Showing posts with label Brothers Karamazov. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Brothers Karamazov. Show all posts
Friday, September 02, 2022
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
Must the Great Novel be large, sprawling, frantic, and a bit of a mess?
No, I didn't disappear under a pile of fennel, but of work...which is like fennel, in that it is tough and large and sometimes hard to cut through, but very good roasted.
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In addition, I have been racing to finish Roberto Bolaño's 2666, because I took it out of the library, and although I can renew it for another three weeks, there's a certain shame in that, a certain failure, and so I read and read most of last weekend, instead of working on my own stuff. OK, so I'm still not quite done. And I don't want to be done. This is a book that I'm going to miss when it's over, even though a great deal of it is concerned with war and murder, especially the mass murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, but also of Jews in World War II. In fact there is, at one point, an almost relentless cataloging of murders, a kind of theme with variations, that goes on for hundreds of pages, while various police officers, politicians, and reporters weave in and out, trying and failing to understand, and sometimes disappearing themselves. Yet, these depictions of atrocities never feel exploitative or sentimentalized; as a reader I felt a tremendous weight of confusion and sorrow, which, oddly, made me unable to put the book down.
The preface and afterword explain that 2666 was Bolaño's last work; he wrote it while becoming increasingly ill, and he knew he was dying as he was finishing it. This no doubt added a certain urgency to the prose, perhaps a certain wildness and willingness to plunge into depths that the rest of us either fear too much, or don't know. In addition there is a raggedness and repetitiveness to some sections, which Bolaño might have edited out, had he been given more time. Then again, his other work suggests polish and brevity were not his concerns. And in 2666, hearing of a friend's preference for "short, neatly shaped novels,"* one of the characters muses:
I do think this novel is that other kind, imperfect and torrential. In my opinion, it's right up there with The Brothers Karamazov and Moby-Dick. It has the same vast scope, the same existential cri de coeur at its center, the same rage to comprehend--to encompass and understand--the entire range of human experience. Interestingly, the novel is not much concerned with God or religion, at least not overtly. Literature seems to replace God as a transcendent, unifying principle. Now, normally I don't approve of novels whose theme is writing (and whose main characters are writers), because they suggest that the author simply can't imagine people with professions unlike his own--which is a blatant failure of the writer's task. However, in this case, writing is the ultimate human quest for answers. The writer, as Bolaño has made clear in any number of works, is a detective. He is not, if he's doing it right, some kind of cloistered, disengaged commentator, but a seeker of truth, a religious pilgrim, outlaw, and professional wrestler rolled into one.
But is it true that an authentically great novel must be of this type--big, messy, overtly trying and ultimately failing to embrace everything? My own preference is, in fact, for such novels, though I have never attempted one myself (as yet). Still, this might just be a personal preference. Or is there a reason that the beautifully crafted, smaller "gem" of a book really does fall short of greatness? Does the perfection of craft represent a failure of intellectual or emotional ambition? Should the writer always bite off more than she can chew, or do battle with monsters she can never hope to catch or tame?
*I am quoting from the Note to the First Edition by Ignacio Echevarría.
The preface and afterword explain that 2666 was Bolaño's last work; he wrote it while becoming increasingly ill, and he knew he was dying as he was finishing it. This no doubt added a certain urgency to the prose, perhaps a certain wildness and willingness to plunge into depths that the rest of us either fear too much, or don't know. In addition there is a raggedness and repetitiveness to some sections, which Bolaño might have edited out, had he been given more time. Then again, his other work suggests polish and brevity were not his concerns. And in 2666, hearing of a friend's preference for "short, neatly shaped novels,"* one of the characters muses:
Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.
I do think this novel is that other kind, imperfect and torrential. In my opinion, it's right up there with The Brothers Karamazov and Moby-Dick. It has the same vast scope, the same existential cri de coeur at its center, the same rage to comprehend--to encompass and understand--the entire range of human experience. Interestingly, the novel is not much concerned with God or religion, at least not overtly. Literature seems to replace God as a transcendent, unifying principle. Now, normally I don't approve of novels whose theme is writing (and whose main characters are writers), because they suggest that the author simply can't imagine people with professions unlike his own--which is a blatant failure of the writer's task. However, in this case, writing is the ultimate human quest for answers. The writer, as Bolaño has made clear in any number of works, is a detective. He is not, if he's doing it right, some kind of cloistered, disengaged commentator, but a seeker of truth, a religious pilgrim, outlaw, and professional wrestler rolled into one.
But is it true that an authentically great novel must be of this type--big, messy, overtly trying and ultimately failing to embrace everything? My own preference is, in fact, for such novels, though I have never attempted one myself (as yet). Still, this might just be a personal preference. Or is there a reason that the beautifully crafted, smaller "gem" of a book really does fall short of greatness? Does the perfection of craft represent a failure of intellectual or emotional ambition? Should the writer always bite off more than she can chew, or do battle with monsters she can never hope to catch or tame?
*I am quoting from the Note to the First Edition by Ignacio Echevarría.
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Tuesday, March 20, 2012
For the love of the flawed novel
From Emily St. John Mandel's review of Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker on The Millions:
It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its author, genius as he is, is just barely in control of his material. His writing often has the feel of a man trying to wrap his arms around a large bag of demonically possessed squirrels. The source of his novels' grandeur is struggle, reflected in his characters' existential anguish. His greatest success, like theirs, is not in overcoming anguish but in giving it voice--sometimes seemingly by accident, as in convoluted prose, rushed scenes, and characters who appear and disappear for no evident reason. I suppose if the whole novel was nothing but these kinds of accidents, we'd call it a promising first draft, or simply a mess. But these flaws coexist with clearly defined conflicts with stakes even larger than life and death, masterful set pieces, and characters whose flesh and blood we come very close to actually touching. The flaws, in fact, make these successful parts even better: they roughen the edges of the masterpiece, making it a visceral experience.
In contrast, I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a very different way. As my previous commentary on it shows, I experienced it as a Work of Art that more or less drove me to my knees. It inspired awe, and had the heft of cathedral tunes. As an artistic achievement, I think it deserves mention in the same breath as Brothers Karamazov, but on an emotional level I'm less drawn to it, because it is not flawed. There is no badly worded sentence, no misstep in the (admittedly much simpler) plot. The artist is in complete control, and there is something vaguely off-putting about that. Maybe because I suspect I can never achieve that level of mastery myself. Or maybe it's because consciousness itself is messy and surprising. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in Sunday's NYT editorial, a recent analysis of MRI data
With its irruptions, dead ends, and coffee and blood stains, the map of Dostoevsky's mind looks far more like mine than Robinson's does. Hard to believe, since her work is set in twentieth-century Iowa and Dostoevsky's in tsarist Russia. But there you go.
[I]t seems to me that there’s something magnificent about sprawling and ever-so-slightly flawed novels.
It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its author, genius as he is, is just barely in control of his material. His writing often has the feel of a man trying to wrap his arms around a large bag of demonically possessed squirrels. The source of his novels' grandeur is struggle, reflected in his characters' existential anguish. His greatest success, like theirs, is not in overcoming anguish but in giving it voice--sometimes seemingly by accident, as in convoluted prose, rushed scenes, and characters who appear and disappear for no evident reason. I suppose if the whole novel was nothing but these kinds of accidents, we'd call it a promising first draft, or simply a mess. But these flaws coexist with clearly defined conflicts with stakes even larger than life and death, masterful set pieces, and characters whose flesh and blood we come very close to actually touching. The flaws, in fact, make these successful parts even better: they roughen the edges of the masterpiece, making it a visceral experience.
In contrast, I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a very different way. As my previous commentary on it shows, I experienced it as a Work of Art that more or less drove me to my knees. It inspired awe, and had the heft of cathedral tunes. As an artistic achievement, I think it deserves mention in the same breath as Brothers Karamazov, but on an emotional level I'm less drawn to it, because it is not flawed. There is no badly worded sentence, no misstep in the (admittedly much simpler) plot. The artist is in complete control, and there is something vaguely off-putting about that. Maybe because I suspect I can never achieve that level of mastery myself. Or maybe it's because consciousness itself is messy and surprising. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in Sunday's NYT editorial, a recent analysis of MRI data
concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.
With its irruptions, dead ends, and coffee and blood stains, the map of Dostoevsky's mind looks far more like mine than Robinson's does. Hard to believe, since her work is set in twentieth-century Iowa and Dostoevsky's in tsarist Russia. But there you go.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Intellectuals in American fiction: a plea
It's very rare that a single book review convinces me to buy a book immediately. A favorable review usually gets tossed in the "I'll have to read that someday" bin in the back of my brain, and repeated reminders are necessary for the thought to ever be retrieved and acted on.
Not so with Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City. James Wood's review in The New Yorker has convinced me that it is necessary for me to read this book as soon as possible. Some of the credit for this has to go to Wood, who is one of the most thoughtful and original reviewers out there. He does not use the book as a launching pad for rants on his own pet artistic concerns; nor does he dutifully plod through the upsides and downsides of plot, theme, character development, etc. Instead, he seeks to fully engage the work on its own terms, and he draws out the book's unique perceptions and contributions--without reducing the book to its own uniqueness. If that makes any sense.
Anyway, the reason I must read this book is its portrayal of the lives of young intellectuals in America. Describing a monologue by one of the characters, a student of literary and cultural theory, Wood says, "This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person." This statement brought me up short, as I have certainly been guilty, in my own fiction, of satirizing. (Maybe of flourishing too, though, God, I hope not.)
Overtly intellectual characters tend to get short shrift in contemporary American fiction. Why? There's a logistical problem, first of all, of thoroughly explaining what their theories actually are--as well as the intellectual bases for the theories--without turning the novel into a theoretical treatise in itself. More important, though, is good ol' American anti-intellectualism, both real and assumed. Nobody wants to read about thinkers, right? Thinkers are not doers; they do not take action, which is both a moral failing and a liability for plot purposes. It's bad enough to be sitting and reading oneself, but to read about readers? What's the outcome of all this thinking going to be, anyway--someone finishes their dissertation?
Well, if your character is Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, or any number of Dostoevsky characters, he or she will try to live out his ideas (sometimes with disastrous consequences). In Dostoevsky, ideas are made flesh. They are not games; they are characters in themselves, in a sense--they are as real and as important to human life as food, the landscape, and one's family and friends. As Wood says, they are part of a person's "whole context."
This is true of Cole's character, Farouq, who's viewed sympathetically but ambivalently by the narrator. As Cole (and Wood and Dostoevsky) remind us, characters can legitimately care as much about ideas as they do about their children and lovers, about understanding their own pasts, or conquering mighty Everest. Intellectuals in fiction need not be *merely* bloodless, hypocritical, or ineffectual--though they can still be funny, strange, immoral, and/or difficult. In other words, ideas are the legitimate stuff of passion in literature; not distractions to be overcome or set aside in the pursuit of "true" experience. The key is to show why the characters care about their ideas so much, so that the reader will care about them too. Don't allow readers to feel simple contempt for the characters, and thus dismiss the ideas.
In fact, those of us who care about intellectual life in this country could do a lot worse than support--and write--good fiction about people who think.
Not so with Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City. James Wood's review in The New Yorker has convinced me that it is necessary for me to read this book as soon as possible. Some of the credit for this has to go to Wood, who is one of the most thoughtful and original reviewers out there. He does not use the book as a launching pad for rants on his own pet artistic concerns; nor does he dutifully plod through the upsides and downsides of plot, theme, character development, etc. Instead, he seeks to fully engage the work on its own terms, and he draws out the book's unique perceptions and contributions--without reducing the book to its own uniqueness. If that makes any sense.
Anyway, the reason I must read this book is its portrayal of the lives of young intellectuals in America. Describing a monologue by one of the characters, a student of literary and cultural theory, Wood says, "This is one of the very few scenes I have encountered in contemporary fiction in which critical and literary theory is not satirized, or flourished to exhibit the author’s credentials, but is simply and naturally part of the whole context of a person." This statement brought me up short, as I have certainly been guilty, in my own fiction, of satirizing. (Maybe of flourishing too, though, God, I hope not.)
Overtly intellectual characters tend to get short shrift in contemporary American fiction. Why? There's a logistical problem, first of all, of thoroughly explaining what their theories actually are--as well as the intellectual bases for the theories--without turning the novel into a theoretical treatise in itself. More important, though, is good ol' American anti-intellectualism, both real and assumed. Nobody wants to read about thinkers, right? Thinkers are not doers; they do not take action, which is both a moral failing and a liability for plot purposes. It's bad enough to be sitting and reading oneself, but to read about readers? What's the outcome of all this thinking going to be, anyway--someone finishes their dissertation?
Well, if your character is Raskolnikov, Ivan Karamazov, or any number of Dostoevsky characters, he or she will try to live out his ideas (sometimes with disastrous consequences). In Dostoevsky, ideas are made flesh. They are not games; they are characters in themselves, in a sense--they are as real and as important to human life as food, the landscape, and one's family and friends. As Wood says, they are part of a person's "whole context."
This is true of Cole's character, Farouq, who's viewed sympathetically but ambivalently by the narrator. As Cole (and Wood and Dostoevsky) remind us, characters can legitimately care as much about ideas as they do about their children and lovers, about understanding their own pasts, or conquering mighty Everest. Intellectuals in fiction need not be *merely* bloodless, hypocritical, or ineffectual--though they can still be funny, strange, immoral, and/or difficult. In other words, ideas are the legitimate stuff of passion in literature; not distractions to be overcome or set aside in the pursuit of "true" experience. The key is to show why the characters care about their ideas so much, so that the reader will care about them too. Don't allow readers to feel simple contempt for the characters, and thus dismiss the ideas.
In fact, those of us who care about intellectual life in this country could do a lot worse than support--and write--good fiction about people who think.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Dostoevsky does Dracula?
It is high time we got back to Dracula.
The vampire hunters band together to kill the title character. In her diary, Mina quotes the inspiring botched English of Van Helsing:
The vampire hunters band together to kill the title character. In her diary, Mina quotes the inspiring botched English of Van Helsing:
How then are we to begin our strike to destroy him? How shall we find his where, and having found it, how can we destroy? My friends, this is much, it is a terrible task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder. For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win, and then where end we? Life is nothings, I heed him not. But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us forever are the gates of heaven shut, for who shall open them to us again? We go on for all time abhorred by all, a blot on the face of God's sunshine, an arrow in the side of Him who died for man. But we are face to face with duty, and in such case must we shrink? For me, I say no, but then I am old, and life, with his sunshine, his fair places, his song of birds, his music and his love, lie far behind. You others are young. Some have seen sorrow, but there are fair days yet in store. What say you?"Whilst he was speaking, Jonathan had taken my hand. I feared, oh so much, that the appalling nature of our danger was overcoming him when I saw his hand stretch out, but it was life to me to feel its touch, so strong, so self reliant, so resolute. A brave man's hand can speak for itself, it does not even need a woman's love to hear its music.
When the Professor had done speaking my husband looked in my eyes, and I in his, there was no need for speaking between us.
"I answer for Mina and myself," he said.
"Count me in, Professor," said Mr. Quincey Morris, laconically as usual.
"I am with you," said Lord Godalming, "for Lucy's sake, if for no other reason."
Dr. Seward simply nodded.
The Professor stood up and, after laying his golden crucifix on the table, held out his hand on either side. I took his right hand, and Lord Godalming his left, Jonathan held my right with his left and stretched across to Mr. Morris. So as we all took hands our solemn compact was made. I felt my heart icy cold, but it did not even occur to me to draw back. We resumed our places, and Dr. Van Helsing went on with a sort of cheerfulness which showed that the serious work had begun. It was to be taken as gravely, and in as businesslike a way, as any other transaction of life.
This scene is rife with Dostoevskian potential. Because he is not Dostoevsky, nor does he care to be, Stoker breezes through the whole vampire-hunting dilemma in less than a page. Now, if he were Dostoevsky, he--in the guise of someone like Ivan Karamazov--would dwell awhile on the fact that if one is killed by a vampire while trying to rid the world of his evil presence, one gets damned by God for one's trouble. You might think it was the bravest, most selfless act of all to risk not only one's life, but one's immortal soul, to protect others from the same damnation. One might think God would want to offer an extra special reward for such a risk. Apparently not. However, apparently "duty" (as Van Helsing puts it) goes beyond the duty to God--the duty to humankind takes precedence.
Perhaps there's a reason why Stoker blew through all this rather quickly. It's a knotty theological problem. Our heroes have, sort of quietly, renounced God, or at least God's blessings, and we admire them for doing so. It can't have been Stoker's intention to reveal the limits of God's love, to suggest that by making the greatest sacrifice of all, you could end up damned forever. Then again, maybe that is what sacrifice really means--giving up God's love voluntarily for the sake of humanity. Leaping without the net, and never expecting the net to appear. It won't, because you are beyond it.
Or is that wrong? Because you give up God's love when you do bad things, also, so...
Anyway, here's a fun writing challenge. Put Van Helsing (minus the accent, please), or Mina (who would be more interesting)* into a dialog with, say, Jesus. Model it on the Grand Inquisitor, and let it explain the role of the vampire in leading us to or away from God.
*Note that in the scene above, Mina is afraid--not of what Van Helsing is describing, but that Jonathan (I will always think of him as Keanu Reeves) is losing his nerve. The touch of his hand reassures her that he is indeed a brave man. But we don't need that reassurance from Mina; we know she's brave. Stoker then has her clam up like a good wife, and let Jonathan answer for her. Too late: she's gotten out of her cage again.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Borrowed Fire: The end of The Brothers Karamazov vs. the last episode of Lost
Two momentous events occurred this week. The much loved and hated series Lost came to an end, and I finished reading The Brothers Karamazov. As a certified comparative literature specialist, I will now compare these two endings for the benefit of fiction writers everywhere.
First, I will say that Trev and I gave up on Lost early this season. We had finally had enough of the characters' endless tramping through the greenery to visit some portentous person or architectural feature, only to be set upon by yet another gun-toting gang of hippie mystics. However, we did watch the final episode, surmising correctly that whatever we had missed was not going to matter. The fact that we did choose to watch it after having given up on the story itself is interesting. Maybe we still had that supposedly irresistible human need for closure. I think we were also wondering just what species of bullshit the writers were going to pull, since they had sunk themselves so deep into the narrative swamp that nothing but bullshit could rescue them.
Now then. Lost and BK are similar in that both are long and convoluted and interweave religious / metaphysical themes into mystery plots. What is the best way to end stories with so many loose ends? Well, the writers of Lost simply snuffed out all the loose ends in a blast of white light. Once it's revealed that the island is some sort of quasi-Christian--but ecumenical!--Purgatory, we are forced to file all the tramping and digging and shooting and bombing and introducing of hundreds of additional characters every week under the category of "tribulations"--or whatever you want to call the ordeals in Purgatory. The Others, and the Other Others, and the No-Not-Those-But-Those-Others are--I guess--the sort of second-tier demons that carry out the Lord's work of helping humans purge their sins, while never getting any credit for it. It's not like the story didn't prepare us all along for some kind of metaphysical ending; it's just that the metaphysical was used to cancel out the physical story, rather than incorporating it. Your petty concerns, such as what was that hydrogen bomb all about, or what actually happened to Walt (who, like Michael, does not seem to have made it to Heaven), don't matter. In the same way, this world, according to some particularly rotten theologies, does not matter. Maybe the rationale is the same in both cases: this world doesn't make any sense, so, uh, let's just forget all about it! Walk toward the light!
Part of the problem is that Lost's metaphysics were never terribly interesting to begin with. The questions boiled down to basically this:
Jack: Everything can be explained by science.
John: No it can't.
So perhaps that set the writers up (probably to their relief) for an either-or type ending. Mysticism beat out science, as usual for broadcast TV, and mysticism by definition can't be explained. White light, music, menorah, Buddha, stained glass, done! Thank God!
In contrast (notice the comparative transition, an oldie but a goodie), Dostoevsky is steeped in a very specific Christian tradition, which he employs to ask very specific questions about human nature, ethics, and the existence and nature of God. Equally important, the different positions are not embodied by separate characters, but present to greater or lesser degrees in every main character. Yes, Ivan is "the intellectual," but I'd argue he's the most spiritual of the bunch, because he really wrestles with the questions of faith, to the point of giving himself brain fever. So while there is no shortage of metaphysical debate in BK--in fact, that's what this book is, a dramatized debate--the different positions tend to overlap, often even entailing rather than negating each other.
So how does Dostoevsky end BK? I mentioned last time how impressed I was (if a tiny bit impatient) with Dmitri's trial. This strategy lets Dostoevsky tie up the threads of the story, but at the same time--and this is really important for a successful novel, I believe--pull some of them loose again. The debate between the prosecution and the defense--you're misusing psychology! No, you are! You're writing a romance! No, you are!--is an argument about the coherence and plausibility of the novel itself. Like I said, Dostoevsky has a ton of confidence in his novel, otherwise he wouldn't dare do this. But we should all have such confidence, and / or fake it if we don't. Too bad the Lost writers didn't seem to have that confidence in themselves or us. I know trials are a cliche of movies and television by now, so maybe an ending with a trial would not have worked. Still, what about putting Jack on trial with John as the prosecutor? Jack is the one who's always trying to save people, and beating himself up when he fails--so the trial would be about his own tormented psyche, and the limits of his loyalty to science. Just for instance.
Anyway (that is an advanced transition, by the way, not recommended for beginning comparatists), since Dostoevsky really wants us all to believe in a just God, and in an afterlife where we'll see all the people we love again (a la Lost), wouldn't it make sense to have God beam the brothers up at the very end? Wouldn't that answer all our questions once and for all? Actually, Dostoevsky stays close to the ground, and does not provide an unambiguously happy ending. Dmitri is condemned to hard labor in Siberia, despite the fact that we know he's innocent. He and his brothers plan his escape, but we don't see that escape happen. And then young Ilusha dies and is buried. His parents are crazed with grief. His schoolmates, including the cocky Kolya, are devastated. At the very end, Alyosha tells them that they must transform Ilusha's death into an inspiration for their own lives:
First, I will say that Trev and I gave up on Lost early this season. We had finally had enough of the characters' endless tramping through the greenery to visit some portentous person or architectural feature, only to be set upon by yet another gun-toting gang of hippie mystics. However, we did watch the final episode, surmising correctly that whatever we had missed was not going to matter. The fact that we did choose to watch it after having given up on the story itself is interesting. Maybe we still had that supposedly irresistible human need for closure. I think we were also wondering just what species of bullshit the writers were going to pull, since they had sunk themselves so deep into the narrative swamp that nothing but bullshit could rescue them.
Now then. Lost and BK are similar in that both are long and convoluted and interweave religious / metaphysical themes into mystery plots. What is the best way to end stories with so many loose ends? Well, the writers of Lost simply snuffed out all the loose ends in a blast of white light. Once it's revealed that the island is some sort of quasi-Christian--but ecumenical!--Purgatory, we are forced to file all the tramping and digging and shooting and bombing and introducing of hundreds of additional characters every week under the category of "tribulations"--or whatever you want to call the ordeals in Purgatory. The Others, and the Other Others, and the No-Not-Those-But-Those-Others are--I guess--the sort of second-tier demons that carry out the Lord's work of helping humans purge their sins, while never getting any credit for it. It's not like the story didn't prepare us all along for some kind of metaphysical ending; it's just that the metaphysical was used to cancel out the physical story, rather than incorporating it. Your petty concerns, such as what was that hydrogen bomb all about, or what actually happened to Walt (who, like Michael, does not seem to have made it to Heaven), don't matter. In the same way, this world, according to some particularly rotten theologies, does not matter. Maybe the rationale is the same in both cases: this world doesn't make any sense, so, uh, let's just forget all about it! Walk toward the light!
Part of the problem is that Lost's metaphysics were never terribly interesting to begin with. The questions boiled down to basically this:
Jack: Everything can be explained by science.
John: No it can't.
So perhaps that set the writers up (probably to their relief) for an either-or type ending. Mysticism beat out science, as usual for broadcast TV, and mysticism by definition can't be explained. White light, music, menorah, Buddha, stained glass, done! Thank God!
In contrast (notice the comparative transition, an oldie but a goodie), Dostoevsky is steeped in a very specific Christian tradition, which he employs to ask very specific questions about human nature, ethics, and the existence and nature of God. Equally important, the different positions are not embodied by separate characters, but present to greater or lesser degrees in every main character. Yes, Ivan is "the intellectual," but I'd argue he's the most spiritual of the bunch, because he really wrestles with the questions of faith, to the point of giving himself brain fever. So while there is no shortage of metaphysical debate in BK--in fact, that's what this book is, a dramatized debate--the different positions tend to overlap, often even entailing rather than negating each other.
So how does Dostoevsky end BK? I mentioned last time how impressed I was (if a tiny bit impatient) with Dmitri's trial. This strategy lets Dostoevsky tie up the threads of the story, but at the same time--and this is really important for a successful novel, I believe--pull some of them loose again. The debate between the prosecution and the defense--you're misusing psychology! No, you are! You're writing a romance! No, you are!--is an argument about the coherence and plausibility of the novel itself. Like I said, Dostoevsky has a ton of confidence in his novel, otherwise he wouldn't dare do this. But we should all have such confidence, and / or fake it if we don't. Too bad the Lost writers didn't seem to have that confidence in themselves or us. I know trials are a cliche of movies and television by now, so maybe an ending with a trial would not have worked. Still, what about putting Jack on trial with John as the prosecutor? Jack is the one who's always trying to save people, and beating himself up when he fails--so the trial would be about his own tormented psyche, and the limits of his loyalty to science. Just for instance.
Anyway (that is an advanced transition, by the way, not recommended for beginning comparatists), since Dostoevsky really wants us all to believe in a just God, and in an afterlife where we'll see all the people we love again (a la Lost), wouldn't it make sense to have God beam the brothers up at the very end? Wouldn't that answer all our questions once and for all? Actually, Dostoevsky stays close to the ground, and does not provide an unambiguously happy ending. Dmitri is condemned to hard labor in Siberia, despite the fact that we know he's innocent. He and his brothers plan his escape, but we don't see that escape happen. And then young Ilusha dies and is buried. His parents are crazed with grief. His schoolmates, including the cocky Kolya, are devastated. At the very end, Alyosha tells them that they must transform Ilusha's death into an inspiration for their own lives:
"Let us be, first and above all, kind, then honest and then let us never forget each other! I say that again. I give you my word for my part that I'll never forget one of you. Every face looking at me now I shall remember even for thirty years. Just now Kolya said to Kartashov that we did not care to know whether he exists or not. But I cannot forget that Kartashov exists and that he is not blushing now as he did when he discovered the founders of Troy, but is looking at me with his jolly, kind, dear little eyes. Boys, my dear boys, let us all be generous and brave like Ilusha, clever, brave and generous like Kolya (though he will be ever so much cleverer when he is grown up), and let us all be as modest, as clever and sweet as Kartashov. But why am I talking about those two? You are all dear to me, boys, from this day forth, I have a place in my heart for you all, and I beg you to keep a place in your hearts for me! Well, and who has united us in this kind, good feeling which we shall remember and intend to remember all our lives? Who, if not Ilusha, the good boy, the dear boy, precious to us for ever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live for ever in our hearts from this time forth!”“Yes, yes, for ever, for ever!” the boys cried in their ringing voices, with softened faces.
“Let us remember his face and his clothes and his poor little boots, his coffin and his unhappy, sinful father, and how boldly he stood up for him alone against the whole school.”
“We will remember, we will remember,” cried the boys. “He was brave, he was good!”
“Ah, how I loved him!” exclaimed Kolya.
“Ah, children, ah, dear friends, don't be afraid of life! How good life is when one does something good and just!”
“Yes, yes,” the boys repeated enthusiastically.
“Karamazov, we love you!” a voice, probably Kartashov's, cried impulsively.
“We love you, we love you!” they all caught it up. There were tears in the eyes of many of them.
“Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya shouted ecstatically.
“And may the dead boy's memory live for ever!” Alyosha added again with feeling.
“For ever!” the boys chimed in again.
“Karamazov,” cried Kolya, “can it be true what's taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?”
“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!” Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.
“Ah, how splendid it will be!” broke from Kolya.
“Well, now we will finish talking and go to his funeral dinner. Don't be put out at our eating pancakes—it's a very old custom and there's something nice in that!” laughed Alyosha. “Well, let us go! And now we go hand in hand.”
“And always so, all our lives hand in hand! Hurrah for Karamazov!” Kolya cried once more rapturously, and once more the boys took up his exclamation: “Hurrah for Karamazov!”
OK, so it's a little maudlin. But despite the fact that Alyosha is a devout Christian, and despite his promise to the boys that they will meet in heaven, this ending is most concerned with this world. Alyosha asks the boys to examine how they feel at this moment and remember it as a source of ethical behavior throughout the rest of their lives. Then, off they go to eat pancakes. The pancakes, Alyosha points out, are important.
So, what's the lesson for writers in these two endings? Well, if you're going to do metaphysics, which I highly recommend you try, remember the "physics" is just as important as the "meta." It's fine to leave some plot lines untied, especially if you address that untied state somehow at the end (a trial where the arguments are persuasive on both sides is just one way to do that sort of thing). But it is not fine to simply dismiss the reader's interest in those plot lines by claiming they should not have cared about them--that was "just" worldly stuff that doesn't matter in the end. Stories, even fabulist ones, are made of worldly concerns. Lost just told us that we were watching all those years for no good reason.
UPDATE: I should point out that my thinking on Lost was influenced by this piece in the NYT by Mike Hale. As Hale mentions, in the last episode, Desmond actually says "None of this matters," which may be a way for the writers to get us used to that possibility.
Friday, May 21, 2010
Borrowed Fire: On going for it, really going for it, in your novel
As I contemplate the distinct possibility that, like Louise, or Thelma, I have now stomped on the accelerator of my novel, and it is now zooming toward the cliff of Not Fixable and into the abyss of I Wasted Six Years on This...I pause again to admire Dostoevsky and The Brothers Karamazov. Today I will admire just the sheer goddamn authorial commitment here. I mean, apart from this being a really long, intricate beast with dozens of characters and profound philosophical and religious implications. That would be plenty for anyone to pull off.
But the home stretch of the book is Dmitri's trial. And here, Dostoevsky pretty much retells the whole story, twice, first from the point of view of the prosecutor, then from that of the defense. This is extremely daring. OK, I will say this: the rehash made me a tad impatient; I may have skimmed a bit. And I am not through the defense part yet. But the point is, Dostoevsky lets the prosecutor go on at great length to poke holes in the novel itself. The prosecutor points out really strange, illogical aspects of Dmitri's character, which Dostoevsky himself has previously--I think--asked us to accept. He dwells on the preposterousness of Dmitri's supposedly exculpating claim that he kept a small bag of money around his neck, telling no one about it--a weird impulse in the first place, for which Dmitri can offer no evidence. This is risky because having a character announce that something in the story doesn't make sense invites the reader to agree. In lesser hands, this could be an attempt to cover the author's failure to make the story plausible, by acknowledging the failure and trying to make it a plot point. Such an attempt is obviously destined to fail. So Dostoevsky's going all in here. He has given himself some leeway by portraying Dmitri all along as a man of vast contradictions. But the prosecutor addresses those contradictions--in fact he describes Dmitri exactly as Dostoevsky himself has--and still says the bag of money is absurd.
It's been a long time since I first read this book, but the previous chapters made it pretty clear that Smerdyakov murdered Fyodor. In fact, I was thinking Dostoevsky had been a little heavy handed about Smerdyakov's villainy; the mystery was not as murky as I had remembered. The prosecutor's speech, though, made me doubt that belief, and my own memory. It's really only because Alyosha and Ivan believe that Smerdyakov did it that I mostly retain my original conviction. I am relying on characters I have come to trust to tell me the truth--which is a pretty amazing feat on Dostoevsky's part. He certainly makes it clear why a reasonable person would see Dmitri as a murderer.
After the prosecutor's speech, Dostoevsky ups the ante even further. He gives us an extended discussion among various anonymous members of the audience as to how well the prosecutor's arguments hold up, in their opinions. So not only does Dostoevsky invite us to comment on the construction of the novel via the prosecutor, we now get to rethink that commentary as well. And we still have not gotten to the defense's argument yet.
So what I'm seeing here in the trial, above all, is Dostoevsky's total commitment to the story. He does not try to gloss over problems the reader might have with the plot and the characters. Instead, he retells the story, again and again, putting its apparent contradictions on display for all to see. He has that much confidence in it--or to say it in terms more like his, he's put his faith in it. As a writer he's decided he'll live or die by this story. I suppose that's what we all have to do, every time.
But the home stretch of the book is Dmitri's trial. And here, Dostoevsky pretty much retells the whole story, twice, first from the point of view of the prosecutor, then from that of the defense. This is extremely daring. OK, I will say this: the rehash made me a tad impatient; I may have skimmed a bit. And I am not through the defense part yet. But the point is, Dostoevsky lets the prosecutor go on at great length to poke holes in the novel itself. The prosecutor points out really strange, illogical aspects of Dmitri's character, which Dostoevsky himself has previously--I think--asked us to accept. He dwells on the preposterousness of Dmitri's supposedly exculpating claim that he kept a small bag of money around his neck, telling no one about it--a weird impulse in the first place, for which Dmitri can offer no evidence. This is risky because having a character announce that something in the story doesn't make sense invites the reader to agree. In lesser hands, this could be an attempt to cover the author's failure to make the story plausible, by acknowledging the failure and trying to make it a plot point. Such an attempt is obviously destined to fail. So Dostoevsky's going all in here. He has given himself some leeway by portraying Dmitri all along as a man of vast contradictions. But the prosecutor addresses those contradictions--in fact he describes Dmitri exactly as Dostoevsky himself has--and still says the bag of money is absurd.
It's been a long time since I first read this book, but the previous chapters made it pretty clear that Smerdyakov murdered Fyodor. In fact, I was thinking Dostoevsky had been a little heavy handed about Smerdyakov's villainy; the mystery was not as murky as I had remembered. The prosecutor's speech, though, made me doubt that belief, and my own memory. It's really only because Alyosha and Ivan believe that Smerdyakov did it that I mostly retain my original conviction. I am relying on characters I have come to trust to tell me the truth--which is a pretty amazing feat on Dostoevsky's part. He certainly makes it clear why a reasonable person would see Dmitri as a murderer.
After the prosecutor's speech, Dostoevsky ups the ante even further. He gives us an extended discussion among various anonymous members of the audience as to how well the prosecutor's arguments hold up, in their opinions. So not only does Dostoevsky invite us to comment on the construction of the novel via the prosecutor, we now get to rethink that commentary as well. And we still have not gotten to the defense's argument yet.
So what I'm seeing here in the trial, above all, is Dostoevsky's total commitment to the story. He does not try to gloss over problems the reader might have with the plot and the characters. Instead, he retells the story, again and again, putting its apparent contradictions on display for all to see. He has that much confidence in it--or to say it in terms more like his, he's put his faith in it. As a writer he's decided he'll live or die by this story. I suppose that's what we all have to do, every time.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Who is your devil?
And now back to The Brothers Karamazov. When last we left poor Ivan, he was down with an attack of "brain fever." I highly recommend this as an ailment with which to afflict your characters, since it gives you license to do pretty much anything with the narrative. In BK, it lets Ivan have a long philosophical conversation with the devil himself.
Ivan's devil is quite an interesting figure. He's not scary, at least not at first glance, so much as persistently annoying. That's because he's a kind of "leftover" of history, which the nation, and Ivan, would very much like to bury:
Ivan's devil is quite an interesting figure. He's not scary, at least not at first glance, so much as persistently annoying. That's because he's a kind of "leftover" of history, which the nation, and Ivan, would very much like to bury:
This was a person or, more accurately speaking, a Russian gentleman of a particular kind, no longer young, qui faisait la cinquantaine, as the French say, with rather long, still thick, dark hair, slightly streaked with gray and a small pointed beard. He was wearing a brownish reefer jacket, rather shabby, evidently made by a good tailor though, and of a fashion at least three years old, that had been discarded by smart and well-to-do people for the last two years. His linen and his long scarf-like neck-tie were all such as are worn by people who aim at being stylish, but on closer inspection his linen was not over-clean and his wide scarf was very threadbare. The visitor's check trousers were of excellent cut, but were too light in color and too tight for the present fashion. His soft fluffy white hat was out of keeping with the season.In brief there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means. It looked as though the gentleman belonged to that class of idle landowners who used to flourish in the times of serfdom. He had unmistakably been, at some time, in good and fashionable society, had once had good connections, had possibly preserved them indeed, but, after a gay youth, becoming gradually impoverished on the abolition of serfdom, he had sunk into the position of a poor relation of the best class, wandering from one good old friend to another and received by them for his companionable and accommodating disposition and as being, after all, a gentleman who could be asked to sit down with any one, though, of course, not in a place of honor. Such gentlemen of accommodating temper and dependent position, who can tell a story, take a hand at cards, and who have a distinct aversion for any duties that may be forced upon them, are usually solitary creatures, either bachelors or widowers. Sometimes they have children, but if so, the children are always being brought up at a distance, at some aunt's, to whom these gentlemen never allude in good society, seeming ashamed of the relationship. They gradually lose sight of their children altogether, though at intervals they receive a birthday or Christmas letter from them and sometimes even answer it.
The countenance of the unexpected visitor was not so much good-natured, as accommodating and ready to assume any amiable expression as occasion might arise. He had no watch, but he had a tortoise-shell lorgnette on a black ribbon. On the middle finger of his right hand was a massive gold ring with a cheap opal stone in it.
In the course of his conversation with Ivan, we find out that the devil's musings on the existence of God, the problem of evil, and so forth are all Ivan's own ideas, which he explored earlier and discarded. He even brings up "The Grand Inquisitor." So he's very much a writer's devil--imagine having all your old short stories read back to you by a smarmy guy in too-tight pants, sitting on your sofa.
In other words, this devil is memory itself: a blend of national memory and Ivan's own rejected past. Now we can start to see why this guy really is scary, his lorgnette much worse than leathery wings. Like a certain kind of relative, you simply can't get rid of him. The harder you try, the more insistently present he becomes. And he pushes every button you have: the guilt, the responsibility, the sense that he and you are really the same deep down. What on earth can you do with a guy like this? What can you do with the past?
So the writing exercise I propose for this week is to come up with an original devil. Let's not go for the obvious ones, like Sarah Palin or Dick Cheney or James Dobson et al. Who can get so deeply into your system that he or she is literally impossible to dismiss?
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Borrowed Fire: In praise of "brain fever"
Ivan is my favorite character in The Brothers Karamazov. He's the author-insert, the tormented intellectual who makes up stories, and as such is Dostoevsky's portal into alternate realities. Margaret Atwood uses a tormented author-character in The Blind Assassin to tell a science-fiction story within a larger, realistic novel. In a similar way, Dostoevsky uses Ivan to give us metaphysical fables, which are juxtaposed with the "real story." Ivan has already brought us "The Grand Inquisitor," which is more than we could ask of any character. Now, after an extended and rather wearying visit with Dmitri, Ivan's back.
And he is better than ever, for he has come down with a case of that wonderful nineteenth-century disease, "brain fever." The symptoms of this illness always, conveniently, are exactly what the author needs them to be. I say that's a good thing. Not to pick on Ian McEwan or Richard Powers again--but what the hell--I think there's a potential loss when a writer builds a character around a specific diagnosis of mental illness. In McEwan's Saturday and Enduring Love, and in Powers's Echo Maker, I sense that diagnosis takes the place of character. It's as if diagnosis itself drives the story; I picture the authors scouring a detailed list of symptoms, seeing what else has to be covered. Now, I hugely admire both of these authors, and I am certain my suspicion of their meticulous research can be partly explained by my own laziness. But this clinical style of novel, while interesting and valuable in itself, does not so easily leap into the metaphysical, which is where I, personally, like to end up.*
Whereas Dostoevsky, or more precisely his narrator, gives himself carte blanche to do with Ivan's brain fever what he will:
Perhaps fortunately for Dostoevsky, the MRI and psychopharmacology had not been invented, so illnesses of the brain did seem more existential--or as special connections to God or the devil. (Dostoevsky's own epilepsy allowed him to think of himself as a kind of seer, although he well knew it was an illness too.) Still, I see no reason why our technologies should bind us. A few disclaimers, admitted conjectures, a "new" but unseen doctor who predicts "hallucinations," and you're good to go. Is Ivan schizophrenic? Does he have a tumor? It doesn't matter. Better not to know, because the real suggestion is that Ivan has driven himself mad, by trying to understand God intellectually. It's this intellectual madness, rather than any plausible illness, that has given us "The Grand Inquisitor," and now, Ivan's fascinating conversation with Satan himself--who both is, and is not, a figment of Ivan's imagination.
The whole conversation with the devil as a "poor relation"--dapper but shabby on closer inspection--probably requires a post of its own. For now, I'll leave you with this suggestion: in fiction, there's nothing wrong with making up your own mental illnesses. Your story might even suggest to you the type of illness it requires.
*I do not think this is the case with Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's wonderful novel, which, like The Echo Maker, deals with Capgras Syndrome: the belief that other people are imposters. While Galchen, a medical doctor, understands the syndrome thoroughly, her touch with it is lighter, more lyrical. Her interest in the illness is primarily aesthetic and existential, and not so much in the plot entanglements such a condition might lead to.
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And he is better than ever, for he has come down with a case of that wonderful nineteenth-century disease, "brain fever." The symptoms of this illness always, conveniently, are exactly what the author needs them to be. I say that's a good thing. Not to pick on Ian McEwan or Richard Powers again--but what the hell--I think there's a potential loss when a writer builds a character around a specific diagnosis of mental illness. In McEwan's Saturday and Enduring Love, and in Powers's Echo Maker, I sense that diagnosis takes the place of character. It's as if diagnosis itself drives the story; I picture the authors scouring a detailed list of symptoms, seeing what else has to be covered. Now, I hugely admire both of these authors, and I am certain my suspicion of their meticulous research can be partly explained by my own laziness. But this clinical style of novel, while interesting and valuable in itself, does not so easily leap into the metaphysical, which is where I, personally, like to end up.*
Whereas Dostoevsky, or more precisely his narrator, gives himself carte blanche to do with Ivan's brain fever what he will:
I am not a doctor, but yet I feel that the moment has come when I must inevitably give the reader some account of the nature of Ivan's illness. Anticipating events I can say at least one thing: he was at that moment on the very eve of an attack of brain fever. Though his health had long been affected, it had offered a stubborn resistance to the fever which in the end gained complete mastery over it. Though I know nothing of medicine, I venture to hazard the suggestion that he really had perhaps, by a terrible effort of will, succeeded in delaying the attack for a time, hoping, of course, to check it completely. He knew that he was unwell, but he loathed the thought of being ill at that fatal time, at the approaching crisis in his life, when he needed to have all his wits about him, to say what he had to say boldly and resolutely and “to justify himself to himself.”
He had, however, consulted the new doctor, who had been brought from Moscow by a fantastic notion of Katerina Ivanovna's to which I have referred already. After listening to him and examining him the doctor came to the conclusion that he was actually suffering from some disorder of the brain, and was not at all surprised by an admission which Ivan had reluctantly made him. “Hallucinations are quite likely in your condition,” the doctor opined, “though it would be better to verify them ... you must take steps at once, without a moment's delay, or things will go badly with you.” But Ivan did not follow this judicious advice and did not take to his bed to be nursed. “I am walking about, so I am strong enough, if I drop, it'll be different then, any one may nurse me who likes,” he decided, dismissing the subject.
Perhaps fortunately for Dostoevsky, the MRI and psychopharmacology had not been invented, so illnesses of the brain did seem more existential--or as special connections to God or the devil. (Dostoevsky's own epilepsy allowed him to think of himself as a kind of seer, although he well knew it was an illness too.) Still, I see no reason why our technologies should bind us. A few disclaimers, admitted conjectures, a "new" but unseen doctor who predicts "hallucinations," and you're good to go. Is Ivan schizophrenic? Does he have a tumor? It doesn't matter. Better not to know, because the real suggestion is that Ivan has driven himself mad, by trying to understand God intellectually. It's this intellectual madness, rather than any plausible illness, that has given us "The Grand Inquisitor," and now, Ivan's fascinating conversation with Satan himself--who both is, and is not, a figment of Ivan's imagination.
The whole conversation with the devil as a "poor relation"--dapper but shabby on closer inspection--probably requires a post of its own. For now, I'll leave you with this suggestion: in fiction, there's nothing wrong with making up your own mental illnesses. Your story might even suggest to you the type of illness it requires.
*I do not think this is the case with Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's wonderful novel, which, like The Echo Maker, deals with Capgras Syndrome: the belief that other people are imposters. While Galchen, a medical doctor, understands the syndrome thoroughly, her touch with it is lighter, more lyrical. Her interest in the illness is primarily aesthetic and existential, and not so much in the plot entanglements such a condition might lead to.
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Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Making children interesting
Dostoevsky's portrait of Kolya Krassotkin in The Brothers Karamazov offers a clinic in creating a smart and complex young person. Child characters, especially if they're minor characters, are often little more than allegories of adult hopes and fears, rather than individuals in their own right. Dostoevsky himself is given to sentimentalizing children, for instance by having them die slowly while bathed in an angelic light (a la Evangeline in Uncle Tom's Cabin). In fact, our acquaintance with Kolya comes about through this very circumstance, the dying being handled by Ilusha, whom we've met earlier.
Dostoevsky spends a great deal of time revealing the extremes of Kolya's character, because, at thirteen (nearly fourteen, as Kolya insists on pointing out), his soul is in the balance. Kolya is intelligent, and that means he's at great risk. Dostoevsky doesn't worry much about the fate of unintelligent people; they are bound to be either holy innocents or brutes. However, the smart can get themselves into serious trouble, and do serious damage, if their intellect outstrips or stifles their spiritual development.
Kolya is a convincing adolescent because he has embraced adult concerns (religion, politics) with all the enthusiasm of the new convert. But he is (pardon the anachronism; I just can't let it go) like a novice driver behind the wheel of a Ferrari. His mind is a powerful engine, which he doesn't have the faintest idea how to control, and so he's constantly crashing. He tricks a peasant into killing his own goose to prove a theory; he lies on railroad tracks and lets a train pass over him (fainting in the process, but developing a reputation as a "desperate character"); he finds and hides a stray dog--Ilusha's lost dog--for a month, in order to train the dog and surprise Ilusha. Kolya's training methods border on cruel, as does his notion that it's better to wait and surprise Ilusha, rather than just give him the dog back as soon as he finds him.* In all cases, Kolya's theories on the superiority of the intellect (especially his own) distort his good, or at least benign, intentions. But Kolya's goodness still comes through: he really does want to make Ilusha feel better, and he does, though at some cost to all concerned.
For this reason--the goodness showing through the cracks--Kolya attracts the attention of Alyosha, who functions as a true angel for the boy. Alyosha's at his most appealing in his interactions with Kolya, which shows us another benefit of creating complex children as characters: they allow your adults to show more interesting sides of themselves as well.
As Kolya recognizes, Alyosha treats him as an adult, which is what an intelligent child desires, and deserves, above all. And by this means, Alyosha gently makes Kolya aware of his errors:
Kolya's pomposity is obnoxious and funny at the same time; and his flustered self-awareness makes us care about him. With Alyosha's help, we forgive his blunders and feel genuine hope for his future.
So, in creating child characters, it might help to think of the child as a person at a crossroads. At stake is the kind of adult he or she will become. The child is trying on adult ideas and ways, playing dress-up, only the game is serious. The child lacks whatever adults possess that enables us to wear our grown-up costumes more successfully...which raises the question, what is that quality, exactly? Is that quality always desirable? In Kolya's case, through the conversation with Alyosha, we learn that empathy--which requires, according to Dostoevsky, belief in God--is the key to a meaningful life. Many adults don't have empathy, and Alyosha is determined to cultivate it in Kolya. Alyosha is like an author developing Kolya's character, acknowledging his cruel and awkward tendencies while drawing out his humanity. We, as authors, could try doing the same.
*I am still not a hundred percent certain that this dog is in fact Ilusha's lost dog. Because Ilusha's ill and also wracked with guilt--he thinks he killed his dog by tricking him into swallowing a pin (a stunt Smerdyakov, the villain, taught him)--Kolya may only be fooling him with a different dog. Either way, Kolya is doing a nice thing for Ilusha, but in an unintentionally mean way.
Dostoevsky spends a great deal of time revealing the extremes of Kolya's character, because, at thirteen (nearly fourteen, as Kolya insists on pointing out), his soul is in the balance. Kolya is intelligent, and that means he's at great risk. Dostoevsky doesn't worry much about the fate of unintelligent people; they are bound to be either holy innocents or brutes. However, the smart can get themselves into serious trouble, and do serious damage, if their intellect outstrips or stifles their spiritual development.
Kolya is a convincing adolescent because he has embraced adult concerns (religion, politics) with all the enthusiasm of the new convert. But he is (pardon the anachronism; I just can't let it go) like a novice driver behind the wheel of a Ferrari. His mind is a powerful engine, which he doesn't have the faintest idea how to control, and so he's constantly crashing. He tricks a peasant into killing his own goose to prove a theory; he lies on railroad tracks and lets a train pass over him (fainting in the process, but developing a reputation as a "desperate character"); he finds and hides a stray dog--Ilusha's lost dog--for a month, in order to train the dog and surprise Ilusha. Kolya's training methods border on cruel, as does his notion that it's better to wait and surprise Ilusha, rather than just give him the dog back as soon as he finds him.* In all cases, Kolya's theories on the superiority of the intellect (especially his own) distort his good, or at least benign, intentions. But Kolya's goodness still comes through: he really does want to make Ilusha feel better, and he does, though at some cost to all concerned.
For this reason--the goodness showing through the cracks--Kolya attracts the attention of Alyosha, who functions as a true angel for the boy. Alyosha's at his most appealing in his interactions with Kolya, which shows us another benefit of creating complex children as characters: they allow your adults to show more interesting sides of themselves as well.
As Kolya recognizes, Alyosha treats him as an adult, which is what an intelligent child desires, and deserves, above all. And by this means, Alyosha gently makes Kolya aware of his errors:
“What do you think the doctor will say to him?” Kolya asked quickly. “What a repulsive mug, though, hasn't he? I can't endure medicine!”
“Ilusha is dying. I think that's certain,” answered Alyosha, mournfully.
“They are rogues! Medicine's a fraud! I am glad to have made your acquaintance, though, Karamazov. I wanted to know you for a long time. I am only sorry we meet in such sad circumstances.”
Kolya had a great inclination to say something even warmer and more demonstrative, but he felt ill at ease. Alyosha noticed this, smiled, and pressed his hand.
“I've long learned to respect you as a rare person,” Kolya muttered again, faltering and uncertain. “I have heard you are a mystic and have been in the monastery. I know you are a mystic, but ... that hasn't put me off. Contact with real life will cure you.... It's always so with characters like yours.”
“What do you mean by mystic? Cure me of what?” Alyosha was rather astonished.
“Oh, God and all the rest of it.”
“What, don't you believe in God?”
“Oh, I've nothing against God. Of course, God is only a hypothesis, but ... I admit that He is needed ... for the order of the universe and all that ... and that if there were no God He would have to be invented,” added Kolya, beginning to blush. He suddenly fancied that Alyosha might think he was trying to show off his knowledge and to prove that he was “grown up.” “I haven't the slightest desire to show off my knowledge to him,” Kolya thought indignantly. And all of a sudden he felt horribly annoyed.
“I must confess I can't endure entering on such discussions,” he said with a final air. “It's possible for one who doesn't believe in God to love mankind, don't you think so? Voltaire didn't believe in God and loved mankind?” (“I am at it again,” he thought to himself.)
“Voltaire believed in God, though not very much, I think, and I don't think he loved mankind very much either,” said Alyosha quietly, gently, and quite naturally, as though he were talking to some one of his own age, or even older. Kolya was particularly struck by Alyosha's apparent diffidence about his opinion of Voltaire. He seemed to be leaving the question for him, little Kolya, to settle.
“Have you read Voltaire?” Alyosha finished.
“No, not to say read.... But I've read Candide in the Russian translation ... in an absurd, grotesque, old translation ... (At it again! again!)”
Kolya's pomposity is obnoxious and funny at the same time; and his flustered self-awareness makes us care about him. With Alyosha's help, we forgive his blunders and feel genuine hope for his future.
So, in creating child characters, it might help to think of the child as a person at a crossroads. At stake is the kind of adult he or she will become. The child is trying on adult ideas and ways, playing dress-up, only the game is serious. The child lacks whatever adults possess that enables us to wear our grown-up costumes more successfully...which raises the question, what is that quality, exactly? Is that quality always desirable? In Kolya's case, through the conversation with Alyosha, we learn that empathy--which requires, according to Dostoevsky, belief in God--is the key to a meaningful life. Many adults don't have empathy, and Alyosha is determined to cultivate it in Kolya. Alyosha is like an author developing Kolya's character, acknowledging his cruel and awkward tendencies while drawing out his humanity. We, as authors, could try doing the same.
*I am still not a hundred percent certain that this dog is in fact Ilusha's lost dog. Because Ilusha's ill and also wracked with guilt--he thinks he killed his dog by tricking him into swallowing a pin (a stunt Smerdyakov, the villain, taught him)--Kolya may only be fooling him with a different dog. Either way, Kolya is doing a nice thing for Ilusha, but in an unintentionally mean way.
Friday, April 09, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Irrationality in fiction
This week, I have learned from The Brothers Karamazov that literary characters can behave irrationally. This is another post in which I state the obvious with a sense of great discovery.
Well, it's kind of a discovery to me, because I realized I've had this notion in my head that characters must be "logically consistent." I think I took that to mean they must be logical, period. I'm not saying that in my relatively brief career, I've set a bunch of Spocks loose on the imaginary world. But I have shied away from having characters do things that seem inexplicable. My worry has been that I would be using an inexplicable action by a character to further the plot. That would be a valid worry, if the action does not make sense for the character, if I'm imposing that action on the character from outside. However, an action that's inexplicable to all other characters, and maybe even to the character himself, is not only permissible, but sometimes critical to the story.
Here is a case in point. Dmitri has been arrested for his father's murder and is being interrogated. He looks guilty as hell--what with the history of rage at his father, the romantic triangle, his appearance shortly after the murder drenched in blood, etc. Also he's really bad at explaining himself, and still kind of drunk after a night of throwing around a large sum of money--the exact amount, it appears, that was stolen from his murdered father.
Dmitri has an explanation for all these things, including where he got the money. But he's reluctant to explain the money, because he's ashamed of having borrowed / stolen it from the aggressively saintly Katerina Ivanovna, his former fiancee. Eventually, though, desperation to save himself from prison wins out, and he tells his questioners that of the full sum he'd borrowed from her, he took half, tied it in a rag, and hung it around his neck. Dmitri attempts to spell out his reasoning:
This "amulet" is now gone and the money spent, so all that's left between Dmitri and prison is this explanation. And the prosecutor isn't buying. He thinks the explanation is "strange." It makes perfect sense to Dmitri, and for Dmitri as a character, but does not work for anyone else. Dmitri, to his despair, sees that clearly.
I'm reminded of Richard Price's Lush Life here (thanks to Ryanx for bringing this book up yesterday). That story, too, hinges on the main character's behaving irrationally at a critical moment, leading to his being accused of murder. As economists are also discovering--apparently with greater wonder even than mine--human beings do not always act in their own best interests. They freak out under stress; they make plans that seem logical at the time, but later seem incredibly weird and stupid. In both BK and Lush Life, these irrational acts drive the plot, because these stories are about human irrationality. (So is the economy.)
In other words, I have learned, it is OK if your plot is not a neat little puzzle made up of characters behaving sensibly. Your plot can be more like, I dunno, an industrial accident,* followed by urgent but incomplete clean-up efforts. For literary works, the latter is most likely preferable. But the accident has to come from a character or characters who are capable of having such accidents. You can't just dump irrationality all over your world from above.**
*Obviously I'm still hung up on DeLillo here.
**It's sort of funny that this is what DeLillo does with his "airborne toxic event." It is literally imposed from above. But it's also the data smog in people's systems, externalized as a plot device and parody of the author-as-God.
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Well, it's kind of a discovery to me, because I realized I've had this notion in my head that characters must be "logically consistent." I think I took that to mean they must be logical, period. I'm not saying that in my relatively brief career, I've set a bunch of Spocks loose on the imaginary world. But I have shied away from having characters do things that seem inexplicable. My worry has been that I would be using an inexplicable action by a character to further the plot. That would be a valid worry, if the action does not make sense for the character, if I'm imposing that action on the character from outside. However, an action that's inexplicable to all other characters, and maybe even to the character himself, is not only permissible, but sometimes critical to the story.
Here is a case in point. Dmitri has been arrested for his father's murder and is being interrogated. He looks guilty as hell--what with the history of rage at his father, the romantic triangle, his appearance shortly after the murder drenched in blood, etc. Also he's really bad at explaining himself, and still kind of drunk after a night of throwing around a large sum of money--the exact amount, it appears, that was stolen from his murdered father.
Dmitri has an explanation for all these things, including where he got the money. But he's reluctant to explain the money, because he's ashamed of having borrowed / stolen it from the aggressively saintly Katerina Ivanovna, his former fiancee. Eventually, though, desperation to save himself from prison wins out, and he tells his questioners that of the full sum he'd borrowed from her, he took half, tied it in a rag, and hung it around his neck. Dmitri attempts to spell out his reasoning:
"...Perhaps it really is incomprehensible. You see, attend to what I say. I appropriate three thousand entrusted to my honor, I spend it on a spree, say I spend it all, and next morning I go to her and say, ‘Katya, I've done wrong, I've squandered your three thousand,’ well, is that right? No, it's not right—it's dishonest and cowardly, I'm a beast, with no more self-control than a beast, that's so, isn't it? But still I'm not a thief? Not a downright thief, you'll admit! I squandered it, but I didn't steal it. Now a second, rather more favorable alternative: follow me carefully, or I may get confused again—my head's going round—and so, for the second alternative: I spend here only fifteen hundred out of the three thousand, that is, only half. Next day I go and take that half to her: ‘Katya, take this fifteen hundred from me, I'm a low beast, and an untrustworthy scoundrel, for I've wasted half the money, and I shall waste this, too, so keep me from temptation!’ Well, what of that alternative? I should be a beast and a scoundrel, and whatever you like; but not a thief, not altogether a thief, or I should not have brought back what was left, but have kept that, too. She would see at once that since I brought back half, I should pay back what I'd spent, that I should never give up trying to, that I should work to get it and pay it back. So in that case I should be a scoundrel, but not a thief, you may say what you like, not a thief!”“I admit that there is a certain distinction,” said the prosecutor, with a cold smile. “But it's strange that you see such a vital difference.”
This "amulet" is now gone and the money spent, so all that's left between Dmitri and prison is this explanation. And the prosecutor isn't buying. He thinks the explanation is "strange." It makes perfect sense to Dmitri, and for Dmitri as a character, but does not work for anyone else. Dmitri, to his despair, sees that clearly.
I'm reminded of Richard Price's Lush Life here (thanks to Ryanx for bringing this book up yesterday). That story, too, hinges on the main character's behaving irrationally at a critical moment, leading to his being accused of murder. As economists are also discovering--apparently with greater wonder even than mine--human beings do not always act in their own best interests. They freak out under stress; they make plans that seem logical at the time, but later seem incredibly weird and stupid. In both BK and Lush Life, these irrational acts drive the plot, because these stories are about human irrationality. (So is the economy.)
In other words, I have learned, it is OK if your plot is not a neat little puzzle made up of characters behaving sensibly. Your plot can be more like, I dunno, an industrial accident,* followed by urgent but incomplete clean-up efforts. For literary works, the latter is most likely preferable. But the accident has to come from a character or characters who are capable of having such accidents. You can't just dump irrationality all over your world from above.**
*Obviously I'm still hung up on DeLillo here.
**It's sort of funny that this is what DeLillo does with his "airborne toxic event." It is literally imposed from above. But it's also the data smog in people's systems, externalized as a plot device and parody of the author-as-God.
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Friday, April 02, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Using flash-forwards
For this week's dissection of The Brothers Karamazov, we'll at a move that seems to be happening more and more in the novel: the flash-forward. These flashes of the future--it's important that they are just momentary--seem related to the intensification of the murder mystery.
For example, after Dmitri is arrested for the murder of his father, the police interrogate him. Grushenka rushes into the room, begging that she be punished for her role in Dmitri's downfall:
For example, after Dmitri is arrested for the murder of his father, the police interrogate him. Grushenka rushes into the room, begging that she be punished for her role in Dmitri's downfall:
“Judge us together!” Grushenka cried frantically, still kneeling. “Punish us together. I will go with him now, if it's to death!”
“Grusha, my life, my blood, my holy one!” Mitya fell on his knees beside her and held her tight in his arms. “Don't believe her,” he cried, “she's not guilty of anything, of any blood, of anything!”
He remembered afterwards that he was forcibly dragged away from her by several men, and that she was led out, and that when he recovered himself he was sitting at the table. Beside him and behind him stood the men with metal plates. Facing him on the other side of the table sat Nikolay Parfenovitch, the investigating lawyer. He kept persuading him to drink a little water out of a glass that stood on the table.
Our glimpse of the future amounts to a vague image of Dmitri looking back on the present. We don't know what he's doing at this future time, whether he's in prison, or free and settled with Grushenka--only that he's alive, and capable of remembering. We don't know how far in the future we are, either; it might only be a few minutes. We don't even know what Dmitri makes of this memory. Is he amused, remorseful, at peace? What is the point of this sudden shift in perspective?
While seeming to provide concrete information (Dmitri will not die, at least not in the next few moments), this move deepens the sense of mystery overall by raising all sorts of additional questions. It also reminds us that there's a narrative intelligence outside of Dmitri, who knows the future--the anonymous first-person narrator, who is more evident at some points than at others. Here he doesn't announce himself directly, but sort of ripples the curtain between us and the story, making us aware of that curtain at a moment of absorbing drama. The characters are engaged in intense dialog--and in dialog, characters can seem especially real and autonomous, as they speak in their own words, rather than being described by the author's. The flash-forward, however, makes them fictional characters once again, if only for a second. Perhaps the (also fictional) author-persona just can't resist making his power known; he's a terrible egoist in his way, and can't let these fakers run away with his tale. Or maybe we're learning that while Dmitri may not be doomed by this investigation, he's doomed in a larger way by his author-God--just as we all are.
Should we, as apprentice writers, attempt such flash-forwards? They clearly mess with your reader's ability to get lost in the story. However, I, for one, like the artificial effects it creates. (I call it "making my stories less publishable.") It's also a way of announcing--if you feel you need to--that your fiction is literary. When Joyce Carol Oates read her story "The Knife" at Stanford last fall, an audience member asked her why she'd employed a flash-forward during the scene in which the main character's life is being threatened. The flash-forward tells us everything is going to be (more or less) OK, which, to the questioner's mind, destroyed the suspense. With the breezy contempt for which Oates is celebrated, she explained that this was not a suspense story.
The flash-forward, if done well, frees you as the author to do other things with a conventional, if gripping, narrative. The question is whether you want to sacrifice that kind of hold on your reader in favor of other ambitions. We know that in the end, Dostoevsky really wants to talk about God, not bicker and argue about who killed who. There's a larger matter at stake than either Dmitri's or his father's life.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Physical gesture in fiction
For the past few weeks I've talked about ways to depict Big Ideas in fiction. But I'm feeling micro today. So for this writing workshop on The Brothers Karamazov, as Dmitri caroms across the landscape on the most fateful errand of his life, I would like to focus on the comic relief passage. I'm especially interested in a little moment of physical action that interrupts the usual Dostoevskian activity of yelling.
Desperate to borrow money (so that he can look even more like a murderer than he already does), Dmitri appeals to Mme. Hohlakov. This dingbat serves as Dostoevsky's explanation for why women should not be "liberated," or even allowed to read. She offers to solve all Dmitri's financial problems by giving him a suggestion worth a thousand times more than the paltry sum he wants to borrow: he must go to the gold mines. It takes Dmitri awhile to realize that Mme. H is giving him the suggestion instead of money, rather than in addition to it--and so follows a somewhat amusing scene of mistaken-assumption type humor. (It might be interesting, though not right now, to compare this to Melville's proto-Abbot-and-Costello routine in Moby Dick.) As Dmitri gets even more flustered, Mme. H offers him a final gift:
I direct my fellow writers to the two sentences beginning with "And she actually put the cord around his neck..." Dmitri's actions in helping her with this useless (to him) gift are so plausible, precisely because they seem implausible. As frustrated as he is, some ancient habit of politeness and propriety still kicks in. We all wait and watch as he gets the ikon properly situated. Of course this detail tells that Dmitri is not a bad sort deep down, for all his bluster and violence. It also shows us how hard he's trying to get on Mme. H's good side, as the money he still thinks he's getting fades away before his eyes. Also it briefly slows the pace of the story, which is otherwise in a headlong rush. Dostoevsky, once in awhile at least, recognizes that his readers need breathers; prose, like music, needs diminuendos as well as crescendos.
The preciseness of this action got me thinking about how writers use characters' physical gestures in general. I sometimes find myself getting so caught up in writing a dialog, or the broader actions in a scene, that I forget to look at what the characters are doing while everything's happening. Now, one can go too far in the other direction:
In real life, people are constantly moving in some fashion, unless they are dead. We don't need to record all these movements. However, when we do show them, they should be significant and interesting. In addition to over-recording the gestures, the passage above (straight from the fevered brain of yours truly, solely for the purposes of illustration) relies on stock gestures: wine, cigarettes, hair. B-movie stuff. The neck action is a little better; perhaps our man has a crick from some interesting experience we will learn about later.
This is an area in which writing is very much like acting. As writers, we inhabit imagined bodies and can operate them as we wish. This gives us great freedom, and we don't want to waste it standing around like dorks--or stubbing out cigarettes. I remember hanging out with an actor several years ago, and feeling increasingly self-conscious as I realized she was observing and filing away my gestures for later use. (I realized this because she told me she was doing it.) Nevertheless, this was a good practice for her as an artist, and it behooves writers to do it as well. In a couple of writing classes, I've been given the assignment to surreptitiously record conversations to learn how people really talk. I would give us all the assignment of watching how people move. Note especially the gestures that deviate from stock actions--which most gestures do, after all. I am even thinking of keeping a gesture library in my journal, so I won't fall back on hair-twisting.
At least, if my female character above is going to twist her hair, she must do it in an original and telling way. Maybe she could be wrapping it around a pencil, a process that ends up drawing far more of her concentration than she had expected to have to give it. Immediately she and the conversation become far more interesting.
Desperate to borrow money (so that he can look even more like a murderer than he already does), Dmitri appeals to Mme. Hohlakov. This dingbat serves as Dostoevsky's explanation for why women should not be "liberated," or even allowed to read. She offers to solve all Dmitri's financial problems by giving him a suggestion worth a thousand times more than the paltry sum he wants to borrow: he must go to the gold mines. It takes Dmitri awhile to realize that Mme. H is giving him the suggestion instead of money, rather than in addition to it--and so follows a somewhat amusing scene of mistaken-assumption type humor. (It might be interesting, though not right now, to compare this to Melville's proto-Abbot-and-Costello routine in Moby Dick.) As Dmitri gets even more flustered, Mme. H offers him a final gift:
“Enough, Dmitri Fyodorovitch, enough!” Madame Hohlakov interrupted emphatically. “The question is, will you go to the gold-mines or not; have you quite made up your mind? Answer yes or no.”
“I will go, madam, afterwards.... I'll go where you like ... but now—”
“Wait!” cried Madame Hohlakov. And jumping up and running to a handsome bureau with numerous little drawers, she began pulling out one drawer after another, looking for something with desperate haste.
“The three thousand,” thought Mitya, his heart almost stopping, “and at the instant ... without any papers or formalities ... that's doing things in gentlemanly style! She's a splendid woman, if only she didn't talk so much!”
“Here!” cried Madame Hohlakov, running back joyfully to Mitya, “here is what I was looking for!”
It was a tiny silver ikon on a cord, such as is sometimes worn next the skin with a cross.
“This is from Kiev, Dmitri Fyodorovitch,” she went on reverently, “from the relics of the Holy Martyr, Varvara. Let me put it on your neck myself, and with it dedicate you to a new life, to a new career.”
And she actually put the cord round his neck, and began arranging it. In extreme embarrassment, Mitya bent down and helped her, and at last he got it under his neck-tie and collar through his shirt to his chest.
“Now you can set off,” Madame Hohlakov pronounced, sitting down triumphantly in her place again.
I direct my fellow writers to the two sentences beginning with "And she actually put the cord around his neck..." Dmitri's actions in helping her with this useless (to him) gift are so plausible, precisely because they seem implausible. As frustrated as he is, some ancient habit of politeness and propriety still kicks in. We all wait and watch as he gets the ikon properly situated. Of course this detail tells that Dmitri is not a bad sort deep down, for all his bluster and violence. It also shows us how hard he's trying to get on Mme. H's good side, as the money he still thinks he's getting fades away before his eyes. Also it briefly slows the pace of the story, which is otherwise in a headlong rush. Dostoevsky, once in awhile at least, recognizes that his readers need breathers; prose, like music, needs diminuendos as well as crescendos.
The preciseness of this action got me thinking about how writers use characters' physical gestures in general. I sometimes find myself getting so caught up in writing a dialog, or the broader actions in a scene, that I forget to look at what the characters are doing while everything's happening. Now, one can go too far in the other direction:
"What are you thinking?" she asked, twisting her hair around her index finger.
"Nothing," he said. He stubbed out his cigarette.
She took a sip of her wine. "It doesn't look like nothing."
"What are you implying?" he said, rubbing the back of his neck.
In real life, people are constantly moving in some fashion, unless they are dead. We don't need to record all these movements. However, when we do show them, they should be significant and interesting. In addition to over-recording the gestures, the passage above (straight from the fevered brain of yours truly, solely for the purposes of illustration) relies on stock gestures: wine, cigarettes, hair. B-movie stuff. The neck action is a little better; perhaps our man has a crick from some interesting experience we will learn about later.
This is an area in which writing is very much like acting. As writers, we inhabit imagined bodies and can operate them as we wish. This gives us great freedom, and we don't want to waste it standing around like dorks--or stubbing out cigarettes. I remember hanging out with an actor several years ago, and feeling increasingly self-conscious as I realized she was observing and filing away my gestures for later use. (I realized this because she told me she was doing it.) Nevertheless, this was a good practice for her as an artist, and it behooves writers to do it as well. In a couple of writing classes, I've been given the assignment to surreptitiously record conversations to learn how people really talk. I would give us all the assignment of watching how people move. Note especially the gestures that deviate from stock actions--which most gestures do, after all. I am even thinking of keeping a gesture library in my journal, so I won't fall back on hair-twisting.
At least, if my female character above is going to twist her hair, she must do it in an original and telling way. Maybe she could be wrapping it around a pencil, a process that ends up drawing far more of her concentration than she had expected to have to give it. Immediately she and the conversation become far more interesting.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Borrowed Fire: How to corrupt a hero
I'll start this week's workshop on The Brothers Karamazov with a follow-up to last week's post. I attempted to explain why Dostoevsky chose to interrupt a nicely galloping mystery plot with a biography of an idealized individual, who is not even central to that plot. The broad answer is that the mystery story is merely a scaffolding on which Dostoevsky hangs his spiritual portrait of Russia--so he is not only free but obliged to wander off into theological labyrinths just as the central crime is about to take place. This structure does serve to create suspense (which may or may not be the same as reader frustration). Also it's interesting that a mystery tale is the apparatus for theological exploration. For Dostoevsky, God and the human heart are intertwined mysteries, so it makes sense that the ostensible plot is about searching, wondering, fastening on clues and chasing down false leads, and being desperate for answers. We literary writers could do well to revisit various forms of genre fiction (science fiction, fantasy, romance, detective, horror, thriller, etc.), with an eye to how these plots might lend themselves to various Big Questions. Personally I find the juxtaposition of genre and anti-genre (if you will) in BK quite bracing.
The Zossima section, as I mentioned last time, depicts religious ecstasy in a convincing manner. Zossima, his professed atheist brother, and a local dignitary who's wrestling with a secret crime, all come to realize and exalt in the interconnectedness of all beings. Zossima's vision is humanistic, by which I mean he believes heaven and hell are ultimately provinces of the human heart. The greatest joy comes when we sense our own hearts opening to reveal infinite love for all creation, the heaven that is contained within each of us. We are all capable--temporarily--of love on this divine scale. A modern equivalent of Zossima's tales might be David Foster Wallace's "All That," which is a really beautiful story. In both, such ecstatic moments are always fleeting; perhaps because the heart can't bear such joy for long without exploding, or maybe because--as Dostoevsky makes explicit in BK--the human vessel is literally corrupt.
Now we discover another reason for the long digression on Zossima's life. Dostoevsky has set him up in order to bring him down. Way down. Writing teachers tell us not to protect our characters, especially those we love and admire the most, and here Dostoevsky complies by causing Zossima's body literally to stink. First, the ailing monk passes away, somewhat peacefully, but not without significant pain, surprising both Alyosha and the reader. Like Alyosha, we're expecting God, and / or the author, to grant this saintly man a painless death. But then things get even worse. There's a general belief on the part of the monks and the townspeople that God does not allow the corpses of holy men to rot. As Zossima's body is laid out and viewed, everyone looks forward to witnessing the miracle of his physical preservation...and then someone suggests they open a window. Zossima's body is rotting, and even faster than expected. This brings cynical delight to all who like to see great men cut down, and it devastates Alyosha--not because he wanted to see a miracle, but because he can't understand why God would humiliate his faithful servant in such a gruesome manner.
Of the corruption, Dostoevsky says,
And this is why authors should imitate Dostoevsky and his God. They must bring the mighty, especially the morally mighty, low. You need not be cruel; you do not want readers like the cynical townspeople and monks, who like to see goodness punished for their own gratification. But there is nothing more human than corruption, in the larger sense. And nothing more challenging to faith and love. You need to give some genuine "shock" to the intellect and emotions of your characters, to strengthen them and give them definite aim. That's how they become real literary heroes.
The Zossima section, as I mentioned last time, depicts religious ecstasy in a convincing manner. Zossima, his professed atheist brother, and a local dignitary who's wrestling with a secret crime, all come to realize and exalt in the interconnectedness of all beings. Zossima's vision is humanistic, by which I mean he believes heaven and hell are ultimately provinces of the human heart. The greatest joy comes when we sense our own hearts opening to reveal infinite love for all creation, the heaven that is contained within each of us. We are all capable--temporarily--of love on this divine scale. A modern equivalent of Zossima's tales might be David Foster Wallace's "All That," which is a really beautiful story. In both, such ecstatic moments are always fleeting; perhaps because the heart can't bear such joy for long without exploding, or maybe because--as Dostoevsky makes explicit in BK--the human vessel is literally corrupt.
Now we discover another reason for the long digression on Zossima's life. Dostoevsky has set him up in order to bring him down. Way down. Writing teachers tell us not to protect our characters, especially those we love and admire the most, and here Dostoevsky complies by causing Zossima's body literally to stink. First, the ailing monk passes away, somewhat peacefully, but not without significant pain, surprising both Alyosha and the reader. Like Alyosha, we're expecting God, and / or the author, to grant this saintly man a painless death. But then things get even worse. There's a general belief on the part of the monks and the townspeople that God does not allow the corpses of holy men to rot. As Zossima's body is laid out and viewed, everyone looks forward to witnessing the miracle of his physical preservation...and then someone suggests they open a window. Zossima's body is rotting, and even faster than expected. This brings cynical delight to all who like to see great men cut down, and it devastates Alyosha--not because he wanted to see a miracle, but because he can't understand why God would humiliate his faithful servant in such a gruesome manner.
Of the corruption, Dostoevsky says,
I should, of course, have omitted all mention of it in my story, if it had not exerted a very strong influence on the heart and soul of the chief, though future, hero of my story, Alyosha, forming a crisis and turning-point in his spiritual development, giving a shock to his intellect, which finally strengthened it for the rest of his life and gave it a definite aim.
And this is why authors should imitate Dostoevsky and his God. They must bring the mighty, especially the morally mighty, low. You need not be cruel; you do not want readers like the cynical townspeople and monks, who like to see goodness punished for their own gratification. But there is nothing more human than corruption, in the larger sense. And nothing more challenging to faith and love. You need to give some genuine "shock" to the intellect and emotions of your characters, to strengthen them and give them definite aim. That's how they become real literary heroes.
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Creating a spiritual landscape
While we are on the subject of Russian literature, it's high time I got back to The Brothers Karamazov.
Last week we saw Dostoevsky shift from the philosophical / spiritual set piece of The Grand Inquisitor into full-on mystery-novel mode. The shift takes place via the consciousness of Ivan, the spiritually tormented intellectual. (Ivan is also my candidate for "author insert," even though Dostoevsky probably wished he were Alyosha.) Ivan's tendency to obsess about matters of good and evil is what leads him into Smerdyakov's trap. Smerdyakov knows Ivan can't resist a moral and spiritual puzzle; he also knows that he himself represents that very kind of puzzle to Ivan. So he lies in wait for him, and then explains how he just might have one of his epileptic fits after Ivan leaves town, at the very moment when Dmitri just might be coming to the house to do something really terrible to the brothers' father Fyodor.
Sure enough, Ivan leaves for Moscow, down Smerdyakov goes, and just as the plot is really heating up, we get...umpteen pages on the life of Father Zossima. This is Alyosha's spiritual mentor, here to represent the godly life well-led. What kind of crappy mystery novel is this?
Well, I remember reading in some book on writing craft (I really can't remember the guy's name; he was a screenwriter, I think) that you should "never take readers where they want to go." This is a method for creating suspense, and I suppose Dostoevsky succeeds in that, because I really didn't want to read about Father Zossima at this point--or possibly at any point. Still, as didactic as the section is so far (I haven't finished yet), it does convey several varieties of religious experience and ecstasy. So it seems to me that the larger purpose of this heavy-handed "meanwhile" is to further explore the spiritual landscape of Russia.
As Elif Batuman mentioned during her reading at Kepler's a few nights ago, Dostoevsky--in contrast to Tolstoy--doesn't spend a lot of time on conventional setting: if Tolstoy is movies, Dostoevsky is theater. That is certainly borne out by BK. While we gather that the story takes place in a small provincial town, Dostoevsky is far more concerned with what goes on in people's minds and hearts than with how their daily lives look from the outside. With BK he presents a sweeping portrait of Russia, but it is a spiritual landscape, filmed with a special kind of night-vision camera. Instead of racing over dunes and forests and mountain passes, like the camera in contemporary "epic" films, Dostoevsky swoops and dives from one soul into another--from Alyosha to Ivan to Smerdyakov to Zossima--and covers a territory just as vast.
So this week's nugget for fiction writers to mull over is an idea I've brought up before, in relation to characterization. Perhaps Dostoevsky's brand of show-don't-tell could be an antidote for our overly visual age. That same book on craft I mentioned earlier says that today's readers expect lots of visual detail, because we've been trained by movies and television in ways that readers from previous eras were not. But maybe writers can overdo the visual--or else feel compelled to focus on it, neglecting the wild terrain of the inner landscape.
An exercise: what would a spiritual portrait of your hometown look like?
Last week we saw Dostoevsky shift from the philosophical / spiritual set piece of The Grand Inquisitor into full-on mystery-novel mode. The shift takes place via the consciousness of Ivan, the spiritually tormented intellectual. (Ivan is also my candidate for "author insert," even though Dostoevsky probably wished he were Alyosha.) Ivan's tendency to obsess about matters of good and evil is what leads him into Smerdyakov's trap. Smerdyakov knows Ivan can't resist a moral and spiritual puzzle; he also knows that he himself represents that very kind of puzzle to Ivan. So he lies in wait for him, and then explains how he just might have one of his epileptic fits after Ivan leaves town, at the very moment when Dmitri just might be coming to the house to do something really terrible to the brothers' father Fyodor.
Sure enough, Ivan leaves for Moscow, down Smerdyakov goes, and just as the plot is really heating up, we get...umpteen pages on the life of Father Zossima. This is Alyosha's spiritual mentor, here to represent the godly life well-led. What kind of crappy mystery novel is this?
Well, I remember reading in some book on writing craft (I really can't remember the guy's name; he was a screenwriter, I think) that you should "never take readers where they want to go." This is a method for creating suspense, and I suppose Dostoevsky succeeds in that, because I really didn't want to read about Father Zossima at this point--or possibly at any point. Still, as didactic as the section is so far (I haven't finished yet), it does convey several varieties of religious experience and ecstasy. So it seems to me that the larger purpose of this heavy-handed "meanwhile" is to further explore the spiritual landscape of Russia.
As Elif Batuman mentioned during her reading at Kepler's a few nights ago, Dostoevsky--in contrast to Tolstoy--doesn't spend a lot of time on conventional setting: if Tolstoy is movies, Dostoevsky is theater. That is certainly borne out by BK. While we gather that the story takes place in a small provincial town, Dostoevsky is far more concerned with what goes on in people's minds and hearts than with how their daily lives look from the outside. With BK he presents a sweeping portrait of Russia, but it is a spiritual landscape, filmed with a special kind of night-vision camera. Instead of racing over dunes and forests and mountain passes, like the camera in contemporary "epic" films, Dostoevsky swoops and dives from one soul into another--from Alyosha to Ivan to Smerdyakov to Zossima--and covers a territory just as vast.
So this week's nugget for fiction writers to mull over is an idea I've brought up before, in relation to characterization. Perhaps Dostoevsky's brand of show-don't-tell could be an antidote for our overly visual age. That same book on craft I mentioned earlier says that today's readers expect lots of visual detail, because we've been trained by movies and television in ways that readers from previous eras were not. But maybe writers can overdo the visual--or else feel compelled to focus on it, neglecting the wild terrain of the inner landscape.
An exercise: what would a spiritual portrait of your hometown look like?
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Borrowed Fire: Depression and plot
Another week has gone by, and I have read all of one page in The Brothers Karamazov. But it is a good page. Partly because we're now in the point of view of Ivan, a more tormented character than Alyosha, but not so histrionic as Dmitri or Fyodor. So he's a good guy to hang around with, narratively speaking--emotional, but able to reflect on his emotions in an intelligent and even entertaining way. Not coincidentally, this combination turns out to be helpful for the plot. My friend Kate and I were discussing how to motivate characters, i.e. how to get them (and therefore your plot) moving from where they are to where you want them to go. I think we can learn something from Dostoevsky here about precisely rendered emotion as a driver of plot.
Having delivered himself of his great poem "The Grand Inquisitor," Ivan heads back to his father's house. His internal monologue is dryly funny:
A recent article in the NYT Magazine on depression tells us that in a study, eighty percent of the writers in the Iowa Writers Workshop met the diagnostic criteria for depression. There are so many ways to enjoy this information that I cannot begin to detail them all here. However, the article reasserts the well-established link between depression and creativity. It's safe to say that depression is the life-blood of literature in general, and certainly of BK. The article, called "Depression's Upside," also suggests there is an evolutionary point to depression, in that it gets us to slow down and really examine our problems, which leads ultimately to solutions. In my experience this is generally true, except for the "solutions" part. One ruminates, one even thinks of plausible solutions; however, one does not act, but simply goes on ruminating until the end of time. Rather like being stuck on a plot point.
But if you're an author, presumably you at least recognize that circular rumination is no good for your book; you want your characters to actually do stuff. So it may be particularly compelling for a depressed author to create a depressed character--who's also an author--who figures out exactly what's wrong, and then does something about it. This character moves your plot forward, which allows you to finish your book, which then lifts your depression, maybe, somewhat, for awhile. So, I dunno: maybe there is an upside to depression, but only if you're able to deploy it through your art.
Anyway, like a good depressive, Ivan ruminates on all the possible reasons he has for feeling like crap.
Ivan is so attuned to the nuances of his depression (again, as the best depressives are) that he realizes that this particular flavor of it is unusual. For once it has an "external character," and he surmises (wrongly, as we will see) that if he can only identify it, he can move it out of his way. Having suffered from depression most of his life, Ivan is highly motivated to deal with this rare, concrete form.
Unfortunately for Ivan, Smerdyakov is no mere book that he can simply replace on its shelf.
Ivan's loathing for Smerdyakov is intertwined with (even motivated by) curiosity. The valet is a distorted reflection of Ivan: intellectual, but soulless and conniving. Smerdyakov is also a figure for Ivan's depression--that mixture of curiosity and loathing Ivan feels is like depressive rumination itself. One cannot bear it, but one also cannot turn away. So Ivan cannot simply pass by Smerdyakov or put him, so to speak, back in his place. Smerdyakov is a servant, and as his "better" Ivan can and should put him there. (Radical in some ways, Dostoevsky is no egalitarian. The fact that Smerdyakov blatantly flouts his social standing is a sign of his villainy.) Well aware of Ivan's nature, Smerdyakov easily lures him into a conversation which will turn out to be a major plot point for the book.
Sometimes writers have their characters stumble into circumstances which they don't anticipate or understand. That could be fine, or it could be a sign that your plot, rather than your characters, is driving your story. If so, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, unless that process doesn't feel right. Maybe your people seem to be resisting you when you push. Or maybe when you push, they fall right over, because there's not enough to them in the first place. I've had both problems in writing my novel, and I think I "emptied out" one character because I needed him to do stuff without question. I had my plot in mind and he was going to follow it, dammit. But in the process I made him a shell, and as a result, the plot itself became implausible.
Here, Ivan is stumbling into a set-up, but it feels entirely like his own doing. He's not stupid or hapless, but highly intelligent, as well as plausibly and vividly depressed. He's drawn to the villain because he wants to understand himself, so he can stop suffering. It's telling that Smerdyakov is waiting for Ivan here. He doesn't have to go out looking for him; Ivan comes right to him.
Having delivered himself of his great poem "The Grand Inquisitor," Ivan heads back to his father's house. His internal monologue is dryly funny:
And Ivan, on parting from Alyosha, went home to Fyodor Pavlovitch's house. But, strange to say, he was overcome by insufferable depression, which grew greater at every step he took towards the house. There was nothing strange in his being depressed; what was strange was that Ivan could not have said what was the cause of it.
A recent article in the NYT Magazine on depression tells us that in a study, eighty percent of the writers in the Iowa Writers Workshop met the diagnostic criteria for depression. There are so many ways to enjoy this information that I cannot begin to detail them all here. However, the article reasserts the well-established link between depression and creativity. It's safe to say that depression is the life-blood of literature in general, and certainly of BK. The article, called "Depression's Upside," also suggests there is an evolutionary point to depression, in that it gets us to slow down and really examine our problems, which leads ultimately to solutions. In my experience this is generally true, except for the "solutions" part. One ruminates, one even thinks of plausible solutions; however, one does not act, but simply goes on ruminating until the end of time. Rather like being stuck on a plot point.
But if you're an author, presumably you at least recognize that circular rumination is no good for your book; you want your characters to actually do stuff. So it may be particularly compelling for a depressed author to create a depressed character--who's also an author--who figures out exactly what's wrong, and then does something about it. This character moves your plot forward, which allows you to finish your book, which then lifts your depression, maybe, somewhat, for awhile. So, I dunno: maybe there is an upside to depression, but only if you're able to deploy it through your art.
Anyway, like a good depressive, Ivan ruminates on all the possible reasons he has for feeling like crap.
Yet at that moment, though the apprehension of the new and unknown certainly found place in his heart, what was worrying him was something quite different. “Is it loathing for my father's house?” he wondered. “Quite likely; I am so sick of it; and though it's the last time I shall cross its hateful threshold, still I loathe it.... No, it's not that either. Is it the parting with Alyosha and the conversation I had with him? For so many years I've been silent with the whole world and not deigned to speak, and all of a sudden I reel off a rigmarole like that.” It certainly might have been the youthful vexation of youthful inexperience and vanity—vexation at having failed to express himself, especially with such a being as Alyosha, on whom his heart had certainly been reckoning. No doubt that came in, that vexation, it must have done indeed; but yet that was not it, that was not it either. “I feel sick with depression and yet I can't tell what I want. Better not think, perhaps.”
Ivan tried “not to think,” but that, too, was no use. What made his depression so vexatious and irritating was that it had a kind of casual, external character—he felt that. Some person or thing seemed to be standing out somewhere, just as something will sometimes obtrude itself upon the eye, and though one may be so busy with work or conversation that for a long time one does not notice it, yet it irritates and almost torments one till at last one realizes, and removes the offending object, often quite a trifling and ridiculous one—some article left about in the wrong place, a handkerchief on the floor, a book not replaced on the shelf, and so on.
Ivan is so attuned to the nuances of his depression (again, as the best depressives are) that he realizes that this particular flavor of it is unusual. For once it has an "external character," and he surmises (wrongly, as we will see) that if he can only identify it, he can move it out of his way. Having suffered from depression most of his life, Ivan is highly motivated to deal with this rare, concrete form.
At last, feeling very cross and ill-humored, Ivan arrived home, and suddenly, about fifteen paces from the garden gate, he guessed what was fretting and worrying him.
On a bench in the gateway the valet Smerdyakov was sitting enjoying the coolness of the evening, and at the first glance at him Ivan knew that the valet Smerdyakov was on his mind, and that it was this man that his soul loathed. It all dawned upon him suddenly and became clear.
Unfortunately for Ivan, Smerdyakov is no mere book that he can simply replace on its shelf.
Ivan shook. “Get away, miserable idiot. What have I to do with you?” was on the tip of his tongue, but to his profound astonishment he heard himself say, “Is my father still asleep, or has he waked?”
He asked the question softly and meekly, to his own surprise, and at once, again to his own surprise, sat down on the bench. For an instant he felt almost frightened; he remembered it afterwards. Smerdyakov stood facing him, his hands behind his back, looking at him with assurance and almost severity.
“His honor is still asleep,” he articulated deliberately (“You were the first to speak, not I,” he seemed to say). “I am surprised at you, sir,” he added, after a pause, dropping his eyes affectedly, setting his right foot forward, and playing with the tip of his polished boot.
“Why are you surprised at me?” Ivan asked abruptly and sullenly, doing his utmost to restrain himself, and suddenly realizing, with disgust, that he was feeling intense curiosity and would not, on any account, have gone away without satisfying it.
Ivan's loathing for Smerdyakov is intertwined with (even motivated by) curiosity. The valet is a distorted reflection of Ivan: intellectual, but soulless and conniving. Smerdyakov is also a figure for Ivan's depression--that mixture of curiosity and loathing Ivan feels is like depressive rumination itself. One cannot bear it, but one also cannot turn away. So Ivan cannot simply pass by Smerdyakov or put him, so to speak, back in his place. Smerdyakov is a servant, and as his "better" Ivan can and should put him there. (Radical in some ways, Dostoevsky is no egalitarian. The fact that Smerdyakov blatantly flouts his social standing is a sign of his villainy.) Well aware of Ivan's nature, Smerdyakov easily lures him into a conversation which will turn out to be a major plot point for the book.
Sometimes writers have their characters stumble into circumstances which they don't anticipate or understand. That could be fine, or it could be a sign that your plot, rather than your characters, is driving your story. If so, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, unless that process doesn't feel right. Maybe your people seem to be resisting you when you push. Or maybe when you push, they fall right over, because there's not enough to them in the first place. I've had both problems in writing my novel, and I think I "emptied out" one character because I needed him to do stuff without question. I had my plot in mind and he was going to follow it, dammit. But in the process I made him a shell, and as a result, the plot itself became implausible.
Here, Ivan is stumbling into a set-up, but it feels entirely like his own doing. He's not stupid or hapless, but highly intelligent, as well as plausibly and vividly depressed. He's drawn to the villain because he wants to understand himself, so he can stop suffering. It's telling that Smerdyakov is waiting for Ivan here. He doesn't have to go out looking for him; Ivan comes right to him.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Borrowed Fire: The Brothers Karamazov: The Grand Inquisitor
This week we arrive at a major milestone in this many-mile long book: the story-within-a-story called "The Grand Inquisitor." It's often taught in high schools and colleges as a stand-alone piece, and even people who haven't read BK have read, or somehow know, the GI.
I've read it a bunch of times now, and it still blows me away every time. Maybe it's just because I'm a lifelong secular humanist / atheist, who occasionally dabbles in Northern California Buddhism. Maybe people who've grown up with religion find the issues here old hat, or else beside the point. It is the same old stuff--the problem of evil and suffering, how we can have free will if there's a God, how Jesus's teachings get twisted by those who teach them. Of course it's also an extended fusillade at the Catholic church, which tends to present a big target in all centuries; and a warning about totalitarianism, which in this case comes cloaked in religion. The Grand Inquisitor's vision looks a lot like the Fox News Channel to me, but never mind.
Anyway, there's no point in my trying to summarize the piece here. I really think you should just go read it. It's only about twenty pages. If you read nothing else in BK, you can do this. I can wait.
[elevator music plays]
I tell you, it just knocks me out, even though it's not a story at all, but a philosophical tract the form of a monologue. One guy (GI) talking to another guy (Jesus), who doesn't even talk back. The occasional interruptions by the storyteller (Ivan) and his listener (Alyosha) are mainly points of clarification; they offer a less clunky way for Dostoevsky to make the GI's philosophy clearer to us, without having him rant on even further.
So how about that Jesus, huh? He actually wants to make things hard for his followers. He doesn't make it easy to believe in him. He refuses to perform the miracles that would convince people to follow him on the spot. They must choose him of their own free will, and deal with the fact that he probably won't show his face to them--unambiguously, anyway--in their lifetime. The GI, meanwhile, just wants to help people who are suffering from this uncertainty. By taking people's free will from them, he gives them what they really want: security and community, which comes through a confirmed belief in miracles. And yet the GI suffers, too. Unlike stock villains, he doesn't enjoy his power in the slightest. He knows he's doing evil, and he suffers--because he wants people to be happy, and not suffer as he does. It's just not easy for anybody in this world, not even the devil. And yet we're still supposed to have faith. That is faith, apparently, this suffering.
All well and fine. But what is the lesson for fiction writers here? Am I suggesting we all write a "poem" (as Ivan calls his story) like this and plunk it down in the middle of our novels or medium-to-long stories? I say yes! I am a big fan of the story-within-a-story, especially if it's self-contained, difficult, and from another time and place than the larger story, with other rules.* I love the unexpectedness of such things, the plunge down the rabbit hole, after which we climb back out and continue on our path through the larger fictional world--only slightly dizzy, and wondering exactly what just happened.
But how to you keep the s-w-a-s from being a mere "lump" that the reader trips over? Especially if it's almost pure research or philosophy, rather than an actual story? A few tips from Dostoevsky:
1) Have a character tell the story, and have that character be mysterious and maybe a little bit unhinged.
2) Make the story a different kind of story than you'd expect that character to tell (as Alyosha points out, Ivan, who has a big problem with God, has ended up praising Jesus in the GI).
3) Make the story slam the outer action to a halt. This sounds counter-intuitive; but the fact that Alyosha has just come from a round of visits to various frantic people, and is desperate to go and see his mentor on his deathbed, raises the stakes of Ivan's story. The story has to be good, and important, for Alyosha to stop and listen to it.
4) Allow interruptions by the "outer" characters. If you are presenting a big block of information (or philosophy), it helps to break it up and offer other characters' takes on the story. We do learn more about Alyosha and Ivan through their little exchanges in the midst of all this heavy stuff. Alyosha's frightened but interested; Ivan, while tormented by these ideas, laughs and is gentle with his brother.
5) Have good, fully developed characters within the story, not stock or purely allegorical figures. In this case, Jesus is still a bit of a cipher. But the suffering Grand Inquisitor towers as high as any of the Karamazov brothers, or Milton's Satan. He is one for the ages.
*Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a great example, which comes to mind 'cos I just finished it.
I've read it a bunch of times now, and it still blows me away every time. Maybe it's just because I'm a lifelong secular humanist / atheist, who occasionally dabbles in Northern California Buddhism. Maybe people who've grown up with religion find the issues here old hat, or else beside the point. It is the same old stuff--the problem of evil and suffering, how we can have free will if there's a God, how Jesus's teachings get twisted by those who teach them. Of course it's also an extended fusillade at the Catholic church, which tends to present a big target in all centuries; and a warning about totalitarianism, which in this case comes cloaked in religion. The Grand Inquisitor's vision looks a lot like the Fox News Channel to me, but never mind.
Anyway, there's no point in my trying to summarize the piece here. I really think you should just go read it. It's only about twenty pages. If you read nothing else in BK, you can do this. I can wait.
[elevator music plays]
I tell you, it just knocks me out, even though it's not a story at all, but a philosophical tract the form of a monologue. One guy (GI) talking to another guy (Jesus), who doesn't even talk back. The occasional interruptions by the storyteller (Ivan) and his listener (Alyosha) are mainly points of clarification; they offer a less clunky way for Dostoevsky to make the GI's philosophy clearer to us, without having him rant on even further.
So how about that Jesus, huh? He actually wants to make things hard for his followers. He doesn't make it easy to believe in him. He refuses to perform the miracles that would convince people to follow him on the spot. They must choose him of their own free will, and deal with the fact that he probably won't show his face to them--unambiguously, anyway--in their lifetime. The GI, meanwhile, just wants to help people who are suffering from this uncertainty. By taking people's free will from them, he gives them what they really want: security and community, which comes through a confirmed belief in miracles. And yet the GI suffers, too. Unlike stock villains, he doesn't enjoy his power in the slightest. He knows he's doing evil, and he suffers--because he wants people to be happy, and not suffer as he does. It's just not easy for anybody in this world, not even the devil. And yet we're still supposed to have faith. That is faith, apparently, this suffering.
All well and fine. But what is the lesson for fiction writers here? Am I suggesting we all write a "poem" (as Ivan calls his story) like this and plunk it down in the middle of our novels or medium-to-long stories? I say yes! I am a big fan of the story-within-a-story, especially if it's self-contained, difficult, and from another time and place than the larger story, with other rules.* I love the unexpectedness of such things, the plunge down the rabbit hole, after which we climb back out and continue on our path through the larger fictional world--only slightly dizzy, and wondering exactly what just happened.
But how to you keep the s-w-a-s from being a mere "lump" that the reader trips over? Especially if it's almost pure research or philosophy, rather than an actual story? A few tips from Dostoevsky:
1) Have a character tell the story, and have that character be mysterious and maybe a little bit unhinged.
2) Make the story a different kind of story than you'd expect that character to tell (as Alyosha points out, Ivan, who has a big problem with God, has ended up praising Jesus in the GI).
3) Make the story slam the outer action to a halt. This sounds counter-intuitive; but the fact that Alyosha has just come from a round of visits to various frantic people, and is desperate to go and see his mentor on his deathbed, raises the stakes of Ivan's story. The story has to be good, and important, for Alyosha to stop and listen to it.
4) Allow interruptions by the "outer" characters. If you are presenting a big block of information (or philosophy), it helps to break it up and offer other characters' takes on the story. We do learn more about Alyosha and Ivan through their little exchanges in the midst of all this heavy stuff. Alyosha's frightened but interested; Ivan, while tormented by these ideas, laughs and is gentle with his brother.
5) Have good, fully developed characters within the story, not stock or purely allegorical figures. In this case, Jesus is still a bit of a cipher. But the suffering Grand Inquisitor towers as high as any of the Karamazov brothers, or Milton's Satan. He is one for the ages.
*Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin is a great example, which comes to mind 'cos I just finished it.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Borrowed Fire: The Brothers Karamazov: Where is the fault?
(For those new to the blog: Borrowed Fire is an ongoing series, in which I attempt to learn fiction writing by reading classic works of literature. All BF texts are posted on Project Gutenberg, so everyone can follow along, or at least locate the relevant sections. We're now about knee-deep in The Brothers Karamazov, God help us. Previous works include Chekhov's "Gusev," H.G. Wells's "The Door in the Wall," Melville's Moby Dick, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Gogol's "The Overcoat," Conrad's The Secret Agent, and Thoreau's Walden. One of my purposes is to figure out how older--and perhaps seemingly outdated--ideas and techniques might be brought to bear on contemporary fiction. This is not, by the way, to say I don't like Raymond Carver. I do. Really. But there are other models we might follow, too, or...dare I say, instead...)
So this past week I was reading along through the series of chapters called "Lacerations." And I have to say it was getting a tad monotonous. Our hero, Alyosha, has become the designated errand boy for the bunch of lunatics that comprise his family and the small town in which they live. We therefore get many, many pages of people falling upon him, pouring out their troubles, and begging him to go see so-and-so and explain to them about such-and-such, because they can't bear to do it themselves, you see... The problem is they all express themselves in pretty much the same way, at length, and at the textual equivalent of high volume (lots of exclamation points!). As we know from the latest season of Lost, constant high volume is as boring as no volume at all. We need ups and downs, what they call in music dynamics. And we need people's voices not to all sound the same.
Still, I'm pretty sure I see where Dostoevsky is going. For one thing, he's building toward "The Grand Inquisitor," possibly the greatest set-piece in all of literature, and certainly one of the most intriguing meditations on Christianity that I've ever read. Before that, the pious Alyosha has to be exposed to all manner of suffering, the bulk of it undeserved--because his faith, although he never loses it, is going to be challenged. The question of why God allows innocents to suffer (or maybe makes them suffer, for that has to be the same thing, really) preoccupies Dostoevsky. The three brothers Karamazov, representing sensuality, intellectuality, and spirituality, are instruments through which he works these questions out. The degree to which they are also very human--not allowing themselves to be completely instrumentalized, by either Dostoevsky or God--is one of the most fascinating aspects of BK. They really do rebel against their creator(s).
Which brings me to today's topic, which was going to be the topic even before I attended Richard Powers's talk yesterday. Now it's even more the topic, because I have it on good authority that this is a question writers are going to have to consider seriously as the trans-human age approaches. The question is, where do characters' faults lie? In the stars or in themselves, or in some specific combination of the two? In other words, does fate (or genes) or free will rule, and how do these forces actually function in your created world?
All right, let's make the question specific to BK. In the course of his errand-running, Alyosha happens across a group of schoolboys who are throwing stones at another boy. Taking the underdog's side, as a good Christian, Alyosha approaches the lone boy to attempt to find out why the others are attacking him. But the victim promptly grabs Alyosha's hand and chomps the hell out of his finger. As fortune--i.e. the tangled web of intrigue woven by Dmitri--would have it, Katerina sends him to the household of that very boy's father. Turns out Dmitri humiliated the boy's father, a captain, by dragging him out of a tavern into the street, by his beard, no less. The schoolboys, who witnessed the scene, call the beard a "wisp of tow," and I suppose the Freudian implications need not be elaborated upon here.
Anyway, in talking to the captain, Alyosha figures out why Ilusha bit his hand.
Alyosha understands that Ilusha is not really justified in biting him. But Alyosha is a Karamazov, a fact of which people keep pointedly reminding him. He is as different from Dmitri as can be, but he bears the same name. Therefore he bears some responsibility, if not guilt, for Dmitri's actions.* There is talk throughout the novel of a "Karamazov curse." Alyosha can disavow neither his brother's actions, nor his name. In this world, there's no going elsewhere and reinventing yourself. This does not mean Alyosha is powerless, but he has to play the cards he's been dealt; and his, though unfairly, will always be marked with a "K." Thus all the errand-running.
This notion of having relatively little control over your basic identity has at least two sources here: a firm belief in an all-seeing God, and the kind of rural / small-town setting that keeps extended families close together. Everyone knows who you are; God knows who you are. And so you are that guy, forever enmeshed in that web. Contrast this with (for example) the atomized three-sibling family in The Corrections, another sprawling family novel that I love. The Corrections concerns questions of responsibility as well, especially responsibility toward one's aging parents when one's own life is going down the toilet. But the sins of Chip have nothing to do with the sins of Gary. They and their sister each struggle along in their own narrative silos; while each appears in the others' stories, the bulk of the novel is made up of separate narrative sections in which each sibling is the lead protagonist. If someone told Gary that Chip was an asshole, Gary might say, "Yeah, he is, isn't he?" and that would be a perfectly reasonable response. Gary has his own problems, besides. But Alyosha must constantly circulate from brother to father, from wronged fiancee to humiliated captain, because the fault is not *only* with oneself in BK. It is familial, national, and ultimately global. Humans are all fallen, and all are therefore responsible for each other.
In other words, deciding where the "fault" lies will shape the structure of your fiction, as well as the precise nature of your characters. An interesting experiment for your (or my) next story might be shifting the location of the fault from where we normally would place it. If you tend to think people are the masters of their own destinies, make it so they aren't. If you believe in an overarching fate or power, remove it, or change that power's nature. Just being conscious of where we place the fault, I think, will yield some very interesting results.
*See the Slacktivist for a fascinating discussion of guilt vs. responsibility, which ties right into Dostoevsky.
So this past week I was reading along through the series of chapters called "Lacerations." And I have to say it was getting a tad monotonous. Our hero, Alyosha, has become the designated errand boy for the bunch of lunatics that comprise his family and the small town in which they live. We therefore get many, many pages of people falling upon him, pouring out their troubles, and begging him to go see so-and-so and explain to them about such-and-such, because they can't bear to do it themselves, you see... The problem is they all express themselves in pretty much the same way, at length, and at the textual equivalent of high volume (lots of exclamation points!). As we know from the latest season of Lost, constant high volume is as boring as no volume at all. We need ups and downs, what they call in music dynamics. And we need people's voices not to all sound the same.
Still, I'm pretty sure I see where Dostoevsky is going. For one thing, he's building toward "The Grand Inquisitor," possibly the greatest set-piece in all of literature, and certainly one of the most intriguing meditations on Christianity that I've ever read. Before that, the pious Alyosha has to be exposed to all manner of suffering, the bulk of it undeserved--because his faith, although he never loses it, is going to be challenged. The question of why God allows innocents to suffer (or maybe makes them suffer, for that has to be the same thing, really) preoccupies Dostoevsky. The three brothers Karamazov, representing sensuality, intellectuality, and spirituality, are instruments through which he works these questions out. The degree to which they are also very human--not allowing themselves to be completely instrumentalized, by either Dostoevsky or God--is one of the most fascinating aspects of BK. They really do rebel against their creator(s).
Which brings me to today's topic, which was going to be the topic even before I attended Richard Powers's talk yesterday. Now it's even more the topic, because I have it on good authority that this is a question writers are going to have to consider seriously as the trans-human age approaches. The question is, where do characters' faults lie? In the stars or in themselves, or in some specific combination of the two? In other words, does fate (or genes) or free will rule, and how do these forces actually function in your created world?
All right, let's make the question specific to BK. In the course of his errand-running, Alyosha happens across a group of schoolboys who are throwing stones at another boy. Taking the underdog's side, as a good Christian, Alyosha approaches the lone boy to attempt to find out why the others are attacking him. But the victim promptly grabs Alyosha's hand and chomps the hell out of his finger. As fortune--i.e. the tangled web of intrigue woven by Dmitri--would have it, Katerina sends him to the household of that very boy's father. Turns out Dmitri humiliated the boy's father, a captain, by dragging him out of a tavern into the street, by his beard, no less. The schoolboys, who witnessed the scene, call the beard a "wisp of tow," and I suppose the Freudian implications need not be elaborated upon here.
Anyway, in talking to the captain, Alyosha figures out why Ilusha bit his hand.
"I think I understand it all now," said Alyosha gently and sorrowfully, still keeping his seat. "So your boy is a good boy, he loves his father, and he attacked me as the brother of your assailant.... Now I understand it," he repeated thoughtfully.
Alyosha understands that Ilusha is not really justified in biting him. But Alyosha is a Karamazov, a fact of which people keep pointedly reminding him. He is as different from Dmitri as can be, but he bears the same name. Therefore he bears some responsibility, if not guilt, for Dmitri's actions.* There is talk throughout the novel of a "Karamazov curse." Alyosha can disavow neither his brother's actions, nor his name. In this world, there's no going elsewhere and reinventing yourself. This does not mean Alyosha is powerless, but he has to play the cards he's been dealt; and his, though unfairly, will always be marked with a "K." Thus all the errand-running.
This notion of having relatively little control over your basic identity has at least two sources here: a firm belief in an all-seeing God, and the kind of rural / small-town setting that keeps extended families close together. Everyone knows who you are; God knows who you are. And so you are that guy, forever enmeshed in that web. Contrast this with (for example) the atomized three-sibling family in The Corrections, another sprawling family novel that I love. The Corrections concerns questions of responsibility as well, especially responsibility toward one's aging parents when one's own life is going down the toilet. But the sins of Chip have nothing to do with the sins of Gary. They and their sister each struggle along in their own narrative silos; while each appears in the others' stories, the bulk of the novel is made up of separate narrative sections in which each sibling is the lead protagonist. If someone told Gary that Chip was an asshole, Gary might say, "Yeah, he is, isn't he?" and that would be a perfectly reasonable response. Gary has his own problems, besides. But Alyosha must constantly circulate from brother to father, from wronged fiancee to humiliated captain, because the fault is not *only* with oneself in BK. It is familial, national, and ultimately global. Humans are all fallen, and all are therefore responsible for each other.
In other words, deciding where the "fault" lies will shape the structure of your fiction, as well as the precise nature of your characters. An interesting experiment for your (or my) next story might be shifting the location of the fault from where we normally would place it. If you tend to think people are the masters of their own destinies, make it so they aren't. If you believe in an overarching fate or power, remove it, or change that power's nature. Just being conscious of where we place the fault, I think, will yield some very interesting results.
*See the Slacktivist for a fascinating discussion of guilt vs. responsibility, which ties right into Dostoevsky.
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