tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1484769201591640982.post5878653849173033309..comments2023-08-22T06:15:33.502-07:00Comments on The Rant Machine: Discovering DostoevskyThe Judgehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16911072587886208028noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1484769201591640982.post-91960595154525574712011-05-03T22:57:43.226-07:002011-05-03T22:57:43.226-07:00You mention Dostoevsky. If you want something or f...You mention Dostoevsky. If you want something or find out more about Dostoevsky, you are on this page will fare well: http://dostojewski.npage.de/<br />With a click, they can also translate page into English.Jatmanhttp://dostojewski.npage.de/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1484769201591640982.post-27581280241313468972011-02-22T17:10:21.772-08:002011-02-22T17:10:21.772-08:00You're right of course, and much of it has to ...You're right of course, and much of it has to do with my personal taste rather than with CAP itself. I do think that compared to some of the other novels you mentioned, CAP was more organically attached to the idea it attempted to get across – the 'panoramic' aspect kind of subsided face to the psychological/philosophical concern. I also felt that that concern was quite unitary and lucid, and thus would not have been completely out of place as the subject of an essay. Something like Great Expectations, by contrast, doesn't have a central idea and it focuses on reproducing a process of personal growth. It doesn't make much of a moral out of it and there's no other (or more) effective way of getting it across than by demonstration. But I can't disagree that to turn CAP into an essay inevitably means to reduce it. I guess it comes down to matters of personal taste and interest.<br /><br />I was less engaged with your reading of BK, because it's obviously more emotional (and subjective). Though I had my own radical views in adolescence, I didn't share this perspective on 'authentic' life which allowed you to relate to Dostoevsky. But then growing up is a very different experience for all of us. I will say, though, that I disagree with this novel being an example of the best way to 'describe life' etc. or anyway to tell a story. At least not anymore. I was watching Aliens (the 1986 one) on DVD just a few hours ago and I was astonished just at the amount of things its visual narrative could do, and the sheer load of information and pathos it managed to pack in just over two hours. I'm not making a 'film vs book' type of argument, but the novel only really emerged because it was a faster, more efficient, more economic way of telling stories. That role doesn't really belong to it anymore, and formally speaking, there hasn't been much invention since Joyce. There's other ways of making and innovating story-telling today, and I'm not convinced BK holds up quite as well. Anyway, just my own thoughts, and I'll admit I'm getting distracted by all those exchanges on tits I've been having with Chris in the blog-post just above this one so I may just have said something really stupid. Cheers for the feedback anyway, always a pleasure.<br /><br />And if your hands get too breathless, try not masturbating for fifteen minutes. (Sorry. Couldn't resist that).The Judgehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16911072587886208028noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1484769201591640982.post-46741881534963169682011-02-21T17:31:41.616-08:002011-02-21T17:31:41.616-08:00Part of your criticism has a bit to do with a dist...Part of your criticism has a bit to do with a distaste for certain conventions of Russian culture at this time. People just decide to get married, people keep saying "today everything will be decided" and then it isn't, people react with such extremity to certain things and barely peep at others. They throw money under the bus and then grind their teeth in poverty in a shack which they don't seem to mind but it would all be so much better if they could just get that inheritance so they could throw it under the bus and continue on interrupted. I identified with this culture at a young age because it describes people with much more LIFE! than we see normally. People who are willing to live on principle alone as if it sustains them like bread. People who are truly affected by what is happening in their lives to an extent that makes their daily lives difficult to live but is so... authentic, so in touch with the emotions that we've dulled with industrial and post industrial life. I don't know, I just think it describes a particularly beautiful way to live and it can be criticized as a silly way to live, but I truly believe that Dostoyevsky is simply describing a real situation and shouldn't be penalized for that.<br /><br />Another convention of Russian novels is the digression. Father Zossima's story is the counter to the digression that is Ivan's poem. One is a story of resurrection, the other is a story of degradation. One is eternal hope, the other is eternal discouragement. They mimic each other and fight like the ideas in the novel like our innate nature fights with our superego, like Alyosha fights with Ivan fights with Smerdyakov fights with Fyodor fights with Dmitri fights with the Pole fights with... and down the spiraling rabbit hole of life. The chaos of ideas held to order in a master's words to describe that indescribable essence of life that is a vortex of ideas and their manifestations leading us down through our history inexorably to an unpredictable end. You're absolutely right to describe the novel as cthonic, it seeks to come from the deepest, most universal part of our nature, like some atavistic symbol that we each carry around without knowing it's there. Dostoyevsky is writing another bible, beautiful and engaging and tortured and religious. And that is what the prosecutor and the defense attorney is summing up, because the novel is like a collage. It's a collage that we're given parts of and if we can add it all up to the beautiful whole ourselves, if we can glass the whole of the conflict on our literary hill, well that's great for a great mind like ours. But he's just described the great battle for the soul of mankind, like Milton, and it reads like a military account, scattered, with each part of the action accounting only for itself and then the attorneys paint the whole picture, the whole battle, in it's scope, like Delacroix, to show exactly what has happened on these pages that should be sacred to all lovers of hermeneutics and literature.<br /><br />Even my hands are breathless. <br /><br />PS Also don't forget to include Barthelme and Foster Wallace as the great writers of generations close to ours because they are.Amandanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05553654875556570397noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1484769201591640982.post-18926255034123100032011-02-21T17:31:14.407-08:002011-02-21T17:31:14.407-08:00BK is exactly what you said it was, the most convi...BK is exactly what you said it was, the most convincing, exhaustive and complex I've ever seen and the reason that I studied literature in the first place. I saw it then as a way to eviscerate life, to show it like an anatomist of the 15th century would show a cadaver to a medical student, all the guts, all the elements almost magically shoved in there in their right places to completely describe everything that we know that we can't communicate.<br /><br />Despite that, I agree with you, the prosecutor's speech, and the defense's speech were excessive. They simply re-narrated a book that I just read. The first time I read the book I skipped most of it actually. But I have come to a better appreciation of it after more readings and more thinking about the novel itself, not the least of which has come as a result of your essay here.Amandanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05553654875556570397noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1484769201591640982.post-39552351929216799202011-02-14T18:51:06.856-08:002011-02-14T18:51:06.856-08:00So you aren't leaving the blogosphere after al...So you aren't leaving the blogosphere after all. I'm happy to see that, and I'm happy to see that you've gotten around to reading good old Fyodor Mikhialovich.<br /><br />I suppose it's to be expected that your reaction to his work isn't as awestruck as my breathless account of it always was, but one never loves what another tells them about as much as what one finds oneself. Part of my hyperbolic love of Dostoyevsky's fiction is the fact that I first read BK at 18 and that (along with Sartre's Nausea) pushed me firmly into a degree in literature. I found the book myself because I had been reading snippets of existentialist thought and decided to jump into a novel as opposed to a technical philosophical text.<br /><br />Part of your analysis is so dead on that it actually opens up avenues of thought about these novels that I hadn't previously traveled, but those avenues of thought have simply buttressed my conviction that your criticisms are shortsighted. First your analysis of CAP, "D's discussions are existential - essentially, he's weighing up the practical possibilities of our metaphysical freedom." YES! Bam, I never thought of it so concisely but that's what it is. What I find so unfortunate about your criticism is that it looks on this and says, but that idea could have been communicated as effectively in an essay. This is not the purpose of a novel. Does "Great Expectations" or even "Ulysses" have an idea behind it that justifies the largesse of the prose? No, but the purpose is to create a story overtop of an idea where the characters are representative of ideas or representative of life itself. The idea that Raskolnikov or even Amalia Ludwigovna could pop out of existence and the idea could be communicated as effectively undermines the idea that art of any kind can communicate complex truth more effectively than simple words and if that were true than Picasso would have put down his brush, turned to the dude sitting next to him and said, "Hey, imagine if that lady's breast was actually her face and it was a triangle." Not like the painting at all.<br /><br />Also, while this novel is created in homage to an idea, it is not simply about the idea. It involves class relations, a portrait of urban Russian life in the middle of the 19th century, gender relations, and all the things that a novel of record (a work meant to preserve the feeling of a time) must have. It's as historical as it is philosophical.<br /><br />The other problem I have with boiling CAP down to the idea that it could have been written shorter or more essayish is first, that Dostoyevsky already did that with Notes from Underground, and second that this novel is about so much more than Raskolnikov. I didn't necessarily realize it until you brought it up, but after you did it all seems so clear. Raskolnikov isn't at the center of a novel with characters who support his story, he's at the center of it because his is the most compelling dilemma of choice and freedom in a world without a central meaning-maker. This is not a story about Raskolnikov, it's a story about freedom and choice and consequence. Semyon Marmeladov, Razmuhikin, Sonya, this is not simply an examination of whether it is right to murder if you believe you have justification to premeditation, but also to what lengths you might go to for a friend, for your family, for love, for your own compulsions. It would be a hell of an essay that could encompass all of the ideas and all of the struggles of the individual characters so specifically and so lifelike even to people whose culture is so different than the culture being depicted.<br /><br />Be back later for BK.Amandanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05553654875556570397noreply@blogger.com