Bitter Carnival by Michael Andr Bernstein;

Author:Michael Andr Bernstein; [Bernstein;, Michael Andr]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400820634
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Six

These Children That Come at You with Knives: Charles Manson and the Modern Saturnalia

nerves wired with the prophecies

of one more West Coast lumpen Raskolnikov.

(Moses Elch Brugger, “Revolutions Before”)

Psychopaths like myself emerge when societies are about to change.

(Ira Einhorn, Campaign Speech:

1971 Philadelphia Mayoral Election)

WHEN Ivan Karamazov finally testifies at his brother’s trial for patricide, he is less interested in clearing Dmitri of the charge than in convicting everyone else in the courtroom of longing to commit the act for which they now feign such repugnance: “Who doesn’t desire his father’s death? . . . My father has been murdered and they pretend they’re horrified. . . . They keep up the sham with one another. Liars! They all desire the death of their fathers. One reptile devours another.”1 But Ivan is far from alone in his demoralizing realization. After all, fourteen-year-old Lisa Khokhlakova had told Alyosha much the same thing, in an even more malicious tone than Ivan would later use: “Listen, your brother is being tried now for murdering his father and everyone loves his having killed his father. . . . Yes, loves it, everyone loves it! Everybody says it’s so awful, but secretly they simply love it. I for one love it.”2 It is true that the spectators at Dmitri’s trial show no desire to applaud Ivan’s insight into their natures. But, no doubt, the prospect of confessing that they, like the Karamazovs, are all “reptiles” in addition to frustrated father-killers helps to dampen their enthusiasm, or perhaps they, unlike both the narrator and intended audience of The Brothers Karamazov, had not read enough Diderot or de Sade (or indeed early Dostoevsky) to recognize a universal truism when it was shouted at them.

In this context, it is striking to remember the ease and tone of assured, speculative daring, so utterly unlike Ivan’s hysteria or Lisa’s nastiness, with which Diderot’s philosophe was able to advance a similar theory, and even to go beyond Ivan by explicitly acknowledging the sexual motive of patricidal impulses. The very fact that in Le Neveu de Rameau it was the philosophe, rather than the anarchic parasite, who said, “If the little savage were left to himself and kept in his natural condition, combining the undeveloped mind of an infant in the cradle with the violent passions of a man of thirty, he would wring his father’s neck and go to bed with his mother,”3 is an index of the confidence with which Diderot felt able to voice his most unsettling theories. Part of his confidence, though, is grounded in the certainty that there will always be a “father” in some form (social as much as biological) sufficiently powerful to compel the “little savage” to repress his desires, and the sanguine future whose possibility is theoretically envisaged is in practice (because of the father’s intimate knowledge of that possibility) effectively foreclosed.

But in The Brothers Karamazov patricide does happen, and in books like The Possessed Dostoevsky is concerned to show that the uncontrolled violence he fears is the logical consequence of Enlightenment liberalism, not of its reactionary antagonists.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.