Dostoevsky's Major Novels as Semiotic Models

Slobodanka Vladiv, Monash University, Melbourne

Despite the well-established view on the pre-eminence of interesting story-telling in Dostoevsky's poetics,(1) it is impossible to read Dostoevsky's novels as conventional narrative fiction, in which the story-telling process is of primary importance to the reader. The reader of Dostoevsky's novels does not read on in order to find out what will happen next to the characters of the work. He must first of all concentrate hard on the text and ask himself time and again 'What is the author driving at in this allegory', or, 'What is he trying to say through this segment of dialogue bordering on the absurd or forming an impressionistic parable?'

Notwithstanding Dostoevsky's strong reliance on the devices of the classical adventure novel or even the detective novel, such structural elements of plot as mystery, digressions, 'zabeganje vpered' ('running away with the story1) secrets, innuendo and allusions, do not fulfil the function of creating plot tension for the sake of interesting story-telling. Although these adventure novel devices may fulfil the above function in a subsidiary way (and older Dostoevsky criticism has singled it out as the exclusive function of the adventure novel devices in Dostoevsky's novels(2)), their primary function lies not on the plot level but on another structural level of the work. This other structural level is connected with the plot of the novel, or more precisely, it is plot in a new and different structural hierarchy. Plot in the Dostoevskian novel is not the traditional structural element which we know from the classic examples of the Realistic novel (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, The Mayor of Casterbridge ) . (3) Because the reader of the Dostoevskian novel does not, in the first instance, ask himself, "What happens next to the characters?", but instead, "How does an idea emerge from this dialogue or this constellation of characters?", one may infer that plot in the Dostoevskian novel does not consist of a story "storia" or "history"), imitating an event or a string of events which might have taken place in historical time. The Dostoevskian plot consists, instead, of "a-historical", allegorical scenes or tableaux, which are dramatised and hence appear to be taking place as "on stage" action. This impression is strengthened by the Dostoevskian narrators, who are in relentless pursuit of a "complete coverage" of "all that has happened". This special function of plot in Dostoevsky's novels is connected with and subordinated to motivation of character. The realistic psychological motivation of character is entirely suspended in relation to the Dostoevskian novel. For example, the movements of characters from one place to another are entirely arbitrary. The author employs only the faintest of pretexts to make these movements artistically plausible. The relationships between

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characters, including natural relationship like family ties, develop outside the bounds of conventional psychological motivation. The suspension of realistic psychological motivation in character relationships and character movements on the plot level results in the impression that all of Dostoevsky's novels are giant allegories or modern prose versions of morality plays.

Unlike characters in the Tolstoyan novel, whose relationships are basically conventional family relationships, Dostoevskian characters as already noted by Vladimir Pozner, come together to talk and to create dialogue.(5) M.M. Bachtin has elaborated on the importance of dialogue in the Dostoevskian novel. According to Bachtin, the Dostoevskian novel is pure dialogue, and the content of dialogue is an idea in its purest essence.

While it is impossible to deny that Dostoevsky's novels deal with a whole range of political and social ideals which formed topics of public debate in his own time, the artistic treatment or fictionalization of these "historical" topics needs to be reexamined in the light of the complex poetics of the Dostoevskian novel.

It is a well-established thesis in Dostoevsky criticism that the novel The Devils (Besy) to take one example, deals with the frictions between the generation of the Liberal 'fathers' of the 1840's and the Radical 'sons' of the 1860's, and that Dostoevsky's sympathies, even if mixed with irony and mild contempt, are with the 'fathers'. To maintain, however, that the content of Besy is exhausted by this historical allegory, even if it is taken in all its textual complexity, would be to miss an entire plane of abstract ideas, which, in the final analysis, might even provide the raison d'être for the entire novel.(6)

Similarly, traditional interpretations of Crime and Punishment, which advance the view that the philosophical content of the novel turns on 'a psychological portrait of a crime' (7), and the spiritual resurrection of a murderer through confession and ultimate conversion to Christian faith, cannot be sustained through a close-reading analysis of the novel. Such a close-reading analysis reveals that the murder committed by Raskolnikov is not motivated psychologically in the strict sense of the word on the plot level and that Raskolnikov is not portrayed as an atheist before or after the crime. These two crucial points have been overlooked by a progression of interpreters. Following the 'trial run' ('proba') undertaken by him before the actual murder, Raskolnikov renounces his, 'idea1 in disgust, even invoking God's help to free him from such 'madness'. Strictly speaking, there is no logical progression of the plot action after the renunciation of the project. Raskolnikov's own explanation, which critics have taken at face value, namely that fate had intervened to force him to make the detour as a result of which he overheard the pawnbroker's sister in Sennaia Square, cannot be categorized as 'psychological motivation'. Nor is it made at all clear by the anonymous third person narrator why Raskolnikov resumes the pursuit of his project after renouncing it so categorically.(8)

Similarly, traditional criticism has put forward a reading of The Idiot, according to which it is a "story" about a tortured

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soul, a fallen woman, enmeshed in a love triangle (or in two triangles), who is driven towards her own destruction and who destroys her two suitors, Myshkin and Rogozhin. Such a reading, which attempts to follow the 'action' of the novel in terms of a plot developing in linear progression, is in what Bachtin might have described as the monologic tradition. Such a reading, however, ignores the symbolic content of the novel. For, more than in any other of Dostoevsky's major novels, the plot in The Idiot is perfunctory and serves as embellishment. In fact, the plot is borrowed from an earlier novelistic tradition. Dostoevsky merely accommodates his readers of 1867 by presenting to them a familiar form, - the plot structure of the 'traditional' Realist novel - in order to be able to fill his work with an unfamiliar and strange new vision of reality. This vision may be described as a cross-section of various states and potentials of the psyche, and of the psychological process of individuation. More obviously than in any other of Dostoevsky's novels, it is apparent that nothing really 'happens' in The Idiot on the level of plot. Characters in The Idiot are not a function of plot, they do not develop. The entire novel is an intricate but static tableau of various psychic states. Bachtin was one of the first to generalise about this structural peculiarity of the Dostoevskian novel when, in 1929, he wrote that Dostoevskian characters do not 'realise themselves' but are mere functions of happenings', that is, anything can 'happen' to them while nothing really 'happens' with them. ("S nimi nichego ne sovershaetsia, no zato s nimi vse sluchaetsia".) (9).

All 'real' happenings in The Idiot take place off-stage, as it were: for example, Nastasia Filippovna's flights to and away from Rogozhin, Myskin's brotherly encounters with Rogozhin during his six months' stay in Moscow (between Parts I and II of the novel), the secretive encounters between Nastasia Filippovna and the Epanchin girls, Myshkin's life in Moscow following his inheritance. Even Nastasia Filippovna's murder is not an event in the 'realistic' sence of the term. The murder is not causally determined by any act or event on the plot level of the novel. It is, instead, pre-determined by a given situation which exists at the outset of the novel. (10)

Given that traditional criticism has tended to concentrate on a 'surface' or 'monologic' reading of the idea content of the three major novels under discussion, the question which poses itself is the question of the function of the adventure novel plots, with their arsenal of devices such as mystery, allusion and sudden peripeteias, in relation to the idea content of the works themselves.

Dostoevsky approached the question of "What is truth?", "What is the nature of the real?" through a new epistemological field dealing with the process of perception and communication. Thus, instead of following the famous cartesian aphorism "Cogito - ergo sum", we find a comic transformation of it in Razumikhin's dictum " Potomu ia i chelovek, chto vru." Stripped of its parodying intonation, the same dictum could read "Potomu ia i chelovek, chto obshchaius', govoriu." Meaning, then, as an ontological category and as a product of the semiotic process, is a major theme in Dostoevsky's novels. The plot structure and motivation of character are subordinated to the theme of meaning in all of

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Dostoevsky's major novels. Meaning is thematised by Dostoevsky as a complex process of the generation of ideas and of communication or dialogue.

An idea is represented in Dostoevsky's works as a major component part of meaning or as an element of a complex ontological structure. It is in this sense that one can speak of the structure of meaning as a major theme in Dostoevsky's novels. The term idea in this context should be understood not in its semantic sense (as a content-filled concept), but rather in its morphological and semiotic sense, as a pure sign devoid of semantic content. As well as being interested in ideas as semantically oriented units (i.e. in the socio-historical ideas which made up public debate in his time), Dostoevsky explored the nature and the generation of ideas as segments of the total semiotic process of perception.

A major discovery of Dostoevsky's artistic quest was the notion that ideas in their morphological sense are generated in a dynamic process of communication. The importance of dialogue in the structure of the Dostoevskian novel issues directly from this major insight into the nature of ideas as semiotic components of a larger semiotic structure called meaning. Consequently, Dostoevsky's major novels may be viewed as representing different aspects of a complex and staggeringly advanced semiotic model of meaning and, connected with that, of the dynamics of the psyche.

Through the use of plot devices belonging to an earlier literary tradition, whose poetics was limited to the simple task of interesting story-telling, Dostoevsky achieved what he himself termed "realism in a higher sense" in his major works. This special brand of realism produced a new phase in the development of the Russian and European novel, the main structure of which became the witnessed and internalized narrative perspective. This narrative mode, known variously as free indirect discourse, "erlebte Rede", "nesobstvenno-primaia rech'", "recit indirect libre", eventually became the chief mode in twentieth century narrative fiction (the so-called 'stream of consciousness' technique under its later, more popular, name). The other major achievement of the Dostoevskian novel bears on the development of semiotics and modern linguistics. Well in advance of any recorded linguistic papers on the subject, Dostoevsky drew up a complex model of the structure of communication and dialogue. It is through this semiotic theme that the puzzling aspects of plot structure and characterization in the Dostoevskian novel should now be approached in new readings of the individual major novels.

NOTES

1. L.P. Grossman in his definitive monograph Poetika Doatoevekogo (1925) explains Dostoevsky's predilection for the adventure novel plots in terms of a simple poetics of interesting story-telling: "Prezhde vsego roman prikliuchenii zanimatel'nost'iu svoikh fabul blestiashche razreshil osnovnuiu zadachu tvorcheskoi poetiki Dostoevskogo. On daval emu neprevzoidennye vo vsei klassicheskoi literature obrazy
   
   

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   zakhvatyvaiushchego povestvovatel'nogo interesa i etim otvechal ego glavnoi potrebnosti v oblasti romanicheskoi tekhniki." (p. 61) Grossman finds that Dostoevsky's chief aim is to "strike and fascinate the reader" ("porazit' i uvlech' chitatelia") (p. 62).
2. Compare, for example M.G. Davidovich, "Problema zanimatel'nosti u Dostoevskogo. In: Tvorchsekii put' Dostoevskogo: Sbornik, Red. N.L. Brodskii. L., 1924, or Vladimir Pozner, "Dostoievski et le roman d'aventures. " Europe, 105/1931.
3. Already Bachtin has noted the major difference between the function of plot in Dostoevsky's novels and what Bachtin terms the "biographical novel", that is, the classical Realist novel of Tolstoy, for instance. According to him, Dostoevsky's characters lack a "biographical" sujet, that is, they do not have fixed socio-typical characteristics. In a "biographical novel", the characters are strictly "localised" within their class, their social and family situation. In Dostoevsky's novels, there is, as in the adventure novel, no social "localisation" of characters. Instead, like the adventure novel, we infer, the Dostoevskian novel uses all localisations of character within the social order merely to establish "situation types", through which the "eternal human being" can emerge (compare Bachtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, "Priboi", 1929, p. 99). According to Bachtin, the real interaction between Dostoevskian characters begins outside or "beyond" the sujet or plot, after the latter had completed its "subsiduary" function. It should be noted that Bachtin uses the term "sujet" in the English sense of "plot", rather than in the Formalist connotation which the term carried in the binary opposition of fabula/sujet.
4. L.P. Grossman speaks of the revelation of new "mystery" (plays) "through the adventure novel plots in Dostoevsky's works (Poetika Dostoevskogo, M. , 1925, p. 174).
5. V. Pozner, "Dostoievski et le roman d'aventures." Europe, 27/1931, Part II, p. 291.
6. In a discarded preface to Besy, Dostoevsky states the problematic nature of "truth" and declares that the novel itself was written in order to answer the question of what is truth: ".. .Ibo ves' vopros v tom i sostoit chto schitat' za pravdu. Dlia togo i napisan roman..." (Zapisnye tetradi F.M. Dostoevskogo. Pod red. E.N. Konshinoi. M.-L. 1935, p. 341).
7. See, for example, Y. Karyakin, Re-reading Dostoyevsky... M. , Novosti Press, 1971.
8. Compare S. Vladiv "The Use of Circumstantial Evidence in Dostoevsky's Works", C.-A.S.S., Special Dostoevskij Issue, 1978. For a detailed analysis of the theme of meaning in Dostoevsky's Besy see S. Vladiv, Narrative principles in Dostoevskij's Besy: A Structural Analysis. Bern: Peter Lang Verlag, 1979.
9. M.M. Bakhtin, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoevskogo, "Priboi", L. 1929, p. 95

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10. This situation is encoded in the Notebooks drafting stage, in which Dostoevsky assigned role names to characters, such as The Beauty, Hera, the Nephew.  In one such entry, in which Nastasia Filippovna still bears the role name Hera, Dostoevsky sketches the following plot situation around her: "NB i glavnoe: nado, chtob chitatel' i vse lica ponimali, chto on mozhet ubit' Gero, i chtob vse zhdali, chto ub"et." P.M. Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie socheninii v 30-i tomakh , t. 9, "Nauka", L. 1974, p. 156.
    In the above passage, "he" refers to the early version of the Idiot, who was a character closely resembling Rogozhin, not Myshkin, at that stage of the drafts.