Totsky, part II

[not proofread, apologies.]

To think of Totsky is to think of the event of appearance in society. We can concentrate on that aspect of Totsky’s character which has allowed him to maintain a “beautiful form” of life. To some extent I have tried to do that already though it will also inevitably bear (especially in light of the narrator’s description of Totsky’s “cowardice”) on what I now wish to say in the way of giving an account of those agencies by which a person is brought to the attention of society. Totsky’s peculiar relationship with Nastasya Filippovna is very much worth thinking about in this regard. The account of their relationship begins with an account of Nastasya’s father.

Filipp Alexandrovich Barashkov, was a man “remarkable for his ceaseless and anecdotal misfortunes” (40). The event that brought about the transfer of Nastasya to Totsky’s care is described in Book I, Chapter IV:

Buried in debts and mortgages, he succeeded at last, after hard, almost peasant-like labors, in setting up his small estate more or less satisfactorily. The smallest success encouraged him extraordinarily. Encouraged and radiant with hopes, he went for a few days to his district town, to meet and, if possible, come to a final agreement with one of his chief creditors. On the third day after his arrival in town, his warden came from the village, on horseback, his cheek burned and his beard singed, and informed him that the “family estate burned down” the day before, at noon, and that “his wife burned with it, but the little children were left unharmed.” This surprise even Barashkov, accustomed as he was to the “bruises of fortune,” could not bear; he went mad and a month later died in delirium. (40-41)

This is the beginning of the account of the “troublesome occurrence” that is the only circumstance which might complicate the “beautiful” account that Totsky has given of himself in society and which might, therefore, disrupt his intention of marrying the eldest of the Epanchin girls (of whom we have not, as yet, heard much save that she is a “kind, reasonable girl and extremely easy to get along with” who, along with the middle sister, is willing to “make sacrifices” for the benefit of the youngest, Aglaya, the “undoubted beauty in the family”). If this troublesome occurrence does not end up barring the marriage, then “in the quiet and beautiful flow of General Epanchin’s family life, an obvious upheaval [would come].”

That occurrence concerns the lone survivor of the “anecdotally” unfortunate Barashkov, Nastasya Filippovna. Nastasya first appears as the child of a man who (1) experienced something very much like doom and (2) who is remembered only in society’s account of something as unnatural as doom, the anecdote. It almost goes without saying that Nastasya inherited something of both from her father. From the first moment of her appearance in the novel as the woman on whose account, according to Lebedev, Rogozhin’s father “wanted to admonish [him] with a blackthorn stick,” as, to put it one way, the mistress of Ganya’s fate (in the midst of the General’s anxiety, Ganya says, “I am the master of my fate.”), as the “remarkably good-looking” woman in the portrait whose name the Prince (to the General’s and Ganya’s amazement) already knows, Nastasya appears to the reader as if she were in the midst of some doom or fate or destiny waiting to irrupt into the normal happenings of society. That irruption is prepared for, in a sense, by the way in which she is known, not to the reader, but to Petersburg society. Like society’s memory of her father, her existence is almost “anecdotal.” Her beauty, her relation with Totsky, her position–these are the subject of conjecture, gossip, and intrigue. When the narrator describes Totsky’s cowardice in the face of Nastasya we can believe that this “conservative” attitude, this expectation, involves the irruption that an anecdotal existence is meant to keep at bay: Totsky would be frightened “not so much at being killed or gravely wounded, or having his face publicly spat in, and so on and so forth, as at it happening to him in such an unnatural and unacceptable form” (44). Here I am forced to pause a little, having run against something I would praise in Myshkin as the very height of courage, that is, the denial of the “acceptability” of fate, the refusal to allow fate to replace a genuine account of another person, the awareness of the existence of “double thoughts,” etc. So that I will at least be able to return to the initial questions of this post, suffice it to say that this “likeness” certainly does not dissolve the difference between Myshkin and Totsky, especially regarding their separate views of what is “natural” and “acceptable,” in other words, their separate views of what can and should be sustained in view and, in Totsky’s case, what must be kept “under wraps.”

We are prepared for Totsky’s cowardice (p. 44) by the threat that this “circumstance” (p. 40) represents for the flow of his life and the lives of others. The circumstance is in the knowledge-category that Jane Austen calls “information”–as in accounts of other people meant to aid in the formation of judgments regarding those people. The information regarding Totsky is complicated because, from the beginning, Nastasya only had this anecdotal existence as his “occasional boast in certain circles.” And so it is as if Dostoevsky is, like Aquinas, setting out the most difficult objections to the “freedom” or the “unfinalizability” of the lives of his characters. All these separate accounts of the same events serve to keep a character in view, but that keeping is a temptation for both the one who “gives” information and the one who “receives” it (and, therefore, for the reader).

To be continued . . .

P.S. When we have grasped the trials of Nastasya’s father and especially of his encouragement at the “smallest success,” how can we fail to censure Totsky when he allows himself to think of Nastasya as a “sheer punishment from God,” though incapable of “doing any harm, for instance, in the legal sense [-] she could not even cause significant scandal, because it would always be too easy to limit her” (43). And how can we fail to somehow agree with him?

inviolable unknowability

William Deresiewicz in The Nation:

In all this, Wood is centrally concerned with the ways novelists tell the truth about the world, how they “produce art that accurately sees ‘the way things are,’” and it is here that we begin to see both his project’s deepest motives and the first of its limitations. Wood’s ideal authors are those, like Chekhov and Mann and the Sicilian writer Giovanni Verga, who are able to invent characters who seem to break free of their creators’ intentions, who feel “real to themselves”–and thus to us–because they “forget” they are fictional. A novelist’s ultimate achievement is to enable us to know a character so well that we catch a glimpse of his inviolable unknowability, his singular quiddity–in other words, though Wood doesn’t use the term, his soul. While Wood esteems Flaubert and, to a lesser extent, Nabokov, he finally finds their exquisite artistic control too confining (hence his remark about Flaubert’s characters being “doomed”). For Wood, the essential authorial endowment is what Keats called “negative capability”–the ability to remain hospitable to alien styles of being and antithetical beliefs and values.

do I look cured?

What if Myshkin had been cured by his Swiss doctor? Would he have been described in the same way?

His eyes were big, blue, and intent; their gaze had something quiet but heavy about it and was filled with that strange expression by which some are able to guess at first sight that the subject has the falling sickness. (6)

Myshkin is sick and not sick at the same time. The way this book is written is rooted in description of this kind–of the “inobjective body.” The way eyes look in both the active (gaze) and passive (expression) sense is as important, if not more important, to the descriptive style as is their color and size. Similarly, the falling sickness–evident to the experienced observer–does not tell the whole story of Myshkin’s illness. In other words, when Myshkin says, “No, they didn’t [cure me],” he is not only referring to epileptic fits. Later, when telling the Epanchins about his illness, he says of the worst part of his illness:

I always lapsed into a total stupor, lost my memory completely, and though my mind worked, the logical flow of thought was as if broken. (56)

We are meant to wonder about the prince’s illness. We are meant to wonder whether his insight into others is knowledge of the truth or merely the accident of a medical condition. We are already dealing with gradations of vision and knowledge, but we do not know how to judge their value. First of all, there is description itself; there is plain-old glancing at someone on the train; there is Rogozhin’s “tactless grin” (6); there is Myshkin’s “special curiosity” (10); there’s the ability to see evidence of illness in another’s eyes (6); there is Lebedev’s “Know-it-all” perception (7-8); etc. In some way, these questions call to mind the Socratic style and the question of the justice of his method. At 506c (Book VI) of the Republic, Socrates is asked to “tell his own convictions about the good” by Glaucon, who argues that it is not just for Socrates to only “tell other people’s convctions.” Part of Socrates reply:

Haven’t you noticed that all opinions without knowledge are ugly? The best of them are blind. Or do men who opine something true without intelligence seem to you any different from the blind who travel the right road?

We must ask this question throughout the novel: on what does Myshkin fix his eyes? Are they fixed on that which is “illumined by truth?”

On the other hand, we are also meant to wonder about the health of other characters. If the prince is ill, are they healthy? If the prince is ill, what is health that he should desire a cure or that we should wish him cured? Which is better? Which is more human? Is Myshkin contagious? In other words, is Myshkin worthy of imitation? Do we have the constitution for such imitation?

I’ll close with this quotation from Rowan Williams’ section on The Idiot:

Myshkin’s physical appearance is plainly modeled on the traditional Orthodox iconography of the Savior, and when Nastasya has vague impression that she has seen him before, it is almost certainly this that is meant to be in mind. (48)

eh…

As I look over the last two posts I notice a few things that should be clarified. I’ve read The Idiot several times, but it’s been a long time since I read it last. And so what I’m writing here is not what I would write in a formal paper. I’m trying to remember what it was about Prince Myshkin that made The Idiot so important to me in high school and throughout college. As I go I hope the writing will become more coherent.

Also the plan to avoid, at least in the beginning, depending on literary criticism is starting to look like wishful thinking. There’s that rule in writing about using quotations when someone has said what you’re trying to say better than you ever will.

Also, I apologize for stuff like this:

Physiognomy itself is already a forgetful name for the “place” that Myshkin’s way of knowing (arguably, of course) seeks.

Yes, I too want to punch me when I read that. But I’m afraid I need to embarrass myself a little in the beginning before I can get to what I’m looking for.

Reading The Idiot

In Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction, Rowan Williams rather beautifully aligns himself with the prevailing “critical consensus” concerning the fundamental failure of Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin (as a Christ figure and otherwise), which I believe to be a problematic and reductive stance. Adequately responding to that stance obviously cannot be accomplished in one post – if it can be accomplished at all – so that’s what this blog will concern itself with until something else comes along and disrupts my generally poor concentration.

At this stage, except for the Archbishop’s book, I will try to forgo referring to the critical reception of The Idiot, instead selecting and commenting on passages from the novel itself. The outline of Williams’ contribution to criticism of The Idiot is as follows:

What we are seeing in the novel, certainly, is not the outworking of theological strategy but the effect that the writing itself has upon the original purposes of the writer. It is more or less inevitable that Myshkin should emerge as a seriously confused and confusing figure. (47)

Myshkin’s own changelessness … prevents him from being a ‘savior’ in any sense, and that the gulf between him and Christ is to do with the fact that the Prince makes no adult choices. (48)

The point that has been made about the Christ of the Inquisitor fable applies far more strongly here: if this is a Christ figure, it is one who has no ‘hinterland,’ no God behind him. (48)

The premature embrace of harmony turns out to be an act of violence in its own way–including violence, suicidal violence, to the self. (50)