Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

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

  In a way, Frank’s books aren’t really literary biographies at all, at least not in the way that Ellmann’s book on Joyce and Bate’s on Keats are. For one thing, Frank is as much a cultural historian as he is a biographer—his aim is to create an accurate and exhaustive context for FMD’s works, to place the author’s life and writing within a coherent account of nineteenth-century Russia’s intellectual life. Ellmann’s James Joyce, pretty much the standard by which most literary bios are measured, doesn’t go into anything like Frank’s detail on ideology or politics or social theory. What Frank is about is showing that a comprehensive reading of Dostoevsky’s fiction is impossible without a detailed understanding of the cultural circumstances in which the books were conceived and to which they were meant to contribute. This, Frank argues, is because Dostoevsky’s mature works are fundamentally ideological and cannot truly be appreciated unless one understands the polemical agendas that inform them. In other words, the admixture of universal and particular that characterizes Notes from Underground5 really marks all the best work of FMD, a writer whose “evident desire,” Frank says, is “to dramatize his moral-spiritual themes against the background of Russian history.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The point is that it’s not just the death-by-canonization thing: there is real and alienating stuff that stands in the way of our appreciating Dostoevsky and has to be dealt with—either by learning enough about all the unfamiliar stuff that it stops being so confusing, or else by accepting it (the same way we accept racist/sexist elements in some other nineteenth-century books) and just grimacing and reading on anyway.

  But the larger point (which, yes, may be kind of obvious) is that some art is worth the extra work of getting past all the impediments to its appreciation; and Dostoevsky’s books are definitely worth the work. And this is so not just becaus
e of his bestriding the Western canon—if anything, it’s despite that. For one thing that canonization and course assignments obscure is that Dostoevsky isn’t just great—he’s also fun. His novels almost always have ripping good plots, lurid and intricate and thoroughly dramatic. There are murders and attempted murders and police and dysfunctional-family feuding and spies, tough guys and beautiful fallen women and unctuous con men and wasting illnesses and sudden inheritances and silky villains and scheming and whores.

  Of course, the fact that Dostoevsky can tell a juicy story isn’t enough to make him great. If it were, Judith Krantz and John Grisham would be great fiction writers, and by any but the most commercial standards they’re not even very good. The main thing that keeps Krantz and Grisham and lot of other gifted storytellers from being artistically good is that they don’t have any talent for (or interest in) characterization—their compelling plots are inhabited by crude and unconvincing stick figures. (In fairness, there are also writers who are good at making complex and fully realized human characters but don’t seem able to insert those characters into a believable and interesting plot. Plus others—often among the academic avant-garde—who seem expert/interested in neither plot nor character, whose books’ movement and appeal depend entirely on rarefied meta-aesthetic agendas.)

  The thing about Dostoevsky’s characters is that they are alive. By which I don’t just mean that they’re successfully realized or developed or “rounded.” The best of them live inside us, forever, once we’ve met them. Recall the proud and pathetic Raskolnikov, the naive Devushkin, the beautiful and damned Nastasya of The Idiot,14 the fawning Lebyedev and spiderish Ippolit of the same novel; C&P’s ingenious maverick detective Porfiry Petrovich (without whom there would probably be no commercial crime fiction w/ eccentrically brilliant cops); Marmeladov, the hideous and pitiful sot; or the vain and noble roulette addict Aleksey Ivanovich of The Gambler; the gold-hearted prostitutes Sonya and Liza; the cynically innocent Aglaia; or the unbelievably repellent Smerdyakov, that living engine of slimy resentment in whom I personally see parts of myself I can barely stand to look at; or the idealized and all-too-human Myshkin and Alyosha, the doomed human Christ and triumphant child-pilgrim, respectively. These and so many other FMD creatures are alive—retain what Frank calls their “immense vitality”—not because they’re just skillfully drawn types or facets of human beings but because, acting within plausible and morally compelling plots, they dramatize the profoundest parts of all humans, the parts most conflicted, most serious—the ones with the most at stake. Plus, without ever ceasing to be 3-D individuals, Dostoevsky’s characters manage to embody whole ideologies and philosophies of life: Raskolnikov the rational egoism of the 1860s’ intelligentsia, Myshkin mystical Christian love, the Underground Man the influence of European positivism on the Russian character, Ippolit the individual will raging against death’s inevitability, Aleksey the perversion of Slavophilic pride in the face of European decadence, and so on and so forth… .

  The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that’s really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being—that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.

  ** Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind? **

  It’s a well-known irony that Dostoevsky, whose work is famous for its compassion and moral rigor, was in many ways a prick in real life—vain, arrogant, spiteful, selfish. A compulsive gambler, he was usually broke, and whined constantly about his poverty, and was always badgering his friends and colleagues for emergency loans that he seldom repaid, and held petty and long-standing grudges over money, and did things like pawn his delicate wife’s winter coat so he could gamble, etc. 15

  But it’s just as well known that Dostoevsky’s own life was full of incredible suffering and drama and tragedy and heroism. His Moscow childhood was evidently so miserable that in his books Dostoevsky never once sets or even mentions any action in Moscow. 16 His remote and neurasthenic father was murdered by his own serfs when FMD was seventeen. Seven years later, the publication of his first novel, 17 and its endorsement by critics like Belinsky and Herzen, made Dostoevsky a literary star at the same time he was starting to get involved with the Petrashevsky Circle, a group of revolutionary intellectuals who plotted to incite a peasant uprising against the tsar. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested as a conspirator, convicted, sentenced to death, and subjected to the famous “mock execution of the Petrashevtsy,” in which the conspirators were blindfolded and tied to stakes and taken all the way to the “Aim!” stage of the firing-squad process before an imperial messenger galloped in with a supposed “last-minute” reprieve from the merciful tsar. His sentence commuted to imprisonment, the epileptic Dostoevsky ended up spending a decade in balmy Siberia, returning to St. Petersburg in 1859 to find that the Russian literary world had all but forgotten him. Then his wife died, slowly and horribly; then his devoted brother died; then their journal Epoch went under; then his epilepsy started getting so bad that he was constantly terrified that he’d die or go insane from the seizures. 18 Hiring a twenty-two-year-old stenographer to help him complete The Gambler in time to satisfy a publisher with whom he’d signed an insane deliver-by-a-certain-date-or-forfeit-all-royalties-for-everything-you-ever-wrote contract, Dostoevsky married this lady six months later, just in time to flee Epoch’s creditors with her, wander unhappily through a Europe whose influence on Russia he despised, 19 have a beloved daughter who died of pneumonia almost right away, writing constantly, penniless, often clinically depressed in the aftermath of tooth-rattling grand mal seizures, going through cycles of manic roulette binges and then crushing self-hatred. Frank’s Volume IV relates a lot of Dostoevsky’s European tribulations via the journals of his new young wife, Anna Snitkin, 20 whose patience and charity as a spouse might well qualify her as a patron saint of today’s codependency groups. 21

  ** What is “an American”? Do we have something important in common, as Americans, or is it just that we all happen to live inside the same boundaries and so have to obey the same laws? How exactly is America different from other countries? Is there really something unique about it? What does that uniqueness entail? We talk a lot about our special rights and freedoms, but are there also special responsibilities that come with being an American? If so, responsibilities to whom? **

  Frank’s bio does cover all this personal stuff, in detail, and he doesn’t try to downplay or whitewash the icky parts. 22 But his project requires that Frank strive at all times to relate Dostoevsky’s personal and psychological life to his books and to the ideologies behind them. The fact that Dostoevsky is first and last an ideological writer 23 makes him an especially congenial subject for Joseph Frank’s contextual approach to biography. And the four extant volumes of Dostoevsky make it clear that the crucial, catalyzing event in FMD’s life, ideologically speaking, was the mock execution of 22 December 1849—a five- or ten-minute interval during which this weak, neurotic, self-involved young writer believed that he was about to die. What resulted inside Dostoevsky was a type of conversion experience, though it gets complicated, because the Christian convictions that inform his writing thereafter are not those of any one church or tradition, and they’re also bound
up with a kind of mystical Russian nationalism and a political conservatism 24 that led the next century’s Soviets to suppress or distort much of Dostoevsky’s work. 25

  ** Does this guy Jesus Christ’s life have something to teach me even if I don’t, or can’t, believe he was divine? What am I supposed to make of the claim that someone who was God’s relative, and so could have turned the cross into a planter or something with just a word, still voluntarily let them nail him up there, and died? Even if we suppose he was divine—did he know? Did he know he could have broken the cross with just a word? Did he know in advance that death would just be temporary (because I bet I could climb up there, too, if I knew that an eternity of right-hand bliss lay on the other side of six hours of pain)? But does any of that even really matter? Can I still believe in JC or Mohammed or Whoever even if I don’t believe they were actual relatives of God? Except what would that mean: “believe in”?**

  What seems most important is that Dostoevsky’s near-death experience changed a typically vain and trendy young writer—a very talented writer, true, but still one whose basic concerns were for his own literary glory—into a person who believed deeply in moral/ spiritual values 26 … more, into someone who believed that a life lived without moral/spiritual values was not just incomplete but depraved. 27

  The big thing that makes Dostoevsky invaluable for American readers and writers is that he appears to possess degrees of passion, conviction, and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today 28—cannot or do not permit ourselves. Joseph Frank does an admirable job of tracing out the interplay of factors that made this engagement possible—FMD’s own beliefs and talents, the ideological and aesthetic climates of his day, etc. Upon his finishing Frank’s books, though, I think that any serious American reader/writer will find himself driven to think hard about what exactly it is that makes many of the novelists of our own place and time look so thematically shallow and lightweight, so morally impoverished, in comparison to Gogol or Dostoevsky (or even to lesser lights like Lermontov and Turgenev). Frank’s bio prompts us to ask ourselves why we seem to require of our art an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions, so that contemporary writers have to either make jokes of them or else try to work them in under cover of some formal trick like intertextual quotation or incongruous juxtaposition, sticking the really urgent stuff inside asterisks as part of some multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit.