Mrs. Epanchin’s gaze

The point of this post is small enough that it may be best to simply record the passage that begins with General Epanchin’s introduction of Prince Myshkin to Mrs. Epanchin and his daughters, especially the part at which he mentions, by way of extricating himself from a discussion of the pearls he gave to Nastasya Filippovna, the hegumen Pafnuty:

“We know where you’re hurrying to,” Mrs. Epanchin said imposingly.

“I must hurry, I must hurry, my friend, I’m late! Give him your albums, mesdames, let him write something for you, he’s a rare calligrapher! A talent! He did such a piece of old handwriting for me: ‘The hegumen Pafnuty here sets his hand to it . . .’ Well, good-bye.”

“Pafnuty? Hegumen? Wait, wait, where are you going? What Pafnuty?” Mrs. Epanchin cried with insistent vexation and almost anxiously to her fleeing husband.

“Yes, yes, my friend there was such a hegumen in the old days . . . and I’m off to the count’s, he’s been waiting, waiting a long time, and, above all, it was he who made the appointment . . . Good-bye, Prince!”

The general withdrew with quick steps.

“I know which count that is!” Elizaveta Prokofyevna said sharply and turned her gaze irritably on the prince. “What was it!” she began, trying squeamishly and vexedly to recall. “What was it! Ah, yes. Well, what was it about this hegumen?”

“Maman,” Alexandra began, and Aglaya even stamped her little foot.

I wonder whether this passage sounds the same in Russian as in English, that is, whether the name “Pafnuty” is as odd and “hegumen” as archaic. They’re the kind of words that you repeat to yourself over and over in private or that a vexed person repeats for effect and, as in this case, to everyone’s annoyance.

At any rate, we begin to see what is often pointed out in the criticism, that the prince is often somehow ready-to-hand. His entrance into the family scene allows General Epanchin to make his exit and it allows the reader to witness the recently and rather amusingly described Epanchins prior to the “major confrontation” that the General is expecting and attempting to put off. At our ease (because they are at theirs), we notice something about Mrs. Epanchin, something that prepares us to understand why Aglaya stamps her foot: “her gray, rather large eyes sometimes had a most unexpected expression. She had once had the weakness of believing that her gaze produced an extraordinary effect; that conviction remained indelible in her” (51). This kind of description is unique to Dostoevsky (so far as I know), something like the ubiquitous “possessed of extreme physical strength,” and you can make a connection to von Lembke’s wife in Demons, who constantly imagines that the younger generation is almost fanatically “devoted” to her (though Mrs. Epanchin’s conviction hardly does as much harm). Though it is the narrator that tells us, we assume the daughters also understand about their mother’s gaze and about the several weaknesses of her personality.

My point in all this is that we are always very close to a very important kind of knowing that often goes unremarked, that often seems somehow worthless. And so, if–as is discussed in the remarkable subsequent conversation–Myshkin is some kind of teacher, it might be assumed that his teaching has to do with what is already before our eyes and especially with what is before our eyes in a familiar sense, as the past mingled with the present. What does it mean to expect Mrs. Epanchin’s “unexpected gaze?” What does it mean to understand how she has acquired the habit such that she probably often gives a look without meaning to, such that there is often a kind of excess in her bearing that frustrates those who know her?

do you believe in God?

One of the most insightful passages in Rowan Williams’ 2008 book on Dostoevsky:

Myshkin’s response to Rogozhin’s questioning about his religious belief is centered upon the conviction that when atheists talk about religion, they are always talking about something different from what believers actually mean; his anecdotes are an almost Wittgensteinian catalogue of diverse uses of the language and gestures of faith, designed as much as anything to show that an answer to the plain question, “Do you believe in God?” is going to tell you almost nothing of the meaning of faith . . . Rogozhin’s sardonic smile as he accepts the cross from Myshkin tells us that this version of religion’s ambivalence is not unwelcome to the person he knows himself to be. (155)

It has often seemed to me that those who have appreciated the subtlety of Homer or Plato, who have discovered Lena Grove to be the most feminine of heroines for simply ejecting Byron Bunch from the back of a pickup truck, have, upon reaching a view of Prince Myshkin (usually after having discovered Alyosha), demanded of him nothing short of absolute certainty and salvific knowledge. They have asked him questions to which they themselves would object in nearly every other context (in any other novel). What Williams says here must be a guide for the reader. It is the only way to read The Idiot. As such, it is similar to the way John Paul II interprets the response of Jesus to the Pharisees in the first audience of the Theology of the Body:

[In answering the questions, "is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?"] Christ does not accept the discussion on the level on which his interlocutors try to introduce it; in a sense, he does not approve the dimension they tried to give the problem. He avoids entangling himself in the juridical or casuistic controversies; instead, he appeals twice to the beginning.

What if Myshkin simply said “Yes” to the question and thought it enough? What effect would that have on the rest of the novel? Would he cease to be a “failure?” Would everyone in Russia begin “to do the dance that was choreographed at the very dawn of time?” How would it affect his confrontation with Ippolit, not to mention Rogozhin? It is his ability to answer with “an almost Wittgensteinian catalogue” that which also enables him to distinguish between capital punishment and the “condemnation” of Ippolit’s consumption, to tell Ippolit to look at the trees?

memor, part II

Myshkin’s recollection of the execution in France is guided by an image of the intrusion of certainty into the the knowing of men:

. . . the chief, the strongest pain may not be in the wounds [of torture], but in knowing for certain that in an hour, then in ten minutes, then in half a minute, you’ll no longer be a man, and it’s for certain–the main thing is that it’s for certain . . . I believe it so much . . .” (23)

Contrast this “I believe” with the repetitious “I don’t believe it.” Can either be said to be normative? Can either be extended into belief in its usual sense as a description of man’s way of knowing God? I would say neither. When Myshkin says “I believe” and when he says “I don’t believe it,” he is saying the same thing. That same thing has to do with, as I said, the intrusion of certainty into the imaginative knowing of men, an intrusion that can cause greater pain that physical torture. For Myshkin, the anticipation of a certain execution is the beginning of “no longer being a man” – more of a beginning, perhaps, than the actual execution itself. We begin to glimpse the meaning of Myhskin’s response to the murderous movements of Rogozhin. When Rogozhin raises the knife over Myshkin, he is hewing to the demonic certainty of type and revelling in its power; he is, as Ivanov says, “surrendering the Ego to the Daimon.” The reader recognizes him as Myshkin thought he recognized the red eyes from a distance, but will the reader rebuke himself as did Myshkin? Can the reader be a “martyr to the faith in  humanity”?

This image (of the French execution) focuses our attention on the dual force of the imagination: it is (1) that by which man can be “mindful” in Casey’s sense and (2) that by which he “loses his mind” in the face of certainty. That these two “forces” belong together for Dostoevsky is especially clear in the character of Myshkin. Dostoevsky couples Myshkin’s ability to imaginatively keep “events” in mind in accord with certain themes (certainty, vision) together with his qualified rejection of type in conversation–for example, with General Epanchin:

And, finally, it seems to me that we’re such different people, by the look of it . . . in many ways, that we perhaps cannot have many points in common, only, you know, I personally don’t believe in that last notion, because it often only seems that there are no points in common, when there really are a lot . . . it comes from people’s laziness, that they sort themselves out by looks and can’t find anything . . . (27)

I mean “type” as in “you’re not my type” which when spoken is hardly different from “we have nothing in common.” It is also not entirely different from the way we speak of “character” in both the moral and literary senses. I have previously attempted to point out the danger that expectancy poses to the reader of The Idiot–the danger of imposing, perhaps egged on by the author, a type upon a character (a character upon a character). It is to that reader, above all, that Myshkin says, “I don’t believe it.” In light of a certain critical consensus regarding Myshkin (his failure as a “character”) I borrowed from Ivanov and called that expectancy “demonic” because, like capital punishment, it forces human knowing to replace “mindfulness” with certainty–effectively turning the thematic repetition of genuine knowing into a guillotine-like severing of imagination . . .

Postscript notes:

I’m sensitive to the fact that numerous critics accuse Myshkin of a certain ghostliness, of not being quite as concrete as they would like (or are used to). Ivanov brings this criticism closer to imaginative worth when he says (I don’t remember exactly where) that Myshkin arrives in Russia as though he were descending from the land of anamnesis. The point is to get closer to Myshkin’s way of knowing. That way is set, by Myshkin himself, at a distance from the usual categorization of unbridgeable difference: things that are had “in common.” Like Casey and Heidegger, however, Myshkin does not denigrate the value and actuality of that way of distinguishing people. He even participates in it himself (“it seems to me that we’re such different people”). The point is not to deny the value or actuality of different kinds of grasping and manipulating as if they were always illegitimate. The point is to attempt to understand what Myshkin is doing when he mixes memory and imagination and, further–since this is a novel, after all–to see whether that mixture can be understood normatively, whether it can be imitated. Though Myshkin refrains from categorization, he is constantly employing another mechanism: imagination. Look at the way he gets to know Ganya: he meets him, refuses to categorize him, but still imagines the way he looks when he doesn’t think anyone else is looking (and he’s right) . . .

As with his argument about the certainty of execution making a difference, why should he not also make an argument about the certainty of knowing? This is the only point I wish to make. When Myshkin says he doesn’t believe it, he is saying that he doesn’t believe (1) that he did know it was coming (even if it seemed a lot like knowing) and (2) that certainty can define knowing. But obviously, like the execution, it is something that happens anyway despite his disbelief.

memor, part I

Myshkin:

And, finally, it seems to me that we’re such different people, by the look of it . . . in many ways, that we perhaps cannot have many points in common, only, you know, I personally don’t believe in that last notion, because it often only seems that there are no points in common, when there really are a lot . . . it comes from people’s laziness, that they sort themselves out by looks and can’t find anything . . . (27)

Edward S. Casey:

Memor, the root of memoria or memory, means “mindful.” Being mindful of something differs from retaining it . . . as well as from recollecting it or even being reminded of it. Being-mindful-of is being full of mind about something: being or becoming in mind of it, heeding it in a way that exceeds the simple apprehension that lies at the core of retention, recollection, and being-reminded. It exceeds all of these precisely by virtue of keeping something in mind. What then is such keeping? Its main action is one of remaining or staying with what we come to be mindful of. Instead of just grasping, or noting, or pigeonholing, or stockpiling, we remain with what we have become mindful of. Remaining-with is a form of abiding by, and it is compatible with not representing the minded item or thinking of it in any express form. It is staying alongside the item, letting it linger longer than if one were to classify it, shunt it into a convenient position in secondary memory, or act upon it in some immediately effective way. Such staying has staying power; it stays on beside what is minded.

Why bring up memory–especially after a quotation from the prince that seems to have nothing immediately to do with it? Unlike Brideshead Revisited, for example, the “theme” of The Idiot is not obviously memory. It is also somewhat premature to begin thinking about Myshkin’s memory on page 27. However, that prematurity has less to do with the power of Myshkin’s memory being put on display–indeed, a few moments earlier, in conversation with the valet, he had recalled in almost excessive detail an execution that he witnessed in France–than with the lack of context through which that power can be properly understood.

In that story, though, there is something that hints at the important role that memory plays in Myshkin’s way of thinking. After Myshkin gives a sort of panoramic moving-picture account of the execution via guillotine, the valet makes this observation: “It’s a good thing there’s not much suffering . . . when the head flies off.” Myshkin, who has been talking animatedly, takes up this conversational remark:

“You know what?” the prince picked up hotly. “You’ve just observed that, and everybody makes the same observation as you, and this machine, the guillotine, was invented for that. But a thought occurred to me then: what if it’s even worse? To you it seems ridiculous, to you it seems wild, but with some imagination even a thought like that can pop into your head. [I will continue with more from this paragraph in a moment]

What is it that Myshkin is remembering? There is the event of the execution which is, in itself, memorable for social and political reasons. But of more interest is the thought that accompanied the prince’s view of the event, the thought to which he is recalled in the course of his conversation with the valet: what if the guillotine, designed to eliminate suffering, causes more suffering instead? That thought is what he picks up “hotly” as if responding to the flicker of memory. This is characteristic of Myshkin’s conversational style. Further, along with Bakhtin’s doctrine of unfinalizability, it is important for understanding the seemingly disruptive relation he has to those people he “meets.” Questions like “why did that pop into my head?” and “what could we possibly have in common?” are, for Myshkin, the same kind of question; they are the questions that memory, coupled with what the prince calls “a little imagination,” is capable of asking. Dostoevsky goes so far as to describe their likeness in a preceding paragraph:

The prince grew animated as he spoke, a slight flush came to his pale face, though his speech was as quiet as before. The valet watched him with sympathetic interest and seemed unwilling to tear himself away; perhaps he, too, was a man with imagination and an inclination to thinking.

Dostoevsky is so insistent on this likeness that it almost goes without saying that it echoes the relation between author and reader (and, for that matter, author and his own soul). I will put that aside for the moment, because I would like to return to the quotation by Edward Casey in order to get at the link between a memory and a new thought. And at the way that link becomes pronounced in conversation. Casey is writing about that which is constitutive for what we call memory or “keeping in mind,” that which is also especially necessary for the interplay of memory and imagination. He defines the linguistic root, memor, as mindfulness or “being-mindful-of”–which is simultaneously both more and less than “mere” retention. We recognize Myshkin in this more and less–mindfulness cannot be in a hurry to “classify,” to “sort out by looks.” Listen to this from Vyacheslav Ivanov, writing in Freedom and Tragic Life, on Dostoevsky’s memory:

Nevertheless, Myshkin is neither Don Quixote nor the Poor Knight. In creating his hero . . . Dostoevsky does not abide by his chosen literary example. With poetic intuition he examines the innermost essence of the type personified in his hero; and, as usually happens before the growth of a great poetic conception, he finds its native soil–which never denies its strengthening sustenance to any truly original work–in obscure memories of ancient myth.

And Myshkin’s:

All his glory lies behind him, in his past: both the glory of his family’s historic name, and also that transcendent, supra-terrestrial, harmonious blessedness, that very spectacle of beauty whose shapeless memory blossoms . . .

This preponderance of the Platonic anamnesis over the sense of reality is just what makes him at once a fool and a wise seer among men . . . The primitive memory is so strong in him that until his twenty-fourth year he cannot adjust himself to this world of ours, and seems an “Idiot.” . . .

Other men, of course, cannot remember the things that are stored in Myshkin’s memory, and do not see what he sees . . .

Myshkin and the valet

From a “preoccupied physiognomy” to “stern astonishment” to “suspiciousness” to “scornful perplexity” to “trebled suspiciousness” to “all but frightened” to “for some reason he liked the Prince” to “decided and crude indignation” to “sympathetic interest . . . unwilling to tear himself away” to “softened expression”–all in one anteroom conversation, just at the beginning of Myshkin’s attempt at “meeting people” (18-24).

Already the reader feels a mimetic impulse. Those who envied the Underground Man for his splenetic ability to anticipate every criticism, to cut off every critique with a more incisive self-critique–they will be moved by a Machivellian intrigue at the persuasiveness of Myshkin’s style. What is it exactly that he does in order to destroy the implicit criticique that is leveled at him? What is the technique? What does its wielder call it? In a later conversation with General Epanchin, the prince will say:

And, finally, it seems to me that we’re such different people, by the look of it . . . in many ways, that we perhaps cannot have many points in common, only, you know, I personally don’t believe in that last notion, because it often only seems that there are no points in common, when there really are a lot . . . it comes from people’s laziness, that they sort themselves out by looks and can’t find anything . . . (27)

The prince speaks of a way of looking, a way of categorizing that is somehow insufficient for “getting to know people.” I will argue throughout these posts that the technique–if I can put it that way–of genuine knowing is what the prince calls “belief,” as in, “I personally don’t believe in that last notion.” It goes without saying that the prince himself has been categorized by the valet from the start; it is nothing less than the valet’s job. It also goes without saying that the prince is aware of the valet’s categorization. Dostoevsky’s depiction of this awareness ought to make the reader recoil from his own tendency toward categorization. Look at this part of the conversation between the prince and the valet:

“But you’re really . . . from abroad?” [the valet] finally asked somehow involuntarily–and became confused; perhaps he had wanted to ask: “But are you really Prince Myshkin?”

“Yes, I just got off the train. It seems to me you wanted to ask if I’m really Prince Myskin, but did not ask out of politeness.”

“Hm . . .” the astonished lackey grunted.

Immediately after Dostoevsky tells you what the lackey may have meant to say, Myshkin astonishes both you and the valet by actually having noticed the same thing. Is that a legitimate move for any other writer? Does that not diminish Myshkin’s own recognition? What is Dostoevsky trying to accomplish by setting one right after the other, the knowledge of the author followed by a character with the exact same knowledge. Here I want to recall once more one of the ways Dostoevsky has described how a genuine artist writes, namely, his comment later in The Idiot on Gogol’s portrayal of Lieutenant Pirogov–that because of the typicalness of Pirogov, Gogol was “forced” to have certain things happen to him, and,  indeed, “threw up his arms in amazement” at Pirogov’s response to what ought to have been disruptive events (463). The artist, no doubt, finds one of his greatest joys in thus “spreading his arms” as if he, like Milton, recognizes his own “literary credentials.” He says,  “Look! I have done something the doing of which does not belong entirely to me!” But what happens when an artist depicts that joy in the same book in which he also depicts a character who has the kind of knowledge that ought only to belong to the writer? Well, something like Myshkin; something like the Underground Man; something–more realistically, as if that somehow matters–like Alyosha. What compels Dostoevsky to write his characters in this way?

I have forgotten most of what I wrote here before about Ganya, but recalling the critical (as in critics) theme of the likeness between Ganya and Myshkin, we could even say that the source of Ganya’s envy, which envy is revealed almost as soon as we catch sight of him (and which the prince himself hints at–shocker), is located exactly in the fact that Ganya realizes he has been written differently than the likes of Myshkin or Rogozhin (whoever, really). Ganya is Myshkin’s double, not because he is evil, but because, more than anything, he wishes he could be typical of an author’s genius, and not simply an intelligent, indecisive, resentful, bargaining kind of ordinary. Ganya has just as much self-awareness as Myshkin–even, and especially, because he allows himself the illusion that he is capable of being a very great man, or, at least, in control of his own destiny–but that awareness does not belong to him in the same way it belongs to Myshkin. It does not belong to him as it would a hero.

That really is the worst thing in the world: to be self-conscious around people who are somehow able to express both their self-consciousness and happiness at the same time!

off the island

Maybe this will get me back into the swing of things.

treasure in earthen vessels

C. J. G. Turner, Dostoevsky’s Idiot: Treasure in Earthen Vessels:

Our final ‘variation’ concerns the novel qua novel, for many would be inclined to reverse Professor Peace’s verdict on Idiot that “as a novel it is an artistic success; while as a vehicle for the great idea, the portrayal of ‘the positively good man’, it is a failure.” While it is not, strictly speaking, possible consistently to separate the idea from the form in which it is expressed, one can hardly deny either that the novel has its artistic flaws or that one substantial element in its success is its attempt to portray an “ideal of man in the flesh” in a contemporary social context. Dostoevskii’s idea, then, is yet another ‘treasure’ in the fragile ‘earthen vessel’ of the novel. He himself regretted that the form of his novel was inadequate to express “even a tenth part” of his treasured idea and recognized that a special cast of mind was required for its appreciation. The extent of the damage done by its artistic defects is disputable and will be differently estimated by different casts of mind, and yet these very defects are a paradoxical merit in that, as a consequence of them, the artistic structure itself of Idiot reflects the theme of value in combination with fragility that is pointed up by two of its major symbols and is central to the concept of its hero.

Ganya II

I was, a while back, about to criticize the tendency that readers have of falling under the influence of a supporting character’s view of the main character–and, in regard to The Idiot, I would have striven to point out that Ganya’s view does more to delimit both his own situation and that of the reader than it does Prince Myshkin’s. But I am beginning to realize that this would not exhaust the phenomenon that occurs when this transposition takes place (from the view to the situation); indeed, I am somewhat surprised to learn that my own view of the relation between Ganya and “the reader” has been almost entirely predetermined by my inordinate desire to recover myself by making an adequate confession. Reading is envy; reading is confession. In my hurry to absolve the Prince of all my own failings (to make him a type that is not-me), I too-quickly attach them to Ganya and so destroy his “unfinalizability,” simultaneously enacting the near-destruction of those things of the heart (and not of reason) that are shown by Dostoevsky to abound in the relationship between two people–the truths that can be spoken even by the envious, by the paranoid, by the unhappy, the not-yet-myselfers, the liars (see the last episode of Psych). It is also to mistake the “extreme readiness” of Myshkin’s personality–to suggest that this is the readiness, merely, of innocence, of pity–and never that of an abiding love.

[An aside for a moment, provoked by the news: if you've followed the recent reporting and analysis of the late founder of the Legion of Christ, you may have come across the question of whether the "charism" of a "religious institute" remains genuine if its founder is deemed to have committed acts that are beyond the pale (with regard to the institute, the Church, society, etc.). Is it possible to consider asking an analogous question in literary criticism (if that's what this is) in regard to The Idiot? I haven't exactly done a good job explaining the "consensus" regarding the failure of Myshkin, but on the assumption that it's correct, does its correctness doom every subsequent attempt to rehabilitate him through something as uncertain as "a view"?]

So, let me return to the actual description of Prince Myshkin’s “introduction” to Gavrila Ardalionovich:

A young man suddenly came into the anteroom with papers in his hands. The valet began to help him out of his fur coat. The young man cocked an eye at the prince.

“Gavrila Ardalionych,” the valet began confidentially and almost familiarly, “this gentleman here presents himself as Prince Myshkin and the lady’s relation, come by train from abroad with a bundle in his hands, only . . .”

The prince did not hear the rest, because the valet started whispering. Gavrila Ardalionovich listened attentively and kept glancing at the prince with great curiosity. Finally he stopped listening and approached him impatiently.

“You are Prince Myshkin?” he asked extremely amiably and politely. He was a very handsome young man, also of about twenty-eight, a trim blond, of above average height, with a small imperial, and an intelligent and very handsome face. Only his smile, for all its amiability, was somewhat too subtle; it revealed his somewhat too pearly and even teeth; his gaze, for all its cheerfulness and ostensible simple-heartedness, was somewhat too intent and searching.

“When he’s alone he probably doesn’t look that way, and maybe never laughs,” the prince somehow felt. (24)

It is tempting to recall the impact that Dostoevsky’s notes have upon a reader’s view of Gavrila–that, having been conceived as an aspect of the personality of the “original” hero, Ganya is now doomed to reveal his inadequacy by aping the prince. And that issue is very much at the heart of a (if not the) basic theme of The Idiot and, often unconsciously, of the criticism, namely, can doom be genuinely depicted (or, in regard to criticism, grasped)–and also: what is the response in the face of the drama or depiction of doom, which is not really doom, but which is treated as if it were by the dramatis personae? Idiocy?*

That temptation, however, does not need to be felt in order to make the contrast between the different kinds of “openness” displayed by Myshkin and Ganya.  Ganya is impatient, but why? There is the sense that he does a lot of trivial/bureacratic work and maybe impatience is just the consolation of drudgery; but there is also the contrast of this impatience with the “simple-heartedness” (a typical description of Myshkin’s attitude) that he seems to “put on.” As the novel begins to progress, the effectiveness of Myshkin’s “simple-hearted,” cheerful approach is manifest. In that light, and if that were indeed his intention, Ganya could hardly be blamed for putting on such a mask as a means to his end. Likewise, he could not be blamed for his “too intent and searching” gaze, seeking out the masks of those who would compete with him. It is here that I would like to say something about the likeness between Ganya’s view and the reader’s view–something that plays on the sense of a kind of suspicious envy that I know very well and which, therefore, will take on confessional form.

Ganya is, in a way, writing poor novels with his “too intent and searching” gaze. In some strange imitation of The Republic, he is creating a city in speech (in his imagination) when he is confronted by the possibility that Myshkin represents. This possibility, in the strict sense, has nothing to do with Myshkin; rather, it has to do with Ganya’s view of his own situation in regard (mainly) to Nastasya and Aglaya and the risk to his desired outcome represented by everyone else. Perhaps I read myself too much into Ganya, but in that same regard that I here attribute to Ganya, I also have a fantastic (in effort if not profundity) imagination. When you really desire something every new person that could desire that same thing is potentially a threat. How terrible! What constant posturing and re-posturing, placing and replacing, narrating and re-narrating! You could have filled hundreds of crappy books with the things I would think up. There was some balm, looking ahead at looking behind, that, if things did turn out like one of my suspicion-novels, I would at least be able to claim some kind of authorship (and therefore imitate the rage of the creator). But when one or two of them did come true, hidden in the frustration was always the slight possibility of a genuine humility. And that hard-won humility (maybe it’s just misjudged honesty) is what makes me believe that Ganya from the beginning looked upon Myshkin as a rival and, also, that he was not entirely mistaken.

* In The Pagan Temptation, Thomas Molnar describes as “neopagan” a kind of existentialist literature in which “literature [itself] shrinks to focus on the subjective world of the self, dark and pessimistic, and falsely illumined by heroic resistance to the barbarians’ assault. This is the pose, the gratuitous gesture performed in a religious, political, and social vacuum, as pure self-affirmation and demonstration of self-surpassing.” I am keeping this in mind as a kind of negative reading of the drama of The Idiot; in other words, that is exactly not what is happening. I am trying to get at a dramatic difference between doom/type/delimitation and what Kierkegaard, in probably a much different sense, called contemporaneity–a contemporaneity that can never be simply typical.

Ganya I

The previous post is called a “preface” to Ganya in order to prepare a claim, perhaps similar to Amos’ concerning Darcy’s letter in Pride and Prejudice, that the written description of the initial confrontation between Ganya and Myshkin is, when looked upon retrospectively, almost physically demonstrative of the reader’s response to the entire novel. Either The Idiot breaks out from its own pages and begins to drag the reader, kicking and screaming, toward humility; or the reader eventually tears up the book for its inability to teach him or her “how to look.”

“How to look” is another way of saying “when to trust.” The Idiot is constantly a book about trust and expectation, and in that respect also it is similar to Jane Austen’s work–a similarity which is not unrelated to Allan Bloom’s appreciative complaint that Austen tells the reader too much about what is going on with her characters. Yet, as we have grown to understand, such a complaint is really not a complaint against Austen at all; it is rather against the reader himself who, despite an apparently complete–and rather bourgeois–knowledge, is unable to predict the drama and discover its meaning without reading (and returning to in memory) the entire book. Amos:

. . . the typical reader of Pride and Prejudice will go along with Elizabeth’s self-understanding throughout the first half, all the while maintaining a confidence in his ability to interpret the character.

In those three hour classes on the Russian Novel, and specifically The Idiot, commentary hardly left the question of which character had the most trustworthy perspective concerning Myshkin. There is a reason for that. Characters are contagious. Ganya’s countenance is contagious. That contagion calls to mind the correspondence Amos finds between the interest of Darcy’s letter–necessary for the understanding of the whole novel–and the broken spine of the physical book. Usurping his notion of a novel’s “second nature,” I would say that The Idiot, precisely because of Ganya, has hives and that I am itchy.

preface to Gavrila

When Myshkin goes to General Epanchin’s apartment for the purpose of making the general’s acquaintance, the reader, already attuned to any mention of physiognomy, may become especially preoccupied with the narrative emphasis on looking in its various senses–to look at, to be looked at, and to have a look. Acknowledging the thematic importance of this emphasis is unavoidable. If we are to ask questions about Myshkin’s social place, education, and effect, we must be prepared to refer back both to the way this theme is confirmed by his entrance into society and to the character that this entrance establishes as Myshkin’s own.

When the uniformed servant opens the door and looks “suspiciously at [the prince] and his bundle,” it is enough to say that suspicion is the proper function of his service. The same can be said, at first, of the general’s valet to whom Myshkin is finally sent. This man–conscious of his own importance–glances “with stern astonishment” at the prince who has sat himself down in the anteroom instead of the reception room, and he is in “great doubt” about admitting him at all. Though the prince’s unexpected arrival and unconventional motives are the cause of these doubtful looks, looking itself is not yet emphasized. So far, the question of expectancy is broached only as a matter of course, that is, he does not fit into the “category of everyday visitors” (18).

Yet, even in these initial stages, countenance has already begun to change; it is brought out into the open and described.

“But are you really . . . from abroad?” he finally asked somehow involuntarily–and became confused; perhaps he had wanted to ask: “But are you really Prince Myshkin?”
“Yes, I just got off the train. It seems to me you wanted to ask if I’m really Prince Myshkin, but did not ask out of politeness.”
“Hm . . .” the astonished lackey grunted.
“I assure you, I am not lying to you, and you won’t have to answer for me. And as for why I’ve come looking like this and with this bundle, there’s nothing surprising about it: my present circumstances are not very pretty.”
“Hm. That’s not what I’m afraid of, you see. It’s my duty to announce you, and the secretary will come out, unless you . . . But that’s just it, that unless. You’re not going to petition the general on account of your poverty, if I may be so bold?”
“Oh, no, you may be completely assured about that. I have other business.”
“Forgive me, but I asked by the look of you. Wait for the secretary; the general is busy with the colonel right now, and afterwards comes the secretary . . . of the company.” (19)

I said a moment ago that the looking is not yet unusual. Everyone knows it is a requirement of his position that an announcer have considerable skill in the judgments he makes by looking. What is interesting in the above conversation, however, is that this necessary skill somehow fails in the face of the prince’s seemingly undisciplined countenance. The valet, through no fault of his own, is unable to complete his judgment. After all, is it possible to be held accountable for not being able to really see someone who doesn’t know how he is supposed to look (how to “be with people”)?  So he means to ask, “are you really Prince Myshkin?” but is constrained by a sense of propriety to ask instead, “But are you really from abroad?” The valet’s discipline did not prepare him for the reflexive conversation that follows, in which, instead of performing his duty, he simply describes it. I do not mean to make a moral of this change. I don’t want anyone to think that I believe the valet, in this second “confused” articulation is somehow better, more human, or more himself than the previous, rigidified, unMyshkinized valet who did his job and did it well. But I do mean to imply that the question of identity is indeed raised and to suggest that in these moments of disrupted countenance people often reveal something of who they really are.