"The Idiot" and Prince Myshkin

I plowed through the last of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" thanks to a head cold.

First impressions:
1) WHY OH WHY did the Prince go back to Nastasya Filippovna!
2) To my great relief, Prince Myshkin is not quite the male counterpart to Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
3) My favorite character was Aglaya, until the epilogue.

General things to keep in mind:
1) Dostoevsky was a Christian Russian nationalist living in Western Europe at the time this was written (under deadline, in serial form) ... he had been in prison & had epilepsy
2) A lot of critics consider this one of his less impressive works because it's not cohesive in terms of plot and characters
3) I read this because I kept finding references to it (Kerouac & Ginsberg & Milan Kundera)
4) The only other Russian lit I've read is "Dr. Zhivago" and I don't remember it

So, to go through this review/critique, I'll probably just follow along where I starred passages in the book and introduction (which I read after). Most of the literary criticism out there focuses on the religious undertones in the book, which I thought were fairly obvious. Another thing to come back to, later down the road: why is there such an emphasis on faces? (As masks? As real?)

The Prince is not Don Quixote because he isn't comical, but tragic. And, well, kinda pathetic. BUT, why did he strike me as pathetic? Because he couldn't engage with a materialistic, cynical and cruel reality-- although he does in certain moments, it's really not something he can generally handle. ("The horror! The horror!" -Conrad's Heart of Darkness parallel) The reason I can't stand these pure, innocent main characters --exemplified by Tess of the D'Urbervilles-- is that they are totally unable to DO anything in their own self-interest. Childish behavior in an adult world always meets a bad end. (And anyway, I disagree with the stereotype of innocent children.)

To portray the Prince as a Christ-like figure is ok, to a point. I mean, Jesus wasn't this naive guy wandering around. I guess Dostoevsky wanted to show the rejection or unwillingness to accept religion in a world that is increasingly materialistic and egocentric -- many of the passionate speeches in the book mention atheism and nihilism (existence is meaningless) -- by showing the Christ-like Prince as a well-intentioned idiot that cannot navigate society's double faces. Ehhh, not sure how I feel about that. Yes, Jesus forgave Mary Magdelene (arguably a fallen woman like Nastasya Filippovna) but Mary wasn't still traipsing around afterward in an effort to preserve her self-destructive personality.

Lastly, before I get to my laundry list of interesting bits, it's intriguing to note that Jack Kerouac often considers himself (throughout his years of letters to Ginsberg) in "Dostoevskian situations" or that he himself is "the Idiot" ... which is SO INTERESTING because, in the end, Prince Myshkin the idiot succumbs to his illness when confronted with the cruelty of reality (murder/senselessness) .... and of course Kerouac in his later years was an alcoholic and a recluse from the constant barrage of press and the public eye, before dying of alcoholism. WOW.

The themes of illness in the novel: epilepsy (psychological), tuberculosis (physical), self-destructiveness (philosophical). And everyone is a victim of their illnesses in the end. In keeping with Russian lit trends, half the people in this book are straight-up out of their damn minds.

"Murder by judicial sentence is immeasurably more horrible ... all this final hope, with which it's ten times easier to die, is taken away for certain."

"It's natural,' he said, 'that it occurred to my client, being so poor, to commit this murder of six people, and indeed is there anyone in his shoes to whom it would not have occurred?'"
(poverty as an excuse for crime - right or wrong or gray area or what)

"Show me an idea that binds the mankind of today ... And do not try to intimidate me with your prosperity, your wealth, the infrequency of famine and the swiftness of the paths of communication! The wealth is greater, but the power is less; there is no binding idea left; everything has grown soft, everything has stewed to mush!"
(Dostoevsky was alluding to Western Europe, but I can imagine him saying the same thing about America today)

"... in every serious human idea that is conceived in someone's head, there always remains something that cannot be conveyed to other people, even tough whole volumes were written and your idea explained for thirty-five years ... so that you will die without perhaps ever having conveyed to anyone the most important part of your idea."

"Suicide may possibly be the only action I can still begin and end of my own free will. What of it, perhaps I want to take advantage of my last chance to act?"
(ah yes, ye olde philosophy of suicide ... a reaction to powerlessness. I want to read Camus' take on this situation, so I might come back to this quote later in my travels)

"Is it enough simply to exclaim: 'Oh, I'm to blame!' You're to blame, yet you persist!"
(name at least two people you know in real life that do this on a regular basis)

Tangential to this reading: Gogol, Balzac, Nabokov's "Lectures on Russian Literature", Tolstoy's "War and Peace" staring me down from my bookshelf, Kundera's "The Comical Absence of the Comical".

Naive Reading

Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this NYTimes article on reading & literary criticism!

"Naïve reading can be very hard; it can be done well or poorly; people can get better at it. And it doesn’t have to be “formalist” or purely textual criticism. Knowing as much as possible about the social world it was written for, about the author’s other works, his or her contemporaries, and so forth, can be very helpful."

(UPDATED: A comprehensive response to the NYTimes article, here. Two things I liked about this ... 1) "the study of literature prepares you for the study of anything" and 2) the comparison between a naive Henry James reading and a naive Stephanie Meyers reading - i.e., by reading Henry James without lit crit guidance you lose some ability to appreciate his uniqueness)

The first commenter on this article mentioned ye olde question of 'what is the canon' and its constant evolution (see previously mentioned Excel sheet) -- leading up to the problem of how does one become "well read"? The commenter referenced a piece from www.pandalous.com, which seems to have been created by some juvenile webmaster but actually yielded this wonderful comment from user Hanna:

"One of the things I love about reading is that each book dictates where I go next. The only person I'm out to satisfy when I read is myself ... I am constantly encouraged to keep going down all the side roads. I take turns this way and that, but always find myself heading back down that main highway. And I love seeing when my choices are validated. As you continue your own literary journey you'll begin to see hints of one book inside another even though they are separated by centuries. And as these connections grow and expand, then you'll know you've become well read. You'll begin to see the ember at the heart of literature, a hint at an eternal dialogue between writers and thinkers across all human existence."

Ditto!

In other news: stalled out for a week on "The Idiot" due to errands & such, but now back in the swing of things.

Book List Update!

Finally finally finally finished Machiavelli's "The Prince" and man, that thing was dry as dirt. Two things that interested me: 1) so little has changed, politically, that this book is still relevant if you read 'prince' as 'president' and 2) he mentions Marcus Aurelius and Commodus ("Gladiator") ... apparently Commodus really was like that. So, with that, I gleefully crossed it off my list and dumped the pdf into the recycling bin. :)

I'm about halfway through "The Idiot" and it's HILARIOUS. More on this later.

My Valiant Effort to Comprehend "On Style"

As the title infers, this second Sontag essay was a monster and I had to seek support. Benefit: I added to my bookmarks (pun?). The first three are maintained by Daniel Green, a retired English professor & academic critic.

The Critical Sphere
Secondary Sources
The Reading Experience
The Valve

Thusly armed with backup, I returned to "On Style" and forged through, emerging with a somewhat rudimentary grasp of what was going on and hopefully putting that into a brief outline here will make my brain stop hurting.

On Style

1. Style is inevitable in art; you cannot not have a style

• Sontag defines style as the degree/manipulation of distance that art maintains from the world; an expression of the will to 'dehumanize' art into a version of the world ... however, an audience wants to feel "closeness" with the world, not distance (want to have an emotional reaction to art!)

2. Subject-matter on the outside, style on the inside (which goes against traditional views)

• "our manner of appearing is our manner of being. The mask is the face."

• The idea of this mask/face isn't restricted to a bad Jim Carrey movie and tends to be a recurring theme in contemporary theater.

• "Stylization" is over-emphasis on the style of presenting a subject -- "to place the accent less on what they are saying than on the manner of saying it"

For example, Beardsley's artwork:
3. Art is typically treated as "a statement being made in the form of a work of art"

• Sontag argues against this, that a work of art is an EXPERIENCE -- not a statement
  
  
  • Although! Although! She later says that "Every style is a means of insisting on something." So this concept tends to be a little fuzzy within the essay.
• "Art is not only about something; it is something." (not just a commentary on the world)

4. "The knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something." ... and therefore, "art cannot seduce without the complicity of the experiencing subject."

• Basically, it's a dialogue.

5. Aesthetic vs Ethical -- they actually aren't independent of one another

• i.e. should you be expected to morally react the same way to a murder in reality versus a murder in a play or novel or depicted in a painting? (Sontag says no.)
  
• morality = a form of ACTING
  
• "The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness."
  ... Green points out in his The Reading Experience post that, well, is bad art then immoral?

• "The qualities which are intrinsic to the aesthetic experience ... are also fundamental constituents of a moral response to life." (which, I think, means to say that your sensibilities as a person contribute to both the appreciation of a work of art AND how you morally act -- unless you happen to be Hannibal Lecter)
  
  
  • The "ultimate reaction" to a work of art, Sontag says, "must be detached, restful, contemplative, emotionally free, beyond indignation and approval." (My question = can you have a visceral reaction to a great work of art? What is a visceral reaction; both aesthetic and moral, then? A bad painting of a bad murder?)

6. "The greatest artists obtain a sublime neutrality." (They make no statement, or make ambiguous statements.)

• For example, what's Hamlet about? You can only definitively say it's about Hamlet and his particular situation. Shakespeare makes no direct extrapolation to the human condition (and ah, back to "Against Interpretation" we go!).

7. Art is a "living, autonomous model of consciousness"

• "What a work of art does is to make us see or comprehend something singular, not judge or generalize."

• Sontag argues for "the examination of works of art as historically specifiable phenomena"
  ... ex: technology and the impact on modern art

8. Style is arbitrary.

• "The most attractive works of art are those which give us the illusion that the artist had no alternatives." (example: I'm writing a novel and decide that Charlene lives in a red house, and this novel then gets published and the critics justify my red house decision as a sly commentary on Charlene's sexual state -- clearly she could not have had a green house!)

9. Style functions as a way to remember.

• "It is the perception of repetitions that makes a work of art intelligible." (example: oral poems remembered by their rhyme/meter ... or even 'row row row your boat' --though hardly art it illustrates the same mnemonic function)

10. Art is an expression of the consciousness, and yet all of consciousness is inexpressible.

• Some things can simply not be said (there are no words for this!), which results in "silences", inexpressible but also real.

Whew. Glad to turn the page on that one.

About to start "The Idiot", hopefully tonight. Sontag has an essay on this, but I prefer to read it and any other notes after I finish the book with my own impressions. Which might take a while. Meanwhile, still slogging through Nicolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" -- boy, politics sure hasn't changed much in a couple centuries.

Introduction & Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation"

The first time I thought about doing a blog on literature was when I picked up two books, excited to read them, and realized I'd already done that years ago. This was when I first started on my quest to tackle the canon , which eventually took a tangential turn toward literary criticism / contemporary drama / the avant-garde. Between all this, I decided it might be wise to keep track of where I am and my opinions, however they evolve. Mostly, I want this to be a guide to do-it-yourself lit study, requiring only an internet connection and a library.

So, here's where I'm at now: not the beginning, but very very close. After reading "On the Road" as per the canon, I read "Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters" and from there resolved to read "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky (currently purchased) and to acquire a reasonable guide to the world of literary philosophy and contemporary thought. Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation and Other Essays" fell into my lap (and I imagine will be followed by Milan Kundera's "Encounter"). That's what I start with.

Against Interpretation

1. We understand art as mimesis or representation; art by definition says something

• "form" vs "content" -- What's the difference? Form is words on a page or images in a painting, whereas content is what those words are about and what the images resemble.

2. Extreme examples of content representation: Freud & Marx (everything is sexual or everything is economics and class) where without interpretation there is no understanding

3. Last Year at Marienbad - I'm putting this here only because it's the second time this week I've heard of this film by Resnais (Jim Emerson being the editor for Roger Ebert).

4. "To avoid interpretation, art may become parody. Or it may become abstract. Or it may become 'merely' decorative. Or it may become non-art."

• Sontag cites Godard's "Breathless" as a film that does not demand interpretation, as "anti-symbolic"

5. Sontag champions transparence, "experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are" and faults our dulled senses.

• "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more." (Is this related to Artaud's total theater?)
• And how to go about doing this? Perhaps more emphasis on form instead of so much content-based interpretation.

Sontag gives several examples of form-based criticisms (essay links below):

• Erwin Panofsky "Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures"
• Northrop Frye "A Conspectus of Dramatic Genres"
• Pierre Francastel "The Destruction of a Plastic Space"
• Roland Barthes on Robbe-Grillet
• Erich Auerbach "The Scar of Odysseus"
• Walter Benjamin "The Story Teller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov"

And on the appearance of art, rather than formal analysis:

• Dorothy Van Ghent "The Dickens World: A View from Todgers"
• Randall Jarrell on Whitman

Updated -- things that impressed me from Jarrell's Whitman essay:
"... It is the contradictions in works of art which make them able to represent to us - as logical and methodical generalizations cannot - our world and our selves, which are also full of contradictions."
"There is something essentially ridiculous about critics, anyway: what is good is good without our saying so. [...] If some day a tourist notices, among the ruins of New York City, a copy of Leaves of Grass, and stops and picks it up and reads some lines in it, she will be able to say to herself: 'How very American! If he and his country had not existed, it would have been impossible to imagine them.'"
Updated II -- things that impressed me from Walter Benjamin's essay:
"Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated."
... and further, the idea of eternity fades and the idea of death fades; it's possible now "to avoid the sight of the dying" (although I'm not sure why this diminishes the idea of eternity; wouldn't it enforce it?)
"The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader."
"A man ... who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five."