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

[james wood]

I'm amazed that someone as intellectually sophisticated as Dan Green can think this about Dostoevsky. Has he never heard of Bakhtin? Dostoevsky was indeed increasingly dogmatic as a Christian, but his fiction tends to mobilize arguments against such dogmatism; Joseph Brodsky nicely said that one ends a Dostoevsky novel "nostalgic" for the lost belief.
Thus "The Brothers Karamazov" may want to be a Christian affirmation, but in fact leaves the arguments for Christianity in shreds. And one should not slight the ideas in Dostoevsky's fiction (or the ideas in fiction generally) as easily as Green does: his fiction is intimately bound up with the ideological history of nineteenth-century Russia, and had an enormous influence on it. Speaking personally, I can say that my reading of Ivan Karamazov on evil pretty much turned me into an atheist (which would have horrified Dostoevsky of course).
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, and 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. We don't have to choose. I recommend that Green reads, say, Jose Saramago's novels, for a sense of how the novel can be at once an ancient and radical form, a way of discussing the world, and the world of ideas; and that this is not in tension with a challenging aesthetics (Saramago's long sentences).

On Dostoevsky, Green is channeling Nabokov's formalist disdain, but a lot of work has been done on the apparently slapdash nature of Dostoevsky's Russian (see Victor Terras, for instance), and his supposedly messy prose turns out to be allusive, self-conscious, parodic, wittingly melodramatic -- exactly what Green would like if it were done by John Barth,say!

James Wood

[the wandering jew]

I always think the transparency of Dostoyevsky and his ilk is exactly what makes him overpraised. It's easy to point at the "greatness" in his work - "Look! Moral truths!" than it is in greater, more slippery books. It's the same blunt, blind logic that makes Moby Dick get praised for talking about God rather than its more complicated merits.