“The fact that we sense the possibility of transcending this law [the ubiquity of egoism, self-preservation, self-interest] and yearn to do so is evidence that we do not belong entirely to the earth or fall exclusively under its jurisdiction. According the Dostoevsky, the desire to transcend the self – the desire to accede to a law higher than that of self-preservation – proves that we are not doomed to the death sentence decreed on earth.” - Susan McReynolds Oddo, from the introduction.
Every once in a while, I'll have a reason to throw caution to the wind and break free of the strictures of my chronological reading list. I can't just do this for any book; it needs to be a book so monumental that it is criminal for me to not have read it. Seeing as Brothers K has been an influence on Freud, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Vonnegut, and Cormac McCarthy (according to Wikipedia), it's probably worth the detour. This is the fourth time, I think, that I've tried to read through Dostoevsky's final novel, and hopefully I'll finally finish the damn thing. I've come across passages so moving and profound that I have no excuse to stop in the middle again.
To give the briefest overview of the first of the novel's four parts, Fyodor Pavlovich is the father of Dmitri, a sensualist much like his father, Ivan, a conflicted humanist and atheist, and Alyosha, a humble monk and the hero of the story, and possibly the illegitimate father to Smerdyakov, a mean-spirited orphan found and raised by his servants Grigory and Martha. Alyosha has just been embarrassed by Fyodor and Dmitri's squabbles over money in front of his mentor, Elder Zosima, who, ill and near death, advises him to leave the monastery. Dmitri reveals to Alyosha that Ivan is in love with his (Dmitri's) fiancee, Katerina Ivanovna, and that he is in love with another woman, Grushenka, who his father is also in love with. Having taken care of the plot, I have grouped the rest of my thoughts about the novel under a few headings that I expect will remain important throughout the novel.
Sensualism
“To angels – visions of God’s throne, / To insects – sensual
lust.” – Friedrich Schiller, “Ode to Joy”
I’ve never heard the word “sensualism” or “sensualist” used
outside of this book, and the definitions I found don’t reflect what
Dostoevsky is getting at with his portrayal of all the Karamazovs, except for
Alyosha, as sensualists. The line from Schiller’s poem, quoted by Dmitri, sheds
light on what “sensualism” should connote: it is that which separates the holy
from the damned and perhaps more significantly, the human from the inhuman. (An aside: Kafka greatly admired Dostoevsky, too, and since Schiller was German, Kafka was probably familiar with him as well. I wonder if this insect comment has anything to do with The Metamorphosis.) We
should remember that Cicero rebuked Epicurus for prizing freedom from pain before all else because he believed there is more to being human that being free from pain; what can be achieved
by a sheep grazing in a field cannot be the greatest good for men.
Like the Epicureans, sensualists are not strictly hedonists, but mawkish people, those who act without thinking, show no restraint, and indulge every whim as drunkards do. We can get an even clearer picture by looking at examples. Fyodor, the novel’s premier sensualist, is a self-diagnosed
buffoon and debaucher, one who speaks with a smattering of exclamation points,
deployed by Dostoevsky to indicate his wasteful energy, misplaced exuberance,
and shameful ostentation. He misquotes books and Bible verses alike in order to
fulfill a role: he is called an actor, someone who puts on a show according to
what others expect of him and what he thinks they expect. He is “wicked and
sentimental,” always ready to take offense, even when there is no offense to be taken.
Dmitri is in many ways his father’s son, but
even though he speaks with the same spectacle that Fyodor does, he is sympathetic rather than pathetic. He has an “ardent heart," one that is more tormented by sensualism than Fyodor is.
While his father at one point instructs his sons to chase every woman, proclaiming that all women are beautiful enough to pursue,
Dmitri declares beauty to be “a terrible and awful thing,” one of many riddles
God has given to men. Fyodor’s heart is shameless; Dmitri’s is troubled. The
former believes that there is no such thing as ugliness, while the latter, in a
devastating passage, claims that “what to the mind is shameful is beauty and
nothing else to the heart.”
Ivan and Smerdyakov are considered to be sensualists, too, but we will get to them another time.
Fate and Free Will
“Why is such a man alive?” – Dmitri, about Fyodor
How does Alyosha escape the curse that the rest of his family
cannot? Perhaps because he looked for a way out. He joined Elder Zosima’s monastery because
“it alone struck his imagination and presented itself to him as offering an
ideal means of escape for his soul from darkness to light.” He did not join because he is a religious mystic, nor is he suited to the life of a monk (that is what Elder Zosima tells him). He joined to escape
the darkness of sensualism, and no matter how ardent Dmitri’s heart is, he never tried to escape.
More will be said of fate and free will later, but to me it is the
most interesting aspect of this novel. How much of our lives is predetermined
and how much is up to us? This is so much more than a question of Calvinist
predestination or strict scientific determinism; it is a question of the extent to which we are who we are. How far can I go when I say that I
am this certain way and not that other way? Where does my biology -- written in stone -- end and my
personality begin? This question first struck me in reading Shakespeare’s Othello, wherein Iago, famously (and paradoxically) claiming
“I am not what I am,” exploits the self-definition of those around him.
Belief and
Skepticism
“Miracles are never a stumbling block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous... Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith."
Most of the
philosophical conflict in the novel stems from arguments about religion, which
pit Alyosha’s serene, Christlike demeanor against Ivan’s troubled humanism,
Fyodor’s faux-rationalist buffoonery, and Smerdyakov’s contempt for tradition
and authority.
Though we will
have to wait to hear more from Ivan, we do find out that he wrote an
essay in favor of the authority of ecclesiastical courts (essentially saying
that church and state should not be separated). Elder Zosima dismisses him as
writing for the sake of irony (what a fucking hipster), but he also sees that
Ivan's heart is genuinely tormented by a world without God.
Indeed, he argues for the power of religion, and though he appears
supercilious, there is sadness in his words. “There is no virtue if there is no
immortality [of the soul].” And again: “There would have been no civilization
if they hadn’t invented God.” It reminds me of the part in White Noise by
DeLillo, when the nun tells Jack that she doesn’t believe in God, and that she resents that he thinks she would believe in something that ridiculous, but she keeps up apperances because people need to know that someone still holds onto the traditions.
Fyodor gives the impression that he is a believer, but exactly what kind of belief he holds is dubious. At one point, he seeks to determine once and for all if God is real by asking Alyosha and Ivan if they believe in immortality (predictably, Alyosha says yes and Ivan says no). In another scene, he muses on being pulled down to tell by iron hooks. “Hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort?" It is this sort of pointless and nonsensical analysis that makes Fyodor out to be a fool. (Also: having been told by Ivan that there is no immortality at all, Fyodor, the fool, declares, “Anything is better than nothing!” The line rings Shakespearean: "Nothing can come of nothing," declared King Lear.)
Smerdyakov is possibly an illegitimate son of Fyodor's and indeed, his behavior has a sensualist tinge, and his arguments have all the bluster and irreverence of Fyodor's, asking, for example, as a child, “Where did light come from on the first day” if the sun, moon, and stars were created on the fourth? (“I’ll show you where!” Grigory screams and slaps him.)
Smerdyakov, in fact, is more disdainful of religion than the conflicted humanist Ivan and boorish Fyodor. He asks the questions that have been endlessly raised, like the question about light, and: “Who will hold a heathen Tartar responsible…for not having been born a Christian?” Even more, he uses his reason with devastating force: He questions Matthew 17:20, in which Jesus says, “For verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” That is, no matter how tiny (and tininess is emphasized by Smerdyakov) your faith is, it will be possible to (seemingly literally) move a mountain.
Smerdyakov says that if he were tortured to renounce his faith, “I should only have had to say at that instant to the mountain ‘move and crush the tormentor,’ and it would have moved… But suppose at that very moment I had tried all that, and cried to that mountain, ‘Crush these tormentors,’ and it hadn’t crushed them, how could I have helped doubting, pray, at such a time, and at such a dread hour or mortal terror?” Grigory doesn’t have the fortitude to rebuke him anymore. (An interesting side note: Smerdyakov is epileptic, as was Dostoevsky.)
Love and Lust
“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared
with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly
performed and in the sigh of all. Men will even give their lives if only the
ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding
as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude." – Elder
Zosima
As the poem by
Schiller says, sensualism is characterized by lust, which is contrasted
with love. As we will see later, Alyosha argues that love of life should be
what all men aspire to, whereas lust for life is reserved for sensualists like
Fyodor (for example, his speech about the beauty of all women). This
distinction will be made clearer later.
Love and lust
also plays an important role in the lives of the sensualists. The complex
love-pentagon that the characters are caught up in should make us wonder who actually feels what for whom, and what their feelings actually amount to. The only love we can be assured of at this point in the
novel is the love of Katerina Ivanovna for Dmitri. Katerina Ivanovna is an angelic figure: “He [Dmitri] can tell
God everything without shame. Why is it he still does not understand how much I
am ready to bear for his sake? Why, why doesn’t he know me? How dare he not
know me after all that has happened? I want to save him forever.” No one else
has the same sort of heavenly love that I believe is what Dostoevsky thinks is
true love, and it makes it all the sadder (but all the more logical) that
Dmitri wants Grushenka over her.
I'll make a second post about Brothers K later on. Tune in later (hopefully by the end of the week) for a post on The Aeneid, by Vergil.
Stray observations:
- Some more from Dmitri on beauty: “Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been defined and is undefinable, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the two shores of the river meet and all contradictions stand side by side.” Two shores of a river run parallel and hence will give the appearance of meeting at infinity but never actually touch. We'll see later that Ivan, too, struggles with the notion of infinity and the limitations of his "Euclidean mind." It is interesting to note that the concept of infinity has a complicated history, and the arguments over its role in mathematics, religion, and everyday life in France and Russia are discussed reasonably well in Naming Infinity by Graham and Kantor (not Cantor).
- Dostoevsky’s evil is much milder than that of other authors. Speaking of Fyodor, the narrator remarks that “in most cases, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose.” We should recall the previous post on Cicero, when he said, “We should not take as our model of wickedness trembling ninnies who torture themselves and fear every shadow whenever they do anything wrong.” “Trembling ninnies” feels a bit too harsh (and more effeminate and British), but I feel it still applies. We can recall Crime and Punishment, too, which, though it was a great novel, also gave Raskolnikov too tremulous a conscience.
- We get a sense of the insatiable quality of sin from Zosima: “Lamentations comfort only by lacerating the heart still more. Such grief does not even want consolation, it feeds on the sense of its unquenchableness.” Compare this with the Epicurean notion that freedom from pain is the greatest good, since pleasure (or pain, which is tantamount to pleasure here) only induces desire for more pleasure. To quote a Bright Eyes song (sorry), “Sorrow is pleasure if you want it instead.”
- Zosima claims that without a religious government, criminals are not deterred because they are not rebelling against holy law, but against human law. And rebelling against human law confirms the idea that “his crime is not a crime, but only a reaction against an unjustly oppressive force.” Now, I certainly don’t agree with this, but it is an interesting thought, one that prefigures the vague, oppressive forces of Kafka.
- Grigory and Martha’s child who dies was born with six fingers. Grigory called it a “dragon… a confusion of nature."
No comments:
Post a Comment