Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin: Readings in Dostoyevsky's Fantastic Realism

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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Introduction

(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

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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