by A Voice Still Heard- Selected Essays of Irving Howe (retail) (epub)
But in The Idiot, Dostoevsky instructs himself, he will try for something much more difficult. “The hero of the novel, if not comical, then possesses another sympathetic trait—he is innocent.” Rather than gain the effect of innocence through the oblique devices of comedy, as Cervantes and Dickens did, Dostoevsky would now try to represent innocence directly, full-face, without comic aids or embellishments.
But is this what he actually did in The Idiot? I think not, and, what’s more, I think he could not. His intention has been shrewdly inferred by Harold Rosenberg: “Myshkin’s function is not to alter the course of the action but to disseminate the aura of a new state of being, let events occur as they will.” Yes; but simply because it is a novel and not an idyll or allegory, the book Dostoevsky wrote demonstrates that despite Myshkin’s marvelous qualities he cannot long remain a figure emanating “a new state of being.” Very quickly he is drawn into the Dostoevskian chaos, the typical ambience of this writer (some might add, of the world), and there Myshkin must, alas, become a force of disorder, altering events in ways he had not anticipated, perhaps even in ways Dostoevsky had not planned. Myshkin has no choice. In his own lovable way he turns out to be almost as destructive as the worldly and malevolent figures Dostoevsky sets off against him. A searcher who cannot remain at rest, Myshkin strains, a little like Don Quixote, to negotiate radical transformations of consciousness and thereby reach a universal state of goodness. But for this, in the Russia within which he must act, he has little capacity and less time. It seems to be a “rule” in fictions devoted to such characters that they cannot be granted long stretches of time—a keen intuition shared by greatly different writers about both the nature of reality and the limits of fiction.
Myshkin is a deeply affecting creature, at times even magnificent, but he is hardly innocent. Good Dostoevskian character that he is, Myshkin admits that “it is terribly difficult to fight against these double thoughts. I’ve tried. Goodness only knows how they come and how they arise.” They sound, these “double thoughts,” very much like the afflictions suffered by the rest of humanity, and perhaps to make certain that even the slowest reader will get the point, Dostoevsky makes Myshkin into an epileptic, a sufficiently gross sign of imperfection.
One of Dostoevsky’s notebooks contains this remarkable sentence: “Meekness is the most powerful force that exists in the world.” If this remark helps explain the power of goodness in Christ and Buddha, it may also explain the power of destruction in Christ and Buddha. “What is so destructive in [Myshkin],” writes Murray Krieger, “is the sense others must get from his infinite meekness that they are being judged. Of course, Myshkin knows the sin of pride that is involved in judging and so carefully refrains, condemning himself instead. But this very inversion of the process constitutes a form of judgment too for the guilty. . . .” Aglaya, the acute young woman with whom Myshkin becomes involved, says to him: “You have no tenderness, nothing but the truth, and so you judge unjustly.” A remark at once astonishing and profound—and worth remembering with regard to Melville’s Captain Vere. I see it as clear evidence that Dostoevsky knew that, whatever else, he had not succeeded in his stated intention regarding Myshkin.
What he did succeed in doing was to write a wonderful novel, in good part because he moved past his stated intention. He complicated the portrayal of goodness with mental imbroglios, murderous attacks, epileptic seizures, and sexual disasters. The road to great fiction is strewn with the collapse of high intentions.
From Prince Myshkin to Milly Theale, the fragile heroine of Henry James’s Wings of the Dove, there is an enormous distance, but there is also one crucial similarity: neither character can find a place in common life; the very distinction of each constitutes a sentence of doom. Each displays loveliness of soul, but both Dostoevsky and James refuse to grant them, perhaps because they cannot locate, the ground for a sustained exercise of goodness. Myshkin, suffering from a surplus of consciousness, cannot manage the circumstances of the Russia into which he is thrust; Milly, radiating generosity of spirit, cannot deal with the ways of London society.
Exquisite, dove-like, Milly Theale rises, as the novel continues, to heights of the angelic. Forgiving all who have betrayed her and casting the shadow of her luminous wings over their lives, Milly suggests something of the cold purity, but also the sheer terror, of angelic being. The more she seems to rise above the comfortably human, the more she is unable to gain the small pleasures and fulfillments of the human—and, as if in recognition that this does not permit of any sustained representation, James sees that he must rapidly withdraw his angelic creature from the shabby milieu into which, as a novelist, he felt obliged to put her. Milly’s loveliness is signaled by her fatality: at least on earth, the angelic has no prospect of duration. So Milly barely lingers with the actualities of goodness: she passes beyond these, into a tremor of sublimity, now hovering, as the mildest of rebukes, over the mortals who survive her.
Dickens, in a few of his novels, also struggles with the problem of rendering absolute goodness. He succeeds with Pickwick, though on a smaller scale than Cervantes with Don Quixote, because he does not strain to make Pickwick into an archetype. A good-hearted, sweet-souled petty bourgeois, Pickwick serves as a “local deity” of Olde England, created to lull readers into a persuasion that benevolence can smooth away the difficulties of life. Pickwick does not try to rise above his class position; he realizes himself through limited social definition and inherited bias, occasionally stretching but never breaking these. He is always on the move, but never moves very far. He cannot be imagined as existing anywhere but in stagecoach England, indeed, anywhere but in his own neighborhood, as an ornament of the provincial imagination. Precisely this historical specificity makes him so greatly loved by the English reading public, and sometimes bewildering to those who know him only through translation. For a moment, with Pickwick and his bumbling troupe, the clock of history stands still: that is the pleasure of it.
Everyone knows how numerous are the tests of goodness that would be beyond Pickwick, and everyone feels glad that Dickens has shielded him from them. Brought low through comic plotting, Pickwick finds himself briefly in prison, from which Dickens contrives through some appropriately silly business to rescue him. It is a traditional strategy of the comic to glance just a little beyond its limits, into stretches of experience that comedy is ill-equipped to cope with. Pickwick’s goodness, insofar as we agree to suspend disbelief for a while, can thrive only in the spaces of a comedy that history has made irretrievable.
A deeper conception informs Dickens’s treatment of Little Dorrit. Mild, unassertive, and selfless, she neither represents the virtues of local custom, like Pickwick, nor strains toward universality of value, like Myshkin. She is a figure at rest, in a setting where everything else is turbulent and false; she is sufficient unto herself, harmonious in nature, unqualifiedly responsive to others. She has no need to think about, nor in responding to her do we feel obliged to invoke, the categorical imperative or any universalization of Christian values. Her goodness is a quality of being without any pressure to invoke whatever might be “higher” than or “beyond” goodness. The imaginative realization of this figure is so pure and lucid, mere ideas fade away.
Little Dorrit is not innocent and rarely, if ever, sentimental. No one who has grown up in the Marshalsea prison could be innocent; no one who has had to put up with all those wretched Dorrits could long be sentimental. She knows quite enough about the varieties of selfishness; that is why Dickens has provided her with the family she has, to educate her in the ways of the world. And though she exists entirely within the world, she has no designs upon it, neither to transform nor transcend it. She has no designs of any kind; she is simply a possibility, very rare, of our existence.
What seems to have inspired the creation of Little Dorrit was Dickens’s residual sentiment of Christianity, a sense or memory of a faith unalloyed by dogma, aggression, or institution. This is a “religion,” if religion
at all, of affection, or an ethic without prescription or formula. Dickens himself, as he knew quite well, was far from embodying anything of the sort, but his imagination cherished the possibility, arousing in him the sort of upwelling emotions that the vision of Billy Budd must have aroused in Melville. The religious experience had largely been lost to Dickens, except insofar as it might leave a sediment of purity.
Little Dorrit is not at all a “Christ figure.” She does not ask anyone to abandon the world’s goods and follow her; she could not drive the money changers from the temple; nor can one imagine her on a cross, though she might be among those mourning near it. Nothing even requires that we see her as a distinctively Christian figure, though nothing prevents us either. The great demand upon the reader of Little Dorrit—it can bring on a virtual moral crisis—is to see her quite as she is, unhaloed, not at all “symbolic,” perhaps sublime but in no way transcendent. She makes no demands upon anyone, nor does she try to distinguish herself in any respect. Her behavior is geared entirely to the needs and feelings of those who are near her. She is a great comforter, which may be all that goodness can be in this world. No one could possibly say of Little Dorrit, as Aglaya says of Prince Myshkin, that she lacks tenderness and “has nothing but the truth.” What can truth be to her, who lives by the grace of daily obligation?
Little Dorrit is an astonishing conception, perhaps the sole entirely persuasive figure of “positive goodness” in modern fiction. (The only possible rival is the grandmother in Proust’s great novel.) As against Dostoevsky’s prescription, she is drawn neither in the comic mode nor as an innocent. For modern readers she constitutes a severe problem. Some dismiss her as insipid; others find it difficult to credit her reality and perhaps difficult to live with that reality if they do credit it. Finally, as with all literary judgments, we reach a point where exegesis, persuasion, and eloquence break down, and fundamental differences of perception have to be acknowledged. I myself feel that a failure to respond to the shy magnificence of what Dickens has done here signifies a depletion of life.
How does he manage it? I wish there were some great clinching formula but do not believe there is—a part of critical wisdom is to recognize the limits of critical reach. Part of the answer, a fairly small part, may be due to what some critics have seen as Dickens’s limitation: his inability to conceptualize in a style persuasive to modern readers, or, still more to the point, his lack of interest in trying to conceptualize. Dickens makes no claim for Little Dorrit, he fits her into no theological or theoretical system, he cares little if at all about her symbolic resonance. He simply sees her, a gleam of imagination. He trusts to the sufficiency of his depiction, a feat of discipline by a writer not always disciplined.
Quite deliberately Dickens shrinks Little Dorrit in size, voice, will, and gesture. Though clearly an adult, she seems almost childlike. She loves Arthur Clennam, the thoughtful, melancholy man worn down by failure. They marry, not in a rush of sensuality but as a pact of “making do,” two people bruised into tenderness. Other writers seeking to validate goodness have fixed upon their characters’ revealing flaws in order to retain some plausibility. Dickens, however, presents goodness not through the persuasiveness of a flaw but through the realism of a price. The price of Little Dorrit’s goodness, as of her marriage to Clennam, is a sadly reduced sexuality—an equivalent perhaps to Billy Budd’s stammer. It is as if Dickens had an unspoken belief that a precondition for goodness is the removal of that aggression which may well be intrinsic to the sexual life.
Impresario of Minor Characters
The picaresque novel sets in motion a line of episodes, which in principle is open to indefinite extension, the sole limitations being the protagonist’s energy and the reader’s patience. The picaro moves from adventure to adventure, and each cluster of incidents brings him into relation with a new set of minor characters whose task it is to speed the action and then fade away (also to entertain a bit). Within the picaro (assuming he has a “within”), nothing much happens: he simply moves along to the next episode. What counts here is not experience but energy—which may explain why a mode of fiction in which the central figure keeps rushing through events comes finally to seem quite static. It is a little like running in place.
Dickens, in his last great novels, takes the picaresque line of action and bends it into a sphere or circle enclosing the modern city. The picaro’s seemingly endless dash through linear space now becomes a claustral repetitiveness of set pieces, with each cluster of incidents bringing back an ensemble of minor characters. But now, especially in Bleak House, the most original of Dickens’s formal innovations, the “minor characters” come to occupy or to appropriate the forefront of the action. In Dickens’s hands, the novel draws upon a large number of interlocking and juxtaposed social groups, in their sum constituting what has been called a polyphonic structure. Simultaneously, the novel appears to acquire a voice of its own, the collective voice of the city, for which Dickens’s virtuoso rhetoric serves as stand-in. In this atmosphere of bewildering appearances and shifting phantasms, the city comes to seem an enormous, spreading, and threatening creature, a fearsome Other apart from the men and women inhabiting it. London, by the time Dickens wrote his last complete novel, Our Mutual Friend, struck him as a hopeless city “where the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged with muffled sounds of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic catarrh.” This sense of the city will spread through large parts of European literature, from Döblin to Céline, Beckett to Kafka. If by now it seems familiar, an effort of the historical imagination can recapture its revolutionary character.
Revolutionary too is Dickens’s treatment of minor characters in the late novels, especially Bleak House and Little Dorrit. In Smollett’s picaresque fictions, obviously an important influence on the early Dickens, it barely matters whether his figures are reasonable facsimiles of human beings, let alone whether they have finely demarcated selves. Like the physicist Laplace dismissing God as an unneeded hypothesis, Smollett can dispense with the hypothesis of selfhood (supposing, which is unlikely, that he was even aware of it), and thereby gain freedom for play with incident and language. But Dickens, in massing his minor characters, is very much aware, even negatively obsessed, with the problem of self or identity. He is making a discovery of very large consequence: that most of the urban figures whom he renders as caricature or grotesque have no souls. In a valid artistic exaggeration, he “totalizes” their soullessness.
Some new and barely identifiable power in the world, destructive and crushing, has annulled whatever souls these figures might have had. For Dickens this comes as a great shock—walk through our cities today and it can still be a great shock. Dickens wheels in his Chadbands, Guppeys, and Smallweeds not just for entertainment, nor just to populate the “Dickens theater”—it is the soullessness of these figures that, through a demonic comedy, provides the ground for the entertainment. Dickens is also testing a hypothesis, in the one certain way a novelist can: through representation. Can he find in these creatures anything but soullessness? Occasionally, as with Snagsby in Bleak House, there is a shred of soul, but most of these minor characters turn out to be quite as he had feared, the waste of the city.
In the great novels of Dickens’s last years, the minor characters may be slotted as mere accessories to the action, but they soon break out of these limits, so that in Bleak House and to a lesser extent in Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend they often become the center of interest while the ostensible heroes and heroines, too often paste figures, have to carry the plot.
Why should the minor characters come to seem so much more memorable than the major ones, indeed, come to be what the Dickens novel “is all about”? I offer a few speculations:
While formally enlisted in Dickens’s elephantine plots, the minor characters are allowed repeatedly to step forward on their own, like performers in a skit, so that the plot can do little or no damage to their vitality.
The fine sentiments which the offici
al Dickens feels obliged to drape about his major characters are largely abandoned when the authentic Dickens, fierce and corrosive, allows his minor characters freedom to exhibit or, as we now say, to do their own thing.
The minor characters are not burdened with an excess of civilized qualities; they act out of a direct and “primitive” (often really a socially decadent) energy, quite as if the “humor” were a basic truth about mankind.
With most of the minor characters there is no pretense of individuality; they can be uninhibited in their generic or even reductive traits, making of the type a monolithic, unshaded force. Indifference to subtlety brings enormous gains in graphic representativeness.
In their grouping and regroupings, their repeated appearances, the minor characters are truly of the city, inconceivable in any other setting, while a good number of Dickens’s major characters seem to be transplanted to the city, alien there and unhappy. The minor characters are utterly at home.
In Little Dorrit, it is true, one major character, Arthur Clennam, is full-scale and persuasively subtle, but even there the gallery of the soulless, those on top who make things go and those on the bottom who do the going, occupies a large part of the book’s foreground. Lacking a ready vocabulary with which to describe or place such figures, we call them grotesques. What Dickens is actually doing with these minor characters—more abundantly in Bleak House, with diminished fervor in Our Mutual Friend—is akin to what his literary cousin, Gogol, evoked with the phrase “dead souls.” Evil is no surprise for Dickens; he has plenty of it in his early books. But by the late novels, evil has been somewhat subordinated as an active principle. Soullessness—that for Dickens is now more terrifying and familiar, the discovery of creatures formed in the image of man but operating as mere functions of the city.
This is a radically new vision of things. Notwithstanding some connections and similarities with Ben Jonson’s “humors,” it is also a radically new way of presenting characters, for Dickens sees them in their social specificity, as Jonson did not. Chadband and his monumental cant, the Smallweeds in their smoldering venality, the Barnacles in their sublime presumption—all are transfigured into varieties of comedy but embodying an increasingly acute sense of class and an utterly grim sense of the world. These are the antimen of greed, commerce, repression, the paltry carriers of the cash nexus. Entering the novel individually as minor characters, they mass together as a major presence.