Problems of Dostoevskij's Prosaics: Paradoxes of Process
Gary Saul
Morson
Several of Dostoevskij's novels pose a challenge to all traditional
poetics because they were written according to norms radically at odds
with them. Faced with works like The Idiot, A
Writer's Diary, and perhaps The Possessed, critics
are faced with the choice of either acknowledging the works as
failures or of discovering overly ingenious methods to show that, in
fact, everything does fit into a coherent structure after all. But
Dostoevskij himself indicates some of the key ideas for a different
poetics—one that dispenses with structure and its concomitant, a
unified design, and proceeds processually, by a set of shifting and
developing designs. As it happens, Dostoevskij saw that the
presumptions about time, causality, and free will built into a
traditional novelistic structure were radically at odds with the views
he wished to exemplify. And so, for him, the creation of a prosaics
of process was not only literary but also philosophical and
theological.
The Idiot is by no means the only major work in world
literature to demand such a prosaics. Works of this sort are a
distinct minority, but they include true masterpieces: War and
Peace and Anna Karenina; Tristram
Shandy, Don Juan, and Eugene Onegin;
and a work that influenced both Sterne and Byron, Samuel Butler's
Hudibras. Thus the project of understanding
Dostoevskij's prosaics of process has broader theoretical
ramifications.
Baxtin's idea of polyphony moves in the direction of a process
poetics, but he ultimately failed to develop it. One sign that the
idea of the polyphonic novel went wrong is the claim that Dostoevskij
invented this type of work. Still more important, he tended to read
all of Dostoevskij's works as polyphonic, whereas it is clear that,
although there are polyphonic and processual elements in
Karamazov, the work is predominantly structural. Whereas
other critics, with nothing but poetics at their disposal, read out
the processual element in The Idiot, Baxtin commits the
opposite error by denying the predominance of structure where it is
present. Not every Dostoevskij novel resembles The Idiot,
just as not all historical novels resemble War and Peace.
Dostoevskij can help us to develop an understanding of questions
simultaneously literary, philosophical, and theological which will, I
hope, lead us out of several theoretical morasses in which we find
ourselves.