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Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in
Critical Literature
Any acquaintance with the voluminous literature on Dostoevsky leaves the impression that one is dealing not with a single author-artist who wrote novel and stories, but with a number of philosophical statements by several author-thinkers – Raskolnikov, Myshkin, Stavrogyn, Ivan Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor, ant others. For the purposes of critical thought, Dostoevsky’s work has been broken down into a series of disparate, contradictory philosophical stances, each defended by one or another character. Among these also figure, but in far from first place, the philosophical views of the author himself. For some scholars Dostoevsky’s voice merges with the voices of one or another of his characters; for others, it is a peculiar synthesis of all these ideological voices; for yet others, Dostoevsky’s voice is simply drowned out by all those other voices. Characters are polemicized with, learned from; attempts are made to develop their views into finished systems. The character is treated as ideologically authoritative and independent; he is perceived as the author of a fully weighted ideological conception of its own, and not as the object of Dostoevsky’s finalizing artistic vision. In the consciousness of the critics, the direct and fully weighted signifying power of the character’s words destroys the monologic plane of the novel and calls forth an unmediated response – as if the character were not an object of authorial discourse, but rather a fully valid, autonomous carrier of his own individual word.
B. M. Engelhardt has been quite correct in noting this peculiarity of the literature of Dostoevsky. “A survey of Russian critical literature on Dostoevsky’s works”, he writes, “shows at once that with very few exceptions it does not rise above the spiritual level of Dostoevsky’s favorite characters. It does not dominate the material at hand; the material dominates it completely. It is still learning from Ivan Karamazov and Raskolnikov, from Stavrogin and the Grand Inquisitor, entangling itself in the same contradiction that entangled them, stopping in bewilderment before the problems that they failed to solve and bowing respectfully before their complex and tormenting experiences”.
J. Meier-Grafe has made a similar observation. “Would it ever occur to anyone to participate in any of the numerous conversations in L’Education sentimentale? But we do enter into discussions with Raskolnikov, and not only with him, but with every bit-player as well”.
This peculiar feature of the critical literature on Dostoevsky cannot, of course, be explained solely by the methodological helplessness of critical thought, nor should it be viewed as a complete violation of the author’s artistic intent. No, such an approach on the part of the critics, similar to the uninstructed perception of readers who are continually arguing with Dostoevsky’s characters, does in fact correspond to a basic structural feature of Dostoevsky’s works. Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.
A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousness, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his works is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousness, with equal rights and each with his own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of events. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse, but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. In no way, then, can a character’s discourse be exhausted by the usual functions of characterization, and plot development, nor does it serve as a vehicle for the author’s own ideological position (as with Byron, for instance). The consciousness of a character is given as someone else’s consciousness, another consciousness, yet at the same time, it is not turned into an object, is not closed, does not become a simple object of the author’s consciousness. In this sense the image of character in Dostoevsky is not the usual objectified image of a hero, in the traditional novel.
Dostoevsky is creator of the polyphonic novel. He created a fundamentally new novelistic genre. Does not fit any of the preconceived frameworks or historico-literary schemes that we usually apply to various species of the European novel. In his works hero appears whose voice is constructed exactly like the voice of the author himself in a novel of the usual type. A character’s word about himself and his world is just as fully weighted as the author’s word usually is; it is not subordinated to the character’s objectified image as merely one of his characteristics, nor does it serve as a mouthpiece for the author’s voice. It possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author’s word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters.
It follows that ordinary pragmatic links at the level of the plot (whether of an objective or psychological order) are insufficient in Dostoevsky’s world: such links presuppose, after all, that characters have become objects, fixed elements in the author’s design; such links bind and combine finalized images of people in the unity of a monologically perceived and understood world; there is no presumption of a plurality of equally-valid consciousness, each with its own world. In Dostoevsky’s novels, the ordinary pragmatics of the plot play a secondary role and perform special and unusual functions. The ultimate clamps that hold his novelistic world together are different sort entirely; the fundamental event revealed through his novel does not lend itself to an ordinary pragmatic interpretation at the level of the plot.
Furthermore, the very orientation of the narrative – and this is equally true of narration by the author, by narrator, or by one of the characters – must necessarily be quite different than in novels of the monologic type. The position from which a story is told, a portrayal built, or information provided must be oriented in a new way to this new world – a world of autonomous subjects, not objets.
(Mikhail Bakhtin:
Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics; Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson/
Introduction by Wayne C. Both; Theory and History of Literature, Volume 8;
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