Asserting the Truth

A.N. Wilson on Dostoevsky (as examined in Rowan Williams's new book on the Russian writer):

. . .In the conclusion to his book, Williams makes the striking claim that the fusion of incompatibilities in which so much of Dostoevsky’s work consists, creates something comparable to the traditions of icon-painting.

It is this fusion of a surrender to the claims of an independent truth and a surrender to the actual risks and uncertainties of asserting this truth in word and action that makes the entire enterprise of spiritual – and specifically Christian – life one that is marked by the decentring and critique of the unexamined self. What is so distinctive about Dostoevsky’s narrative art is that he not only gives us narratives in which this difficult fusion is enacted; he also embodies the fusion in his narrative method, in the practice of his writing, risking the ambitious claim that the writing of fiction can itself be a sort of icon.

This seems right to me, and is precisely the reason why Dostoevsky is, in my opinion, such a terrible writer. He's a religious dogmatist and a reactionary conservative who uses fiction as, in Wilson's words, "demonstrations of the areas which have to be explored if one is to make sense of any of the great questions of philosophical theology." Unsurprisingly, most of Dostevsky's novels tell us that, once we've "explored" these areas, we would be well advised to become. . .religious dogmatists and reactionary conservatives.

It is incomprehensible to me that so many readers and critics have fallen for Dostoevsky's cheap tricks (and endured the unrelenting tedium of his fiction) and declared him an "existentialist" or religious "seeker" or some other such rot. Wilson's account of Dostoevsky the journalist--the "hectoring satirist, the bombastic nationalist, the predictable anti-Semite"--has always seemed to me a perfectly obvious description of Dostoevsky the novelist as well.

Comments

[Pacifist Viking]

Dan, I’m not remotely surprised you don’t like Dostoevsky, and I appreciate the honesty in your comments about why: you read for particular reasons, and Dostoevsky does not fulfill/satisfy those reasons.

What I sometimes find frustrating in your writing is the contempt you express for those who read for other reasons. As it happens, I too read for particular reasons, and Dostoevsky quite fulfills/satisfies those. But I take it you find this “incomprehensible,” and find me a weak reader too easily falling for “cheap tricks.”

[Zachary Bos]

Dan, you write, "I read fiction for the aesthetic experience it might provide, and Dostoevsky's fiction provides me with none. It's too busy doing EVERYTHING."

I'm unsure of how your terms are working here. Isn't an aesthetic response largely instantenous? And the consideration and reflection afterwards, the accumulation of effect as you proceed through a text, more intellectual than aesthetic in kind? Given this understanding of the aesthetic component of reading -- and it is my understanding -- it is hard to imagine how one could dismiss Crime and Punishment, or any other 'inexhaustible' text, as not provoking a rich aesthetic response. It's a long book; there are many passages, some even extending to multiple pages, which stimulate the senses, the moral self, and the thinking mind. If we disagree, it might be because we're working on different levels of analysis. "Aesthetic" for me is discerned at the scale of passages, paragraphs, scenes, phrasing; "beliefs" and "argument" reside in larger structures, and are conveyed via quite different means.

[Steven Augustine]

"And I think that the variegated reactions here suggest that Dostoevsky does succeed in bringing out differing reactions from different souls..."

Ed, uniquely universal would be the writer who *doesn't*.

[Joel]

"My statement was no broader than that."

Sorry. I should read more carefully.

[ed]

If fiction can do everything, why can't it help me balance my checkbook?

Despite Mr. Wood's largesse (both in replying to this thread and dutifully defending Dostoevsky), I must confess that the conclusion Green derives from Dostoevsky likewise baffles me. To present an ethical dilemma and insinuate a few possible existences does not necessarily mean that the reader is inclined to follow these ontological crumbs. Dostoevsky's "cheap tricks" amount, in my mind, to a point of view, but by no means a conclusive or a prescriptive one. And I don't believe that anyone can read the sprawling philosophical talk in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV or the colorful characters that inhabit THE IDIOT coming away thinking that Dostoevesky is a hard realist. What we have here is a bunch of people fulminating about what they derive from Dostoevsky on a personal level, as opposed to dwelling upon the more interesting question of what a specific Dostoevesky passage might mean. And I think that the variegated reactions here suggest that Dostoevsky does succeed in bringing out differing reactions from different souls, which is precisely what Mr. Wood has suggested here.

[Dan Green]

"Polyphony means that Dostoevsky's novels have exactly the opposite effect of Dan Green's assertion"

I have great admiration for Bakhtin, but I have always found his account of D's fiction totally unconvincing. D's agenda is utterly transparent, at least to me, and no critical analysis has ever persuaded me otherwise.

[John Fox]

I find it interesting that no one picked up the James Wood comment about Bakhtin at the beginning of these comments. I think the point was to reference polyphony, which is Bakhtin's argument that Dostoevsky isn't engaged in flat-out philosophizing of the dogmatic sort, but rather cultivates a multi-voiced discussion in which viewpoints are raised but a clear answer is never reached:

"Bakhtin asserts that Dostoevsky created a totally new kind of novel he calls "polyphonic": i. e., it consists of independent voices which are fully equal, become subjects of their own right and do not serve the ideological position of the author."

Polyphony means that Dostoevsky's novels have exactly the opposite effect of Dan Green's assertion:

"Unsurprisingly, most of Dostevsky's novels tell us that, once we've "explored" these areas, we would be well advised to become. . .religious dogmatists and reactionary conservatives."

Dostoevsky's own struggle with faith/knowledge/identity was represented in the fragmentation of voices and perspectives in Brothers K. If you want dogmatism, turn to Ayn Rand or Huxley's later work like Point-Counter-Point, not Dostoevsky.

[Jacob Russell]

Whatever a novel "is," it is in us and we are in it. Whatever we mean by "world," we are in and of it, as the world is in and of "us"... whatever we are, whatever it is. So yes, the novel is about all of the above... cannot help but be all of the above-- though "about" is a problematic word here. Being so much of them, untangling these matters is impossible. What's left is the game of drawing borders, lines that might appear as figures--like the imaginary lines we draw between the stars, constellations, which, though having no objective reality, permit us to orient ourselves against and within the all encompassing night.

It is easier--or at least safer--to exclude or separate the affective from the cool formalities of the reading experience, as the former are so slippery, and will not stay still or hold their shape, but it is delusional to believe that we are capable of thinking outside our bodies--like brains in a bottle. No thought but is also ("also?") a bodily process, an animal response, a felt reality. The most lucid argument, the most rational, empirically demonstrable claim, must also convince, and beneath or part of every conviction there is an element beyond or past reason.

My rejection of a purely formal criticism rests on the same ground as my rejection of the far too narrow conventions of "reality" in establishment literary fiction. What is left out of each is more important than what is included.

[Steven Augustine]

EC:

Just a tiny clarification: it's not what one reads, but one demands of a reading, that makes one (or the reading), in my *opinion*, middlebrow or not. I believe in the possibility (nay, the necessity) of highbrow readings of The Reader's Digest, man. I also believe that "highbrow" and "lowbrow" are aesthetically, and politically, more likely to harmonize than either option will co-exist comfortably with middlebrow. And at no point did I claim to be against certain works by Dostoevsky.

"Formalism vs. The Middlebrow? That's it? Only two possible critical strategies for reading a centuries-old art form?"

Joel, I wrote that I perceive that most of the heated threads on *T.R.E.* boil down to that division. My statement was no broader than that.

[Edmond Caldwell]

Thanks for that clarification, Dan; for me at least it makes your current arguments against D jive more in my own mind with what I had taken to be your broader aesthetic outlook in other of your posts...

From Joseph Frank's pretty thorough biography of Dostoevsky (which of course includes many of D's own statements from his letters and so forth) I came away with the idea that D certainly considered himself a literary artist and not just a polemicist or prophet, so no, he wouldn't have disavowed being the maker of aesthetic objects - of works of art. For you and for other readers, including Nabokov (a wonderful novelist himself altho' not quite up to D's stature), he doesn't succeed in being an artist. For me he does; maybe I'm just reading him "wrong" so that for some screwed up reason I end up getting aesthetic pleasure out of the hybridity, the way I do out of Joyce's hybridity in Ulysses or Sebald's hybridity in Rings of Saturn (altho' of course with differences as well, respective to those authors and their objects) just as I get pleasure out of his work's other aesthetic qualities that I cited, the fantastic, the burlesque, the paranoid, etc., or else, to take the route of Augustine's Manicheanism, I'm just a hopeless middlebrow who likes Dostoevsky - and Joyce, Sebald, and Sterne (a veritable four-headed ogre of middlebrowism!).

Or: Dostoevksy is indeed an artist, and you just don't happen to care for his work. Nothing wrong with that.

Cheers & thanks again for the stimulating post & followups.

[Joel]

Formalism vs. The Middlebrow? That's it? Only two possible critical strategies for reading a centuries-old art form? In fact, only one is a critical strategy, while the other is a sub-genre. I've actually read some formalistic analyses of sentimental fiction from antebellum America, so the two opposing ideas you mention are hardly incompatible. My problem with formalism--and it may be an ignorant one, since Dan and Steven appear to know more about it than I do--is that it's being treated here as less a strategy for producing interesting scholarship than as an exclusionary system to weed out any novel that doesn't let itself to formalistic analysis. Also, I would contend that nostalgia is actually the central issue in the entire history of the novel, even if it started as a parody of nostalgia for chivalry and the chivalric tale: Cervantes, Sterne, Fielding, etc. This is a fascinating argument to me, since I tend to prefer the types of novels that Dan (and I would guess Steven) prefer. On the other hand, I also really dig Fyodor--Turgenev, too, and he's not even fashionable anymore.

[Dan Green]

I certainly do not argue "against the hybridity of novels per se." I have distaste for Dostoevsky's kind of hybridity in particular. He's not marshalling all these "discourses" in order to produce an aesthetic experience. He's doing it to reinforce his own overarching argument: Believe in God, in moral absolutes, in the authority of the national state, or else chaos ensues. This is what I take away from D's novels, not their status as "aesthetic objects." I think Dostoevsky himself would recoil in disgust at the idea that readers thought this latter was his project.

[Steven Augustine]

"...Wood's theory that the novel can, indeed, "do" everything."

Arguing broadly that the "novel does EVERYTHING" while, at the same time, going to career-spanning lengths to specify what it *must* do, instead, seems like a pretty convenient method for having it both ways (ie, presenting a claim-staking case it's rather difficult to nail down in order to refute). Further, a case can be made that *Everything* "does Everything".

That's one thing. The other:

Dan, re: Rohan's overall argument: your definition of "middlebrow" seems queerly contingent. I've "seen" you gallop into the middlebrow camp on a fire-breathing horse and lop noggins over books/sentences no more middlebrow than Rohan's "...it seems sad not to have room in your reading life for, say, 'Vanity Fair' or 'Middlemarch'..." (that smugly didactic "sad" can only have been delivered from the vantage of richer experience, no? Fixing a range of emotional valences to the reading experience is supremely middlebrow stuff; we expect to hear about the "uplifting", the "passionate", the "devastating", et al, in due course, as well).

Well, I'd suggest that being as this thread can't really be taken seriously, re: Dostoevsky, as anything other than DG's claim that he doesn't enjoy/admire what he can read of Dostoevsky's work, and those who *do* enjoy/admire same responding that it's foolish for him to say so... the whole thing is about what most of DG's comment threads are about: Formalism vs The Middlebrow.

The difficulty of getting The Middlebrow among us to stand up and be counted being, of course, that it's not just neutral taxonomy but has an intellectually pejorative taint to it, like calling someone "earnest". But how else to refer to those who A) emphasize didactic novels or B) ascribe didacticism to novels where the term is a ridiculous fit (see recently fashionable, *again*, didactic readings of "Lolita"). By Talmudic readings of Fiction shall ye know them.

The middlebrow specialty is nostalgia: back we go to a simpler (holier, more merchant-and-ivory-er) time when adults with deeply proscribed experiences (less worldly than your average 8-year-old today) sought advice/solace/protection in The Bible. Or, with rather less piety, the didactic novel. It's suggestive to note, by the way, that Jane Austen's mother very nearly lost her life on the gallows (falsely accused of thieving some lace)... one could see how the didactic novel would have some traction back then.

(Does the existence of Guantanamo Bay undermine one half of my thesis while bolstering the other by explaining the resurgence of the didactic-novel mindset? Possibly.)

(Still, do we naturally expect the function/perception of the novel to have changed, in the Judeo-Christian sphere, with the dramatic waning of strict Judeo-Christian practise? Of course! Let no one be fooled: Western, 21st century Christianity, on the whole, is as pagan and poly-deistic as the narrative tropes daily discourse is now made of; people eat shellfish, glory in unmarried, non-procreative sex, indulge in witchcraft... covet not only their neighbors' asses but everything else and sin lavishly with DIY projects on the Sabbath day; the Ur-didactic Bible has as much influence on the modern person and writer as Scientology had on Eliot).

The overlap here is Dostoevsky's didactic purpose.

JW chides DG for the expediency of borrowing the glamour of Nabokov's famously anti-Dostoevsky stance, then proceeds to borrow the glamour of a pro-Dostoevsky authority (since neither DG nor JW can read the material in the original): the cornerstones of both of their arguments are hearsay at best.

No, no, again: this thread is the latest in T.R.E. flare-ups between DG's High Formalist default and a middlebrow insurgency. This entire blog is practically a theme park of such skirmishes. Strangely, DG opts to argue his position in the guise of a critic, as opposed to as a *writer of fiction*, which, again, introduces the distancing element of the second-hand to the discussion.

[Edmond Caldwell]

Dan writes:

'I myself don't read works of literature for arguments about "belief" (for "arguments" generally), as "political pamphlets" or "social philosophy," certainly not for "psychological insight," and not to be "taught" anything at all. I read fiction for the aesthetic experience it might provide.'

I'm with you all the way, Dan. Dostoevsky's novels are like mythical beasts, hybrids of feuilleton, political pamphlet, social philosophy, eschatological prophecy, psychological investigation worthy of Nietzsche and Freud, sensationalistic pot-boiler, and more, and I find it exhilarating the way that Dostoevsky novelizes these various genres and forms, uses them as raw material for the aesthetic objects - the mythical beasts - which are his novels, which I then approach and appreciate as aesthetic objects.

Like you, I go to novels to read novels. If I want a political pamphlet (and I often do), I read a political pamphlet. If I want to be taught something, I take a class or go to wikipedia. If I want an "argument," I post a blog entry and wait for the comments. And when I want my favorite kind of aesthetic experience, I go to the novel.

And that aesthetic experience is particular to the novel -- not like the aesthetic experience of, say, lyric poetry, or a Bach fugue, or an Anselm Kiefer painting, etc. What is the particularity of the novel form? I think the history of the novel attests to the fact that ONE of its important particularities is its great impurity and hybridity, its ability to cannibalize other forms and genres, and that is one thing (among others) I enjoy about the form, aesthetically enjoy.

Or, Dan, is your argument against the hybridity of novels per se? Are novels which cannibalize other forms "not novels," as some critics are prone to say about types of this omnivorous form that they don't happen to like? Or do you acknowledge the hybridity but argue that it is illicit to enjoy it? Laurence Sterne's novel Sentimental Journey, for example, hybridizes travel narratives and contemporary novels of sentiment. Is it illicit of me, or "not aesthetic," to say, "One thing I enjoy about Sterne's Sentimental Journey is the way that it includes genres such as the travelogue and the novel of sentiment?" I'm just trying to understand your position here . . .

[Rohan Maitzen]

"I think Rohan Maitzen makes a basic mistake when he [she, actually] asks what or who is my *standard* to assess good or bad writing and then mentions a bunch of famous novels. . . Whether these books are "well written" or not depends on whether these writers succeeded or not in doing what they had set out to do."

I didn't in fact mean to set up any of these novels as models, only to suggest what you take up in your reply--that being "well written" is not in itself a very helpful category since we can see books as diverse as the ones I mentioned as all being "well written" in their own ways. So the question "is it well written?" promptly opens up a lot of other questions (such as, what is its project? well written to what ends? etc.). So I certainly agree with you on this point. And I agree about literary merit not being completely relativized by this realization, but evaluating it certainly becomes much more complicated.

[M. O'Nail]

My apologies to Rohan Maitzen for referring to her as "he". I have now realized my mistake, but I cannot edit my post.

[M. O'Nail]

I think Rohan Maitzen makes a basic mistake when he asks what or who is my *standard* to assess good or bad writing and then mentions a bunch of famous novels. He is mixing up the notion of *standard* with the notion of *model* and he is asking me which my *model* is. Of course I have none, nor can I conceive of any critic or teacher or reader so narrow-minded and so fanaticised in his/her tastes as to think that to be a good novelist you have to imitate such and such book or such and such writer.

It's another mistake to think that because there have been many different good writers who have written in many different ways the notion of good/bad writing has become so relativized as to make it impossible to assess literary merit. Richardson, Wilde, Joyce or Ishiguro -to use Rohan Maitzen's examples- set out to do quite different things when they wrote 'Clarissa', 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray', 'Finnegans Wake' and 'The Remains of the Day'. Whether these books are "well written" or not depends on whether these writers succeeded or not in doing what they had set out to do. It seems each of them did, so it follows that each of these novels in its own fashion is "well written".

Writing well is using effectively the linguistic resources necessary to build the text that you want to produce. To judge if you are a good writer it is your use of those resources that has to be considered, not your choice of text. That is to say, the important thing is that you can use language and narrative technique, not that you write a parody of a Queen's speech or the diary of a schoolboy.

[Joel]

Thanks for the clarification. I agree that Formalism is valid now, and I agree that academic fads shouldn't dictate one's methods, but why limit your literary *preferences* to your preferred critical theory? Can Formalism not work alongside other valid critical methods? Identifying the "literary" in literature is an interesting project on its own, but why let this limit your tastes? This reminds me of those arguments in film studies about whether or not a movie should be "purely visual." The novel is a hybrid genre, one that is much freer when critics don't try to limit what it "can" do.

[Dan Green]

My preferences aren't fixed in the literary avant-garde but in formalism and New Criticism--in particular critical approaches to literature that seek to identify the "literary" in literature. I reject the idea that critical methods are just passing academic fads, one replaced by another as the academic winds shift. Formalism is as valid now as it was a half a century ago.

[Joel]

Your assertion--"my preferences wouldn't have seemed quite so "disabling" thirty or forty years ago"--helps clarify why I can never fully agree with your critical prescriptions. For all your championing of the experimental, your partisanship seems so narrow, so fixed in the post-World War II literary avant-garde. Why a binary of aestheticism and thematic literary interpretation? Are all aesthetic opinions solely based on the "use of language," whatever that may mean? Lacking any knowledge of Russian, I can't say whether or not D. knows how to write pretty metaphors, or alliterate like William Gass, but I do know that the construction of character, the evocation of divine mystery in the character's life, and the development of that character over time (i.e. the plot), are all deliberate and difficult linguistic choices on the author's part. The generic "nineteenth-century novel" of Comp Lit 101 has always been a chimera to me. The fact that I can love Dostoevsky for the above reasons, yet also love Sorrentino's metafiction, Beckett's massacre of the language, and Barth's mockery of literary forms, probably supports Wood's theory that the novel can, indeed, "do" everything. Aestheticism is fine--and far better than the mainstream reviewers who judge solely on the issue raised by a novel's book jacket. But I'd prefer a more polysemous criticism.

[Dan Green]

I do mean my statements to be expressions of my own preferences, and this blog as an extended attempt to defend those preferences, which, as this thread attests, is not a "mainstream" view (or what has become the mainstream, since my preferences wouldn't have seemed quite so "disabling" thirty or forty years ago.) My views are "prescriptive" only to the extent that I think consideration of literature ought first of all to be an aesthetic consideration, or there's no reason to single out literature as a mode of writing in the first place.

I can't say I find in Rohan's comments either an advocacy of "middlebrow seance channeling" or an attempt at "having the last word on every discussion." She's puzzled by my literary preferences, and I'm happy to try to explain them to her--on this thread and future threads.

[Steven Augustine]

"Like philq, I'm disappointed in the tone this thread has sometimes taken; I don't think it can stand as an example of the best lit-blogging can do."

Rohan, if you think a middlebrow seance channeling and/or burlesquing ancient literary arguments about taste (interleaved with humid examples of arse-kissing; with "tone" corrected to your specs) represents "the best lit-blogging can do", I must say I'm relieved you don't have the influence or authority to police the territory.

JW already has several large-ish (print) forums in which to fire his flamey salvoes, against noted stylists, unmolested; it's a little much to expect his immunity to extend (not down, but) out here. Don't you think?

You write, to DG, "If you mean your statements as assertions of your own preference, that's one thing..." as though that's not what every single commenter (including JW) is doing here! You suffer from the pedagogue's addiction to having the last word on every discussion; a kind of "rightness" on subjective matters only possible in a classroom (or a Stalinist paradise). As such, you argue from a custom-made reality as non-transferably powerful as any lotus-eater's fog.

The brilliant thing about the Litblog thread as a medium of exchange is not its awful potential for aping the dusty decorums of the interacting cliques and hierarchies of "print"... it's the fact that any and every soi-disant Authority who logs on is suddenly, vulnerably, uncloistered... aswim in the wide world itself... with the exhilirating danger of coming up against bigger brains and wider learning.

Unless you, or JW, believe yourselves to be in possession of the most massive thinking equipment on Earth, you can only benefit from losing the college-prep-Eng-teacher swagger (the borrowed armor of gratuitous citation should be the first to go) and opening up to the possibility of illumination (not in the realm of "facts" but of points of view).

As for Doestoevsky: Steven Augustine may be brash (and irritating as sand in a mucous membrane) but he's not going to hazard a strong opinion on a writer he's never read in the original... because *somebody* out there *has*.

[LML]

"As for the thrashing Mr. Wood received here, I think it will be edifying."

Yes, I'm sure James Wood is crushed. SBK and Steven Augustine really made some convincing points against him! That'll teach him to respectfully engage his detractors!

[Rohan Maitzen]

A quick further note: M. O'Nail writes above that "We should first and foremost value a novel on the basis of how well or badly written it is." This line (which was famously Oscar Wilde's) is the kind of statement that sounds straightforward but collapses almost as soon as you try to put its putative principle into action. How will you judge? What (or who) is your standard? There is no single aesthetic criterion or model that will serve, especially when the possibilities are as expansive as they are in fiction. Is 'Finnegan's Wake' well written or badly written? What about 'Clarissa'? Or 'The Remains of the Day'? Or 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'?

[Rohan Maitzen]

Like philq, I'm disappointed in the tone this thread has sometimes taken; I don't think it can stand as an example of the best lit-blogging can do.

Dan, I wonder if you have read the exchange between Richard Posner, Wayne Booth, and Martha Nussbaum that ran in 'Philosophy and Literature' some years ago (1997, I think). In "Against Ethical Criticism," Posner argues what he calls the 'aesthetic' case. Booth and Nussbaum argue a variety of things, but one of Booth's major interests is the way form itself is expressive of ideas (his particular interest is in ethical ideas). The question they are working on is basically how distinct an 'aesthetic' response can be from, say, philosophical, political, or other 'beliefs.' You might find the discussion interesting.

When you say that you don't read literature "for arguments about 'belief' (for 'arguments' generally), as 'political pamphlets' or 'social philosophy,' certainly not for 'psychological insight,' and not to be 'taught' anything at all," what strikes me is that yours is a very specific and historically contingent assumption about what literature is for or about--in many respects, it's a concept of literature that dates from the late 19th / early 20th century, for instance. It seems potentially very disabling as a way to read literature written under very different assumptions. The idea that literature should instruct as well as amuse is, after all, a very old theory. If you mean your statements as assertions of your own preference, that's one thing (though it seems sad not to have room in your reading life for, say, 'Vanity Fair' or 'Middlemarch,' both of which have a strong didactic impulse along with their astonishing formal virtuosity). If you mean these statements prescriptively, though, which is how it often sounds (as in, "until we figured out the primacy of form, everyone else was doing it wrong, as are writers today who have not learned or accepted the lessons of modernism--all great fiction will be of this one type"), then I find it almost bizarre in its narrowness, and also fairly certain to fall down in the particular (I'm sure that in practice you enjoy novels of a variety of kinds, though maybe in fact you don't).

I thought there were some unnecessary claims of "these guys got fiction wrong but these guys did it right" in Wood's 'How Fiction Works,' too, as you may know if you read my review--as I said there, Fielding and Defoe are not failing at being Proust, and Thackeray is not a failed Chekhov. We have to enter, at least provisionally, into the author's world (to allow him, as James said, his "donnee"), and my own view would be that the best criticism comes from engaging on those terms (something I think Wood can do beautifully--I think of his review of Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go,' for instance, which moved me almost as much as the novel itself).

Anyway, here's another nice 'pluralistic' line on the novel, from George Eliot: "there is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements. Like crystalline masses, it may take any form." Reading experiences too can (and, I'd say, should) be of many kinds. Maybe the definite article in your blog title is more revealing than I thought. (But I too always enjoy being provoked by your posts, even when, or especially when, I find their premises disagreeable, so thanks!).

Rohan

[Frances Madeson]

Dan is, of course, right about the novel, and definitively so. Rejecting omnipotent God only to replace Him (gender very much intended in this case) with omnipotent novel is silly. As for the thrashing Mr. Wood received here, I think it will be edifying. His elitism and delusions impair his ability to be of service, freezing him in a nostalgic past. Simply put, with all his enthusiasm and attendant exclamation points urging me to feel what he so fervently feels, he doesn't help me see the world. His beliefs and it must be said, corporate allegiances, are a scrim very much in the way. To the extent that his bubble has been burst here, or at least dented, fresher air may soon fill his lungs.

[M. O'Nail]

If I have to opt between Dan Green's *formalism* and James Wood's ecclecticism ("fiction does everything") I definitely choose the former. I don't think we should value a novel -at least not primarily- because of the *themes* it handles or the *issues* it deals with or the *ideas* it contains. We should first and foremost value a novel on the basis of how well or badly written it is. Fictional literature should not be considered a substitute for philosophy or social science.

James Wood mentions Saramago as an example of a writer whose novels "do everything". Well, if we had time to discuss Saramago's novels we might debate whether perhaps they are not good because of but inspite of containing so many *ideas*.

I can see two reasons for the prevailing emphasis on *ideas*, *issues* and *themes*. One reason is ideological: there is this notion that reading fiction is a frivolous pastime, thus fiction reading can only be justified if it is *useful* -that is, if it *teaches* us something or if it transmits some *ideas* (I cringe when I see someone saying that such and such novel is "thought-provoking" -is the function of novels to provoke us into thinking?). The other reason is practical: it's much easier for a critic -and much eachier for his/her audience, too- to discuss the (alleged) ideological content of a novel than to analyse how it is written.

[Andrew]

For starters Dan, you should only read Dostoevsky in the Pevear Volokonsky translation, and see their comments about the strangeness of his language, and intense attention to detail, in the form particularly of each character's distinct use of language. This and other often humorous self-mocking almost of language are almost infallibly overlooked in other "smooth" translations, which do away with Dostoevsky's sometimes jagged edge strangeness. The level of aesthetic achievement, in its grandest sense of life as extension of life, in an early work like "The Double" is at times stunning, and Notes From Underground certainly a work, or perhaps "the" work that ushered in the modern age, again remarkably strange and revolutionary as a work of art. This "reactionary" claim makes so sense, given the small-scale Copernican revolutionary nature of his art from previous forms of truth.

[philq]

It is true that print does not have exchanges like this, but it also does not have immature flame wars. With such mean comments directed at Mr Woods in lieu of substantial argument, it is not surprising that blogs continue to get a bad rap compared to print.

Anyway, back to Dostoevsky. When James Woods said that the novel does EVERYTHING, I don't take him to mean that each individual novel does everything. He means that a novel can do anything, and so it is unfair to judge a novel simply for doing something in particular- for example making an argument or illustrating morality. Of course the particular novel may not be to your taste, but that is different than arguing that the novel is trash.

Jim H. gets it exactly right when he says: "To say fiction does EVERYTHING is to miss the level of reality on which fiction operates—where fiction works. It is to take the sort of leap of faith Dostoevsky, in the context of Christianity, demanded in the face of all rational objection to the existence of God."

This is true, but we shouldn't be so quick to reject the leap. You cannot rationally prove that novels deal with characters, morality, or truth. But you cannot rationally prove any complete worldview. We have to decide whether to believe it in the same way we decide on whatever worldview we have- try different ones on for size and see which one gives you a world large enough in which to live (a line from the great Rowan Williams, who indirectly started this thread.) Just like the solipsistic world in which people are simply sensory impressions, the world in which novels are simply words unmoored from truth is not the world in which I live. If it were I wouldn't waste my time reading books. And frankly, given some of the understandings of the novel advanced in this thread, I don't understand why some of the commenters do so.

[Dan Green]

As most of the comments here attest, my opinion of Dostoevsky is certainly a minority opinion. I'm quite sure that everyone is sincere in his enthusiasm for the elements of Dostoevsky's work evoked, but I myself don't read works of literature for arguments about "belief" (for "arguments" generally), as "political pamphlets" or "social philosophy," certainly not for "psychological insight," and not to be "taught" anything at all. I read fiction for the aesthetic experience it might provide, and Dostoevsky's fiction provides me with none. It's too busy doing EVERYTHING. If this makes me a "formalist fatalist," so be it. "Form" is at least something. If novels are otherwise doing everything, they're really doing nothing.

[Jim H.]

Dan,

Kudos for facilitating such a salon-like atmosphere on the internets with your ever-provocative posts. It seems the status of Dostoevsky is a perennial favorite lure.

I think it goes without saying that D. is a major writer. His work has stood the test of time and continues to provoke intense passionate debate—often about taste. Indeed, I do find myself in agreement with James Wood on a whole host of issues, particularly his view that D. pioneered intense psychological novelistic insight into characters of a less than savory social status. And I appreciate his tracing the lineage back to Diderot and Rousseau (which we gleaned from his book). I don't think it's fair or valid to assert that in understanding Raskolnikov we can understand every low-life murderer, though.

Dan's viewpoint, if I read him aright, is an ancient and honorable one best expressed on the MGM lion logo: ars gratia artis. The point is, again forgive me if I'm putting ideas in your head (or, if you're analytic, words in your mouth), the text is a battleground. At war over the use of the text are authors/writers on the one hand and interpreters/critics on the other. The writers assert their intentions govern the meaning of the work. The critics claim is that the text has a meaning somewhat other than what the writers assert—and, in the 20th Century, meanings have been meaningful only in the context of such systems of thought as ideologies, philosophies, partisan politics, and the like. On the critical side, of course, there are any number of sectarian skirmishes and out-and-out civil wars aflame. Art for art's sake attempts to liberate the text from the warring critical agendas and to preserve textual integrity against the utilitarian motives of its interpreters (as well as from the claims of its writer's intents). Maybe this, too, is noncontroversial, though it is by no means obvious. Umberto Eco refers to the "open text", "unlimited semiosis" (a Peircian notion) which attempts to see the work qua battleground, to understand it just as it allows such a diversity of interpretations, and to affix the empirical constraints on critical interpretation within the empirical grounds of the text (which, of course for him, included intertextuality, allusion, reference, etc.). I have been blogging the past few days on the series of lectures he delivered this week on just this point.

Now, I may be wrong in my appreciation of Dan's point of view, but I must confess my ignorance of the term "formalist fatalism". (Is that your term JW?) They may be the same—though the latter formulation seems a bit crabbed. If not, then I will cop to the view expressed in the preceding paragraph, own it as my own, and allow Dan to speak for himself as we all know he is perfectly capable.

On another matter: does anyone really believe that Raskolnikov would cop so readily to the murder? Was he that weak? Was his conscience so overwhelming? or was this just a way for D. to end the story in a redeeming, sort of uplifting way he couldn't find it in himself to challenge? D. was never a great storyteller. Do you think he had a failure of nerve?

Best,
Jim H.

[John]

"It is incomprehensible to me that so many readers and critics have fallen for Dostoevsky's cheap tricks (and endured the unrelenting tedium of his fiction) and declared him an "existentialist" or religious "seeker" or some other such rot."

That's because you must be so unimaginably wise, as opposed to people like Nietzsche, Hesse, Einstein who said Dostoevsky taught him more than all of science. As for Dostoevsky's reactionary transparency...from the man who turned accepted notions of consciousness on their head with works like "Notes From Underground."
As Dmitri Karamazov says, "Man is broad, too broad even. I would narrow him down." And of such narrowed down souls are your good self, so sure of what you are most ignorant.

[HumanProject]

Let now be heard from the audience a clap, guffaw, laugh, or squeal of fear or excitement. You boys play hard. "Silkily Machiavellian" is a keeper, kudos to Augustine. I think we've just seen a demonstration of the fun that can't easily be had in print.

[Chris]

Joel -- for archaic shit-talking you'd be far better off reading Edward Dahlberg.

[Steven Augustine]

"For all that, to answer Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles, I "troll" Dan Green's site, because although I don't often agree with Dan, I think he is smart and provoking. Exchanges like this can't be easily had in print. --James Wood"

What sort of "exchange" is JW referring to, do you suppose? He posts a comment disagreeing utterly, sneeringly (quasi-peremptorily) with DG's article, sprays some politic flattery-foam (see above) to cap the ungreased proctology of his comment ("But then Green is hostile to ideas in fiction; he is a formalist fatalist... It is an astonishingly narrow view of the novel"), settles a couple of micro-scores, takes care of another possibly dangerous blogger (one wonders if James Wood could be so silkily Machiavellian as to flatter the man who writes a blog called "Contra James Wood" on *purpose*, or if it was a priceless gaffe)... and nips off.

Admittedly, it's not easy to have that kind of fun "in print"... but to call it an "exchange" (thus far) strikes me as stretching things a bit.

One can only anticipate DG's zaftig rebuttal.

[arthur]

And, for what it's worth, I once tried to push Dan Green towards print. He stuck to his principles. He is really true to blogging, no matter my best Mephistophelean efforts.

[Joel]

I'm on Wood's side with regard to Dostoevsky and Dan's restricted formalism, but please don't ever delete SBK's last comment. It's the most hilariously archaic shit-talking I've ever heard--the online equivalent of the slap that proceeds a dueler's demand for satisfaction. Pistols at dawn, James?

[Chris]

Everybody's a critic.

[Dan Green]

I don't myself question James Wood's motives in contributing to a comment thread on a blog. I don't think of it as trolling, although it would be nice if he contributed more than once in a great while. Perhaps the heated rhetoric sometimes directed his way from the blogosphere would even cool off somewhat if that were to happen. Nevertheless, I take him at his word when he says he finds exchanges such as this all too rare--if not impossible--in print.

Also: I don't approve of the sort of language that SBK uses in the above comment, but since SBK has made numerous intelligent contributions to comment threads in the past, I'm not going to delete this one. Although I was sorely tempted to do so.

[Steven Augustine]

"I find it highly suggestive that whenever I contribute to one of these threads, there is always someone around, like "Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles," to express disbelief that James Wood would have come down from his Olympus to troll around in Hades..."

We just find it difficult to believe that you have time to fritter on the Sisyphean task of chasing down so many of the (legion of) intelligent commenters, online, who disagree with you (or believe that your rasher propositions need work); I don't find your "trolling" bathetic, I find it tactically peculiar. A little too much like Putin in his karate clobber, proving that he doesn't need that bomb-proof Zil?

JW, are you being needily egalitarian or witchily insecure?

[Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles]

Actually, I thought it was just a poor troll to pick, of all the possible names for trolling, the name James Wood. I'm not familiar with you, as before this post I thought your name was James Woods and you wrote mundane newspaper reviews of mundane american authors for fat flatheaded and mundane americans. So far, it looks like the only thing I have gotten wrong is the spelling of your name. No where at all in my post did I intimate awe at a visit from an intellettualoide, nor have I ever suggested that Green's site is the conceptual, linguistic, or even simple equivalent of "Hades"; perhaps when you do visit I can start comparing it to certain sooted circles of the Inferno. Finally, you need not worry about someone mistaking you for a sojourning olympian since your thoughts are entirely comprised of lapalissades and your diction exhibits a tepidness beyond the wide globe of expression found in English, Latin, French, Greek, German, and Italian. You columbus of stupidity and boredom! I suppose Tyhpaon would be envious of your putrid barkings and the subsequent linguistic rape and slaughter that accompanies them, but you are certainly not inspiried by both, or even a single peak of Parnassus (not even a tree!)

Nietzsche as full of tremendous psychological insight? He owes his philosophy and "psychology" to Leopardi and La Rochefoucauld. You might know this if you bothered to read beyond popular philosophical trends or were brave enough for intrepid thinking and not inclined of reciting assertions you most likely stumbled upon in puerile introductions to translated philosophical texts.

Regarding ressentiment, I would be suprised if you managed to say it without butchering a certain language I am fond of, and no doubt only encountered the word due to the unfortunate downside of philosophy which is that it eventaully trickles _all_the_way_down_ to the fetid public. (Alexander was right to complain to Aristotle about the Metaphysics!) I personally spend much time with Juvenal (and thus with Mars) but only because I saw what the public (comprised of people like you) did to Socrates, and feel the need to be equipped to defend Truth and Good Taste because so few will come their aid and so many wish assault them.

Now then: Yes, Dan does write interesting pieces; you should make him challenge his principles and try to get him published in main stream print (to see if he *really* is true to blogging!)

addendum: I just discovered you are an englishman and since I have given you a relentless and ruthless spanking I imagine instead of humiliating you, I have made you giddy. Please repay my favor with sparing Zeus a lightning bolt and killing yourself. Or at least just being silent for a little while.

[james wood]

I find it highly suggestive that whenever I contribute to one of these threads, there is always someone around, like "Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles," to express disbelief that James Wood would have come down from his Olympus to troll around in Hades...
Dostoevsky had a word for this, of course, and he called it the Underground mentality. It had a considerable influence on Nietzsche, who brilliantly turned it against Dostoevsky, and applied the notion of "ressentiment" against the very Christianity that meant so much to the Russian. So much for Dan Green's assertion, expressed in an earlier post, that fiction has never had anything to do with new ideas.
Edmond Caldwell is right that there is an obvious link between, say, 'Notes from Underground' and Benhard's 'The Loser.' I'd go further and take the line back to Diderot's 'Rameau's Nephew', and to Rousseau, who was read with great interest by Dostoevsky. Rousseau's idea of "amour propre" is essentially a dry-run for the idea of ressentiment. (I argue this in my new book).
Jim H is too hasty. Intelligent readers will see that there is nothing in his post at tension with mine. I did not and do not try to confine Dostoevsky to 'realism'(it is he, not I, who brought up this word, tellingly); on the contrary, like Edmond Caldwell, I see and enjoy Dostoevsky's fantastical elements. But I do think Dostoevsky has tremendous powers of psychological insight (as did Nietzsche, Freud and, I suspect, Thomas Bernhard). That this insight is practised on hypothetical clusters of words we choose to call fictional 'characters' (and how could it be otherwise?) does not rob it of great human truth. Ford Madox Ford puts it like this: he hoped that the novel could be seen as "a means of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore as a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case." Not realism (FMF was not a realist in the traditional sense); the human case. People like Jim H always seem to be terrifically pleased with their epistemological powers, but of course they are not saying anything controversial or even arguable. They are essentially just saying that fiction is made or words, and invents hypothetical fictional scenarios. So what? Who quarrels with this?
What IS arguable is Dan Green's formalist fatalism, in which fiction is only, and dismally, about itself. (See his post about how no novel has ever really moved him -- well, of course not!)
For all that, to answer Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles, I "troll" Dan Green's site, because although I don't often agree with Dan, I think he is smart and provoking. Exchanges like this can't be easily had in print.
--James Wood

[Jim H.]

"...it needs to be said again and again that fiction does EVERYTHING: it is about itself, and it is also about the world; it is about sentences, and also about lives; it is form, and it is also politics, metaphysics, ideas."

No, no, and no. It is about these things (call them ideas) embodied in human-seeming characters who face challenges, make decisions, and then act (or fail to do so) and thereby change (or don't) in the as-presented "reality" of the world of the novels they inhabit.

With regard to the status of fictional propositions, there can be no dispute that they are avowedly untrue. They have no referents in the world external to the text—except by sheer chance or coincidence. To say anything other is nonsense. Delusional, in point of fact. One thinks of Tarski's formula: "'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white." In the fictional text, the author may create a fictional (call it 'possible') world wherein all snow is only green. Thus, the statement "snow is white" in the world of that text would be demonstrably false. Whereas those of us who have lived in cooler climates would, generally, agree that, indeed, snow is white. Thus, we have "'snow is green' is true if and only if 'snow is green.'" The truth conditions of fictional propositions are falsifiable only by appeal to the text itself, not to the real world of tables, chairs, snow, neurosis, narcissism, etc.

"The current King of France ate a slight lunch of kitten eyes" cannot be a true statement in any other context than an avowedly fictional (specifically textual) account of an imaginary depraved French monarch. It is not "about the world"—or at least about any other world than that imaginary one created by the author of text. The life of that "current King of France" is only about the life bequeathed to the imaginary monarch in the text about him by the creative effort of the author. The "politics, metaphysics (whatever that is taken to mean), ideas" are the politics, metaphysics (ditto), ideas at play in the text and, hopefully, dramatized in the story(!) and characters of the work.

Certainly, Messrs. Wood and Beale et alii are free (as are we all) to infer from fictional texts conclusions about people, lives, worlds, and ideas, etc., and even, through their own imaginative effort, to apply those conclusions to the people, lives, worlds, and ideas they encounter in their daily travels. That is the work of the reader. Sometimes they will fit, sometimes they won't. But to ascribe that sort of coincidental fit to 'realism' is simply out of bounds. To say fiction does EVERYTHING is to miss the level of reality on which fiction operates—where fiction works. It is to take the sort of leap of faith Dostoevsky, in the context of Christianity, demanded in the face of all rational objection to the existence of God. Indeed, in fiction everything IS permitted, but only when one lets go the god of reality.

Best,
Jim H.

[LML]

Surely this post was more provocation than serious argument. I agree that Dostoevsky at his worst is a laughably bad writer, too reliant on cheap suspense and the shock value of certain types of derangement, but it's also true that Tolstoy takes himself too seriously and Proust could have done with a couple hundred thousand words fewer. Dostoevsky's excesses are inseparable from his achievement, and as E. Caldwell says, his influence if nothing else makes him an essential writer. I'd argue furthermore, in direct contradiction to Dan's thesis here, that there are few books as morally elusive as Notes from Underground. Dostoevsky thought his way through modernity long before it was established fact, and his vision (at least as encapsulated in that book) still hasn't been superseded.

[Schopenhauer's Bloody Knuckles]

wait is someone now trolling as "James Wood"?

"But then Green is hostile to ideas in fiction; he is a formalist fatalist (see his earlier post) for whom fiction, over the centuries, simply discloses not the world, nor ideas, but ideas about how fiction gets written...It is an astonishingly narrow view of the novel"

I like the phrase formalist fatalist, but I would say Green's view *is* the current intellectual understanding of the "novel" because once one has read the bulk of western literature one cannot faithfully or truely suspend the disbelief required to absorb the text as a "true believer" would experience it; yes, we modern or postmodern readers can suspend our disbelief, but only to subsequently view a text with very rational, very skeptical, and perhaps hostile and traitorous, eyes. We have only listened to the text for one moment, accepting its biases and blindspots as truths, so that later, like Cicero, who studdied his opponents positions so vigorously, we can refute and critique them, knowing them better than they know themselves.

regarding style, Dostoevsky is complete trash. Poets and philosophers (Keats, Will, Plato, Nietzsche, La Fontaine, La Rochefoucauld,etc) have style but not novelists. I loathe Joyce because he is moderne; good taste demands it.

"...fiction does EVERYTHING: it is about itself, and it is also about the world; it is about sentences, and also about lives; it is form, and it is also politics, metaphysics, ideas."

actually, fiction is none of these things; these qualities are what you are inventing for and adding into "fiction." Without you (which while we are at it, is also an invention), the texts you love (and it really is love here which is speaking, which is pretty I suppose) are silent, meaningless artifacts full of vacuous symbols (this is an old line of thinking, running from Plato's Cratylus through Nietzsche and recently employed by Derrida. Plato of course does it with the greatest sarcasm, Nietzsche is subtly vocal about it, and Derrida makes the bourgeois dizzy with it).

Have I misread the entire post, or do you as a critic read sincerely and not ironically or with a great degree of cynicism? If I havent misread, I've got some magical Forms I want to tell you about!!

[Edmond Caldwell]

A quick addendum. I wrote:

"There’s the use – perhaps even the invention? – of a distinctly modern paranoid vision in conception and plotting (in all of his major novels but especially in The Possessed, which is saturated with the same kind of politically and metaphysically-paranoid vision that we find updated in works by, say, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo)."

but I think another version of that "paranoid vision" can be found in Melville as well, in Moby Dick and The Confidence Man, maybe Pierre too. It's interesting to think of such a vision deriving from absolutist Russia on the one hand and the small-r republican (except for blacks, Indians, & women) United States on the other, although both share being to some degree on the margins of the development of the European novel . . .

[Nigel Beale]

Anyone who can write this line "The old man has been honest all his life and as faithful to my father as seven hundred poodles," goes to the top of my pantheon.

[Edmond Caldwell]

Dan certainly knows how to get a discussion going.

I’d put it this way: Dostoevsky’s ostensible impurities and absurdities and excesses are exactly what make him, for me, such a great and interesting novelist. His novels are like mythical beasts, hybrids of feuilleton, political pamphlet, social philosophy, eschatological prophecy, psychological investigation worthy of Nietzsche and Freud, sensationalistic pot-boiler, and more. There’s also the powerful element of the fantastic in his depiction of character, as if everyone in his novels (often brought together into the same small room for one of his great, hallucinatory ‘scandal’ scenes) is running a very high fever. There’s the use – perhaps even the invention? – of a distinctly modern paranoid vision in conception and plotting (in all of his major novels but especially in The Possessed, which is saturated with the same kind of politically and metaphysically-paranoid vision that we find updated in works by, say, Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo). In fact, I’m almost tempted to say that Dostoevsky’s burlesque, over-the-top plots and characters amount to kind of brilliant “hysterical realism” avant la lettre, except for the fact that these ostensible novelistic impurities and excesses pre-date Dostoevsky by a long mile. The novel as the pre-eminently mixed genre form goes back to Cervantes and Rabelais; it was only in the nineteenth century that it got fixed into a more streamlined, uniform “realism” that in turn lent itself so well, in the twentieth century and up to today, to commercial “literary fiction.” I would think Dan would admire Dostoevsky’s works for bucking that nineteenth century trend that has led to something very tedious indeed, and which he has written about with such power elsewhere on this blog.

And I still haven’t mentioned Notes from the Underground, which anticipates so many writers, from Hamsun to Bernhard, that I’m certain Dan admires.

Thanks for the provocative post!

[Rohan Maitzen]

"it needs to be said again and again that fiction does EVERYTHING"

I agree that there is often a very narrow, and narrowly prescriptive, view of the novel put forward here--one that can seem to exclude many of my own favourite novels from counting as art. I don't see the payoff in this attitude; there seems much more to be gained and enjoyed (aesthetically and intellectually) by taking more of the attitude Henry James invokes in "The Art of Fiction":

"[T]he only condition that I can think of attaching to the composition of the novel is, as I have already said, that it be interesting. This freedom is a splendid privilege, and the first lesson of the young novelist is to learn to be worthy of it. 'Enjoy it as it deserves,' I should say to him; 'take possession of it, explore it to its utmost extent, reveal it, rejoice in it. All life belongs to you, and don't listen either to those who would shut you up into corners of it and tell you that it is only here and there that art inhabits, or to those who would persuade you that this heavenly messenger wings her way outside of life altogether, breathing a superfine air and turning away her head from the truth of things. There is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place; you have only to remember that talents so dissimilar as those of Alexandre Dumas and Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Gustave Flaubert, have worked in this field with equal glory. . . . Remember that your first duty is to be as complete as possible--to make as perfect a work. Be generous and delicate, and then, in the vulgar phrase, go in!'"

[philq]

It is certainly true that those who claim Dostoevsky as a "seeker" or "existentialist" are way off the mark. But it is the opposite error to reject his arguments out of hand, simply because he believes in truth. One does not have to embrace Zosima's worldview and become a Christian, but then until someone finds another answer to Ivan Karamzov we're stuck with the Grand Inquisitor.

As Dostoevsky say in one of his notebooks, "I've overcome greater doubts to Christian faith than my critics have ever conceived."