Persistent Forms by Kliger Ilya; Maslov Boris; Hayot Eric

Author:Kliger, Ilya; Maslov, Boris; Hayot, Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

THE CRISIS OF AUTHORSHIP IN PROBLEMS OF DOSTOEVSKY’S ART (1929)

Bakhtin mentions Dostoevsky on several occasions in the early manuscript, each time in connection with some form of disruption in the authorial domain. Indeed, as we turn to the Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art, we find ourselves in the midst of a familiar problematic. Here, Dostoevsky’s protagonist is characterized as a pure, disembodied consciousness, ceaselessly dissolving all positive determinations. This is a hero who “knows that all [external, finalizing] definitions […] rest in his [own] hands and cannot finalize him precisely because he himself perceives them; he can go beyond their limits and can thus make them inadequate.”21 In other words, the hero appears to usurp the authorial privilege of finalization, to become his own author, or obsessively to anticipate and forestall other characters’ attempts to finalize him. Once authorial outsideness is transferred as it were “inside” the consciousness of the hero, it loses its stability, becomes open to the “event of being,” or, in short, is heroized. Correspondingly, the author in Dostoevsky renounces all “excess of seeing” vis-à-vis the hero, refuses to treat the hero as an object in an external world, and limits “himself” to the task of creating spaces and situations that would most effectively stimulate or provoke the expression of the hero’s own “particular point of view on the world and on [himself]” (47).

We might say then that Dostoevsky’s work represents a classic case of the “crisis of authorship.” And this would surely be correct in the terms of “Author and Hero.” Yet it is precisely the meanings of the central categories of analysis that have, by an almost unnoticeable sleight of hand, changed. In fact, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Art doesn’t so much elaborate upon the categories of “Author and Hero” as transpose them onto a different historiological plane. And it does so by shifting a crucial set of associations surrounding the category of the author in particular, divorcing the authorial function from transpersonal tradition and attaching it to the supremely modern figure of the solitary individual standing over and against the objective world to be mastered and possessed. Rather than casting the author as the redeeming and ultimately communal agent of finalizing grace, the 1929 book represents the standard modern authorial figure—by contrast with Dostoevsky’s revolutionary kind—as capable of depriving the protagonist of his or her humanity, of sneaking behind his or her back and attacking under the cover of darkness (278). This author’s stance vis-à-vis the hero is rigid and objectifying, and it ultimately serves as an instantiation, in the domain of narrative fiction, of the single unifying consciousness that has arisen in modernity as the dominant form of meaning-making. Bakhtin writes:

All ideological creative acts are conceived and perceived [in modernity] as possible expressions of a single consciousness, a single spirit. Even when one is dealing with a collective, with a multiplicity of creating forces, unity is nevertheless illustrated through the image of a single consciousness: the spirit of a nation, the spirit of a people, the spirit of history, and so forth.

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