Consider the Lobster (34 page)

These last few queries, though, while sincere, obviously involve much larger and more abstract questions about the connections (if any) between aesthetics and morality—about what the adjective in a phrase like “The Magazine of Good Living” is really supposed to mean—and these questions lead straightaway into such deep and treacherous waters that it’s probably best to stop the public discussion right here. There are limits to what even interested persons can ask of each other.

2004

HAVE A PROLEGOMENOUS LOOK
at two quotations. The first is from Edward Dahlberg, a Dostoevsky-grade curmudgeon if ever in English there was one:

The citizen secures himself against genius by icon worship. By the touch of Circe’s wand, the divine troublemakers are translated into porcine embroidery.
¹

The second is from Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons:

“At the present time, negation is the most useful of all—

and we deny —”

“Everything?”

“Everything!”

“What, not only art and poetry … but even … horrible to say …”

“Everything,” repeated Bazarov, with indescribable composure.

As the backstory goes, in 1957 one Joseph Frank, then thirty-eight, a Comparative Lit professor at Princeton, is preparing a lecture on existentialism, and he starts working his way through Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky’s
Notes from Underground
. As anyone who’s read it can confirm,
Notes
(1864) is a powerful but extremely weird little novel, and both these qualities have to do with the fact that the book is at once universal and particular. Its protagonist’s self-diagnosed “disease”—a blend of grandiosity and self-contempt, of rage and cowardice, of ideological fervor and a self-conscious inability to act on his convictions: his whole paradoxical and self-negating character—makes him a universal figure in whom we can all see parts of ourselves, the same kind of ageless literary archetype as Ajax or Hamlet. But at the same time,
Notes from Underground
and its Underground Man are impossible really to understand without some knowledge of the intellectual climate of Russia in the 1860s, particularly the frisson of utopian socialism and aesthetic utilitarianism then in vogue among the radical intelligentsia, an ideology that Dostoevsky loathed with the sort of passion that only Dostoevsky could loathe with.

Anyway, Professor Frank, as he’s wading through some of this particular-context background so that he can give his students a comprehensive reading of
Notes,
begins to get interested in using Dostoevsky’s fiction as a kind of bridge between two distinct ways of interpreting literature, a purely formal aesthetic approach vs. a social-dash-ideological criticism that cares only about thematics and the philosophical assumptions behind them.
²
That interest, plus forty years of scholarly labor, has yielded the first four volumes of a projected five-book study of Dostoevsky’s life and times and writing. All the volumes are published by Princeton U. Press. All four are titled
Dostoevsky
and then have subtitles:
The Seeds of Revolt, 1821-1849
(1976);
The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859
(1984);
The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865
(1986); and this year, in incredibly expensive hardcover,
The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871
. Professor Frank must now be about seventy-five, and judging by his photo on
The Miraculous Years’
s back jacket he’s not exactly hale,
³
and probably all serious scholars of Dostoevsky are waiting bated to see whether Frank can hang on long enough to bring his encyclopedic study all the way up to the early 1880s, when Dostoevsky finished the fourth of his Great Novels,
⁴
gave his famous Pushkin Speech, and died. Even if the fifth volume of
Dostoevsky
doesn’t get written, though, the appearance now of the fourth ensures Frank’s status as the definitive literary biographer of one of the best fiction writers ever.

** Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to
seem
like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? **

In a way, Frank’s books aren’t really literary biographies at all, at least not in the way that Ellmann’s book on Joyce and Bate’s on Keats are. For one thing, Frank is as much a cultural historian as he is a biographer—his aim is to create an accurate and exhaustive context for FMD’s works, to place the author’s life and writing within a coherent account of nineteenth-century Russia’s intellectual life. Ellmann’s
James Joyce,
pretty much the standard by which most literary bios are measured, doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory. What Frank is about is showing that a comprehensive reading of Dostoevsky’s fiction is impossible without a detailed understanding of the cultural circumstances in which the books were conceived and to which they were meant to contribute. This, Frank argues, is because Dostoevsky’s mature works are fundamentally ideological and cannot truly be appreciated unless one understands the polemical agendas that inform them. In other words, the admixture of universal and particular that characterizes
Notes from Underground
⁵
really marks all the best work of FMD, a writer whose “evident desire,” Frank says, is “to dramatize his moral-spiritual themes against the background of Russian history.”

Another nonstandard feature of Frank’s bio is the amount of critical attention he devotes to the actual books Dostoevsky wrote. “It is the production of such masterpieces that makes Dostoevsky’s life worth recounting at all,” his preface to
The Miraculous Years
goes, “and my purpose, as in the previous volumes, is to keep them constantly in the foreground rather than treating them as accessory to the life per se.” At least a third of this latest volume is given over to close readings of the stuff Dostoevsky produced in this amazing half decade—
Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, The Eternal Husband,
and
Demons
.
⁶
These readings aim to be explicative rather than argumentative or theory-driven; their aim is to show as clearly as possible what Dostoevsky himself wanted the books to mean. Even though this approach assumes that there’s no such thing as the Intentional Fallacy,
⁷
it still seems prima facie justified by Frank’s overall project, which is always to trace and explain the novels’ genesis out of Dostoevsky’s own ideological engagement with Russian history and culture.
⁸

** What exactly does “faith” mean? As in “religious faith,” “faith in God,” etc. Isn’t it basically crazy to believe in something that there’s no proof of? Is there really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe’s sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it’ll produce good weather? How can somebody have faith before he’s presented with sufficient reason to have faith? Or is somehow
needing
to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith? But then what kind of need are we talking about? **

To really appreciate Professor Frank’s achievement—and not just the achievement of having absorbed and decocted the millions of extant pages of Dostoevsky drafts and notes and letters and journals and bios by contemporaries and critical studies in a hundred different languages—it is important to understand how many different approaches to biography and criticism he’s trying to marry. Standard literary biographies spotlight an author and his personal life (especially the seamy or neurotic stuff) and pretty much ignore the specific historical context in which he wrote. Other studies—especially those with a theoretical agenda—focus almost exclusively on context, treating the author and his books as simple functions of the prejudices, power dynamics, and metaphysical delusions of his era. Some biographies proceed as if their subjects’ own works have all been figured out, and so they spend all their time tracing out a personal life’s relation to literary meanings that the biographer assumes are already fixed and inarguable. On the other hand, many of our era’s “critical studies” treat an author’s books hermetically, ignoring facts about that author’s circumstances and beliefs that can help explain not only what his work is about but why it has the particular individual magic of a particular individual writer’s personality, style, voice, vision, etc.
⁹

** Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible? My behavior sure seems to indicate that this is what I believe, at least a lot of the time. But isn’t this kind of a selfish way to live? Forget selfish—isn’t it awful lonely? **

So, biographically speaking, what Frank’s trying to do is ambitious and worthwhile. At the same time, his four volumes constitute a very detailed and demanding work on a very complex and difficult author, a fiction writer whose time and culture are alien to us. It seems hard to expect much credibility in recommending Frank’s study here unless I can give some sort of argument for why Dostoevsky’s novels ought to be important to us as readers in 1996 America. This I can do only crudely, because I’m not a literary critic or a Dostoevsky expert. I am, though, a living American who both tries to write fiction and likes to read it, and thanks to Joseph Frank I’ve spent pretty much the whole last two months immersed in Dostoevskynalia.

Dostoevsky is a literary titan, and in some ways this can be the kiss of death, because it becomes easy to regard him as yet another sepia-tinted Canonical Author, belovedly dead. His works, and the tall hill of criticism they’ve inspired, are all required acquisitions for college libraries … and there the books usually sit, yellowly, smelling the way really old library books smell, waiting for somebody to have to do a term paper. Dahlberg is mostly right, I think. To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people.
¹⁰

** But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision? **

And it’s true that there are features of Dostoevsky’s books that are alien and off-putting. Russian is notoriously hard to translate into English, and when you add to this difficulty the archaisms of nineteenth-century literary language, Dostoevsky’s prose/dialogue can often come off mannered and pleonastic and silly.
¹¹
Plus there’s the stiltedness of the culture Dostoevsky’s characters inhabit. When people are ticked off, for instance, they do things like “shake their fists” or call each other “scoundrels” or “fly at” each other.
¹²
Speakers use exclamation points in quantities now seen only in comic strips. Social etiquette seems stiff to the point of absurdity—people are always “calling on” each other and either “being received” or “not being received” and obeying rococo conventions of politeness even when they’re enraged.
¹³
Everybody’s got a long and hard-to-pronounce last name and Christian name—plus a patronymic, plus sometimes a diminutive, so you almost have to keep a chart of characters’ names. Obscure military ranks and bureaucratic hierarchies abound; plus there are rigid and totally weird class distinctions that are hard to keep straight and understand the implications of, especially because the economic realities of old Russian society are so strange (as in, e.g., the way even a destitute “former student” like Raskolnikov or an unemployed bureaucrat like the Underground Man can somehow afford to have servants).

The point is that it’s not just the death-by-canonization thing: there is real and alienating stuff that stands in the way of our appreciating Dostoevsky and has to be dealt with—either by learning enough about all the unfamiliar stuff that it stops being so confusing, or else by accepting it (the same way we accept racist/sexist elements in some other nineteenth-century books) and just grimacing and reading on anyway.

But the larger point (which, yes, may be kind of obvious) is that some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation; and Dostoevsky’s books are definitely worth the work. And this is so not just because of his bestriding the Western canon—if anything, it’s despite that. For one thing that canonization and course assignments obscure is that Dostoevsky isn’t just great—he’s also fun. His novels almost always have ripping good plots, lurid and intricate and thoroughly dramatic. There are murders and attempted murders and police and dysfunctional-family feuding and spies, tough guys and beautiful fallen women and unctuous con men and wasting illnesses and sudden inheritances and silky villains and scheming and whores.

Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good. The main thing that keeps Krantz and Grisham and lot of other gifted storytellers from being artistically good is that they don’t have any talent for (or interest in) characterization—their compelling plots are inhabited by crude and unconvincing stick figures. (In fairness, there are also writers who are good at making complex and fully realized human characters but don’t seem able to insert those characters into a believable and interesting plot. Plus others—often among the academic avant-garde—who seem expert/interested in neither plot nor character, whose books’ movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas.)