Roman Katsman

An Invisible Gesture of A Jester: Body and Machine in The Idiot by F.M. Dostoevsky

After what Nathalie Sarraute has written about gesture in Dostoevsky's works, after what students of Dostoevsky have written about Myshkin the idiot's affinity with Don Quixote, and in the wake of all that we know about the gestures of comic figures in literature and drama, it is only natural to expect that Dostoevsky's poetics of gesture, especially the poetics of comic, grotesque, boisterous gesture, would be revealed most clearly in the figure of Myshkin. This is not the case, however. In The Idiot everyone performs gestures, some out of revealing naivety, others out of camouflaging theatricality; only Myshkin himself is as if isolated inside his own body, within a sterile space of non-gesture. His gestural silence is so evident in light of the behavior of other figures and the realistic conventions of the times that it becomes the problem of a hidden and invisible body. This is not a problem of trace, since Myshkin's body is not replaced by any sign, expression, rhetoric or mythology. Dostoevsky creates Myshkin as a black hole, as a zero-degree of gesticulation if you will. He abolishes dichotomies of naivety and cunning, of spontaneity and artificiality, of accident and intention, of comic agitation and tragic quietness, in order to create a new category of gesture as convulsion. Dostoevsky puts the body outside the limits of visibility in order to take it beyond control, language and expression. The body thus turns into a mechanism, which in this particular case is identified with nature. The epitome of authenticity is mechanical man, a Pinocchio or golem, whose gestures are mechanical actions or reflexive convulsions.

 This identity of machine and nature is what the consumptive Hippolyte speaks of in the famous scene of his confession, where he refers to Hans Holbein the Younger's painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb":

Looking at such a picture, one conceives of nature in the shape of an immense, merciless, dumb beast, or more correctly, much more correctly, speaking, though it sounds strange, in the form of a huge machine of the most modern construction which, dull and insensible, has aimlessly clutched, crushed and swallowed up a great priceless Being (400).[1]

 The protest against the rule of machine/nature sounds so very "natural" coming from Hippolyte and, by the way, also from Dostoevsky, so very in tune with our expectations, especially since it serves to justify Hippolyte's idea of committing suicide as the only possible realization of his personality and his autonomy in face of the actions of this crushing machine. However, nothing so realizes the humanity of Hippolyte's figure as the ludicrous failure of his attempted suicide, yet another victory of automatic, uncontrollable psychological mechanisms.

 This mechanical conception of personality is only apparently connected to a physiological dysfunction in Hippolyte or Myshkin, that is, to an actual disease. The disease merely has the purpose of creating the necessary conditions: to turn the body from a transparent sign into an opaque symbol, into a training ground for a self-consciousness struggling for survival against the threats posed by the public domain. This struggle became a literary convention and metaphor (as Susan Sontag has described at length) throughout the long nineteenth century, expressed by means of a rich gallery of epileptics, consumptives, etc. These conditions became characteristic of urban Western civilization towards the end of the eighteenth century and, as Richard Sennett has shown, accompany the "fall of public man". [2] These are also the conditions under which the cultural category of gesture as convulsion emerged in Dostoevsky's writings. The self, after having been detached from man's social function and posed in opposition to him, can no longer attain an "authentic" realization by means of the signifying, expressing, playing, learned and controlled body as was the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Body language is no longer language at all, but rather a cryptogram, which demands skill in decoding and interpreting the uncontrollable behaviors of a body which has become identified with the intimate, the individual and, as a result, the authentic. Dostoevsky merely brings this conception to its absolute implementation, ad absurdum: the most "spontaneous" and "authentic" gesture is also the most uncontrollable – a mechanical, automatic, convulsive movement in which a person loses his humanity, in which "everything human seems obliterated" (228).

 Hippolyte's absurd, ridiculous rebellion is thus no more and no less absurd than Myshkin's Christian resignation, as already pointed out by existentialist thinkers. What I would like to stress here is that this conception grows out of a conception of the body as an authentic machine, which includes also the conception of gesture as convulsion. With Dostoevsky this conception is no less paradoxical than his others. After the initial expectation as to Myshkin's gestural character has been refuted, the novel goes on to build up the contrary expectation, of gestural restraint as an expression of sincerity and authenticity. But towards the end of the novel this expectation is suddenly and almost unwittingly dashed when Aglaya says to Myshkin: "Gesticulate as you always do" (515).

 The prince, it thus turns out, does perform gestures, in fact many of them. But his gestures are not visible to the reader; they are not represented. There is, however, another possibility as well: Aglaya may perhaps have referred to gestures of a certain kind, different from others mentioned in the novel, or not mentioned but assumed as self-evident in the novel's cultural context. If this is the case, a short typological analysis of the gestures in the novel would be in order. Such an analysis reveals that there are three kinds of gesture which are mentioned in the text:

1.         Gesture as a symptom of illness; this is the closest to convulsion and marks the person as unfit for the society of normal, respectable human beings. Thus Madame Epanchin says about Myshkin before she became acquainted with him: "I only trust he is quiet when he has a fit. Does he [make gestures]?" (48).[3]

2.         Gesture as a means of expression, as a symptom of personal non-authenticity and insincerity, and of social conformism. Thus, for example, Lebedev's many gestures: "Lebedyev set a chair for Prince S. too, expressing profound respectfulness by the very curve of his back as he did so" (236).Gestures of this type also possess a respectable, serious manifestation, about which Myshkin himself speaks: "My gestures are unsuitable" (334); [4] or elsewhere: "I have no [gesture]. [5] My gestures are always inappropriate, and that makes people laugh, and degrades my ideas" (541). [6]

The conclusion from the above is not that the prince possesses no gestures at all, just that he does not have a respectable, appropriate gesture; however, his non-respectable gestures are merely mentioned infrequently and not represented, together with the morbid gestures of the first kind (mentioned above), with only isolated but significant exceptions that we shall discuss below. The prince's gestures are not respectable due to their uncontrollable spontaneity: "timid gesture" (376);[7] "He tried to look round at the company and had not the courage; Yevgeny Pavlovitch caught his [gesture][8] and smiled" (327).[9]

 Everything looks as if the narrator himself is ashamed to describe the prince's gestures. In this category there is a clear contradiction between a gesture's authenticity and artificiality, between sincerity and hypocrisy. It is this kind of gesture that the prince has in mind when he says: "Sincerity is more important than [gesture], [10] isn't it?" (541). Myshkin here enunciates the conception that accompanies the fall of public man: the personality's external, social expression never fits its authentic inner self; publicness is the opposite of sincerity.

3.         Finally, there is the third kind, blurred and liminal – the so called "grand gestures" (515)[11] – in Aglaia's words. What makes it possible to isolate grand gestures as a distinct kind is what Aglaia adds: "I'll bet anything you'll begin talking on some serious, learned, lofty subject. That will be E tactful" (ibid.).[12]

  Clearly the gestures which accompany Myshkin's talk of something "serious, learned, lofty" are neither morbid nor unrespectable; nor do they fit into categories of sincerity versus hypocrisy. Yet in gestures of this kind one can discern elements of the previous two kinds: to others they do indeed appear as symptoms of morbid abnormality and social inappropriateness. The "grand gesture" brings together unbridled spontaneity and a desperate, overdone expressiveness, in an unrestrained attempt to touch the other at any price, as Nathalie Sarraute has written, even at the price of the loss of self. This is the sincere gesture, which sounds like an oxymoron in the novel's cultural world. This impossible gesture oscillates at the thin boundary between pure convulsion and a hieroglyph-gesture in the style of Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty or Vsevolod Meyerhold's biomechanics. The "grand gesture's" inadequacy constitutes a necessary integral element of it: it is the warranty for its authenticity and sincerity; it is also what is meant to impart a grotesque and comic dimension to Myshkin's invisible gestures. But this does not happen, and the reason for this lies in the specific type by which the prince's inadequacy is represented: the funny body and its ridiculous gestures disappear almost completely from the representation; what is plentifully represented are others' gestures which point to the prince's invisible body; the gestures of others, gestures of appropriation to use René Girard's and Eric Gans' terms, [13] turn the center, where their vectors of desire cross, into untouchable sanctity, into a secret which is everything and nothing.

 The paradoxical creature at the novel's sacred center demonstrates a triple essence: divinity is bound up in it with machine and nature. Into this center, in elliptical trajectory of sorts, other figures enter from time to time – Rogozhin, Hippolyte, Nastasya Filipovna. They all, not just the prince, achieve the apex of their realization by losing themselves, by disappearing: Hippolyte dies of tuberculosis while trying to organize his death as repeated sacral rituals; Nastasya Filipovna, the novel's paradigmatic victim, is murdered by Rogozhin and her figure is definitively certified as a martyr; Rogozhin himself became ill, lost his sanity, recuperated and was taken out of the social arena. And of course the prince himself sinks once more into severe idiocy; his personality disappears, gobbled up by the contradictory forces that rule the heart of his homeland. All of these "disappearances" are connected to some degree or another with the loss of control over one's body. This can be seen first-and-foremost in mechanical behaviors, what are called "machinal" in the language of the novel; these are bodily "slips of the tongue" or stutterings of sorts. The special attention Dostoevsky pays to mechanical behaviors is anchored in the same cultural context that led Freud to study slips of the tongue and unbridled speech – a mechanical conception of the body, derived from an impoverishment of expressive behavior in the public domain. This is also the source of Henri Bergson's theory that laughter has as its source a person's mechanical behavior, a symptom of the temporary loss of humanity. But there is a huge gap between Bergson's conception and Dostoevsky's paradoxical approach, according to which loss of control over one's body is seen as the apex of humanity. The pathos that accompanies this revelation puts a brake on laughter. It even puts a brake on irony, which makes Dostoevsky less accessible to Existentialist intellectuals in the West and more open to Personalist Russian intellectuals such as Nikolai Berdiaev and Alexei Losev.

 Here are the key sentences describing Myshkin's experience, in which illumination and supreme self-awareness are intertwined with the loss of one's human self, in which he turns into divinity and machine at one-and-the-same time:

He remembered among other things that he always had one minute just before the epileptic fit, when suddenly in the midst of sadness, spiritual darkness and oppression, there seemed at moments a flash of light in his brain, and with extraordinary impetus all his vital forces began working at their highest tension. "What if it is disease?" he decided at last. "What does it matter that it is an abnormal intensity, if the result turn out to be the acme of harmony and beauty, and gives a feeling, unknown and undivined till then, of completeness, of proportion, or reconciliation, and of ecstatic devotional merging in the highest synthesis of life?" These moments were only an extraordinary quickening of self-consciousness and at the same time of the direct sensation of existence in the most intense degree (219-220). 

And in the other place:

It is well known that epileptic fits come on quite suddenly. At the moment the face is horribly distorted, especially the eyes. The whole body and the features of the face work with convulsive jerks and contortions. A terrible, indescribable scream that is unlike anything else breaks from the sufferer. In that scream everything human seems obliterated and it is impossible, or very difficult, for an observer to realize and admit that it is the man himself screaming. It seems indeed as though it were someone else screaming from within the man (228-229).

 This significant, powerful text, with its paradoxical nature, its personalistic and quasi-religious rhetoric, blurs to some extent the machine conception from which it grows. This conception can be seen very clearly in other, more minor cases, but we must remember that for Dostoevsky, as Gregory Pomeranz has written, the most important truths appear in the supposedly less important scenes. The topic of mechanical movement enters the novel with Rogozhin's figure already in the first chapter: "Rogozhin himself for some reason talked readily to the prince, though indeed his need of conversation seemed rather [mechanical] [14] than [moral] [15] , arising more from [absent-mindedness] [16] than frankness" (6). [17] A number of comments are in order concerning this passage. First of all mechanicalness, identified with absent-mindedness or lack of awareness, is here contrasted with morality, identified with sincerity. This contrast, so typical of the period in question, sounds almost banal when coming from Dostoevsky. Obviously "moral" here means "aware", "out of choice". The novel does not consistently adhere to this binary approach. As we mentioned already, in the course of the composition sincerity becomes almost synonymous with mechanicalness, as the most ethical hero's gestures turn into convulsions. Dostoevsky does not remain attached to the banal binary metaphysics. The text's rhetoric breaks itself, that is the course of argumentation, apart, in the kind of deconstruction about which Paul de Man has written: amoral mechanicalness is presented as motivating conversation, facing the other, in Levinas' terms; as the moral act par excellence. It is this conversation after all, derived from completely mechanical and accidental motives, which sets into motion the chain of events to which the novel is dedicated. A mechanical act is the originating scene, the big bang, from which everything begins; it is the plot's engine!

 The next two times a machine appears in the novel in two completely different contexts. However, the surprising use of one-and-the-same idiomatic expression in both places brings the contexts and the figures which appear in them together. The first is Rogozhin: "With my mother's blessing [I] set off by [machine] [18] to Pskov, and I arrived in a fever" (10). [19] The second is prince Myshkin: "They make the man lie down and then a great knife [falls down by machine], called the guillotine" (18). [20]

 The expression "by machine" does not appear elsewhere in the novel. The prince's act of repetition, in a kind of echo or imitation of an expression which he heard from others, is also quite unique; it is more usual for others to use the prince's expressions, like Hippolyte, or to comment on their uniqueness, like Aglaia. But in this lies its importance. The fact the Rogozhin impressed Myshkin greatly both in his character and his story is obvious. The fact that the prince and Rogozhin gradually turn into near doubles of each other, beginning already in the very first scenes and expressed in linguistic echoing, is less obvious but not surprising. What truly arouses wonderment is the echoing expression itself and the surprising proximity that it creates between the two contexts: a train and a guillotine. The revulsion which Dostoevsky felt for total industrialization is well known. In this novel it can be seen in Lebedev's enthusiastic speech against the expansion of the Russian railway system which, so he claims, clearly expresses the suppression of the great and sublime ideas which used to motivate humankind in the past. Lebedev gives the whole matter grotesque proportions and an ironic tone. Of course, his speech is merely a diversionary tactic. The true focus of the matter lies in the comparison between the train and the guillotine, and the prince points to the nature of the latter as it appears to him, in its full inhuman fearfulness: it performs executions with complete certainty – "the worst part of it is that it's certain" (19). [21] Thus the conception which first appeared to constitute a run-of-the-mill, romantic anti-industrialist protest turns into something strangely paradoxical: for according to this approach the machine takes away from man two diametrically opposed things; on the one hand, morality, that is free choice, knowledge of the law and self-control; and on the other hand, chance, that is uncertainty, ignorance, blind and unpredictable fate. While the former is a distinct representative of order, the latter represents chaos in its scientific as well as mythological meanings. It has always been the case, so this approach seems to tell us, that the universe and human existence have depended on these two elements. The robbery victim in Myshkin's parable further on can still be saved from his enemy if his luck holds out, or if the bad man will have mercy on him. Order and chaos are negated at once by the machine, whether represented by a judicial system which favors the death penalty, or by industrialization, exemplified by the railroad.

 How can a machine negate two contradictory elements together? We would have been left with the paradox, were it not for the following passage in which a machine is mentioned: "It's strange that people rarely faint at these last moments. On the contrary, the brain is extraordinary lively and must be working at a tremendous rate – at a tremendous rate, like a machine at full speed. I fancy that there is a continual throbbing of ideas of all sorts, always unfinished and perhaps absurd too, quite irrelevant ideas" (61). [22] It thus turns out that even the victim of the guillotine, at the apex of his limit-experience, to use a term of Maurice Blanchot, can be considered as a machine. Perhaps someone will say that this is just the prince's wild imagination and picturesque language, nothing more than rhetoric. But it is the rhetoric here that is so very important! The metaphor exposes the utterance's epistemic foundation – the habits of thought and the cultural and anthropological conceptions that motivate and enable the text. This metaphor may have appeared as very cynical did it not belong to a figure that is as far away from cynicism as could be. It thus turns out that in the conception that takes shape in the novel the machine does not deny man and his moral and chaotic foundations, but rather replaces him.

 How is such a mechanical man possible? Why did Dostoevsky create this homunculus, this golem with the name of God inscribed on his forehead? Let us survey all the other passages in which mechanical behavior is mentioned:

1.         The prince stands in the line-of-fire between Ganya and Nastasya Filipovna and Varvara, before being attacked by Ganya: "Almost frightened, he [mechanically][23] stepped forward" (100).[24]

2.         Ganya almost attacks his father, a few minutes before he tries to attack his sister, and attacks the prince: "'Father, I beg you, come out and let me have a word with you,' said Ganya in a shaky and harassed voice, mechanically taking his father by the shoulder" (107).[25]

3.         Rogozhin rushes into Ganya's home: "Mechanically he moved into the drawing-room, but as he went in, he suddenly saw Nina Alexandrovna and Varya, and stopped somewhat embarrassed, in spite of his emotion" (109).[26]

4.         Rogozhin takes leave of Myshkin at the threshold of his home in the midst of a conversation about faith and murder, in a scene which presages the scene in which Rogozhin tries to murder the prince: "'Good-bye,' said Rogozhin, pressing tightly though mechanically the hand that was held out to him" (213).[27]

5.         The prince goes out of his home on that strange stroll in which he thinks about the nature of epileptic fits and which ends in Rogozhin's attempt to murder him and a fit which saves the prince's life: "Myshkin went out and walked away mechanically" (217).[28]

6.         Rogozhin leads the prince to his home, to the body of Nastasya Filipovna whom he murdered: Rogozhin "was walking almost half a step in front of him, looking straight before him, not glancing at anyone they passed, making way for other people with mechanical care" (593).[29]

 Now we can see what all these cases have in common: man turns into a machine in the vicinity of points of instability and liminality, of hesitation and choice, but this choice is not free. The mechanicalness signals that the person is already on a deadly course leading to a fateful decision, although he does not realize it yet. In terms of chaos theory these are bifurcation points, at which a number of options are available simultaneously; which is chosen cannot be predicted by man, but it is determined by fate and unavoidable. The person no longer controls himself; he turns into a chaotic machine, a wooden doll in the hands of blind fate. But paradoxically chaos gives man his human nature, and the literary figure its vitality. Yuri Lotman, in his Culture and Explosion, described this mechanism and pointed to its function as a permanent engine for the renovation of culture and life. In the novel of Dostoevsky, mechanicalness is revealed at points of origination and is always associated in some manner with violence, entering into it or exiting from it. Violence appears here as the alpha and the omega of culture and life, and therefore the guillotine and the train become the paradigmatic symbols of tragic fate, as students of Dostoevsky have often remarked. However, what they have not noticed and what has been demonstrated in my study is that the tragic hero surprisingly turns into a golem, a mechanical man, Pinocchio.

© R. Katsman

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