Return to Process: The Unfolding of The Idiot

… this study attempts to return process to criticism …

—Ralph Cohen

Part One: The Types of Criticism

Ralph Cohen carefully distinguished "process" criticism, which concerns the making and revising of a work, from product criticism, which treats the work as a finished artifact. In his two books on The Seasons, he practiced both criticisms superbly.¹ Process criticism considers the poem as it is evolving; product criticism, the final moment of this process. The latter gives us the structure as it may be grasped at a single moment, the former the arduous series of steps during which other possibilities presented themselves. The criticisms differ in their orientation to time.

As it happens, the poem to which Cohen chose to apply both types of criticism, James Thomson's The Seasons, is itself, as its title suggests, centrally concerned with time. Thus the title The Unfolding of "The Seasons" can be taken to refer not only to time as a theme of the poem (product) but also to the time of making this poem (process). In fact, the work as product grew to include its process in a kind of "palimpsest" and, with process and product thus joined, it became "a model of the conception of history it advocates."²

So did Dostoevsky's oddest novel, The Idiot, and I would like to adapt Cohen's approach to elucidate it. I will first discuss Cohen's distinction between process and product in more detail. Turning to The Idiot, I will then consider key passages exploring our experience of time. Finally, I will examine the work's peculiar poetics, which demand that we read the finished text not as product but as process.

Three Types of Criticism

In The Art of Discrimination, Cohen actually distinguishes three types of criticism: product, process, and by-product. By "by-product," Cohen has in mind other artistic activities, such as illustrations or parodies, that interpret a work. Product criticism, "the formal discipline of explaining or evaluating (or theorizing about) literary works" (A 2), is what most of us do. Whenever we take a work as a finished whole, discuss its meaning, see how its parts fit together to achieve artistic unity, or relate that work to genre and tradition, we are discussing it as "product." By "process" criticism Cohen has in mind the activity of the poet in revising the poem, or of the critic in examining that activity. How did the poet arrive at this or that passage and what other steps might he have taken? If the poet revised the poem after it was in print, as Thomson did, what guided the revisions?

One key difference between process and product criticism, then, concerns versions. For the product critic, to examine the work as a perfected whole, "a stable text is necessary for explication to proceed" (A 37), and so he must presume a specific version of the work, "the one in which parts fit together maximally well." Without such fit, it would not be a finished product at all. Thus we have the common pedagogic exercise or critical article in which the interpreter shows how an apparently dispensable detail constitutes a necessary part of the total structure. As Stanley Fish would say, the critic transmutes the (apparent) lump.³

By contrast, a process critic tends to see any version of the work as one of many possible versions. No matter which is before him, the critic appreciates "the alternatives the poet might have taken but didn't" (A 31) or took in another version. There are many possibilities, not several imperfect approximations of a perfect one. If the author has published many revisions, then each shadows the others as an alternative. Even if there is only one published version, the process critic adumbrates the "sideshadows," as I like to call them—the other versions that might have been. The text we have is only one of many possible texts.⁴

Product criticism of almost all schools presumes that for great works there is what Gottfried Leibniz calls a sufficient reason for each detail, a reason that it, and only it, can...