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4. Confession and Slander in Action: Crime and Punishment
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Chapter Four Confession and Slander in Action: Crime and Punishment Evil cannot be done with the whole soul. —Martin Buber You cannot ever make [written] language come out even, [. . .] it conceals as well as reveals, and does so by its very design. —Walter Ong The true being of man is [. . .] his act; individuality is real in the deed. —Hegel WORDS, LIES, AND SECRETS There is something fundamental about the inability of language to tell the whole truth. Commenting on a study demonstrating that chimpanzees who learn sign language immediately try to trick their trainers, Walter Burkert suggests that “at the very beginnings of civilization, lying and language were there together.”1 In Latin, “to give words” (verba dare) means “to deceive,” and “sense” (sensus) means the opposite of “words” (verba).2 Different discourses are false in different ways. Scientific language, mathematical formulas , and the professional jargons of commerce and the law perform diminished tasks: to get a job done, to measure or delineate a state of affairs, to convey legal judgment. They communicate an unambiguous message within carefully defined parameters. Theirs is a shrunken, indicative truth. In contrast, artistic writers attempt to say more than language can bear. They create a model of the universe that is complex, nuanced, and susceptible to interpretation. To the utilitarian reader, this truth is inaccessible. But Dostoevsky was not writing for the utilitarian reader. Dostoevsky was profoundly subversive. His novels appeared at a time when writers were expected to reproduce the textures, sights, smells, and 67 Chapter Four 68 sounds of a particular material and cultural reality, and to engage fully in political and social life. Great faith was placed in language as a reliable vehicle for truth telling. If there were any hidden messages, they were assumed to be political, and were deciphered without difficulty by the reading public. But in Dostoevsky’s works, the depiction of the material world and the communication of a political message are merely the surface. These functions of language are at minimum a mere distraction and at maximum a dangerous, demonic delusion. Analyzing Russian demonism in the Orthodox tradition, Simon Franklin establishes ties between paradox (from the Greek to paradoxon —that which runs contrary to human reasoning or expectation) and a “poetics of transfiguration” involving possession, exorcism, and miracle. Franklin’s medieval Russian demons can be immanent even where they are invisible, and in spite of their ostensibly evil nature, they can “help bring mankind to salvation.”3 This fact can be of use as we seek out Dostoevsky’s secrets. An indicative reading will yield only demons—the lies on the surface . Language says what God is not rather than what he is: “Human beings can describe God’s essence or their own only by a set of assertions and negations which admit the incomplete and distorting nature of the ideas asserted .”4 Here, in the dead and lonely space of the printed page, everything obvious is a lie. So an apophatic (literally: “saying away”) approach takes the entire surface of the novelistic world as negative example. Reading, we must “negate it back.” All visible levels of Dostoevsky’s text are deceptive: setting (the slum street, the tenement apartment, the brothel), character (the prostitute, the drunk, the pedophile), and plot and narrative (that is, stories and their tellers ). A crossroads in a slum market is the locale for a miracle; a prostitute serves as a vessel for the holy spirit. In this book, it is the level of narrative that interests us most. The much-noted paradox of Dostoevsky’s poetics involves a tension between actions and the words that tell them. The truth reveals itself through private, secret interactions between two characters. As distance from these interactions increases, so does the distance from the truth. The more characters talk, the more lies they tell. My reading presumes that it is impossible for characters to tell the truth; the truth comes in moments of recognition, metaphorically, through a poetics of transfiguration . This is why slander and gossip (including its most malicious variant, zloslovie, “evil wording”) play such an important role in Dostoevsky’s works.5 Talk leads away from the truth. To counter the insidious workings of the indicative, Dostoevsky offers a metaphorical language of symbolic gesture, intuition, and, in keeping with his paradoxical poetics, silence. This language will lead to moments of transfiguration.6 The final step for Dostoevsky’s readers will be to understand that the novel itself is a version of the reality...