David Wallace - Consider the Lobster - And Other Essays

** Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? **

In a way, Frank’s books aren’t really literary biographies at all, at least not in the way that Ellmann’s book on Joyce and Bate’s on Keats are. For one thing, Frank is as much a cultural historian as he is a biographer — his aim is to create an accurate and exhaustive context for FMD’s works, to place the author’s life and writing within a coherent account of nineteenth-century Russia’s intellectual life. Ellmann’s James Joyce, pretty much the standard by which most literary bios are measured, doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory. What Frank is about is showing that a comprehensive reading of Dostoevsky’s fiction is impossible without a detailed understanding of the cultural circumstances in which the books were conceived and to which they were meant to contribute. This, Frank argues, is because Dostoevsky’s mature works are fundamentally ideological and cannot truly be appreciated unless one understands the polemical agendas that inform them. In other words, the admixture of universal and particular that characterizes Notes from Underground 5 really marks all the best work of FMD, a writer whose “evident desire,” Frank says, is “to dramatize his moral-spiritual themes against the background of Russian history.”

Another nonstandard feature of Frank’s bio is the amount of critical attention he devotes to the actual books Dostoevsky wrote. “It is the production of such masterpieces that makes Dostoevsky’s life worth recounting at all,” his preface to The Miraculous Years goes, “and my purpose, as in the previous volumes, is to keep them constantly in the foreground rather than treating them as accessory to the life per se.” At least a third of this latest volume is given over to close readings of the stuff Dostoevsky produced in this amazing half decade— Crime and Punishment, The Gambler, The Idiot, The Eternal Husband, and Demons . 6 These readings aim to be explicative rather than argumentative or theory-driven; their aim is to show as clearly as possible what Dostoevsky himself wanted the books to mean. Even though this approach assumes that there’s no such thing as the Intentional Fallacy, 7 it still seems prima facie justified by Frank’s overall project, which is always to trace and explain the novels’ genesis out of Dostoevsky’s own ideological engagement with Russian history and culture. 8

** What exactly does “faith” mean? As in “religious faith,” “faith in God,” etc. Isn’t it basically crazy to believe in something that there’s no proof of? Is there really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe’s sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it’ll produce good weather? How can somebody have faith before he’s presented with sufficient reason to have faith? Or is somehow needing to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith? But then what kind of need are we talking about? **

To really appreciate Professor Frank’s achievement — and not just the achievement of having absorbed and decocted the millions of extant pages of Dostoevsky drafts and notes and letters and journals and bios by contemporaries and critical studies in a hundred different languages — it is important to understand how many different approaches to biography and criticism he’s trying to marry. Standard literary biographies spotlight an author and his personal life (especially the seamy or neurotic stuff) and pretty much ignore the specific historical context in which he wrote. Other studies — especially those with a theoretical agenda — focus almost exclusively on context, treating the author and his books as simple functions of the prejudices, power dynamics, and metaphysical delusions of his era. Some biographies proceed as if their subjects’ own works have all been figured out, and so they spend all their time tracing out a personal life’s relation to literary meanings that the biographer assumes are already fixed and inarguable. On the other hand, many of our era’s “critical studies” treat an author’s books hermetically, ignoring facts about that author’s circumstances and beliefs that can help explain not only what his work is about but why it has the particular individual magic of a particular individual writer’s personality, style, voice, vision, etc. 9

** Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible? My behavior sure seems to indicate that this is what I believe, at least a lot of the time. But isn’t this kind of a selfish way to live? Forget selfish — isn’t it awful lonely? **

So, biographically speaking, what Frank’s trying to do is ambitious and worthwhile. At the same time, his four volumes constitute a very detailed and demanding work on a very complex and difficult author, a fiction writer whose time and culture are alien to us. It seems hard to expect much credibility in recommending Frank’s study here unless I can give some sort of argument for why Dostoevsky’s novels ought to be important to us as readers in 1996 America. This I can do only crudely, because I’m not a literary critic or a Dostoevsky expert. I am, though, a living American who both tries to write fiction and likes to read it, and thanks to Joseph Frank I’ve spent pretty much the whole last two months immersed in Dostoevskynalia.

Dostoevsky is a literary titan, and in some ways this can be the kiss of death, because it becomes easy to regard him as yet another sepia-tinted Canonical Author, belovedly dead. His works, and the tall hill of criticism they’ve inspired, are all required acquisitions for college libraries … and there the books usually sit, yellowly, smelling the way really old library books smell, waiting for somebody to have to do a term paper. Dahlberg is mostly right, I think. To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people. 10

** But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision? **

And it’s true that there are features of Dostoevsky’s books that are alien and off-putting. Russian is notoriously hard to translate into English, and when you add to this difficulty the archaisms of nineteenth-century literary language, Dostoevsky’s prose/dialogue can often come off mannered and pleonastic and silly. 11 Plus there’s the stiltedness of the culture Dostoevsky’s characters inhabit. When people are ticked off, for instance, they do things like “shake their fists” or call each other “scoundrels” or “fly at” each other. 12 Speakers use exclamation points in quantities now seen only in comic strips. Social etiquette seems stiff to the point of absurdity — people are always “calling on” each other and either “being received” or “not being received” and obeying rococo conventions of politeness even when they’re enraged. 13 Everybody’s got a long and hard-to-pronounce last name and Christian name — plus a patronymic, plus sometimes a diminutive, so you almost have to keep a chart of characters’ names. Obscure military ranks and bureaucratic hierarchies abound; plus there are rigid and totally weird class distinctions that are hard to keep straight and understand the implications of, especially because the economic realities of old Russian society are so strange (as in, e.g., the way even a destitute “former student” like Raskolnikov or an unemployed bureaucrat like the Underground Man can somehow afford to have servants).