Ideas and the Novel by Mary McCarthy

Author:Mary McCarthy [McCarthy, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literary Criticism, American, General, Books & Reading
ISBN: 9781480441217
Google: jVX6AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00FEZ22PM
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

4

YOU COULD SAY THAT Crime and Punishment was a novel about the difference between theory and practice. Well, if you were a philistine, you could. The Possessed, too, deals with advanced ideas and the effects of applying them to life. It does so on a wider scale, and without any reassuring suggestion that to try to implement them is to see them refuted. In the earlier book there was just one theory, Raskolnikov’s, which he fails to prove, owing to his own half-heartedness in applying it—an indication of a possible weakness in the theory itself. In The Possessed, there is a whole band of theorists, each possessed by a doctrinaire idea, and a whole innocent Russian town to practice on. But in the outcome there is no divergence between idea and reality; in most cases theory and practice have fused, which is what makes the novel so frightening. The exception is the superannuated old liberal, Stepan Trofimovich, an idealist in his writings and something more abject in his daily conduct; such a man can hold no terrors for his fellow-citizens.

It is possible to see Crime and Punishment as a prophecy of The Possessed. There is the seed of a terrorist in Raskolnikov, which cannot come to fruit since he lacks a prime essential: organization. He is isolated, and his having a devoted mother and sister who bring out the “good” in him makes him feel all the more cut off. He appears to believe in socialism, yet his only friend, the former student Razumihin, is a conservative and disquietingly thick with functionaries of the law. A minor figure, Lebezniatikov, is lumped together with Raskolnikov by a spiteful person as one of a pair of “notorious infidels, agitators, and atheists.” Lebezniatikov, who keeps talking about a commune and regards Sonia’s being forced into prostitution as “a vigorous protest against the organization of society,” is certainly a socialist, but Raskolnikov, who has no time for idiots, consistently gives him a very wide berth. He is reserved, proud, and unsociable and, despite his boldness in theory, never had any plan to commit more than a single murder (the second was unplanned and regretted), obviously not a chain of crimes. A final liability is the difficulty he has in making up his mind.

In The Possessed, all these deficiencies are made up. There is determination in Pyotr Verhovensky, an organizing gift, complete absence of scruple. He thinks large, in sweeping arcs, not one faltering step at a time. He is highly sociable, almost convivial, has no pride; when we first meet him, he is described as “an ordinary young man, very lively and free in his manners but nothing special in him.” He is constantly paying visits in the town’s highest circles but he has other calls to make too. At the direction of a mysterious “Committee” somewhere abroad, he has set up a “quintet” of inconspicuous citizens, each and all inhabited by ideas. These obscure men are chords he knows how to strike at the right moment in a revolutionary overture of his own authorship.

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