passages of the novel are reserved for explaining Hanno’s weakness, how inadequately shielded he is from so many “instances of decline, dissolution, and termination” that slam his family and his own fragile being:

He had once again felt how painful beauty truly is, how it plunged you into shame and yearning despair and at the same time gnawed away at your courage and fitness for daily life. He had felt it as a dreadful, gloomy mountain pressing down on him so heavily that once again he was forced to admit that something more than private grief must be weighing him down, that some burden must have oppressed his soul from the very beginning and would suffocate him one day.

Hanno’s artistic sensitivity is indissociable from the pain he seems destined to bear the full brunt of. This is the cruelest irony. To be an amnesiac like Tony is to be invulnerable to the past, voluble and irrepressibly expressive. Thomas Buddenbrook, his father, is wracked by an awareness that he is only performing his own life, that he is out of step with his time and duties, but his habits, artifice of dignity, and disappointment with others make up a shield against this awareness. Memory is a threat, while to feel is to be swallowed up in a swarm of anguished, cacophonous racket. The music Hanno improvises belongs to “the fanatical cult of nothing... There was also something insatiable and depraved beyond measure in the way it was savored and exploited. It sucked hungrily at its last sweet drops with almost cynical despair, with a deliberate willing of bliss and doom, and it fell away in exhaustion, revulsion, and surfeit.” His improvisation is the closest thing that Buddenbrooks presents to its own recapitulation and appropriation of the past, but it ends in exhaustion, without a witness: the motifs simply wear themselves out.

Readers of The Magic Mountain will recognize here Mann’s “philosophy of disease” [Quotation from his essay on Goethe and Tolstoy]:

Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect. On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. It may be going too far to say that disease is spirit, or, which would sound very tendentious, that spirit is disease. Still, the two conceptions do have very much in common. For the spirit is pride; it is a willful denial and contradiction of nature; it is detachment, withdrawal, estrangement from her. Spirit is that which distinguishes from all other forms of organic life this creature man, this being which is to such a high degree independent of her and hostile to her. And the question, the aristocratic problem, is this: is he not by just so much the more man, the more detached he is from nature—that is to say, the more diseased he is?

“Spirit is disease.” Notice how far we are from the Hegelian idea that spirit is history. Disease is inescapably presentist, while history is burdened with the accumulated wreckage of the past. Although Mann has written one of the great historical novels, in the sense of Buddenbrooks being a period piece, it is a history that sinks, voiceless, into the mire, its lips murmuring as they are dragged beneath the whirlpool.

History in Buddenbrooks is a debâcle, but one that vanishes wordlessly, without any return of the repressed or messianic plea or twilight of the gods. There is no blame or moralizing about how the bad end was avoidable. There is only the underscoring that this was a dead end of history, bequeathing nothing: account closed.

I take the last lines of 100 Years of Solitude to be doing the same thing. There, too, the family and its memory “would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” and their family records and “everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forever more, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The underground man represents a certain type of freedom. Or at least a kind of revolt. A revolt against reason, which would classify, mathematize, systemize, and reify our nature in the name of instrumental pragmatics. Against these utilitarian classifications, the underground man asserts desire, chaos, destruction, the irrational, perversion, and against teleology, calculation, finality, and egoistic self-interest. In short, freedom and flux against control and partition. 

These philosophical positions will remind us of any number of postures: Existentialism, Deleuzian schizophrenia, and of course, Dostoevksy's original targets for his satire/caricature: the nihilists and radicals of the 1860s. Notes from the Underground is not a set of positions but a performance; not a polemic but a (one-person) dialogue; not a critique of society but an immanent critique (à la Hegel) of the contradictions and unravelling of this subjective position and its fraught, untenable paradoxes.

The "radical" positions of the underground man can be summarized as follows:

• Consciousness is not to be equated with rationality, but with suffering.
• Desire is independent of egoism and utility.
• Consciousness is immobilizing and incompatible with action, in a kind of Zeno's paradox.
• There is no possible, final foundation for certainty and justification.

Now, on their own, these are positions we should take seriously, criticize, etc. But these positions are not on their own. Rather they emerge, seething, from a bilious insecurity. They are determinate positions, moored in the dubious niches of the underground man's screed.

To begin, the "free, unfettered desire... one's own fantasy, sometimes roused to the point of madness" is not at all represented as free, but (in René Girard's) term is always in Dostoevsky a mediated desire. The underground man has no desire that is original to himself: he learns what to want from the others. The entire address of Part One is quivering with a cringing, crouching anticipation of the (imagined) audience's judgments and response:

(That's a poor joke, but I won't cross it out. I wrote it thinking that it would be very witty; but now, having realized that I merely wanted to show off disgracefully, I'll make a point of not crossing it out!)

I felt how they swarmed inside me, these contradictory elements. I knew that they had been swarming inside me my whole life and were begging to be let out; but I would't let them out, I wouldn't, I deliberately wouldn't let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame; they drove me to convulsions and--and finally I got fed up with them, oh how fed up! Perhaps it seems to you, gentlemen, that I'm repenting about something, that I'm asking your forgiveness for something? I'm sure that's how it seems to you... But really, I can assure you, I don't care how it seems...

These contradictory elements are, to be sure, masochism / sadism, exhibitionism / isolation, vanity / self-humiliation, etc. But there is no masochism without the other's desire; there is no exhibitionism without the other's gaze; there is no self-humiliation without the super ego's surveillance.

Thus, the revolt of the underground man, his maintaining a "loophole" for himself, an escape route to evade finalization and objectification, is always voiced, petulantly asserted:

Of course, it was I who just invented all these words for you. That, too, comes from the underground. For forty years in a row I've been listening to all your words through a crack. I've invented them myself, since that's all that's occurred to me. It's no wonder that I've learned it all by heart... But can you really be so gullible as to imagine that I'll print all this and give it to you to read?... Confessions such as the one I plan to set forth here aren't published and given to other people to read. 

But what does it mean, this undermining of consciousness by desire and the willful frustration of reason? "Desire is a manifestation of all life," we are told. Consciousness is the analytical awareness of this desire to desire, the registering of the sore, rusty taste of dissatisfaction. Consciousness, further, is the agent of this frustration, when it becomes the obstacle itself (as in the discussion of revenge in Chapter I).

What kind of life is manifested by desire, though? Wouldn't we rather say that the Notes evince an avoidance of life? and life's replacement by an unceasing stream of words? The underground man cuts off everyone entirely, is "terribly afraid of being seen, met, recognized," whose apartment "was my private residence, my shell, my case, where I hid from all humanity." And this paranoid isolation... this is the concept of life that follows from the above philosophy. "I wanted to remain alone in my underground."

To be thrust into life is to not have all the answers. Only in the underground does one have all the answers. In life, there is every chance that one will be drawn into the needs and pleadings of others, their sad stories, and find oneself bound (constrained!) to responsibility. To be thrust into life means any number of situations where there is no possible "last word." But the underground man's entire philosophy means having the last word. This is the point of making a scene.

A word about his much-vaunted freedom. It is a bluff, a filibuster. There is no last, fundamental desire at the bottom of the underground man. There is only the next response, the arbitrary shift to one side. As Mikhail Bakhtin notes, "The underground man not only dissolves in himself all possible fixed features of his person, making them all the object of his own inspection, but in fact he no longer has any such traits at all, no fixed definitions, there is nothing to say about him, he figures not as a person from life but rather as the subject of...[a] dream."

He says as much himself, if you know where to look. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving to himself constantly that he's a man and not an organ stop!" That is, the point is the proof, the unattainable certainty and guarantee that one is independent, unconfined, not calculable. This is the cruelest paradox (one also found in Crime and Punishment): the whole story of the underground man is to misbehave so badly, to say something so unforgivable, to cut people off so irreparably, that one's isolation will be confirmed and permanent. "The whole of man's work seems to consist only in proving..." means that this very logic of autonomy is subordinated to a quest for finality: to really be left alone forever. But this is just what is intolerable. 

What the underground man wants in this last, undefinable freedom of desire is not freedom or an ontological flux, but to have held something back from the game of otherness. As I wrote elsewhere, "The self-importance of the scandal purports to 'hold back' some image of the self which would not be tainted by finitude or need..." It is really being-something-at-all which is disgusting to the underground man. 

Of course, you can read this on the last page: "We're even oppressed by being men--men with real bodies and blood of our very own. We're ashamed of it; we consider it a disgrace and we strive to become some kind of impossible 'general-human-beings.'"

Dostoevsky equates this self-disgust with a cynical need for power, the suppression of pity: "For me love meant tyrannizing and demonstrating my moral superiority." Finally the underground man blurts out, at the critical juncture of his moral life, "They won't let me... I can't... be good!"

Why? Because to be loved, to be needed, is above all to be weak. The utmost exposure and vulnerability rob us of power. When the prostitute Liza understands that the underground man himself was "unhappy," sees that "it must have been very painful for me to utter all of this," it is this sensitive perception which is unforgivable. The entirety of the Notes is a dodge to make sure that this never happen again.

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy underwent a profound spiritual crisis (documented in A Confession), which led to a complete renunciation of his possessions, his class status, and the copyright to his works, and at last to his excommunication from the Russian Orthodox Church. Until the end of his life, Tolstoy became increasingly "enlightened" (and bitterly dogmatic) about the injustice of the political and social order, and increasingly frustrated with the failure of those around him to keep pace with his relentless activism and self-criticism. As Tolstoy successively elaborated and revised his vision of a Christian non-violent anarchist asceticism, anyone who did not see the atrocious sins of existing society with the clarity that he saw them, could only be deluded and mystified. It was all so stunningly apparent to Tolstoy.

During this time of his religious conviction, Tolstoy wrote a great deal of short fiction which has the reputation of being the finest in the world: "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," "Hadji Murat," "Master and Man," "Father Sergius," "The Forged Coupon," et al. However, the one long late novel, Resurrection, is little-known and has been easily ignored as a work of Christian propaganda. It is an entirely different creature than War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and perhaps therefore an inevitable disappoint. The closest comparison really is to the hundred-page screed on the philosophy of history that either encapsulates or mars War and Peace, as much of Resurrection is only one step away from intrusive, non-dramatic sermonizing.

Some aspects of Resurrection will be familiar to anyone acquainted with the main line of the nineteenth-century novel. The injustices of the penal system had been explored in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables and Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit,the "fallen woman" had been depicted by Thomas Hardy in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and the depravity of the slums and prostitution and urbanized peasantry were exposed in Zola's Rougon-Macquart novels. And in Tolstoy's earlier work, in the figures of Pierre Bezukhov and Constantin Levin, we find antecedents for Resurrection's protagonist, Dmitri Nekhlyudov, the existentially-torn aristocrat searching for a transcendental and profound statement of "the meaning of life."

In a sense, Resurrection marks the end of the line of that style of social-critical novel, or even something past the end of the line, being almost an exit from the novel form itself.

In Chapter 38 of Part II, we read that the hero, Nekhlyudov, has seen two men, prisoners being marched to Siberia, die of sunstroke in one day. In addition, "three more men... had dropped down dead from sunstroke. One had been taken to the nearest police-station like the first two, and two more had collapsed in the station itself." At this point, Tolstoy inserts a footnote of his own (not the Penguin editor's): "In the early 1880s five male convicts died of sunstroke in a single day while being marched from Butyrsky prison to the Nizhny Novgorod railway station." Is it too much to say that this footnote marks the precise end of the realist novel? Tolstoy breaks every rule of the novelist's relation to historical verisimilitude; even that other novelist-prophet Hugo never added "And this is really true; it actually happened!" to his works. Suddenly we are in a newspaper account, or a prefatorial apparatus.

Or, as it eventually becomes clear, a Christian sermon that finally has no interest in narrative resolution, and concludes abruptly with several pages of quotation from the Gospel according to Matthew, accompanied by commentary. Whereas in War and Peace, Tolstoy confined this explicit didactic summary to an epilogue, Resurrection becomes more and more a vehicle for outright judgments and expositions of a code of moral conduct and a recapitulation of Tolstoy's institutional critique. I saw "Tolstoy's" and not "Nekhlyudov's," because there is finally no pretense of a merely-implied author, and the text merges with the non-fiction writings that Tolstoy was churning out simultaneously, like The Kingdom of God is Within You and "Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?"

Bakhtin has a word for this quality of Tolstoy's prose: monologic. At times, this is his greatest novelistic strength, as in the great Isaac Babel quote: "If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy." In his best writings, we feel that Tolstoy's characters are understood and described as from another plane of consciousness: human fragility and self-deception are not condemned so much as they are shown to be our lot, the very mode of our being and the conditions of our goodness and reason. In the early going of Resurrection, one finds this Tolstoy often, as striking as ever. After describing the freshness and gladness of a spring day, when children and the entire natural world are bathed in a free grace, Tolstoy notes that "In the office of the provincial prison nothing sacred or significant was seen in the grace and gladness of spring given to all animals and people; the sacred and the significant consisted in the arrival the previous day of a stamped and numbered document on headed paper." He observes the powerlessness of our decisions to take hold of our lives. When Nekhlyudov is planning to break with his mistress, he listens eagerly to gossipy reports that suggest (while prompting some jealousy) that she might have a new lover. He knows already that he cannot expect to raise himself out of this miserable attachment entirely on his own.

Throughout the novel, Tolstoy punctures the self-importance of rank and function, and the entire span of human vanity, but he is working on a reduced canvas. The main oddity of Resurrection is that it consists of a number of brief portraits, canned encounters, as Nekhlyudov busily tries to reform his life and free a wrongly-convicted prisoner. Officials, prisoners, bureaucrats, wives, peasants, stewards, railway men, guards--everyone is drawn with the inimitable brushstroke of Tolstoy, but the reader quickly learns that these characters will never reappear in the story, that one need not learn their names. Nekhlyudov is somewhat like Dante in the Divine Comedy, reduced to being an observer of an unstructured "bad infinity" of individual cases of justice, without being able to interfere in 9 cases out of 10, and himself standing in the safety of his aristocratic privilege.

The ostensible action of the novel is Nekhlyudov's moral transformation and personal redemption, which leads him into the thickest morass of human cruelty and abuse of power, the Russian prison system. However, Tolstoy undermines this action in several ways.

First, the "endpoint" of the novel, the spiritual resurrection of Nekhlyudov, is not a surprising and narratively-immanent one: it is simply Tolstoy's own personal code of morality, legible outside of the novel in numerous essays, speeches, and exhortations. This external Weltanschauung exercises a curious gravity on the novel and its characters. All opinions, values, and decisions in the fictional universe are evaluated against this independent, non-narrative standard. This means that the worst characters are those with the fewest resolutions in common with the late Tolstoy, while the best characters are those in progress towards a complete overlap with the author's viewpoint. And every person in the novel can be clearly mapped on this continuum.

The validity of Tolstoy's judgments, or the persuasiveness with which he argues his case, are not in question here. But these conclusions can be safely found, undiluted, in Part III, Chapter 19:

All forms of violence, cruelty and brutality are not only not proscribed, they are actually permitted by the government, when it suits, and therefore they are all the more readily accepted by these very people who are suffering imprisonment, poverty and hardship. It is almost as if these institutions had been specially invented to create the highest degree of corruption and evil, unattainable by any other means, with the specific aim of disseminating the corruption and evil over the whole of society on as wide a front as possible. "It's as if they had run a competition for corrupting the greatest number of people in the most effective and infallible way," thought Nekhlyudov, contemplating all that was being done in the prisons and at the halting-stages. Every year hundreds of thousands of people were reduced to the lowest level of depravity, and when they had been thoroughly corrupted, they were set free in order to communicate the corruption acquired in prison to the rest of the population.

The problem is a narrative one. Once the reader knows that the above conclusion is where we are headed, and that the novel is constructed as an iron case against the status quo, everything is entirely predictable and undramatic. There is no tension or suspense, since the only plot is Nekhyludov's spiritual awakening. But he is only going to awaken into agreement with the narrator's voice that is present from the start.

There is another problem. Tolstoy's worldview dictates that the offenses and hard-heartedness inherent in the system stem from mystification, blindness, and a conspiracy to deceive people through religion and poor education. This is a classic anarchist position, one that derives from the Enlightenment and especially Voltaire. Tolstoy the social thinker does not have the patience for "ideology" as a set of lived practices, for the real existence of illusory relations---everything "true" can be accomplished for him by the single yanking away of a blindfold. Thus, for Tolstoy the peasants are spontaneously good and perceptive, because uncontaminated.

This is disastrous for the novel, because all of the insights into the sinfulness of the world's organization (which should take 500 pages to unpack and synthesize) all clump together and are of a piece. Tolstoy is committed to the obviousness of evil, and therefore to a sudden enlightenment rather than an arduous and complicated travail of the soul.

"Everything was now quite clear and unambiguous... What a muddle he had got himself into over these insoluble questions with their endless ramifications. He now asked himself the same questions, and was surprised how straightforward it all was. It was straightforward because he wasn't thinking about what was going to happen to him, which was irrelevant, but only about what he was duty-bound to do."

"This explanation of everything that was taking place seemed so clear and straightforward to Nekhlyudov, but the very simplicity of it all made him reluctant to accept it. Surely a complex phenomenon like this couldn't have such a simple and terrible explanation."

"Everything was clear to him. It was clear that all things considered good and important are actually useless or vile, and that behind all this glamor, all this luxury, lurked all the old familiar crimes, which not only go unpunished, they wax triumphant, embellished with every charming device the human mind can dream up."

What happens to the novel form when Nekhyludov attains this almost-instant access to an undiluted truth? The story is thereby deprived of the very struggle that made Pierre and Levin so compelling. Nor does Tolstoy show Nekhyludov involved in a set of tragic commitments as in The Mayor of Casterbridge or Nostromo, where complications and responsibilities absorb and frustrate the reform of self and society.

The novel from Don Quixote onward has represented the world as impervious to idealism. Resurrection ends up resembling and confirming Don Quixote, but to its cost. Tolstoy does not show Nekhlyudov's resolutions being practically realized in the world of prisons and legislation, and the book becomes a mere series of encounters, mere reportage with an entirely arbitrary ending. And Nekhlyudov's realization that the system is organized such that grievous wrong is "nobody's fault" (the original title for Little Dorrit, by the way) is a correct description of a social pathology, but not something that Tolstoy eventually wants to explore.

At last, then, Resurrection sputters to a halt, having made its point long before. Besides the narrative consequences, there is one further drawback to Tolstoy's thinking, one which was borne out in his biography. This is the risk that, in trying to "get way, get away from all these false dealings," in turning away from society and towards a rigorous program of denunciation and critical analysis of a widespread deception, one will cut oneself off from those who love and need one's sympathy and understanding. As a man, Tolstoy failed to see this, and the book is tinged with a bitterness that urges Tolstoy to inflict only more self-denial upon Nekhlyudov. It is a hard saying, and one that threatens to pull "the truth" ever further from the other persons who are right there.

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.