Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin
Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin READINGS IN DOSTOYEVSKY'S FANTASTIC REALISM
MALCOLM V.JONES UNIVERSITY OF NOTTINGHAM
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Published by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY IOOI I , USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1990 First published 1990 Printed in Great Britain at the University Press, Cambridge British Library cataloguing in publication data
Jones, Malcolm V. (Malcolm Vince) Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: readings in Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism. 1. Fiction in Russian. Dostoevski F. M. (Fedor Mikhailovich), 1821-1881 1. Title
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Jones, Malcolm V. Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: readings in Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism / Malcolm V. Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-521-38423-0
1. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Realism in literature. I. Title. PG3328.Z7R385 1990 89-77367 CIP 89i.73'3~dc2o ISBN 0521 38423 o hard covers
Contents
Preface 1 Introduction: Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
page
Part One: The Underground 2 The Double: Dostoyevsky's idea for The Double 3 Notes from Underground: the discovery of'the underground5 Part Two: Driving People Crazy 4 5 6
Crime and Punishment: driving other people crazy The Devils: driving society crazy The Idiot: driving the reader crazy Part Three: Chinese Whispers
7 8 9
The Marion motif: the whisper of the precursor The Brothers Karamazov: the whisper of God Conclusion: Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism Notes Bibliography Index
vii i 33 35 59 75 77 96 113 147 149 164 191 200 210 217
Preface
Science, says Thomas Kuhn, has periods of crisis, when there is no agreement about the dominant paradigm, when application of the paradigm which has previously governed scientific enquiry in a particular area discloses an unacceptable number of anomalous cases which cannot be convincingly assimilated to it; at such moments new paradigms may be proposed which are more successful in accounting for the evidence and which necessitate a radical re-evaluation of work governed by earlier paradigms.1 Dostoyevsky's view of society in his day bears a striking resemblance to this process: he saw his world as passing through a crisis in which the old paradigms linking the concepts of God and people had, for better or for worse (and he tended to think for worse), ceased to be adequate to the evidence which people sought to account for, and in which there was an anarchic clamour of competing alternatives, each with its adherents and each more or less equally adequate to the facts, but no general agreement on a new paradigm which would force an abandonment or re-evaluation of the rest. It is perhaps this fundamental feature more than any other which makes him seem so modern (a modernist/post-modernist slipping in and out of old-fashioned clothing). Analogous ideas are expressed in various ways and places in Dostoyevsky's work. In The Idiot1 characters discuss the view that in the Middle Ages people were guided by a single binding idea, whereas now they are confused by many ideas competing for their allegiance and seeking to undermine each other. Living life eludes them. Dostoyevsky apparently held that the Christian vision was still basically sound, but it needed to be articulated in new ways for a more complex world - not in the traditional ways of Catholicism, Protestantism, sectarianism, socialism or 'bourgeois' individualism. The very low profile given to Orthodox Christianity in his fiction suggests that for all his pious ardour he also thought that its articulation was no longer wholly adequate. What
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seems to have been required - to use Bakhtin's terminology - was an assimilation of its 'authoritative discourse' into new, 'internally persuasive discourse' which would win general and widespread acceptance. Ideologically speaking, Dostoyevsky's novels illustrate this state of affairs - this period of crisis supposedly on the brink of a re-evaluation. But they do far more than this because ideas and feelings in his world are so intimately related: the crises he depicts are not simply intellectual ones but emerge also on the levels of individual emotion and social psychology. There have always been some readers who have thought that Dostoyevsky himself accomplished the breakthrough, but the consensus is far from universal and therefore it would seem by definition that he did not; or that if he did the world has not yet come round to accepting it. We may however put this question aside because this book is not about re-evaluating the world but about re-evaluating Dostoyevsky's text. My approach has been to ask again a number of critical questions about Dostoyevsky which have in the past stimulated much debate. For the most part I do not believe that definitive solutions are possible, but I have attempted to answer them in relation to a variety of texts which either had a natural priority in terms of the questions (e.g. 'What was Dostoyevsky's "idea" for The Double}') or provided characteristic and convenient examples. It has not proved too difficult in this way to relate individual chapters to each of Dostoyevsky's major works, which will, I hope, give added interest to the book. But any impression that the treatment of my themes is exhaustive is quite illusory. Exhaustive treatment or a magnum opus on Dostoyevsky was not my ambition here. As always I have addressed myself to what seem to me to be critical problem areas. My theoretical starting point, as will shortly become clear, is the work of M. M. Bakhtin. Bakhtin was undoubtedly the most brilliant reader of Dostoyevsky of our time. 3 He has triumphantly survived the principal criticisms levelled against him, either because these criticisms have been based upon an imperfect understanding of his work or because, although his readings may be problematic, they express the central problems of Dostoyevsky's text better than anyone else has done. Although pre-Bakhtinian readings of Dostoyevsky still appear in large numbers, there is little doubt that he has provided a new paradigm (in Kuhn's sense) that has forced many of Dostoyevsky's critics to re-evaluate all that has gone before in the light of his work. References to him now seem almost obligatory even where understand-
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ing is thin. Recently, it is true, there has been a noticeable reaction to this trend. 4 But it would be a great pity if a new academic consensus that Bakhtin is passe were to result in a widespread rejection of his insights before their full potential has been realized. The Bakhtinian paradigm does not account for everything in Dostoyevsky equally satisfactorily; in some cases, as I shall attempt to show, there are very important gaps which need to be explored and very important additions to Bakhtin's reading which need to be made. Yet it is so powerful that it should not simply be abandoned until we have a far better alternative. There are other perfectly adequate readings of Dostoyevsky as a nineteenthcentury novelist of course; there are the classical psychoanalytic and existentialist readings of our own century; but none except Bakhtin's even approaches an adequate reading of the modernist features of Dostoyevsky's text. To publish a new book on Dostoyevsky requires some justification in the light of the enormous literature on him which already exists. To do it a second or third time demands a special explanation. The origin of the present book was an invitation to give a series of lectures on Dostoyevsky to a group of Cambridge undergraduates in the Lent Term of 1985, lectures which I repeated with some modifications in the following year. No doubt the invitation was largely a result of my earlier book Dostoyevsky: the novel ofdiscord,5 written more than ten years before. Perhaps there should be a Statute of Limitations on the authorship of books, a period of time after which authors cannot reasonably be held responsible for what they have written. The earlier book had long before drifted away from me and although I recognized it as an item on my list of publications it seemed to me that my current views on Dostoyevsky had little in common with it, or indeed with any other book on Dostoyevsky that I know - which was why I decided to try to give the series of lectures a more permanent form. In retrospect I think that the two books are not entirely incompatible in their overall view of Dostoyevsky: the 'principles of complexity' which I tentatively put forward in my earlier book without any theoretical justification — one reviewer quaintly took me to task for introducing terms unknown to 'philosophy and aesthetics' - still seem to me to be fundamental. It is rather, perhaps, that I have come to think that what was of enduring importance in Dostoyevsky's art was not the overtly ideological dimension (for example, the debates about God, Russia, freedom, beauty, morality) but those aspects of it which he himself regarded with
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suspicion and disquiet. What was important about his 'fantastic realism' was not what can be defined in terms of the ideological debate or cultural climate of the time, but what can only be defined, if at all, in terms of a modernist (or even a post-modernist) conception of art on the edge of the abyss. Dostoyevsky undoubtedly sought to suppress such features of his work in response to the criticisms of 'friends' like Strakhov and his own envy and admiration of the mature artistry of such writers as Pushkin, Turgenev, Goncharov and Tolstoy. This reading of Dostoyevsky owes a great deal to the development of literary theory in the intervening years and to my personal encounter with it. It is not a theoretical treatise and I hope no-one will find it overburdened with unfamiliar terminology. Some may indeed still find it too 'intuitive' or 'humanistic' for their liking. But there is no doubt that I, like many others, have been sensitized anew to Dostoyevsky's texts by many of its insights and strata jies which, for those with eyes to see, are only too evidently present there. If I have achieved any degree of success, it is thanks in large measure to the intellectual environment created by the Critical Theory Group at the University of Nottingham of which I was a slightly improbable member from its inception in 1979. As a survivor of the humanist tradition who finds the mental effort of sustaining a structuralist or post-structuralist attitude (in the face of common-sense and the traditions of scholarship in which I was reared) extremely demanding, and who adheres to the view that a successful theory must address itself to most or all of the problems which current practitioners find significant, I have no doubt that I find Bakhtin attractive partly because he seems to offer common ground on which adherents of various literary theories (including humanists, Christians and Marxists of various kinds) can meet. Moreover it accounts persuasively for their current failure to do so. It is a further bonus that Bakhtin's best-known work was devoted to Dostoyevsky, to whom his own views on novelistic discourse owe so much. Bakhtin's position and status in contemporary literary theory seems at first glance to be very complicated. Attentive Dostoyevsky scholars were already familiar with Bakhtin's work before the Second World War, but he has come to the notice of non-Russianist literary theorists in the West only since the appearance of translations of his principal writings in the 1970s.6 By this time his work seemed old-fashioned in some respects, yet strangely ahead of its time in others, so that it was not long before some were proclaiming his 'metalinguistics' a viable
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alternative to structuralism.7 More recently even more impressive claims have been made on his behalf. For Michael Holquist, for example, Bakhtin 'is gradually emerging as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century5.8 Dostoyevsky specialists are not always aware of other literary theorizing going on around them, but they too have in some cases reviewed their understanding of Bakhtin and of his book on Dostoyevsky in the light of other works by or attributed to him. Some of these have been published in Russian for the first time only during the last twenty-five years and have become available in translation in recent years thanks primarily to the efforts of Michael Holquist, Katerina Clark, Caryl Emerson, Gary Saul Morson 9 and their colleagues in the United States and to Julia Kristeva,10 Tsvetan Todorov 11 and others in France. Recent books in English on literary theory have seemed slightly embarrassed by Bakhtin. It is as if their authors do not care to omit him in case he turns out to be as important as Todorov or Holquist (or even de Man 12 or Wayne Booth13) seem to think he is, while being uncertain exactly what to do with him. His appearance on the scene, like that of a visitor from another time and place who does not quite speak the language properly, yet is too challenging a phenomenon to be simply ignored, has resulted in attempts to assimilate him variously to psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, Marxist critical theory, feminism, and even the high traditions of liberal humanism. In my own view, and I suspect in that of Clark and Holquist, he could just as easily be assimilated to a Christian literary theory of a new kind and, despite the neglect in his writings of the Christian tradition - he was after all writing in Soviet Russia - his personal adherence to Orthodoxy makes one think that he would not have been altogether surprised or dismayed by such a suggestion. I take this up in my chapter on The Brothers Karamazov}* It is true that some of these appropriations of Bakhtin have been made easier by the belief that he was the principal author of books bearing the names of Voloshinov and Medvedev but in most cases they do not depend on them. 15 Another way of looking at Bakhtin is to adopt the view that rather than assimilate him to one or other of the critical endeavours which have engaged Western minds in recent times, it would be more fruitful to see him as offering that theoretical basis which is required to validate and create order out of the current confusion. That is more or less how I have used Bakhtin here. I say 'more or less' because one of the chief
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problems with Bakhtin's thought (as well as one of its charms) is that it is not a system. Some (e.g. Todorov) see this as a weakness and some (e.g. Clark and Holquist) as a strength. His extremely long-winded (though once the terminology has become familiar, not obscure) style has a long pedigree in Russia and, whatever else may be said about it, its lack of system, its constant going over old ground, which may be said to conform to the 'imperfective' traditions of Russian discourse, is certainly more appropriate than a closed 'perfective' system to a theory which celebrates openness and indeterminacy and even carnival. At all events, it certainly appears to be the case that many of the insights and strategies associated with structuralism, reader-response criticism, deconstruction and other modern critical movements can be assimilated to Bakhtin and seem, when eased away from their theoretical ground, to be natural and helpful developments of his thought. A good deal of what is interesting and original in them, and which seems to have been wrought with such pain and strenuous effort, flows with almost natural ease from what I call 'modified Bakhtin'. My approach is to treat Bakhtin's as a higher level theory linking a number of lower level theories without substantially changing the strategies and manoeuvres which each recommends. It may be objected that Bakhtin's critique of Saussure, who has provided the theoretical basis for much contemporary critical theory, makes this approach implausible. Bakhtin rejects Saussure's distinction between parole and langue, insisting on the element of social evaluation in concrete utterances. 16 But although Saussure's historical role in structuralism and its derivatives is undeniable and the plausibility (though not necessarily the validity) of such theories taken on their own terms depends to a large extent on the link with Saussure, their favoured strategies are not necessarily dependent on their own view of this connection and may look even more plausible if brought into relation with an over-arching theory which can resolve some of their theoretical differences. This book does not attempt theoretically to justify such an approach. It adopts it pragmatically on the grounds of its prima facie plausibility as a way of reading Dostoyevsky. While I was writing my attention was drawn to a timely article by Allon White in which he attempts to show 'that Bakhtin's work prefigured both structuralist and deconstructionist views of the language of literature, but crucially placed them both in a sociolinguistic framework which thereby makes them responsive to a historical and
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thoroughly social comprehension of literature'. 17 He argues that 'an understanding of heteroglossia may lead one to avoid not only the extravagance of most popular forms of deconstruction but also the restrictions of traditional structuralism'. 18 No less interesting, though he does not pursue it, is the thought that Bakhtin 'anticipated much of the current German thinking about reception'. 19 It is impossible to summarize adequately White's argument here; it is a critique of structuralism and deconstruction as well as an advocacy of Bakhtin, but it is worth quoting his own conclusions, which might profitably be developed further. I have corrected some apparent errors of punctuation: Bakhtin's work seems to me to transcend both deconstruction and structuralism by revealing each to be a one-sided abstraction from the lived complexity of language. On the one hand, structuralism, following Saussure, treats language as 'langue' by isolating unified structures within monoglossia. This works well for monoglossic societies ... On the other hand, deconstruction abstracts only those aspects of language where intention and unity appear to falter. It is like a geological map of language which marks out the slippage, the fault-lines and the crevices, but omits all the strata and formations between them. Whereas Bakhtin sees both formations and their fractures as constitutive of style and meaning, the deconstructionist sees only the fault-lines, an impasse, a non plus ultra. Bakhtin's sociolinguistic knowledge gives him a more inclusive understanding of how discourse works than the deconstructionists for whom - most of the time - discourse fails to work at all (it plays)... By centring his theoretical understanding of language upon dialogic utterance, he fuses the insights of both schools into a critical sociolinguistics of culture which supersedes both ... 'Critical sociolinguistics of culture' was carefully chosen. I think it is clear how Bakhtin fulfils the dictum of Weinreich, already quoted, about breaking down the identification of structure with homogeneity. 20
I have tried, and in this I follow the practice of my earlier book, to give Dostoyevsky's text priority over theory - in any case in a state of continual dialogue and flux. This is, after all, an attempt to provide a richer and more adequate reading of Dostoyevsky and if there are any gains in the realm of literary theory these are secondary and thanks are due to him. As Todorov has remarked, it was Dostoyevsky not Bakhtin who invented metalinguistics.21'Polyphony' (the conception of a fiction in which all embodied voices including the author/narrator's carry equal weight and may enter into dialogue with each other) is not, incidentally, as some commentators seem to think, the same thing as
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heteroglossia or multivoicedness. When Bakhtin published his book on Dostoyevsky in 1929 he held that Dostoyevsky was the inventor of the polyphonic novel. But heteroglossia or double-voiced discourse as developed in 'Discourse in the novel' in the 1930s is the defining characteristic of the novelistic form in general, or more precisely it is in the novel that heteroglossia and double-voiced discourse (which is always a response to the voice of the other and the anticipation of a rejoinder) find fullest expression. Heteroglossia is the environment in which the novel flourishes. As Bakhtin writes, Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters are merely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel; each of them permits a multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and interrelationships (always more or less dialogized). These distinctive links and interrelationships between utterances and languages, this movement of the theme through different languages and speech types, its dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social heteroglossia, its dialogization - this is the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.22 One way in which I have grafted recent Western theory onto Bakhtin merits a brief parenthetical comment and will serve as an illustration of my approach. An uninformed glance at some pages might give the misleading impression that parts of this book attempt a deconstructive analysis of Dostoyevsky. A closer look will reveal that this is not so. But as I was attempting to provide some definition of'fantastic realism', it dawned on me that Dostoyevsky's novels are indeed selfdeconstructing texts in a way which sets them apart from those of his contemporaries, and that this and related concepts can help to define an important aspect of their uniqueness more precisely even than Bakhtin's concept of polyphony of which it seems to me to be a special case. Indeed this is one area in which I wish to go further than Bakhtin, for his reading of Dostoyevsky's 'polyphonic' novel is in the end too comfortable. Bakhtin declines to see, and therefore to theorize adequately, that abyss which for many readers is more characteristic of Dostoyevsky than any other single feature: the point, one might say, where polyphony threatens to become cacophony. Bakhtin was very good at accounting for the way in which Dostoyevsky orchestrates the multitude of voices in his novels. He was less good at accounting for the subversive elements in his poetics: the threat of chaos, the pathological, the apocalyptic. There is something too reassuring about the idea of
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polyphony which Dostoyevsky's novels do not always merit. He had a deep suspicion of the reassuring and an uncanny sense of when and where it could be radically subverted. Bakhtin declines to follow Dostoyevsky into these areas and seems reluctant to see the gaps, reversals and slippages so beloved of deconstruction on which I shall lay some emphasis in the pages which follow. It also became increasingly clear to me that the more Dostoyevsky sought to rediscover the sources of 'living life' the more he seems to have discovered that they were subject to what deconstructionist criticism calls 'infinite deferral' or 'postponement'. It was not simply that particular certainties were open to question, but that the very idea of logocentric certainty was put in doubt, though never of course entirely abandoned (indeed it remained the object of an obsessive quest). This discovery emerges in his novels on the ideological plane, but not simply as a statement about the world (real or represented); it arises as a consequence of the nature of discourse itself. It has been said that all great writers are distinguished by the fact that they understand the limits of discourse better than other people do. A consciousness of the limits of discourse as a vehicle for the expression of an ultimate Truth came in Dostoyevsky's case from bitter and anguished wrestling. In other words Dostoyevsky's 'deconstructive spirit', if that is what it is, does not start life as a theoretical statement but as an empirical observation about the operations of human consciousness, especially in situations of crisis. No doubt some readers and reviewers will remain sceptical. Does not Dostoyevsky seem to attract every new and fashionable intellectual movement? Have we not already had so many different Dostoyevskys all apparently claiming to be the real one that we feel condemned to a sort of perpetual critical dizziness and are relieved to discover, for example in Joseph Frank's books,23 the refreshingly common-sense view of a literary biographer who can reduce this bewildering critical kaleidoscope to something the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mind feels at home with? It seems to me that the fact that Dostoyevsky does attract so many different readings is itself not accidental and it needs to be explained other than by the need of the critic to say something new, or by pious references to his genius. Whatever general claims we may make about imaginative literature, great works or critical theory, there is a special sense in which Dostoyevsky's texts require the reader to create their
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meaning; a sense in which this is not the case, for example, with Dostoyevsky's great contemporary Tolstoy, perhaps because of Dostoyevsky's acute consciousness of the problem. To use different terminology, Tolstoy's texts contain within themselves their own stable conception of reality, their own norm of lived experience, and project a confidence that it is shared by the reader. Dostoyevsky's do not, or at least any attempt to define one is open to serious dispute. The norm must ultimately be injected into his texts or at least be validated by the reader, who may very well find that at some point the text seems to seek to subvert it. There is a special sense in which 'the text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination' (Roland Barthes, 'The death of the author'). 24 Some readers, baffled by an obscure awareness of this, have sought the 'real meaning' of Dostoyevsky's texts in his life or his letters, or his Diary of a Writer, only to find that the fictional world refuses to be reduced to the personal authorial voice. Those - the present writer included - who have sought an (albeit polyphonic) meaning within the texts have sometimes been surprised to find themselves accused of recreating Dostoyevsky in their own image. If I am right this last accusation is unavoidable. A deconstructionist might claim (cf. V. Leitch) that 'every reader is caught in the historical logocentric webs of discourse and that all are condemned to use traditional language and concepts, even in the most radical moments of criticism and deconstruction. There is no outside and no escape from the logocentric enclosure ... Derrida insists on this point.' 25 But there may be some merit in exploring in detail the reasons why this may be said of Dostoyevsky independently of a specifically deconstructionist theory, what it is that makes Dostoyevsky's apparently 'realist' texts behave like modernist or post-modernist ones, in what ways (to use Barthesian terms) they are 'illisible' or 'scriptible' and how it comes about that, in spite of his modernism or post-modernism, Dostoyevsky may still be read as a latter-day Christian or humanist. Finally a few words on style and conventions used in the present book. I have as far as possible given references to English translations rather than to the Russian originals of critical works. My principal references to Dostoyevsky's works are to the 30-volume Academy edition (Polnoye sobraniye sochineniy v tridtsati tomakh), Leningrad, 1972- . At the time of writing, publication had reached volume 30©. To assist readers who know no Russian, references are given in the
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following form, e.g., The Idiot, n, vi;A. vm, p. 339, where the numbers before the semi-colon represent the internal divisions of the novel or story and those after it represent the volume and page number in the Academy edition, indicated by the letter^. For this purpose the 'parts' into which Dostoyevsky divides The Brothers Karamazov are omitted. The system of transliteration is that used until recently by the Slavonic and East European Review, except that no semi-vowels are indicated in the spelling of proper names in the text and certain simplifications are admitted where they seem to have become conventional. I should like, in concluding this preface, to express my thanks to the editors ofDostoevsky Studies26 and Essays in Poetics21 in whose pages I first tried out some of the ideas in chapters 4, 6, 7 and 8, for permission to reproduce lengthy passages verbatim. My special thanks go to Professors Caryl Emerson, Victor Terras, Barbara Heldt and Gerry Smith who were kind enough to read and pass on invaluable comments on earlier drafts and to Miss Irina Kirillova who, by her responses to the first version of my lectures, helped me to formulate my original ideas. Without wishing to implicate them in what has resulted, I should like to express my warmest gratitude to them here. I should also like to thank more than I can easily say colleagues at Cambridge University Press, especially Dr Katharina Brett.
I Introduction: Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
Most sympathetic readers seem to grasp intuitively what fantastic realism is. Some relate it to Dostoyevsky's immersion in German Idealism; some to his Christian beliefs; some to his anticipations of Nietzsche or Freud; some to his romantic penchant for contrasts and intensity and the traditions of Gogol, Dickens and Balzac; or latterly, in the wake of a rediscovered Bakhtin, to the carnivalization of literature; some to his polyphonic handling of point-of-view; some to his modern grasp of the way meanings recede indefinitely with truth as a mere vanishing point of the text. One thing is clear in all this: a wide variety of modes of reading responds to the magnetism of Dostoyevsky's text and plausibly claims him as its own, thus purporting to disclose the underlying characteristics of fantastic realism. In this chapter I shall try to map out some of the choices and move towards some general principles for further exploration. At this stage I would venture just one generalization. Critical literature shows that Dostoyevsky's texts both attract common-sense readings in the tradition of social realism and strenuously resist them. This book takes the former phenomenon for granted and explores the latter. I am not sure that Dostoyevsky ever actually used the expression 'fantastic realism' but his statements about his style fully justify its use as a shorthand term. In spite of many attempts to elucidate it, however, the concept is not altogether clear. FANTASTIC REALISM: OBITER
DICTA
There are a number of passages in Dostoyevsky's articles and letters which are relevant to the question, though it is doubtful whether any of them is capable of bearing the weight of an entire theory of fantastic realism. Five are quoted particularly frequently and we may begin by looking at them:
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(1) I have completely different ideas about reality and realism from our realists and critics. My idealism is more real than theirs. Good God! Wouldn't the realists proclaim that it was sheer fantasy if we tried to relate intelligibly all that we Russians have experienced in our spiritual development in the last ten years? Yet this is true realism! ... With their type of realism it is impossible to explain even a small fraction of real, factual occurrences. And with our idealism we have even prophesied facts. We have actually prophesied them.1 (2) I have my own view of reality in art and what in the view of most people verges on the fantastic and the exceptional is sometimes the very essence of the real for me. Everyday trivia and the conventional view of them do not, in my opinion, amount to realism, but the very opposite. In every newspaper you find reports of facts which are at the same time totally real and yet quite extraordinary. To our writers they seem fantastic and they do not take them into account; and yet they are reality, because they art facts ... But is my fantastic Idiot not reality; reality, moreover, of the most everyday kind? Such characters must exist at this very moment in those strata of society which have become divorced from the soil - social strata which are in reality becoming fantastic.2 (3) In Russia, truth almost always assumes an entirely fantastic character. In fact people have finally succeeded in converting all that the human mind may lie about and belie into something more comprehensible than truth, and such a view prevails all over the world.3 (4) Granted that this is a fantastic tale, but when all is said and done the fantastic in art has its own limits and rules. The fantastic must be contiguous with the real to the point that you must almost believe in it. Pushkin, who gave us almost all kinds of art, wrote The Queen of Spades - the summit of fantastic art. And you really believe that Hermann had a vision in keeping with his world-view, and yet when you have read the story through and reached the end, you do not know what to think.4 (5) They call me a psychologist: this is not true. I am just a realist in a higher sense, i.e., I depict all the depths of the human soul.5 When scrutinized closely there are some real difficulties here owing largely to inconsistencies in formulation. However, in terms of Dostoyevsky's own cultural environment, the general drift is clear. There is
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
3
no doubt that his views derive from the traditions of 'expressivism', as Charles Taylor calls them, 6 with their Russian origins in the influence of German Idealist philosophy and Romantic poetry to which Dostoyevsky was exposed from his adolescence onwards. According to this tradition truth was not to be discovered by the superficial procedures of experimental science or rational argument, but by peering by means of artistic intuition into the depths of the human soul, through which not only the secrets of the human soul itself but also those of the universe were to be discovered. Leaving aside for a moment passage 4, one may paraphrase Dostoyevsky as follows. 'Realism in a higher sense', or what he calls his 'idealism', gives a unique access to the truth, i.e., the depths of the human soul, and permits an intelligible account of the spiritual development of a society or nation. This realism is not to be found in everyday trivia or the conventional view of them and is not reducible to the positivist conceptions of contemporary Russian 'realists' and critics. Where then is it located? Sometimes the essence of the real is to be found in the fantastic and exceptional (in the sense of abnormal). In Russia, as a matter of fact, the fantastic is sometimes not exceptional at all (in the sense of rare) but an everyday occurrence. As people become divorced from their native traditions (the soil) they become more fantastic and the depths of the human soul are more easily discerned in them (as, one might say, the psychopathology of everyday life is more easily discerned in the abnormal patient). Indeed in Russia the truth almost always seems to assume a fantastic character. In outline, and within the expressivist tradition, this may seem clear enough. But some serious problems remain. Most serious of all are questions about the parameters of this 'fantastic' dimension and its relationship to material reality. Debate on the subject, taking its cue from different ideological postures adopted by Dostoyevsky himself, has been inconclusive. There is, for example, a difference of opinion between prominent Western critics about whether fantastic realism designates a higher spiritual or poetic reality and if so what kind of realm this is; whether, for instance, it is a higher religious realm in which the multivoicedness of human discourse (Bakhtin's heteroglossia) finds unity in what Derrida calls a metaphysics of presence in which the transcendental signified finds a divine guarantee. Robert Jackson, who in this passage begins by distinguishing
4
Introduction
between the fantastic as in passage 4 and the use of the term elsewhere, writes, One may distinguish in Dostoyevsky's thought, so far, two formally distinct categories of the fantastic in art, or of so-called fantastic realism: the seemingly fantastic facts or phenomena which are represented in art and which find a real (even if sometimes rare) correlative in life, and the actually or literally unreal phenomena that we encounter in one degree or another, for instance, in Hoffmann and Poe . . . But the very distinction - assumed here - between real and unreal phenomena or facts is obliterated, or at least seriously blurred, in Dostoyevsky's Christian religious illumination of reality. We noted at the beginning of this chapter Dostoyevsky's view that man is familiar only with the immediate and visible, 'and this is only in its appearance, while the ends and beginnings - all this is still a realm of the fantastic for man'. The 'fantastic' here, of course, is precisely ultimate reality in the philosophical or religious sense ... Ultimate reality for the author of The Brothers Karamazov is the transcendent reality of the universal, Christian ideal.7 Elsewhere Jackson convincingly explains that what Dostoyevsky objected to most of all in contemporary realism (naturalism) was the lack of a moral centre. 8 But this does not mean, and Jackson does not claim, that the presence of a moral centre in itself constitutes the essence of fantastic realism. Some readers have come to exactly the opposite conclusion to Jackson's. Sven Linner, referring to the third passage quoted above, says, We would, I believe, miss Dostoevski's point if we were to take his words as primarily referring to some kind of higher and, for that reason, poetic truth. 9 And, referring to the fifth passage, he adds, To say ... that the attributes 'full' and 'in a higher sense' imply a vision of some higher order is hardly warranted; in any case, since such a vision is also found among the people, it is not the privilege of the artist. The annotation, as it stands, is far too fragmentary to be taken as Dostoevski's authoritative statement on the nature of his realism. A passage so fragile cannot carry that much weight. If, nevertheless, critics prefer to use the line 'a realist in a higher sense' when defining his position as a writer, they do so not because they know what he intended it to mean, but only because the words summarize their opinions.10 That is well put. No doubt 'fantastic realism' was used by Dostoyevsky to designate a realism with perspectives other than those of
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
5
unreflective, everyday experience, even when informed by his highly modern understanding of human dialogue, but we look in vain in his writings for a wholly consistent and satisfactory definition of the perspectives which it does afford. FANTASTIC REALISM AND EXPRESSIVISM
It has seemed obvious to some that the elusive key is to be found in Dostoyevsky's idealist philosophical environment. N. N. Strakhov, his colleague on the journals Time and The Epoch, tells us that Dostoyevsky liked to hear his ideas formulated in terms of contemporary philosophy.11 By this he meant post-Kantian idealist philosophy of which he was himself an exponent. This is hardly surprising, for Dostoyevsky was inevitably in constant dialogue with contemporary culture, and it is no more surprising to find occasional passages in which he makes the attempt to formulate his ideas in such terms himself. Some have argued that his portrayal of individuals and their relationships derives from or echoes Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind12 or Cams' Psyche.13 The question is not whether or not such echoes can be heard - they demonstrably can and could be in Dostoyevsky's own day - but how far they take us in understanding fantastic realism. There can be no doubt that a philosophical environment which held that ideas constitute the ultimate reality sensitized Dostoyevsky and many of his contemporaries to the role which conflicting ideas and ideologies play in human consciousness, in a way which bears marked similarities to the effect in our own day of the view that nothing can properly be said to exist outside the text. Although I have suggested that appeal to the cultural environment has in itself been of limited value in elucidating Dostoyevsky's use of the term 'fantastic realism', we cannot ignore the fact that he inevitably conceived and expressed his thoughts in terms which derived from it, and a brief examination of some of these thoughts may at least give us some clues. There are times, indeed, when his words sound not unlike a popularization of Schelling's philosophy: Some ideas are deeply felt but remain unuttered and unconscious; there are many such ideas fused, as it were, with the human soul. They exist in the nation and in humanity as a whole. The nation experiences living life of the deepest kind only while they lie unconscious in the national life and are simply felt, strongly and unmistakably, and while all its life-energies are concentrated on bringing these hidden ideas to self-consciousness. The more faithfully the
6
Introduction
nation preserves them and the less prone it is to betray them or succumb to false interpretations of them, the more powerful, the stronger and the happier it will be. But this does not mean that some false development of these ideas cannot knock it off course.14 Here and elsewhere Dostoyevsky reflects several expressivist emphases.15 The first is the view that the essence of each organism lies deep within its subconscious spiritual life and that it directs its energies towards clarifying this spiritual life as well as living it out. The second is the view of feelings as modes of awareness, coupled with a strong anti-dualism and a passionate demand for unity and wholeness. The third is the realisation that authentic self-expression may be threatened by distortions of external origin. As Taylor points out, the new expressivist anthropology founded by Herder conceives of people defining themselves not in relation to an ideal order beyond, but rather to something that unfolds within themselves. While Fichte, Schelling and Hegel situated this anthropology within a metaphysical system that related personal development to that of a cosmic subject and a spiritual principle underlying the whole of nature, Dostoyevsky's position in this respect is entirely unclear. Dostoyevsky seems true to the expressivist tradition in his view of art too. For the expressivist/romantic, art is the paradigm human activity: language and art (or sign systems as some might say nowadays) are the privileged media through which expression is realized. Dostoyevsky stresses here too that deviations may take place under outside pressures: No doubt in the course of his life man may depart from normal reality and from the laws of nature, in such cases art will go along with him. But this only goes to prove its close and unbreakable ties with man, and its eternal loyalty to man and his interests.16 There is nothing strictly incompatible between these views and the view of human psychology inscribed in the novels. Yet I think Dostoyevsky is here leading us up a cul-de-sac (in which I have spent too much time myself). As we shall see as the argument of this book unfolds, the characteristic features of fantastic realism are not to be located in the process of spiritual evolution described by Dostoyevsky in such passages, but in the 'deviations', 'false developments', the 'departures from normal reality', the result of external pressures, the destabilizing effects of what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia in urban life where
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
7
man is torn from his roots. Dostoyevsky might indeed be thought of as the novelist of 'deviations' and 'false developments' par excellence. Deviations and false developments do not however imply a dialectic movement in which they are recuperated on a higher level. But where and what is this 'normal reality'? The quoted passages may be seriously misleading if they suggest to us that Dostoyevsky reveals a clear grasp of an objective norm grounded in natural processes, from which the deviant phenomena of his novels depart. On the contrary the implied norms from which modern men and women depart seem to be not natural laws but dreams of the Golden Age, childhood memories, speculations about the past, life-long quests after Utopian or spiritual ideals, philosophical fantasies. Some are driven to the conclusion that the laws of nature themselves demand that disharmony which for others is evidence of'false developments'. We seem to be in a world where the norms themselves appear to shift relative to the observer and where any relationship to objective laws of nature is radically uncertain. To trust assertions like those quoted above serves little purpose except to give encouragement to critics anxious to stabilize a discourse which itself thrives on instability. The character of this instability together with the ceaseless search (shared by the sympathetic reader) for a firm ground will be examined further in later chapters. Dostoyevsky did not attempt to define these complex interactions, yet his novels are about nothing else, and it is there that we may hope to find the secret of fantastic realism with its many and varied though inexact echoes of precursor texts: in his examination of the 'deviations' and 'false developments', the 'departures from normal reality' which are characteristic, in his view, of the modern world. FANTASTIC REALISM AND ROMANTIC INTENSITY
One way in which the reader may seek to define these 'deviations' is to scan the topography of the novels themselves. As I have noted, some readers see Dostoyevsky as one of the great nineteenth-century realists, and this entirely plausible but limited view, with appropriate qualifications, has been particularly prevalent among Soviet critics. Others see him as one of the votaries of the cult of romantic intensity, who 'does not portray the world of nineteenth-century reality; [but] reveals the myths upon which that reality is founded'. 17 The combination and interaction of the two may be said to underlie Dostoyevsky's peculiar
8
Introduction
'reality effect' (or as we may feel at times his 'unreality effect'). Critics who have looked to his novels for the phenomenology of fantastic realism have sometimes found its essential characteristics in a combination of contemporary 'public opinion' and 'the rules of the genre' (to borrow two principles of verisimilitude from Todorov). 18 It is not always easy in practice to distinguish them (the second may be seen as a sub-set of the first or the first as the product of the second). However, the first category focuses on areas of human life regarded at the time as particularly 'real' (for instance, the lot of the humiliated and oppressed supported by concrete details from contemporary life) and also perhaps on newspaper sensationalism, those dramatic, exceptional events with which in our own day English tabloid newspapers regale their readers under the pretext that 'all human life is there'. The second draws attention to what Donald Fanger has called the traditions of'romantic realism' (Gogol, Dickens, Balzac, Sue), 19 this same social context presented through the devices of the melodrama and the Gothic novel: the enigmatic, the mysterious, modes of intensity, suspense, mysticism, the occult, illness as a path to higher knowledge, the excitement of gambling, heightened awareness, extreme emotional situations, oxymoron, stark contrasts, dreams, the unconscious mind, coincidence, the blurring of conventional distinctions, and so on in no particular order. The myth of St Petersburg, expressed variously in the works of Pushkin and Gogol and developed by the feuilletonists of the forties, bridges the two realms. Most of Dostoyevsky's stories and novels (though not The Devils or The Brothers Karamazov) are set in St Petersburg. Of this myth Fanger writes, Petersburg is established as the most real of places in order that we may wonder at what strange things happen in it: it is, in fact, the condition of our perceiving the full force of the strangeness, the lever that forces the suspension of our disbelief. But once our wonder has been stimulated, the city itself becomes its object, and all that seemed most real a moment before may at anytimebegin to appear the sheerest fantasy. The dialectic process is the Dostoevskian hallmark: he himself called his method 'fantastic realism1.20 According to this view the world of fantastic realism discovers the strange in the familiar, the subjective in the objective, the melodramatic in the humdrum and sustains a precarious balance on the threshold between the one and the other. Different critics focus on different sides of this picture. Alex de Jonge
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
9
in his book Dostoevsky and the age of intensity places his emphasis on the non-referential side of fantastic realism. No doubt many readers would agree that underlying Dostoyevsky's 'idealism' ('realism in a higher sense', the 'fantastic' side of fantastic realism), is a cult of intensity which incorporates a 'sense of cultural collapse and disruption', 'a perpetual stressed tension between the ideal and the real', 'a pathological distortion of the personality', a conception of the city as 'a root cause of contemporary trauma and spiritual loss', in which 'violent oscillation is the base component of Dostoyevsky's grammar of human behaviour'. In this world the quest for 'the intensest possible moment' is the summum bonum, and this is 'that world's most telling indictment'. 21 Whatever else may be said about this vision, it is undoubtedly based upon the extreme contrasts and oppositions of which the romantics were so fond and which fed into the Decadent movement, oppositions between the real and the ideal, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the evil, the normal and the abnormal, the conscious and the unconscious, the rational and the irrational, and so on, and also upon the effects of bringing these opposites into close proximity and dwelling on the threshold between them. Heightened awareness of various kinds, from the fevered consciousness of the gambler or the dying consumptive to the Underground Man's morbid introspection or Myshkin's epileptic mysticism, are the subjective by-products of these tensions. FANTASTIC REALISM, MODERNISM AND POST-MODERNISM
Although de Jonge's view of Dostoyevsky, in this respect like Fanger's, situates him among the romantics and romantic-realists of his own time, similar features of the novelist's work have been highlighted in attempts to define his relationship to modernism. Such an attempt is that of Marshall Berman in his chapter on 'The modernism of underdevelopment' in All that is solid melts into air.22 Berman sees the connection between such modernism and some of Dostoyevsky's links with his precursors and locates it in the image of Petersburg. He recalls that for Dostoyevsky Petersburg is 'the most abstract and premeditated city in the world'. One is reminded of several passages where the solidity of Petersburg seems (to borrow Marx's expression) to melt into air. Here is one such passage from 'A Weak Heart' (1848).
io
Introduction
It was already dusk when Arkady returned home. Approaching the Neva, he stopped for a moment and cast a penetrating glance along the river into the foggy, turbid, frosty distance, which suddenly flushed with the last shades of a blood-red sunset, burning out on a misty horizon. The night hung over the city and in the last reflections of the sun the vast surface of the Neva, distended by the frozen snow, was veiled by a shower or sparks from innumerable needles of frost. It was twenty degrees below zero. Horses were being driven to death and people were running as their frozen breath hung in the air . . . It seemed as though in this twilight hour that whole world, with all its inhabitants, the strong and the weak, with their dwellings, the refuges of the poor or the gilded palaces of the great ones of the world, took on the likeness of a fantastic, magical reverie or dream, which in its turn would suddenly disappear and evaporate in a dark blue sky.23 Or, in A Raw Youth (1875), However, I would mention in passing that Petersburg mornings, even the most prosaic, seem to me to be among the most fantastic in the world. That is my personal view, or, more exactly, my personal impression, which all the same I stand by. Such Petersburg mornings, damp, humid and foggy, must, it seems to me, encourage the wild dreams of some latter-day Hermann from Pushkin's 'Queen of Spades' (a colossal character, an unusual, typically Petersburgian type - a type of the 'Petersburg period'!) Repeatedly, during such fogs, I would fall prey to a strange, persistent dream: 'What if the fog should lift and take the whole damp, viscous city with it, rising with the fog, disappearing like smoke and leaving nothing but the old Finnish marshes, and - in the middle, for the sake of ornament perhaps - the Bronze Horseman on his exhausted, hotly breathing steed?' In other words I can't express my impressions properly, because it's all fantasy, that is, poetry, or consequently, rubbish; all the same I have often been and still am troubled by one completely nonsensical thought, 'There they all are, rushing hither and thither, and perhaps it is all just someone or other's dream, and there is not a single real person there, not a single actual deed. Whoever has been dreaming will suddenly wake up - and everything will suddenly disappear.' But I have let myself get carried away.24 In Berman's view, Petersburgers responded to the failure of the Decembrist Revolt with a 'brilliant and distinctive literary tradition, a tradition which focussed obsessively on their city as a symbol of warped and weird modernity, and that struggled to take possession of this city imaginatively on behalf of the peculiar sort of modern men and women that Petersburg had made'. Dostoyevsky stands amid a tradition that begins with Pushkin's 'Bronze Horseman', passes on
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
11
through Gogol, and finds its later incarnations in the work of Belyy, Zamyatin and Mandelstam. The list could be extended. In Belyy, modernism is preoccupied with the dangerous impulses that go by the name of 'sensation of the abyss'. Second, the modernist imaginative vision is rooted in images rather than abstractions; its symbols are direct, particular, immediate, concrete. Finally, it is vitally concerned to explore the human contexts ... from which sensations of the abyss arise. Thus modernism seeks a way into the abyss, but also a way out, or rather a way through.15 It is easy to get carried away. Although Dostoyevsky claims that 'reality strives towards fragmentation', his texts are not modernist in the way that Belyy's fragmented vision is. Yet most of these generalizations especially about the concern with exploring the human contexts from which sensations of the abyss arise - could equally well be made of him. Perhaps indeed what we need is a distinction between modernism and post-modernism, such as that sketched by Ihab Hassan who stresses that post-modernism Veers toward open, playful, optative, disjunctive, displaced, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of fragments, an ideology of fracture, a will to unmaking, an invocation of silences — veers toward all these and yet implies their very opposites, their antithetical realities'. 26 Does not Dostoyevsky find himself drawn towards such a vision in spite of his traditional starting points? More recently Brian McHale has distinguished between modernism and post-modernism as between literature which foregrounds epistemological questions (e.g. 'How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?' 'What is there to be known?' 'Who knows it?' 'What are the limits of the knowable') and literature which foregrounds ontological questions (e.g. 'Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it? What is the mode of existence of a text and what is the mode of existence of the world (or worlds) it projects?') 27 Readers of Dostoyevsky will intuitively recognize questions of both kinds in his novels, the latter especially in those regions of his texts where, as some would argue, he seems on the verge of losing control. The suggestion that Dostoyevsky is a precursor of post-modernism is not of course a new one. In 1956, Nathalie Sarraute, while admitting that his techniques were perhaps a little primitive, situated him squarely in this tradition. She writes, Le temps etait bien passe, ou Proust avait pu oser croire qu' 'en poussant son impression aussi loin que le permettrait son pouvoir de penetration' (il pourrait)
12
Introduction
'essayer d'aller jusqu'a ce fond extreme ou git la verite, l'univers reel, notre impression authentique'. Chacun savait bien maintenant, instruit par des deceptions successives, qu'il n'y avait pas d'extreme fond. 'Notre impression authentique' s'etait revelee comme etant a fonds multiples; et ces fonds s'etageaient a Pinfini.28 It is to this vision that she assimilates Dostoyevsky and concludes that the 'ground' on which all the surface signification seems to rest may be no more than what Katherine Mansfield, 'avec une sorte de crainte et peut-etre un leger degout' called 'this terrible desire to establish contact'.29 FANTASTIC REALISM AND IDEOLOGY
Many readers would claim that what sets Dostoyevsky's major texts apart from the rest of romantic realism, and what is neglected by Alex de Jonge, is the ideological dimension, expressed in its most extreme form in Raskolnikov's dream (or nightmare) of a world of conflicting ideas impervious and hostile to each other, each embodied in a separate human individual. For some, for example, Joseph Frank, the ideological dimension constitutes Dostoyevsky's principal claim to fame. 30 From Notes from Underground onwards, with the concept of 'idea-feelings' (according to which personal ideology and personal emotions are inseparable), Dostoyevsky becomes not only a great novelist, but also a great metaphysician - a view which Berdyayev propounded 31 and the present-day Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston finds defensible. 32 A naive attempt to read the novels as fictional representations of contemporary ideological debate is limiting. But such naive readings are not here at issue. Whereas Frank has amply documented, Bakhtin has performed the inestimable service of theorizing the place of ideas in Dostoyevsky's text. We shall return to Bakhtin shortly for other purposes, but we may here summarize his principal contributions to this theme, as expounded in his book Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics. Bakhtin argues that in Dostoyevsky's work each opinion or idea really does become a living thing and is inseparable from an embodied human voice affirming the T of the other not as an object, but as another subject (in what Martin Buber would call an 'I-Thou' relationship). 33 Dostoyevsky's novel is ultimately dialogic. It is constructed not as the whole of a single consciousness, absorbing other consciousnesses into itself (as in the traditional monologic novel), but as a whole formed by
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
13
the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other. Dostoyevsky's world is the artistically organized coexistence and interaction of spiritual diversity, not stages in the evolution of a unified spirit. However, the heroes of his novels are not ideas, as Engelhardt thought. 34 His hero was humanity, or to use his own words, 'man in man'. For Dostoyevsky there are no ideas in themselves. Even 'truth in itself he represents as incarnated in Christ. Bakhtin appears to equate 'man in man' with 'individual consciousness in intense relationship with another consciousness'. 35 'Dostoyevsky could hear dialogic relationships everywhere, in all manifestations of conscious and intelligent human life; where consciousness began, there dialogue began for him as well.' 36 The author of the polyphonic novel does not fix and define his characters once and for all but himself enters into dialogue with them. The hero, then, interests Dostoyevsky not as a fixed character that can be defined, finalized and closed off from without, but as a point-ofview on the world: how the world appears to his hero and how he appears to himself (though, of course, this does not prevent his heroes and narrators from trying to define each other and their world monologically). A human being always knows something about himself that will elude external definition. The truth about the world is inseparable from the truth about the personality and, according to Dostoyevsky, an idea can and must be not only understood but also 'felt'.37 Bakhtin rightly notes this point, upon which Dostoyevsky repeatedly insists. Some critics have represented it as the most important feature of Dostoyevsky's perception of human thought. Without doubt, Bakhtin has made some comments of fundamental importance about the Dostoyevskian novel which spotlight a number of interrelated problems. But how far does this help us to define fantastic realism? For his part Bakhtin directs attention to the dislocation of narrative point-of-view: The self-clarification, self-revelation of the hero, his discourse about himself not predetermined (as the ultimate goal of his construction) by some neutral image of him, does indeed sometimes make the author's setting 'fantastic', even for Dostoevsky. For Dostoevsky the verisimilitude of a character is verisimilitude of the character's own internal discourse about himself in all its purity but, in order to hear and display that discourse, in order to incorporate it into thefieldof vision of another person, the laws of that otherfieldmust be violated,
14
Introduction
for the normalfieldcanfinda place for the object-image of another person but not for anotherfieldof vision in its entirety. Some fantastical viewpoint must be sought for the author outside ordinaryfieldsof vision.38 Bakhtin goes on to quote at length from the author's foreword to 'A Meek One' where Dostoyevsky explains how he has created a 'fantastic' element in the composition of the story which for him is highly realistic. He writes as if a husband whose wife has just committed suicide is pacing up and down thinking while her body is lying there in the room. He tries to put his thoughts together logically; he recalls past events, and gradually moves towards the subjective truth. Of course such a person could not really write his thoughts down in this way; nor could anyone else take them down in shorthand, yet the process recorded is psychologically true. As Dostoyevsky acknowledged, the technique is not original. But Bakhtin is pointing towards another possibility, that the fantastic realism of Dostoyevsky's novels may have something to do with a mode of narration and its capacity for rendering the truth of subjective reality. Indeed Dostoyevsky's experimentation with narrative point-of-view gives rise to some of the most striking characteristics of the texture of his imaginative world. As we shall see when we look at The Idiot, changes in narrative point-of-view serve not principally to light up the subject from different angles, but more often to subvert the integrity of the reader's perception of the imaginative world, particularly to subvert the refuge of the familiar, to lure readers into thinking they know 'where they stand' in relation to characters, setting and plot, only radically to undermine their suppositions. To put it another way, they think they understand the 'world' they are in, only to find their confidence repeatedly shaken. Characters are in a similar position in relation to each other. In a realm which consists of discourse the difference between world and world-view is a fine one. Rosemary Jackson finds a prominent place for both Dostoyevsky and Bakhtin in her study of Fantasy, the literature of subversion.39 She accepts Bakhtin's view that Dostoyevsky's novels are sustained dialogues, interrogating the 'normal' world and relativizing its values. 'Dostoyevsky effectively "hollows out" the real world, discovering a latent emptiness.' The same techniques of subversion apply to his characters: Dostoevsky's protagonists are in opposition to monological definitions of the real, or offixedpersonal identity ... Through the double, 'the possibilities of
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
15
another man and another life are revealed', writes Bakhtin. 'The dialogical attitude of man to himself... contributes to the destruction of his integrity and finalizedness.' Dostoevsky does not present 'characters', but disintegrated figures who no longer coincide with their 'ideal' selves, i.e. their culturally formed egos. Perhaps this last sentence is a bit misleading. He does present characters, or at least it is perfectly possible to make 'characters' out of the bundles of events, descriptions and connotations which create the illusion of character, by deploying the strategies we generally deploy when defining character in fiction or lived experience. What is right about the Jackson/Bakhtin sentence is that they are constantly subject and subjected to processes of disintegration and reformulation, by themselves, other characters, the narrator and, no doubt, the reader. Like 'living life', 'characters' in Dostoyevsky ultimately elude our grasp. And Bakhtin is undoubtedly right in his view that fantastic realism, 'my idealism' or 'realism in a higher sense' was for Dostoyevsky ultimately about people's dialogic discourse generated by other voices. In the end Dostoyevsky's realism is fantastic because, as in the literature of fantasy (or for that matter much modern literature), '"meanings" recede indefinitely, with truth as a mere vanishing point of the text'. 40 In the end readings of Dostoyevsky as the Christian, the Marxist, the existentialist, the psychoanalytic are misconceived if they are seen as definitive, as would be a naive realist or naturalistic reading. In a notable passage, which is perhaps his most important and most neglected theoretical statement, Dostoyevsky wrote 'Ideas fly in the air, but always according to laws ... Ideas live and spread according to laws which elude our grasp.' 41 What all the passages about 'fantastic realism', 'my idealism', 'realism in a higher sense' and so on have in common is the belief that (at least in a period of crisis) human perceptions do not exist in a stable relationship to an anterior reality, unless it be an elusive spiritual reality which we cannot grasp, but live lives of their own, validated as much by some principle of internal coherence as by conformity or responsiveness to an objective reality and constantly in a state of flux and reformulation. Dostoyevsky's own novels are designed in such a way as repeatedly to challenge the reader's (and the character's) easy identification of signifier with signified, sign with meaning, verisimilitude with reality. The strategies which Dostoyevsky adopts are to be found in both character-to-character relationships and in the narrator-reader
16
Introduction
relationship and they involve not merely intellectual subversion but also emotional disturbance. FANTASTIC REALISM AND PSYCHOLOGY
Bakhtin's analysis of the embodied idea in Dostoyevsky's world opens up questions about the relevance of psychology to an understanding of fantastic realism. Some readers would in any case say that Dostoyevsky's psychological grasp is so central to his vision that fantastic realism must perforce be defined in relation to it if an adequate definition is to be found. The pursuit of the cult of intensity and heightened awareness, the centrality of neurotic conflict, the view that ideological attitudes are indivisible from emotional positions - the argument might run - all invite and require an explanation in psychological terms. Similarly the intersubjectivity of which Bakhtin writes cannot be properly grasped without an underlying psychological theory of some kind. Admittedly, there is the difficulty that Bakhtin 42 attempts to refute Freud while many of the best-known psychoanalytic approaches to Dostoyevsky - including perforce Freud's own - derive from Freudianism, but no doubt some way can be found to resolve this problem. At this point I should repeat that it is my intention to use Bakhtin as my theoretical basis: it follows that psychoanalytic theory, if it is to be exploited at all, will take second place. I have no doubt that various psychoanalytic approaches can yield very valuable readings of Dostoyevsky's text, and continue to do so to the present time, and I shall revert to this theme in later chapters. Until recently, most psychological readings of Dostoyevsky could be divided into two main groups: those, like Freud's own, 43 which were devoted to the psychoanalysis of the author and used the literary text as evidence; and those which attempted to psychoanalyse his characters. This second group was a very catholic one, ranging from specialist articles by trained psychologists and psychoanalysts to general studies by literary critics persuaded of the relevance of psychoanalysis to the study of character in Dostoyevsky's novels. Among the worst are articles which attempt a crude application of half-assimilated psychoanalytic concepts. Among the best are the fine essays of F. F. Seeley, a literary critic who has also mastered the psychoanalytic literature. Occasionally, but not usually, attention has been focused on inter-
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
17
personal relations rather than on characters seen principally in isolation. Useful studies of the dreams and hallucinations of Dostoyevsky's characters, not forgetting the phenomenon of 'the double', have been published from time to time. In the chapters which follow the insights of some of the specialist articles will be acknowledged. Nor do I wish to appear to neglect two recent books on Dostoyevsky written from the vantage-point of psychology. Gary Cox 44 likens the population of Dostoyevsky's fiction to a primitive tribe, whose rules of interaction may be studied and formulated. His insights into the world of Dostoyevsky's 'tribe', emphasizing the centrality of his characters' preoccupation with establishing their place in the dominance hierarchy, are consistent with a strong version of Bakhtin's views on the ways in which individuals attempt to impose their Voices' on those of other people.45 Cox claims that one of Dostoyevsky's discoveries was that the inversion of the dominance hierarchy is one of the mainsprings of its operation, that the aggressor may become a victim and the victim may become an object of veneration. This view affords striking parallels with Bakhtin's conception of Dostoyevsky's texts as examples of the carnivalization of literature, even though it substitutes oppressive hierarchical relationships for what in Bakhtin are creative and joyful ones. However, it has to be said that Cox's particular approach, once its primary thesis has been demonstrated, yields less than might have been hoped. The outstanding psychological study of Dostoyevsky is undoubtedly Elizabeth Dalton's book on The Idiot.46 Dalton ably defends Freudian criticism against its detractors, whilst accepting its inherent limitations and regretting its all too frequent abuse. In her view psychoanalysis provides the critic with a method based primarily on Freud's approach to the dream, exploiting its well-known techniques of dream formation: repression and the return of the repressed in condensation, displacement and secondary revision. Dalton, however, does not use the text as a means of access to the author's unconscious. Her point of departure and arrival is the text itself in its emotional impact on the reader: The unconscious conflicts represented symbolically in great literature are of such magnitude and depth that they reach a virtually universal layer of the psychic substratum. Fantasies at this level are bisexual and 'polymorphous perverse', involving both sexes' erotic and aggressive feelings toward both parents, active and passive wishes, and fears of genital injury. Oedipal feelings
18
Introduction
shade off into more primitive pre-oedipal fantasies and fears, including those of primary fusion, which involve the wish to incorporate or be incorporated by the mother's body.47 This passage sums up well the gist of Dalton's approach. Its quotation will not convert the sceptical and is not intended to. But a reading of her intelligent and rich treatment of Dostoyevsky's novel, with its many insights into the individual psychology of the characters, their relations and personal interaction and the structure of the text itself, stands a very good chance of doing so. She observes that in reading the novel one has the sense that its action is balanced quite perilously, that just beyond or below its precarious coherence is a kind of maelstrom or abyss in which emotion might lose its connection with intelligible form and manifest itself in some unimaginably direct 'raw' state, in which ordinary coherent speech and gesture might give way to frenzy or blankness. Indeed the novel does present this in the epileptic experiences of Myshkin, which in a sense are the prototypes of emotional experience in The Idiot: In the great scenes of climactic emotion or violent confrontation, the reader is led to participate in a kind of loss of control: the ego of the protagonist, under the assault of repressed impulses, gives way to energies and fantasies usually inaccessible to it and undergoes an enormous expansion of its capacity for perception and feeling. But this momentary expansion also exposes it to the possibility of annihilation through the savage force of id energies and the retaliation of superego: the result is the collapse of the ego in frenzy, loss of consciousness, or epileptic convulsions.48 Something similar repeatedly happens on the level of the plot itself: The compulsion to introduce this kind of excitement into the novel nearly destroys it as an aesthetic experience. The anxieties aroused mobilize the defenses of the reader's ego, which may protect itself by finding the book 'unbearable', or 'overwritten', or 'ridiculous'. Moreover, in their explosive force, the great scenes threaten to escape the control of the plot, to disrupt the continuity of the narrative and drive it into incoherence. This dangerous flirtation with loss of form [emphasis mine, MVJ] is the analogue in the structure of the novel itself to the courting of loss of ego control in the protagonists, especially Myshkin. Thus the novel in its terrible fidelity to moral and psychological experience almost loses itself in the gamble. Almost, but not quite. Form and meaning are salvaged perilously, like the hundred thousand roubles Nastasya pulls from thefireat the last moment.49
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
19
Few readers can fail to be impressed by this reading of the texture of the novel, and fail to be grateful for an analysis which systematically accounts for it, indeed the only type of analysis which so far has proved capable of doing justice to the emotional appeal of Dostoyevsky's text. The Idiot demonstrates the characteristics which Dalton discusses more dramatically than any other of Dostoyevsky's novels. Yet the suspicion lingers that she has put her finger on a characteristic feature of all his fiction, something which must surely be central to the idea of fantastic realism. It is not only the paradigm scenes involving epilepsy or execution which partake of dreamlike qualities. Many of the lesser scenes, even apparent digressions, like the one in which Myshkin returns home to find a birthday party going on at his house, also have strong dreamlike features. If there is something essential to fantastic realism here, what is it? Is it the way in which the ego manages, or almost fails to manage (i.e., to translate into culturally acceptable meanings) the shared primal fantasies of author and reader? Is it the way in which this perilous balancing act is reproduced in the psyches of the characters? Or both? Or has it something to do with the processes of transference and counter-transference between text and reader, as suggested in a recent article by John Forrester?50 One central aspect of the psychoanalytic treatment of the dream is the crucial role of language. If Dostoyevsky's world is dreamlike, we might expect dreamlike things to happen to language. As Dalton reminds us, a large part of Freud's writing is devoted to linguistic and philological analyses, on word-play in dreams, parapraxes (slips of the tongue) and so on. Likewise, the ideas of condensation and displacement - active in dream formation - are akin to the figures of speech, metaphor (associations based on likeness) and metonymy (associations based on contiguity). For Freud language is in an ambiguous position with one side facing inwards towards the unconscious and the other turned outwards towards consciousness: the passage from the unconscious to the preconscious is accomplished through language. The relationship between psychoanalysis and language has recently been the subject of intense interest. No doubt best known is Lacan's theory of a pre-linguistic, pre-oedipal stage (the realm of the 'Imaginary') followed by a 'Symbolic order' in which the child is initiated into language and where a hidden gap opens up between signified and signifier (concept and sign). What certainly occurs in Dostoyevsky is that the conventionally established links between words and their
20
Introduction
meanings, sign and referent, private fantasy and reality, feelings and ideas are subject to slippage and reformulation. And these phenomena are vividly present as early as Dostoyevsky's second novel, The Double. Freud's (or Lacan's or Derrida's) views on the mechanisms and strategies involved are less important here than the fact of their occurrence. Could this be the key to Dostoyevsky's intuition of'realism in a higher sense', the laws which ideas observe but which are beyond our grasp, fantastic realism? FANTASTIC REALISM AND INTERTEXTUALITY
Bakhtin lays much emphasis in his book on Dostoyevsky on the role of parody and stylization in his texts. The objects of these strategies may be literary models or they may be models taken from everyday experience in society: the discourse of bureaucracy (Luzhin) or the Church (Zosima), for example, the voices of authority in the environment. That Dostoyevsky's texts are replete with echoes and allusions to precursor texts has been thoroughly demonstrated. There are the major and minor classics of ancient and modern literature, for example: Plato, the New Testament, Russian religious works, the lives of the Saints, Dickens, Balzac, Rousseau, Gogol, Schiller, Hoffmann, Shakespeare, Goethe, Sue, Hugo, Herzen, Pushkin, Fourier, Hegel, Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Renan, Turgenev, Bernard, to mention only a random selection of those on whom special studies have been written. As a by-product of these studies it has become clear that the relationship between Dostoyevsky's texts and his precursors is usually very complex, elusive and difficult to define or even to generalize about. By constant reference to other texts, Dostoyevsky stimulates the reader to adopt them as models for reading his own, or as models against which to read them. The idea of 'intertextuality', as it derives from the work of Julia Kristeva, has nothing to do with literary influence as such. But it does (if I understand it correctly) have to do with the ways in which individual texts are read, and indeed can only be read, in the light of systems derived from other texts.51 A present-day reader, in approaching parts of Dostoyevsky's novels which seem to defy conventional nineteenthcentury readings, has newer systems to appeal to, such as that of Freudian psychology, for instance. Jonathan Culler in his well-known book Structuralist poetics (1975) distinguished five levels of vraisemblance, 'five ways in which a text may
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
21
be brought into contact with and defined in relation to another text which helps to make it intelligible'. First there is the socially given text, that which is taken as the Veal world'. Second, but in some cases difficult to distinguish from the first, is a general cultural text: shared knowledge which would be recognized by participants as part of culture and hence subject to correction or modification but which none the less serves as a kind of 'nature'. Third, there are the texts or conventions of a genre, a specifically literary and artificial vraisemblance. Fourth, comes what might be called the natural attitude to the artificial, where the text explicitly cites and exposes vraisemblance of the third kind so as to reinforce its own authority. And finally, there is the complex vraisemblance of specific intertextualities, where one work takes another as its basis or point of departure and must be assimilated in relation to it. 52
Dostoyevsky employs each of these levels and exploits their possibilities for mutual subversion: one way or another he lures the reader into particular reading strategies only to put them in question. Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism is built upon his perception of the irreducible intertextuality of human experience, particularly vividly represented, he seems to believe, in the Russia of his own time. Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism opens up gaps, even chasms, between the conventional perceptions of everyday life and their referents, challenging them subtly at every point by drawing attention not to the opposition between objective and subjective accounts of reality but to alternative intersubjectivities or intertextualities of which the Freudian has become in our own day a particularly strong variant, but one which Dostoyevsky could not foresee in all its detail. This applies just as much to those perceptions which are overtly 'ideological' (religion, literary convention) as to those which, because they are sanctioned by common consent, are taken for indisputable everyday reality. Because Dostoyevsky portrays human experience at its extremes, believing that this is characteristic of his age, he has the double advantage of showing these experiences in their clearest form and also in the form in which they are most vulnerable to subversion. Bakhtin, with his emphasis on the potentiality of heteroglossia for enrichment, neglects, it seems to me, Dostoyevsky's insights into its destructive potential. But in one respect he is much truer to Dostoyevsky than the narrow concept of 'intertextuality' properly allows. For Bakhtin, all texts, all ideas, are informed with emotions, all intertextuality is at least potentially intersubjectivity.
22
Introduction
Dostoyevsky liked to use the image of a Russian urban intelligentsia 'divorced from the soil'. This has usually been taken to refer to the social and cultural alienation of the inhabitants of St Petersburg from the customs and traditional views of the Russian countryside and its supposed faith in the peasant commune, Orthodoxy and Russian nationality. No doubt rightly so. However it can also stand as an image of a society which has lost its naive sense of a unity between socially sanctioned perceptions and reality and has been wafted away on ideas that 'fly in the air according to laws which are too difficult for us to grasp'. FANTASTIC REALISM, DIALOGIC DISCOURSE AND EMOTIONAL INTERACTION
Bakhtin's analysis is by far the most adequate account of the dynamics of discourse in Dostoyevsky's novels and although he fails to make the connection explicit himself, an understanding of the dynamics of Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism is greatly assisted by reference to his work. Wayne Booth has suggested that Bakhtin's significance is not limited to his role as literary critic, theorist or historian: To me it seems clearly to rest on a vision of the world as essentially a collectivity of subjects who are themselves social in essence, not individuals in any usual sense of the word; to this degree it is definitely incompatible with all but the subtlest of materialisms ... We come into consciousness speaking a language already permeated with many voices - a social, not a private language. From the beginning, we are 'polyglot', already in process of mastering a variety of social dialects derived from parents, clan, class, religion, country. We grow in consciousness by taking in more voices as 'authoritatively persuasive' and then by learning which to accept as 'internally persuasive'. Finally we achieve, if we are lucky, a kind of individuality, but it is never a private or autonomous individuality in the western sense ... Anyone who has not been maimed by some imposed 'ideology in the narrow sense', anyone who is not an 'ideologue', respects the fact that each of us is a 'we', not an 'I'.53 These are large claims. It may be objected that Booth underestimates the adversarial nature of Bakhtin's world, consisting as it does of subjects each trying to impose his or her discourse on the other, but there are good grounds for making claims of this kind and their applicability to Dostoyevsky is by now evident. On the level of narrative
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
23
his novels exploit and often subvert voices deriving from a wide variety of narrative traditions (for example, the Gothic novel; the 'romanticrealist' novel; the novel of manners; the epistolary novel); the confession; thefeuilleton; the documentary chronicle; satire; the saint's life; the philosophical conte; and, Bakhtin would stress, ultimately the traditions of the Mennipaean satire and the carnival). The inflection of the narrator not only is often determined by the Voice' which he considers appropriate to the subject matter of his narrative, but also is drawn into the zones of discourse of his characters, resulting in what Bakhtin calls hybridization and various forms of stylization, parody and free indirect speech. The narrative may be third person, or first person, and, if the latter, he (or she in the case of Netochka Nezvanova) may be the central character, or a marginal character, or not involved in the action at all. The narrator may at times be identical with the voice of the implied author and at times the two voices may part company. Embedded in the narrative are not only the direct and reported speech of the characters but also, for example, diaries, confessions, poems, articles, anecdotes, letters, portraits, paintings, quotations from newspapers, allusions to and quotations from well-known works of literature or their authors. The direct speech of characters, like that of the narrator, draws on all these secondary narratives, on conventional literary or popular stereotypes, on folk traditions, on rumour and gossip, on norms of social respectability. Every utterance is double-voiced (claims Bakhtin): it responds to antecedent voices (to the already uttered, without which it could not exist) and anticipates a rejoinder. This is true also of the voice of the narrator, who anticipates the response of his (or in one case her) readers. Moreover the impulse of each voice (with its own intertextual dominants) to impose itself on the voice of the other leads to interactions of a kind which R. D. Laing effectively explored in the 1960s in relation to Crime and Punishment. One of the theoretical difficulties with Bakhtin's thought is his recourse at crucial junctures to binary (privative) oppositions which do not survive careful scrutiny. Thus Dostoyevsky's novels are polyphonic, but those of all his predecessors and contemporaries are monologic. The novel embodies heteroglossia and double-voiced discourse, but poetry and the epic do not. On the other hand he also displays a tendency to the view that all utterances are ultimately double-voiced and one assumes that in accordance with this principle it should be possible to establish a scale of different degrees of double-voicedness
24
Introduction
which extends further than that which he provides in Problems of Dostoevsky 's poetics.
However this may be, underlying the whole of Bakhtin's oeuvre is a fundamental value-judgement which gives negative value to attempts to achieve or practise total monological unity, closure, objectification, definition, finalization, authoritative discourse, except where they are part of a wider, open-ended dialogue. At the other end of the spectrum he would equally reject total disorganization and chaos. Positive value is accorded to dialogue, double-voiced discourse, internally-persuasive discourse, non-equivalence, openness, 'polyphony' ... That does not mean that Bakhtin would banish or thinks it possible to banish the former series, and certainly he is not blind to the overwhelming role of such drives in philosophy, theology, literary criticism, and in everyday relationships, indeed in human enquiry and social life at all levels. He has much in common in this respect with Buber, Sartre, Barthes or Laing. It is only that he opposes attempts to give them ultimate value, an attitude which, as Wayne Booth perceives, puts in question a very high proportion of Western intellectual discourse through the ages. 54 And these value-judgements, as Booth again observes, are based on claims about human experience itself, its essential, irreducible, multivoicedness and multi-centredness together with an acute awareness of people's proneness to objectify, to delimit and reduce to monologue. It is because, in Bakhtin's view, the novel at its best comes nearest to understanding this essential fact of human experience, that it is the focus of his attention: A completely new structure for the image of a human being- a full-blooded and fully signifying other consciousness which is not inserted into the finalizing frame of reality, which is notfinalizedby anything (not even death), for its meaning cannot be resolved or abolished by reality (to kill does not mean to refute)... The second discovery is the depiction (or rather the re-creation) of the self-developing idea (inseparable from personality). The idea becomes the object of artistic depiction and is revealed not at the level of a system (philosophical or scientific), but on the level of a human event.55 Bakhtin's book on Dostoyevsky (an ongoing dialogue with himself and others) is not to be swallowed whole or uncritically. Indeed that would be a most un-Bakhtinian thing to do. Some of its most challenging ideas are surely overstated (for example, that Dostoyevsky's presentation of character is entirely synchronic and has no diachronic or causal dimension, though one could defend the view that the
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
25
synchronic dominates to an unusual degree). Others seem confused and carelessly obscure. I emphasize 'seem' because Bakhtin's discursive style (repetitive without ever repeating exactly, as though he is fumbling through a process of trial and error towards a truth perceived through a glass darkly) does not make for certainty. Caryl Emerson charitably calls his style 'luxuriously inefficient5 and as having 'that congenial shapelessness of a voice expecting at any moment to be interrupted'. 56 His discussion of discourse in Dostoyevsky too seems to need further refinement which, though the general principles are clear enough, it does not receive in his comments on Dostoyevsky's texts. If as Bakhtin claims, and it appears to be true, most analyses of Dostoyevsky's novels from an ideological viewpoint have studied individual characters as separate entities, juxtaposed certainly, but rarely in dialogue (even, I would venture, in the cases of Ivan and Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov where the one is pronounced by Dostoyevsky himself to be a rejoinder to the other), it is also the case that most psychological studies of Dostoyevsky's characters deal with them individually rather than in interaction with each other. Elizabeth Dalton's book is, as we have seen, one of the major exceptions. The principal area in which I wish to modify and extend Bakhtin is, in fact, his treatment of character and characterization, and this therefore deserves a few more words here. There is no doubt, as many critics trained in the New Criticism and bemused by the legacy of structuralism have protested, that we not only read characters in novels as if they were real people. We also remember them as real people. As Rimmon-Kenan (quoting Chatman) reminds us in her brief summary of the problems, we often recall fictional characters vividly yet not a single word of the text in which they came alive.57 Mikhail Bakhtin's brother Nikolay Bakhtin was in no doubt about this. He thought of the characters in War and Peace as real people without ever having read the novel from beginning to end. 58 Wayne Booth remarks on the 'shameful fact that as soon as you name a character and allow even one events readers will, in truculent naivete, treat them like people in human situations, and all the effort at pure form has gone down the drain'. 59 Characters in nineteenth-century 'realist' fiction, at least, are partly modelled on the reader's conception of people and in this they are person-like. We may easily forget that the models we apply in lived experience (the basis for the naming and definition we engage in in relation to others) are very similar to those we
26
Introduction
apply in 'reading' character in works of art, and these strategies are invited, encouraged, assumed and indeed relied upon by the novelist, even where his ultimate intention is to subvert them. Bakhtin does not in fact forget this, though his conception of psychology may seem oversimple to those who are more sympathetic to other, e.g. psychoanalytical, models. In particular Bakhtin's discussion of Dostoyevsky's characters - although he repeatedly refers to 'embodied ideas' or 'the self-developing idea inseparable from personality' - takes very little account of desires or emotions either in fictional characters or in writers and readers. Yet we are aware in reading Dostoyevsky, as we are in our relationships within lived experience, that utterances do not simply provoke verbal rejoinders or silences of a rational kind: they also provoke emotional responses, arising from their confirmation or disconfirmation of our subjective selves. Or perhaps we should say that they often provoke emotional responses first and verbal responses second. That these are communicated to us in the novel through the medium of the written language (albeit dialogic language) rather than by the direct observation and intuitive reading of muscular response or intuitive or private knowledge of the self, is very important both theoretically and in practice. But since these data of lived experience are frequently reported and even commented upon in the fictional narrative and, even where they are not, often motivate subsequent dialogue, its significance can also be exaggerated. Both in lived experience and the reading of fiction, our perceptions of people are constantly disturbed and reformulated. Dostoyevsky is a master at depicting this process and Bakhtin's account lays the groundwork for an understanding of it. But there is no doubt in my mind that Bakhtin's psychology lacks and needs a theory of emotional interaction of a kind which some types of modern psychology can quite easily provide. Why Bakhtin should have failed to explore adequately this particular area is a matter for speculation. Voloshinov's book on Freud is probably not the right place to look for an explanation, not only because it now seems certain that Bakhtin was not its author, but also because, as G. Pirog has shown, its attitude to Freud differs significantly from that of Bakhtin's works of the same period. 60 Morson and Emerson in their analysis of some of the early works explore Bakhtin's objections to the kind of 'theoretism' which Freud and other psychologists were deemed guilty of. I am inclined to think, however, that the major stumbling block to Bakhtin's assimilation of psychoanalysis is the negative value he
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
27
places on the forces of the unconscious in the individual's coming to consciousness through dialogic discourse: Forces that lie outside consciousness, externally (mechanically) defining it: from environment and violence to miracle, mystery and authority. Consciousness under the influence of these forces loses its authentic freedom, and personality is destroyed. There, among these forces, one must also consign the unconscious (the 'id'). 61
Dostoyevsky would, of course, have agreed with that. But an account of Dostoyevsky which does not do full justice to the forces of violence, the unconscious, mystery, miracle and authority (let alone the environment) looks doomed to one-sidedness. I shall develop this theme in my later chapters. By appealing to psychology of a phenomenological kind in what follows I do not wish to make any specific theoretical statement about its relationship to Bakhtin. I would only say that I do not think that the theoretical problem is an insoluble one and that Bakhtin's peculiar place in the development of critical theory in the West has led to his being claimed as an ally by less likely companions. It is implicit in what follows, however, that the emotional strategies we employ in real-life relationships are transferred to our relationship with the narrative voices of literary texts and those of the characters in them. Many of them are also typical of the relationships between fictional characters, whether as a result of tacit collusion between reader and text (or author) or of hints or explicit commentary in the text itself. It will become evident that I hold that what Bakhtin calls double-voiced discourse or dialogic discourse is frequently used in Dostoyevsky as a means of undermining the integrity and stability of the emotional life of the other person (broadening out eventually into social groups) and that unless some such cluster of emotional experiences as that which is typically experienced by real individuals is posited, it is not possible to do justice to Dostoyevsky or to realize the full potential of Bakhtin's reading of him. That this implies that fictional characters appear to have some sort of definable emotional identity (or at least that their conduct displays some sort of consistency) must therefore be accepted. The intimate relationship between the emotions and discourse in Dostoyevsky means that giving full weight to the psychological factor in fantastic realism is essential to its understanding.
28
Introduction SO WHAT IS FANTASTIC REALISM?
Where does all this leave us? This highly selective survey of critical approaches to Dostoyevsky highlights a number of characteristics of Dostoyevsky's text relating fantastic realism to heteroglossia and to a modernist or post-modernist perception of the various ways in which discourse breaks loose from the reality principle and suffers internal fracture. Let me finish with some general conclusions suggested by this discussion. The rest of the book will attempt to follow up some, though by no means all, of their implications. (1) In his theoretical comments Dostoyevsky does not himself offer more than clues to the nature of fantastic realism. They are couched in terms which derive from expressivist philosophy. This gives them an air of sophistication and solidity, but in reality they are only preliminary and tentative and not entirely consistent with each other or his practice. He does not even use key concepts like Tact', 'truth', 'reality' unambiguously, and he notably fails to clarify what he understands by 'higher realism'. What they do testify to is a realization that a 'positivist' view of reality is naive and superficial with respect to the life of the human spirit and specifically that of contemporary Russia. Similarly the conception of 'ideas flying in the air according to laws that are too difficult for us to grasp' suggests a view of human consciousness according to which discourse may take leave of material reality, and live a semiindependent life according to elusive laws which may perhaps be caught in imaginative fiction. There is no indication, however, that Dostoyevsky had in mind any form of dialectic movement. In this Bakhtin's emphasis is undoubtedly right. (2) Dostoyevsky's concentration upon abnormal, extreme (romanticmelodramatic) situations, his philosophical references to deviations from normal spiritual development and his penchant for abnormal psychology all lead to the view that the reality to which fantastic realism is supposed to give access is particularly clearly visible under circumstances of acute emotional stress. Critics frequently dwell on the 'mythological' aspect of Dostoyevsky's St Petersburg with its own inner coherence and emphasise its non-referential aspects. And studies of Dostoyevsky from the point-of-view of romanticism, modernism or post-modernism frequently quote
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
29
those passages in his fiction which suggest that even the material reality of St Petersburg might in the last resort 'disappear like smoke', 'evaporate in a dark blue sky', or, as Berman has it, 'melt into air'. (3) According to Bakhtin these impressions or ideas are not only inseparable from feelings, but also participate in an ongoing, intersubjective dialogue. Fantastic realism, according to this view, is not simply a matter of individual fantasy, the mental aberrations of individuals under conditions of material stress. It is the product of social interaction, and, as we shall see, of the strategies people consciously or unconsciously employ not only to enrich each other's consciousness but also to disorientate one another. Strong emotional impulses (deriving from what Freud called the Oedipus complex, for example, or the urge to raise oneself in the dominance hierarchy) may focus and give dynamic direction to these fantasies, and also lead to opposition and conflict between persons engaged in dialogue. (4) It may be that Freud gives us essential clues to the emotional basis of Dostoyevsky's view of the world, the internal dynamic which accounts for its immense emotional appeal for the reader and for its own ultimate coherence. Certainly the close match between Dostoyevsky's and Freud's psychologies (pace Bakhtin) has been amply demonstrated, and it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that if Dostoyevsky conforms to Freud so well this is all that is needed to finally validate both of them. However, although such an emotional nucleus may well underlie Dostoyevsky's texts and motivate the surface phenomena which I have been describing, this is not in itself, it seems to me, what was at the back of Dostoyevsky's mind when he wrote of fantastic realism. Having said that Dostoyevsky's definitions are inadequate to ground a whole theory does not mean that we should entirely ignore their drift. One characteristic of a satisfactory definition must be that it still allows us to imagine Dostoyevsky attempting to define it in the way he chose. There is much in the Freudian analysis which conforms to and contributes to our discussion. Clearly the intrusions of the unconscious, repression and the return of the repressed, dream structures and the like are all part of the intersubjective dialogue. In later chapters mention will be made of the distorting roles of memory and repression. In the end however fantastic realism, or so I shall claim,
30
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
Introduction is about the intersubjective experience of reality and the elusiveness of a much sought-after, universal Truth. In this world of intersubjectivity and what Bakhtin calls heteroglossia, all attempts at 'monological' definition are subject to subversion. Since individual readers are part of the dialogue, this goes for them too: that is, their attempts to 'grasp' the novels, to impose closure upon them, will, unless the concrete reader is obtuse, inevitably be frustrated. Truth is 'a mere vanishing point of the text'. There is evidence for this not only in the experience of individual readers but also in the wide variety of diverse readings represented in published research and criticism. Moreover we shall see that Dostoyevsky's narrative voices deploy some of the same strategies of disorientation vis-a-vis the reader as characters do towards each other. According to Bakhtin (and some forms of psychoanalytic theory) the relationship between text and reader can be regarded as reciprocal. The result - in ways yet to be explored - is violent oscillation, instability, threshold situations, a world and individuals poised on a knife-edge of viability and non-viability, almost real but not quite. De Jonge alludes to a Violent oscillation' as the 'base component of Dostoyevsky's grammar of human behaviour',62 though he does not attempt to describe this grammar. We see this oscillation, or what Kohlberg calls the 'obsessive balancing and unbalancing of one idea or force with its opposite', 63 internalized in the psychology of the Underground and typically externalized in the Dostoyevskian scandal scene. Dostoyevsky at his most precarious is most typical of fantastic realism: if we look for conjunctions of artistic failure or near failure with objects of the author's compulsive fascination, we may find important clues. We shall indeed find some of the most important in two such texts: The Double and The Idiot. The fact that threshold situations, where coherence teeters on the verge of the abyss, may give us essential clues does not mean, however, that human discourse in Dostoyevsky lacks all direction. Quite the contrary, his characters thrust out in many directions. Positive value is accorded to those still seeking 'living life', a Truth which transcends the nihilistic crisis of modern humanity. Exploring some of the negative implications of Bakhtin does, of course, involve challenging him, at least implicitly, and extending
Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
31
his reading of Dostoyevsky. I make no apology for this and am delighted to find that the same project informs Caryl Emerson and Gary Saul Morson's recent book. It is for the reader to judge whether such attempts are successful. The chapters which follow explore these implications, but they do not attempt to explore them all at once. Chapters 2 and 3 look at general features of personal interaction among the characters, interaction between narrator and reader and ways in which monologic certainties are both posited and undermined under conditions of stress. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 look at particular interactive strategies on what one might loosely call the synchronic level, though since all double-voiced discourse, according to Bakhtin, echoes previous utterances and anticipates a rejoinder, the term 'synchronic' must be understood in relative terms. Chapters 7 and 8 adopt a diachronic standpoint, the first concentrating on images which are remembered and revised, the second on images which are repressed and return in disguised form. At this point I shall discuss again in the light of earlier discussion the question of a Christian reading of Dostoyevsky, which might seem to be ruled out by the 'nihilistic' deconstructionist tendencies which this book stresses and which are particularly evident to a reader of the modernist or post-modernist school. Finally I shall discuss whether these investigations can help us to a new conception of Dostoyevsky's poetics and a new understanding of his fantastic realism.
PART ONE
The Underground
2
The Double: Dostoyevsky's idea for The Double
No analysis of Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism can afford to overlook his second novel. When it was published in Notes of the Fatherland in 1846, everybody, it seems, was disappointed in The Double', almost all reviewers disliked it, accusing Dostoyevsky of imitating Hoffmann or Gogol, even to the extent of plagiarism (K. S. Aksakov, for example, in The Petersburg Collection)1
Even the sympathetic Belinsky, who had enthused wildly over Dostoyevsky's first novel Poor Folk, was driven to make excuses for the way his protege had misused his talent.2 Dostoyevsky himself was devastated and was soon persuaded that his second was an artistic failure. Yet he stood by the idea of The Double virtually all his life. He repeatedly thought of rewriting it, first of all in 1846, then in 1847, again in 1859, and finally during the years 1861-5. He never did so, although the 1866 version (which is the one we read) has some welcome pruning and is a great improvement on the original. We also have some brief notes for a reworking. They fall into two groups of episodes, the first concerning the Double's attempts to help the hero in his wooing of Klara Olsufyevna, the second being an account of the Double's involvement with contemporary polemics (including the Petrashevtsy and the system of Fourier which had begun to engage Dostoyevsky's attention shortly after the original version of his story was written).3 In his notebooks for the years 1872-5 Dostoyevsky called the 'double' his 'major underground type', and hoped that this bragging would be forgiven him in view of his consciousness that his story had failed artistically.4 Then in the Diary ofa Writer for 1877 he wrote, 'My story was a positive failure, but the idea was quite a bright/clear (svetlaya) one, and I never introduced a more serious one into literature. But the form of the story completely failed. If I were to undertake the idea now and set it forth again, it would take a quite different form.' 5 If anything, this seems rather to understate Dostoyevsky's continuing 35
36
The Underground
interest in his story, which not only endured for thirty years but spanned the period of his exile. It prompts some questions. What in fact was his 'idea'? Why did it fail? What is so special about it that he remained obsessed by it for so long to the point of trying to rewrite it after his return from Siberia? How does it relate to the development of his mature art, and how did he try to solve the problems of The Double in his later work? It may be of course that, as with some of his other important ideas, Dostoyevsky did not himself know the answers to these questions. DOSTOYEVSKY'S IDEA - SOME POSSIBILITIES
Let us turn back to my first question (what was Dostoyevsky's 'idea' for the story?) As we have seen, Dostoyevsky regarded his hero as a supreme example of the 'underground type' and he was very proud of his 'discovery'. It is striking in this connection that Dostoyevsky's plans to rewrite The Double seem effectively to have ceased shortly after publication of Notes from Underground and that certain of its most prominent motifs found disguised expression variously there and in his later novels. His notes for reworking the text, which must be taken together with his later comments, contain anticipations of the connections between ideology and emotion which are characteristic of his mature works. Golyadkin IPs involvement with the Petrashevtsy and Fourierism is echoed by the Underground Man's obsession with Chernyshevsky. Yet the plans did not immediately cease and Dostoyevsky's surviving notes for reworking The Double do not in themselves directly anticipate Notes from Underground. I shall be turning to the underground type in the next chapter. Equally certainly the idea must surely have had something to do with the phenomenon of the double itself- why else would it have haunted Dostoyevsky so long? If it did, then it is possible that it is connected with his presentation of the experience of the uncanny in terms, as he saw it, of social realism. Of course the experience of the uncanny was almost commonplace in the works of Hoffmann, which Dostoyevsky knew well. What may be said on behalf of a claim to originality is that Dostoyevsky grasped the essential features of the uncanny and translated them into the world of the poor civil servant, living in the unreal, phantom-like city of
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St Petersburg. We shall come back to this question later in the chapter. Here we may note that it is unlikely that the uncanny in the narrow sense - a localized experience of the supernatural in the natural - was what Dostoyevsky attached so much importance to, if only because he did not repeat it. Nevertheless we may reserve judgement on whether a generalized version of the uncanny has explanatory power for the phenomenon of fantastic realism. Another related thesis might be that the idea was the exploitation of the conventional romantic idouble' motif as a means of dramatizing a particular kind of internal psychological division brought about by social rejection. There were many examples of the double theme in Hoffmann, Chamisso, Gogol, Vertman, Lazhechnikov and other writers well-known to Dostoyevsky and his readers. What then does Dostoyevsky do according to this hypothesis? Demonstrate, as he does elsewhere, the links between 'the fantastic' in the romantic tradition and abnormal psychology, by rewriting the former in terms of the latter, that is, by translating the conventions of the romantic fantastic into terms acceptable to a 'public opinion' refashioned in the mould of the Natural School. Of course he was bound to fail because his intuitive grasp of abnormal psychology was far in advance of his readership. But this was a very good idea, if that is what he had in mind. It would explain why he abandoned it in the mid-1860s when the fantastic had lost its hold on the reading taste of his public, though that was also true of the early 1860s and leaves unexplained his keenness to rewrite his story then. It is even arguable that it had lost its hold in 1846 and that this was a further reason for the story's failure with the public. It therefore seems unlikely that it was his play with the tradition of the fantastic which fascinated Dostoyevsky so long. His discovery of the psychological potential of the tradition (more successfully presented in his later works when the links with that tradition were more effectively concealed) is however another matter. Another answer to the question might be that Dostoyevsky's idea was connected with the development of the inner multivoicedness of a hero cut off from stable dialogue with other people, and the fateful consequences that ensue. Bakhtin's own extremely subtle and complex analysis of the double phenomenon is conducted almost exclusively in terms of language and intonation.6 An examination of Golyadkin's discourse shows that he seeks above all to simulate total independence from the words of the other towards whom his primary posture is one of
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indifference. Perhaps the most prominent trait of the whole story, according to Bakhtin who accordingly devotes most of his attention to it, is the way he plays the role of another person towards himself, constantly persuading, reassuring and comforting himself from, as it were, an independent position. In so doing he compensates for the lack of adequate recognition from other people which in reality he seeks to avoid. Gradually and subtly Dostoyevsky transfers this second voice to the narration itself so that it too is addressed dialogically to the hero. The hero also has a third voice, which gives in all too readily to the assumed voice of the other. The key to the double, for Bakhtin, is that 'it tells the story of Golyadkin's desire to do without the other's consciousness, to do without recognition by another, his desire to avoid the other and assert his own self, and what resulted from this'. The result is that the second voice, finding it impossible to merge with Golyadkin, and employing increasingly treacherous and mocking tones, eventually throws off its mask. The inner conflict is dramatized by the appearance of the double, who at first adopts Golyadkin's cringing tone, while Golyadkin assumes the independent, confident voice. Then suddenly the roles are reversed. Here, according to Bakhtin, we see a typical Dostoyevskian device in which he transfers discourse from one mouth to another forcing his hero to recognize himself in another person, though with the intonation of parody or ridicule. Dostoevsky intended The Double as a 'confession' (not in the personal sense of course), that is, as the representation of an event that takes place within the bounds of self-consciousness. The Double is the first dramatized confession in Dostoevsky's work.7 Bakhtin devotes further attention to the narrative voice, stressing the fact that it is dialogically addressed to Golyadkin, and that, like the 'documentary style' of the narration of the later novels, its function is not to describe but to expose and provoke. He also remarks that the narration is situated very close to the hero. He finds this lack of 'distance perspective' typical of Dostoyevsky's narrators. Finally, Bakhtin emphasises the literary parody present in the discourse of the hero and the narrator, of the high society novel, of the historical novel, of the works of the Natural School and, above all, of the works of Gogol, especially of The Overcoat, Dead Souls and, one might
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add, 'The Diary of a Madman'. Literary parody of this kind does not limit and reduce the independence of the text. It enhances its multivoicedness. Although Bakhtin does not set out to answer the question which I posed, there is much here which is relevant to an answer. It may indeed be that crucial to Dostoyevsky's 'idea' for the novel was his intuition of the ways in which emotionally infused ideas can repel and attract each other and how these movements transcend individual personalities (e.g., the hero draws the narrator into his own orbit but the two principal voices of the hero, although they may change places, cannot dwell in harmony). However Bakhtin does not address himself to the question of psychological motivation, which for many readers must have priority over the devices, brilliantly analysed by Bakhtin, through which Dostoyevsky realizes it. In looking at the question of fantastic realism in the previous chapter I entertained the unoriginal idea that one key to the unique texture of Dostoyevsky's work might be his grasp of abnormal psychology. Joseph Frank (and he is by no means the only one) finds it entirely plausible on this level.8 There have been some crucial differences of opinion about The Double, but Lawrence Kohlberg's 'Psychological analysis and literary form: a study of the doubles in Dostoevsky', published in Daedalus in 1963, has some claim to priority for our attention. In the early twenties Otto Rank, a follower of Freud, published his monograph on the literary phenomenon of the double. 9 Rank, says Kohlberg, was only partly right in his analysis, because he relates the phenomenon of the double to the classic paranoid state: paranoid delusions and hallucinations do indeed emerge from feelings of shame and pathologically low self-esteem and are presumed to be the result of the defence mechanism of 'disowning projection': that is, shameful impulses and tendencies towards self-accusation are denied as belonging to the self and are projected onto imagined external enemies. Obviously Dostoevsky intended Golyadkin II to be a hallucination representing the assertive, shameless impulses which first 'propelled' Golyadkin I into his patron's ballroom, since the novel ends with the double propelling him again into the same ballroom. Golyadkin Ps sense of low esteem, his feeling that he is being intrigued against, his life in a world in which he makes and receives veiled threats and innuendoes, are indeed striking portrayals of the paranoid attitude.10
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However, the experience of a hallucinatory duplicate of the self is not explained by, or consistent with, a paranoid psychosis, Kohlberg explains, for two reasons. Firstly, the typical paranoid concept is one of a spotless self being unjustly blamed and tortured by evil others. Dostoyevsky's hallucinatory or semi-hallucinatory doubles however persecute their creators by asserting their identity with them. Secondly, their creators are aware that the double is their 'other self and such self-awareness is quite alien to the paranoid state. Nor does the 'popular psychiatry' concept of the 'split personality' furnish an adequate interpretation of the double phenomenon. Dostoyevsky's divided selves (e.g. Versilov in A Raw Youth) do not correspond to psychiatric notions of the 'split personality' which are best exemplified by the hysterical phenomenon of multiple personalities (e.g. the Three Faces of Eve) each living independently of one another. The 'selves' within any of Dostoyevsky's figures are, by contrast, simultaneously aware of one another. The widely misused term 'schizophrenia' is of no more help. However, Kohlberg has a more positive suggestion. Dostoevsky's consciously 'split' characters do present classical symptoms of the obsessive-compulsive character, however. The 'split' is not a separation of selves, it is an obsessive unbalancing or undoing of one idea or force with its opposite.11 Kohlberg has more to say. He tells us that there is in fact a direct psychiatric parallel to the kind of hallucination described in The Double - what he calls the 'autoscopic syndrome' - a projection of the body image into space. Several well-known writers have been known or thought to have experienced these: Maupassant, Hoffmann, Musset, Richter and probably Poe. As far as we know, Dostoyevsky did not have such experiences, although they are often apparently associated with the kind of epilepsy he suffered from. Presumably, however, he was not writing from experience in 1845-6, since his epilepsy does not seem at that stage to have emerged. In modern literary depictions such 'autoscopic phenomena' usually have devil-like qualities. We need not follow Kohlberg any further along this road, although the finger is clearly pointing at Ivan Karamazov and his devil. We may summarize by saying that The Double is explicable in terms of the psychology of the hero, but seems somewhat unusual and difficult to account for entirely satisfactorily. Even psychoanalysts have sometimes
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got it wrong. The implied underlying mechanism would seem to be roughly the following: because Golyadkin cannot realize his social and personal aspirations, and his ideal image of himself in his social relations differs so radically from the self-image forced upon him by others, the former splits off in his imagination, but instead of assisting him, as it first promises to, persecutes him and eventually drives him insane. But Kohlberg's statement about the 'obsessive unbalancing or undoing of one idea or force with its opposite' is surely of fundamental importance for understanding Dostoyevsky and points again to the necessity of supplementing Bakhtin's reading with a deeper psychological rationale. If Dostoyevsky's texts are about the dialogic interaction of voices which themselves constitute socially conditioned ideological positions, then the more clearly we can formulate the principles of interaction to be found in his text the better. If these are voices infused with emotion (of a kind not directly expressed in discourse) then we shall be looking for principles of emotional interaction, and Kohlberg's principle seems to offer a promising start. It is time however to pause and look more closely at the text. I shall not seek to repeat or refine Bakhtin's own comments on the hero's and narrator's discourse. My approach will be the traditional one of trying to make sense of the narrative as it relates to the hero, to look for indications of the nature of the hero's psychological problems and to locate the points at which a coherent naturalistic reading breaks down. It may be that in doing so we shall collect more questions than answers, but these questions may be interesting in themselves and may point to a non-traditional approach. That at least is the possibility I shall explore. THE FIRST DAY
The first five chapters of The Double cover the first day of the story, beginning with Golyadkin's waking shortly before eight o'clock and closing with his recognition of his double. There is nothing here which precludes a naturalist reading. Indeed the text seems to invite one, calling on the reader's 'experience' of the life of a down-at-heel government clerk in St Petersburg with social ambitions above his station, and reinforcing the sensation of familiarity by concrete detail. It is true that the reader may be drawn by literary recollections and the grotesque-humorous style in which the story is told to anticipate Gogolian developments of an overtly fantastic kind. Yet such possi-
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bilities are given no real encouragement during the first day. Within this context the reality-effect is developed in relation to modes of conduct which are quite familiar to the modern reader, and for which we may use the following labels. SOLECISMS
From the very first page the reader is made aware that the hero is conscious of being constantly looked at by others. The furniture in the room returns his glance; the weather grimaces at him; a figure looks at him from the mirror; the samovar seems to be talking to him. In a state between dream and wakefulness (in which absurd ambitions may seem realisable), he temporarily feels comfortable - until he realizes that his servant Petrushka is missing. When Petrushka turns up absurdly dressed, it becomes clear that this grotesque appendage to Golyadkin's social image is going to show him up badly to the world and is even scornful of his master. He follows Golyadkin's every movement with a strange kind of expectancy and giggles at him in front of other servants. The rest of the first day is devoted to a series of escalating social solecisms. They appear as such both to Golyadkin and to other characters, including his manservant, his doctor, his colleagues from work (junior and senior) and his former patron and his family and servants. He is caught in a double bind, trying to transform himself into a socially acceptable person, with aspirations to his patron's daughter's hand, yet knowing that in thus projecting himself he seems even more ridiculous in the eyes of others, and that he has neither the psychological nor the social means to sustain the role. Moreover the disconfirming glance of the other constantly throws him into a state of inarticulate panic, prompting from him responses which make him seem ever more eccentric, pathetic and absurd. However much Golyadkin may try to make himself independent of others by means of inner dialogue, it is clear that his treatment at their hands is in reality of vital importance to him. DISCONFIRMATION
In his conversation with his doctor, which leaves the doctor bewildered and in which the suggestion is made that the hero's lack of sociability is at the root of his problems, it emerges that Golyadkin feels persecuted.
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This hardly comes as a surprise. It is easy to imagine that a person who feels unfriendly glances at every turn, from the weather to his samovar, might feel persecuted. But when he talks about his 'enemies', it is not clear how far he is reporting facts which other characters might verify and how far he is reporting his own paranoia. It becomes evident that he has indeed made some embarrassing remarks at his patron's house which have resulted in his being debarred from entry to his patron's daughter's party. In other words he is in that sort of situation where paranoid anxieties seem to have foundations in objective reality. But having worked himself up to a pitch in order to create an impression at the party - and the reader now knows what a grotesque impression this is bound to be - he cunningly insinuates himself and commits the ultimate self-destructive solecism, which inevitably leads to his being ignominiously thrown out. Even if readers of Dostoyevsky's own time were not as familiar as we are with the theoretical outlines of Golyadkin's problem, it could not have been altogether unknown to them in reality. Golyadkin is oppressed by a myth of normality in which other people are strong, successful, confident, attractive and powerful, and in which he seems to fail at every turn in spite of his most strenuous efforts to live up to a more 'normal' image. Feeling, rightly or wrongly, that other people instantly see through these efforts to the pathetic, inadequate creature underneath, he crumbles into an absurd caricature of the image he seeks to project. Having thrown everything into a desperate last attempt to establish himself in 'society' he is greeted with annihilation by virtually everyone he knows, not only his social superiors and equals, but social inferiors as well. Awareness of the threat of such total annihilation (even from such 'father figures' as his former patron and his doctor, as well as from the young woman he has set his heart on) causes him to stutter, tremble and freeze, and to wish to be swallowed up in the ground. THE THRESHOLD AND THE ABYSS
There is perhaps no clearer and better example of the threshold — which in its more positive and creative form Bakhtin has identified as the characteristic Dostoyevskian chronotope 12 - than Golyadkin's situation as he tries to find the right moment to gain illicit entry to Olsufiy Ivanovich's house. He feels himself already on the edge of that
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abyss which eventually threatens to swallow him up after his expulsion. Standing there in the darkness for hours awaiting the right moment, he tries desperately to shore up hisflaggingconfidence with examples from his reading (the Jesuits, the French minister Villele, the Turkish vizier Montsemiris and the beautiful Margravine Louise) experiencing avant la lettre the Underground Man's conclusion that without our books we should have no firm ground to stand on. Golyadkin's 'books' (i.e. literary recollections) offer only paper-thin ground, as he surely knows, because his own lived experience refuses to conform to them. On his expulsion, he is shattered, crushed and wishes to be literally annihilated himself. He feels the physical abyss of the staircase looming up together with the spiritual abyss of total annihilation. The St Petersburg elements show him no mercy. He was so bemused that several times, completely preoccupied in spite of his surroundings with the idea of his recent terrible disgrace, he suddenly stopped dead in the middle of the pavement and stood there motionless as though turned to stone; in those moments he died and disappeared from the face of the earth; then suddenly he would tear himself away like a madman and run, run without a backward glance, as though trying to escape from pursuit or from some even more terrible disaster.13 THE UNCANNY
The experience of the uncanny which follows is thus very thoroughly psychologically motivated. If the hero's mind shows signs of derangement it can come as no surprise. In fact it is rather remarkable (as is the coincidence of Dostoyevsky and Freud on many other points) how many of the motifs which Freud associates with the uncanny are present here. It is in his analysis of Hoffmann's 'Der Sandmann' that Freud sets forth his views. The fact that Dostoyevsky probably knew this story in no way accounts for the coincidences, since many of them are evident in Hoffmann's story only to an eye informed by Freud's reading. Generally speaking the uncanny for Freud is related to what is frightening. The uncanny constitutes 'that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar',14 repressed desires or surmounted modes of thinking belonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race. An uncanny effect, says Freud, is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as
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imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. It is this factor which contributes not a little to the uncanny effect attaching to magical practices. The infantile element in this, which also dominates the minds of neurotics, is the overaccentuation of psychical reality in comparison with material reality - a feature closely allied to the belief in the omnipotence of thoughts. 15
According to Freud 'das Heimliche' is ambivalent in its meaning. It has associations of the familiar, friendly, cheerful, comfortable, intimate and of being at home in the world, as well as associations of that which is hidden, secreted, obscured, so that its negation means to disclose, to discover, reveal, expose areas normally kept hidden. 16 The uncanny ('das Unheimliche') embraces both these levels of meaning and transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar. Rosemary Jackson, in her account of Freud's treatment of the uncanny, summarizes: 'what is encountered in this uncanny realm, whether it is termed spirit, angel, devil, ghost, or monster, is nothing but an unconscious projection*.11 Helene Cixous argues that the uncanny exists only in relation to the familiar and the normal. It 'only presents itself, initially, on the edge of something else' 18 or, as Weber has it, from a position abseits.19 For Cixous the unfamiliarity is not merely displaced sexual activity, but a rehearsal of an encounter with death, whereas for Freud the association with death is but an instance of the uncanny along with, for example, epilepsy and madness or the fear of being buried alive. Freud additionally mentions the role which repetition and 'the double' in all its many manifestations have in the production of the sensation of the uncanny, though he does not develop the idea and refers the reader to the work of Otto Rank and his own Beyond the pleasure principle.20
Freud's study of Hoffmann's story also uncovers connections between the uncanny and such experiences as whirling around and falling into the void. It is in chapter 5 that Golyadkin first becomes aware of the figure which subsequently reveals itself as his double and experiences the sensation of the uncanny. No sooner had Mr Golyadkin said, or thought, this, than he caught sight of a figure coming towards him, probably some belated wanderer like himself. On the face of it it seemed a trivial chance encounter, but for some unknown reason Mr Golyadkin was troubled and even afraid, and felt at a loss ... cAnd besides, who knows?' the thought came unbidden into Mr Golyadkin's mind - 'perhaps this passer-by is - he, himself, perhaps he is here and, what matters most, he is
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not here for nothing, he has a purpose, he is crossing my path, he will brush against m e . ' . . . Suddenly he stopped as if rooted to the spot, as if he had been struck by lightning, and then turned sharply about after the stranger, who had only that moment passed him - turned about as though he had been twitched from behind, or as though the wind had whirled him round like a weathercock ... His situation at that moment was like that of a man standing above a terrible chasm when the ground has begun to break away, is already rocking and sliding, sways for the last time and falls, carrying him into the abyss, while the poor wretch has neither the strength nor the willpower to spring backwards or to turn his eyes away from the yawning gulf; the abyss draws him and at last he leaps into it of his own accord, himself hastening his own doom. Mr Golyadkin knew and felt, was indeed quite sure, that some other evil thing would inevitably happen to him on the way, something else unpleasant would burst upon him; for instance, he might meet the stranger again; but strange to tell, he even wanted the meeting ... Some far-off long-forgotten idea, the remembrance of some long-past circumstance, now came into his head, knocked like a little hammer in his brain, pestered him, would not leave him alone. 21
Here we have the motifs of repetition, doubling, the crossing of paths (the threshold), standing on the edge of the abyss, the sensation of some far-off, long-forgotten idea, the remembrance of some long-past happening, the symbol assuming the functions of the thing it symbolizes, the anticipation of madness and death, all of which Freud and his commentators associate with the experience of the uncanny. Just as striking is the motif of the eyes or the sensation of whirling like a weathercock, which have a prominent place in 'Der Sandmann'. But the experience of the uncanny is not inconsistent with a naturalistic reading, because such subjective experiences no doubt occur, and the literary conventions of the time reinforced such a common-sense belief. In a truly fantastic tale, the narrative might at this point pass over into supernatural fantasy. But does it? This is where the reader's difficulties begin. THE SECOND DAY
Given the state of Golyadkin's mind and his recent experiences, even chapter 6 might be recuperated in realistic terms. He oscillates between belief that the memories he wakes with are no more than a fantastic delusion and a conviction that they are an undeniably real plot of his enemies, between vague feelings that something worse is in store and feelings of reassurance. He speculates on connections between experi-
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ences; he offers explanations in terms of third and apparently unrelated factors. He is in an almost incapacitating state of anxiety when he reaches the office. The turning point in this chapter is the appearance of Golyadkin II. And it is a turning point because from now on Golyadkin's problems about reality become the reader's too. Nobody in the story seems surprised when the newcomer is introduced. Is this because the resemblance is really slight and Golyadkin exaggerates it in his mind, or is it because they pretend not to notice for some reason? Or does he imagine that they do not notice? We are not greatly helped by the narrator, who seems, as Bakhtin intimates, to be mimicking the hero's voice. The man now sitting opposite Mr Golyadkin was Mr Golyadkin's horror, he was Mr Golyadkin's shame, he was Mr Golyadkin's nightmare of the previous day; in short he was Mr Golyadkin himself- not the Mr Golyadkin who sat in his chair with his mouth gaping and the pen frozen in his grasp; not the one who worked as assistant to his section-head; not the one who liked to keep in the background and bury himself in the crowd: not, finally, the one whose demeanour said so clearly, 'Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone,' or 'Leave me alone; I'm not interfering with you, am I?' - no, this was another Mr Golyadkin, a completely different one, and yet at the same time very like the other - of the same height and build, dressed in the same way and with the same bald patch - in short, nothing, absolutely nothing, was lacking to complete the resemblance, so that if they were taken and placed side by side nobody, absolutely nobody, would have taken it on himself to say which was the real one and which the imitation, which was the old and which the new, which was the original and which the copy.22 How much of this is free indirect speech (the narrator assuming the point-of-view of the character and therefore making no claim to objectivity) and how much is it the voice of a narrator who preserves some degree of detachment? While Bakhtin's analysis helps us to see that the two have to a large extent merged, this device makes it impossible for us to evaluate the hero's experiences and perceptions and many readers will feel that the narrator has abdicated his responsibility to them. As the chapter progresses another character (Anton Antonovich who runs Golyadkin's section) is introduced. He seems at first to offer an objective viewpoint. Unfortunately, according to Golyadkin, he is rather old, so perhaps his eyesight is imperfect, and although his comments seem to confirm the thesis that there really is a
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newcomer, he really is called Golyadkin, like the hero he does come from a distant part of provincial Russia and he really does look remarkably like Golyadkin, the reader remains unsure about the degree of similarity. At first Anton Antonovich has apparently been aware only of a family resemblance (unless he is being tactful, reluctant to believe his own senses or indulging in naive irony). Suddenly, but only when Golyadkin points it out, the extraordinary degree of similarity strikes him: he calls it miraculous and claims he had wanted to ask about it. To begin with readers may feel they are still just in touch with a world of common-sense realism, even though the characters' own perceptions are untrustworthy and their conduct odd. Yet they may share Golyadkin's own feelings as he walks home in a state of elation, 'Mr Golyadkin looked round him again and his hopes revived. He also felt, though, that there was some remote idea troubling him, some unpleasant idea.' 23 At the end of the chapter Golyadkin II ingratiates himself and the hero reluctantly invites him home, where the newcomer behaves with the utmost meekness and shy good manners and the second day ends with the two of them retiring to bed in Golyadkin's apartment apparently on the best of terms. Golyadkin, though, still feels a twinge of anxiety. Golyadkin finds himself, though he does not yet know it, in another threshold situation. VALIDATION AND ANNIHILATION
Psychologically, the hero here commits himself to his double in a most fateful way. He decides, reluctantly at first, to open his heart to the newcomer. He turns with kindness to one of whom he is frightened and suspicious, and to his immense gratification the newcomer appears to accept the gesture gratefully and to return his proffered friendship. To be subsequently mocked and rejected for no apparent reason would bewilder and disconcert even someone who normally moves 'confidently in a relatively secure network of confirming relationships' 24 let alone a person of Golyadkin's stamp. It is interesting to note that in Dostoyevsky's plans to rewrite the novel the double's apparent goodwill is extended to assisting Golyadkin in his suit of Klara Olsufyevna. Here there would have been even greater scope for a subsequent annihilation.
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THE THIRD DAY
On the third day Golyadkin wakes up to find his guest gone and Petrushka apparently confused about which is which. At the office he finds Golyadkin II in a totally different frame of mind, bustling, self-confident and impudent and seemingly oblivious to the evening before and the debt of gratitude he owes. He seems to have usurped Golyadkin's reassuring, self-confident voice and to have left him only with his desperately insecure one. Momentarily Golyadkin toys with the idea that the whole thing is a sort of dream, that he took himself for someone else, but the sudden reappearance of his double makes this thesis untenable. On the level of personal interaction there is still no difficulty about giving a realistic reading to Golyadkin's conduct. After being taunted and tormented by Golyadkin II in full view of junior clerks, Realizing instantly... that he had beenridiculedand humiliated in the presence of outsiders, treacherously insulted by the man whom he had thought of only the day before as his foremost and most trustworthy friend, and that he had disgraced himself utterly and for ever - Mr Golyadkin rushed in pursuit of his enemy.25 Only the day before he has innocently exposed his feelings to somebody he takes to be his friend only now to be met with wilful ingratitude and abuse from the same person. It is, however, very difficult to explain the double's conduct and even his existence. Are we still to take the narrator's voice as trustworthy? Is it perhaps that Golyadkin II is really in the office but that the hero imagined entertaining him at home the previous night, that is that there are two Golyadkin Us, the one a real colleague in the office and the other a projection of the hero's imagination; the one overlapping with the other in the hero's mental life and in the discourse of the narrator. But this raises problems which are impossible to resolve. It raises questions about the status of the narrative itself. Assuming a simple answer to this complex problem, that the narrator is now faithfully following Golyadkin's subjective experiences, themselves to be read as an inextricable muddle of projection and publicly verifiable events, how can the reader make sense of them in terms of an opposition between the two? Golyadkin is constantly complaining about people wearing masks, about duplicity and so on. How far is this a justifiable complaint about them and how far
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is it paranoia? Does it matter any more? Has not the centre of organization shifted away from the world of material, publicly verifiable reality to that of subjective ideas in which the real drama has to do with how and whether Golyadkin will eventually manage his own identity crisis and reconcile the lowly, pathetic care-laden, guilt-ridden figure he has to be to survive in society with the successful, domineering, carefree conscienceless person he would like to be and projects as a separate, independent personality? According to such an interpretation it would not matter that questions about whether or not certain events 'objectively occurred' were unanswerable: they would be beside the point. Or is the real drama now not so much about Golyadkin's relationship with his world as about the reader's relationship with the narrative as Bakhtin's analysis would seem to imply? The day concludes with the episode of the letter which Golyadkin writes to his double. He receives a reply from Vakhrameyev (formerly a friend) which appears not to be a trick of his imagination and which turns all his accusations against him, imputing to him the kind of behaviour he has suffered from Golyadkin II. What are we to make of this? Is Vakhrameyev's voice the authentic voice of realism? If so, what is left of the primary narrative? Or is Vakhrameyev's letter emblematic of the message of the text: that its readers have become susceptible to the kind of experience they would previously have regarded as the weird disorders of a fantastic literary creation? THE FOURTH DAY
The fourth and last day begins with chapter 10. The hero sleeps poorly and has a long involved dream in which, among many other things, Golyadkin II attempts to prove that he is the genuine one and Golyadkin I the counterfeit, and instantly converts everyone else to this point of view. Golyadkin's world has been turned upside down. The dream finishes even more nightmarishly: With every step he took, every time his foot struck the pavement, there sprang up, as if from under the ground, another exactly and completely identical Mr Golyadkin revolting in his depravity. And no sooner had they appeared than all these complete replicas started running along one behind the other, stretching out in a long file like a string of geese and scurrying after Mr Golyadkin senior. There was no escaping from perfect counterparts of
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himself. Horror took away the much-to-be-pitied Mr Golyadkin's breath. Finally there sprang up a terrible multitude of perfect replicas until at length the whole capital was clogged with perfect replicas and a policeman, whose attention was drawn to this disturbance of decorum, was obliged to take all the replicas by the collar and incarcerate them in a convenient cell.26 In the events that follow, although we may feel confident that Golyadkin's trip to the office has some objective reality, we can be sure of hardly anything else. When he finds Vakhrameyev's letter has been altered since he last saw it, what are we to make of that? If we take the text seriously and look in it for some consistency we soon find ourselves asking the same sort of compulsive questions as the hero is asking: has Petrushka altered it? If so, did someone put him up to it? Or has Golyadkin imagined the alterations? Or has he imagined the whole letter? Or even his initial letter? Or even Petrushka? Where on earth does the reader stand in relation to all this? Shortly afterwards, as Golyadkin is snubbed by all his colleagues, Golyadkin II arrives and the scene of the dream is reenacted. Eventually Golyadkin II shakes Golyadkin's hand by accident. The hero seizes it with impulsive warmth, only for his double to realize his mistake and wring his hand as though he had dirtied it with something extremely nasty. Possibly we are hearing the authentic voice of Anton Antonovich when he reminds the hero of his conduct in connection with Klara Olsufyevna and Karolina Ivanovna, and of his slander of 'another person'. If so, there is much crucial detail about Golyadkin of which we are ignorant and shall remain so. We may try to reconstruct. Did Golyadkin actually turn his double out on that first occasion (his denial puts the thought into our head)? But such speculations are vain. We are hardly surprised when we are told that 'our hero didn't know where he stood'. Nor do we, the readers. Is his subsequent conversation with his double any more authentic? Eventually the tale lurches to its end via a number of conversations and encounters with other characters. After a further descent into emotional and perceptual confusion, in which it is impossible to distinguish the narrator's and the hero's voices, the hero and his double, the 'real' and fantasy, the double colludes in the hero's departure for the asylum. At one point Golyadkin tells his double to read his letter in exactly the opposite sense to that in which it was written, and once again the reader of the novel may suspect that the
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author is strewing hints in his path, hints, however, which do no more to clarify than do Golyadkin's occasional illuminations. At another point there is even a suggestion that perhaps Golyadkin II is not very much like the hero after all. Is this a random thought of no significance, or is it the key to the whole thing? It is worth pausing on some of the concluding scenes. At the beginning of chapter 11 Golyadkin catches up with Golyadkin II and pleads with him to spare ten minutes. In the scene which follows the narrator, as we have observed, seems to adopt Golyadkin's point of view. Golyadkin pleads, cries in anguish, blushes. Golyadkin II speaks with false gentility, shamelessly and with revolting familiarity claps Golyadkin on the shoulder, winks slyly, makes pointless but maliciously cunning remarks, smiles with apparent amiability and a false show of cordiality and pretence of pleasure, falsely represents himself as sad, regretful, full of compassion and decency, speaks infamous words and is described as a false friend. Sometimes, however, he is serious whereas Golyadkin speaks coldly and with dignity or with spirit. Sometimes they speak in similar sweet tones, as in the exchange over Golyadkin's cough, only for Golyadkin II to revert to a tone of rudeness and indifference. It is as if the narrator has anticipated Kohlberg's objection to his presentation of paranoia, that the typical paranoid concept is one of spotless self being unjustly blamed and tortured by evil others. But this is only a stage in the development of the double phenomenon in the novel. What weight do the narrator's interpolations really have? The fact that he apparently seeks to communicate his hero's feelings and value judgements at this point has to be seen in a broader context. His hero had not seemed as amiable or pathetic in earlier parts of the narrative. When thus contextualized, do not these remarks at the very least seem ironic? Like the hero and his double, the narrator is inconsistent in his attitudes and view of things. Clearly he must be distinguished from what Wayne Booth and others call the Implied Author, the consciousness which apparently organizes the text including the narrator's inconstant voice. This passage also plainly exhibits that process of alternating confirmation and disconfirmation of the hero's subjectivity which we have seen before. At one moment Golyadkin II is insulting the hero by objectifying him as the sort of person who likes thin little German women. A little later he is enquiring in honeyed tones after his health
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and cautioning him against developing tonsilitis. Then he is reproaching him coldly with his ill-judged letter and speaking absently and indifferently, returning treachery for simple-hearted courtesy. In a scene which follows in chapter 13 the hero has responded to Klara Olsulfyevna's entreaty to elope with her by lurking outside her house behind a woodpile. In a sustained passage of apparent conventional good sense, he moralizes to himself about foolish young ladies whose imaginations are enflamed by romantic reading, French novelists and German poets, and reproaches her with luring a kind-hearted man like himself to collude in her fantasies. Of course it is a volteface on his part. If that is what he really thinks, what is he doing there at all? We may be momentarily reassured by this apparent reversion to good sense, until it occurs to us that we can by no means be sure that Klara had anything to do with it. Shortly the hero discovers that his letter from her has disappeared. Did it ever exist? If it did was it addressed to him or his double? In the former case, who wrote it? Did Klara write it, did he write it himself, did his double write it? In any of these cases, does his double really exist (whatever his 'double' is)? And what sort of girl is Klara? Is the letter (if not written by the hero) genuine or a trap? And if there is a letter, whoever wrote it, does it really say what Golyadkin reads there? It is, of course, possible to make up a number of'stories' to account more or less satisfactorily for the 'plot', reconstructions which would depend on imaginatively filling in enormous gaps in the material of the narrative and undertaking a thorough rewriting in which the narrator's role would be radically reviewed. The plot, one might say, traces the hero's descent into madness, consequent on his loss of a sense of identity, which itself follows from a failure to obtain confirmation from the generalized other. While the hero still retains some sort of grip on reality, the narrator (confusingly) tells the story from a position just outside the hero's consciousness, presenting him to the reader in all his Gogolian trappings. As the hero loses his grip on reality, so the narrator departs with him, seeming more and more to impersonate his confused point-of-view, swinging from one extreme to another. Bakhtin, Vinogradov27 and others have pointed to the way in which in the later chapters the double is consistently described by the narrator by pejorative epithets which conform to Golyadkin's view of him as dishonourable, insolent, perfidious, and false, whereas the hero himself is described as honest and noble. Neither the hero nor readers know
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where they stand in relation to the reality principle. Is this what Dostoyevsky meant when he wrote that 'in the course of his life man may depart from normal reality and the laws of nature. In such cases art will go along with him'? 28 In one sense the whole novel is a quite remarkable tour de force anticipating post-modernist texts. The reader is drawn irresistibly along by the process of the hero's slide into insanity and fascinated by the accompanying slippage between perception and reality, signifier and signified, sign and referent, a slippage indicated not by a direct statement of reality in opposition to subjective perception, but by the constant failure of anticipations and responses to connect with concrete utterances, perceptions with conduct and conduct with perceptions. It is in the experience of the uncanny that this phenomenon finds its focus. If we return to Bakhtin's subtle analyses of Golyadkin's three voices, their differing stories and the way in which the narrator is drawn into the hero's character zone, we may appreciate the rationale behind the apparent confusion. But the problem remains, how does the reader approach the text as a story, which surely it is supposed to be? This crucial question underlies my insistence on trying to read the story 'as if for the first time'. But the second time is no easier. The host of questions which we want answered are either trivial distractions which hardly justify their place in the text (because the text is nothing but an unreliable reflection of the hero's consciousness) or they are essential to a satisfactory reading of the novel (in which case the text's inability or refusal to furnish answers is frustratingly perverse). Many of the shortcomings which are usually advanced for the novel's failure can be readily forgiven when weighed against Dostoyevsky's masterly portrayal of the disintegration of coherent experience. But the crucial aspect of this achievement, which constitutes both the glory and the misery of this magnificent experiment, is that the questionable position occupied by the narrator forces the reader's attention away from questions of psychology towards questions about the nature of narrative and discourse. Of course it is on the psychological level that the disjunction between and confusion of signifier and signified, sign and referent, the uncanny and the canny, first strike us. But we cannot reduce the problem to a psychological one in the hero because the narrative defies a naturalistic reading. The narrator, in being drawn into the character zone of his hero, prompts the same doubts about his own narration.
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The reasons most often advanced for the novel's failure are the detailed psychology of the hero (see Kohlberg's analysis, summarized above); Dostoyevsky's inability to free himself from the poetics of the Natural School and specifically from Gogol's comic grotesque (Mochulsky);29 the inconstant focus of the narrator (Bakhtin, Vinogradov). But Schmid30 and Neuhauser 31 are surely right in arguing that the interference of narrator's text and character's text, even if it does not come off entirely satisfactorily here, is a most important experiment in interaction with the reader which had significant consequences for Dostoyevsky's later work, as we shall see in chapter 6. Meanwhile, however, let me attempt a summary. SOME FINAL REFLECTIONS
It seems to me highly probable that what attracted Dostoyevsky about the idea of The Double was that in it he had succeeded in bringing together a whole complex of devices which he was to exploit highly successfully in his great works and which are all essential to fantastic realism. No other conception could in principle have achieved this so economically. Of these devices four are particularly important. The first is the ability of the other, by means of various strategies for creating emotional confusion, to drive the hero crazy. At the heart of the tale is the personality of a socially oppressed hero who is driven to distraction by the refusal of others to validate his self-image. His distraction expresses itself in terms of'Kohlberg's law' (the obsessive balancing and unbalancing of one idea or force with its opposite) so that he is rarely certain what position he is in with regard to other people and they with regard to him. He simply knows that they are dreadfully wrong. His relationship with others exemplifies the impulse to objectify and the resistance of the subjective self to such objectification. Golyadkin no doubt has his own basic psychological weaknesses and in the case of a real-life Golyadkin we should no doubt seek their source in infancy; but he is eventually driven to distraction by the annihilating glance of other adults, by their rejection, contempt and mockery, and, more significantly, by the instability and unpredictability of their responses. On the level of personal interaction Dostoyevsky's characters constantly label, define, objectify themselves and others in terms of
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conventional social stereotypes and these labels are constantly found wanting in social contact and in contact with individual subjectivity. Some of his characters are desperate to assume such a socially acknowledged identity. Success depends not on desperation, but on a satisfactory and relatively stable match between the hero's self-image and the defining glance of others. This self-image is built up on the basis of intersubjective experience which once put radically in question leaves the subject hovering over the abyss. No label is adequate to a rounded individual: in the words of more than one of Dostoyevsky's characters, people in the modern age are 'too broad', too complex. In other words they display too many anomalies when an attempt is made to assimilate them to a conventional stereotype. They may be stifled by such a definition (e.g. 'Goldyadkin is a madnu n') or at sea for want of a distinct sense of social identity (e.g., the Man from Underground), or constantly elude attempts at definition (e.g. Myshkin, who is clearly not an idiot, a rogue, Christ, Don Quixote, a liberal democrat, Pushkin's 'poor knight', a shifty 'scion of the nobility', a treacly Jesuit or any of the other definitions thrust upon him). The second device was to make the whole story turn on the experience of the uncanny. The conception of the double enabled Dostoyevsky to explore psychological threshold situations: the thresholds between wakefulness and dreaming, the conscious and the unconscious, reality and fantasy, sanity and madness, self-confidence and the abyss, stability and instability, where the personality is most vulnerable to the breakdown of certainties about itself and the world. But most importantly it also enabled him to explore the slippage between signifier and signified and between sign and referent. Moreover his chosen mode of narration enabled him to convey to the reader the sensation that these are not simply symptoms of the hero's madness, but inherent, though less evident, in all discourse. The third device was stylistic and concerns the use Dostoyevsky made of well-known precursor texts. In spite of criticisms which have often been levelled at him, the use of Gogol's and Hoffmann's styles serves an important purpose which generic styles often serve in Dostoyevsky's major novels, namely, they buoy up the reader's confidence in a familiar fictional world, only subsequently to subvert it. There is a sense in which this text is not only about 'a double' but is itself a double. Collusion between reader and author generates the ghosts of other texts which propose themselves as models with which to
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make sense of the one to hand. Hence the sometimes painstaking comparisons made by critics between The Double and Gogol's 'The Nose' or 'The Diary of a Madman' or Hoffmann's Die Doppeltgdnger. Poe's 'William Wilson' or Robert Louis Stevenson's The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (the last of which of course post-dates Dostoyevsky's work by some forty years) also come unbidden to the reader's mind in reading Dostoyevsky's novel. These 'doubles' are not exact parallels; indeed on closer examination they prove to be of little help in understanding The Double. Yet the endless discussion about Dostoyevsky's 'plagiarism' of Gogol is put in a more positive light if we see the relationship as an exemplification on the level of intertextuality of the ostensible theme of the book, in relation to which readers find themselves in a position quite close to the elderly, short-sighted Anton Antonovich who is not quite sure if there is an uncanny resemblance down to every last detail or whether his eyes deceive him. In chapter 7 I will examine some intertextual relationships of a similar kind. These narrative techniques constantly draw the reader (if the responses of the critics are anything to judge by) into vain and at times obsessive attempts to impose closure on the text, thus underscoring its irreducibility. Fourthly, the double motif coupled with the shifting point-of-view of the narrator enabled Dostoyevsky to explore what from Bakhtin's standpoint was the most important insight of all, how emotionally infused ideas can attract and repel each other, can draw each other into their own orbits or expel them, and that these movements transcend individual personalities. The action takes place within a world of double-voiced discourse in which every utterance responds to preceding utterances and anticipates a rejoinder, in which the inner voices of the hero, the voices of narrator and secondary characters move in a strange sort of dance in which they now separate, now touch each other, now mimic, parody or reassure each other, and readers are left with the choice of joining the dizzying dance or departing and taking their seats. So what went wrong? What went wrong, I would venture, is that for too much of the story the reader is irredeemably disorientated and has nothing reliable to cling to. It is after all primarily a novel and not a text for philosophical reflection on discourse. Readers do not know what position they are in with respect to the reality principle. What is supposed to be reality for the purpose of the fiction, that is, a reality to which most of the characters would subscribe, is 'bracketed out' by the
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narrator. And although Dostoyevsky and his original readers probably did not know it the psychological plausibility of the double phenomenon was allowed to take second place and has subsequently been questioned by experts. It seems to me that the cause of Dostoyevsky's failure to make his various insights and innovations convince is that one crucial voice in the chorus of heteroglossia is shouted down until it can no longer be distinctly heard in the clamour. The voice in question is that of everyday reality. Dostoyevsky surely knew this. He says as much in his letter to Abaza. Although there are threshold situations in the text in which reality and fantasy are delicately poised, and the text as a whole might be seen as a threshold text, it is impossible at most given points to discern where the threshold lies. The text passes over into a permanently confused state and takes the reader with it. Dostoyevsky seems to have learned two important things from this experience. The first was that the voice of everyday reality (or of genre traditions which have become automatized), however ironically contextualized, must be incorporated into the dialogue in order to give the reader familiar ground to stand on. This is, I think, what Bakhtin means when he speaks of the 'documentary' tone of Dostoyevsky's later narrative voices. The second was, and The Double surely reinforced him in this view, that this voice must never go unchallenged in the dialogue: readers must have somewhere to stand but they must never feel entirely comfortable there for long. Indeed they must be made to feel the sand shifting beneath their feet as it shifts beneath the feet of the characters. Dostoyevsky achieved this through what Bakhtin defines as his narrator's limited perspective and his closeness to narrated events. Nevertheless, in making this mistake, the author of The Double gives us a privileged close-up of those typically Dostoyevskian strategies and situations which elsewhere exist on the margins of his narrative and give it its distinctive flavour. It is in this text situated on the threshold of modernism and post-modernism, where questions about knowledge merge into questions about existence, and where we wonder whether we are dealing with alternative world-views or alternative worlds, that Dostoyevsky gives away his secret.
3 Notes from Underground: the discovery of 'the underground'
THE TRANSITION
A great deal happened to Dostoyevsky between the writing of The Double in 1847 a n ^ Notes from Underground in 1864 and he published a great deal as well. It stands to reason that this cannot be ignored in any comprehensive treatment of the development of his writing. However, that is not my aim here as I indicated in my preface. The idea for The Double and the discovery of 'the underground' are related in various ways. On the one hand Dostoyevsky described Golyadkin as an underground type; on the other he was writing Notes from Underground and trying to rewrite The Double at much the same time. This does not seem like mere coincidence. Even if it was, it is a convenient one for my purposes. Whereas the underground leads Golyadkin to madness, it leads the more intelligent and educated hero of Notes from Underground to a state of mind perhaps best described as 'ideologically validated resentment', though that scarcely does it justice. In Notes from Underground Dostoyevsky effectively solves some of the structural problems which are often felt to spoil The Double. As we have seen, if you ask the question 'what really happened?' of The Double you get no answer which you can clearly distinguish from an answer to the question 'what did the hero experience?' Yet the story is told in a narrative voice and with an original focus more appropriate to the first question than the second. Dostoyevsky disengages himself from this problem in Notes from Underground by using a first person narrator and makes it easier to treat realistically the problems of a hero whose self-image other people in the immediate environment refuse to confirm. The problem of a hero who, unable to establish an equal dialogue with other people, is subject to the obsessive balancing or undoing of one idea or force with its opposite is, of course, also common to both texts. Here however the reader has direct access to the hero's voice, a 59
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voice which is, moreover, constantly conscious of, indeed obsessed with, the reader's response, typifying what it considers to be the common opinion. The hero assumes we are intelligent people, abreast of current intellectual trends and followers of Chernyshevsky, that we are blessed with health, emotional balance and self-respect. And, in spite of his wish to engage us in dialogue, he holds us in contempt. He assumes that what he says will upset our sense of propriety and decorum and scandalize us and that we will at first not understand and then find distasteful his constant display of spite and his wish to tell repellent details about his private life. He presumes we shall think (wrongly) that he is making a kind of confession to obtain our forgiveness. He imagines that we shall attribute what he says to a desire to score points off 'men of action'. In general he takes it for granted that we shall adopt a superior, mocking attitude to everything he writes. We represent 'normal reality' and by means of this strategy he convinces us that he retains a tenuous hold on the 'reality' which we inhabit. Bakhtin has a fine analysis of this dialogic relationship.1 In thus objectifying and defining us the hero is of course placing us in a double bind: if we wish to continue reading we have to accept a definition of ourselves which we probably (especially now that the days of crude scientific determinism are over) find uncomfortable and would wish to argue about. At least dimly therefore we, his readers, are made aware of the hero's own predicament, though as readers we are doomed to silence. While defining us, however, the hero is determined to avoid definition himself. As Bakhtin writes, What the Underground Man thinks about most of all is what others think or might think about him; he tries to keep one step ahead of every other consciousness, every other thought about him, every other point of view on him. At all the critical moments of his confession he tries to anticipate the possible definition or evaluation others might make of him, to guess the sense and tone of that evaluation, and tries painstakingly to formulate these possible words about himself by others, interrupting his own speech with the imagined rejoinders of others.2
Readers may respond to these tactics by attempting to play the hero's game and anticipate and refute his arguments in advance. If so, to judge from the resultant literature, he probably continues to outwit them to this day. But the great revolution in Notes from Underground is the foreground-
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ing of the ideological dimension. Such a development had been sketched by Dostoyevsky in relation to the Petrashevtsy in his notes for revising The Double. There is an accompanying leap in the intellectual equipment of the hero which furnishes him with territory where he has good reason to consider himself superior to his associates and in which he can generate new 'texts' to replace the old. In this chapter I want to explore themes which Bakhtin leaves aside, but this does not mean that his insights are less significant or relevant than they were in the last chapter. Again basing his reading on an analysis of intonation and discourse, he lays emphasis on the extreme and acute dialogization of the narrative. The speaker in this 'confession' directs his every word towards the anticipated response of the other (the reader), now cringing, now shrill and spiteful, the tone rising at the end of each section in open anticipation of the other's response. The text contains not a single monologic word. The hero must at all costs retain for himself the possibility of having a final word in this dialogue. He is extraordinarily dependent on the discourse of the other and extremely hostile to it. But since he does not know for certain what the response of the other will be he has to leave open various possibilities. His discourse is by design unfinalizable, since he fears above all the defining word of the other person. To this end he devises a number of strategies: one is to project such an unattractive picture of himself as to free himself from the other's defining glance and to leave space for independent inner dialogue. Another is what Bakhtin famously calls 'the loophole of consciousness and the word', which involves always retaining for oneself the possibility of altering the final meaning of one's own words. The word with a loophole is by definition always the penultimate and never the final one. The hero from the underground eavesdrops on every word someone else says about him, he looks at himself, as it were, in all the mirrors of other people's consciousnesses, he knows all the possible refractions of his image in those mirrors. And he also knows his own objective definition, neutral both to the other's consciousness and to his own self-consciousness, and he takes into account the point of view of a 'third person*. But he also knows that all these definitions, prejudiced as well as objective, rest in his hands and cannot finalize him precisely because he himself perceives them; he can go beyond their limits and can thus make them inadequate. He knows that he has the final word?
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His dialogue with himself is also divided: in one of his voices he must perform as surrogate for the other person and again this speech is alien to finalization. Finally, Bakhtin warns us that the hero's ideological discourse displays the same features: even the world he defines has a loophole and is unfinalizable. It is this aspect of Notes from Underground that I want to explore further and in particular the nihilistic side of the ideological debate which exercises the hero's mind. For when all is said and done, one of the deviations from normality which the man from underground exemplifies best is a growing tendency (evident in the youthful adventures he relates in Part n of his notes as well as the middle-aged cerebration of Part i) to take refuge from the torments of a lop-sided intersubjectivity in a world of intertextuality-, of dream, of fantasy, of fiction, of philosophizing, a world in which a consciousness of the power of the 'written' over the already-experienced and the still-to-beexperienced leads him to put his trust increasingly, though with loopholes as Bakhtin would put it, in 'writing' rather than immediate spoken dialogue, in the authoritative word of fashionable literature and philosophy (and his own critique of it) rather than inwardly persuasive discourse born of socially oriented dialogue, and in a discourse subject to violent reversals and unable to reach conclusions except, as with the ending of his notes, by arbitrarily calling a halt. The Underground Man discovers that all written discourse, as it were, has a loophole: its meaning can always be changed by placing it in a new, unexpected context, by altering the tone, making it appear ironical, by foregrounding whatever it marginalizes and vice-versa provided that it remains removed from the possibility of validation or non-validation through socially oriented dialogue. All the devices for distancing himself from the judgement of other people, from the social dimension of discourse, are both psychologically crippling, and also intellectually subversive. They do not free the Underground Man from dependence on the voice of the other, but they deprive him of social confirmation of his view of the world and consequently expose this view (or these views) to the stormy and unstable forces which guide his ambiguous relations with others and himself.
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THE UNDERGROUND
Notes from Underground is full of ironies. Foremost among them is the fact that in his desperation to achieve recognition the hero sometimes yearns to be recognized in terms of a stereotype, even a negative one, and in this ambition seemingly fails. Yet his ambition was to be amply fulfilled in the world beyond Dostoyevsky's text. Nearly 100 years later the American scholar Joseph Frank, who incidentally sees the text rather convincingly as a sort of Swiftian satire, could write: Few works in modern literature are more widely read or more often cited than Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, The designation 'underground man' has entered into the vocabulary of the modern educated consciousness, and this character has now begun - like Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan and Faust - to take on the symbolic stature of one of the great archetypal literary creations. No book or essay on the situation of modern culture would be complete without some allusion to Dostoyevsky'sfigure.Every important cultural development of the last half-century - Nietzscheanism, Freudianism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Crisis Theology, Existentialism - has claimed the underground man as its own, and when he has not been adopted as a prophetic anticipation, he has been held up to exhibition as a luridly repulsive warning.4 Writing in 1961 he naturally did not include more recent intellectual developments. A deconstructive analysis is perhaps waiting to be made, for the Underground Man's philosophizing can quite well be read as an exercise in deconstruction in which the hierarchical ordering of the opposition reason/will (in which reason is the superior and will the inferior term) is subverted in the course of its exposition by its suppressed contradictions and the latter term promoted from supplement to the prior position. Subsequently the opposition individual will/social harmony is threatened with the same kind of subversion and reversal. I do not propose to attempt a deconstructive analysis here for the reason that it would be alien both to the spirit of Bakhtin which informs the rest of the book and to the psychological motivation which Dostoyevsky gives to the process of deconstruction, but I shall suggest that Notes from Underground exemplifies in a painfully exposed way a characteristic of writing which is close to the hearts of deconstructionist critics: the tendency of any holistic ('logocentric') text, or ideology, to contain the seeds of its own undoing and reversal. Here the deconstructive process is helped on its way by violent emotional impulses. In this
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case it is the views of the Russian enlightenment of the 1860s which are the subject of attention. This anticipation of the deconstructive process is accompanied by a number of other emphases of post-structuralism which I shall return to in due course. This is important not for its own sake, but because it illustrates how Dostoyevsky was moving, as was Nietzsche at roughly the same time, towards insights which, while they grew out of and could not escape the orbit of the nineteenth-century realist tradition, threatened to radically subvert it. And this was to leave a permanent mark on the Dostoyevskian text. As Frank argues - and at first sight this seemed perverse to many who had seen the Underground Man as the spokesman for existentialist values - the hero is the prisoner of the rationalism and utilitarianism of the 60s. What we actually witness in the course of Part 1 is a breakdown and reversal of priorities in favour of will and passion. In The Double the emotional point of reversal was dramatized in the moment when Golyadkin sensed he had passed his double going the other way in the street: from then on the hero continues his downward path towards madness, while his double apparently climbs upwards out of limbo towards worldly success. In Notes from Underground this crossing over is metaphorical. It is both emotional and intellectual and it is dramatized in the course of a soliloquy by a philosophical volte face. In flight from intersubjectivity, the hero presents himself as a prisoner in a web of texts and intertextuality, unable to get a firm foothold in 'reality' or 'real life' which, as soon as he thinks he has found it, dissolves in a process of infinite deferral. The moment of deconstructive reversal in the hero's philosophizing occurs when he becomes aware of this difficulty: But how am I, for example, to set my mind at rest? Where are the primary causes on which I can take my stand, where are my foundations? Where am I to get them from? I exercise my powers of thinking, and consequently each of my primary causes pulls along another, even more primary, in its wake, and so on ad infinitum. This is the very essence of every kind of consciousness and thought. It must be another natural law.5
Here we have a kind of inverse 'word with a loophole'. It is not so much that each word is a penultimate one as that no word turns out to be the first. At best it is never more than second generation. Unfinalizability applies to origins as well as to ends. The hero's response is not however the heady intoxication one might
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expect from a modern devotee of deconstruction. Rather does he try to batter his way out of the endless dance by the assertion of himself as subject and the affirmation of his own individual will. Traditional criticism has sought in its various ways to set the Underground Man right, to analyse and diagnose his predicament and to show in what ways his behaviour and his philosophy deviate from some fundamental norm of his existence. A deconstructionist view, on the other hand (and this is as far as I shall go down this road) would seek to subvert this 'metaphysics of presence' in favour of a 'logic of the supplement' in which presence is always deferred and only the illusion of presence can be temporarily achieved. Highly conscious Dostoyevskian man undoubtedly seeks certainty and Truth, but he finds that all his theories, together with his sense of being a coherent subject, are susceptible to self-deconstruction, though ironically unable to escape the premises they undermine. 6 THE PRISONER OF INTERTEXTUALITY
Because he has always been an outsider (alienated from though unable to escape society and other people) the Underground Man has never been capable of the unreflective certainties which characterize the socially well-integrated man. Like Golyadkin, he envies the man who is perceived by others in terms of one or other social stereotype, the 'positive man', or the 'man of nature'. He envies them their certainties while at the same time sensing the superiority of his own infinitely more complex perception. Unlike them, he cannot find a secure mooring in life on any level of his experience. He has no sense of the Holy (as Dostoyevsky was to write of him sbme years later). 7 He has always been easy prey to fashionable intellectual attitudes which attempt to organize, classify and objectify experience, but not in a haphazard way: he has thought them through and discovered their weaknesses in relation to his own intuitive experience, the incompleteness of supposedly complete systems. Compulsively he lurches towards an alternative model. Almost at the end of his Notes the Underground Man is utterly exhausted and confused by his vain efforts to find 'living life', the Truth beyond the endless plurality of interrelated texts which make up the totality of his experience. He observes: We do not even know where living reality is now, what it is, or what it is called. Leave us alone without our wretched little books and we immediately get into a
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muddle and lose our way. We don't know what to adhere to, what to follow, what to love, what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We even become weary of being human beings - human beings with their ownfleshand blood.8 We saw that at times Golyadkin consciously fell back on literary texts to give structure to experiences which threatened him with annihilation. Dostoyevsky's 'dreamers' in his writing of the 1840s constantly do this. The hero of White Nights (1848) tells his lady friend at length how he lives in a world made up of dreams based on the adventures of characters from Walter Scott (Clara Mowbray, Diana Vernon, Effie Deans) and historical romance (Jan Hus facing the tribunal of prelates, the rising of the dead in Robert the Devil, St Bartholomew's Night, the Battle of Berezina, Cleopatra and her lovers, and so on): in fact, sometimes he almost believes that his dream-life is not a figment of his imagination, self-deception or delusion, but something real, actual, existing.9 Similarly the narrator of 'Petersburg dreams in poetry and prose' tells how he sees the people of the capital first in terms of Schiller's idealized heroes and heroines and then as grotesque Gogolian characters. 10 In Part II of Notes from Underground, where the narrator recalls his life at the age of twenty-four, it is Gogol, Nekrasov, Schiller, George Sand and composite fantasies from the romantics, the Natural School and recent human history, particularly the age of Napoleon, that swarm in his mind. Models of behaviour taken from Pushkin, Lermontov or Byron come seething into his head. By a process of repeated superimposition (which I shall examine in chapter 7) some motifs have taken on dominant roles in the economy of his imagination. The motif of the wet snow is a trademark of the Natural School and the epigraph is taken from Nekrasov, its leading poet; the pervasive ideals of the sublime and the beautiful are concepts to be found in the aesthetic philosophy of Burke, of Kant, and most significantly for Russia in the 1840s, of Schiller, whose ideas left traces on several generations. The images of the pure prostitute, of acute sensibility as both curse and a sign of superiority, were widespread romantic motifs. Part 1, when the narrator has reached the age of forty, is set in the 1860s, years marked first by the Great Reforms in Russia and then by the American Civil War and the Prussian seizure of Schleswig-Holstein. Most important of all: a new set of ideas has overlaid the old ones, retaining traces of the old (for example the image of the genius as outcast), but exalting reason to pride of place.
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The central figure in propagating the new utilitarian, rationalist and determinist ideas of the 60s was Nikolay Chernyshevsky: they present man as an ultimately rational creature, who has only to be shown his true interests to act in accordance with them in a world where rational laws prevail in the moral as well as the natural sphere, so that individual freedom is severely restricted, if not altogether illusory. Among related ideas which can be easily identified in the text are those of Diderot and Fourier, of Darwin as published in his On the origin of species (1859), glossed in Huxley's Man }s place in Nature (1863 in English and 1864 in Russian translation), and those of the English writer H. T. Buckle who in the first volume of his History of civilisation in England (published in Russian in 1863) expressed the view that with the development of civilization wars will cease. He remains confused about reality. His problem is not so much that he cannot distinguish between literature and lived experience. Sometimes this is the case because he lives in a world ('the underground') in which distinctions between lived experience and read texts are frequently blurred. But a much more important problem is that, whereas for most people lived experience (the real) has priority and the read text (whether 'fictional' in the normal sense or reported 'reality') is secondary or even marginal, the reverse is true for the Underground Man. He frequently plots his next move in accordance with literary conventions. Part II of his Notes tells story after story in which he tries compulsively and unsuccessfully to impose a 'literary' hierarchy of values with the self-image it contains on those who subscribe to inferior philistine values. Naturally enough they refuse to confirm him in this, with the embarrassing exception of the prostitute Liza who takes his sermon seriously. Others find him strange and would prefer to ignore him. Sometimes they will not even do him the honour of expelling him. Such is the case with the billiard-hall episode in Part 11, where he yearns to be thrown out just so as to feel he has achieved recognition by others. He cannot manage it, but an officer, in whose way he stands, picks him up by the shoulders and moves him. Then he passes on as if he doesn't exist. Instead of picking the quarrel he has sought, the Underground Man slinks away, but the humiliation haunts him for several years. He knows that to talk about personal honour in a billiard room would expose him to ridicule, but eventually, after years of scheming and plotting in accordance with literary norms, he literally bumps into the officer in the street without giving way and thus 'puts
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himself on an equal social footing with him in public5. But the victory, such as it is, is pyrrhic. The extended episode with Zverkov and his friends is but a more complicated version of the same thing. His attempts to impose his bookish mode of behaviour fail. His deployment of the 'toothache strategy', in which he torments other people in revenge for his own discomfort, also fails. He lurches from one extreme to another. Having failed to impose literary systems comprehensively on lived experience (even when he is successful he angrily repudiates and rejects what he has done), he turns his hand to transforming lived experience into a literary text by writing his notes. Indeed he makes it his sole and ceaseless activity in life. At the end of the notes their editor tells us that they do not in fact stop at that point, but that it is a good point to break off. The primary object of this exercise is to establish a situation for himself, to establish who he is and where he stands, to attempt to stabilize the constant reversals of ideas in his relations with other people and with himself. And again he fails. His first strategy is to represent his own contradictoriness and perversity as unavoidable. Though this may conform to ideas of scientific determinism then in the air, it is difficult to reconcile them to the equally fashionable idea of humanity as rational and it is with this second idea that the first reversal comes about. Let us look briefly at the way that his reasoning unfolds. To begin with, the first section of Part I may strike the reader as the self-revelation of someone who is emotionally and intellectually confused rather than as a text with philosophical significance. But in the second and third sections these introspective meanderings and complaints move in the direction of something recognizable as philosophy, with the narrator's ascription of his emotional problems to what he calls the laws ofconsciousness. He wants to understand and to explain why it is that in a 'rational' world he feels pleasure in the knowledge that he is a scoundrel and in making other people uncomfortable; why he feels so many conflicting emotions doing battle within him; why he is spiteful and yet at the same time knows he is not really spiteful; why it is that when he is most sensitive to 'the sublime and the beautiful' he does the most immoral things; why he feels such pleasure at his own degradation. The conclusion he comes to is that he is suffering from an excess of
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what he calls 'consciousness', of what the common-sense mind might call morbid introspection and self-analysis, and that this consciousness is subject to laws which deprive him of his free will. Whatever illusions he may have about acting in accordance with his ideal, or improving himself morally, these laws debar him from changing himself in any way. The man with the over-sensitive consciousness is tormented by ideals of goodness and beauty; yet he is lured into vice as well, and, finally, he knows that it is all completely beyond his control. None of this stops him from feeling his degradation, from smarting at insults or from dreaming of revenge, but he can never make up his mind to do anything because he knows that everything is subject to laws over which he has no influence. This, at least, is the explanation he offers. He feels impotent, and he suffers all the humiliation, rancour and resentment of impotence. The only thing to do is to take it out on other people. In section four the narrator introduces his famous metaphor of the educated man with toothache which, as Bakhtin claims, reflects in the form of extreme parody the relationship of author to listener in a confession.11 The educated man knows he can do nothing about his toothache, that whether it goes or gets worse is subject to impersonal natural laws. In a sense he enjoys the consciousness that he is the plaything of such laws. But he makes other people suffer too by his groans and thereby obtains some relief from his suffering. In the following sections of Part 1 he takes these and other ideas introduced in the first four sections further. He affirms that the result of excess consciousness is inertia and ennui. Stupid people are sure of their social identity, they know who they are and where they stand and they jump easily to conclusions; intelligent people know none of these things and they get lost in their own analyses and can never find a sufficient cause for any course of independent action. The narrator's predicament seems to be that whatever feelings, thoughts or philosophy implicitly claim his exclusive attention at any particular time he is compulsively drawn to some opposite, incompatible feeling or idea, some supplement, we might say, which is relegated to marginality by the system of ideas in question. Because the philosophy which dominates him points to the conclusion that there is no escaping from such contradictions (not because contradiction is the source of historical development or any such reassuring doctrine, but because whatever happens is inevitable, however confusing to the intelligent mind) he comes to take a sort of pleasure in them, a pleasure,
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one might say, in holding in precarious balance and even superimposing the opposing terms in the deconstructive process. But the Underground Man's preoccupation with freedom and constraint points to the fact that he is unsure about the supposed illusoriness of his own freedom. Similarly, his obsession with inner contradiction and irrational behaviour points to the fact that he is not convinced about the rationality of human behaviour. He has as it were been trailing before our eyes and his own inner eye that supplement, that vast area of anomaly, which refuses to be reduced to Chernyshevskian philosophy. Now by a process of paraleptic reversal he comes to question the validity of these so-called laws. He asks whether it is after all so obvious that if people were shown their own interests in accordance with some mathematical table, they would in fact act in accordance with them. Have people, he asks, in the whole of recorded history, ever behaved rationally, even when they understand the correct rational course? Human beings are irrational and perverse. At times it may even be of benefit to them to do something contrary to their own interests as seen from the rational standpoint, and if this is true then it undermines all rational schemes for regulating human activities. He runs through a number of well-known historical events; he glances at Buckle's questionable view of civilization; he alludes to the martial activities of the two Napoleons; he mentions SchleswigHolstein and the still-raging American Civil War; and finds little to support the view of fundamental human rationality. Diderot may have believed that people are like organ-barrel sprigs or piano keys, and science may teach that the laws of nature determine human actions; logarithm tables may be worked out for every conceivable eventuality; the Crystal Palace may be built. But, if for no other reason than that they were bored, people would be certain to knock the edifice down. The narrator concludes that the rationalists - who ostensibly include the reader and the narrator himself - are wrong: humanity is not ultimately rational. In all times and places people prefer to act as they choose rather than in accord with reason if the latter means sacrificing individuality. They prefer independent choice - that is, to go against the prescribed and approved norm - to a rational, limited, comfortable existence. Here the Underground Man is not only proposing to reverse the opposition reason/will which has hitherto governed his thought, he is also adopting a philosophical outlook which legitimizes such processes of reversal and opens up an infinity of choices.
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But what if there is no such thing as independent choice? Here the narrator is brought back to the crux of his problem, and he replies that whereas reason may bring one to this conclusion, reason is only one of several faculties. The faculty which represents the whole man is not reason, but will, and will says differently. This is the pivot on which the process of deconstruction rests and is precariously balanced. Reason, which had been regarded earlier in his thinking not only as the chief faculty, but also as the one to which all others are subjected, is now displaced to a subordinate role, one among several secondary faculties in an unspecified hierarchy. Similarly the will, which previously had been represented by irrational whim or perversity of a sordid and trivial nature, has assumed the central role. Insofar as the discussion depends on the opposition reason/will, the hierarchy has been reversed. The totality of the narrator's experience as expressed in the text is apparently better accounted for on such an hypothesis than on the rationalist one. And it is indeed an either/or reversal, not some sort of synthesis on a higher level. Yet the point is that the hero has caught the enlightenment out suppressing the vital fact that in the last analysis 'rational humanity' shows little evidence of the capacity for rationality. The narrator does not rest content with his assertion but continues to exemplify it. People would rather will something perverse or even go mad than accept the tyranny of reason. They may be attracted to the rational and the constructive, but they are also attracted by chaos and destruction, perhaps because what they fear above all is to bring a task to completion. Ants may behave in accordance with a mathematical model, but human beings are not ants. Twice-two-is-four may be very appealing to the reason, but twice-two-is-five has its fascination too. The narrator ultimately rejects the Crystal Palace (the symbol of perfect rational order), as he memorably says, because people cannot put out their tongues at it. And here he is in danger of slipping back into his earlier hierarchy, for the building of a perfect rational order is scarcely conceivable in the world which the hero now describes, and putting one's tongue out is hardly worthy of a species driven by will. Dostoyevsky's narrator does not experience the satisfaction of discovering a new revolutionary paradigm. Even if that were what he had done, he would still lack the necessary recognition of others, the consensus which gives the new paradigm its authority. He is finally exhausted by all his philosophizing and the emotional toll which it takes and he sinks back into his 'underground', in which he has deconstruc-
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ted the firm philosophical ground of Chernyshevskian philosophy by an analysis which itself has the appearance of being rational, although propelled by violent emotions whose validity as a basis for human behaviour Chernyshevsky's philosophy denies. He does not find this exciting and invigorating. He finds it ennervating and demoralizing. The affirmation of the will over the claims of reason has left him drained of energy and will power. He is the prisoner of a debilitating intertextuality, in which, no doubt, important distinctions can be made, but none sufficiently well defined to serve as a basis for coherent action. There is perhaps something better for which he yearns, and here there might begin a further deconstruction, about which specialists on Dostoyevsky's works have often speculated. There are traces of a development of the narrator's thought in the direction of a ' Christian Golden Age'. But traces only. On the ideological level this is where the man from underground's disquisition ends. The deconstructive process is, of course, akin to that of the Derridean enterprise in appearance only. It is motivated and driven by emotional instability in a distorted process of social communication through an endless chain of utterances, not by the logic of the signifier moving in an endless chain of signifiers. Yet, theoretical questions aside, the experience of there being 'nothing outside the text' is here almost palpable. Text stands in for lived experience and the relationship of the former to the latter is fluid and uncertain. As the toothache image stands in a metaphorical relationship to the confession as a whole, so does the confession as a whole and in its parts to the 'experience' which they represent. This play with metaphor and metonymy, characteristic of the dream, is common to The Double and Notes from Underground (though held in check in the latter text by constant reference to the reader). Later, in a fascinating section of the The Idiot, we shall see further developments of this device. CONCLUSION
In a sense The Double and Notes from Underground may be seen as twin texts (as doubles), the latter repeatedly evoking the former in respect of the hero's problems in his relations with others. Yet we have noticed a crucial advance. With the inconstant narrator removed, the Underground Man is preserved from madness by his endless philosophizing,
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his creation of text, and his obsessive dialogue with common-sense (the role of the reader). In the end this may be insufficient to save him, for part of him is ready to give up, but for the duration of the narrative it preserves his sanity. The Underground Man's experience and his philosophizing raise interesting questions about interaction with others. But in both these texts the psychological consequences of discontinuing relationships are perceived predominantly from the point of view of the victim. If Dostoyevsky wanted to pursue this further then he needed to adopt another narrative focus. While planning Crime and Punishment he abandoned the original first person focus for that of a third person narration, and in the following chapter, devoted to this novel, we shall see how he did pursue the question of interpersonal relationships in a context of polyphony. In chapter 5, devoted to The Devils, we shall observe these strategies at play not only between individuals as they confront each other but also on a broader social front. Curiously, The Idiot reintroduced the inconstant narrator, though this time he plays no role in the plot and although apt at times to identify with his hero, and at other times to distance himself, this is never allowed to undermine completely the reader's ability to make sense of the text. However, the strategy does allow Dostoyevsky to exploit the possibilities of interaction with the reader in ways adumbrated in The Double and Notes from Underground. In chapter 6 I shall examine how the strategies which inform the relationships between characters in Crime and Punishment are used by the narrator to cause disturbances in the emotionally engaged reader. I am far from wanting to suggest that these problems constitute the only interest of these texts or even, from many points-of-view, their chief interest. But they nevertheless help us towards our principal goal, that of redefining fantastic realism.
PART TWO
Driving People Crazy
4 Crime and Punishment: Driving other people crazy
In spite of the length of Crime and Punishment this chapter will be a relatively short one. My aim is not to offer a reading of the novel as a whole but to explore a number of the strategies which it exemplifies. Dostoyevsky's first major novel provides the opportunity for extending the study of his psychology into new areas, specifically into the areas of personal interaction and coexistence on which Bakhtin writes so eloquently. As a result of the choice of a third person narrative technique which permitted the narrator to focus on more than one character at once and, more important, to give them something approaching equal weight in accordance with the principle of 'polyphony', this novel exemplifies and clarifies a number of issues which were depicted only one-sidedly in the earlier works I have discussed. It shows, for example, what may happen when people attempt mutually to objectify and classify each other, seek to impose two or more incompatible images on another person at the same time, and deploy emotionally disturbing strategies on each other. This is an area into which Bakhtin declines to venture. In the person of the protagonist, Raskolnikov, the novel exemplifies an inner conflict between emotional demands for objectification (particularly of other people, but not exclusively) and (inter)subjectivity. The one enables him to contemplate and in part to commit his murder through labelling himself as a 'great man' and Alyona Ivanovna as a 'louse' within a system of ideas which permits members of the former category under certain conditions to dispose of the lives of members of the latter. The other leads to his relationship with Sonya. DOSTOYEVSKY THE PSYCHOLOGIST
When Dostoyevsky says 'They call me a psychologist: this is not true. I am merely a realist in a higher sense, i.e., I depict all the depths of the human soul',1 it is not at first sight entirely clear what he is denying. A 77
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Jungian might consider that the second part of his statement cancels out the first. But Nietzsche (1844-1900), who admired the 'psychology' of Crime and Punishment, and apparently of The Idiot, was twenty-three years younger. Freud was born only in 1856. Since Dostoyevsky himself called the novel a psychological account of a crime 2 it is clear that the word 'psychological' is not entirely alien to him. What he may be disowning is the kind of two-edged psychology which Porfiry Petrovich tries successfully on Raskolnikov. Porfiry's success derives from the fact that he does not regard it as a sure method of working out the truth, but rather as a strategy for provoking a confession. This is an important distinction. Much has been written about the psychology of Dostoyevsky's characters. Usually it has concentrated upon divided individuals or on minor characters as their 'doubles'. In the chapters which relate to the major novels I shall make no attempt to follow such motifs throughout the text and it should not be necessary to rehearse here in detail the variations in Raskolnikov's behaviour, commonly referred to his compassionate and saintly side and to his Napoleonic and demonic side, or to the Pilate-like hand-washing which he exhibits as he dismisses the fate of the girl in the street or his heroic aspect when he defends Sonya against Luzhin's plot. I (and many others) have written on these questions elsewhere. With Raskolnikov we have an excellent example of the compulsive emotional oscillation between two extremes which we have noted before in Dostoyevsky's characters as well as the attempt of the character to distance himself from it. Similarly, much has been said about the links between ideas and emotions in Dostoyevsky's world. Raskolnikov's division of humanity into two types, the ordinary and the extraordinary, is clearly a projection of his own inner conflict. Psychological analyses of the dreams in Crime and Punishment are also not difficult to find: especially of the dream of the old nag. Nor shall I dwell more than necessary on the difficulty Raskolnikov (and sometimes the reader) has in distinguishing 'commonsense reality' from the layers of 'texts' (dreams, fantasies, the half-waking state, letters, articles, books, theories, true and false and distorted statements, Holy Writ, the conflicting and dissonant voices of others, all echoes in a heteroglot chorus of textual memories which reinforce and counterbalance each other). However, this at times confusing context may lead to disorientation among characters as well as among readers and such a state of disorientation may lead them to
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seek more urgently to define their own positions. At the same time it may make them more vulnerable to further confusion. UNTENABLE POSITIONS
In this chapter I shall take my cue from R. D. Laing's work of the 1960s, beginning with a passage from his book Self and others, where he refers to Dostoyevsky more than once. 3 Here he is writing about the long letter Raskolnikov receives from his mother informing him of Dunya's engagement. The receipt of the letter is preceded by the encounter with the drunken Marmeladov in the pub, in which Marmeladov tells how he has in effect stolen from his almost destitute family, driven his daughter Sonya to prostitution and taken her money for drink. The parallel with Raskolnikov's acceptance of his own sister's proposed sacrifice (in effect driving her to marry Luzhin by his own failure to make ends meet, and then accepting charity from her and her future husband) hovers in the background and does nothing to ease Raskolnikov's confusion. Laing first considers Raskolnikov from the point of view of his confusion of dream, fantasy, imagination, and waking perception. But then he moves on to discuss the way in which Dostoyevsky relates Raskolnikov's experience to the position he is 'placed' in before the murder. According to Laing this is a position that could be termed 'false', 'unfeasible', 'untenable', 'impossible'. He asks us to consider the position that Raskolnikov is placed in by this letter. He is told: 'I realize that you would never allow your sister to be humiliated.' He is also told that his sister, after one frightfully humiliating experience, is in the process of undergoing what, as his mother makes clear to him, is an even greater humiliation. Whereas in the first instance she herself was blameless, in the second instance, by entering into a marriage that is no more than legalized prostitution, she is corrupting her own integrity. He is told that she is doing this only for his sake. And this he is expected to welcome. But he has already been defined by his mother as a man who would never allow his sister to be humiliated. Is he at the same time to be a man who will allow her to sell herself for his sake? This is an untenable position. Another twist to the tourniquet is turned around happiness. 'If only you are happy, we shall be happy.' In terms of the person he is supposed to be, how could he be made happy by such a state of affairs? Yet another turn is added in respect of religion and godlessness. The whole concern of the major part of the letter is the sacrifice of one person's life, in
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order to provide enough money for another to get on in the world. This is taken as an index of Dunya's 'heart of gold', a suitably ambiguous expression, and of what an angel she is. However, what is the position of a Christian placed in the position of being the recipient of this gratuity?4
Laing continues with further complications and adds that to tease out all the strands in the entanglements of this letter, or even in the above extracts, would require an examination many times longer than the letter itself. He suggests that in reading the letter it is a useful exercise to imagine what would be the likely effect on the person for whom it is meant, thinking not simply of the disturbance in the letter, but also of its disturbing impact on the person to whom it is addressed. What is happening here? Raskolnikov's image is being defined by his mother in two incompatible ways. On the one hand he is implicitly being defined as the sort of person who would accept his sister's voluntary humiliation to help him get on in a world which is godless and which does not recognize the imperatives of love and compassion. He is also being cast as the sort of person who would argue to himself that all this is compatible with Christianity and who could live happily in the knowledge of his sister's sacrifice. Explicitly, on the other hand, he is being defined as a Christian, who would never let his sister humiliate himself for his sake, who would never permit himself hypocrisy... Yet there are also bridging elements: he ought to be grateful to his sister; her sacrifice ought to make him happy, because she is doing it to make him happy. So he is being told in effect that it is his duty as a good brother to think and feel like a Christian and yet to conduct himself as though he were not. Why? Because material circumstances demand it. Of course Raskolnikov's mother has unerringly put her finger on Raskolnikov's most painful problem. She has foregrounded values which have played a dominant role in her relations with him as mother and child (the Christian values which leave him with tears in his eyes) but which he has desperately tried to suppress. She has insinuated values which he now regards as mature and realistic, but in a context which makes them seem despicable, because they involve his sister. At the same time she has managed to imply that she wants him to adopt the despicable conduct in the name of the Christian values (what Raskolnikov calls Jesuit casuistry). But anyone reading between the lines can see that she is fooling herself and trying not very successfully to fool him. Raskolnikov intuitively understands all this and in the pages that
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follow the letter he is tormented by it all. He has suffered agonies about such questions for ages. The letter however forces him to the realization that he has to take action himself, action, however, which in moral terms seems superior to Dunya's only if one gives priority to the welfare of his immediate family. But would Dunya be any happier about his murdering for her sake than he is about her marrying for his? The answer to this question, which is one of the few which does not seem to occur to him, becomes evident later in the novel. If his mother's letter has brought Raskolnikov's internal debate to the surface of his mind, it is then dramatized in the scene that follows, when he encounters the drunken girl on the street and tries at first to save her and then disclaims her. The image that runs all through these pages is that of the girl victim who prostitutes herself for the sake of her family or is seduced. The spotlight is turned in the latter case from the girl's self-sacrifice to the girl as victim of a lascivious man and, subsequently, to Raskolnikov's reaction to her plight. That Raskolnikov is conflating these images is clear. For instance he calls the man loitering about 'Svidrigaylov'5 (a character from his mother's letter who has pestered his sister). When thinking about his mother's letter he also thinks of Sonya (Marmeladov's prostitute daughter). 6 The next scene is his 'pathological' dream of the beaten mare, again focusing on the innocent victim and on his response, and tending to reduce the emotional structure of his problem to the conflict between compassion for the innocent victim, sadistic cruelty and amoral emotional distancing from the scene. The relationships between the characters in the dream and characters in Raskolnikov's waking life (including himself and his long dead father) are multifold. Here they are peripheral to our discussion. But the image of the innocent victim is also transferred to the old woman Raskolnikov intends to murder. As he wakes up he asks himself whether he really intends to kill her with an axe? All the superimposed narratives leave the common trace of the innocent victim, and Raskolnikov's moral collusion with the persecutor persistently haunts him. Should he show compassion (intersubjectivity)? Should he accept that there is statistical evidence that such things happen to a certain proportion of humanity and wash his hands of the matter (objectification)? Can he bring himself to ally himself with the persecutors if it is for the greater good? Might he not even find emotional satisfaction in doing so and would this put his motive in
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question? Such questions are either formulated explicitly or will emerge to haunt him. Experiences become memories and memories become voices in the dialogue from which an emotionally coloured image emerges and leaves a permanent trace. In chapter 7 I shall examine ways in which this endless chain of traces extends beyond the pages of Dostoyevsky's book. OBJECTIFICATION AND SUBJECTIVITY
There is an opposing series of traces which urges Raskolnikov on to the murder of the old woman. It is born of his impulse to affirm a distinct identity for himself reinforced by a sense of being assisted by destiny, a destiny which seems to have machine-like characteristics. At this stage he is already driven, it would seem, by the image of himself as a great political leader of heroic dimensions, although there is no overt trace in the early chapters. What eggs him on is the consciousness of a project which has previously been part of an anguished and inconclusive internal debate, gradually, and almost miraculously, realizing itself and bit by bit sweeping aside opposition. He is furnished (by destiny?) with a rational argument for the deed and a whole sequence of coincidences which make it possible for him to perform it and escape detection. All the pieces are now there: all that is necessary to complete the puzzle is the deed itself. This coincidence would always seem strange to him. This trivial conversation heard in a shabby restaurant had a very great influence on him as the affair developed further, as though it actually had been a kind of prefiguration, a sign ... If he had actually managed at some point to examine everything and decide every last little detail conclusively, if doubt no longer remained - at just this point apparently he would have rejected it as absurd, monstrous, impossible, and refused to go through with i t . . . This last day, however, which had begun so unexpectedly and decided everything at once, had acted on him in an almost mechanical way, as if catching him by the hand, and pulling him along with unnatural power, blindly, irresistibly, and permitting no argument; and he was caught, as if by the hem of his coat in the wheels of a machine, and was being drawn in.7
Final certainty (of the kind that might, had all the details been available at once for calm scrutiny, have put a stop to his plan) is deferred until the momentum of the machine is so overwhelming that it
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can no longer be resisted and Raskolnikov's subjectivity is quite swallowed up. It is worthy of note that most of the dialogue in Part 1 and the following chapters is Raskolnikov's internal or internalized dialogue (that is, other people's speech remembered or projected). What he is incapable of is open intersubjective relationships with others: hence his avoidance of other people except in combative or manipulative relationships in which the other is objectified. And now that he is in a state of emotional confusion and has an awful secret to conceal, that tendency is doubly reinforced. It is often said and implied that the narrative of Crime andPunishment\ although it is in the third person, retains clear traces of an earlier first person draft in that almost throughout it adopts the focus of Raskolnikov. An exception is made for passages dealing with Svidrigaylov and his suicide. Yet this is not altogether true. The focus shifts unmistakably at one point to Razumikhin (Part 3, middle of chapter i to end of chapter ii) and this, temporarily at least, gives him a status comparable to that of Raskolnikov and elevates him in the hierarchy of importance which the narrator shares with the reader. Sonya has her moment too (Part 3, middle of chapter iv). However, it is Razumikhin who is the spokesman for the case against classification and objectification, which he identifies with both the progressive movement and the bureaucracy: 'You can't reform a man by rejecting him, and all the more so with a kid.... You stupid progressives don't understand a thing' ... 'He's been classified as a murderer too!' Razumikhin went on heatedly ... 'They want complete objectivity, that's what they're after. Anything to avoid being themselves.'8 Whatever else may be said about Razumikhin, he is 'himself: 'Razumikhin had the gift of being able to express his character instantly and entirely, no matter what mood he happened to be in, and people quickly knew with whom they were dealing.' 9 To the extent that the novel may be said to illustrate the pitfalls of the objectification and classification of other people and the superiority of open relationships, Razumikhin may be said to represent the norm of psychological and social health. Raskolnikov continues to fend off all personal contact even with those who mean him well and put up with his insults, until he comes across the dying Marmeladov in the street. It is fitting that we see this new side to his conduct in connection with an incident which - with
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respect to drunkenness, a horse and carriage, a death - recalls his dream. This time a man is trampled to death; the driver is distraught. Raskolnikov runs to Marmeladov's aid. This spontaneous act of compassion on his part, and contact with the little Marmeladov girl, bring him back to life. It is as though he has exorcized one part of his dream (the killing of the old mare) by acting out another (compassion for the victim). Of course his inner dialogue is far from over, but he has reinforced an essential aspect of inner balance. He has come back to life by openly acknowledging the claims of moral choice, love, compassion and openness to the other. But he has also opened himself up to the impact of other people on his emotional life.
DRIVING OTHER PEOPLE CRAZY
As Laing intimates in his analysis of the letter, it is a question not simply of inner disturbance, but also of the disturbing impact of one person's discourse on another. We saw in earlier chapters how, where the need for confirmation by the other is strong and where the other presents negative or confusing signals, acute emotional disturbance may follow. Laing has analysed some of these confusing signals. Quoting H. F. Searles he lists six modes of.driving the other person crazy. JEach of these techniques tends to undermine the other person's confidence in his own emotional reactions and his own perception of reality.' 10 There is nothing absolute about the number or, I suspect, their exact formulation. I have slightly modified them here, but only by substituting emotional stimulation for stimulation which is specifically sexual. (1) p repeatedly calls attention to areas of the personality of which 0 is dimly aware, areas quite at variance with the kind of person 0 considers himself or herself to be. (2) p stimulates 0 emotionally in a situation in which it would be disastrous for 0 to seek gratification. (3) p simultaneously exposes 0 to stimulation and frustration or to rapidly alternating stimulation and frustration. (4) p relates to 0 at simultaneously unrelated levels (e.g. emotionally and intellectually). (5) p switches from one emotional wavelength to another while on the same topic (being 'serious' and then being 'funny' about the same thing).
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(6) p switches from one topic to the next while maintaining the same emotional wavelength (e.g. a matter of life and death is discussed in the same manner as the most trivial happening). According to Searles the striving to drive the other person crazy takes place predominantly at an unconscious level. What is specific to these techniques, according to Laing, is interpersonal action which tends to confuse or mystify. 'This makes it difficult for the one person to know "who" he or she is, "who" the other is, and what situation they are "in".' 11 In Raskolnikov's relationships with other characters we may clearly see Searles' strategies at work. I am not referring here to that maddening rudeness and lack of gratitude with which Raskolnikov greets Razumikhin's kindness. Though, if we assume that Razumikhin's kindness is at least partly a result of his having perceived warmer emotions in Raskolnikov in the past (which he clearly has, as we can tell from the account he gives to Dunya and her mother), this relationship too can be attributed to the same unconscious strategy. I have in mind scenes such as the confrontation between Raskolnikov and Porfiry Petrovich, not only because it illustrates the strategies very well, but also for two other reasons. Firstly, Porfiry is deploying them consciously and actually makes some of them explicit. Secondly, this encounter brings out another interesting comment made by Laing: strategy (1) at least (repeatedly calling attention to areas of the personality at variance with the person the subject considers himself or herself to be) is used not only to confuse but also, by psychoanalysts, as a part of treatment. In other words what in one situation could be confusing could in another be clarifying. Strategies of confusion or mystification are particularly effective where the person on whom they are used desperately needs to know where he or she stands, and does not know or, as in Raskolnikov's case, has a guilty secret. This is the position when Raskolnikov, in Razumikhin's company, visits Porfiry Petrovich to report that he had pawned some things with the old woman. Raskolnikov has his dreadful secret and he is going with it into the lion's den. The last thing he must do is to give any real grounds for them to believe that he is the murderer. He has already used a number of daring strategies to throw them off the scent (such as pretending almost to confess to Zamyotov, awakening
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his interest and then throwing the evidence back in his face and leaving the impression that the real murderer would never have dared to go so far). Raskolnikov has been stimulating their curiosity and then frustrating it in turn. But he is not sure how successful he has been. Now, though he is in a highly excitable state, he is very concerned to inject just the right amount of naturalness into the dialogue and not give anything away, while also finding out exactly how much they know. It is difficult to achieve these two objectives at once, especially when one is dealing with an artist in the conscious use of the same techniques. Porfiry has another advantage over Raskolnikov. Having no dreadful secret to betray he can deploy them dispassionately and calmly. Raskolnikov is unlikely actually to drive Porfiry crazy, though his conduct could make him angry. But the reverse is not the case. Porfiry does not actually need to drive Raskolnikov to distraction, nor does he simply want to extract a confession. He also wants to play a part in Raskolnikov's rehabilitation, and hopes that he will bring to the surface those aspects of Raskolnikov's personality at variance with the sort of person he imagines himself to be and which may at the same time provide the basis for a stable emotional life in the future. His primary goal is therefore to create emotional and mental disturbance of the kind which raises doubts about the meaning of discourse and the intentions behind it. Porfiry needs to do hardly anything to set Raskolnikov's mind and emotions in turmoil: Thoughts whirled like a cyclone in Raskolnikov's head. He was terribly irritated. 'The point is they don't even hide it, they don't even pretend to observe proprieties! Since you don't know me at all, what reason did you have to talk about me with Nikodim Fomich? It follows that they don't even want to hide the fact they're keeping track of me like a pack of hounds! They spit in my face openly!' He was trembling with rage. 'Hit out if you must, but don't play cat and mouse with me. That's just bad manners Porfiry Petrovich, and anyway I may very well refuse to let you! I'll just get up and tell you the whole truth to your face. Then you'll see how I despise you all!' He caught his breath with difficulty. 'What if I'm wrong though? What if it's only a mirage and I'm wrong about it all? Losing my temper from inexperience ... Their words are all ordinary, but there's some hidden meaning. Quite ordinary words, yet there's something behind them. Why did he come straight out and say "at her place"? Why did Zamyotov add that I spoke cunningly} Why that particular tone?... Did Porfiry wink at me just now or didn't he? Probably nonsense. Why should he wink? Maybe they want to play on my nerves and provoke me?' 12
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And so he goes on. Raskolnikov finds it very difficult to interpret many of Porfiry's words and gestures and so indeed may the reader. We gather from Razumikhin that he is well known for the kind of practical joke which involves misleading his friends about something important (going into a monastery or getting married for example) while keeping a straight face. Porfiry's first remark (a propos of Razumikhin's entry) is 'cheerful'. A little later he 'laughs'. This impression remains with us until in a general description the narrator tells us that his face looked 'alert and even ironical' and that apart from the impression made by his eyes, which made him look as though he was winking, he might have seemed benevolent. Even the word 'maternal' is used of him. He then addresses Raskolnikov in a businesslike fashion and looks at his guest 'with that concentrated, overserious and embarrassing attention that tends to make one ill-at-ease from the first especially... if what one has to say does not seem commensurate in importance with the attention accorded it'. 13 The businesslike air is momentarily replaced by a look of unconcealed irony and a sort of wink which lasts only a moment. A while later Porfiry goes out to order tea and returns suddenly gayer, and as the conversation on crime develops, he grows livelier and laughs every time he looks at Razumikhin. The next minute he replies to a question from him with 'surprising gravity'. Then the conversation turns to Raskolnikov's article on crime. Most of the following dialogue proceeds without any overt comment from the narrator. It is difficult to tell how seriously Porfiry is taking the article itself as distinct from the light it throws on its author, until we have a reference to Porfiry's 'unconcealed, obtrusive, irritating, discourteous sarcasm', and his inability to sit still. Later he apparently becomes hesitant in asking his indelicate question about whether Raskolnikov might conceivably consider himself an extraordinary person, and winks with his left eye and laughs inaudibly as he follows the question up with an even bolder one. He takes leave of him 'sweetly', holding out his hand in an extremely friendly way, and then appears apologetic as his parting ruse to trick Raskolnikov into giving himself away is foiled. These are very similar to the words and gestures Golyadkin perceives in his double and just as resistant to unambiguous interpretation. All these changes of attitude might be explicable by changes in the subject of the conversation (though in fact they are not). In reality however the conversation has only one subject for both Raskolnikov and
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Porfiry and that is an utterly serious one: Raskolnikov's responsibility for the murder. Their implicit questions about it are different. Porfiry's is 'Can I confuse him and get him to confess?' Raskolnikov's are 'Can I confuse him so that he is not sure, and has he any hard evidence?' But by the nature of things neither is quite sure of the question the other is really asking and cannot enquire straight out without risking the game. Porfiry comes perilously close to doing this, but he is in much the stronger position and has other cards up his sleeve. Porfiry is constantly switching emotional wavelength while on the same topic (being serious and then being funny about the same thing). Moreover, by playing the genial host with an intellectual curiosity in theoretical questions of crime (taking the opportunity to quiz the author of a fascinating article) and at the same time carrying on an unofficial interrogation of a murder suspect, switching unpredictably from one role to another, Porfiry is intentionally confusing Raskolnikov about what situation he is really 'in', 'who' he is (literary guest/ criminal) and 'who' the other is (genial host/interrogator). He is relating to him simultaneously on ostensibly unrelated levels. He is stimulating Raskolnikov's vanity as an author in a situation in which it would be disastrous for him to give full rein to it, simultaneously exposing him to encouragement and frustration, confirmation and disconfirmation. Finally, he discusses a matter of life and death to Raskolnikov in such an off-hand way that Razumikhin, without knowing the truth, rebukes him for it. Porfiry is perfectly well aware how important it is to people who feel threatened and confused to have a clear 'position' - to know what situation they are in, who they are and who the other is. In the interview with Raskolnikov at the police station which follows he uses the same techniques as we observed earlier, but explains in addition why he does not always arrest suspects immediately: Td like to have a case you could call mathematically clear; I'd like to have evidence of the kind twice two equals four - direct and unmistakable proof! Yet if I went and arrested him before the time was ripe, even though I'm absolutely sure it's him - well, you see, I'd be depriving myself of the means of incriminating him further. And why so? Because I provide him with what you might call a clear-cut position; I define him psychologically, so to speak. I give him comfort, and he withdraws from me into his shell... Now suppose I leave this gentleman completely alone ... I don't run him in, I don't bother him; but
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every minute of every hour I let him know, or at least I let him suspect, that I know everything right down to the dirt under hisfingernails;day in and night out I follow him, and since he's always in a state of doubt and terror his head will really start swimming, and he'll come of his own free will; yes and he'll do something that is like twice two ... And, yes, nerves too. You've forgotten about nerves, now, haven't you ... Well, that gives us a lot to work on.'14 Porfiry torments Raskolnikov by describing almost exactly his predicament and identifying it with that of the murderer he is hunting. Now he is indeed playing cat and mouse with him, virtually telling him that he knows he is the guilty man but refusing to take the logical step and have him arrested. Raskolnikov can bear it no longer and says so without of course admitting his guilt. It is then that Porfiry turns the final screw and begs him to calm down because 'that way you'll drive yourself crazy'.15 In other words he implicitly denies that he is driving Raskolnikov crazy by applying the techniques he has just described in such detail and suggests that it is something amiss in Raskolnikov's own conduct which is the sole cause of his trouble. We can identify here two further techniques. (7) p reveals indirectly and by repeated hints that he knows 0's guilty secret while declining to come out with it directly, thus leaving open the possibility of denying the objective existence of the hints (the 'word with a loophole'). (8) p accuses 0 of being the exclusive cause of that particular acute disturbance (consciously or unconsciously) occasioned by the intervention of p. This last strategy is worth a further comment. I am not implying that Raskolnikov is in no way to blame for his psychological state. Much more important than that, his state is the result of the interaction between himself and others. But there is no doubt that the particular confusion which rages in his encounters with Porfiry arises because, by his own account, Porfiry is trying to confuse him further. Among the ways in which Porfiry tries to achieve this are the pretence that incriminating evidence is actually exculpating evidence and viceversa, that common-sense is paranoia and vice-versa, by recalling words which were never uttered and by forgetting or distorting ones that were. Behind all this is the wish to make Raskolnikov think that he is unintentionally giving himself away and to confuse him about what Porfiry does or does not really know and can or cannot really prove,
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what is a figment of his inflamed imagination and what is objectively occurring. In other words Raskolnikov senses he is being manipulated and objectified and desperately needs to know whether he is being objectified as murderer or as innocent victim of circumstantial evidence. It is in Porfiry's interests to keep him guessing in the hope that he will eventually be desperate enough to resolve the issue himself. He does confess to the deed - to Sonya. But with Sonya he opens his heart. What he finds much more difficult to do is to provide plausible reasons for what he has done. TORMENT AND CONFESSION
By the time the former encounter with Porfiry has taken place Raskolnikov (his secret apart) is back on more sociable terms with other people. With Razumikhin he is like old friends. Considering the context he is even surprisingly tolerant with Svidrigaylov. Svidrigaylov insists that the two have something in common, which is the last thing Raskolnikov wants to believe, for Svidrigaylov disgusts him, not only because of his persecution of his sister but also because of his cynicism in general. If Luzhin is to be believed Svidrigaylov has been mixed up in some 'fantastic homicide' from the consequences of which he was saved only by a cover-up organized by his late wife, and the parallel with his own homicide cannot escape Raskolnikov. It is when he thinks of this that he feels the impossibility of rejoining the society of other people and opening himself to his family. Once Luzhin has been expelled from his sister's life, and the legacy from Marfa Petrovna together with Razumikhin's business proposals have saved his mother and sister from the brink of destitution, he wants nothing more than to cut himself off again from other people and to be by himself. These events, with their promise of a happy outcome for his family, cut the ground from under the most pressing of Raskolnikov's motives for the murder, to save his sister from sacrificing herself to Luzhin, to save himself from dependence on them and to save Dunya and their mother from destitution. He is now formally free of those moral commitments and accompanying confusions which haunted him from the outset. But it is at this moment, paradoxically, that he makes his first confession - to his friend Razumikhin:
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It was dark in the corridor. They were standing near the lamp. For a minute they looked at each other in silence. All his life Razumikhin would remember this minute. Raskolnikov's burning and persistent gaze seemed to keep growing stronger with every moment, pierced into his consciousness and into his soul. Suddenly Razumikhin shuddered. Something strange seemed to have passed between them ... An idea had slipped through, a kind of hint; something terrible, hideous, suddenly understood on both sides ... Razumikhin turned pale as a corpse. 'Now do you understand?' Raskolnikov said suddenly, his face twisted with pain.16 At the meeting with Sonya which follows, there is no conscious duel between the two participants as there was between Raskolnikov and Porfiry. Moreover, although both participants are emotionally highly vulnerable, Raskolnikov is in a position of advantage. Sonya's father has just died before her eyes after a horrible accident. She is the sole bread-winner for her destitute family and greatly embarrassed in Raskolnikov's presence by the way she earns her living. Almost any scene in the novel could be analysed in terms of the strategies for driving other people crazy, but this is clearly a promising case. Sonya does not know where she stands with Raskolnikov. She constantly recalls the generous stranger who turned up out of the blue, whom her mother regards almost as their guardian angel and who gave his last money to help them. Yet the man before her appears cynical and bitter and maliciously cruel, and keeps probing her most sensitive points, implying somehow that her mother is living off her immoral earnings, reminding her (though this time unintentionally) of her 'cruelty5 to her parents, assuring her that her mother will die soon, sadistically making her think about what would happen to the children if she did, and even worse if Sonya herself was carried off to the hospital with venereal disease. He paints a terrifying picture in which Polya too becomes a prostitute, a thought which Sonya cannot face. He tries to undermine her faith in God's protection and even tells her that her mind is going. Then suddenly he falls at her feet and kisses her foot, bowing down 'to all suffering humanity', and asks her whether suicide wouldn't have been preferable to all this degradation side by side with such holy feelings, since she knows she cannot save anyone anyway. Sonya cannot admit to herself what Raskolnikov is telling her: that God does permit people like her to go to the wall. That is the negative side of her secret,
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that is why she finds it so difficult to read the story of Lazarus to him, a story which affirms the divine miracle; that is why she understands so well the sceptical Jews who doubt that Jesus can help the dead man and shares in the triumph of his success. She is reduced to a trembling fever. But unconsciously Sonya is also provoking Raskolnikov. She reveals that the murdered Elizaveta was a close friend, that it was Elizaveta who gave her the Russian New Testament, from which he has asked her to read and that Elizaveta had some of those features of personal goodness which appeal to him in herself. She has even had a memorial service read for her murdered friend. Unconsciously she is drawing Raskolnikov forth to tell his secret, not just to confess his crime but to plumb the depths of his own soul and find the cause. Finally she offers him a way out. But she is implacable and this too torments Raskolnikov. Both are calling forth in the other 'areas of the personality of which the other is dimly aware and quite at variance with the person he or she considers him- or herself to be'. I think that this formula can be tightened up here: both are calling forth in the other areas of the personality quite at variance with the self-image he or she is committed to in order to cope with a hostile environment. To undermine this image means not simply to review it calmly and dispassionately, but to threaten total annihilation. At this point in the story Raskolnikov is already in the process of adjusting his self-image and goes to Sonya for moral support. It is Sonya who at the time is more radically confused. After the funeral meal, the episode with Luzhin and Sonya, the death of Katerina Ivanovna, and Raskolnikov's collaboration with Svidrigaylov in providing for the orphans, everything seems in a cloud. He wishes that there could be some kind of struggle, some kind of challenge, some kind of attack to concentrate his energies, as there had been when Luzhin had come upon the scene, for Luzhin is a great one for classifying and objectifying. It is then that Porfiry appears and tells him at great length that he knows he is the murderer and offers him the chance of confessing. Porfiry understands that he no longer believes in his theory and that what he wants above all is a clear position, and 'fresh air'. The theme of 'air' is one which Svidrigaylov has introduced. 'Air' represents a way out of an untenable position. Svidrigaylov now exercises a mysterious fascination over Raskolnikov. Why? Perhaps it is because he too is a strange mixture of evil impulses and good intentions. Perhaps it is
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because Raskolnikov fears that Svidrigaylov will use his knowledge to blackmail Dunya. Perhaps it is also because Svidrigaylov seems to understand a 'secret' about Raskolnikov - not simply the fact that he committed the murder, though this would be enough to give him some sort of hold, but something psychological. At the time Raskolnikov senses that he either has to take Sonya's way out or Svidrigaylov's. Yet he does not know what Svidrigaylov's is. He only knows that he has rejected Sonya's. The 'secret' that Svidrigaylov stirs up in Raskolnikov is what he calls his 'Schillerism' and by doing so he provokes his disgust and rejection. No doubt this rejection and Dunya's play a crucial role in determining Svidrigaylov finally on suicide, for even Svidrigaylov needs some confirmation from someone he respects. An excursus on Svidrigaylov here would be quite in place because his story temporarily takes over from Raskolnikov's and the question of what drives him ultimately to suicide is an important and much debated one. Nevertheless the above simplification is, I believe, sufficient for now. Without confirmation from someone he respects Svidrigaylov is left alone with his own sensuality, which disgusts and bores even him. He emotionally rejects Raskolnikov's objection of him as 'nothing but a sensualist'. He too is in an untenable position. Yet without the collaboration of someone who latches on to something more honourable in him he has only one way out. That collusion is denied him in spite of his attempts to impress Raskolnikov and Dunya with his philanthropy. In his interview with Dunya his double motives become clear to him too. Not only does she reject him. He rejects himself. He pulls the trigger. R A S K O L N I K O V ' S WAY O U T
Raskolnikov, meanwhile, is embracing those childhood Christian values which his mother enjoined on him in her letter. He has kissed her and asked her to pray for him. He has rejected suicide. He, unlike Svidrigaylov, can find plenty of people who will confirm his 'honourable' conduct and have faith in his future: his family, Razumikhin, Sonya, even Porfiry Petrovich. Unlike Svidrigaylov he is not surrounded by people who throw his villainy constantly in his face. Unwelcome though it is there is a way out of Raskolnikov's 'untenable position' and everyone is pointing in the same direction.
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The fact that he has made the women around him unhappy weighs more with him than the 'rightness' of his murder and he tells himself that if he had been alone everything would have been all right. Yet of course if he had been alone - if there had been no letter from his mother, no story of Sonya - he would probably not have committed the murders (he constantly forgets the second). If Raskolnikov had actually had a 'new word' for humanity and had had companions who shared his vision then his 'crime' might have looked different both to himself and to others. Razumikhin had been reassured at the thought that he might have been part of a political conspiracy. But he has no new word and no companions. The techniques of emotional confusion have paradoxically led to the possibility of gradual clarification. This is not so surprising as it seems. As Laing comments on Searles' first strategy (calling attention to areas of the personality at variance with the person one considers oneself to be), psychotherapists also do this. So the question arises when it is liberating and when it is not. He suggest? that the answer is that 'therapy with such cases entails coming to look ai the assumptions made on the basis of shared phantasy-systems. The disjunction must be seen. Once seen, and faced for the first time, confusion is converted to conflict.'17 Raskolnikov has seen for a long time but he has not faced till the last all the emotional implications of his perception. The fact that it is the women's point of view which prevails with Raskolnikov (even Porfiry Petrovich is given some feminine characteristics, even the view of Raskolnikov's dead fiancee is drawn in) may be of some interest to those who claim that women play only a subordinate role in Dostoyevsky's novels.18 Insofar as they do we may perhaps sense here a deconstructive reversal which anticipates The Idiot but which had to be agonizingly re-experienced by the author in the course of his many drafts. A notable feature of character discourse in Crime and Punishment is the way in which characters take hold of the evidence (usually the discourse of others) to make plausible but unprovable stories, based on 'psychological' logic, about something of importance to them. This is true not only of the exchanges between Porfiry and Raskolnikov, but about virtually every other character. Katerina Ivanovna and Pulkheriya Aleksandrovna are particularly adept at it and in their cases wishful thinking plays an exceptionally important role. The novel has stimulated critics to engage in precisely the same kind of activity. And the
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deployment of this strategy itself facilitates the strategies of driving other people crazy. Nowhere, however, is it implied that the narrator himself is subject to the same kind of limitation or that he might have a similar effect on his readers. That problem is developed in Dostoyevsky's next novel - The Idiot.
5 The Devils: driving society crazy
For tactical reasons I propose skipping Dostoyevsky's next major novel and making my points in relation to The Idiot and The Devils in reverse order. This is because my discussion of the way in which characters in Crime and Punishment drive each other crazy naturally raises the wider social implications of such strategies. Such questions, are, I think, best dealt with in relation to The Devils whose social range is greater than that of Dostoyevsky's other novels and where hierarchy, expressed in terms of religion, society, literary forms or even bodily functions, is exemplified in its most acute form and most obviously threatened with collapse. It is Pyotr Verkhovensky's avowed aim to bring about this collapse, to undermine the foundations of morality and the state, to bring everything down with a crash by political action. CARNIVAL AND SCANDAL: SOME THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
There is no doubt that the novel in general and particularly the chapters on the 'holiday' (prazdnik or fete) invite analysis in terms of Bakhtin's concept of carnival. It is not, however, that the prazdnik is an example of carnival pure and simple. Bakhtin says in his book on Rabelais, As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions. Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed. 1
The prazdnik in The Devils is not conceived by its organizers as carnival. On the contrary it is intended to be official feast. Its degeneration into carnival is what makes it scandalous and is a measure of the degree to which the higher ranks in the social hierarchy have lost
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control of the lower. The true function of the carnival, by contrast, seems to be to provide a controlled safety-valve for the repressed desires of the lower orders in relation to official culture. It has been pointed out that the European carnival in its historical forms displayed other features which Bakhtin's Utopian and nostalgic version do not adequately account for,2 but this need not concern us here because I do not propose analysing The Devils by reference to the notion of the carnival itself. My intention in mentioning it is to point out that the carnival is the privileged locus of what Bakhtin calls carnivalistic 'eccentricity' (permitting the socially suppressed sides of human nature to reveal and express themselves) and 'mesalliances*. All things that were once self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic hierarchical world view are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations. Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid.3 In the carnival the rules of social cohesion (decorum, good sense, reverence, respect for conventions and the social hierarchy, good manners, considerateness, etc.) are disrupted by carnival values (free, familiar contact between people, irrespective of rank, eccentric behaviour, carnivalistic mesalliances of the sacred and the profane, the lofty and the lowly, the great and the insignificant, the wise and the stupid). Where such conduct is ritualized (i.e., special occasions are set aside for it) it can be socially contained. Where it breaks out spontaneously, the result will be to relativize conventions of social conduct and radically to confuse people about where they stand in relation to each other. Scandal scenes in Dostoyevsky are in essence group exercises in 'driving other people crazy'. The key to the strategies which I discussed in the previous chapter is the threat of bringing into the open and exposing to critical judgement sometimes secret but always intensely serious desires of crucial importance to the subject which often cannot be aired publicly without embarrassment or worse, and alternately taking them seriously and trivializing or discounting them. It is this threat to the sacred which is played out on a broad, social scale in The Devils. This chapter is about scandals in Dostoyevsky and explores the way that disruptive strategies are deployed to bring about a breakdown of that decorum which enables the social group to cohere. In Dos-
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toyevsky's world scandals occur in situations which are already unstable but not unstructured, typically in situations where strong, unruly emotions are being suppressed with difficulty beneath a veneer of decorum, and where a small quantitative change (e.g., in the hostility factor) would alter them dramatically. So we have two sets of conditions which we may look for in Dostoyevsky: a situation (a) in which the participants are potentially emotionally unstable and (b) in which therefore a rather smaller than usual quota of elements deviating from the prevailing norm of social decorum needs to be introduced to bring about instability - especially if it comes as a surprise. A special study of 'the internal dynamics of the Dostoyevskian conclave' has been made by D. K. Danow, 4 based on an analysis of four scenes, one from each of the major novels: the Marmeladov funeral meal from Crime and Punishment, the Burdovsky affair from The Idiot, the chapter entitled 'The subtle serpent5 from The Devils and the one entitled 'An unfortunate gathering' from The Brothers Karamazov. For Danow, 'the concept of the conclave evokes the sense of a "crowd scene" resulting in an inevitable scandal'. He writes, The following points will serve to outline a basic descriptive model meant to encompass these prominent scenes. (i) As the given presupposition, a collection of disparate individuals, whose interests and incendiary personalities are bound to clash, gather for a meeting of sorts. (ii) One/or more of these individuals come/s forward to demand 'his/their rights'. (iii) There follows an account of previously unknown events designed to provide greater information, allowing for a reconsideration of what has already transpired. To this end, one or more characters will relate some real or fictive episode, the effect of which is to bring about the conclave's inevitably boisterous denouement. (iv) Finally, either someone appears in the crowd to resolve things in generally astounding fashion - or, if no resolution is forthcoming, the episode will of necessity generate further action until the matter is finally ended. If particular information is withheld, in other words, it will eventually be converted into more drama. Danow adds, As one further preliminary observation, it should be remarked that in each such instance the primary opposition established is between an initially stated lie and
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the truth as yet to be revealed. Presented in the form of a direct utterance, the lie is consistently - if not immediately - confronted by the truth, itself dramatized in the subsequent action of the novel.5 Whereas Danow uncovers some common features in the four episodes, I do not think he accounts altogether satisfactorily for the element of scandal. The structure he describes - based on false claims publicly shown to be false - is certainly one recipe for scandal but it does not touch on what is most characteristic of Dostoyevsky's handling of the motif. It is significant that his account of the Marmeladov funeral meal makes no reference to the behaviour of the guests at the meal (Luzhin, Lebezyatnikov and Raskolnikov apart, owing to their role in the adjacent episode in which they dispute the truth of Luzhin's accusation of theft against Sonya), or the final expulsion of Katerina Ivanovna and the children onto the street. And insofar as the Luzhin/ Sonya episode contributes to the subversion of decorum, Danow makes no mention of it. His account of the second scene is similarly truncated, and in the third he has to admit that the 'truth' is deferred until Stavrogin's Confession (which was actually excluded from the published text). It would seem then that the actual publication of the 'truth' is not essential to the scandal scene. As far as the last scene goes, Danow tells us, 'in essence, it takes the entire novel to unravel truth from lie'. 6 One might very well question whether in fact the 'truth' is ever unravelled, especially in a novel deprived of'Stavrogin's Confession'. Danow skirts the issue of the relativity and elusiveness of 'truth', given in so many versions with various degrees of plausibility. He might possibly retort that he is interested in the structure of the conclave and not the nature of the scandal. Yet he seems to have cut off this line of retreat by intimating that there is some (unexamined) connection between the crowd scene and the scandal. Let us look more closely, concentrating our attention on two scenes from The Devils. Among the most important oppositions in Dostoyevsky is that between social decorum (involving the mutual confirmation of the stories people publicly project about themselves to preserve their self-respect) and gossip (the malicious stories people tell about each other in each other's absence). We have seen how devastating it can be when other people openly and to one's face disconfirm one's own gratifying, but fictitious self-image and affirm a hostile and humiliating one. It can also be humiliating when contrary to one's secret hopes
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other people falsely confirm the false image one is projecting (for example, General Ivolgin and Myshkin). There are, of course, impressively handled scandal-scenes in most of Dostoyevsky's works, certainly in all his major ones. I have chosen to concentrate here on The Devils because in addition to personal scandals it depicts scandal on the level of provincial society as a whole. The focus for this broadly based scandal is theprazdnik. Significantly, the Russian word means any kind of festive occasion, from religious feast day, high days and holidays, to a birthday. Clearly, therefore, it may include the element of the carnival in Bakhtin's sense. Firstly, let us look more closely at a more intimate scene, that of 'The Wise Serpent', where the action seems to be moving jerkily towards the revelation of a scandalous secret, governed by what Barthes calls the hermeneutic code. It is as if an unconscious communal attempt is being made to peel off the layers of heteroglossia (other people's discourse, the stories they tell about each other and about themselves, genre stereotypes and so on) and discover the answer to an underlying mystery. Of course the motives of characters are very various and there is a countervailing impulse which affects most of them: that of achieving the goal with minimal damage to their own self-esteem. The fact that some characters do not seem concerned by this consideration (for example, Marya Timofeyevna and Dasha) is a mixed blessing for those who do. The result of these conflicting impulses is a constant jockeying for position, a constant realignment of relationships between the protagonists. THE WISE SERPENT The setting
The setting is as Danow indicates: the scene is peopled by a number of characters who are very likely to do something, intentionally or unintentionally, to upset each other and decorum. Events take place on Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina's territory, imposing certain formal obligations on her as hostess and on the others as her guests. The preservation of decorum on her own terms (i.e. in support of her self-image as pre-eminent in the social hierarchy) is exceptionally important to Varvara Petrovna, as she emphasizes by her gracious
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and superior airs with the Governor's wife before the scene opens. But she is prepared to risk it to solve the mystery underlying the potentially devastating rumours about her son. In spite of the rather simple terms in which some psychiatrists talk about the disjunction between the true self and a false image of the self, the concept of self-image is really a very complex one. However it is clear that all of Dostoyevsky's principal characters project an image (in some cases more than one image) of themselves which they (and readers) are capable of recognizing as being in some sense false, untrue or incomplete. In some cases play-acting becomes almost second nature, but can be shown up for play-acting nonetheless. Since the function of such personal strategies is to protect individuals from anxiety and to assist them in playing social roles which buoy up their self-esteem, their deflation can have devastating consequences. Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky have invested enormous quantities of emotional energy in social roles (the grande dame and the persecuted liberal intellectual) which are at this juncture highly vulnerable to challenge. The ground has already been prepared by intimations of the fickleness of public opinion, by unnatural impulsiveness, raptures, hysterics. The normally unflappable Varvara Petrovna looked 'as though she were really terrified, and turned pale. (Everyone noticed it at the time, but did not understand what it meant.)' 7 In the carriage she sat 'as though in a trance'. 8 We are repeatedly told of the deathly pallor of her face and of Stepan Trofimovich's flushed appearance. Social decorum involves the provisional mutual confirmation of self-images, so far, that is, as they conform to the overall image of respectability prevalent in the group and so far as they are not incompatible with each other. But there are those who do not conform, who hardly conform, who are determined for one reason or another not to confirm the self-image of others. The introductory section of Part I chapter 5 is a classic Dostoyevskian scene in which the conflicting emotions of half a dozen characters are woven into an interactive web. Nobody is sure where they stand in relation to the others. An apparently weak-brained an,d socially inept girl is upsetting the respectable hostess, who is already irritated with Stepan Trofimovich; they are severally and jointly annoying and confusing her. The awkward Shatov is there. Varvara Petrovna calls for the sick Dasha. Meanwhile she has become aware that 'everybody in the room knew something, and yet
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they were all afraid of something and evaded her questions, anxious to conceal something from her'. 9 This is one axis on which the drama is constructed, that of concealing the 'awful truth' or 'awful rumour' from the person whose standing is most affected by it, thus widening the gap between the public 'truth' of social decorum and the subversive 'truth' of malicious gossip. The greater the confusion, the more likely that leakage from the lower to the higher realm will occur. Meanwhile the distraught Praskovya Ivanovna turns up with Mavrikiy Nikolayevich, who is unhappily engaged to Liza. Liza, who is obsessed by some powerful emotion, is threatening to do socially embarrassing things, and has already been acting like a madwoman outside the church. Marya Timofeyevna, who has according to Liza been laughing hysterically in the carriage, is the centre of attention and holds the key to a mystery which threatens Varvara Petrovna's selfesteem and her public image. Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdova and Varvara Petrovna are at daggers drawn, and for reasons which are not clear Praskovya Ivanovna seems intent upon launching an attack on Varvara Petrovna at the first opportunity. This impulse, which affects others too, represents the second axis of the drama. Praskovya Ivanovna, at least, is prepared to refer openly to the 'family scandal' which is apparently in everyone's minds. THE COMPLICATION
They start quarrelling and provoking each other. Praskovya Ivanovna seems at first intent on bringing about a reversal of their normal positions in the dominance hierarchy. Ever since their schooldays Varvara Petrovna has dominated her. But in fact the first signs of faintness on Varvara Petrovna's part bring out feelings of guilt and remorse in Praskovya Ivanovna and instantly restore their normal relationship. The equilibrium between self-image and the image others have of one is poised on a knife-edge and threatened by the slightest excessive movement. Praskovya Ivanovna accuses Varvara Petrovna of involving Liza in Varvara Petrovna's family scandal. Liza says maliciously that she has come of her own free will to hear the lame woman's story. Praskovya Ivanovna accuses Varvara Petrovna of being terrified of public opinion. Everyone seems to have heard of the scandal and Dasha seems to have been involved in handing over some money. Praskovya
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Ivanovna and Varvara Petrovna in turn admit to having received anonymous letters linking a lame woman with Stavrogin. Varvara Petrovna attempts to effect a reconciliation with Praskovya Ivanovna and at the same time to reassert her superiority. Although she has experienced terror and other extreme emotions, she has preserved her dignity throughout. But she, like other characters, seems involved in a constant realignment of mutual relationships. At her insistence Lebyadkin is then admitted. He is not the sort of person who can be allowed into a drawing room. He is one of Dostoyevsky's buffoons, whose special function is to provide a vulgar parody of respectability and at the same time to undermine it. There were, it may be recalled, a number of subsidiary buffoons in the funeral meal scene in Crime and Punishment', Nastasya Filippovna has Ferdyshchenko; Keller and Lebedev play this role in relation to Myshkin; Fyodor Karamazov himself plays it in Zosima's cell. What is most scandalous about the behaviour of most of them is that they are so obviously play-acting and doing it with so little taste or social finesse. Parts of the description of Lebyadkin are worth quoting: I have already described the appearance of that gentleman, a tall, curly-headed, thick-set fellow of about forty, with a purple, rather bloated andflabbyface, with cheeks that shook with every movement of his head, with tiny, bloodshot, sometimes cunning little eyes, with a moustache and side-whiskers, and a repulsive-looking Adam's apple which was beginning to be covered with a layer of fat. But the most striking thing about him was that he appeared wearing a frock-coat and clean linen. 'There are people who look indecent in clean linen/ as Liputin had once said to Stepan Trofimovich [Verkhovensky], who had reproached him jestingly for being untidy... he was again pacing the room. It is characteristic of these people that they are completely incapable of controlling their desires; on the contrary, they are overcome by an irresistible urge to reveal themselves in all their squalidness the moment they arise. Finding himself in unaccustomed company, such a man usually starts timidly, but if you give in to him by a hair's breadth, he will immediately begin treating you with arrogance.10 In one passage the narrator concentrates observations about the reactions of all the chief characters, which are now focused on Lebyadkin: The Captain was already excited ... It is true, he could not possibly have been absolutely sober. Liza Nikolayevna, too, was in the room. Her presence seemed to have gone to his head, though he never glanced at her once. However, this is
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merely my supposition. Anyway, there must have been some reason which induced Varvara Petrovna to overcome her repugnance for that man and listen to him. Praskovya Ivanovna was simply shaking with terror, without, apparently, realizing what it was all about. Stepan Trofimovich, too, trembled, but that, on the contrary, was because he was always inclined to see too much in everything. Mavrikiy Nikolayevich [Drozdov] stood in the attitude of a man who was ready to rush to everybody's defence. Liza was very pale and was watching the wild Captain steadily with wide-open eyes. Shatov sat without stirring; but the strangest thing of all was that Marya Timofeyevna [Lebyadkina] had not only stopped laughing, but had grown terribly sad. She leaned against the table with her right arm and followed her brother's harangues with a long, sad gaze. Darya Pavlovna [Dasha] alone seemed to me to be composed. 11 There is trouble between the young women. Liza's eyes flash with hatred at the sight of Dasha; and Lebyadkin, whose presence holds out the possibility of clarification, simply mystifies and confuses.
CRISIS AND DENOUEMENT
Shortly Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky enters, an eccentric young man, whom nothing, apparently, can embarrass. He plays the buffoon too, but a peculiarly well-groomed, well-educated and eloquent one and consciously uses his buffoonery as a technique to create disorder. It is soon clear that he threatens his father's self-image in the eyes of Varvara Petrovna and society and refuses to respond sympathetically to his father's sentimental play-acting, which has become second nature to him. Quietly Stavrogin also turns up. His face is like a mask. His mother, impulsive in moments of crisis, suddenly poses the question. Stavrogin does not answer, but deflects it by turning to Marya and telling her she must remember she is not his wife. He is tormenting not only his mother who wants a straight answer, but also Shatov who believes that he, more than anyone, is above social dissembling. When they leave there follows an excited hubbub, and again the narrator attempts to account for everybody's reaction: I am afraid I have partly forgotten the exact order in which it all happened at the time, for everything was in confusion. Stepan Trofimovich was shouting something in French and throwing up his hands, but Varvara Petrovna was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to take any notice of him. Even Mavrikiy Nikolayevich muttered something abruptly and rapidly. But Pyotr Stepanovich
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was more excited than anyone; he was trying desperately to convince Varvara Petrovna of something, gesticulating wildly, but for a long time I could not make out what he was talking about. He also addressed Mavrikiy Nikolayevich and Lizaveta Nikolayevna, and even shouted something in passing to his father in his excitement - in a word, he kept rushing about the room. Varvara Petrovna, all flushed, was on the point of jumping up from her chair and shouted to Praskovya Ivanovna, 'Did you hear? Did you hear what he said to her just now?' But Praskovya Ivanovna was not in a fit state to reply. She just muttered something with a wave of the hand. The poor woman had her own worries: she kept turning her head every minute towards Liza and looking at her in panic, not daring even to think of getting up and leaving before her daughter had got up. In the meantime the Captain, I noticed, was only too anxious to slip away.12
Pyotr Stepanovich constantly flouts the accepted rules of conduct, but, having found Varvara Petrovna's weak spot, succeeds in deceiving her by flattering her self-esteem. She is reassured and her son's nobility is re-established in her mind. Varvara Petrovna has, of course, images not only of herself but of those who live within her zone of influence which they must live up to and to which others must subscribe. If they let her down, as Stepan Trofimovich does, she is unforgiving. Now, thanks to Pyotr Stepanovich, she has another 'story', compatible with her previous one, to account gratifyingly for new, potentially subversive facts. But Pyotr Stepanovich now has her completely in his power, because, knowing it is his own invention, he can shatter the illusion at will. Finally, Stavrogin returns, looking cheerful. Liza becomes hysterical again. Stavrogin drops a brick by prematurely congratulating Dasha on her engagement and Pyotr Stepanovich takes advantage to begin humiliating his father again by blurting out in public all his most intimate thoughts confided in private letters. All of which causes his father real grief. Having apparently averted one scandal by deception, Pyotr Verkhovensky now intentionally causes another. Although these outpourings are ostensibly 'truthful' Pyotr Stepanovich is playing a part. The denouement occurs when Shatov unexpectedly strikes Stavrogin a blow in the face. Stavrogin controls himself by a superhuman effort and his image is preserved. Liza screams and faints. ANALYSIS
This brief account of a very complex situation demonstrates two things very clearly. The first is that the scandal consists in the multiple
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challenges (culminating in Shatov's blow) to the emotionally charged deceits, fictions and play-acting which form the web of social decorum. It is when this web of'lies', if only transiently, is shown up for what it is, or is cynically and transparently exploited in such a way as to reveal aspects of'reality' quite at variance with the world which the character or the group wishes to acknowledge, that the scandal arises. The 'demanding of rights' may, although presented as a stand for truth, be nothing more than an alternative fiction. Where it occurs its significance is clear: it is a protest at being left out of the game or marginalized in it, a game whose purpose is to keep all in equilibrium by means of a fiction which reassures the majority, especially the dominant members of the group. The juxtaposition of 'lies' and 'truth' is therefore not entirely to the point here. The truth, as revealed in Stavrogin's Confession, would appear to be that Stavrogin really did marry Marya Timofeyevna in St Petersburg and for unworthy motives (though how are we to know that this is not also a fiction or a fictionalized version of the truth?). A reader who approaches 'The Wise Serpent' with this knowledge will read it quite differently from one who has no such knowledge. And it is important to remind oneself that for decades Dostoyevsky's readers were denied this information: although drafted in several variants, the chapter containing the confession was never included in any edition during Dostoyevsky's lifetime. Is it therefore pertinent 'information' at all? Is it not the fact that the reader is left with no 'truth' to set against the contending 'fictions'? That is not to say, of course, that degrees of truthfulness and variations in motive are not discernible in the discourse of the characters and narrator. It is only to say, as we shall note again in due course, that there is an increasing diffuseness in Dostoyevsky's presentation of experience. Here, while the existence of truth is taken for granted by a common-sense narrator writing in a realistic mode, its accessibility is made increasingly problematic. The second point is that into this 'respectable' situation are introduced items of conversation or conduct which fail to meet the criteria of respectability. Taking our cue from Jakobson's communication model we may note departures from norms of respectability on all the following levels: in messages themselves; in the demeanour of addresser and addressee; in the context (whether we have in mind the immediate social context and the way the atmosphere of the salon degenerates and is cheapened by the activities it witnesses, or alter-
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natively the referential context of some of the discourse); in the code (linguistic register); and even at times in the contact (for example, Lebyadkin's Table'). In summary, then, we may say that a scandal may occur in Dostoyevsky's world when there is a radical threat to decorum. Decorum is a social device for maintaining established power relationships within a social group by means of a system of stories which people tell about themselves and about each other in order ta preserve the equilibrium and coherence of the group in relation both to its parts and the world outside. The relationship of these stories to the events they purport to relate is highly variable and they often take on the likeness of stereotypes from the cultural tradition. Direct attacks on the established dominance hierarchy are made at various points in the scene we have been examining; by Praskovya Ivanovna (determined to attack at the first opportunity and convinced that Varvara Petrovna has reason to be afraid of her); by Lebyadkin (resolved stoutly to defend his somewhat shadowy 'rights' but reticent about spelling them out); by Marya Timofeyevna (by her eccentricity and unpredictability in terms of received norms); by the writer of the anonymous letters; by Pyotr Verkhovensky (who smooths over the doubts about Stavrogin only to shatter his father's standing in even less time); and by Shatov (who deeply resents the fact that Stavrogin is not apparently prepared to risk breaching decorum in the name of a higher truth and strikes him in public). Liza, by threatening a hysterical scene, is playing the same kind of game. It is in fact with Liza's scream and faint that the scene ends. But each of the major attacks and defensive actions involves modifications to the stories people tell about each other. This can be shown most easily by reference to Varvara Petrovna and her son. The chapter begins with Varvara Petrovna in a state of terror because she cannot incorporate Marya Timofeyevna into an acceptable story involving her son, yet she knows that the stories which other people are privy to and apparently telling require this to be done. From her point of view this must be achieved without a radical disturbance to her standing in society; if possible enhancing it. But clearly a crisis has come and all may be lost. The frustrating thing is that as yet she cannot find out exactly what other people are saying. She risks inviting the impossible Lebyadkin into her drawing room in full public view, but fails to get any sense out of him. Eventually, when her son arrives, she puts the question to him point-blank: is he married to Marya Timofeyevna? He
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side-steps the question, leaving Pyotr Stepanovich to explain at length that the whole thing was simply a piece of eccentricity on Stavrogin's part and that there is no question of a marriage. Lebyadkin was Falstaff to Stavrogin's Prince Harry. Varvara Petrovna's imagination has been working furiously: this is not enough for her, though she is grateful for the help. Now she transforms the story and her son emerges from it not as a Prince Harry but as a kind of Hamlet, one who never had a Horatio or an Ophelia, a man with a lofty feeling of compassion, capable of noble and sacred responses. Pyotr Verkhovensky had not meant quite this, but he is happy to feed the illusion. Varvara Petrovna, of course, has stories about all her intimates and, should they let her down, they have to pay a dreadful price. Pyotr Stepanovich immediately sets about dismantling his father's tottering image. He has, needless to say, become a master of the techniques of 'driving people crazy'. This scene is full of them, though here the emphasis is on the wider social canvas as well as on the level of the individual. In the case of the first strategy, for instance, we are dealing not simply with areas of the personality but with areas of social experience of which subjects are only dimly aware and which are quite at variance with the kind of world they wish to believe they belong to. Thus it is with the rumours and hints which Varvara Petrovna repeatedly hears about her son. Both Lebyadkin and Pyotr Stepanovich deploy strategy 6: (see p. 85) switching from one topic to the next while maintaining the same emotional wavelength, discussing a matter of life and death in the same manner as the most trivial happening. But Pyotr Stepanovich's most characteristic strategy is a variant of strategy 3: exposing the subject to alternating stimulation and frustration. In the conversation with Varvara Petrovna he says, 'It's the sort of thing we find in religion: the harder a manfindslife, or the more downtrodden and the poorer people are, the more stubbornly they dream of their heavenly rewards, and if a hundred thousand priests also invoke the same thing, inflaming their dream and building on it, then - oh, I understand you/13 Pyotr Stepanovich proves a master of inflaming the dreams of those around him, and this gives him a terrible weapon, because he is then well placed to dash them to the ground, to destroy their world and leave them thoroughly disorientated and demoralized. It is akin to the
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strategy of proffering and then withdrawing love. He has already shown how he can tempt people into baring their souls to him, exposing their fondest dreams and illusions. In other words he stimulates them emotionally (strategy 2) and they do seek gratification - thus laying themselves open to disaster through exposure. Should he choose this route, he may then turn on them with a variant of strategy 8, blaming them for the disaster he has engineered himself: 'Don't shout please', Pierre said, with a wave of his hands, 'believe me, it's all your sick old nerves, and it won't do you a bit of good to shout. You'd better tell me why you didn't warn me, for you must have realized I'd be the first to start talking.'14 But young Verkhovensky has an Achilles heel: he is also prone to illusions and hero-worship. The rest of the novel shows the outcome. The Fete
The episode of the Fete is built up over some 150 pages, and in the middle of it would have been Stavrogin's Confession. On the basis of the foregoing analysis it may now be enough to sketch in its general outline. As mentioned above, there is here a special scandal-creating agent not always, it is true, wholly in control of events or understanding them — but successful in provoking the desired outcome. Pyotr Stepanovich is himself the victim of illusions about his own success with other people (for example in the permanence of the effect of his reassurance of Governor von Lembke, or in his image of Stavrogin as the tsarevich), but above all, he is an expert at disrupting other people's images and illusions and the way in which society attempts to hold them in balance. Just think of the illusions about themselves and their own special role entertained by the von Lembkes, man and wife, by Karmazinov, and by the elder Verkhovensky. Those who fall outside this balancing act are usually consigned to the category of the deviant or even the mad, and are accorded only marginal roles. In times of disturbance, however, they may threaten the stability of the edifice, and it is precisely these marginal people whom Pyotr Stepanovich stirs up. In examining The Double I noted how on the level of individual psychology, the marginal may become the central; the same phenomenon was evident also on the level of ideology in Notes
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from Underground. Now, in The Devils, this obsessive undoing of the central by the marginal is transferred to the social plane. A second ploy is to build up people's hopes and cause them anxiety on the basis of unfounded rumour. Rumour, or public opinion, is their closest contact with truth and buoys them up until the bubble bursts. We may recall Stavrogin's own loss of faith in his own beliefs: 'When Stavrogin believes, he does not believe that he believes, and when he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe.' 15 A third strategy (strategy 6 again) is to build up an atmosphere of undifferentiated levity among 'responsible' members of society, which is subversive of good order, which mocks the sacred and which makes no distinction between the sublime and the trivial, the good and the evil, occasions calling for humour and occasions calling for compassion. People's tendency to mock the misfortunes of others is encouraged. We note the escapades of the young men and women, the mocking of the officer's wife, the Bible woman, the episode of the mouse in the icon, the suicide and the visit to the Holy Fool. Dostoyevsky links this to the passage in the Apocalypse: I am neither hot nor cold. Critics link it with Stavrogin who has lost his sense of a distinction between the ugly and the beautiful. The use of this strategy attains almost epidemic proportions. It is precisely what Yuliya von Lembke does with her husband: she persuades him to do things which are almost illegal while making a great fuss about trivia. A fourth technique is one we have already observed to be Pyotr Stepanovich's speciality: to work one's way into someone's confidence, elicit his fondest ideals, lure him into exposing himself emotionally and then pour scorn on him - this was, incidentally, the first strategy used by Golyadkin junior on Golyadkin senior and it is what the Underground Man does to Liza. It is an advantage to do it in public and in front of people who will revel in the victim's humiliation, challenging if possible conventional hierarchies and encouraging disrespect for authority (whether that of the father or that of the provincial administration). Similarly, disrespect for whatever other people cherish nearest to their hearts but about which they feel insecure. We may recall Pyotr Stepanovich's cavalier treatment of von Lembke's and Karmazinov's manuscripts or of his father's love-letters. Pyotr Stepanovich wished to drive his father to despair, the narrator tells us. In the end the old man is driven to theatrically cursing his son, who simply laughs at him the more. Both of the von Lembkes are particularly susceptible to this
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technique. Yuliya is convinced she has a mission to save the younger generation by being kind to them and she is blind to all evidence of the failure of this strategy while everyone else is expecting catastrophe. A similar technique is to undermine the trust that (albeit in a fragile form) people have in each other. Think of the mistrust which Pyotr Stepanovich sows between Varvara Petrovna and his father, leading to a final rift in which Varvara Petrovna mouths Chernyshevskian ideas under the influence of the son. What better scheme, to bring all this together, than to collude in setting up a grand, official public function, in which everyone is supposed to know 'his place', with its own understood rules of decorous behaviour, its own illusions (in which there will be a great emotional and even financial investment) and then to subvert it all by letting loose the agents of disruption. Combined in this event are private destinies (Karmazinov's and Stepan Trofimovich's last words to the world; the career and sanity of the Governor and the fate of his ambitious and short-sighted wife; the future of countless poverty-stricken families who have pawned their belongings and woven their own dreams to take part in a function which proves disastrous for all concerned); public affairs (the social fabric - riots, arson, plague, epidemics, political subversion are all in the background). Into a situation which is usually marked by a ritual respect and decorum, Dostoyevsky introduces forces of the opposite kind which eventually gain the upper hand: people of the lowest kind get involved, they heckle when they should be quiet and respectful; buffoons create embarrassment. Rumour is again brought into play: the expectations of Balthazar's Feast are brought crashing down with the eventual nonappearance of even a buffet. There are caricatures of the impoverished subscribers, lampoons of the supposed beneficiaries (Stallybrass and White have noted that carnival pillories not only stronger but also weaker groups),16 a general atmosphere of hatred for the chief organizer. It is obvious that if the slightest thing goes wrong there will be an uncontrollable outburst of indignation. The dyke is full to overflowing and the dam is about to burst. Individually, and in the wider social context, the main characters are driven into what Laing calls 'untenable positions' vis-a-vis each other. There is no way out, no way of producing a dignified story which will restore decorum and reconcile both past reputations and relationships with present events. Von Lembke's unfailing efforts not to displease his
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wife by seeming too harsh on the open effrontery of Pyotr Stepanovich are a small but important example of such an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. In a way, of course, the whole thing is grossly overdone, but in another way it is a masterpiece, and at the centre of it all is this old problem which we have followed through from the beginning: the balance between ideal self-image and the confirming or disconfirming views of others, and the ease with which this balance can be disrupted. Dostoyevsky's achievement is to have widened this from an individual psychological problem to a broad social canvas. That he was master of the depiction of disruption there can be no doubt. But he had another ambition: to find a firm ground for 'living life' beyond the manipulation of rumour, illusion and conventional or fashionable readings of experience, for the characters in The Devils are lost in stories of their own making as much as is the Man from Underground. That ambition was to find expression in his last novel. There is one further level on which strategies of driving people crazy are employed in this novel which I have not discussed and which will no doubt have occurred to the reader. That is the level of interaction between narrator and reader. But I have reserved this for the next chapter when, among other things, I shall consider it in relation to The Idiot.
6 The Idiot: driving the reader crazy
We have seen how in The Double the narrator's position vis-a-vis the reader and the hero can cause the reader intense frustration (at the cost of the realism of the 'socially given text') and how in Notes from Underground the narrator openly draws the reader into the dialogue. This experience, together with his exploitation of techniques for creating emotional and perceptual confusion, is put to new and original use in The Idiot. So much so that it is justifiable not only to speak of readers not knowing where they stand in relation to the text, but also of the deployment of strategies for confusing the reader. These were present also in earlier texts, but nowhere so highly developed as in The Idiot. In fact the novel both states and exemplifies the problems which arise in trying to bridge the gap between discourse and reality. If this sounds over-abstract or unorthodox (surely The Idiot is about the destiny of a positively beautiful man in St Petersburg or something of the kind) then a re-reading of the novel with this question in mind should be sufficient to convince the most sceptical reader. The difficulty of expressing adequately and truthfully not only the most sacred truths but even ordinary everyday facts is harped on constantly by both characters and narrator. It is not just the frequency and pervasiveness of the theme which makes it the most important problem. Its position in the hierarchy of problems is assured because it puts in question the status of the novel itself and all the voices within it. SUBVERTING THE NARRATIVE VOICE Dostoyevsky's techniques for attracting and retaining his readers' interest have been sufficiently discussed: the present argument assumes that the reader is engaged by means of a combination of rhetorical and emotional devices (possibly in ways indicated in Elizabeth Dalton's Freudian analysis) and concentrates on ways in which the narrator 113
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provokes increasing anxiety in readers as they pursue their reading of the text. One way in which the narrator makes the reader uneasy is by a constant change of narrative voices, each corresponding to a different literary sub-genre or style of everyday discourse. Reproducing in detail Robin Feuer Miller's closely reasoned and well-illustrated argument, with which I agree in all major respects, would occupy too much space. But her findings - especially those of chapters 3 and 4 - are so important that a summary is essential and I shall revert to them in the course of my discussion and use them as a framework.1 Miller distinguishes between the voice of the real author (Dostoyevsky), the voice of the implied author (the self the author projects as he writes and who gives the text its meaning), and the narrator (whose role is to interest and entertain). To each of these there is a corresponding reader (or corresponding mode of reading) and they increasingly diverge as the novel progresses. The narrator moreover assumes a number of different voices. This does not necessarily destroy the impression of a single narrator; indeed the narrator's own protests about the difficulties of narrative give added realism to a voice whose tone and strategies change from time to time in accordance with the subject matter and character zone. Miller distinguishes four such voices within the narrative: (1) the voice of a sympathetic and omniscient narrator; (2) a voice, ironically detached from the action, which passes along the current local rumours; (3) a comic voice of limited intelligence which relates a kind of novel of ill-manners; and (4) a gothic voice which employs techniques of arbitrary disclosure and heightened terror. Although Praz, Grossman, Bakhtin, Steiner and others had noted the gothic in Dostoyevsky before, it is to Miller that the credit belongs for perceiving how a gothic voice is orchestrated in the polyphony of the novel. No doubt other analyses of the narrative voices in the novel are possible, but this is a very plausible attempt. There are various gradations within these four voices and sometimes they merge. The 'omniscient' narrator, for example, often seems to have only 'limited omniscience' and sometimes arbitrarily to deny the reader the benefit of what he knows. As novelist he sometimes seems bemused by the problems of narrative. The ironically detached voice is sometimes more ironic than at other times. The degree of irony varies according to the object: in the early parts of the novel the minor characters are treated ironically, while Myshkin and Nastasya Filip-
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povna are not. Later Myshkin too falls victim to this tone. The voice of the 'novel of ill-manners' merges at times with this last, ironic voice. All these voices, let it be added, are acceptable as 'realistic' modes of discourse in our own times as well as in Dostoyevsky's. To Miller we owe also the important insight, based on a close reading of the text, that the relationship between narrator (s) and reader radically changes as the novel progresses. In the first two parts a definite order prevails. The narrator uses appropriate voices for different subjects, so that the reader acquires a basic trust in the narrator's tact and in his ability to report the action of the novel. At the same time the reader senses that the narrator's voice does not coincide completely with that of the implied author; the narrator's powers of reasoning sometimes seem deficient. The clouds of rumors out of which he occasionally generates his narrative do not always create the impression of an ironic, detached narrator, but rather at times reduce him to the status of a town gossip. His tendency to beg off providing information is often annoying because it is so obviously arbitrary ... The narrator with his various voices vacillates between two roles, both of which emphasize his own dissociation from the action. Often he resembles a journalist or reporter concerned with citing all possible facts and circumstances; he favors words like 'accurate' and 'detail'. At other times, he assumes the role of novelist; he frequently makes reference to 'our story', 'our hero' and 'the reader'.2 So perhaps the reader's confidence in the narrator is already less than absolute. In Part m, Miller says, the easy rapport between narrator and readers begins to undergo a strain. They become confused by the abrupt, unpatterned changes in the narrator's voice. The voice of the ironic purveyor of rumours which was in the early parts of the novel subsumed by the voice of omniscience becomes dominant and puts the latter in question. The narrator's ironic mode and the mode which resembled that of the novel of manners grow more bitter, the implied author (through disquisitions of both characters and narrator) begins to endow the problem of the distortion or inability to express ideas with metaphysical significance. In Part in polyphony becomes cacophony but, in spite of rapid changes of voice, the narrator draws closer to his hero, drawing the reader with him;3 by the end of Part 111, reality for Myshkin has become completely fantastic. In Part iv the narrator appears obsessed with the business of
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narration itself and does not let the reader forget his presence. Moreover the material of the novel appears to escape the narrator's control and he seems impatient simply to finish the story: he adopts a tone of irony even towards his hero and for the first time tampers with strict chronology. The growth of the narrator's impatience coincides with the onset of Myshkin's own loss of his grip on reality. Finally he calls the whole basis of the narrative in question by claiming ignorance of key facts and an inability to give explanations, while proceeding directly to give them. The implied author and the narrator bifurcate. In her two following chapters Miller demonstrates how the passages of inserted narrative (frequently exploiting the confessional mode) emphasize explicitly in the realms of ethics and religion these same problems of communication. All this is a very cursory summary of Miller's crucial chapters, which she amply illustrates from the text, showing how important these factors are for a reading of the novel and how a neglect of them can produce incompatible, partial readings, such as those of Lord and Frank. 4 But I do not wish to follow her down this track. What should be noted is that in this interplay of voices the narrator makes sure that contact with the voice of everyday reality and the socially given text is never permanently lost. I wish to proceed by exploring two lines of enquiry suggested by Miller's analysis and following on from my earlier chapters. The first concerns the way in which the narrator and also the characters establish and then undermine a whole series of conventional norms of realism. Most of the characters most of the time conform to the narrator's ironic worldly-wise voice. But there are some important exceptions. The second is the way in which not only the characters in their relations with each other exploit techniques of the kind which, according to Searles, may drive other people crazy (we have said enough about this for readers to conduct their own analyses), but also the narrator in relation to the reader. Probably most readers of Dostoyevsky elude actual insanity. After all they can put the book down, if only at the end, and remind themselves that it is 'only fiction'; and of course Dostoyevsky's narrator increasingly does this too. But it is easy to feel the strains and pressures, the irritations and frustrations which in other circumstances might lead to a more distressing outcome.
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SETTING UP AND SUBVERTING PROVISIONAL NORMS
Through adopting different narrative voices with their characteristic rhetoric, Dostoyevsky constantly sets up norms, like false floors on which to stand and look, and these are subsequently subverted by other voices in the text itself. As we noted, Robin Feuer Miller discerns four (not always easily distinguishable) narrative voices in this novel: a gothic voice which employs techniques of arbitrary disclosure and heightened terror; a comic voice of limited intelligence which relates a kind of novel of ill-manners; a voice, ironically detached from the action, which passes along current rumours; the voice of a sympathetic and omniscient narrator. In Bakhtin's terms (though this is not exactly his view) each of these voices has its own corresponding chronotope. To the first corresponds the chronotope of the threshold (the chronotope which Bakhtin regards as characteristic of Dostoyevsky in general), typified by the knife-edge of deconstruction, of the confrontation and reversal of oppositions, of resurrections, renewals, epiphanies, the uncanny, ecstasy and the abyss. It falls out of biographical time and in it time is instantaneous. This is the Dostoyevskian world whose events could be plotted on a series of catastrophe graphs. To the second (the voice of the hovel of manners) corresponds the chronotope of the drawing room or salon (which Bakhtin says is uncharacteristic of Dostoyevsky, though it certainly plays a role in this novel). It is the chronotope of Jane Austen, Balzac, Stendhal, Trollope, to some extent Tolstoy, even Proust, a place where public and private events may come together and where historical and biographical time are condensed and concentrated in the dialogic interaction of characters within a specific social setting. To the third (the town gossip) corresponds the chronotope of the market place (though 'the street' would serve as well). It purports to relay accurate biographical facts and chronology often of a scandalous nature, but is often grotesquely self-contradictory, unintelligent, lacking in essential information, reliant on gossip and rumour, at odds with alternative and more reliable sources of evidence and confused in its chronology. It likes to 'objectify', to attach simple 'common-sense' labels to people and to their conduct. The last (sympathetic, omniscient and non-intrusive) voice corresponds, it seems to me, to the chronotope of biographical time and the family idyll (with its resonances of the Fatherhood of God and the family of man), which is perhaps why this voice is so difficult to
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sustain in a world so lacking in cohesive human families of the Tolstoyan type and so full of the malice of the town gossip, a world moreover in which its only representative himself has no close family or friends. Omniscience and sympathy in this context amount to another important characteristic: the appearance of intuitive sensitivity, that is, the ability to see through the objectifying labels of language to the subjective experience of the other. I think we have to grant the last voice priority over the others in terms of the relatively direct access it gives us to Myshkin (the relative absence of distancing, objectifying techniques). The difficulty, as I have indicated, is that the narrator does not sustain this voice and eventually seems to become critical of, and impatient with, his hero and his narrative himself, thus identifying himself with those characters (and readers) who react to Myshkin in a similar way and colluding with them in the subversion not only of his own principal voice (thus undermining the whole hierarchy of voices he has earlier established) but of Myshkin's too, which is also characterized by an unusual ability to see through the objectifying labels of language to the subjective experience of other characters. Nevertheless, by the time he does so, the seeds of his own undoing have been thoroughly sown. Readers who might have shared his impatience with Myshkin are likely to extend it to the narrator too. It is important to note in passing that the association of the chronotope of the salon with the novel of manners does not entail that every scene set in a salon is a pure example of this type. Let us take as examples the three parties in this novel, each of them set in someone's drawing room. The Yepanchins' salon does set forth this norm, though its inhabitants do not always live up to it. Nastasya Filippovna's salon is renowned for its elegant manners and decorum, but she contrives to introduce the atmosphere of a gothic novel; moreover the world of the streets also invades it with the arrival at her behest of Rogozhin and his gang. Myshkin's salon (Lebedev's dacha at Pavlovsk) seems to be almost an extension of the street, both with respect to freedom of access and to behaviour. If people are kept out it is not at his bidding. Hence in part the different effects of'scandal scenes' in these different environments. In the novel of manners the tone is set by the host and possibly by important guests. Thus at the Yepanchins' the reader's attention is riveted by the scandal itself and the general embarrassment it causes.
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At Nastasya's, however, the beautiful, elegant hostess herself is the source of disorder: the points of interest are her violently alternating moods and their emotional effect on the other characters. At Myshkin's the progressive general anarchy and its emotional effect on the host creates a dream-like atmosphere in which points of reference for behaviour seem arbitrary and relativized. Even the narrator seems at sea and unable to distinguish the significant from the insignificant. This chronotope may be subdivided by making a distinction between drawing room (the private family scene tending towards a mutual confirmation of subjectivity) and the salon (the public occasion, tending towards the objectifications of the street). If, as the text seems at first to suggest, Miller's four narrative voices can be placed in a hierarchy with the voice of intuitive sensitivity at the summit and that of objectifying insensitivity (the town gossip) at the base, the descending order of priority would seem to be: omniscient and sympathetic voice; voice of the gothic novel; voice of the novel of (ill) manners; voice of the town gossip. A case could be argued for reversing the middle two. It is always necessary to remember that these voices merge and interpenetrate, sometimes successfully (as when we are told of Myshkin's subjective experience of an epileptic fit in language which derives from the vocabulary of the gothic novel but with a focus of omniscient sympathy), sometimes destructively (as when the voice of the town gossip is applied to Myshkin not merely by other characters but by the narrator himself). However, we could propose an alternative hierarchy based loosely on dominance on the level of narrated events and their gravitational pull on the focus of the narrator. In this case the order would seem to be reversed. A WORLD MADE OF STORIES: WHERE DOES THE READER STAND?
Not only are we confused by the narrator's own voices; the characters as mediated to us by the narrator confuse us in similar ways. The interplay of fact (the socially given text) and fiction (sub-varieties of the general cultural text), dissembling, 'masks', labelling, objectification, the impulse towards subjectivity and so on, which the narrator foregrounds, assist him in his mystification of the reader. It will help to illustrate these various points by looking at the way the narrative develops, especially in the early stages where the reader forms
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his initial impression of characters, chronotopes and narrative focus, and to this end we shall wander through the text. So far as characterization is concerned it will be enough for my purpose to comment principally on Myshkin. PART I
In her book on The Brothers Karamazov Nina Perlina contrasts the opening sentences of Dostoyevsky's novel and Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. She comments that whereas 'Tolstoy is highly interested in presenting his own word as the only authoritative and unalterable prescript, Dostoyevsky deliberately makes his narrator hesitate and presents his word only as an assumption, qualified as an unfinalized view'.5 To put it another way, Tolstoy's narrator assumes that his waders will agree with him about the nature of reality and moral values and on that assumption guides them through the narrative. Dostoyevsky, on the other hand, keeps his readers constantly on the verge of losing their balance, on the threshold of out-of-text normality. In the opening pages of The Idiot Dostoyevsky's narrator is already nudging the reader towards choosing a conventional norm/chronotope whose rules are known to him. New readers will probably assume that they are entering a world of romantic realism (Balzac, Sue or Dickens), of social deprivation and psychological imbalance verging at times on gothic melodrama (the polar opposites in the characterization of the two heroes, the reference to illness, passion and innocence, the remarkable eyes, extraordinary coincidence, and so on). By the third page, however, a third character (Lebedev) has come on the scene and so has the first narratorial T (not it seems the sympathetic one) who gives us an amusingly cynical account of the type of the shabby 'know-all', before withdrawing the intrusive T and reverting again to an apparently impersonal omniscience. Miller acutely notes that the irony of the narrator's account of the type of the 'know-all' is that he is, at times, no more than a know-all or town gossip himself. Here, by recounting Lebedev's contribution to the conversation, the narrator projects his own tendency to play the gossip into the reported dialogue. He is temporarily (though only just) saved from lowering the tone of the narrative by using Lebedev as a proxy. In this (social gothic?) opening section the narrator contrasts Rogozhin's passionate conduct to Myshkin's innocence; what they have in
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common is a directness of response. And the passionate Rogozhin, with his sectarian background, not unnaturally labels Myshkin a 'holy fooP. There is a sense in which Myshkin has now already been labelled (objectified) twice: by the narrator as the innocentfigureofgothic realism (Eugene Sue, Balzac or Victor Hugo, where the figure is usually female) and by a character as the type of the Russian Holy Fool. Both may be described as potential 'genre portraits', of a highly stereotyped kind. If Elizabeth Dalton's view is accepted 6 it may be the submerged feminine traits in Myshkin (never explicitly spelt out) which give coherence to his personality, whereas the overt 'masculine' labelling never seems convincing. In support of this view it may be noted that the character traits which are most striking - compassion, humility, childlikeness, appreciation of beauty, insight into the suffering of others are all characteristics more readily associated in lived experience with the female than with the male, no matter what Christian culture may prescribe. For the purpose of providing background information about the Yepanchins the narrator assumes a voice which is not unlike that of the town gossip in its wealth of circumstantial detail, but has about it something of the dignity of the narrator of the novel of manners, engaging here and there in a stylization thought appropriate to the subject matter, before resuming the tale with Myshkin's arrival at the Yepanchins' house and reverting to sympathetic omniscience. The next character to meet him, the Yepanchins' servant, seems to be a man of common sense and does not know what to make of him: the prince merely seems strange and embarrassing in his ignorance of social proprieties. The servant has not got a ready category in which to place him and thus would prefer him not to be there. He eventually concludes that he is either a cadger or a simpleton with no sense of personal
dignity. He opts for the latter explanation though he is subsequently moved by their conversation on the suffering of the condemned man (displaying a deep understanding of the personal dignity of others) in which Myshkin likens his own sympathies and insights to those of Christ. This is only a hint. It is not taken up either by characters or by the narrator, but provides another label for readers to keep in their minds and try for themselves. In the Prince's vague autobiographical recollections to General Yepanchin he refers to himself as having been {almost an idiot and he appears to regard 'idiocy' as a medical term akin to 'insanity'. This label
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carries some special weight partly because it is used by the prince himself and partly because it forms the title of the novel, though the reader does not yet know the precise meaning of the title nor whether it is used ironically. The narrator has reported him as saying that he has been suffering from something in the nature of epilepsy or St Virus's dance, some kind of convulsive spasm or twitching; he has told Rogozhin that because of his illness he has no knowledge of women; later he tells Ganya that he cannot marry for the same reason. Now he refers to repeated fits which had almost made an idiot of him and of which he is not properly cured, though his treatment has helped him a great deal. Yepanchin takes to him for his openness, but without immediately providing an additional label. Both he and Ganya seem to regard him as simple and harmless until his potential for unintentionally upsetting their carefully laid and precariously balanced plans becomes evident. The message that Yepanchin passes on to his wife, however, in order to distract her from her preoccupation with his own infatuation with Nastasya Filippovna, is that the prince is a wretched idiot and almost a beggar who is ready to accept charity. Yepanchina is consequently nervous, while her daughters decide to make sport with him. They soon realize he is much less eccentric and much more interesting than they had supposed, but no easier to place. Yepanchina decides that what she wants to know is how he tells a story, as though this perhaps will resolve their doubts about how, and if, he fits into normality as they perceive it. Meanwhile Aleksandra and Aglaya have decided provisionally that the prince is not an idiot but a rogue playing a part. The narrator allows Myshkin to tell his story in direct speech so that the reader too can judge. The reader may or may not warm to Myshkin but will undoubtedly conclude that the labels provided so far by other characters are unduly restrictive, though they revert to them in moments of difficulty throughout the novel - even the narrator does when, towards the end, he endorses Radomsky's view. What emerges is a narrative which does not easily fit the world of the novel of manners in which it is embedded. It could form a part of a gothic text with its contrasts of the Swiss scenery, the goodness and innocence of the prince and the narratives of imprisonment and execution, though the relaxed tone of the narrative itself and its lack of a central adventure plot is quite unlike the gothic novel. It certainly does not conform to the cynical voice of the town gossip with his liking for scandal and trivialization.
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The only voice which will accommodate it is that of the sympathetic omniscient narrator who has more expansive views about normality. But, even so, if we are right in associating his voice with the chronotope of the family idyll, Myshkin's narrative challenges that model by its preoccupations with death, loneliness, victimization, cruelty and alienation, against which he sets his own childlike trust, affection and insight into the sufferings of others who are frequently denied that insight once they have been labelled by society as outcasts. The norm (though not the narrative voice or focus) which Myshkin's recollections evoke above all is that of the Gospel narrative, also characterized by discourse about human contact with outcasts (lepers, madmen, criminals, prostitutes, the financially corrupt, Samaritans, Romans) who are negatively labelled by society, and which from the beginning of the narrative (the slaughter of the innocents, the execution of John the Baptist) to its penultimate chapter (the Crucifixion) recounts a series of bloody executions, especially of the innocent. Many of the motifs of the story also recall the Gospel narratives - the donkey, the children, the fallen woman called Marie, the inhumanity of the priest... The mode of narration is not however that of the Gospels, not that of an evangelist recording for the community of the faithful the miraculous life, death and resurrection of a prophet sent by God to save his people, in tones derived from Holy Scriptures and with a figural conception of truth of which his own narrative would come to form a part. It might rather be seen, to use Bakhtin's terms again, as an example of authoritative discourse (Holy Writ) become internally persuasive discourse (translated into the experience/discourse of an everyday, secular reality). We have seen that there is more than one 'discourse of everyday reality'. Myshkin's choice is that of sympathetic, compassionate narrator - that of the family idyll - telling of the lot of people who are persecuted and whose souls are in turmoil, and of his own role in seeking to reconcile them to their persecutors. His one theme is the propensity of social groups to label some of their members as outcasts by virtue of some 'crime' they are deemed to have committed, and henceforth to refuse them human warmth and compassion, to deny them their subjectivity in relation to other subjects - the ultimate fate of the earthly Jesus among the Jews. When the prince leaves the room they are unsure whether he is nice but rather simple or whether he is just pretending to be simple and nice.
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The truth, as perceived by the reader, is that he is not direct and open in all respects: he is responsive to the embarrassment he causes other people by his lack of savoir-faire and tries to modify his behaviour to minimize the embarrassment. Yet sometimes he overlooks the most important thing (e.g. that mention of Nastasya Filippovna in the Yepanchin household is likely to cause consternation). Once the penny has dropped he becomes elusive on this subject too. Such temporizing, together with his own enigmatic comments (that perhaps he does not speak entirely out of simplemindedness but has his own 'idea') 7 together with the narrator's intimations that a 'strange, though still rather vague idea was beginning to take shape in his head' 8 encourage the impression that he cannot be taken entirely at face-value and therefore give grounds for the sort of doubt which besets the Yepanchin women and even later the narrator and consequently the reader. In telling stories about distant events and people Myshkin's directness is unimpaired. Once he becomes conscious of the reactions of his audience he becomes embarrassed and awkward. This is not simply because other people are unwilling to confirm him, but because they are uncertain what label to attach to him within their system of perceptions. It soon becomes evident that the prince has a number of problems in sustaining open interpersonal relations with those among whom he has fallen, which makes it even more difficult for them to situate him. The first is that they are all engaged in secretive manoeuvres in which he is expected to collude. He soon finds that if he does not play the games their way (as with the tact expected of him over Nastasya Filippovna's portrait or Ganya's note to Aglaya) he provokes annoyance and anger; and he is not insensitive to personal attacks. His open trustfulness leads him to blurt out the news about the portrait and to accept Ganya's commission in spite of misgivings: in other words to put himself in a position where he has to restrain his openness towards others or betray someone else's secrets. Keeping faith with some involves being less than frank with others, even risking being thought to be involved in other people's conspiracies. Yepanchina perceives this dilemma and comes out on the side of trustfulness and openness.9 Aglaya, in spite of the suspicions she utters, actually trusts him with confidences only a couple of hours after she has first met him. 10 Ganya suffers most, however, from the prince's unwitting involvement in his affairs: twice he unthinkingly calls him an idiot to his face, not presumably intending any clinical definition, but
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indicating his fury at Myshkin's lack of discretion in matters which are highly sensitive, which he has stumbled on by accident and which are none of his business. It is Ganya who first decides that the prince is definitely a dissembling rogue: he cannot reconcile his openness and social naivete with his intelligence and insight. When the prince takes exception to being called an idiot it seems to Ganya that he has removed his mask.11 The reader may feel that there would have been less embarrassment had Myshkin been less open and trustful (shown more discretion). In that case he would have made less of an impact of a positive kind as well. Adelaida has remarked that with beauty like that of Nastasya Filippovna one could turn the world upside down and the reader will soon discover (as Totsky had years before) that she is certainly capable of upsetting the world of superficial propriety and good manners. Rogozhin, by his own account and by the effect which his name has on others, clearly has a similar potential. It is now becoming evident that Myshkin has this capacity too. The superficially respectable but cynical world of Totsky and the Yepanchins (the world of the novel of manners) is in imminent danger. Whether this danger is posed chiefly by the carnival world of the gothic, by the erosive tactics of rumour and gossip, or by the subjective openness of Myshkin remains to be seen. In fact it is robust enough to survive all three, but not without sustaining serious damage to the youngest and favourite daughter. The next scene is set in the home of the other General's family, that of Ganya's parents, also threatened with disruption by Nastasya Filippovna, although already much nearer the point of disintegration. Here is a drawing room come down in the world, in which the elegant posing of high society is reduced to crude and transparent falsification: the boarder Ferdyshchenko specializes in creating an effect by his eccentricity, that is, in putting on an act which usually creates a bad effect. General Ivolgin indulges in recollections which seem to be partly or wholly the product of fantasy and which he passes off for truth. Ganya's mother wonders how Ganya could have persuaded Nastasya Filippovna that he loves her when he clearly does not. The prince, again without intending to, ushers in Ganya's nightmare: Nastasya Filippovna arrives and meets his family with the apparent intention of humiliating them all, though she finally shows what seems to be genuine respect for Ganya's mother. The suggestion that reality has merged with dream and nightmare is strengthened by the way that
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the prince and Nastasya Filippovna both feel that they have seen each other somewhere before. It is now Nastasya Filippovna who (foreshadowing the game at her own party) provokes Ivolgin into spinning one of his notorious yarns (which this time he has filched from LlndependanceBeige). The Rogozhin party irrupts into the house, and the scene culminates in Ganya's slapping the prince as he tries to prevent him striking Varya. Myshkin finally reproaches Nastasya Filippovna with pretending to be something she isn't and she accepts the reproach. The prince has been less perceptive with Ganya, whom he has come to dislike and only takes to when the latter makes it up in an access of childlike enthusiasm. Subsequently, at Nastasya's party, he vouches personally for the fact that Myshkin is certainly not 'an idiot'. But it is evident that Myshkin too is vulnerable to that mutual closure which forbids intersubjective exchange. It is imoortant to note this, because some readers express surprise at later developments which are subtly foreshadowed here. In his Kafka-like tour around Petersburg that evening with General Ivolgin all his companion's conversation and activity seem to be composed of falsehoods, the only distinction to be made between them being the degree of their plausibility. The straightforward and reliable Kolya rescues him and guides him to the party. So we come to the third drawing-room scene. Nastasya Filippovna knows exactly how to set up a Dostoyevskian scandal (a technique which we examined in the last chapter) in which a carnival reversal of proprieties is calculated to occur. She provides on the one hand an occasion when the preservation of social proprieties is important to a number of people with unsavoury secrets and populates her drawing room with them. Her previous parties have been known for their decorum. She also creates a situation in which they are all justifiably fearful that propriety will be undermined and stage-manages the presence or the arrival of others who will assist the process. Like other characters in other Dostoyevsky novels, she knows that the confrontation of the vain and the outwardly respectable with the vulgar and eccentric is a sure way of preparing the ground for the impending catastrophe and for stirring up emotions which are normally kept safely under conscious control. Ferdyshchenko is there for that purpose and Nastasya Filippovna seems to welcome the prince's unexpected arrival at least partly for the same reason. While she appears to be waiting for some unannounced event and all
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are on tenterhooks about her decision concerning marriage to Ganya, Ferdyshchenko proposes his parlour game: that each of them should tell the story of the worst action of his life - the interesting thing being to see what sort of lies each will tell. By refusing to respond in kind to the vulgarity of Ferdyshchenko's story and by the veneer of elegance and respectability with which Totsky's and Yepanchin's stories are told, the company more or less preserves its poise. Nastasya Filippovna, however, follows this up by asking the prince an unthinkable question: to decide for her whether or not she should marry Ganya (thereby incidentally making essentially the same request as Ganya had vainly made of Aglaya). She insists that this is 'her story', thus blurring again the distinction between lived and narrated experience. There follows Rogozhin's second irruption on the scene, the prince's proposal, his announcement of his fortune, Nastasya's acceptance of him and then her change of mind; her throwing of Rogozhin's money on the fire, its rescue and her departure with him. Yepanchin exclaims that it is Sodom. It is, as Nastasya Filippovna declares, 'her holiday', her prazdnik (a Bakhtinian carnival), in which she turns upside down all proprieties, all decorum, compulsively reversing her own declared attitudes even within the scene itself. The beggar becomes a rich man; the beautiful former mistress declares herself first a princess and then a woman of the streets. The chaos and low humour of the streets invade the high society salon and depart again bearing off their prize. There is plenty here to drive anyone crazy: Ganya, Totsky, Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna, Rogozhin. All six of Searles' strategies are at work in this scene. A thorough analysis is unnecessary because it is not the principal point of this chapter, but a few examples may serve to bring the point out. Who can doubt that Nastasya Filippovna and Myshkin call attention to areas of the other's personality of which they are themselves only dimly aware and which are quite at variance with the kind of people they normally consider themselves to be; that Nastasya Filippovna stimulates Ganya's passion (for money) in a situation in which it would be (psychologically and socially) disastrous for him to seek gratification; that she exposes Rogozhin (and Myshkin, and Totsky and Yepanchin) to stimulation and frustration and to rapidly alternating stimulation and frustration; that she relates to herself and Myshkin at simultaneously unrelated levels (as a wealthy prince and as a sick idiot); that she switches from one emotional wavelength to another while on the same topic (his proposal to her and many other things). It is perhaps
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Totsky who best exemplifies the strategy of switching from one topic to the next (the trivial to the matter of life and death) while maintaining the same emotional wavelength, but all the stories, including Nastasya's, do it. Above all Nastasya Filippovna stimulates a feeling of confidence and relief in people who have a passionate interest in her behaving in a certain way, and then turns on them, laughs at them and does the opposite. The prince wilts and Nastasya herself is reputed to have gone mad that evening. This scene not only depicts other aspects of the prince's character, by showing him in a new, testing situation (how could this avowedly sexless creature seriously think of marrying Nastasya?). It also introduces a change in his social status. He is now not a beggar or a scrounger: he has a fortune.
But none of this is aimed directly at readers' emotions except insofar as they have come to participate imaginatively in the scene, to identify with Myshkin or, less probably, one of the other characters. As Miller notes, the major scenes, which could have been the subject of gothic narrative, have actually been relayed dramatically, with a minimum of narratorial comment. Readers will not yet have been greatly upset by changes in the narrator's voice, but they may have become aware of an underlying lack of firmness, as indeed they should have become aware that Myshkin, for all his openness, is not impervious to the responses of others and occasionally has recourse to defensive strategies of closure. Miller says: By the end of Part 1 a definite pattern of narration has emerged; the reader has become acquainted with the narrator's voices and has acquired grounds for expecting when a particular voice will appear. The narrator will describe Totsky and the general in an ironic mode, relying heavily upon public opinions and rumors. He will use a similar voice for the rest of the Epanchin family, but there, in addition, he has an eye for the details of domestic life and manners. Though entering the prince's mind rarely, when he does so, the narrator bewilders the reader; he refrains from an ironic, distanced presentation of the hero. All this seems fitting and proper, and the reader's trust in the narrator's judgment, taste, and tact has been established.12 PART II
It is in Part 11 that the narrative patterns become more pronounced. It opens with the ironic detached voice of the chronicler who cannot (or
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prefers not to) do more than retell a mixture of rumours and facts for which he can vouch. It seems as if the narrator knows about Myshkin's activities only when he is in Petersburg and its environs and then he is sometimes, though oddly not always, privy even to his thoughts and feelings. Myshkin receives a further casual label when Aglaya puts his note in a copy of Don Quixote. The narrative continues from closer quarters as we are told of the prince's arrival at Lebedev's house at Peski. Lebedev's clowning, posturing and play-acting in order to elicit the prince's charity remind us again of the difficulty of penetrating behind the mask. Lebedev does it to ingratiate himself and exploit the prince. But Myshkin too is tempering his remarks to avoid giving offence - a more acceptable because less self-seeking form of ingratiation? - and Lebedev's nephew catches him out: 'Are you smiling at something Prince? You don't think I'm right, do you?' 'I'm not smiling, but I really don't think you're quite right,' the prince replied reluctantly. 'Tell me straight that I'm entirely wrong. Don't try to wriggle out of it. Why not quite right?' 'If you like, you're entirely wrong.' 'If I like! That's funny...'13 A little later the narrator tells us that the prince is beginning to feel an intense dislike of the young man. Chapters 3 and 4 recount Myshkin's visit to Rogozhin's house, his anecdotes in response to Rogozhin's questions about his belief in God, Rogozhin's account of his treatment by Nastasya, the Holbein picture of Christ taken from the cross and the argument about the knife. Nastasya alternately mocks and torments Rogozhin and then subsides and promises to marry him. Twice she has been on the brink and then has run away. Once he has beaten her black and blue and then refuses to eat until she has forgiven him. He is in an 'untenable position': he is tormented even in his dreams by the thought of her with another man, while knowing that she would be better off with someone else; in her presence he is tormented by her alternating complaisance and mockery, the chance that she may some day marry him with the knowledge that one way or the other he will probably end up murdering her. Nastasya acknowledges, even encourages him to think of, this last possibility. The prince is in an untenable position too. He also has been tormented by her coming and going, by her accepting marriage and
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then throwing it in his face. He loves her and pities her; he knows that a marriage with Rogozhin would be disastrous; he has promised Rogozhin not to interfere; Rogozhin has now yielded his claims to the prince. Nastasya herself is in an untenable position: she has cut her ties with Totsky and Yepanchin; if she commits herself to Myshkin she will destroy him; if to Rogozhin he will destroy her. But it is Myshkin who remains at centre stage and holds the narrator's and the reader's attention. The gothic mode comes into its own in chapter 5 as Myshkin wanders in a feverish state through Petersburg, haunted by Rogozhin's eyes and a terrible demon which has attached itself to him; mesmerised by the knife in the shop window and the idea that Rogozhin is planning a murder; prey to sudden impulses and ideas; absorbed by a desire for solitude and thoughts of his experience of luminosity and darkness when having an epileptic fit. This gives a new dimension to the reader's perception of Myshkin. Whatever his performance in the world of good society, he is uniquely blessed or cursed with an experience of supreme spiritual harmony and spiritual darkness and stupor. The idea that he is mentally limited, which has had to be abandoned in the light of his own responsiveness to his new surroundings, now has to be fundamentally revised. His superior intelligence is not simply a sensitivity to other people's sufferings, what Bakhtin would call vzhivaniye.14 It is also an extraordinary, mystical, perhaps morbid, knowledge of the extremes of spiritual experience. The scene ends with Rogozhin's murder attempt frustrated by the prince's sudden epileptic fit on the stairs. It is at this point that there is a further unexpected complication in the plot which makes many readers uneasy. The triangle involving Rogozhin, Myshkin and Nastasya fades into the background and a relationship between the prince and Aglaya comes to the fore. The prince is convalescing and it may seem to the reader unwise for him to welcome to the Pavlovsk dacha all who choose to call, including a number of highly strung people in a highly excitable mood. The voice of the narrator has reverted to that of the novel of ill-manners, though the scenes and characters it describes seem rather to belong to the streets. The tone is comic, though it becomes more serious when Pushkin's poem The poor knight is introduced, with Aglaya's allusions to Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna. Here another label is applied to Myshkin, by a jealous Aglaya obsessed by the prince's relationship with Nastasya. The reader is unlikely to find that it clarifies much in Myshkin, though it
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does effectively bring to the foreground and help to characterize Aglaya's ambiguous feelings for the prince and the prince's embarrassment at the thought of some emotional involvement between himself and the youngest Yepanchin girl. The poor knight, she says, is a serious Don Quixote. Don Quixote's name has previously been associated with the prince. Although a lot of people are privy to and appreciate Aglaya's 'joke', it is far from clear that they regard it as anything more than this. Readers will not, because by now they know too much about Myshkin to accept a definition of him in terms of a limited literary stereotype. What happens next- the arrival of Tavlishchev's son' and his retinue - is more serious, bringing with it a detailed, satirical prose article by Keller in a humorous newspaper followed by a malicious epigram, all attacking Myshkin as a spoilt, selfish, stupid and wealthy scion of the nobility
and consisting of crude distortions. This objectification, like the last, is presented as such. No reader, however unsympathetic to Myshkin, is going to regard it as a fair and plausible account of him. Apart from characterizing the author of the portrait, therefore, it draws attention to the process of objectification (or the inevitable disjunction between sign and referent) as such. But the significant thing is that other characters have given up trying to situate Myshkin seriously in terms with which they are familiar, and their attempts now take on the appearance of parody. Such attempts are unlikely therefore to assist the reader much in understanding Myshkin. What of the narrator? Ganya's account of Burdovsky's origins appears just as wide of the mark in its (ironic?) attribution of honourable motives to all and sundry, including the probably corrupt lawyer Chebarov, as Keller's article about the prince had seemed. What emerges is that Myshkin is still quite unable to achieve a balance between open sincerity and honest speaking on the one hand and avoidance of giving offence on the other. Either he is accused of being intentionally offensive or of being deceitful and scheming: Yes, Prince, to do you justice you certainly know how to exploit your - well, illness (to put it politely). You've contrived to offer your friendship and money in such a clever way that no honest man could possibly accept them under any circumstances. That's either a little too innocent or a little too clever - you are in the best position to know which.15 This chapter ends with Nastasya Filippovna's cry to Radomsky from her carriage. The prince is feeling quite ill again as his guests depart.
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He soon develops anxiety about two extremes in his relations with others: a 'senseless and tiresome trustfulness' and a 'contemptible and gloomy suspiciousness'. He is less sure than he was about his ability to penetrate behind the mask of words and accompanying signs to the real motives of his companions: he is less sure about his judgement of people. He is in fact the victim of the eighth (our second supplementary) strategy for creating emotional confusion: having been repeatedly accused of being the exclusive cause of those particular acute disturbances occasioned by the conduct of his accusers. Moreover Ganya, who wants to exchange friendly confidences with him, finds him distracted and consequently assumes a tone of greater reserve himself. The main thing absorbing the prince is the thought that if he stays in this world any longer he will inevitably become absorbed in it. He feels he wants to flee to solitude, but dismisses it as cowardice. He confesses to Keller that he too suffers from 'double thoughts', that is, the coincidence of an innocent with a self-interested thought. Lebedev, however, uses words only to get the upper hand, irrespective of their truth or falsehood, and has made a regular business of it. PART III: DRIVING THE READER CRAZY (i)
If the novel up to this point has confused its readers about where they stand in relation to the text and the text in relation to some supposed anterior reality, it is in chapters 4 and 5 of Part 111 of the novel that disintegration seems almost complete. In some ways these chapters are the most unsatisfactory in the novel, from which it never really recovers. It is here probably that impatient readers first discover their impatience. But if this is so in terms of familiar fictional structures, we should not lose sight of the fact that Dostoyevsky is only pushing to an extreme the narrative techniques he deploys throughout the novel and with them the predicament of his characters when deprived of the conventional certainties of lived experience. As with The Double those junctures where Dostoyevsky seems to lose control may provide the crucial clues to his originality. These chapters may indeed be seen as a threshold not only for Myshkin and the other characters, but also for the narrator, a threshold from narrative confidence to uncertainty about the nature and validity of narrative itself. It is as if the narrator is dazed by events in his narrative and does not know what to make of them, pausing occasionally to talk rather
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pathetically to the reader about the problems of writing novels. Whether it is the nature of narrative and the knowledge it affords that is at stake, or whether the issue is that of alternative worlds (the difference between modernism and post-modernism as perceived by McHale) is, as we saw in the Introduction, a difficult question to resolve. It is in Part HI that the easy rapport between the narrator and the reader begins, says Miller, to undergo a strain. 'As he turns less reliable, it becomes important to distinguish the narrator's point of view from that of the implied author.' 16 To begin with the narrator indulges in some aimless and selfcontradictory thoughts about practical people, before resuming the Yepanchin family chronicle and a long and not very original disquisition by Radomsky on Russian liberals and socialists who, he protests, are actually anti-Russian. It is not clear whether Radomsky is serious or not because he often jokes with a straight face. News is passed around that Burdovsky and Ippolit have shown a sudden affection for the prince, but the prince himself seems to be in a very peculiar state. Whereas he had handled the Burdovsky affair quite well (except in the eyes of the Yepanchins who seemed to have felt compromised by it) he is now unable to distinguish joking from seriousness; his intuitive responses (e.g. to the Burdovsky group) seem at odds with his theorizing (e.g. about the effect of perverted ideas on the new generation); he seems to do things which perhaps he never meant to do (as when he approaches Radomsky to reassure him about something at the beginning of chapter 2); he confesses that his words and gestures do not fit his ideas and that they degrade them. He seems prey to alternating moods of excessive embarrassment and excessive rapture. As they go out into the pleasure gardens he seems (apart from noting Aglaya's mention of the green seat where she sits early in the morning) to switch off from the accompanying dialogue. Aglaya says he looks as though he is not sure whether she is real. As Miller says, the voice of the narrator is still appropriate to its subject (as previously established) but the tempo of change increases. He now moves into gothic gear as Myshkin's thoughts become ever more fantastic and dreamlike with the appearance of Rogozhin and Nastasya Filippovna. The dreamlike nature of this episode is strengthened by the fact that it is just the sort of dream Myshkin might be expected to have, containing echoes of 'real events' from the preceding narrative and structured by the relationships with Nastasya and Rogozhin
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which he has tried to suppress from his waking life. Had the narrator presented it as a dream the reader would not have found it at all implausible. It ends with Nastasya striking an officer in the face with a riding crop, and Myshkin restraining the officer's arm. The greater the confusion the greater the need to 'understand'. Other characters perceive this event as part of an intrigue and periodically become convinced that they have 'understood' vaguely what is going on and who is involved in it. All the same it is not clear to the reader, and whether the narrator knows is also not clear. General Yepanchin says of his wife, She's in hysterics, she's crying and declaring that we've been shamed and disgraced. Who? How? By whom? When and why?... I agree that the future is full of endless possibilities and that there is much that remains unexplained. There's certainly some kind of intrigue going on, but although we here don't know anything about it, they can't explain it either. If I haven't heard, you haven't heard, he hasn't heard, and the next person hasn't heard, then who, I ask you, has heard? How do you propose to explain it except by assuming that half of it is a mirage and doesn't really exist, that it's all moonshine or some kind of apparition.17
When Keller confirms the prospect of a duel the prince seems almost hysterical himself and even proposes that they get drunk. The ensuing conversation with Rogozhin in the park is again vague and disquieting and dreamlike, full of apparent explanations which actually explain nothing, because, although plausible, they are based on speculation about the motives of others and incapable of being confirmed. Chapter 4 is even more dreamlike in its opening. The prince arrives home with Rogozhin to find a party in full swing with the most unlikely guests. He 'suddenly realizes' it is his birthday. Once the scene has been set the narrator lets the dialogue continue with the minimum of comment. But it is a very curious dialogue, seemingly with very little structure, a series of guests coming up to Myshkin and saying the most surprising things. Certain events in the plot that promised the most fateful consequences (e.g., the prospective duel) are resolved almost in passing; other important developments which in the course of time come to nothing (such as Radomsky's desire to have an important conversation with Myshkin) are foreshadowed. Why, readers may wonder, is the narrator presenting all this to them? Various people (Radomsky, Ganya, Keller, Lebedev, Ippolit) seem in an unnaturally spirited mood which augurs no good, while the prince
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seems improbably serious about the most grotesque discussions (such as Lebedev's talk about medieval cannibals and their preference for eating monks). Lebedev's disquisitions and even his exchanges with the flippant and ironic Radomsky seem to contain the occasional nugget of wisdom surrounded by an extraordinary concoction of intellectual dross. People are contradicting their emotions of yesterday (Ippolit now says he does not like the prince). Some are suddenly changing moods for no very clear reason and behaving out of character, creating a strange impression on others (for example Radomsky in his reaction to Ippolit's production of the 'Explanation'.) The prince's frightened gesture frightens Ippolit. No-one is in control of events. No implicit rule of decorum prevails. No-one takes charge, there are no Yepanchins or Totsky here this time to set the tone. From time to time someone or other seems temporarily to dominate the unruly conversation by the impossible and unexpected nature of his contribution. Least of all is the prince in charge now. He does not know what to do about Ippolit's threat to kill himself. It does not even occur to him to take the gun away. Yet for a long time no-one seems able to get away from the scene which exercises a strange fascination over them all. And readers, so long as they go on reading, are in the same predicament. They are imprisoned in this world of barely structured dialogue and emotional provocation where ill-defined ideas flash through people's minds (sometimes all of them together) but without their nature being conveyed to the reader: 'a certain idea, which was common to them all, flashed faintly through their minds'. 18 In other words they are overcome by vaguely apprehended ideas which seem momentarily to offer an explanation for what they have not grasped. The reader too is waiting desperately for a clarification and explanation. Ippolit's so-called 'Explanation' therefore offers tempting bait. The narrative itself is full of conventional intimations of resolutions and clarifications-to-come which never materialize. The techniques of effective story-telling themselves are being undermined. Indeed in this section the narrator abandons (or travesties) such techniques and lets the characters speak whatever rubbish comes into their heads. Within the narrative nobody seems able or willing consistently to confirm the self-image of the other. Ippolit's principal motive for the confession, it appears, is to test the reactions of his audience.
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The notorious chapters 4 and 5 of Part 111 are crucial in the establishment of this new tone, which, in my view, is not simply a confusion of the previous ones (i.e., a negative phenomenon) but a new distinctive phenomenon in its own right not unlike a dream in which signifiers detach themselves from their signifieds and attach themselves elsewhere in accordance with Freudian principles of displacement and condensation. It applies to the reader the techniques of creating emotional and perceptual confusion. But it is not simply that the reader cannot tell which 'false norm' to adopt because the narrator keeps shifting his position. It is because he has withdrawn all (or almost all) decisive markers; we do not even know what sort of conduct is appropriate in the context, because the context conforms to no recognizable social situation; we are no longer sure what the different characters feel about each other at any particular moment or what conduct to expect from them; the conversation is peppered with generalizations about human motives and relationships, about the impossibility of expressing truth (or even one's own thoughts) in words, about the value and joy of seeking reality (America) rather than of finding it, about the impossibility of calculating more than a few moves ahead in life and the incalculable effect of the 'seeds of goodness' which men sow in their encounters with others. Finally Ippolit says that his 'last conviction' came about not owing to any logical process but as the result of some curious shock. It was not therefore a logical, but an emotional, response. I would suggest that the confession and the surrounding dialogue are about two related themes: the lure and impossibility of complete intersubjectivity and the ultimate inadequacy of human discourse to render experience or to grasp truth. In his late notebooks Dostoyevsky points to Ippolit not simply as the centre of this Part, but of his whole novel.19 There is an important clue here. Compare Ippolit's story with Myshkin's recollections of Switzerland or the well-structured and carefully planned 'stories' of Nastasya's party in Part 1. It rambles from one episode to another, from a profound thought to a trivial one, from 'gothic' dream to the 'social reality' of the Natural School, from nihilism to individual philanthropy, from intimate conversation to strategies of exclusion. The sense of being an outcast, separated from the festival of Nature as from communion with fellow human beings, is what haunts Ippolit on his death-bed. Ippolit is not excluded from dialogue in Bakhtin's general sense,
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from responding to the dialogue of others and to evoking responses. Nor is he denied the emotional response of others. (He is not just ignored.) What he is denied is positive emotional confirmation, and what he deploys in response are strategies for creating emotional and perceptual confusion. It is noticeable how many of the characters approach Myshkin during this succession of scenes to ask him to be their friend or to assure him of their friendship (Radomsky, Aglaya, Ippolit and others) subsequently to have second thoughts. When the narrator steps aside, what he reveals, therefore, are characters using the same techniques. Of course Ippolit does not literally drive anyone mad, because for the most part they distance themselves emotionally and withdraw into worldly cynicism. But what of the prince? He is the one character who is unlikely to do this and who is at the same time most vulnerable to such techniques. After Ippolit's abortive suicide attempt Myshkin reflects that he too feels excluded from the same festival of Nature. There follow his dream on the green seat in the park and his conversation with Aglaya in which some dark patches in Myshkin's past relations with Nastasya and his feelings for both her and Aglaya are really clarified. Oddly, in view of his illness, lack of sleep and the way his nerves have been exposed by recent experiences, he seems to behave more normally, to be more relaxed, and the narrative seems to proceed more as the reader has come to expect as he returns home after a brief interview with Yepanchina. But the succession of trivial incidents concerning minor characters still occupies the prince's and the narrator's attention. Both seem slightly fazed by the experience. There now follows the beginning of the episode of the theft of Lebedev's four hundred roubles by General Ivolgin (an echo of Ferdyshchenko's story in Part 1, as though the narrative is seeking to rediscover its bearings after a feverish interlude through figural echoes of the familiar). Still, the next section reverts to the question of the correspondence between Aglaya and Nastasya and to what concerns the main plot (or at least the principal characters). The letters, we are explicitly told, are like a bad dream and so, we sense, is Myshkin's encounter with Nastasya in the park when she throws herself at his feet and asks if he is happy. The reader has been taken through some extraordinary experiences in Part in (unparalleled anywhere in literature). Miller rightly points to the fact that the only thing the reader may feel sure of is that occa-
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sionally the narrator will reveal the state of the prince's psyche: in that sense he draws closer to his hero. As I have repeatedly intimated the narrator is employing strategies for creating emotional confusion: while he employs the
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narrator is relentlessly present throughout Part iv, only to disclaim responsibility for the narrative. (b) the narrator switches from one narrative voice to another while on the same topic, being serious and ironic, clear or confused, about the same thing (strategy 5). The best examples of this strategy are to be found in Part iv. At the engagement party, at which Myshkin knocks over the vase, he seems to adopt what Miller calls an ironic or cynical attitude towards Myshkin; certainly it is patronizing and certainly he distances himself. In presenting all these facts and refusing to explain them, we are far from wishing to vindicate our hero in the eyes of our readers. On the contrary, we are inclined to share the indignation he aroused among his friends.21 (c) the narrator relates to the reader on simultaneously unrelated levels (those of implied author and narrator) and the distance between these two varies considerably from place to place (strategy 4). The gap is best illustrated by the narrator's treatment of Radomsky's intelligent but unsubtle account of Myshkin, of which the narrator explicitly approves. Miller quite rightly says that the narrator's reader has no choice but to accept this at face value (i.e., not ironically) but the implied reader cannot possibly rest content with yet another partially appropriate stereotype which is no more satisfactory than those which have preceded it. It is a further indication that the narrator has given up trying to understand Myshkin himself. (d) the narrator switches from one topic to another while maintaining the same emotional wavelength and dwells equally on trivial and serious topics, sometimes abandoning matters of life and death to pursue some apparently sordid episode (strategy 6). This strategy is adumbrated in chapters 4-5, but is more intensely used later on, e.g., where after Myshkin's abortive wedding he dilates on the personal and business affairs of a walk-on character.22 Perhaps a more serious example is the long digression on the fate of Ivolgin, where the narrator admits he is going to have to give more space to Ivolgin than he originally intended.23 PART IV: DRIVING THE READER CRAZY (il)
As Dostoyevsky's narrator sometimes does we have already run on ahead. Part rv (after the digression on ordinary people) opens with the
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news (relayed by Varya and later modified) that Aglaya and the prince are in spite of everything definitely engaged; but the reader still has to endure further developments in the Ivolgin household, which the narrator explains by saying that he is obliged to devote more space to the general than he had originally intended and forgo explanations, limiting himself to simple narrative. As Miller points out, he does not in the event limit himself in his way. The chief significance of the General's stories of his childhood in the service of Napoleon seems to lie in the prince's reaction: once again he restrains his natural honesty, which conflicts with his charitableness. He acts as though he believes the general, though he knows the General will later realize that he cannot have done. The prince's nocturnal visit to the Yepanchins' (when he arrives at midnight thinking it is still nine o'clock) followed by a quarrel with Aglaya results in her gift of a hedgehog: Lizaveta Prokofyevna [Yepanchina] was completely stunned by this news. There was no special reason but she happened to be in that kind of mood. Her alarm was aroused to quite an acute degree, and chiefly about the hedgehog. What did the hedgehog mean? What was their understanding about it? What did it signify? What sort of sign was it? What sort of message?24 No-one knows what it means, except that the narrator confirms (by now we may be unsure of his reliability in offering an opinion) that it is nothing but a sign of friendship. It appears rather to be a signifier without a signified. It may be see« as a metaphor for the problems of discourse which vitiate the whole text. When the princefinallyproposes to Aglaya and she apparently rejects him everything is still confusion. Her family are the more convinced that she loves him and that they will marry. The meaning of even the most forceful words is entirely obscure. The family assume that she means the opposite of what she appears to mean. Chapters 6 and 7 narrate the engagement party when Myshkin knocks over the vase. The Yepanchins are once again associated with external dignity and decorum. The prince, in spite of his efforts, becomes excited out of all proportion to the subject of the conversation, with results which are by now predictable. His philosophizing (in which he objectifies, generalizes, labels) seems to take leave of him, as though it is not him speaking, but some ideology is 'speaking him'. It is this which presumably drives the narrator finally to objectify the
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prince and to lose patience with him. Once the prince behaves like this, the narrator cannot, it appears, restrain himself further. So, after all, the voice of the omniscient narrator is only a pose like any other and is dislodged as the king-pin in the narrative structure. Chapter 8 finds Myshkin partly recovered from his fit and surrounded by sub-plot bustle. There follows the foursome arranged by Aglaya, the scene between the two women and Nastasya's victory. At the beginning of chapter 9 the narrator again says things are so complicated that he will not attempt explanations but limit himself to facts. Firstly the rumours throughout the area about what has happened, then the plans for the wedding. Radomsky's comments and the rest of the story swiftly follow. The opening of chapter 9 is an extremely good example of the voice of the cynical purveyor of current rumours. The narrator says he shares the general indignation at the prince's behaviour and moreover agrees with Radomsky. Radomsky is furiously objectifying, explaining the prince's behaviour by means of explanatory concepts like linherent inexperience*, {extraordinary simplicity*^ ^phenomenal lack of a sense of proportion\ {intellectual enthusiasm* and so on. T h e narrator now en-
dorses this. As we have remarked the final Part contains the most overt examples of the six strategies. The narrator's ironizing about Myshkin (strategy 1); the disjunction between implied author and narrator when the latter identifies with Radomsky in his estimate of the prince (strategy 2); the digressions on the Ivolgins and trivial themes (strategy 3); the tension about Myshkin's wedding and the murder of Nastasya (strategy 4). The fundamental strategy which the narrator now uses on the reader is the alternation of techniques for confirming and discontinuing the prince's subjectivity. In this strategy other characters play a role throughout the novel and frequently do so by evoking cultural stereotypes and finding them wanting. Towards the end the narrator comes out on the side of objectifying techniques which are clearly inadequate by the standards of his own previous practice. In one sense he has deconstructed the sympathetic and omniscient voice, removed its authority and centrality and given priority to the voice of the cynical narrator of the novel of ill-manners and his companion the chronicler of rumours. This narrator has the last word. On the other hand he has the last word only with respect to the
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linear sequence of utterances which make up the text and the temporality of a first reading. The omniscient narrator is much closer to the implied author/reader, and further reflection about the meaning of the text will almost certainly restore the original hierarchy of authority and oblige the reader to distinguish more clearly between implied author and narrator and consciously to give preference to the former. But, if the history of criticism of the novel is anything to judge by, this process of deconstruction and reconstruction will in all probability continue to tantalize attentive readers and leave them without a definitive and comprehensive image of Myshkin. This is not simply because they are confronted by the problem of piecing together a consistent account in the text. It is also, I suggest, because (as in Notes from Underground) they are confronted by the text with a problem about their own identity. To put it crudely: am I, the reader, the sort of person projected by the cynical (but sensible) narrator who brings the novel to a close? Am I capable, that is, of losing sight of all the fine, complex characteristics of the hero in my impatience with his conduct under extreme stress and his failure to measure up to a Christ-like image and to effect any general and permanent good in the world? Am I also inclined to dismiss him with a stereotyped label? If I decide I am not, then I have to start thinking again, to work out what I do think of the prince on all the evidence, and risk committing myself (in some sense) to a form of life which undoubtedly has enormous practical drawbacks. The alternative, therefore, seems to be: am I on the side of the intersubjectivity, childlike trustfulness, naivete, compassion and so on which leads the prince and many of those who are seduced by his personality to disaster? Both of these solutions may relate to strategies 5 and 6 as defined above. Both threaten to give prominence to areas of the personality which are at variance with what one supposes the self-image of most readers to be. Both, particularly the second, might be said (except by adherents of primitive Christianity) to stimulate conduct which, if acted out in real life, could lead to disaster. But it must be insisted that this opposition is not the same as the one implied in much of the secondary literature: is Myshkin saint or idiot? The reason for this is that both these are labels which represent inadequate paradigms. 'Saint' is of course the more difficult to define, but the literature on the subject of Myshkin's saintliness leaves little room for doubt that most readers who use the term have in mind
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'Christian' qualities of meekness, compassion, insight, childlikeness, and so on, perhaps also his vision of a higher harmony, and are greatly perplexed by evidence of 'double thoughts', darkness and stupor, failure of judgement and insight and negative features of this kind. We have seen how characters prompt the reader to apply various explanatory models from the stock of 'public opinion' and literature: idiot, rogue, 'holy fool', Don Quixote, Christ, Jesuit, immoral scion of nobility, 'poor knight', democrat. All these labels assist readers to try the adequacy of paradigms with which they are familiar and to take from them what may be appropriate. But readers who try to apply any of these paradigms in the style of Procrustes will find too many anomalies to remain satisfied. Long before they have encountered all these hints in the text they have become familiar with a new phenomenon to which all these paradigms are inadequate and which we may most conveniently, but imprecisely, label 'Myshkin'. It may bear a family resemblance to some of the others but that is all. In a similar way, I would suggest, readers are lured into assimilating the narrative to those associated with the different voices identified by Miller and supplemented in this chapter: in the end none of them will serve as a paradigm for the whole novel - what we are dealing with, as Bakhtin has pointed out, is a new phenomenon which he calls the 'polyphonic novel'. But it is a gross over-simplification to assume that each character has but one, static, definable voice. We may remind ourselves finally of the remaining two strategies in Searles' list and our two supplementary strategies. These are more difficult to translate to the plane of reading. At first I thought that strategy 7 was not present, but on reflection I think it may turn out to be the most fundamental. (e) The narrator reveals indirectly and by repeated hints that he knows his readers' guilty secret (that they are given to a naive, unreflective acceptance of the fiction as having referential status, and can easily be lured into taking verisimilitude for reality, especially if it involves reassuring objectification?), while declining to come out with it openly. There is a sense, of course, in which this is the reality of individual consciousness in Dostoyevsky's world of 'fantastic realism', a form of consciousness which however is never allowed to rest easy. (f) Or perhaps strategy 7 should be taken together with strategy 1. Is the 'guilty secret' the reader's intuitive sympathy with the emotional
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underground of which Elizabeth Dalton writes so eloquently and convincingly, while ostensibly responding to the level of the story, or to the ideological and religious levels of the text? Perhaps the narrator does call attention to areas of the personality of which the reader is but dimly aware, areas quite at variance with the kind of person the reader considers himself or herself to be: evidence from real readers (admittedly unsystematically gathered) together with the kinship discovered between Dostoyevsky and Freud, would suggest that this is probably so. What is certain is that any reader who to any extent identifies with the major characters is identifying with emotions and experience which the reader posited by the ironic narrator (who encourages objectification and the labelling of people as 'practical', 'ordinary' and so on) could not possibly be expected to have. More to the point perhaps is the fact that the implied reader is expected to respond in ways which the narrator's reader will be too shallow to understand. At all events it is necessary, if strategies for creating emotional confusion are to have any profound effect, for the reader to have a considerable emotional involvement in the text. (g) Perhaps also there is an implication that the reader and not the narrator is responsible for any confusion which may arise. Insofar as the reader is drawn into collusion with the narrator and subsequently reproaches him- or herself, then one may argue that some such technique is at work (strategy 8). But there is an even more tantalizing possibility here, that the conduct of the narrator is akin to that of someone thrown off balance by the reader's 'silence' in the face of his (the narrator's) own need for confirmation in his strongly implied sympathy for the aberrant Myshkin. Hence, it might be argued, his nervous, confused and illogical diversions on the problems of writing novels, on ordinary and practical people and so on, as though he is himself nervously uncertain what position he is 'in' in relation to the reader. Silence, as is well known, is the most devastating response to the demand for confirmation. But this takes us beyond the bounds of what can be demonstrated in relation to the text. (h) Finally, does the narrator stimulate his readers emotionally in a situation in which it would be disastrous for them to seek gratification (strategy 2)? I cannot offer more than an intuitive answer to this question. It implicitly raises all those questions about the impact of
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fiction on the conduct of readers which are so frequently debated in the context of moral censorship. It is certainly true that any reader who felt tempted to act out a typically Dostoyevskian scene in a setting of social respectability would quite likely trigger off a scandal which might merit the label disastrous. I have witnessed such scenes but do not know how far Dostoyevsky was to blame. Do we assume that most readers live in such settings and that this is the implicit norm (not very different from that of Tolstoy) which most readers import? To end on a not entirely whimsical note, it is possible that, while the deployment of these strategies on some readers may leave them distraught, the effect on others (as Laing suggests is the case with a successful psychotherapist using strategy 1) may be to clarify. This, after all, is perhaps only another way of expressing the Aristotelian idea of catharsis.
PART THREE
Chinese Whispers
7 The Marion motif: the whisper of the precursor
In the preceding chapters I have attempted to explore certain lines of enquiry suggested by Bakhtin beyond the limits which he himself observes. I have tried to demonstrate how dialogue with the other is linked with emotional polarities and reversals of the kind which we have come to recognize in Dostoyevsky's text and that these are linked to ideological polarities and reversals. I have also tried to show that the emotional dimensions of dialogue involve narrator-reader as well as character-character and narratorcharacter relationships. In the course of my examination of the nature of these relationships I have discussed the way in which each participant in the dialogue is drawn into the process of positing norms which are then subverted as the (reading of the) text proceeds. This positing and subversion can be examined on the level of interpersonal emotional relationships, on the philosophical level and on the level of discourse, and result in the undoing of equations which have been made in the original acts of positing, to the point where the possibility that this process is in principle endless imposes itself on the reader's consciousness. And not only on the reader's. Some of Dostoyevsky's characters, notably the Man from Underground, are caught up in similar terrifying possibilities. Bakhtin stresses that Dostoyevsky's world is essentially a world of coexistence and interaction: 'he saw and conceived his world primarily in terms of space, not time'. 1 The dialectic I have been examining has been viewed in this way too, from a synchronic standpoint. But Bakhtin does not exclude the diachronic, the dimension of becoming. His stress on double-voiced discourse, in which the utterance both responds to a previous utterance and anticipates a rejoinder {ad infinitum?) invites development. Indeed his lengthy and copiously illustrated discussions of parody, hybridization and stylization, in which texts are superimposed on each other, implicitly pose the question as to whether this too is a process potentially without end. 149
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In this chapter and the next I shall explore examples of double-voiced discourse from a diachronic viewpoint, and although I shall only scratch the surface of this very rich field I shall include chains of rejoinders and anticipations which extend beyond Dostoyevsky's texts and also look at their function within the text. I shall concentrate on textual 'memories' in this chapter and 'repression5 in the next. This division of emphasis is merely for the sake of clarity. In the texts themselves they are indivisible. And we may perhaps guess at, though I shall not discuss, similar processes at work in the reader-text relationship. In my analyses of synchronic phenomena I emphasized both the assertion of norms and their subversion, and the consequent illusions of continuity and discontinuity, of mastery of reality and its elusiveness. The same features are to be found in this diachronic analysis. Moreover I shall discuss the ways in which motifs are modified in their migration from one text to another. CHAINS OF ECHOES
People in many countries play a party game which in Britain is sometimes called Chinese Whispers. It involves a group of people whispering a message one to another until the message gets to the end of the line. The fun of the game is to see what distortions the message has undergone in the process of being transmitted. In reality people usually try to repeat exactly the words they have heard (Bakhtin's 'repeating by heart') and the deviations and distortions are unintentional. There are some examples in Dostoyevsky which might be likened to this (as when one of the characters in The Brothers Karamazov calls Alyosha 'Chernomazov', where both 'Kara' and 'Cherno' mean 'black'). The literary phenomena I intend analysing belong rather to Bakhtin's category of'retelling in one's own words' rather than translating. I shall not attempt to classify all the principal types of distortion which are possible where messages are ill-heard and the hearer has to make up the gaps. For the time being I shall suggest (following Freud's analysis of the dream-work) that such distortions are generally based on the principles of displacement or condensation, which may be likened to the tropes of metonymy and metaphor, the one based on contiguity and the other on likeness. Sometimes, needless to say, the two are found in combination. At each stage in the chain of retelling, revisions take place
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in accordance with the new context and these revisions are necessitated partly by the emotional demands of the narrator and partly by the formal requirements of the narrative. Imagine that all the participants in the game suddenly die and leave no record of their game except for the message as it started out and the message as it finished. Even if the two were identical, it would be in principle impossible, except by luck or speculation, to reconstruct the various stages through which the message was transformed. The passage of'influence' from one text to another is often as elusive as the unobserved stages in a game of Chinese Whispers. Though we may have endless satisfaction in identifying direct quotations and allusions it is very rare for us to find cases where we can with any degree of confidence attempt to reconstruct a whole complicated chain. DOSTOYEVSKY AND ROUSSEAU
In this chapter I intend to explore such a rare case and it concerns the 'influence' of Rousseau on Dostoyevsky, or, as Bakhtin might put it, the voice of Rousseau in Dostoyevsky's text. Moreover I hope to do three things in this chapter. The first is to show that a particular motif from Rousseau's Confessions plays an identifiable role in Dostoyevsky's work and that we can discern several important links in a chain. The second is to show how this motif is assimilated into Dostoyevsky's work (becomes, if you like, internally persuasive, by means of displacement, condensation and revision). The third task is to demonstrate that the evolution of this particular motif metonymically stands for the thematic movement of Dostoyevsky's work as a whole; in other words, that we can see in microcosm in the evolution of his treatment of this particular motif processes which are also to be discerned in macrocosm in his work as a whole. If this can be done, it should prove quite interesting. There is no doubt that Rousseau's voice belongs to that general category of influence which people loosely call 'pervasive'. Some of Dostoyevsky's passages have struck readers as 'the kind of thing Rousseau might have written in Dostoyevsky's place'. The reader senses that in some important respects Rousseau and Dostoyevsky are kindred spirits, that there are family resemblances awaiting definition and that, for example, Dostoyevsky's interest in the confessional mode must owe something significant to Rousseau. The Underground Man comments,
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Is it possible to be completely frank even about oneself and not to be afraid of the whole truth? Incidentally, I should like to mention that Heine stated that reliable autobiographies are almost an impossibility and that as soon as they start to talk about themselves people inevitably lie. According to Heine, Rousseau certainly lies about himself in his Confessions. He did so, moreover, intentionally, from vanity. I am certain that Heine was right. I understand perfectly how it is possible, in certain circumstances, to accuse oneself of a whole series of crimes, from pure vanity, and I understand that sort of vanity very well.2 But I am not concerned here principally with thematic or artistic questions. We have, I think, Dostoyevsky's authority for saying that particularly striking literary scenes (that is, scenes from other people's fiction) may sometimes play a crucial role in his work. Critics often recall the passage from his Notebooks where he says 'To write a novel the author must start with one or more strong impressions which his heart has actually experienced ... on the basis of which he develops a theme, a plan, a harmonious whole.' 3 Whether or not their emotional origin is to be found there, such impressions may, it seems, be actually experienced in reading. Versilov, in A Raw Youth, remarks that in the works of great artists there are scenes which are so painful that you remember them all your life: for example, Othello's last monologue, Yevgeny Onegin at Tatyana's feet, or the meeting at the well on a cold night between the fugitive convict and the little girl in Hugo's Les Miserables. Such scenes cut into the heart and leave a permanent wound.4 It is my hypothesis that Dostoyevsky found such a scene in Rousseau's Confessions (one of those tedious scandal scenes Razumikhin refers to in Crime and Punishment).5 It contains moreover a motif which, as we have already seen, is prominent in Crime and Punishment and which seems to have gripped Dostoyevsky's imagination to the point of obsession: the best name I can think of for it is 'gratuitous victimisation' and this is the constant factor which runs all along the chain. THE MARION STORY6
The Rousseau text is the Marion episode in Book 11 of the Confessions. The story concerns a period when Rousseau was in service. He steals a pink ribbon, but he does not hide it and it is soon found. When he is
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asked where he got it he accuses a maidservant, Marion, of having given it to him, thereby by implication accusing her of theft. The girl is of irreproachable character and it is improbable that she stole the article. But she is summoned and Rousseau repeats the accusation publicly and to her face. She quietly denies it and tearfully appeals to Rousseau not to ruin an innocent girl. The moderation of her replies compared with Rousseau's firmness tells against her and both end up by being dismissed. Rousseau is ignorant of her subsequent fate, but destitution probably awaits her. The narrative may be roughly divided into the following units: 1.
(a) An object of little value is stolen by the (male) author of the confession. (b) He falsely accuses another (young, female) person who is highly vulnerable and entirely innocent. (c) The victim denies the charge and reproaches him, but accepts her fate meekly. (d) The author allows her to be punished (dismissed) and consigned to probable destitution. (e) The author is also dismissed.
In his commentary on the episode the narrator makes, among others, the following points: 2.
(a) There was an element of perversity in his act. (b) There was an element of the actegratuit in it (he describes her as 'le premier objet qui s'offrit'). (c) He was actually quite fond of the girl and in a sense this was the cause of his accusation; he accused her of giving him the ribbon because he had himself intended giving it to her. (d) He did not fear punishment so much as shame. (e) Had the right words been uttered he would have confessed there and then. (f) What worried him most about her fate was not her probable destitution but the thought of what a young girl might be driven to by the humiliation of dishonoured innocence ('le decouragement de Pinnocence avilie').
Paul de Man, in his article on the purloined ribbon, 7 claims that the confession is not really a confessional text because to confess is to overcome guilt and shame in the name of truth. Rousseau not only
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confesses, he also excuses himself. On another level the function of the confession is to afford Rousseau a public scene of exposure, a stage on which to parade his disgrace, or, what amounts to the same thing, a good ending for Book n of his Confessions. Here then, in addition to the narrative units I distinguished, we have a number of factors in the narrator's motivation, firstly on the plane of motivation for the narrated acts and secondly on the plane of motives for the published confession. Robin Feuer Miller has already drawn attention to the parallel episode in The Idiot which is the first link in the chain occurring within Dostoyevsky's texts which we shall look at.8 This is because it is the clearest example, and there cannot be any reasonable doubt about its literary provenance, though if we apply the Chinese Whispers model, we shall remain uneasily aware that the clearest echo is not necessarily the first in the chain. THE DARYA STORY
The episode is Ferdyshchenko's story in the game at Nastasya Filippovna's party.9 It is also presented as a confession. Ferdyshchenko, in his story, is at a party and, for no reason he understands, steals a three-rouble note. The theft is discovered and the maids questioned. Suspicion falls on a maid called Darya. Ferdyshchenko tries to persuade her to confess. He feels an extraordinary sense of pleasure, preaching to her while the note is actually in his pocket. Later the girl is dismissed. It never occurs to him at the time to confess his crimes (either the theft or the false accusation). He does not say, probably does not know or care, what happened to the girl afterwards. When his story does not go down well he is very displeased. Taking into account the fictional context the reader may wonder whether Ferdyshchenko simply made up the story on the basis of Rousseau's, as General Ivolgin makes up a story about himself on the basis of a report in llndependance Beige.
The first four of the narrative units we noted in the Marion story are present, with some slight modification, in Ferdyshchenko's story as well. What has significantly changed is the motivation for the crimes described. He feels no sense of guilt or shame either at the time of the theft, slander and dismissal or later. On the contrary he feels an extraordinary sense of pleasure in combining high-sounding moralizing
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with a consciousness of his own villainy and her innocence. He shares only one apparent motive with Rousseau: of wanting to create an impression by his exposure of his own villainy, a motive which the Underground Man had noticed in Rousseau. To use Genette's terminology,10 we have here a significant transmotivation with regard to narrated acts, a partial transmotivation with respect to the confession. There is a significant though slight transformation in the narrative mode: it is the confession of a character rather than the author or fictional narrator. That means it is set within a context where the voices of other characters are to be heard, thus enhancing the degree of what Bakhtin calls 'polyphony'. Nevertheless it lacks the complexity of Rousseau's story. In abstract terms the voice is the same: that of the male victimizer; the focus is the same, though the victimizer is no longer a fellow-servant, but a guest and social superior. The reasons for confidence in attributing the parallels to Rousseau are various. The episode was at the time extremely widely known, probably the best-known episode of the Confessions, even among people who had not read them. Dostoyevsky, moreover, was undoubtedly familiar with it. Aside from passing remarks in his Notebooks there is Razumikhin's advice to Raskolnikov on suitable material for translation: 'When we finish that we'll start translating a book about whales, then I've got some very tedious scandals from the second part of the Confessions marked out, and we'll translate those.' 11 It is interesting to note that some crucial aspects of Rousseau's story which are not dealt with by Ferdyshchenko resound in other parts of the novel. Nastasya Filippovna's own story (the one Totsky is terrified that she will tell) is precisely about what a girl may be driven to by the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. That Dostoyevsky had thought this question through, with or without the hint from Rousseau, is not to be doubted. THE OLYA STORY 12
Now, by way of experiment, I want to look at a quite different and much more problematic case. The most that can be said is that it takes up the question that Ferdyshchenko failed to deal with and which constitutes the theme of Nastasya's untold story. There is an episode in A Raw Youth which, at first sight at any rate, bears a distant family relationship to the Marion story. It might perhaps be claimed, to echo an earlier remark, that it is the
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sort of thing that Rousseau might have written. It is surprising how powerful such impressions can be in spite of their apparent vagueness. The episode I have in mind is the story of little Olya in A Ram Youth. Olya, again a young, innocent and vulnerable girl, has just had a humiliating experience at a brothel which she visits owing to a naive mistake; shortly before that she has had a no less humiliating experience with a merchant. Soon afterwards Versilov, out of genuine good will, visits her and leaves her some money to tide her over while he finds her some work. She trustfully accepts the gesture. Later she comes to the conclusion that he too wishes to insult and humiliate her and seeks him out to fling the money back. Later in despair she hangs herself. We may distinguish three narrative units here. (a) The little girl displays naive trust towards the narrator's father. (b) This is followed by an outburst of humiliated rejection. (c) She hangs herself in despair. None of these narrative units parallel those of the Marion episode. Consequently, nor do the explanations. So what basis is there for a comparison? Let us invoke Genette's terminology again (though he himself would be more cautious), and try to assemble an argument. Firstly we may argue that the most crucial transformation here is a transfocalization. The focus of interest has shifted from the victimizer to the victim and elaborates precisely that element of motivation in the Marion story which was left hanging in the air - the thought of what a young girl might be driven to by the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. The girl thinks she is the victim of an act of gratuitous victimization - never mind whether in Versilov's case she is right - and she suffers the humiliation of dishonoured innocence - never mind whether she has just cause - and as a consequence takes her own life. The change in focus is accompanied by a change in voice. The story is told not by the victimizer but by the son of the man who performs this role, and, through him, by the mother of the victim. So there is an element of transvocalization here too. Undoubtedly there is also a very substantial transmotivation. The victimizer, if in deference to Olya we may still call him that, far from wishing to victimize, is actually trying to help. The motivation for Olya's action is, of course, suggested in the Marion story, but there is no corresponding recorded action. What we have then, it might be argued, is what Genette calls a continuation paraleptique (a paraleptic continuation) of Rousseau's story
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in which the psychological focus is shifted to the victim to such an extent that it is a matter of indifference what were the intentions and indeed the actions of the 'victimizer', provided that they were sufficient in context to produce the recorded effect (to resume the terminology of Part 11, 'to drive Olya crazy'). So, by the application of a few simple principles of transformation, the possibility of formal links between the two texts can be convincingly shown. What we may momentarily overlook - and the traditional hunter after influences typically overlooks - is that we are talking precisely of formal links between two texts and not of creative links between a precursor text and a reader/author. What is lacking is either an explicit and convincing avowal - which here does not seem to exist - o r a missing textual link or links which might serve as circumstantial evidence that we are dealing with a progressive assimilation of Rousseau's text over a number of Dostoyevsky's texts, as manifested in a chain of related episodes in the successor texts. Such evidence would not be absolutely conclusive, but would be very valuable. I believe there is such a chain in this case and the missing textual link is to be found, I shall argue, in The Devils. THE MATRYOSHA STORY 13
There are several versions of Stavrogin's 'Confession'. I have used the one dating from 1872 in Dostoyevsky's wife's hand. The confession was never published during Dostoyevsky's lifetime for reasons of public taste, but it was written as an integral part of Stavrogin's characterization. In his confession which, like Rousseau's, is presented (though here in the mouth of a character) as a written document, Stavrogin dwells on a particular episode. He recounts how he permits an innocent young girl to be beaten for stealing his missing penknife, although he had never intended this to happen and has no reason to think that she has taken it. Later it turns up on his bed where he had presumably mislaid it. If we compare this story with the Marion story and the Darya story we shall see that all three contain a number of narrative units in common, but, if we are to describe the units in the Matryosha story with any degree of precision, we shall note that in each case there has been a significant attenuation.
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(a) An object of little value is supposed to have been stolen; whereas in the Marion and Darya stories it really has. (b) A young girl who is highly vulnerable and entirely innocent is accused; but not by the male victimizer who stands passively by. (c) The victim apparently accepts her fate uncomplainingly; there is not even a protest. (d) The narrator allows her to be punished; but plays no active role and makes no accusation himself. He morally colludes in the injustice by not subsequently revealing that he has found the lost object. If there is attenuation in the substance of the narrative units there is, by way of contrast, an elaboration of the motivation. A study of the motivation of Stavrogin requires a much more detailed treatment than there is room for here, but no-one would deny that there would be a place in such a study for discussion of an element of perversity in Stavrogin's behaviour, an element of the acte gratuity the thesis that he did not fear punishment so much as shame (Tikhon's view), and the idea that Matryosha was the victim of the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. The third important shift is the inherent subversion of the mode of the confession itself. Paul de Man has shown that this is there in embryo in Rousseau's confession. In the preamble to Stavrogin's confession the narrator explicitly casts doubt on the reliability of Stavrogin's document, without being prepared to give a verdict. Thomas Barran, in a comparative study of Rousseau's and Stavrogin's confessions,14 says that Dostoyevsky attacks Rousseau's confessional genre with three main arguments: (1) indiscriminate candour alone does not expiate sins or establish the moral worth of an individual, but rather dulls the ability to distinguish good from evil; (2) written confession, no matter how avowedly sincere, cannot avoid presenting the confessor as he wishes to see himself, and not as he actually is; (3) the very motives which impel men to confess on paper are all too often rooted in pride and contempt of others, rather than in a desire to expiate guilt or express remorse. But unlike Rousseau or Ferdyshchenko, Stavrogin does record what happened afterwards and he is deeply implicated in it. After the events briefly described above there is a sequel in which, in a sudden neurotic display of passion, previously suppressed, the young girl throws herself at Stavrogin. This is followed by a period of shame and withdrawal and
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finally by suicide. What seem to be the major narrative units here are not identical with those in the Olya story, but the underlying psychological sequence is in one respect very similar. In each case the child's ideal of innocence is subverted, she is emotionally drawn to the person she sees as victimizer, then covered in shame, finally to kill herself. The two parts of the Stavrogin-Matryosha story knit together Dostoyevsky's transformation of Rousseau in The Idiot and the Olya story in A Raw Youth and demonstrate the reality of the family likeness which, taken in isolation, it cost such pains and methodological contortions to bring to light. THE THEMATIC MOVEMENT OF DOSTOYEVSKY'S NOVELS
Earlier I made a more substantial claim, that here we have not simply a series of episodes which display a progressive assimilation and transformation, but also one which metonymically 'stands for' the thematic movement of Dostoyevsky's work as a whole. The essence of this claim can be seen in the transformations which, by way of experiment, I noted in my discussion of the Olya episode. In the course of progressive assimilation into Dostoyevsky's texts the Marion episode has undergone weakening in some respects and strengthening in others. Let me mention the most important. Firstly there is a change in narrative mode; the confessional genre has been subverted and has almost disappeared as direct dialogue with the reader. Secondly, the voice is not that of the victimizer but of both victim and victimizer mediated by other voices. Thirdly, the focus has shifted relatively, but not entirely, from victimizer to victim and the contents of the victim's mind. Fourthly, there is alongside this a shift in motivation. Insofar as it concerns the victim it concentrates on the actions a young girl might be driven to by consciousness of the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. But insofar as it concerns the victimizer, it represents a shift from wilful, gratuitous victimization accompanied by various emotions, to unintended, accidental victimization existing in the mind of the victim rather than that of the victimizer. At the same time responsibility for the girl's misapprehension is distributed in some measure among a number of characters including the narrator, who has blackened Versilov's character in her presence.15
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Had we used the earlier variant of Stavrogin's confession preferred in the Soviet Academy edition of Dostoyevsky's works (based on the proofs of The Russian Messenger), we should have found that this confirmed our general thesis. There the collusion is more explicit: Stavrogin spots his penknife just as Matryosha's mother is reaching for the besom and he keeps silent on purpose. In this earlier version he also gratuitously steals a wallet from a civil servant between the two parts of the Matryosha story, thus, so to speak, redistributing parts of the Marion story and possibly tending to confirm our intuition of a link between the two. In the later version which we have used, these two elements (direct conscious involvement in bringing about the punishment and the retention of theft by the hero, albeit distanced from the principal story) are removed, thus illustrating the fine brushwork of the process of dispersal and attenuation which we have noted on a broader canvas. Perhaps it is hardly necessary to dwell on the parallel developments in Dostoyevsky's major works, because they are too well known already. I am referring to the intensification of what Bakhtin calls 'heteroglossia'. Equally important is the progressive thematic development from intentional act (for example, Raskolnikov's murder of the old woman) to unintended, or ambiguously intended effect (for example, Ivan's responsibility for his father's death) and from specific responsibility (for example, Totsky's violation of the young Nastasya) to generalized responsibility (for example, in The Brothers Karamazov). Moreover there is a movement away from the point of view of both victim and victimizer towards that of the implicated bystander. Compare The Brothers Karamazov again where the murder is as much, if not more of, a problem for the three brothers who did not commit it as for the one who did. CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS
In conclusion I should like to suggest the following general observations. 'Family resemblances' in texts may lead one away on trips of fantasy which have little to do with the principal characteristics of the text in question (other than the opportunities it affords for doing just that). But, where one can demonstrate that they pinpoint links in an evolutionary chain, the claim that something in Dostoyevsky is 'the sort
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of thing Rousseau might have written' is more weighty and tells us something interesting about Dostoyevsky's work itself. The study of chains of episodes like the one we have examined enables us to see 'influence' not primarily as the exploitation of a parent text by a successor text (though this may be relevant in the case of close parody or travesty or stylization - three of Bakhtin's favourite modes of intertextual dialogue), but in terms of a gradual assimilation and development which may, as in the present case, present parallels with the overall development of the writer's work. The chain may contain links which precede the point where the comparison with the present text is most obvious. It is not in fact Raskolnikov who 'translates' the tedious scandal from Book n of Rousseau's Confessions into Russian but, metaphorically speaking, Luzhin, in his attempt to compromise Sonya by planting money on her and publicly accusing her of theft. 16 It is Raskolnikov who saves her from the humiliation of dishonoured innocence. In the chronology of Dostoyevsky's work this precedes the Ferdyshchenko/Darya episode and perhaps should be inserted before it in our reconstructed chain. Totsky's story at Nastasya's party may likewise be seen as a stage or a branching off. And it will be noted that Luzhin accuses Svidrigaylov of having cruelly outraged a girl who subsequently hangs herself.17 Not all chains will display a distinct, consistent development. That is something that has to be looked into in each individual case. There may be chains of episodes, deriving in part from an external parent text, whose genealogy escapes us entirely. If Dostoyevsky's manuscripts for the chapter 'At Tikhon's' had not survived that would have been the case here. Tracing them is a very chancy business and we have to be philosophical about our failures. However, with the help of the Matryosha episode we can see retrospectively that the relationship between the Marion and Darya stories is one of likeness (metaphor/condensation), whereas that between the Marion and Olya stories is one of contiguity (metonymy/displacement). The Matryosha story synthesizes the two. A chain may intersect at various points with other chains or recurrent motifs. For example the confrontation of rival women (adumbrated in Stavrogin's confession, where he thinks of contriving a meeting between his two mistresses, one a lady and the other her maid); 18 an explosion of suppressed passion (Matryosha in Stavrogin's confession); the flinging back of a gift of money (the Olya story)19 are all members of series of events of a similar kind.
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There may be more than one precursor text. In some cases rival claims to parentage may be easy to adjudicate. For example Lermontov's Pechorin is a perpetrator of gratuitous victimization on innocent girls, but his example seems textually less significant in the chain we have examined (because less apt in point of detail) than Rousseau's. In other cases it may be more difficult to decide. Different parts of the chain may relate to different precursor texts. Here, for example, we may be tempted to look for an ancestor of the Matryosha/Olya suicide episodes in Dostoyevsky's reading. I know of none in English or German or Russian literature. Of works of French literature known to Dostoyevsky, Eugene Sue's Mathilde springs to mind.20 Here the aristocrat Gontran de Lancry seduces a girl of humble origins and then abandons her, after which she commits suicide. No details are given and the episode, reported in retrospect but not described, is insufficiently developed to make a definite connection. In any case would this brief episode on its own have made much of an impact on Dostoyevsky's imagination? It is to be doubted. It is important however to bear in mind Dostoyevsky's almost obsessive interest in suicide in his novels and Diary of a Writer, often of girls or young women, and this reminds us that the lines between incidents experienced directly, in reading or in fantasy, may be fine ones. It would of course be possible to discern in the text rival chains of associations which, if rigorously followed through, might not only have created a different chain of associations in the reader's mind, but might have altered the development of the plot. Supposing that Olya's mind had been influenced less by Marion-type models and more by Cosettetype models of the sort known to Versilov who perhaps saw the incident in this light. Cosette, we may recall, is the little girl in Hugo's Les Miserables, who at the well in the terrifying forest is approached by an escaped convict only to feel reassured by his presence, a feeling which is amply justified by subsequent events. In the case I have examined, however, I have managed to define a constant thematic factor which holds the chain together. This is not necessarily the case in games of Chinese Whispers, but where it occurs it helps the reconstruction. Here the constant factor was 'gratuitous vicimization'. But it might have made a difference to the way I perceived the chain had I defined it differently. For example, had I chosen to call it 'false accusation', I might not have made the connection with Olya. And Stavrogin himself makes no accusation. As a matter of fact this difficulty
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could have been resolved and my general thesis preserved, but the point remains. Another reader might have wanted to say that all these episodes (including the Rousseau one) are disguised versions or substitutes for the theme of child rape (another of Dostoyevsky's obsessive motifs) and the wish of the rapist to blame the victim for seducing him. If I had taken this line I might have followed a different path through Dostoyevsky, including Svidrigaylov, and given Totsky a more prominent place. My justification for the present procedure is, however, my starting point, the 'influence' of the passage from Rousseau, his originary whisper. Finally, are we dealing here with a unique case or is this really a paradigm case for a pervasive phenomenon in Dostoyevsky's work? In the last resort I am leaving the answer to this question for future research, but I am fairly confident that the study of other chains of episodes or motifs would continue to reveal in miniature important characteristics of Dostoyevsky's evolution in general. I am not sure that they would reveal anything very different from the present experiment, which in one form or another is a central concern of Dostoyevsky. I have not discovered another example so inherently interesting and convenient for demonstration. It will also certainly be the case that not all such chains relate so clearly to an external parent text. It is because, I think, the passage which Razumikhin describes as a 'tedious scandal' was actually for Dostoyevsky one of those scenes which 'cut into the heart and leave a permanent wound' that it is possible to trace different stages in the chain. But not all such scenes (for example the ones Versilov mentions) do in fact leave a sequence of traces. Here I think we are simply fortunate in finding connections which normally remain submerged. Perhaps, as sensitive readers of literature, we should do better to leave them there. All this belongs to what (basing our terminology on that of Russian grammar) may be called the imperfective realm, the realm of rhyme, assonance, family resemblances, of traces, (approximate) repetitions and reinforcements, with no natural, 'perfective' beginnings or ends (for where we choose to begin or end is to some extent arbitrary). Its disregard for boundaries gives us some grounds moreover for the self-indulgence of following chains across the spaces between the hard covers of separate novels and notebooks, quite independently of the specific enquiry about 'Rousseau's influence'.
8 The Brothers Karamazov: the whisper of God
THE POETICS OF QUOTATION
No study of The Brothers Karamazov based on Bakhtinian principles can afford to neglect Nina Perlina's book on quotation in the novel.1 Its implications are much wider than the title would suggest. Perlina adopts and modifies Bakhtin and although her modifications diverge from mine and her conclusions might seem to contradict them, there is no doubt that she makes out a powerful and impressive case. For Perlina, Dostoyevsky's last novel is indeed polyphonic, but formally it is different from all the other novels, for 'it is only in The Brothers Karamazov that quotation organizes the whole architectonics of the novel'. Moreover quotations, and indeed all the discourse of characters, are organized hierarchically as it were on the ascending and descending slopes of a ladder. It would appear therefore that if Perlina is right The Brothers Karamazov does, despite its polyphony (and the relativity this may seem to imply), contain an irresistible hierarchy of values privileging Holy Writ and its most faithful exponents Zosima and Alyosha: In the text of the novel, quotations from Holy Scripture appear as words of unshakable truth, and as 'living bond' between the eternal and the temporal... In Dostoyevsky's multileveled hierarchy of quotations, the highest level is occupied by the authoritative word of the Holy Writ. It is a legacy of absolute, incontestable authority ... In a sense they [quotations from the Gospels] .stand above the novel's poetic system, yet govern and organize it.2 If this is indeed so, Dostoyevsky would seem to have fulfilled his desire to write a novel which expresses the truth of Christianity for our own day in the midst of what otherwise would be an endless cacophony of voices, synchronic and diachronic, each competing vainly for primacy. In the last chapter I looked at the way in which one particular motif migrates through various works by Dostoyevsky. Perlina has con164
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vincingly shown that The Brothers Karamazov teems with such migrating motifs. She mentions eighty-three quotations from the Bible alone. 3 Over forty different sources are mentioned or quoted by Ivan in 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor'.4 In addition, quotations from hagiography and religious folklore, Pushkin, Schiller, Nekrasov, Herzen, Pecherin, Polezhayev and others, not to mention contemporary journalism, abound throughout the novel. From hagiography Dostoyevsky takes not so much individual motifs (though these are present in his characterization of Zosima) as the technique of representing figurally the general idea of holiness. The hagiographer is not interested in collecting and regrouping facts, but in revealing a single Truth. Perlina claims that the fusion of novelistic and hagiographic traditions is noticeable on all poetic levels of the work. She shows that Dostoyevsky had no need to look up his quotations: like many contemporary writers his mind was already full of them and continued to mop them up. Moreover his readers would expect him to enter explicitly into dialogue with other literary works. This tradition was firmly established in Russia at the time and Dostoyevsky was by no means the only one to practise it. Apart from direct quotations, Perlina also examines a phenomenon which she calls 'veiled quotations' (which we may liken to stages in the chain of Chinese Whispers where the source is barely identifiable) and another phenomenon which permits the redistribution of particular sources in various parts of the novel. Although all the major characters quote and are quoted copiously, the way they reaccentuate their quotations is determined by the rung on the spiritual ladder they have reached and whether they are on their way up or down. Since characters are engaged in polemical confrontation, they do not usually accept the word of the other as internally persuasive. On the contrary they may distort, travesty, caricature or parody it, quote it irrelevantly, misquote it, plagiarize or degrade it in senseless repetition. Alternatively, on the ascending slope of the hierarchy, (moving towards the central idea of Zosima's teaching, itself an authoritative interpretation of Holy Writ) quotations grow into leitmotifs and keywords. All these forms of quotation may (presumably) be enacted in non-verbal as well as verbal forms. This is of course only a brief outline of Perlina's richly documented and extremely valuable book. Her case for a hierarchy of values receives unwitting support from the philosopher of religion Stewart Sutherland who argues that Ivan is devoid of those religious emotions which are an
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essential part of the meaning of religious utterances in their primary form.5 That the hierarchy in favour of the authoritative Word of the Gospels conforms to Dostoyevsky's intention would not be disputed by anyone familiar with the novel's creative history. That the poetics of the novel is built on this principle in an extraordinarily elaborate and pervasive fashion must be evident to any sympathetic reader of Perlina's book. Moreover Vetlovskaya had already demonstrated that the rhetoric of the novel is biased in favour of Zosima and Alyosha and against Ivan.6 All this is important because Perlina's book makes a very strong case for a reading of The Brothers Karamazov which would seem to conflict with the spirit of the most influential modern readings and which the spirit of our age would seem to many to discount. Moreover it comes close to claiming that a reading which does not respect this inbuilt hierarchy is a serious misreading and perhaps illegitimate. Perlina does not of course deny that ideological polyphony can exist within a hierarchical poetics, but since this poetics, according to her argument, has a strong ideological function it is impossible entirely to divorce the two. Yet, convincing though her argument is, especially if one grants the general validity of Bakhtin's reading of Dostoyevsky, doubts about its central thesis must remain. I would say, in addition, that a similar ambiguity exists within Bakhtin's own theory. There are three principles which threaten to subvert the hierarchy established by Dostoyevsky through his narrator. Firstly, it is generally conceded that within the novel the principle of polyphony permits an ideological reading in favour of Ivan, or at least not wholly favourable to Zosima. Moreover many readers (Camus among them)7 seem to have sensed intuitively that whatever the structure and composition of the novel and whatever the rhetorical devices used to incline the reader to Zosima's side, Dostoyevsky's emotions were rather with Ivan than with his saintly characters. According to this view the hidden function (though certainly not the author's conscious intention) of all this structuring would be to present the Christian case in its strongest possible form in order more effectively to undermine it. Secondly, as Sergei Hackel has persuasively shown, the religious quotations are fundamentally unsatisfactory in their evasiveness about God.8 He concludes his article by quoting A. B. Gibson's view that the
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reader is ultimately confronted with 'the combination of the sincerest piety with the apparent absence of its object'.9 And thirdly, as Perlina herself reminds us, all utterances are potentially double-voiced and not only echo antecedent voices but also anticipate future rejoinders. In fact most of the influential voices which the novel as a whole has actually anticipated have more in common with Ivan's point of view than with Zosima's. When Camus said that Dostoyevsky was a better prophet of the twentieth century than Karl Marx, it was not the voice of Zosima or Alyosha that he was referring to but to that of Ivan. The most powerful rejoinders have in the event come from Marxism, some forms of existentialism, Freudianism, all of them atheistic. I am reminded of some words of Jean-Luc Nancy in a quite different connection, who says that talk of a so-called return of the spiritual and the religious in our day is to forget, out of stupidity or cunning, the philosophical work which has been unremittingly carried out from a starting point in the death of God (thinking today entails among other things recognizing and meditating ceaselessly upon this irrefutable and unshiftable event which has rendered derisory in advance any 'return of the religious').10 Whether Nancy is right or wrong is not the point. What matters is that he expresses a widespread and probably dominant intellectual view of our time, at least in Western, developed society. Within this context the authoritative voice of Holy Writ is perceived as dead. It is striking, and significant, that Perlina does not quote a passage from Bakhtin on authoritative discourse only a few pages away from one which she quotes at length. The passage I have in mind reads: Authoritative discourse can not be represented - it is only transmitted. Its inertia, its semantic finiteness and calcification, the degree to which it is hard-edged, a thing in its own right, the impermissibility of any free stylistic development in relation to it - all this renders the artistic representation of authoritative discourse impossible ... It is by its very nature incapable of being double-voiced; it cannot enter into hybrid constructions. If completely deprived of its authority it becomes simply an object, a relic, a thing. It enters the artistic context as an alien body, there is no space around it to play in, no contradictory emotions - it is not surrounded by an agitated and cacophonous dialogic life, and the context around it dies, words dry up. For this reason images of official-authoritative truth, images of virtue (of any sort: monastic, spiritual, bureaucratic, moral, etc.) have never been successful in the novel. It suffices to mention the hopeless attempts of Gogol and Dostoyevsky in this regard.11
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Perhaps Perlina does not agree with this. But at least it suggests an ambiguity about the role of Holy Writ and its derivatives in the novel which she does not grant. The fact that the novel can triumphantly survive a deconstruction in favour of Ivan is the best possible testimony to the force of unfettered polyphony within it to overcome any attempt to impose a hierarchy. The truth surely is that the novel responds in part to polyphonic and in part to hierarchical readings but to neither throughout its length. These are the issues which I shall discuss in this chapter under the heading 'the whisper of God', turning first to the axes upon which deconstruction may be said to turn and concluding with an alternative series of suggestions about the way in which, in the world described by Nancy, a religious meaning might be recuperated. THE TRIPLE MYTH
Let me first establish the context for my discussion by stating my thesis: not one but three clearly identifiable structuring myths underlie The Brothers Karamazov and on almost every page of the text we can see them (however faintly) jostling for supremacy. The first two represent the ideological dialectic of the novel as seen by Dostoyevsky himself and most of his subsequent commentators. The first is the Christian myth and we have seen some of its characteristics above. I shall return to it later. The second is that of Ivan Karamazov which I wish to expand on at some length below. The third, which Michael Holquist has shown to be much more important than was previously thought and which also requires some comment, is the myth of parricide which underlies the central plot of the novel. Each of these myths finds its principal embodiment in one of the brothers. But the structuring myth is not to be equated with the ostensible ideology of each of the heroes. Each hero embodies his myth in a very particular, individual way and is to some extent affected by the myths of his brothers. For each of the myths is imperialistic and lays claim to the whole novel. In order to work progressively towards the restitution of a Christian reading through, as Dostoyevsky would have said, the crucible of doubt, I shall take them in reverse order.
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THE MYTH OF PARRICIDE
It is Michael Holquist who has argued that the central myth of the novel is that of parricide itself.12 Since on the level of the story this is what the narrative is all about this view is rather persuasive. He claims that Dostoyevsky's preoccupation is not with children as such but with how children relate to adults, and has shown how this story matches what Freud sees as the 'scientific myth of the father of the primal horde' and which he elaborates, inter alia in Totem and taboo and Moses and monotheism. It is a myth based on regeneration of the sons through the murder of the father (exemplified here primarily, though not exclusively, in Dmitry and his father) and rests on the forces of raw power and self-interest (rivalry, violence and cannibalism). It sets up taboos in the next generation against parricide and incest, founds the Oedipus complex, and makes possible a gentler form of fatherhood (exemplified here by Zosima's attitude to Alyosha and Alyosha's relationship with the children). It makes explicit, moreover, a link between the structure of Christianity and the primal myth: 'There can be no doubt that in the Christian myth the original sin was one against God the Father. If, however, Christ redeemed humanity from the burden of original sin by the sacrifice of his own life, we are driven to conclude that the sin was a murder. The law of talion, which is so deeply rooted in human feelings, lays it down that a murder can only be expiated by the sacrifice of another life: self-sacrifice points back to blood-guilt. And if this self-sacrifice of a life brought about atonement with God the Father, the crime to be expiated can only have been the murder of the father.' 13 For a detailed argument readers may be referred to Holquist, but even a brief indication may be sufficient to convince them that there is a case to be made for claiming that the central myth of the novel is that which underlies the Dmitry story, into whose orbit the other brothers and characters are drawn by their complicity (in the case of Smerdyakov the actual doing of the deed) and other forms of involvement. The rejection of Zosima when his corpse decomposes may be seen as the dethroning of a spiritual father. Ivan's rejection of God may be seen as a metaphysical expression of the murder of the Divine Father. The weaknesses of Freud's account of the myth need not detain us here. It serves an heuristic purpose in helping us to focus on a structure which we can recognize by its family resemblance to important structural aspects of Dostoyevsky's novel. Most interesting of all in
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Holquist's account is the way he assimilates to Freud not only the obvious Oedipal features of the novel, including of course the rivalry of father and son for the same woman (Grushenka) but also the story of Alyosha and the children which would seem at first sight to be unassimilable. Here one sees the gentler form of fatherhood which derives from the real or metaphorical murder of the father and the compensatory act of atonement. A strong reading through the parricide myth may therefore be said to deconstruct a traditional Christian reading: even Dmitry's own regeneration is explicable in terms of Freud's atheistic account of the development of human society. In a more subtle way it may also be said to deconstruct a reading which takes its cue from Ivan's ideology, by translating Ivan's cerebration into violent physical deeds and thus making a palpable contact between signifier and signified, sign and reality, which Ivan cannot himself deny, in spite of his penchant for seeking fables to account for the phenomena of experience at many removes from his actual immediate experience, and of his desire to distance himself from moral responsibility. THE MYTH OF THE TEMPTATIONS
My discussion of the second myth, that of Ivan, will occupy more space than that of the first. When in the last chapter I attempted to show how the relationships between similar episodes in various texts by Dostoyevsky and his precursors could be likened to the party game of Chinese Whispers, I elaborated the positive side of the metaphor, concentrating on what was remembered and reworked and to some extent on how it was reworked. There is also a negative side: that of forgetting, suppression, or what Frank Kermode in The Genesis ofsecregr14 calls deafness. It is deafness or
suppression in this sense that I wish to discuss here, and the erection of the misheard into a dogma in its own right. Full though the text of The Brothers Karamazov is of Biblical references, it might be argued in opposition to Perlina's thesis that it has become deaf to the essential kerygma of the New Testament, that the religious discourse has become an empty husk, and that this makes it particularly vulnerable to a modern, secular reading which results in all the rhetorical and compositional devices propping up the Christian reading falling away. Only by exposing successive distortions can one
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hope possibly to trace its religious discourse to its presumed source in the heart of the Christian Gospel, but even this would be an arbitrary choice of origin. Perhaps in the end there is no Truth there at all, only an endless succession of whispers. As we have seen this is not to deny that the ultimate source of religious discourse in the novel - behind the Church Fathers, medieval Christian texts, the echoes of heresies and gnosticism, modern rereadings and so on - is the tradition of the New Testament, or that a variety of Christian readings can be given, taking one's cue, perhaps, from the epigraph, or from the anticipation of the Antichrist in 2 Thessalonians 2,3-12 (of which more will be said below). The question therefore is not so much, 'can the novel be given a comprehensive and consistent Christian reading?' (allowing of course for the existence of non-Christian and heretical views within it). We know that it can because it has been done many times. It is rather, 'what is the status of an equally possible post-Christian reading which has, by a process of cumulative suppression, produced within the text an entirely incompatible ideology, which may offer a similarly comprehensive account?' Whereas elaborate Christian readings are undoubtedly possible, they are subject to subversion by quite opposite opinions. In view of the importance which Dostoyevsky attached to 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor' it is not surprising that a crucial moment of reversal is to be found there. Firstly a reminder of the main features of 'The Legend' which dramatizes the conflict between the Gospel account of Jesus and the impasse which the institution of the Catholic Church has reached at the time of the Inquisition. Ivan's story begins with Jesus returning to Seville in the sixteenth century, the day after 100 heretics have been burnt at the stake. He stops to bring a little girl back to life, but the Grand Inquisitor has him arrested. Whether it really is Jesus or a case of mistaken identity or the delirium of a ninety-year-old man affected by the previous day's experience does not matter, Ivan assures Alyosha.15 The Inquisitor addresses him as if he were Jesus and tells him that the Church has corrected his teaching over the centuries. People have laid their freedom at the feet of the Church and he has no right to come back and meddle. The Inquisitor then introduces his discussion of the Three Temptations in the wilderness, in which he refers to the devil as 'strashniy i umnyy dukhf dukh samounichtozheniya i nebytiyd! ('a terrible and intelli-
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gent spirit, the spirit of self-annihilation and non-being'.) 16 These three miraculous questions express the whole future history of humanity. The meaning of the first is that humanity in its vast majority gives priority to earthly food over spiritual food. The leaders of the Church will supply earthly bread in Jesus' name, and this deception will cause them to suffer. But they will be satisfying humanity's most fundamental craving, someone to worship, something with incontestable and universally recognized authority (for the sake of which it will be prepared to kill) and someone to whom to yield its freedom. People will prefer earthly bread unless someone can ensnare their consciences (because the mystery of life is in knowing why one lives, not just in living). But instead of taking possession of people's freedom Jesus gave them even greater freedom, thereby laying the foundation for the destruction of his own kingdom. There are three forces only that will hold people's consciences captive for ever: miracle, mystery and authority ({chudo, tayna i avtoritef). When the devil tempted him to throw himself from the pinnacle of the Temple in the confidence that God would save him, he rejected the temptation, as he also rejected the temptation to win people's hearts by the miracle of coming down from the cross. But people are weaker and baser than Jesus took them to be; if Jesus denied them miracles then they will devise their own. The Church now teaches them the mystery that they must obey blindly even against their consciences (as presumably in the case of burning heretics). The last gift which the devil offered was earthly dominion and the Church has accepted that gift which Jesus rejected. IfJesus had accepted this offer he could have given people all they yearned to know: whom to worship, to whom to entrust their consciences and how to unite in a universal ant-heap. The Church now follows Satan, not Jesus. It will be a long time, but eventually people will throw themselves at the Church's feet. Its leaders will relieve them of their pride, their consciences, their freedom, enticing them with the illusion of the reward of heaven. The Grand Inquisitor concludes with a confession that he too has dwelt in the wilderness, that he too blessed freedom and was prepared to stand among the chosen ones, but in the end he rejected madness and joined those who corrected the work of Jesus. It is tempting to try to equate each of the Three Temptations with one of the three forces which the Grand Inquisitor lists: miracle, mystery and authority, and perhaps also with the three great torments: people's
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need for someone to worship, for someone to entrust their consciences to and for the universal state of the ant-heap. But although all are related in the Grand Inquisitor's reading of the temptations and human history, there is no exact symmetry and no direct equation. The idea of miracle, together with the yearning for someone to worship, seems to be related in his mind to both the first two temptations (turning stones into bread and throwing oneself off the pinnacle of the Temple). In the Gospel the yearning for someone to worship is linked with the third temptation through Jesus' reply. The idea of authority is linked in the Legend with the third temptation, that of earthly dominion, and with the third torment, the yearning for the universal antheap. But mystery, together with the need for someone to whom to entrust one's conscience, seems more loosely related to all three. Earthly dominion and the power to perform miracles seem to put one in a position to offer solace to people's consciences and take from them the burden of guilt. Whereas the devil's purpose seems to be to tempt Jesus to attain his Messianic ends by false means, by employing 'miracle, mystery and authority' (which is the thrust of the Grand Inquisitor's reading and of most of his interpreters too), Jesus' replies emphasize another implication, that of 'failing in the radical obedience to God that is the duty of every human soul'. 17 The Jesus of the Gospels does not take up the points of the Grand Inquisitor in Ivan's poem, though they are implicit in the devil's questions. He does not try to defend or justify some specious and burdensome doctrine of freedom. In each case his responses are prefaced by the words 'It is written', quote Scripture, and refer not to his impact on people's imagination, but to his personal relationship with God. Both Matthew's and Luke's accounts of the temptations thus involve a tripartite dialogue, in which the devil is attempting not simply to win Jesus's allegiance but more importantly to seduce him away from his allegiance to God. Here is the whole relevant passage from Matthew (4. 1-11), whose version Ivan uses: 1. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2. And he fasted forty days and forty nights, and afterward he was hungry. 3. And the tempter came and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.' 4. But he answered, 'It is written, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God."' 5. Then the devil took him to the holy city, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, 6. and said to him, 'If you are the Son of God, throw
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yourself down; for it is written, "He will give his angels charge of you," and "On their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone."' 7. Jesus said to him, 'Again it is written "You shall not tempt the Lord your God."' 8. Again, the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; 9. and he said to him, 'All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.' 10. Then Jesus said to him, 'Begone Satan! for it is written, "You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve."' 11. Then the devil left him, and behold, angels came and ministered to him.
The Grand Inquisitor, as Sandoz remarks in his book Political apocalypse^ suppresses Jesus' replies, or to be more exact, since he quotes the beginning of Jesus' reply to the first temptation, he suppresses reference in them to Jesus' relationship with God, and specifically to a relationship based upon God's authoritative word. The Grand Inquisitor demonstrably and radically misconstrues the Biblical text in this respect - with results which are entirely consistent with the nature of the misconstruction - and on the surface he seems entirely unaware of it, since he has built a whole ideology and a lifetime's strenuous endeavour on the misconstruction. The Gospel which the Inquisitor claims he has 'corrected' has, it seems, already been corrected before by an original suppression. His response to Jesus in the 'Legend' is the result of a double suppression, the one facilitating the other. In the first act of suppression he had 'rewritten' the Gospel narrative without God; in the second he accuses Jesus of imposing too great a burden on man for him to bear alone (i.e., without God) and proposes a further 'rewriting'. There is no doubt about the consequences of this double suppression, misreading or rewriting: we can observe them in detail. Theologically, as numerous commentators have observed, the Grand Inquisitor suppresses Divine Grace; 19 he suppresses the authority of God underlying Jesus' inwardly persuasive discourse and he translates Jesus' discourse into an authoritative (in this case, dead) voice which, according to him, needs to be abandoned and corrected. Personally, within the narrated dialogue, he forbids Jesus to modify his Word (as he, the Grand Inquisitor, has interpreted it) i.e., he forbids him to remind him of the dimension he has suppressed. Textually, he suppresses the greater part of Jesus' replies to Satan, and with them the authoritative discourse of Holy Writ, made inwardly persuasive through Jesus.
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In this respect the partial suppression of the Second Temptation (in which Jesus is tempted to leap from the pinnacle of the Temple) is of particular importance. It follows logically, because it is the Second Temptation which lays most emphasis on an emotional relationship with God. In the view of the devil in the Gospel narrative, the success of the first temptation is to be guaranteed by Jesus' power as a wonderworker. The success of the third is to be guaranteed by Satan himself. The success of the second, however, depends on God's own intervention to save his misguided son. The Grand Inquisitor assimilates the Second Temptation partly to the wish to impress people by miracle. He also comments on the objection that to try it out would be catastrophic since it would involve a questioning and hence a loss of that faith which might preserve Jesus from catastrophe. If Jesus leapt from the pinnacle of the Temple he would instantly lose his faith and be dashed to pieces. However, Jesus' reply in the Gospels indicates that he sees it not so much as a test of his own faith or a threat to himself, as a matter of putting God to the test or, in more modern language, subjecting God to moral blackmail, attempting to put God in what R. D. Laing would have called an untenable position (or, after Bateson, a 'double bind'). 20 The syllogism which underlies this seems to be roughly as follows: (i) God protects the righteous from natural disaster, (ii) I am one of the righteous, (iii) Therefore God must protect me from natural disaster. Leaving aside the logical ambiguities of the syllogism, its theological faults lie in the arrogance of self-definition as one of the righteous, and the assumption that such righteousness affords absolute protection against all physical ills, even when self-provoked. According to Elihu in the Book of Job, this was Job's mistake. The Book ofJob implicitly makes a further point: when God is subjected to moral blackmail, he withdraws. That, it has to be said, is a consequence which the Grand Inquisitor also foresees. The overriding point which the Inquisitor brackets out, however, is that to subject someone (even God) to moral blackmail implies a pre-existing emotional relationship. The suppression of the Second Temptation has another dimension. Although the fact that Jesus is invited to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple rather than from a high point in the wilderness is often commented upon, the choice of location is usually put down to the fact
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that in Jerusalem Jesus would have an audience he could impress. Obvious though the thought is, it seems not to occur to readers that the Temple might symbolize the religion of the Old Testament, and that to jump from it might symbolize the abandonment of the Old Covenant in favour of a new dispensation which, paradoxically, God is expected to sustain while his very existence is challenged. This omission is all the more surprising in that Matthew's Gospel repeatedly insists that Jesus fulfils and does not supplant the Old Covenant embodied in the Hebrew Scriptures. In the Grand Inquisitor's reading of Jesus' creed, however, he has abandoned the idea of Divine Grace entirely. In other words the Grand Inquisitor is here suppressing the significance of his own reading of Jesus' creed.
He not only fails to notice that his Jesus (the one he accuses in his monologue) has, unlike the Jesus of the Gospels, abandoned the authoritative Word of God and replaced it by a creed of unsupported freedom. He also fails to recognize that this same Jesus (his Jesus) has succumbed in this measure to the Second Temptation. And the presumably unconscious strategy which enables him to do this is the assimilation of the Second Temptation to the First: the implication that both are essentially about impressing people by performing miracles.21 It is apparently an example of suppression not so much by simple omission or oversight as by emotionally motivated misreading. It might be argued that once the Grand Inquisitor's stratagems are laid bare the way is open to his assimilation into the Christian apocalyptic tradition of the Antichrist sketched in 2 Thessalonians 2, 3-12 and to his being seen as a symbol of the generation of which Ivan Karamazov is a member and to which Zosima and in part Alyosha provide a Christian counterweight. An alternative, however, would be to see his distortions as essential, if painful, steps towards a post-Christian, even post-modernist dispensation, steps, which, if more slowly and by a different route, Zosima and Alyosha are also unwillingly taking. My earlier reference to Kermode brings to mind a passage from the same book in which he writes: If the true sense of the Old Testament is only what is fulfilled and made plain in the New, the literal sense of the New may itself be subject to further determination ... It could be argued, for example, that as the Old signified the New Testament, so the New Testament signified the Church, which alone had power to determine its spiritual sense.22
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Kermode points out that this is not mere theory: it is history. Whether the Grand Inquisitor be seen as a literary omen of the Second Coming, the herald of a brave new atheistic world, or the harbinger of endless deconstructive processes cast adrift on a sea of nihilism and cut off from the anchor of spiritual Truth, it is of interest to see how far other major characters in the novel are infected by the suppressions which he announces. How far can they be read in terms of the Grand Inquisitor's deconstruction of the Gospels? Alyosha certainly seems at times to be a victim. He appears retrospectively to have succumbed to the Second Temptation in his reaction to the odour of Zosima's corpse. The underlying syllogism here seems to be: (i) God protects the righteous from the ill-effects of natural processes (and even goes against them to indicate his approval) (ii) Zosima is one of the righteous (iii) Therefore God must preserve him from the ill-effects of natural processes (etc). When God does not apparently behave in this way, Alyosha is devastated and his faith radically weakened. It is true that he subsequently has mystical experiences (his vision of the marriage feast and his experience in Zosima's garden) which seem to renew his faith, but these experiences, although high on the scale of emotional intensity, are, as Hackel has shown, of uncertain and not necessarily of divine origin.23 Ivan is a much more complicated case. For reasons which Stewart Sutherland examines at length in his book, I do not think that the obvious charge of emotional blackmail against God will stick. It is certainly true that Ivan says he prefers to return the ticket of entry to paradise rather than accept innocent suffering here, but there are grounds for concluding that his religious imagery is conventional, lacks a basis in religious emotion and is the product of debate with a religious environment of which Alyosha is the immediate representative. There is certainly the structure of blackmail here, and the reader must not forget that Ivan is the author of 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor'. However that does not necessarily mean that he is aware of all its implications. His religious awareness is dulled and there is no evidence that an experience of the divine is a part of his own experience or that it counts for anything in his assessment of reality. Sutherland persuasively argues that
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the God whom Ivan accepts is afiniteGod, he is the God who is the invention of a Euclidian mind, and of whom one can only think and talk in anthropomorphic terms ... At the third level of Ivan's atheism he is not simply mocking Alyosha: he is rather denying that the life to which such language belongs is in any sense a coherent or intelligible possibility.24 Yet all this is of the utmost importance since it provides the basis for a secular reading of the text in which the experience of God does not represent a final Truth, but a pathetic, incoherent illusion, and that realization is the basis for a strenuous imaginative quest for new foundations for the ordering of human life and experience. But what about Zosima? Zosima does presumably have religious emotions with their origins in an experience of God which permits the primary use of religious utterances. The difficulty of distinguishing between what Hackel has called the cosmetic use of Christian discourse 25 and the genuine article makes it difficult to reach a final judgement. He even questions whether Zosima| would have a better answer than Shatov in The Devils if asked the same question about his belief: 'But in God?' 26 It has to be said that Zosima's God is a distant one. He is a God who has to be sought, who seems to be located at a distance in time and space (anywhere indeed but in the here and now of human experience) and in the forms of his representation in this world (the image of Christ preserved in the monasteries but for which humanity would have gone astray). There is even a Pelagian hint that people have to find their own salvation. It would hardly be too much to say that Zosima's seems to be a man-centred rather than a God-centred religion and his paradise an earthly one. It is tempting to add that he reduces God to a function of human love, or worse, of Russian nationality. Still there is sufficient of the traditional Gospel there, or its echo, to make one unsure. Is this, after all, only a distortion in the game of Chinese Whispers in the direction of internally persuasive discourse, and where does this end and heresy begin? The answer probably depends on how clearly readers hear the originary whisper of the Gospels in reading Zosima's discourse, on how far Zosima's 'heresies' are perceived as surface deviations and therefore peripheral, and how far they are perceived as having taken on their own independent life. It should not be imagined that, whether or not he was conscious of these subtleties, Dostoyevsky himself was altogether unaware of the essential suppressions. The material in Geir Kjetsaa's book on Dostoyevsky and his New Testament makes this plain.27 From our point of
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view three things stand out about the passages that Dostoyevsky marked in his own copy. He did not mark the Temptations either in Matthew's or Luke's versions, though he did mark a number of other passages which take up the themes which the Grand Inquisitor associates with them; for example Jesus' rejoinder in Mark 12, 17 that people should 'render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's', where once again God is explicitly made part of the equation; he also marked the passage in Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2.3-12) which warns of the one who will come according to the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, sitting in the Temple of God and setting forth the mystery of lawlessness. Besides the many passages in John's Gospel exhorting people to love one another which Dostoyevsky marks, he also notes in the First Letter ofJohn (4. 12) a passage which expresses the essence of Zosima's doctrine of active love ('No man hath beheld God at any time; if we love one another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected in us') and also the passage (John, 12. 24) which forms the epigraph to the novel. Most important of all, he marks numerous passages, especially in John's Gospel, but also in Paul's Letters, which emphasize the doctrine of Grace, the relationship between God and Jesus and people's approach to God through Jesus. Whatever their relationship to the novel, one cannot argue that they entirely escaped Dostoyevsky's attention. Consciously or unconsciously he diminished their importance in his novel. The evidence is true to the general character of Dostoyevsky's texts in which any attempt to find a single principle of coherence seems as doomed as the illusion that any single one of his characters has found the ultimate secret of that elusive 'living life' preached by John in his Gospel and sought by Dostoyevsky's characters. Ultimately the principles of polyphony and the obsessive balancing of one idea or force with its opposite, taken in the context of a readership which will in its majority not share the religious emotions and beliefs apparently called for by the composition of the novel, permit those unifying forces to be overcome in the process of reading, without any irreparable violence to the text. In fact, once the unifying principle has been displaced, huge gaps open up allowing a variety of readings of crucial events. For example, to ask what is the referent of 'Jesus' in the Legend is a patently
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unanswerable question. Even Ivan mocks it within the narrative itself. To ask what conception the signifier 'Jesus' refers to is a possible question but a highly problematic one; so also are such questions about that famous kiss. There are at least three possibilities. (i) Jesus is the Jesus of the Gospels: in which case he understands all about the Inquisitor's deafness; the prelude might suggest this, but is Ivan capable of such a conception? If he is, consciously or unconsciously, then the kiss might signify the fullness of Christ's understanding, forgiveness, mercy and compassion. (ii) Jesus is the Jesus of the Grand Inquisitor's first suppression, who has given people a burden too heavy to bear. Ivan is capable of this conception. In this case the kiss might signify loving though sorrowful acceptance of the Inquisitor's case. (iii) Jesus is simply a compulsive, sentimental trace in the Inquisitor's imagination, incapable of anything but an approximate repetition of past deeds and of acquiescence, perhaps also of provoking a final statement of the Inquisitor's alternative creed. The significance of the kiss must depend on the answers to these prior questions, though even so ambiguity remains. Ivan's refusal to let Alyosha ask such questions is perhaps his own supreme suppression of pre-modernist certainties and assertion of post-modernist scepticism. In diachronic terms, then, we have observed a series of distortions and suppressions leading to two principal latter-day descendants of the Christian Gospel. In synchronic terms we may observe diverse systems of ideas with their own internal coherence, interacting in ways which seek to subordinate the other to an inferior (or at least negative) place in its own hierarchy of values. Most significantly we find both in Zosima's creed and in the Inquisitor's (and is Zosima's creed less a creation of Alyosha than the Inquisitor's is a creation of Ivan?) the seeds for the undoing of the other. I have dwelt on Ivan's deconstruction of Alyosha's and Zosima's positions because Dostoyevsky makes this the centre of his novel. But it is no less true that Ivan deconstructs Dmitry's position, reducing the rebellious life-force which he represents to a form of life which has to be controlled by a system of lies based on miracle, mystery and authority, by taboo and the law.
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THE WHISPER OF GOD IN A FALLEN WORLD
We may now turn to the question of the status of the Christian myth in the novel, a novel, it is now plain, which gives strong support to alternative myths which subvert the Christian one. One way of approaching this problem is suggested in the epigraph: 'In truth, in very truth I tell you, a grain of wheat remains a solitary grain unless it falls to the ground and dies; but if it dies it bears a rich harvest.' (John. 12, 24) Jesus is ostensibly speaking here of his own impending death; but his words also make a more general point about the Word of God in a fallen world: death/self-sacrifice in love is the condition of fuller life. It could be argued that for the Christian the grain of wheat represents the Gospel message and would therefore, if my opening metaphor be taken seriously, be the first whisper (the Divine whisper) in chains which lead variously, with the lack of symmetry characteristic of an evolutionary tree, to both Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor. Kermode, among others, would want to question whether the Gospel message itself is as free from ambiguity as some would maintain. Are the parables or the miracles unproblematic? Is the Passion narrative itself entirely transparent in its meaning? Does the image of Christ have a definite semantic content? The history of Christianity, from the reactions of the disciples recorded in the Gospels themselves to the disputes of preachers and theologians through the ages, would not lead one to think so. Here too, some would want to claim, truth is endlessly deferred. There is no locatable first whisper, though we may arbitrarily, or owing to a particularly rich concentration of meaning, define one as such. My point, however, is simpler: Dostoyevsky's text does not unambiguously privilege something that can be consensually defined as 'Christianity' and associated with the 'Christian characters' over against something which can be unambiguously defined as a departure from, or negation of, it. That is not to say however, that it cannot be effectively read from the point of view of a Christian poetics. On the contrary, I believe that it can and that there is much to be said for doing so. Bakhtin never (so far as we know) developed such a poetics, though he opens the door to one in his tantalizing reference to the possibility (oddly ignored by Perlina, since it could be used to rescue her from the accusation I made above) that authoritative discourse and inwardly persuasive discourse are
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sometimes, though rarely, found in unity.28 Had he developed a theology there can be no doubt that he would have found this convergence in the person of the Jesus of the Gospels and would inevitably have made great play with the theology of the Gospel ofJohn ('In the beginning was the Word'), as well no doubt as with the materiality of the Christian Gospel, and with the image of the Galilean prophet living in a world of familiar contacts who subjects the official world of Judaism to a series of reversals which might even in some aspects be likened to the carnival. In other words I have pressed as hard as I can the view that the text of The Brothers Karamazov deconstructs its own Christian poetics not because I believe it to be overwhelmingly true, but because I believe that in our day a full account of that Christian poetics must first acknowledge the force of this deconstructive process. A Bakhtinian way of describing Jesus' mission would be to say that it was to make the authoritative Word of God as revealed in the Old Testament inwardly persuasive, without denying the fiat of the Old: 'for while the law was given through Moses, grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; but God's only Son, he who is nearest to the Father's heart, he has made him known.' (John i, 17-18) A profoundly challenging example of an attempt at a Christian poetics which is conformable to Dostoyevsky's text is Michael Edwards' book Towards a Christian poetics published in 1984. 291 introduce it here not in order to claim that this is how The Brothers Karamazov should be read but to offer a theoretical framework from outside the text which perhaps Dostoyevsky would not disown. Michael Edwards claims that we do not understand literature without a theory of language and we do not understand either without a theory of life. He sets out to discover what we can learn about literature and language by viewing them in terms of Christianity and comments that it is surprising that, given the richness of Christian enquiries in other areas, the basic questions about literature and language do not appear to have been asked, despite the fact that Christianity foregrounds language by its doctrine of the Word, and literature by the centrality of the Scriptures.30 The central trope in Edwards' theory is that of the Fall. In his terms Dostoyevsky's text (and the discourse of his characters) like all other human discourse is a fallen discourse in which immense gaps open up between signifier and signified and the sign and the referent.
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Following Pascal he argues that all that is great about a man derives from his 'first nature'. His wretchedness, blindness, mortality is constituted by his 'second nature' which has resulted from the original sin of Adam. In a fallen, contradictory world Jesus is the supreme paradox in which greatness and wretchedness are combined. Yet he also points beyond the contradictions and initiates a renewed greatness: the cosmology of Christianity is triadic, a cosmology founded on creation, fall and recreation. In the hope of taking my reader with me, I should like to pause here and note the strong traces of this structure in Dostoyevsky's work which can be acknowledged by both Christian and and non-Christian reader alike. There is no doubting his profound concern about and detailed analysis of each stage in this cosmology. That his novels are about 'fallen humanity' is not likely to be seriously disputed even by those who would prefer other terminology. Where he considers the Fall in his texts (above all in 'The Dream of a Ridiculous Man') it has, as in the Bible, an overtly linguistic connotation: it is fundamentally and explicitly associated with the lie. Similarly his preoccupation with 'recreation', whether seen in terms of earthly Utopia, the spiritual resurrection of a Raskolnikov or a veiled Fyodorovism, is too well attested to require detailed demonstration. Edwards perceives in the cosmology of Christianity, in Biblical history and in Biblical anthropology, not merely a triadic pattern but a dialectical process: in the sending ofJesus, God climaxes the revelation of his love. God too approaches dialectically, as Creator, Judge, Redeemer. Whether or not we are Christian we may recognize that, in each of the subtly related areas, and underneath them all, there is a fundamental process at work that perfectly defines our happiness, our unhappiness and our desire: a process of life, death and resurrection. Outside of Christian belief, the process is at least true to the need of the human condition, or to its dream. Inside, it achieves a profoundly elegant, and moving, and awesome focus. All the many instances of dialectic have their ground and origin in no less than the experience of God himself, being exemplified and crowned in the life, death and resurrection of Christ.31 Edwards traces the way in which language accompanies each of the moves by which the Bible expounds its dialectic - from Adam's Edenic naming, which is true to the nature of things and charged with human significance, byway of the Fall of language in the lie (fallacious gloss) of
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the serpent and the confusion of Babel to the pledge of the future transformation of the world at Pentecost. We do have a sense of language in an Edenic condition of efficacy and plenitude, at one with the world and with ourselves, fulfilling our desires as speakers and writers, and doing so with ease. We recognise it at times as a quite prodigious power. On the other hand, we also know, perhaps more clearly in our century than ever before, that language has been subjected, like the human and non-human world to which it belongs, to Vanity' and 'corruption' ... We arrive after generations of shady complicity between language and the world, to find ourselves in an inextricable yet incongruous texture of words, self, things. The incongruity of language, however, is precisely our chance. The flaw between word and object, the flaws within words (the apartness of sound and sense, for example), and the complex obscurities of meaning, impel the imagination.32
Dostoyevsky was unquestionably aware of this fallen state in a sense not very distant from Edwards' as he was also aware of the consequences of it for literature and lived experience: 'We tell stories in a fallen world.'33 In Edwards' sense Dostoyevsky is a novelist of'fallen' discourse, and all his characters (narrators included) are inevitably subject to this universal condition. In one sense this is, given Edwards' premises, inevitable: all human discourse partakes of this same condition. What is particular about Dostoyevsky is the acute consciousness of it which permeates his entire fictional world and the acute sense that God's originary whisper comes to us and is passed on by us in imperfect and distorted forms. That is why those divine images to be found in the Gospels and preserved in memories of childhood and, above all, in the Russian monasteries are so precious. I am hesitant to look for confirmation of my own thesis in Dostoyevsky's rather opaque epigraph. But it expresses succinctly the argument of this chapter: unless the seeds of a Christian poetics fall to the ground and die they will stand alone and be overwhelmed. If they do submit, then the fruits of reconstruction are doubly rich.
THE WAY OF REBIRTH
Dostoyevsky's text shows as no previous text had ever done the various ways in which fallen discourse is distorted. Our discussions have
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suggested where to look for this: in the disjunction of signifier and signified characteristic of The Double or The Idiot; in the emotionallybased reversals of the Underground; in the confusion over 'where people stand' in relation to each other brought about by strategies for creating emotional and perceptual confusion; in the seeking of security in narratives designed to preserve self-esteem at the cost of complexity and catholicity; in the discovery in lived experience of the strategies of dream-work (condensation and displacement); in the process of progressive distortion which utterances undergo in being transmitted into new contexts, and so on. It is not difficult to give further illustrations relating specifically to The Brothers Karamazov. One may point again to the inconstant voice of the narrator (here varying between an anonymous local resident who is a realist and sceptic and an omniscient narrator who is an idealist and believer) with the various stylistic, lexical and syntactic devices which Terras claims highlight the provisional nature of the discourse: repetition, pleonasm, hyperbole, slang, catachresis, hedging, awkward and prolix syntax, the use of modal expressions such as 'actually', 'even', 'seemingly', and the use of words and expressions such as 'kayoy-to* ('some sort of), 'kak-by' ('as if) and so on which suggest hesitation and uncertainty.34 Or one may point to the way that the narrator stresses the many-layeredness of discourse in key passages, such as Zosima's testament or 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor'. Even the parricide story is set about with distancing techniques: the hedging about whether Dmitry is really the murderer, whether Smerdyakov is telling the truth, whether, moreover, he is really Karamazov's son. Thirdly one may point to the way that the many-layeredness of discourse is emphasized by the constant quotation, misquotation, hearing, mishearing, remembering, misremembering, construing, misconstruing of other texts by means of the Chinese Whispers phenomenon. Fourthly one may point to the role of misreading, or 'lying' in the characters' discourse. On a more subtle level, we have observed, notably in chapters 5 and 6, the phenomenon of making up narratives to make sense of the world. Two secondary forms of 'lying' are particularly worthy of note here. The first is the collection of evidence and 'jumping to conclusions about it', what we call 'putting two and two together and making five' in pursuit of some desired end. The prosecution and defence counsels do this about Dmitry. Smerdyakov does it about Ivan's intentions towards his father. The monks do it with respect to the
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odour of Zosima's corpse. The second form of lying may be called the 'Mimchhausen syndrome', the penchant for telling far-fetched stories, again in pursuit of some desired end. Old Karamazov does this. But is not 'The Legend' in some ways a more sophisticated version of the same thing? The Grand Inquisitor has designed a world-order which is avowedly built on a lie. So where is the way back? In the first place the myths which underlie the Dmitry and Ivan stories, if taken together, contain the seeds of their own undoing. On the face of it the parricide myth, like that of the Grand Inquisitor, disposes of Christianity. If we wished to try to trace the theme of parricide back to an originary text, we should have no difficulty in identifying modern precursors well known to Dostoyevsky (Schiller's Die Rduber above all, and George Sand's Mauprat). Nor, as Freud has shown, should we fail to find sources in the ancient world. However, we immediately have a problem if we wish to show that the originary whisper is to be found in the Jewish or Christian Scriptures, in the Word of a Jewish or Christian God. The Scriptures contain instances, of the killing of animals, sons (including the Son of God), brothers, kings and others, but are frustratingly silent about the murder of fathers. In the spirit of Freud we might argue that this psychic motif is not so much absent as repressed, indeed that the whole weight of Jewish and Christian tradition is thrown into its repression and sublimation, even that this is its primary function. Freud lays much emphasis on the supposed origins of monotheism in the murder of the primal father, later deified. In the case of the Jews this primal father is Moses, who according to certain extra-biblical traditions was murdered by his people.35 Freud even allows himself to speculate that remorse for the murder of Moses provided the stimulus for the fantasy of the Messiah and sees the absence of the motif in the Old Testament narrative as consistent with the view that it had been repressed into the unconscious. All this conforms to his beliefs about the primitive origin of religion and, as we have seen, Holquist has shown how The Brothers Karamazov can fruitfully be read in the light of Freud's theory. However, although to argue in this way may be to show that The Brothers Karamazov is consistent with a particular, Freudian, view of the development of religion (including Christianity) and even dramatizes
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the relationship between the murder of a particular father (Karamazov) and the 'death of God' in contemporary ideology, it does not show that The Brothers Karamazov is a Christian text, a direct spiritual descendant of a Judeo-Christian revelation. Rather the contrary, it shows that it harks back to a pre-Jewish, pagan stage in religious development which has resurfaced in a post-Christian scientific world. This is in itself remarkable but, far from vindicating a Christian reading, radically subverts it. A Christian reading would stand the Freudian view on its head and say that the text gives evidence of the return of a repressed originary Divine Whisper (repressed in Freud as in all 'fallen' discourse). The claim here would be that the text, like modern consciousness in general, turns all its energies to repressing the originary Divine Whisper, but that the latter repeatedly breaks through in the immediate religious experience of Zosima, Alyosha, Dmitry, even in the childhood memories of Ivan. None of these experiences is plagiarized from the Scriptures or bears a close resemblance to biblical narrative, though some of them bear a certain similarity to texts in the Christian tradition. They are, to use the term popularized by Auerbach, 'figuraP. Evidence of this is to be found in virtually all recent studies of the religious motifs in the novel from Hackel to Perlina. Such a reversal is strongly supported by my analysis of the myth of the Grand Inquisitor of which it is necessary to say little more here. If, as I have argued, the structure of that myth rests upon the suppression of the Divine Word and if it is a metaphor for secular society, then we shall not expect to find blindingly direct expressions of the Divine Word in the discourse of that society. We should look rather for indirect expressions. Dostoyevsky, as most readers agree, lost no opportunity to emphasize by the manner of his writing that this is indeed a fallen world in which all utterances are flawed, and to signpost, without arguing explicitly for them, possible ways back. THE SCANDAL IN THE MONASTERY AND THE 'WHITE CARNIVAL'
We may conclude by looking at one extended scene in The Brothers Karamazov which shows the features of fallen discourse we have already observed and in addition dramatizes the question of 'fallenness' versus
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the whisper of God's Word. It occurs early in the novel and is one of Dostoyevsky's major scandal scenes. Moreover it is the one occasion on which all the major protagonists in the novel meet physically. There are a number of features of this scene which are worth special mention. The first is that although the source of the scandal is old Karamazov's outrageous behaviour before a personage universally held in reverence and in a place associated with the most sacred ideals, the guardians of these ideals do not seem greatly put out by his buffoonery. He does not induce emotional and perceptual confusion in them: he does not 'drive them crazy'. They experience no damage to their self-esteem. On the contrary they receive him with the deepest concern and understanding. The personification of offended decorum is a secondary character, Miusov. (Apart from Dmitry he is Karamazov's principal victim and is more obviously put out than anyone by Karamazov's talk of the trivial and the serious in the same tone, by his being serious and humorous about the same thing, by his stimulating emotions which Miusov is embarrassed to display and even by his calling attention to aspects of Miusov's personality of which he is ashamed.) The second point of interest is that Zosima diagnoses the roots of Karamazov's behaviour in his being ashamed of himself and in his proneness to lying, and advises him above all not to lie, especially to himself. Karamazov is a compulsive liar, and he lies and clowns, he claims, in order to cover up his shame. His lies include not only the manufacture of stories, say, about Diderot's supposed conversion in Russia (in which he modifies folk-rumour by grafting on widely-used sayings), but his own play-acting and posturing in which he lifts phrases and attitudes even from the Scriptures, always it seems with some critical inaccuracy. He is a living example of the ways in which misquotations accumulate as they are passed on and modified by the emotional needs of the moment. Zosima says to Karamazov: A person who lies to himself and who listens to his own lies reaches a point where he can't distinguish any truth in himself or in those around him, and so loses respect for himself and for others.36 Thirdly, we may note that Alyosha sees Zosima as a direct link with the Word of God: He is holy, in his heart lies the secret of a renewal for all, the power which will finally establish truth on earth, and all will be holy, and will love one another,
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and there will be no morerichor poor, exalted or humbled, but all will be as the children of God and the real kingdom of Christ will come.37 Alyosha's dreams are not fulfilled, but they make explicit the yearning for a direct link with the Word of God as embodied in the Scriptures and in the loving relationships of living people. The keys to renewal are brought out clearly in the novel. Firstly there is the timeless 'image of Christ' as preserved in the monasteries, giving pride of place to the Scriptures as passed on in Orthodox tradition. This is 'authoritative discourse' as Bakhtin calls it. Secondly, on the diachronic level and against this background, there is the memory of a religious experience by the individual believer (Bakhtin's 'inwardly persuasive discourse'), known by some (e.g. Alyosha) in a mystical vision, by others (e.g. Dmitry) in a vivid dream, by yet others (e.g. Ivan) in beautiful childhood memories or (e.g. Zosima) in the dying thoughts of a close relative. And against this background there is the 'memory' of superimposed religious texts, echoes and allusions, of elation, the cult of tears, the veneration of the earth. Thirdly, on the synchronic level, there is a life of active love in dialogue with others and a belief that this 'paradise' is within humanity's grasp, in which, presumably, the individual's coming-to-consciousness would indeed be a creative and mutually-supportive process of accumulating inwardly persuasive discourse. If, as I claimed above, Karamazov's scandalous behaviour causes little disturbance among the leading monks, including the sick Zosima, it is in part because their Christian ethic itself partakes of certain carnival qualities. In The Idiot Myshkin's saintliness, humility, innocence and insight have a disturbing effect on those round him which may lead to spiritual renewal. Myshkin, Zosima and the monks, Alyosha too to some extent, set the official world on its head no less than the ritual of the Bakhtinian carnival. And if Miusov is the touchstone of decorum so far as Karamazov's clowning is concerned, he is no more at ease with the monks, and no less confused by their reaction to Karamazov. He arrives at the monastery convinced that the elder is an impostor and a charlatan, but is nevertheless deeply embarrassed by Karamazov's breaches of decorum. He is hardly less discountenanced by the monks' refusal to reject the old buffoon. We may distinguish the Christian 'turning the world upside down' from that of the Bakhtinian carnival by calling it the 'white carnival' (an
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adjective I have borrowed from Michel Tournier who uses it in a different but comparable context).38 Any student of the New Testament will recognize that Jesus by his message challenged the same 'official world' which is the target of the Bakhtinian carnival, but used entirely different means. Bakhtin does not make much of this as a distinct phenomenon, but Dostoyevsky undoubtedly understood it. Indeed Ivan's article on Church and state makes explicit mention of the Church's vocation to turn the world upside down and embrace the state. In a sense the alternatives he describes (a state which, like the Roman state and its heirs, embraces the Church as a government department, or a Church which embraces the state) 39 may be seen as a metaphor for the choice confronting readers in their approach to the novel. One possibility is to see religion as a particular phenomenon in a world conceived in secular terms in the spirit of the narrator and modernity. An alternative, no less legitimate, is to take a cue from Zosima and Alyosha to turn this perception upside down and to read the secular world as a fallen discourse within the context of a Christian dispensation. Dostoyevsky's narrator allows his readers to define their own position in this crucial respect. But they have a genuine choice. And if they opt for the latter view they are not left {pace the Grand Inquisitor) to make their way unaided. By Divine Grace they may themselves read the novel in the light of the Scriptures, the image of Christ, their own religious experience and a life of active love. It is clear that, notwithstanding Jean-Luc Nancy, many of Dostoyevsky's readers still do.
9 Conclusion: Dostoyevsky's fantastic realism
SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
It may seem an anti-climax to state baldly at the close of this book that the essence of fantastic realism is an emotionally invested heteroglossia. Is that not after all exactly what Bakhtin's reading amounts to? Of course in one sense it is and my debt to Bakhtin is clear. What I have attempted to do however is to trace the implications of Bakhtin's insights in directions which he chose not to follow and which I would now claim are no less crucial to our understanding of the structure of the novels. What Bakhtin declines to do is to explore the consequences of failure to establish productive and creative subjective relationships with others, which Kohlberg has defined and which underlie the destructive, disruptive, irrational and subversive side to Dostoyevsky's vision of the world. But far from being peripheral, I have argued that these emotions are a vital element in his fantastic realism, affecting characters in their relations with each other and the narrator in his relationship with the reader. To which I would add that they are as vital to a Christian reading of the novel as to any other. When Dostoyevsky insisted that his idealism was the truest realism, he was in effect claiming that emotionally invested heteroglossia is reality or as near as we can get to it. The emotions which underlie Dostoyevskian heteroglossia are so strong that they bring about disturbances of perceptual and intellectual functions. Some readers of Dostoyevsky have gone so far as to claim (I have done so myself) that in his view no human idea is abstract in the sense that it is altogether free of emotion. To the extent that it becomes abstract, it distances itself from heteroglot reality. In the chapter on The Double I examined a variety of phenomena including the chronic breakdown in the selfimage of the hero confronted by the disconfirming gaze of others, the obsessive balancing or undoing of one idea or force with its opposite, the loss of identity between sign and referent and signifier and signi191
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fied and the drawing in of the narrator to the focus and voice of the hero. Subsequently I traced some of the ways in which ideas followed emotions in a radically heteroglot world and I looked at the way in which voices and texts interacted in this heteroglot reality. I have tried to examine them in both their synchronic and diachronic relations. In the former, I looked at disturbances brought about by various (usually) unconscious strategies for creating emotional and perceptual confusion, including labelling, obj edification and the positing of conventional norms which failed to account for the richness of human subjectivity and the drawing forth of unconscious or shameful emotions. I showed how these factors enter into the reader-text relationship as well as into relationships between characters. I also traced examples of distortions (condensation, displacement and secondary revision) as they affect the plot (The Idiot). This summary leaves out much which I found to be of interest, but it leads me to make a further statement which conforms to traditional views on Dostoyevsky and which seems to me to be of great importance. Whether or not Dostoyevsky depicts satisfactorily an ideal of lived experience from which reality in his texts generally departs (heteroglossia in his world seems to consist of interleafing and interacting deviations), the ideals of individual characters are often well defined and play a crucial role in the process I have been describing. These ideals are among the most powerful expressions of what Lacan calls the domain of the Imaginary in Dostoyevsky's world. Dostoyevsky clearly inclines towards the view that a realization of the 'true ideal', based on the image of Christ preserved by the Russian monasteries, was the best guarantee of stability in human relationships and of the ability to cope emotionally and intellectually with disturbances with external sources. It follows from this that Dostoyevsky's own attempts to describe the essence of his realism/idealism which I conscientiously reproduced in the Introduction are not in themselves very helpful and have tended to ensnare interpreters in pre-modern readings of his text. They do serve, however, as valuable controls to test the plausibility of one's own hypotheses. There are, nevertheless, ways of showing that had Dostoyevsky turned his mind to a more comprehensive account of fantastic realism the theoretical materials were to hand in his own writing. I should like
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to conclude with some admittedly highly speculative attempts to make this final series of equations. AUTHORITY, MYSTERY AND MIRACLE IN HUMAN DISCOURSE
Bakhtin regarded unconscious emotions, together with the principles of authority, miracle and mystery, as baleful, external coercive forces. As exploited by the Grand Inquisitor for the purposes of social and political control, so of course they are. If however the idea of 'authority' introduced by Ivan Karamazov in 'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor' may be said to anticipate Bakhtin's idea of authoritative discourse, it is perhaps surprising that he did not also incorporate the ideas of mystery and miracle into his theory of discourse. Such concepts, though alien to Bakhtin, are vital to Dostoyevsky. They too exercise a sort of authority over human xonsciousness, though not of the absolute kind that Bakhtin ascribes to the authoritative word. I am not here going to attempt more than an outline of how Bakhtin's theory might be extended in this way, but, since it offers a framework for drawing together the various lines of enquiry into fantastic realism which this book has undertaken, such a preliminary sketch is irresistible. THE VOICE OF AUTHORITY
In one important sense, as we have seen there appears to be no authoritative voice, no 'taboo voice of the narrator/father' reigning over Dostoyevsky's world as there might be said to be one reigning over Tolstoy's. It may, of course, strike the reader that there is an unacknowledged 'voice of the father' exercising its authority over the text and that it is to be located in Dostoyevsky's own biography, especially as read by Freud who sees his neuroses, his epilepsy and his life-long obsession with death and parricide as deriving from guilt about his own father's death. It may also strike the reader that this preoccupation is frequently echoed in Dostoyevsky's works, particularly in the central role played by the dead body (Holbein's Christ in The Idiot, Zosima's in The Brothers Karamazov) with the suggestion, but not the conviction, that with physical death comes the cessation of spiritual authority.
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Nor does the suggestiveness of the metaphor end there, as Elizabeth Dalton's work testifies. If Dostoyevsky's work has an underlying emotional appeal for his many readers, is it not because his text evokes emotions connected with the struggle with the voice of the father, a struggle which, like the struggle of the hero with the voices of the other, ends typically in the obsessive balancing and unbalancing of opposing forces and ideas? And if this is so are we not, faute de mieux, obliged to invoke Freud (or Lacan) to explain it? Yet even a view of the spiritual hierarchy in The Brothers Karamazov like that of Nina Perlina does not attempt to displace polyphony as the governing principle of the structure of interpersonal dialogue. It may be argued that the authority has simply been transferred to the voice of the implied author - the notional personality which acts as a guarantee for the coherence and meaning of the narrative. But this transfer, if that is what it is, is accompanied by a significant alteration in the character and status of the authority. On the level of the narrative that authority appears fragmented. The principles of coherence underlying the voice of the implied author are distanced from the reader at many removes and have to be sought at the cost of great effort. The voice of the narrator himself is subject to variation in accordance with prevailing speech-genres. Alternative readings may be juxtaposed and argued over endlessly and inconclusively. In the course of attempting to tease out the meaning of the text the relationship between discourse and meaning is frequently broken up and the elements rearranged. To put it another way, it is as if the father (the source of the voice of authority) is dead and his voice is now heard, if at all, refracted, fragmented, disputed, conflated with other voices, one voice in a chorus. Even the narrator, as we have seen, adopts a variety of different conventional voices. A variant of the metaphor may also be applied to my discussion of Dostoyevsky's relationship with his literary precursors. Dostoyevsky does, we have noted, adopt genre conventions in order to establish a sense of familiarity, only then to subvert them. But there is of course no writing without such conventions. Harold Bloom in his influential book The anxiety of influence1 has written of the voice of the strong precursor text and of the different forms that influence may take. The first four of these 'revisionary ratios' as he calls them may, without conscious distortion, be applied thematically to the four different manifestations of the Marion story which we
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discussed in an earlier chapter. Firstly comes 'clinamen', which Bloom defines as poetic misreading or misprision proper - a swerve away from the predecessor, implying that the precursor poem went accurately up to a point, but then should have moved in the direction of the new poem (the Darya episode). Secondly 'tessera', defined as completion and antithesis, where a poet antithetically 'completes' his precursor, by so reading it as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had not gone far enough (the Matryosha episode). Thirdly, 'kenosis', a breaking device similar to defence-mechanisms against repetition compulsions, a movement towards discontinuity with the precursor. Both poet and precursor are 'emptied out' (the Olya episode). 'Daemonization', finally, is the term Bloom choses to represent what happens when the poet opens himself to what he believes to be a power in the parent poem that stands outside it (many other examples of gratuitous victimization in Dostoyevsky). If I am not entirely sure that I have applied these terms appropriately it is not only because I take Bloom seriously (and ironically) in his view that all reading is misreading; it is also because there is a certain imprecision and generality about the definitions which makes misreading probable. But although the match between terms and examples may be questioned, the general applicability of Bloom-like principles to these and similar examples in Dostoyevsky should be clear. Underlying Bloom's thesis is the Freudian concept of the authoritative and virtually inescapable voice of the strong father. There are a number of different issues at stake here. But it may be possible to agree that insofar as there are authoritative voices in Dostoyevsky's text they never go unchallenged. As his final two novels amply demonstrate, the idea of fatherhood is itself interrogated and deconstructed. However 'authoritative discourse' in Dostoyevsky's novels is not just a matter of anterior voices exercising their influence on his text; it is also a matter which concerns the relationships between his characters, between narrator and characters, and between narrator and readers. In all these relationships we have seen evidence that the interaction of voices is not simply a comfortable and civilized exchange of perspectives, which leads to creative assimilation as 'inwardly persuasive discourse'. In fact, consciously or unconsciously, individuals try to enhance their position in the power structure and provoke emotional confusion in others who are prone to it. They label and objectify other
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people in order to contain and subordinate them, appealing sometimes to fashionable ideologies, gossip or other sources of authority. They manipulate them and seek to undermine their emotional and perceptual integrity. It is in examining aspects of the negative, destructive potential of dialogic discourse in a constant power struggle that I have sought in this book to extend, and to some degree to challenge, the emphasis of Bakhtin's analysis. THE VOICE OF MYSTERY
This leads into the second principle or the second type of discourse, of which, as we have seen, and Perlina confirms, Dostoyevsky's text is replete, both as a whole and in detail. We may call it the discourse of mystery. It is the realm of heteroglossia proper in which priorities are in constant flux and and in which the authoritative voice is distanced. In this multilevelled intertextual discourse, whose originary whispers may be uncertain, certain patterns may nevertheless emerge which grip the imagination. In his book The Genesis of secrecy, Kermode writes of the activity of this principle not only in terms of memory, but also in terms of blindness, deafness, intermittency of remembering, forgetfulness, mishearing, recurrence and repetition, to which we have added displacement, condensation and secondary revision, censorship and repression. Such principles underlie the dream-work and affect waking memory. Texts may be purposely written to encourage the reader to discover family resemblances, to make connections and to ascribe significance to them in accordance with a wide variety of different patterns and devices. Thus it is, as Kermode argues, with texts as different as the Gospels and Joyce's Ulysses. There is an implication in the Gospels either that the Gospel parables are obscure on purpose so as to damn outsiders (Mark) or that though they are not necessarily impenetrable, outsiders, being outsiders, will inevitably misconstrue them (Matthew). In either case there is a powerful incentive to prove to oneself that one is an insider, at least if one cares about the issues at stake, an incentive to seek out the meaning.2 One way of doing this is to relate them to anterior texts, to seek out patterns. Dostoyevsky's text encourages such voyages of discovery. On an earlier page I glossed over the three literary passages which Versilov refers to i n ^ Raw Youth'? Othello's last monologue (probably
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Versilov means his penultimate one); Onegin at Tatyana's feet; and Jean Valjean and Cosette at the well in Les Miserables. What all three of these episodes have in common is that they register a moment of deconstructive reversal or, as we might say, a moment when some previously hidden truth is made manifest and when some hierarchical relationship is reversed. Othello is no longer the accuser but perceives himself as the guilty one; Onegin's emotional superiority over Tatyana (in which she is suppliant and he denies her) has undergone a similar reversal; the threatening figure of the convict who approaches behind the terrified little girl in the wood is felt as reassuring. A similar, though not identical, structure can be seen in the Marion/Darya/Matryosha stories. In each the accuser is revealed as the guilty one, and the accused innocent. The same is true of the parallel scene where Luzhin falsely accuses Sonya and the tables are subsequently turned. In the Olya story the girl deeply feels her humiliation although none was intended. She mistakenly regards herself as the innocent victim of an immoral act and as a consequence herself becomes guilty of taking her own life as a result of an innocent act. Versilov does not stress the situational irony or the reversal of fortunes in reporting his reaction to the first three of these episodes. He stresses the emotional effect: such scenes cut into the heart and leave a permanent wound. Gary Cox4 has argued that power inversions become the structural centre of many of Dostoyevsky's mature works and that these inversions become the subject of 'situation rhymes' which appear with almost obsessive regularity in his works. This seems also to be the case with the other chains of motifs which we associated with Stavrogin's confession: the flinging back of a gift of money, the confrontation of two rival women (consider Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaya, Katerina and Grushenka, Stavrogin's two mistresses, Stavrogina and Drozdova), or an explosion of previously suppressed passion. Each of them threatens to upset a significant hierarchy of values and with them the personal relationships of the participants. Each of them can be traced to precursor texts with which Dostoyevsky was familiar, including, it should perhaps be added, the Gospels and the carnival tradition. The relationship between one occurrence of a motif and another may be likened to what Auerbach calls the object of 'figural interpretation' which 'establishes a connection between two events or persons in such a
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way that the first signifies not only itself, but also the second, while the second involves or fulfils the first'. The sense of mystery, of perceiving dimly some unidentified truth, seems to depend increasingly in Dostoyevsky on the conjunction of such emotionally disturbing episodes and a diffuseness of meaning enhanced by narrative distancing techniques. The elusiveness of truth, the impossibility of inscribing it in human discourse, together with the impossibility of ceasing to seek it and the sense that one is on the verge of finding it, are foreshadowed by the experience of the 'uncanny', in which signifiers and signified, signs and referents part company, on which The Double depends and which constantly breaks through the surface of Dostoyevsky's narrative in his other novels. Here again I have tried to develop Bakhtin's insights along new lines, indicating ways in which, in Dostoyevsky, centrifugal principles may threaten structure altogether. THE VOICE OF MIRACLE
The third voice is the voice of miracle. Edwards, in a passage quoted in chapter 8, writes of our sense of an Edenic language of efficacy and plenitude, at one with the world and with ourselves, fulfilling our desires as speakers and writers and doing so with ease. Dostoyevsky's text too expresses a yearning for such a language and perhaps comes nearest to its simplicity and directness in Zosima's discourse, though stylistically only for it has been rearranged by Alyosha. This would be the discourse of miracle. We have seen how in their relations with each other characters yearn for the realization of an ideal which appears to be contrary to nature or common experience, certainly contrary to the image which other people project upon them. Rosemary Jackson, I noted in the opening chapter, says that Dostoyevsky does not present 'characters' but disintegrated figures who no longer coincide with their 'ideal' selves. Perhaps for present purposes we might define 'miracle' as an ideal event whose realization would be inconsistent with the reality effect. To bring about such 'miracles' characters weave Utopian fantasies about themselves, about each other and about external reality for which they seek the confirmation of others. It is when this confirmation is denied them and they become aware that their 'stories' are incompatible with those of others in ways which radically threaten them, that they become
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confused about where they stand in relation to other people. We have seen how consciously or unconsciously people can confuse each other about their mutual relationships and play on each other's dearest hopes; how they can refuse to acknowledge the subjectivity of others and by objectifying them reduce them to stereotypes. A mentality which is morbidly obsessed with the phenomenology of such situations enters 'the underground' (part 1). The strategies employed by people whose attention is still directed chiefly outwards and the situations in which they place each other were the subject of Part 11 which I called 'Driving people crazy'. Psychological studies of Dostoyevsky's text confirm what some of his characters intuit and even express overtly, that there are two sources of the ideal, which sometimes but not always coalesce: the one is direct physical gratification (I think this is what Dmitry Karamazov means by 'the ideal of Sodom') and the other is a pure idealized spiritual image ('the ideal of the Madonna'). Miracles as such do not occur in Dostoyevsky, but the voice, the sense of, the demand for miracle is ever present. The nearest thing to such a miracle is perhaps Alyosha's mystical experience or the promise held out by the image of Christ. I have tried to extend Bakhtin also in the direction of a Christian poetics. We have heard all these voices again and again in Dostoyevsky's text and we can perhaps see better now how they are related within the structure of his work, how indeed the departures from the undefined norm of which he spoke may be seen to follow obsessive patterns if not definable laws. The question must arise: is it not ironic that the principles of the Grand Inquisitor's heresy seem to apply so well to Dostoyevsky's text when Dostoyevsky the author sought to refute them? Perhaps so, but since it is the declared object of that text to represent the fragmented mind of modernity it is not the least surprising or inconsistent. The more interesting question is perhaps whether - to use the central image of the Christian myth - the fragmented voice of an anterior divine authority remains dead or is 'resurrected' in the act of reading, or whether, as seems more probable, the reader experiences only the obsessive balancing and unbalancing of the one idea or force with its opposite. The modern mind (both within Dostoyevsky's world and in relation to it) may be that of the uneasy heir to Christianity, of the secular humanist or nihilist; or it may live on the threshold between the two.
Notes
PREFACE
1 Kuhn, The structure ofscientific revolutions. 2 The Idiot, HI, iv (4 VIII, 315).
3 Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (Leningrad, 1929); Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo (Moscow, 1963), translated as Problems o/Dostoevsky's poetics firstly by R. W. Rotsel (1973) and secondly by Caryl Emerson (1984). My references are to Emerson's translation. 4 For example, Dryzhakov, 'Segmentatsiya vremeni v romane Prestupleniye i nakazaniye\ who appeals to both Soviet critics and to Rene Wellek to support her view. Dryzhakov is, it seems to me, justified in most of her specific criticisms of Bakhtin, but not justified in relegating him to the museum of literary theory. 5 Jones, Dostoyevsky, the novel of discord. 6 See note 2. Two French translations of Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo appeared in 1970, one by Guy Verret, Problemes de lapoetique de Dostoi'evski (Lausanne), the other by I. Kolitcheff, La poetique de Dostoi'evski (Paris). Other translations of works by or attributed in part or in whole to Bakhtin appeared subsequently and are listed in the bibliography. 7 Steiner, Russian formalism, p. 270. 8 Holquist in Bakhtin, The dialogic imagination, p. xiv. 9 Holquist has been actively engaged in translating and editing Bakhtin's work (see bibliography) and is co-author of the principal English-language critical biography of Bakhtin: Clark and Holquist, Mikhail Bakhtin. 10 A number of articles by Julia Kristeva clearly exhibiting the influence of Bakhtin are included in Kristeva, Desire in language, a semiotic approach to literature and art. Dostoyevsky figures prominently in other of Kristeva's writings, notably the recent and so far untranslated Soleil noirf depression et melancolie. 11 Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, the dialogicalprinciple. 12 de Man, 'Dialogue and dialogism'. 13 Booth, introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevski's poetics. 14 Too late to be taken into consideration in writing this book there appeared David Patterson's Literature and spirit. 200
Notes to pages xi-5
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15 The question of the authorship of two books by Voloshinov and one by Medvedev (see bibliography) often attributed to Bakhtin has been widely discussed, most recently in Morson and Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin, pp. 31-49. Their extremely sensible and well-argued view is that although the texts in question bear the marks of discussions with Bakhtin they are essentially the work of the writers whose names they bear. 16 Cf. Bakhtin, 'The problems of speech genres', in Emerson and Holquist (eds.) Speech genres and other essays, pp. 60-102. 17 White, 'Bakhtin, sociolinguistics and deconstruction', p. 123. 18 White, 'Bakhtin, sociolinguistics and deconstruction', p. 127. 19 White, 'Bakhtin, sociolinguistics and deconstruction', p. 129. 20 White, 'Bakhtin, sociolinguistics and deconstruction', pp. 141-2. 21 Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, the dialogicalprinciple, p. 107. 22 Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the novel', The dialogic imagination (pp. 259-422) p. 263. 23 Frank, Dostoyevsky, the seeds of revolt, 1821-184% Dostoyevsky, the years of ordeal, 1850— i8$g; Dostoyevsky, the stir of liberation, i860—1865. 24 Barthes, 'The death of the author', p. 148. 25 Leitch, Deconstructive criticism, an advanced introduction, pp. 99-100. 26 Jones, 'Dostoevsky, Rousseau and others (a study of the "alien voice" in Dostoyevsky's novels); '"The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor": the suppression of the Second Temptation and dialogue with God'. 27 Jones, 'Dostoyevsky - driving the reader crazy'. I
INTRODUCTION
1 Letter to A. N. Maykov from Florence, 11/23 December 1868, A. 28(ii) (pp. 327-33) p. 329. In the nineteenth century the Russian calendar was 12 days behind the Western one: hence the alternative dates. 2 Letter to N. N. Strakhov from Florence, 26 February/10 March 1869,^. 29® (pp. 14-22) p. 15. 3 'Something about lying', Diary ofa Writer 1873,1S^- 21 (PP- I I 7~ 2 5)p. 119. 4 Letter to Yu. Abaza, 15 June 1880, A. 30® (pp. 191-2) p. 192. 5 Notebooks for 1880-1, A 27, p. 65. 6 Taylor, Hegel. Taylor (p. 13) ascribes the use of the term in this sense to Isaiah Berlin. 7 Jackson, Dostoyevsky's quest for form, p. 89. 8 Jackson, Dostoyevsky's quest for form, pp. 76-7. 9 Linner, Dostoevski] on realism, p. 56. 10 Linner, Dostoevski} on realism, pp. 204-5. 11 Strakhov, Biografiya, pis'ma i zametki iz zapisnoy knizhki F. M. Dostoyevskogo, P- 195-
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Notes to pages 5-16
12 I discussed this in Jones, 'Some echoes of Hegel in Dostoyevsky'. Among more recent discussions of Dostoyevsky and Hegel which implicitly or explicitly take issue with me are Rice, 'Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" and Hegel's "master and slave'", and Hanak, 'Hegel's "frenzy of self-conceit" as key to the annihilation of individuality in Dostoyevsky's "Possessed"'. 13 Gibian, 'C. G. Cams' Psyche and Dostoevsky'. 14 'The environment', Diary of a Writer i8yj, 3, A. 21 (pp. 13-23) p. 17. 15 Jones, 'Dostoyevsky and European philosophy'. See also Bakhtin's critique of expressivist aesthetics in 'Avtor i geroy v esteticheskoy deystvitel'nosti', Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva, pp. 7-180. 16 'Mr -bov. and the question of art', A 18 (pp. 70-103) p. 101. 17 de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the age of intensity, p. 2. 18 Todorov, Introduction to poetics, pp. 18-19. 19 Fanger, Dostoevsky and romantic realism. 20 Fanger, Dostoevsky and romantic realism, p. 134. 21 de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the age of intensity, pp. 27, 32, 39, 40, 42. 22 Berman,y4// that is solid melts into air. 23 'A Weak Heart', A. 2 (pp. 16-48) pp. 47-8. 24 A Raw Youth, 11, viii, i;A. 13, p. 113. 25 Berman, All that is solid melts into air, p. 266. 26 Hassan, 'The question of postmodernism', p. 125. 27 McHale, Postmodernistfiction,pp. 9-10. 28 Sarraute, L'ere de soupcon, p. 10. 29 Sarraute, L 'ere du soupgon, p. 33. 30 Frank, 'The world of Raskolnikov', pp. 30-5. 31 Berdyayev, Dostoevsky, p. 11. 32 Copleston, Philosophy in Russia, pp. 147 ff. 33 Buber, / and thou. See Nina Perlina, 'Bakhtin and Buber: problems of dialogic imagination'. 34 See Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 85. 35 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 32. 36 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 40. 37 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 85. 38 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 54. 39 Jackson, Fantasy, the literature ofsubversion. 40 Jackson, Fantasy, the literature ofsubversion, p. 38. 41 'Something about youth', Diary of a Writer 1876, December 1, iv, A. 24 (pp. 50-2), p. 51. 42 It is widely held that Voloshinov's book on Freudianism (V. N. Volosinov, Freudianism: a Marxist critique) was actually written by Bakhtin. As already noted this view has, to my mind, been convincingly refuted by Morson and
Notes to pages 16-35
43 44 45
46
47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63
2O
3
Emerson in Rethinking Bakhtin, pp. 31-49. However, it remains true that both Voloshinov and Bakhtin have severe reservations about Freud. See G. Pirog, 'The Bakhtin circle's Freud: from positivism to hermeneutics'. Freud, 'Dostoevsky and parricide', Standard edition ofthe complete psychological works, 21, pp. 177-94. Cox, Tyrant and victim in Dostoevsky. It has been argued that Bakhtin never grappled with these implications, which Aaron Vogel attempts to do in his 'Coerced speech and the Oedipus dialogue complex', Rethinking Bakhtin, pp. 173-96. Dalton, Unconscious structure in 'The Idiot\ An interesting critique of this book is provided by Gary Saul Morson, 'Literary theory, psychoanalysis and the creative process'. Dalton, Unconscious structure in 'Theldiot\ p. 36. Dalton, Unconscious structure in 'TheIdiot', p. 138. Dalton, Unconscious structure in 'The Idiot\p. 144. Forrester, 'On Dostoyevsky's The Gambler, transference and the stenographer'. Kristeva, Desire in language, introduction by Leon S. Roudiez, p. 15. Culler, Structuralist poetics, p. 140. Booth, 'Introduction' in Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevski's poetics, p. xxi. Booth, 'Introduction', pp. xxi ff. Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 284. Emerson, editor's preface to Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky ys poetics (pp. xxix-xliii) pp. xxxi and xxxiv. Rimmon-Kenan, Narrativefiction:contemporary poetics, p. 33. Bachtin, 'Tolstoy's War and peace', p. 28. Booth, 'Introduction', p. xv. Pirog, 'The Bakhtin circle's Freud'. Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 297. de Jonge, Dostoevsky and the age of intensity, p. 142. Kohlberg, 'Psychological analysis and literary form, a study of the doubles in Dostoevsky', p. 352. 2 THE DOUBLE
1 A. 1, pp. 484 ff. contains an account of the critical reception of the novel at the time of its first publication. On Aksakov's review, see p. 489. 2 On Belinsky's assessment^. 1, pp. 489-90. 3 Dostoyevsky's notes for the new episodes are published in A 1, pp. 432-6. 4 Notebooks for 1872-1875,^. 1 (pp. 252-73) p. 264. 5 'The history of the verb stushevat'sya\ Diary ofa Writer I8JJ, November, 1,
\\,A. 26 (pp. 65-7) p. 65.
204 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
14
15 16 17 18
Notes to pages 37-61
Bakhtin, Problems ofDos toevsky's poetics, pp. 211-21 and 224-7. Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky 's poetics, p. 215. Frank, The seeds of revolt, p. 311. Rank, The Double: a psychoanalytic study. Kohlberg, 'Psychological analysis and literary form', pp. 350-1. Kohlberg, 'Psychological analysis and literary form', pp. 351-2. Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, pp. 170 ff, and Holquist, ed., The dialogic imagination, pp. 248 ff. The Double, v;A. 1 (pp. 109-29) pp. 139. The translations of this text are my own, but in making them I found Jessie Coulson's version published together with Notes from Underground particularly helpful. Freud, 'The Uncanny', Standard edition, 17 (pp. 217-56), p. 220. See also my article' "Der Sandmann" and "the uncanny": a sketch for an alternative approach'. Freud, 'The Uncanny', p. 244. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 65. Jackson, Fantasy, p. 66. Cixous, 'La fiction et ses fantomes. Une lecture de YUnheimliche de Freud', p. 201.
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
28 29 30 31
Weber, 'The side show, or: remarks on a canny moment'. Freud, 'Beyond the pleasure principle', Standard edition, 28, pp. 8 ff. The Double, v;A. 1, pp. 140, 142. The Double, vi; A. 1, pp. 146-7. The Double, vi;A. 1, p. 151. Smail, Illusion and reality, p. 18. The Double, \m; A. i , p . 167. The Double, x;A. 1, p. 187. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics, pp. 213 ff.; V. V. Vinogradov, Evolyutsiya russkogo naturalizma, pp. 261-7. See the discussion in Frank, The seeds of revolt, p. 307. 'Mr -bov and the question of art',/4. 18 (pp. 70-103) p. 101. Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, his life and work, p. 51. Schmid, Der Textaufbau in den ErzdhlungeDostoevskijs, especially, pp. 147-8. Neuhauser, Das Fruhwerk Dostojevskijs: literarische Tradition undgesellschaftlicherAnspruch, p. 173. 3 NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
1 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, pp. 51-3, 227-37. 2 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 52. 3 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's poetics, p. 53. I have corrected an error in the translation.
Notes to pages 63-94
205
4 Frank, 'Nihilism and Notes from Underground?', p. 1. 5 Notes from Underground, 1, \;A. 5 (pp. 99-179) p. 108. The translation is my own, but I have found particularly useful Jessie Coulson's translation for Penguin Classics and Andrew R. MacAndrew's for Signet Classics. 6 Cf. Hirschkop, 'Bakhtin, discourse and democracy', p. 98. 7 Notebooks for A Raw Youth (January-November 1875), A. 16 (pp. 252-439) p. 330. 8 Notes from Underground, 11, x;A. 5, pp. 178-9. 9 'White Nights', n;A. 2 (pp. 102-41) p. 116. 10 'Petersburg dreams in poetry and prose', A. 19 (pp. 67-85) pp. 70-4. 11 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky 's poetics, pp. 231-2. 4 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
1 Notebooks for 1880-1, A 27, p. 65. 2 Letter to M. N. Katkov, from Wiesbaden, 10(22)-15(27) September 1865, A. 28(ii) (pp. 136-9) p. 136. 3 Laing, Self and others, pp. 61-7, 132-4, 165-73. 4 Laing, Self and others, pp. 170-1. 5 Crime and Punishment, 1, iv; A. 6, p. 40. The translations are my own but I have found Sidney Monas' version for Signet Classics particularly helpful. 6 Crime and Punishment, 1,'w;A.6, p. 38. 7 Crime and Punishment, 1, \i;A. 6, pp. 55, 57, 58. 8 Crime and Punishment, 11, iv; mxs, i;A. 6, pp. 104, 105, 155. 9 Crime and Punishment, 111, ii;A. 6, p. 154. 10 Laing, Self and others, p. 139. Both Laing and Searles related these unconscious strategies to the development of schizophrenia. Their thesis has turned out to be highly controversial. Most psychologists would now simply say that it was wrong. I am not making any such connection here however. My thesis is that where, for some definable reason, an individual displays a propensity to be emotionally and perceptually confused, the deployment of such strategies by others is likely to aggravate this propensity. 11 Laing, Self and others, p. 140. 12 Crime and Punishment, 111, \;A. 6, pp. 195-6. 13 Crime and Punishment, m, v;A. 6, p. 192. 14 Crime and Punishment, iv, \;A. 6, p. 261. 15 Crime and Punishment, w, v;A. 6, p. 265. 16 Crime and Punishment, iv, in; A. 6, p. 240. 17 Laing, Self and others, p. 143. 18 See, for example, Barbara Heldt, Terrible perfection, women and Russian literature, p. 37.
206
Notes to pages 94-124 5 THE DEVILS
1 Bakhtin, Rabelais and his world, translated by Helene Iswolsky, Bloomington, 1984, p. 10. 2 Stallybrass and White, The politics and poetics of transgression, especially, the Introduction, pp. 1-26. 3 Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevski's poetics, p. 123. 4 Danow, 'A note on the internal dynamics of the Dostoevskian conclave'. 5 Danow, 'A note on the internal dynamics of the Dostoevskian conclave', p. 62. 6 Danow, 'A note on the internal dynamics of the Dostoevskian conclave', p. 67. 7 The Devils, 1, iv, 7; A. 10, p. 126. The translations of this text are my own but I have found David Magarshack's version for Penguin Classics particularly helpful. 8 The Devils, 1, iv, 7; A. 10, p. 126. 9 The Devils, 1, i, \,A. 10, p. 128. 10 The Devils, 1, v, 4; A. 10, pp. 136, 140. 11 The Devils, 1, v, \,A. 10, p. 140. 12 The Devils, 1, v, 6; A. 10, p. 147. 13 The Devils, 1, v, 6; A. 10, p. 152. 14 The Devils, 1, v, 7; A 10, p. 163. 15 The Devils, in, vi, 2; A. 10, p. 469. 16 Stallybrass and White, The politics and poetics of transgression, p. 19. 6 THE IDIOT
1 2 3 4 5 6
7 8 9 10 11 12
Miller, Dostoevsky and 'The Idiot*. Miller, Dostoevsky and 'The Idiot', pp. 122-3, I 2 5 Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot', p. 138. Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot', pp. 159-61. Perlina, Varieties of poetic utterance, quotation in The Brothers Karamazov', p. 7. Dalton, Unconscious structure in The Idiot'. Dalton does not actually advance this argument; her analysis is on an altogether more sophisticated level. But it would be one possible reading of it. The Idiot, 1, vi;y4. 8, p. 55. The Idiot, \,\n,A. 8, p. 67. The Idiot, 1, vii;^. 8, p. 65. The Idiot, 1, vii;^. 8, pp. 71-2. The Idiot, 1, vii; A. 8, p. 75. Miller, Dostoevsky and The Idiot', pp. 107-8.
Notes to pages 124-155
207
13 The Idiot, 11, '\\,A. 8, p. 163. 14 See the discussion of this term as used in Bakhtin's early work in Morson and Emerson, eds., Rethinking Bakhtin, pp. 10—12. 15 The Idiot, 11, ix;A. 8, p. 235. 16 Miller, Dostoevsky and 'The Idiot', p. 127. 17 The Idiot, HI, iii;y4. 8, p. 235. 16 Miller, Dostoevsky and 'TheIdiot', p. 127. 17 The Idiot, in, \\v,A. 8, p. 296. 18 The Idiot, HI, \;A. 8, p. 320. 19 Notebooks for The Idiot, A. 9 (pp. 140-288), p. 277. 20 The terms 'digital' and 'analogic' as applied to human communication are discussed and defined in Watzlawick, Beavin and Jackson, Pragmatics of human communication, pp. 60 ff. 21 The Idiot, iv, ix; A. 8, p. 479. 22 The Idiot, iv, x;A. 8, p. 494. 23 The Idiot, iv, iii;y4. 8, p. 402. 24 The Idiot, iv, v;A. 8, p. 424. 7 THE MARION MOTIF
1 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky ys poetics, p. 28. See also Bakhtin's brief remarks on literary influence, p. 159. 2 Notes from Underground, 1, xi;A. 5, p. 122. 3 Notebooks for A Raw Youth, A. 16, p. 10. 4 A Raw Youth, in, viii;y4. 13, p. 382. The reference to Othello is probably to his penultimate monologue, that to Onegin to the end of the eighth chapter, and that to Hugo to Les Miserables, 11, iii, 5, where Jean Valjean meets little Cosette. 5 Crime and Punishment, 11, i;A. 6, p. 88. 6 J.-J. Rousseau, Les Confessions, Oeuvres completes, 1, pp. 1-656. The Marion episode is on pp. 84-7. 7 de Man, Allegories of reading, pp. 278-301. I have left out of account de Man's discussion of'desire' and how it might apply in Dostoevsky, since it would involve a psychological discussion of some length and complexity, which is not the object of the present chapter. 8 Miller, Dostoevsky and 'The Idiot', pp. 178-82; also 'Rousseau and Dostoyevsky; the morality of confession reconsidered'. 9 The Idiot, 1, xiv;A. 8, pp. 123-4. 10 Gerard Genette, Palimpsestes. 11 Crime and Punishment, 11, i;A. 6, p. 88. 12 A Raw Youth, 1, viii, i - 1, x, 1 passim; ^4. 13, pp. 112-49 passim.
208
Notes to pages 155-175
13 'At TikhonV, A. 11 (pp. 5-30), pp. 13-20. Variants are to be found in A. 12, pp. 109-14 and 123-7. 14 Barran, 'Dark uses of confession: Rousseau and Dostoyevsky's Stavrogin'. 15 A Raw Youth, 1, x, 5; A 13, p. 162. 16 Crime and Punishment, v, iii; A. 6, pp. 300-11. 17 Crime and Punishment, rv, n;A. 6, p. 228. 18 'At Tikhon's', \\;A. 11, pp. 12-13. 19 A Raw Youth, 1, ix, \,A. 13, p. 131. 20 Sue, Mathilde, 11, pp. 104-5; s e e Jones, 'An aspect of romanticism in Dostoyevsky: Netochka Nezvanova and Eugene Sue's Mathilde*. 8 THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21
Perlina, Varieties of poetic utterance. Perlina, Varieties of poetic utterance, pp. 13, 24, 72. Perlina, Varieties of poetic utterance, p. 71. Perlina, Varieties of poetic utterance, p. 37. Sutherland, Atheism and the rejection of God: contemporary philosophy and 'The Brothers Karamazov1, pp. 50 ff. Vetlovskaya, Poetika romana 'Brat'ya Karmazovy\ Camus, The rebel, p. 52 (footnote). Hackel, 'The religious dimension: vision or evasion? Zosima's discourse in The Brothers Karamazov\ in Jones and Terry (eds.). New essays on Dostoyevsky, pp. 139-68. Gibson, The religion ofDostoevsky, p. 196. Nancy, 'Of divine places', p. 16. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the novel', in Holquist (ed.), The dialogic imagination (pp. 259-422) p. 344. Holquist, Dostoevsky and the novel, pp. 165-91. Freud, 'Totem and taboo', Standard edition of the complete psychological works, 13 (pp. ix-161) p. 154. Kermode, The genesis ofsecrecy, on the interpretation of narrative. The Brothers Karamazov, 11, v, 5; A 14, p. 228. The Brothers Karamazov, 11, v, 5; A. 14, p. 229. Beare, The Gospel according to Matthew, p. 105. Sandoz, Political apocalypse, p. 152. See, Sandoz, Hackel, Gibson and, among others, Barth, The Epistle to the Romans. Laing, pp. 125 ff.; Bateson, Jackson, Haley and Weakland, 'Towards a theory of schizophrenia'. It has to be said that the reading of the Second Temptation in terms of a miracle to impress the masses is widespread among theologians, some of
Notes to pages 176-197
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38 39
whom go no further. Indeed Beare (p. n o ) is only a partial exception. He remarks that the narrator must be thinking of public display, otherwise Satan could just as well have chosen a high point in the wilderness. Kermode, The genesis ofsecrecy, p. 19. Hackel, 'The religious dimension: vision or evasion? Zosima's discourse in The Brothers Karamazov', pp. 160-2. Sutherland, Atheism and the rejection of God, p. 36. Hackel, 'The religious dimension', p. 164. Shatov, in The Devils (11, i, 7; A. 10, pp. 200-1) simply says, in reply to Stavrogin's persistent question, that he will believe in God. Kjetsaa, Dostoevsky and his New Testament. Bakhtin, 'Discourse in the noveP, p. 342. Edwards, Towards a Christian poetics. Edwards, Towards a Christian poetics, p. 2. Edwards, Towards a Christian poetics, p. 7. Edwards, Towards a Christian poetics, p. n . Edwards, Towards a Christian poetics, p. 73. Terras, A Karamazov companion, pp. 84-120. Freud, 'Moses and Monotheism', Standard edition ofthe complete psychological works, 23 (pp. 3-137) p. 36. The Brothers Karamazov, 1, ii, 2; A. 14, p. 41. The translations of this text are my own but I have found David Magarshack's version for Penguin Classics particularly helpful. The Brothers Karamazov, 1, i, $\A. 14, p. 29. Tournier, La Vent Paraclet, pp. 198 ff. The Brothers Karamazov, 1, ii, 5; A 14, pp. 56 ff. 9 CONCLUSION
1 2 3 4
209
Bloom, The anxiety of influence. Kermode, The genesis ofsecrecy, pp. 28 ff. A Raw Youth, HI, m\\\A. 13, p. 382. Cox, Tyrant and victim in Dostoyevsky.
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The bibliography lists titles to which this book contains references together with a small number of additional titles of particular relevance. Bachtin [Bakhtin], Nicholas, 'Tolstoy's War and Peace\ lectures and essays (Birmingham, 1963) pp. 23-33. Bakhtin, M. M. Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (Leningrad, 1929). Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo (Moscow, 1963). Problems of Dostoyevsky ys poetics, trans. R. W. Rotsel (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1973). Problems ofDostoevsky ys poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minnesota and Manchester, 1984). References in this book are to this translation. Problemes de la poetique de Dosto'ievski, trans. Guy Verret (Lausanne, 1970). La Poetique de Dosto'ievski, trans. I. Kolitcheff (Paris, 1970). Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow, 1975). The dialogic imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1981). Rabelais and his world, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984). Estetika slovesnogo tvorchestva (Moscow, 1979). Speech genres and other essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas, 1986). Literaturno-kriticheskiye stat'i (Moscow, 1986). Barran, Thomas, 'Dark uses of confession: Rousseau and Dostoevsky's Stavrogin', Mid-Hudson Language Studies, 1 (1978)97-112. Barth, Karl, The epistle to the Romans, trans. E. C. Hoskyns (Oxford, 1933)Barthes, Roland, 'The death of the author', in Stephen Heath (ed. and trans.), Image, music, text (Glasgow, 1977) pp. 142-8. Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. and Weakland, J., 'Towards a theory of schizophrenia', Behavioural Science, 1 (1956) 251-64. Beare, Francis Wright, The Gospel according to Matthew (Oxford, 1981). 210
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Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J. H. and Jackson, D. D., Pragmatics of human communication (New York, 1967). Weber, Samuel, 'The sideshow, or: remarks on a canny moment', Modern Language Notes, 88 (1973) 1102-33. White, Allon, 'Bakhtin, sociolinguistics and deconstruction', in Frank Gloversmith, ed., The theory of reading (Sussex and New Jersey, 1984) pp. 123-46. Wright, Elizabeth, Psychoanalytic criticism, theory in practice (London and New York, 1984). Zaharov, V. N., Sistema zhanrov Dostoyevskogo (Leningrad, 1985).
Index
This index, for obvious reasons, does not include references to Bakhtin or Dostoyevsky as such. However, terms which have a peculiar meaning in their writings are listed under their names. Names in endnotes are included only when they are the subject of special comment. The bibliography is not included. double-voiced discourse, xiv, 23,
Abaza, Yu., 58 Aksakov, K. S., 35 Aristotle, 145 Auerbach, E., 187, 197 authoritative discourse, see Bakhtin, M.M. authority, see Dostoyevsky, F. M. autoscopic syndrome, 40
24> 27, 30, 59> ^ 9 , 150. 167 heteroglossia, xiii, xiv, 3, 6, 21, 23, 28, 78, 100, 160, 191, 192, 196 internally/inwardly persuasive discourse, viii, 22, 24, 62, 123, 174, 175, 181, 182, 189, 195 many-layeredness, 185 Mennipaean satire, 23 metalinguistics, x, xiii monologic, the, 12, 24, 30, 31, 61 multivoicedness, xiv, 3, 24, 37, 39 polyphony (polyphonic novel), xiii, xiv, xvi, 1, 13, 23, 24,77, J43> 155, 164, 166, 168, 179, 194 unfinalizability, 61, 64, 120 vzhivaniye, 130 Bakhtin, N. M., 25 Balzac, H. de, 1, 8, 20, 117, 120,
Bakhtin, M. M. authoritative discourse, viii, 22, 24,62, 120, 123, 164-7, J74> 176, 181, 182, 189, 193-6 carnival, 1,17, 23, 96, 97, 100, i n , 125-7, 182, 189, 197 chronotope, 43, 117, 120 biographical time, 117 drawing room, 117, 119, 138 family idyll, 117, 123 market-place, 117 salon, 117-19 street, 17, 118, 130 threshold, 30, 43, 48, 56, 58, 117, 120, 132 dialogic discourse, xiii, 12, 13, 24, 26, 27 discourse/the word with a loophole, 61, 62, 64, 89
121
Barran, T., 158 Barthes, R., xvi, 24, 100 Bateson, G., 175 Beare, F. W., 2O9n2i Belinsky, V. G., 20, 35 Belyy, A., 11 Berdyayev, N. A., 12 Berlin, I., 2Oin6 217
2l8
Index
Berman, M., 9, 10, 29 Bernard, C , 20 biographical time, see Bakhtin, M. M. chronotope Bloom, H., 194, 195 Booth, W., xi, 22, 24, 25, 52 Brett, K., xvii Buber, M., 12, 24 Buckle, 67, 70 Burke, E., 66 Byron, G. G., 66 Camus, A., 166, 167 carnival see Bakhtin, M. M. Cams, C. G., 5 Catholicism Roman, vii Chamisso, A. von, 37 Chatman, S., 25 Chernyshevksy, N. G., 20, 36, 60, 67, 70, 72 Christ, see Jesus Christian readings, x, xi, xvi, 4, 15, 31, 166, 170, 171, 183, 184, 187, 191, 199 Christianity, 1, 4, 80, 143, 168, 181, i82ff, 186, 187 chronotope, see Bakhtin, M. M. Cixous, H., 45 Clark, K., xi, xii Copleston, F., 12 Coulson, J., 2O4ni3, 205ns (ch 3) Cox, G., 17, 197 Culler, J., 20 Dalton, E., 17, 18, 19, 25, 43, 121, 144, 193, 2o6n6 (ch 6) Danow, D. K., 98-100 decadent movement, 9 deconstruction (deconstructive readings, etc) xi-xvi, 31, 63-5, 70-2, 142, 177, 196 Derrida, J., xvi, 3, 20, 72
deviations, see Dostoyevsky, F. M. dialogic discourse, see Bakhtin, M.M. Dickens, C , 1, 8, 20, 120 Diderot, D., 67, 70, 188 Dostoyevsky, F. M., authority, 27, 172, 173, 193-6 deviations, 7, 28, 150 false developments, 6, 7 fantastic, the, 2, 3, 4, 10, 13, 14, 37 fantastic realism, xiv, 1, 3-9, 14-16,19-22,27-31,35,37, 39> 73> H3> I9I-9 idealism, 2,3,9, J5> I 9 I living life, vii, 15, 30, 112 miracle, 27, 172, 173, 193, 198-9 mystery, 27, 172, 173, 193, 196-8 realism, 2, 3, 4 realism in higher sense, 3, 9, 15, 20,28
double-voiced discourse, see Bakhtin, M. M. drawing-room, see Bakhtin, M. M., chronotope dreams, 78, 119, see also Freud, S., dreams Dryzhakov, E., 2oon4 Edwards, M., 182-4, 198 Emerson, C , xi, xvii, 25, 26, 30, 2oini5, 2O3n42 Engelhardt, B. M., 13 existentialism, 63, 64 existentialist readings, 15, 167 expressionism, 63 expressivism, 3, 6, 28 false developments, see Dostoyevsky, F.M. family idyll, see Bakhtin, M. M., chronotope
Index Fanger, D., 8, 9 fantastic realism, see Dostoyevsky, F.M. feminist readings, xi FichteJ. G., 6 Forrester, J., 19 Fourier, C , 20, 35, 67 Frank, J., xv, 12, 39, 63, 64, 116 Freud, S., 1, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 26, 29,39,44-6,63,78, 113, 136, 144, 150, 167, 169, 170, 186, 187, 193, 194, 195, 2O3n42 condensation, 17, 19, 136, 150, 151, 161, 185, 192 displacement, 17, 19, 136, 150, 151, 161, 185, 192 dreams, 19, 29, 150, 185 ego, 18 id, 18, 27 Oedipus complex, 17, 18, 19, 29, 169,170 return of the repressed, 17, 29, 31 secondary revision, 17, 151, 192 superego, 18 transference, 19 Fyodorov, N. F., 183 Genette, G., 155, 156 German Idealism, see idealist philosophy Gibson, A. B., 166 Goethe, J. W. von, 20 Gogol, N. V., 1, 8, 11, 20, 35, 37, 38, 4I>53>55~7>66, 167 Goncharov, I. A., x gothic, the, 23, 114, 117-22, 125, 128, 130, 133, 136 Hackel, S., 166, 177, 178, 187 Hassan, I., 11 Hegel, G. W. F., 5, 6, 20 Heine, H., 152
219
Heldt, B., xvii Herder, J. G., 6 Herzen, A. I., 20, 165 heteroglossia see Bakhtin, M. M. Hoffman, E. T. A., 4, 20, 35-7, 40, 44, 45> 56, 57 Holquist, M., xi, xii, 168-70, 186, Hugo, V., 20, 121, 152, 162 humanist readings, x, xi, xvi, 199 Huxley, T. H , 67 idealism, see Dostoyevsky, F. M. idealist philosophy, 1, 3, 5 individualism, vii, 70 infinite deferral, xv, 64 internally persuasive discourse, see Bakhtin, M. M. intersubjectivity, 21, 29, 30, 56, 64, 77, 81, 119, 126, 136, 142, 192 intertextuality, 20, 21, 57, 62, 64, 72 Jackson, R[obert] L., 3, 4 Jackson, R[osemary], 14, 45, 198 Jesus (Christ), 56, 121, 123, 143, 169, 171-6, 179, 181-3, 189, 190, 192, 199 Jonge, Alex de, 8,9, 12, 30 Joyce, J., 196 Jung, C. G., 78 Kafka, F., 126 Kant, I., 66 Kermode, F., 170, 176, 177, 181, 196 Kirillova, I., xvii Kjetsaa, G., 178 Kohlberg, L., 30, 39-41, 52, 55, 191 Kristeva, J., xi, 20, 2oonio Kuhn, T., vii, viii LacanJ., 19, 20, 192, 194
220
Index
Laing, R. D., 23, 24, 79, 80, 84, 85, 94, i n , 145, 175, 2O5nio (ch 4 ) Lazhechnikov, I. I., 37 Leitch, V., xvi Lermontov, M. Yu., 66 Linner, S., 4 Lives of the Saints, 20, 165 living life, see Dostoyevsky, F. M. Lord, R., 116 Mac Andrew, A. R., 205 n5 (ch 3) McHale, B., 11, 133 Magarshack, D., 2o6n7 (ch 5),
Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, 70 naturalistic readings, 41 Nekrasov, N. A., 66, 165 Neuhauser, R., 55 New Testament, 20, 123, 166, i7off, 196, 197 Nietzsche, F., 1, 63, 64, 78 objedification, 24, 77, 81, 83, 90, 92, 117-19, 121, 131, 141, 143, 195 Orthodoxy, vii, xi, 22
multivoicedness, see Bakhtin, M. M. Musset, A. de, 40 mystery, see Dostoyevsky, F. M.
Pascal, B., 183 Patterson, D., 200m 4 Pecherin, V., 165 Perlina, N., 120, 164-8, 170, 181, 187, 194, 196 Petrashevtsy, 35, 36, 61 Pirog, G., 26 Plato, 20 Poe, E. A., 4, 40, 57 Polezhayev, A., 165 polyphony (the polyphonic novel), see Bakhtin, M. M. post-Kantian idealism, see idealist philosophy post-modernism, 11, 54, 58, 133, 176, 180 post-modernist readings, xvi, 28, 31 post-structuralism, 64 Praz, M., 114 Protestantism, vii Proust, M., 11, 117 psychoanalytic readings, xi, 15, 16, 30, 167 Pushkin, A. S., x, 8, 10, 56, 66, 130, 165
Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 66, 70, 78, 140
Rank, O., 39, 45 reader-response criticism, xii
Man, P. de, xi, 153, 158, 2 0 7 ^ Mandelstam, O., 11 Mansfield, K., 12 many-layerdness, see Bakhtin, M.M. market-place, see Bakhtin, M. M., chronotope Marx, K., 9, 167 Marxist readings, x, xi, 15, 167 Maupassant, G. de, 40 Medvedev, P. M., xi, 201m 5 metalinguistics, see Bakhtin, M. M. Miller, R. F., 114-17, 120, 128, i33> !37> !39> J 40, H3> J 54 miracle, see Dostoyevsky, F. M. Mochulsky, K., 55 modernism, 9, 11, 58, 133 modernist readings, xvi, 28, 31 monologic, the, see Bakhtin, M. M. Morson, G. S., xi, 26, 30, 20ini5,
Index realism in a higher sense, see Dostoyevsky, F. M. realist readings, 46 reception theory, xiii Renan, E., 20 Richter,J.-P., 40 Rimmon-Kenan, S., 25 romantic movement, 3, 6, 9, 37, 53, 66 romantic readings, 28 romantic-realism, 9, 12, 23 Rousseau, J.-J., 20, 151, 163 salon, see Bakhtin, M. M., chronotope Sand, G., 66, 186 Sandoz, E., 174 Sarraute, N., 11 Sartre, J.-P., 24 Saussure, F. de, xii, xiii Schelling, F. W.J. von, 5, 6 Schiller, F., 20, 66, 93, 165, 186 schizophrenia, 40 Schmid, W., 55 Scott, W , 66 Searles, H. F., 84, 85, 94, 116, 127, 138, 143, 2O5nio(ch4) sectarianism, vii Seeley, F. F., 16 Shakespeare, W., 20 Smith, G. S., xvii socialism, vii split personality, 40 Stallybrass, P., 111 Steiner, G., 114 Stendhal, 117
221
Stevenson, R. L., 57 Strakhov, N. N., x, 5 street, see Bakhtin, M. M., chronotope structuralism, 25 structuralist readings, xi, xii, xiii Sue, E., 8, 20, 120, 121, 162
Sutherland, S., 165, 177 Swift, J., 63 Taylor, C , 3, 6, 2Oin6 Terras, V., xvii, 185 Todorov, T., xi, xii, xiii, 8 Tolstoy, L. N., x, xvi, 117, 118, 120, 145 Tournier, M., 190 Trollope, A., 117 Turgenev, I. S., x, 20 uncanny, the, 36, 37, 44-6, 54, 56, 57, 117, 198 unfinalizability, see Bakhtin, M. M. utilitarianism, 64 Veltman, A. F., 37 Vetlovskaya, V. E., 166 Vinogradov, V. V., 53, 55 Vogel, A., 2O3n45 Voloshinov, V. N., xi, 26, 201m 5,
Weber, S., 45 Weinreich, U., xiii White, A., xii, xiii, 111 Zamyatin, Ye., 11
