James Wood grew up in Durham
in the United Kingdom, where his father was a professor
of zoology at the university and his mother a schoolteacher. His parents were
and are very serious evangelical Protestants. He respects, though he did
not long share, his parents' religious fervor. In this regard, he writes
of his own childhood, "The child of evangelicalism, if
he does not believe, inherits, nevertheless, a suspicion
of indifference. He is always evangelical. He rejects the religion
he grew up with, but he rejects it religiously. He has buried
evangelical belief, but he has not buried
evangelical choice, which seems to him the
only important dilemma. He respects the
logical claustrophobia of Christian commitment,
the little cell of belief. This is the only kind
of belief that makes sense-- the revolutionary kind. Nominal belief is
insufficiently serious. Nominal belief seems
almost a blasphemy against earnest atheism." As a choirboy singing
in the cathedral choir, he would look out
at the congregation. "We pitied them," he writes,
"because they were not singing. Music was our only concern. It entirely dominated
our sense of worship. During the lesson, or
during the service, we would doze in our tall choir
stalls, or read the sheet music of our next performance. We were vaguely aware that
a form of religious liturgy surrounded us-- a
rather pleasant, lax aesthetic liturgy-- but it impinged little. We approached these daily
performances self-obsessively. As technicians, we had ears
only for our own sounds." He attended Eton on
a music scholarship, and won first class honors
in English literature at Jesus College Cambridge. He is a very serious pianist. His profession is
book reviewing. After graduation, he
wrote freelance reviews. At 26, he was the chief
literary critic of The Guardian. Since 1995, he's been
at the New Republic, though he publishes
reviews elsewhere. The New Yorker,
the London Review of Books, Times
Literary Supplement. A number of the reviews
have been published in two recent collections. The first, The
Broken Estate, essays on literature and belief,
was published in 1999. The second, The
Irresponsible Self, on laughter and the novel,
was published this year. The titles themselves
reflect a change. The Broken Estate was
the religious dream of complete or stable knowledge. Weakened by the
Enlightenment, it broke down during the
19th century, for most. In its place we have
literature, in which the self exists, in
Henry James' phrase, "in the irresponsible,
plastic way." Irresponsible in the sense of
unreliable, or perhaps better, unfathomable. That is to say, in
James Wood's own words, "Modern fiction
offers no guarantee of reliable knowledge,
yet, paradoxically, it continues to believe in the
revelation of character. Continues to believe that
the attempt to know character is worthwhile, even if it
is beautifully frustrated." James Wood's literary
criticism, all of it in the form of reviews,
has received praise beyond that accorded to any
other critic in my time. Listen to this. "Consensus is building
that James Wood is the best literary
critic of his generation." That's Adam Begley. "After finishing one
of James Wood's essays, I feel that I have been in
the company of a man who reads more
perspicaciously and writes more incisively than anyone
producing criticism today." That's Janet Malcolm. "James Wood has been called
our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic. He writes with a
sublime ferocity." Cynthia Ozick, "James Wood is
an authentic literary critic, very rare in this bad time." That's Harold Bloom. James Wood's novel,
The Book Against God, was published in 2003. The central character, its
first person narration, abandons all to write
his book against God. His starting point is the
existence of evil in the world, and the disjunctive
syllogism that often follows from that observation. Either God cannot
control this evil, in which case he is not
all-powerful, or, in some way, he wants it to exist, and,
therefore, he is not all good. In his somewhat desultory
quest, the narrator abandons his PHD
dissertation, loses his wife, at least temporarily, and in the
culminating event of the novel, betrays the memory
of his father. And yet, the novel belongs
to that rare genre, religious comedy. The characters respond to one
another, often mistakenly, but just as often, with
such wisdom and forbearance as they can muster. It is a comedy of forgiveness. This academic
year, James Wood is at Harvard University
as a visiting lecturer, and his wife, the
novelist Claire Messud, is a Radcliffe Institute fellow. Please join me in welcoming
James Wood to Boston College. [APPLAUSE] Thank you very much. Ah, this one. Thank you very much, indeed. I guess we'll-- there's no mic. I'll just-- That's all right. I don't need one. I'll just talk nice and loud. Thank you very much, Paul, for
that wonderful introduction. I think introductions like that
are cruel jokes, aren't they? Designed only to force you into
embarrassment as you wander up with your paltry lecture. Quite impossible to live up
to that list of plaudits. Well, this is about suffering. It does strike me that it's
quite an apt topic, isn't it, for the day after the election? We all carry our own
particular picture of that. It's called Dostoevsky, Camus,
and the problem of suffering. Suffering is a problem. There's something
instantly offensive about that word, problem. Suffering is more than a
problem for those who suffer, and it ought to be more than a
problem even for those among us who don't suffer very
much, or haven't done yet. But, of course, the word
problem is generally invoked when people want to discuss
suffering in relation to God in the familiar
phrase, "the problem of evil." Suffering is always
a problem for us because we have to
endure it, but it's taken to be a special problem
for people who believe in God, and God's providential
watch over us. The contradiction seems to
exist between a heavenly regime of love, and the pain and evil
that seems to fill the world. The existence of this suffering
seems to limit God's power or qualify his goodness. Either God is powerful enough
to reign in the forces of evil, or he is not. And if he is powerful but does
nothing, then he is not good. As everyone knows-- certainly
everyone in this audience knows-- a long history exists whereby
various believers and thinkers have sought to justify
God's goodness and his power in the face of this
suffering, and this effort is called theodicy. Before talking about
Dostoevsky and Camus, and for those Camus
lovers in the audience I'm going to slightly
disappoint you by letting you know
now that Camus comes in as a tiny coda at the end,
which is maybe appropriate when we're talking about the
relation of these two writers. It might be worth touching
before that, though, on the best known theodicies,
because both Dostoevsky and Camus make use of
them, if only to adapt or even deny them. The most venerable but once
most despised and respected might be called the
incomprehensibility argument, in which theology
essentially hangs its head before the
mystery of suffering and it acknowledges that it
is indeed a great mystery. The great originator
of this theory is god himself, when he appears
at the end of the Book of Job and insists that god is more
unknowable than Leviathan, and that, essentially, Job
should shut up and bow down before this
incomprehensible nullity. Maimonides agrees, arguing in
his writing on the Job story that god's providence is not
the same as human providence, and cannot be judged
in the same terms. The next oldest, I suppose-- of these theories-- is the
idea that good and evil are at war with each other, and
that God does not necessarily have the upper hand. That's manichaeism, and
a version of gnosticism flows from this belief. Third, there are
the various attempts to make suffering meaningful
or redemptive in some way. We don't know why
we suffer, but we must trust that it takes part
in a larger teleological plan. Simone Weil lapses into
this every so often in her essay on affliction. She says that when an
apprentice on a worksite hurt himself on
the job, there used to be a saying among
workmen, "It is the trade entering his body." She sees suffering as a
similar kind of apprenticeship. It's good for us that
we don't know how. Closely related to this idea,
but perhaps a shade less brutal and perhaps also a
shade less honest, is the belief that in heaven,
god will wipe away all tears from their eyes-- in that
lovely verse from Saint John-- and that those who suffer
will be paid back in heaven, rewarded with great joy. And this is the soul-making
theory, I suppose. The idea that the earth
is a veil of tears, but also a place
where we build a path towards the joy of heaven. Finally, there's the
free will defense. This is the one that
gets me most agitated, but I will try not
to get too agitated. And it's probably, I
suppose, the most successful of all theodicies. Usually identified
with Augustine, but endlessly elaborated
and, of course, the theologians among you know
much better than I do what awful difficulties
over the centuries the church got itself into-- both churches,
Protestant and Catholic-- with the notion of free will. Augustine's argument
though, in fact, several of the earlier
church fathers like Origen anticipated him on this point-- was that man had to be
born free in order for life to be morally meaningful,
and that man freely chose through Adam to sin. Since God cannot be
the source of evil, it is we who have gone astray. The angels were created
good, as was man, but Satan, like Adam, chose
to stray from righteousness. And Adam's fateful choice
had universal repercussions for the rest of mankind
who inherit his taint. Later versions of
the free will defense have essentially been
footnotes to Augustine. It would be monstrous,
later philosophers assert, to live in a world
without freedom. We'd be mere robots, automata,
without the free will to do either good or evil. This would not be meaningful
life in any way we know it. In other words, the existence
of Hitlers and Stalins, with all their freedom to
cause untold suffering, is the necessary price we pay
for the even larger freedom of our ordinary lives. The Oxford theologian
Richard Swinburne ingeniously and
monstrously, in my opinion, blends the usefulness
of suffering theory and the free will defense in
his book The Existence of God. "If free will is a
good thing," he says, "because it allows god to
watch us develop morally as free moral beings,
then to suffer is a good thing, for it
allows the person who is doing bad things to you to
exercise the obvious benefit of free will." Quote, "Being allowed to suffer
to make possible a great good is a privilege, even if the
privilege is forced upon you. It is an additional
benefit to the sufferer that his suffering is the means
whereby the one who hurt him had the opportunity to
make a significant choice between good and evil,
which otherwise he would not have had." This is the kind of thing that
gives academics a bad name. Dostoyevsky, I think, made
use of all these theories-- picked at a great
salad of them-- only to suggest their
final limitations. His work certainly abounds
with the manichean dualism of good and evil at
war with one another. Ivan Karamazov, you'll
remember, is, in fact, visited by the devil in
the Brothers Karamazov. Some of you will remember-- of course, it delights me-- that in that passage,
the devil is actually likened to a critic. The devil essentially
says, people are always telling me to go
into the world and negate. And he says, without negation
there would be no criticism, and what sort of journal
has no criticism section? That's what Dostoevsky writes. And the devil goes on. Without critics, there'd
be nothing but Hosanna. But Hosanna alone is
not enough for life. It's necessary that
this Hosanna pass through the crucible of doubt,
so they chose a scapegoat. The devil continues, they made
me write for the criticism section, and life came about. No, they say, live,
because without you there would be nothing. The philosopher and
theologian Nicholas Berdyaev, who revered Dostoevsky,
argued that Dostoevsky was a great defender of freedom. And because of this,
"Dostoevsky," said Berdyaev, "believed that man
must be allowed to suffer as an inevitable
consequence of freedom. The existence of
evil," Berdyaev said, "is a proof of God, not
the other way around." Berdyaev, you can
see there, slyly combines a free will defense-- we need freedom-- a usefulness
of suffering theory-- it's good to suffer-- and a lingering manicheanism
or gnosticism, in which evil is always somehow
there and helps to define, almost as a force in
its own right, God's existence. Berdyaev, I think,
is too schematic, but it is true the Dostoevsky's
work is drawn again and again to the question of freedom. The best example
of this probably occurs in Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov, it's true, is free
to kill the old pawnbroker, and of course does so. But he's also in a mental
and spiritual prison, as evidenced by the unbearably
claustrophobic Petersburg in which he moves. Invaded, in effect,
by the devil, thus Dostoevsky's
lingering manacheaism. He feels compelled, if you
remember, in the novel. He feels compelled to walk
towards the old woman's apartment, and doesn't
recall afterwards why he took the turn he
did to do the bloody deed. But he's also free to be
saved, or to save himself. And Dostoevsky
labors to suggest, from very early in the book,
that Raskolnikov has the right soil, as it were--
the proper ground-- for the eventual spiritual
watering that Sonia the prostitute and Saint
John's gospel will bring him. Far from being a sudden, last
minute conversion, the despised famous epilogue-- despised by writers like Nabakov
for easy sensationalism-- and disliked even by Bakhtin,
who felt that it closed off argument in the novel. Far from being a sudden,
last-minute conversion in the Siberian prison camp,
Raskolnikov's conversion begins, in a sense, as
soon as the novel begins-- certainly as soon as
he commits his sin. Dostoevsky makes clear
that Raskolnikov is not just a murderer,
but one who suffers. Sonia says to him,
"You are suffering." And he agrees. She later implores him
to accept his suffering, to confess and take
his punishment, and she tells him that she
will accompany him to Siberia. "We shall go and suffer
together, and accept our crosses together." Raskolnikov has always been
free to turn to Christ, but it's only in a real
prison at the end of the book that he can finally do this. I don't know if
anyone has ever argued this, but the notion that
Raskolnikov's goodness exists along with his badness,
and that a person may be unaware of these elements
until they reveal themselves is strikingly similar,
at least to my mind, to Kierkegaard's notion of
despair in The Sickness Unto Death. What Kierkegaard says in
The Sickness Unto Death, is that the very fact of not
being conscious of despair is itself a form of despair. I know your eyes are
already beginning to glaze over at this typically
Kierkegaardian paradox. "The very fact of not
being conscious of despair is itself a form of despair,"
and Kierkegaard goes on. "Despair differs from
ordinary sickness, because it's a
sickness of the spirit. When someone is sick, there
is a clearly delimited time before which they were not sick. But once despair appears," says
Kierkegaard, "what is apparent is that the person
was in despair, and has been in despair
his entire life." So it's nothing like being
healthy and then being sick. As soon as despair
manifests itself, you realize that, in fact,
you've always been in despair. You just weren't aware of it. Despair in Kierkegaard's
scheme, of course, sounds very like
original sin, doesn't it? The sentence has been
passed on you at your birth, but you weren't aware of it. And indeed, we can see
Raskolnikov as a sinner who's fallen from
grace, and who spends the entire novel regaining it. But Kierkegaard,
like Dostoevsky, wants to stress the freedom that
is inside us to turn from sin. He writes, "It is the
greatest bad fortune never to have been in despair, because
never to have had despair is never to have
lived as spirit. Despair finally relates to the
eternal," says Kierkegaard. Those of you familiar with
the Death of Ivan Illyich will recognize something
interestingly similar here. I think Tolstoy's idea
of Ivan's sickness, which is a thoroughly
religious one, is very close to
this idea of despair. That in fact his entire
life has been a sickness, and it's only when
he acknowledges that his entire life has been a
sickness that he can turn away from it, literally,
towards the light, in those final images
of that novella. Dostoevsky's work is
irradiated by this notion of the freedom of the spirit,
the ever-changing unfinalizable quality that both
Dostoevsky's characters have, and his work as a whole
possesses, and that was so praised by Bakhtin. And, by the way, in
which we constantly strive towards an end,
which we both long for and can never quite reach. One of the most eloquent
formulations of this, I think, appears in The Idiot, when
Ippolit suggests that Columbus was happiest not when
he arrived in America, but perhaps three days
before he got to America. Three days before he
discovered the New World. Ippolit continues, "It
is life that matters. Life alone. The continuous and
everlasting process of discovery, and not
the discovery itself." Now, it will be fair to say
that though Dostoyevsky makes these ideas about suffering
and theodicy his own, and you could see the way
in which he borrows them from what I set up, as
it were, the tradition, and then does what
he wants with them. There is nothing necessarily
distinctively novelistic about them. In my discussion, I
could fairly easily make Dostoyevsky, up to this
moment, sound like Kierkegaard or [INAUDIBLE] like a lapsed
or eccentric theologian. I'm a literary critic who
is quite endlessly drawn to theological
chitchat, but in the end I'm much more
drawn to the novel. So, I inevitably ask the
question, how does Dostoyevsky respond to the problem of
suffering, as a novelist? What is the reply to suffering
that only a novel can embody? I want to suggest that
Dostoevsky's work incarnates a number of replies to
the problem of suffering, and that it further
suggests that these replies only the novel
as a form can deliver. And furthermore, that
these purely novelistic replies or exclusively
novelistic replies to the problem of
suffering coexist with and finally complicate the more
obviously theological responses I've been discussing
up to this moment. The first and most
obvious answer to suffering in
Dostoevsky's novels is his insistence
that we see suffering. That we don't turn away from
it in convenient ecstasies of horror. We've only to think
of Dostoevsky's work to see in our mind's
eye a great parade-- a virtual cortege of suffering. In particular, the pain caused
to animals and to children. The clearest examples of
what Levinas calls useless suffering. Both Crime and Punishment,
and the Brothers Karamazov, are replete with pictures
of maimed animals and dying children. And of course those of you who
are familiar with Dostoevsky's biography will know that
two of his own children died, causing him intense pain. I don't mean, when I talk
about dead or dying children in Dostoevsky, the dying child-- the suffering child whom
Ivan flourishes as a token-- as a counter in his argument-- his famous argument with
Alyosha I mean the actual scene, the descriptions of the little
consumptive boy Alyosha, whose death is very
movingly described in the Brothers Karamazov. Crime and Punishment
contains a famous dream in which Raskolnikov pictures
a poor gray jade harnessed to a cart and beaten to death
by a drunken pack of peasants. And unpleasant as it is, but
precisely for that reason, I'm just going to read a
little bit of it to you. You remember that
Raskolnikov falls asleep and has a terrible dream. He remembers being a little
boy, remembers the churchyard that he was very fond
of, and also a tavern that he used to walk by,
with a feeling of dread as he would walk
past the tavern. In this dream, some men
come out of the tavern and harness a small
horse to a large cart. "It was one of
those big ones that are usually drawn by
great cart horses, and are used for transporting
goods and wine barrels. He'd always liked watching
those enormous cart horses with their long
manes and brawny legs, moving at a tranquil,
measured pace as they hauled along an
entire mountain of goods with not a shadow of strain,
as though they actually found it easier to move when
they had such a load to haul than when they did not. It was a strange thing, however,
that in the present instance, one of these massive carts
had been harnessed up to a small, thin,
grayish peasant jade-- one of the kind which--
he had often seen this-- sometimes over-strain
themselves when hauling a tall load
of hay or firewood, particularly if the cart
gets bogged down in the mire or in a rut. And when the muzhiks
always beat so viciously. So viciously, with their
whips, sometimes even about the muzzle and the eyes. And the sight of this would
always make him feel so sorry. So sorry that he would
almost burst into tears, and his mother would take
him away from the window. But all of a sudden, it had
started to get very noisy. Out from the drinking house,
drunk as lords, shouting, singing, brandishing balalaikas,
came some big muzhiks in red and blue shirts. "Come on, get in,
the lot of you!" One of them shouted. A man still young with a
fat neck, and a meaty face that was as red as a carrot. "I'll take you all. Get in." Instantly, however,
there was a burst of laughter and exclamations. "That old jade
will never make it. Come off it, Mikolka. Have you lost your
brains, or what? Harnessing that little
filly to that great cart?" "Get in, I'm going
to take you all," Mikolka said, leaping into the
cart, first taking the reins and standing up at full
height on the front board. "Don't spare her, lads. Take whips, all of you. Have them ready. That's right, flog her." Roaring with laughter
and cracking jokes, they all piled into
Mikolka's cart. Six of them got in, and
there was room for even more. They took a fat, red-cheeked
peasant woman with them. She was dressed in
bright red calico, with a kichka and
beads on her feet. She was cracking nuts and
laughing softly to herself. The people in the crowd
that surrounded them were also laughing, and indeed
how could they fail to laugh? A wretched little
mare like that going to pull such a load at a gallop? Two of the lads in the
cart at once picked up whips in order to
lend Mikolka a hand. At the cry of, "Gee-up!" the little jade began to
tug with all her might, but not only was she unable
to set off at a gallop, she could barely manage
to move forward at all. Her legs scittered
about underneath her as she whinnied and cowered
under the blows from the three whips that rained down on
her to no effect whatsoever. The laughter in the
cart and among the crowd doubled in intensity. But Mikolka lost his
temper, and began to flog the little
mare even harder, as though he really believed
he could make her gallop. "Let me have a go,
lads, a young fellow who had now got a taste for the
thing shouted from the crowd. Get in. All of you get in,"
Mikolka shouted. "She'll take us all. I'll flog her." And he lashed her
and lashed her, until he hardly knew what
he was doing in his frenzy. "Papa, papa," he
cried to his father. "Papa, what are they doing? Papa, they're beating
the poor little horse." "Come along. Come along, said his father. They're drunk, playing mischief. The fools. Come along, don't look." And he tried to draw him
away, but he broke loose from his father's arms. And beside himself, ran
over to the little horse. But by this time, the little
horse was in a bad way. It would gasp, stop
moving, stop tugging again, and then nearly fall down. "Flog her to death,"
cried Mikolka. It's come to that. I'll do it myself. Suddenly a loud
volley of laughter rang out, drowning everything. The little mare, unable to
endure the intensified rain of blows, had begun
an ineffectual kicking of her hind legs. The old man could not
repress a bitter smile. It was true enough. A wretched little mare like
that, yet she could still kick. Two more lads in the crowd
each took another whip and ran over to
the little horse, in order to whip its flanks. One lad ran to either side. "Whip her on the muzzle. On the eyes, on the
eyes," Mikolka shouted. "A song, lads," someone
shouted from the cart. And everybody in
the cart joined in. A song with dubious
words rang out, a tambourine rattled,
and there was whistling during the refrains. The woman went on cracking nuts,
and laughing softly to herself. I won't go on, but
in the next page Mikolka replaces his whip with
a thick pole from his cart, and enraged by the mare's
inability to get up, kills it. Beats it to death. Some of you also familiar
with Dostoevsky's biography will know that he was very
affected as a teenager by seeing a government courier-- a civil servant-- being
drawn in a carriage by a peasant on a
horse, and the courier was angrily whipping the
peasant, who was then angrily whipping the horse. The purpose of
reading that passage aloud is to re-enact what
Dostoevsky makes us experience. A process which itself causes
us suffering just to read, so that we partake,
even so smally, in the victimization
that is described. This is something that most
theology and philosophy never does. It shies away from
describing suffering, while paying lip service
to the irreducibility-- the concreteness-- of suffering. Contemporary philosophy and
theology tends to be very good at what might be called
a poetics of piety, in which the theologian
makes clear that suffering is a concrete occurrence that
cannot and should not be theorized for fear of
trivializing the pain of victims. But it is literature, and
specifically here the novel, that can indeed supply
a poetics of pain. It's the novel that insists on
precisely the describability of suffering. And it's no surprise
that Crime and Punishment returns again and again
to the question of seeing. There are the eyes of the poor
jade, beaten by the peasants. There is the half-ironic,
half-sincere taunt of Porfirio Petrovic,
the inspector who says to Raskolnikov
when he's caught him and he knows him to
be guilty of murder. "I looked and god
gave you to me. You showed your face." And there is the whole dialectic
of seeing and being seen, which finds its culmination in
the conversion in the Siberian prison camp, in which
Raskolnikov sees Sonia standing outside the prison gates,
reads the gospel, finally, and in which we see
Sonia's eyes begin to shine with an infinite happiness. Dostoevsky always stressed
the aesthetic principle in our response to God, and
found more moving than words the image of Christ. For his 58th birthday, his
wife gave him a reproduction of Rafael's Sistine Madonna. "How many times," she wrote,
"have I found him in his study in front of that great picture,
in such deep contemplation that he did not
hear me coming in?" Seeing suffering, being made
to witness it, is not of course a solution to suffering. But perhaps, it's the
only comprehension we can really possess. A contemporary
philosopher, Kenneth Surin, ends his book on
the problem of evil by saying that suffering is
indeed a theological mystery. So, he essentially ends with
the incomprehensibility theory. That it is indeed a theological
mystery, and that all we can do is let it exist as
an interruption. That's the word he italicized. As an interruption in our sense
of divine order and goodness. When I first read
this book, years ago, I thought Surin's
conclusion little more than postmodern relaxation. An [INAUDIBLE] A kind
of preciousness in which Surin had managed to find a
convenient metaphorical blanket for the elephant in the room. But I'm not so sure, now, and
find the idea of interruption, and the kind of interruption
provided by Dostoevsky is novels, a useful way of
addressing these issues. Interruption, first
of all, in the way that I interrupted my lecture
to read from the novel. The interruption that the
representation of pain brings to our largely
unbroken existences. But there's also
the interruption that Dostoevsky's peculiarly
open-ended novels provide. Bakhtin famously called this the
dialogical principle, by which he meant the way in which
ideas in Dostoyevsky circulate alongside
other ideas, and none seems to be privileged
by the form of the novel. "For Dostoyevsky,"
wrote Bakhtin, "There are no ideas, no
thoughts, no positions, which belong to no one-- which exist in themselves. All ideas are attached
to characters, who then warp and modify them. And this applies as freely
to obviously good ideas," like the preaching of the
monk Zosima in the Brothers Karamazov, who says we
must love each other, "As it does to the
obviously bad ideas," like Raskolnikov's
utilitarian nihilism. Perhaps all narrative,
indeed, corrugates dogma. Puts truths in motion. Narratives continuousness,
if you think about it-- this happened, and
then that happened, and then that happened-- is secular rather
than religious, because it is endless in the
way life is, rather than eternal in the way religion promises. In other words, like life,
narrative only seems endless. It's bottomless
rather than circular. But eternity,
religious eternity, stops time by expanding
it into infinity, and making a circularity of it. Time will come to an end, we
are doctrinally instructed, when the apocalypse comes. Perhaps also, the deeper
struggle with Christianity may always be
bloodily intramural. Thus the fiercest
objectors to Christianity are often themselves believers. Their belief is
doubt intoxicated, while by contrast, the atheists
are merely drunk on certainty. And Dostoyevsky, the most
fiercely believing novelist in literature, wrote novels
whose self-argumentative power is so great that
by their end, one is almost nostalgic for the
orthodoxy that has been so systematically annihilated. There are many examples of
the way in which Dostoevsky deliberately makes problematic
a straightforward theological reading of his fiction. There are many ways in
which he makes it hard for us simply to say, this
is what the novel means. This is what
Dostoevsky is arguing. Thus famously, the
unreliable narrator in Notes from Underground. There's the apparently
christlike figure Prince Myschkin in The
Idiot, a holy fool, but not much of a
model in the end, because he seems to cause
confusion and unhappiness wherever he goes, and
is also an epileptic. And there's the way in
the Brothers Karamazov in which all three Karamazov
sons, even saintly Alyosha, can be seen to have been
in some degree complicit in the murder of their father. Of course, none of those three-- oh dear, I'm about
to give it away-- none of those three
actually did it. But they all imagined
it in some way, and like Macbeth, that novel is
immensely a book about the idea that as soon as you've imagined
it, you've actually done it. But the best known example
in all Dostoevsky's work is the chapter in
that novel known as the legend of the
grand inquisitor. Just before he tells this
story to his believing brother Alyosha, Ivan, the
atheist, who believes that without God
everything is permitted, attacks god for allowing to
exist a world in which children suffer. Ivan is one of those atheists
who stands on the rung just below faith. He is an almost believer, and
Dostoevsky clearly admires him. In such a man, unbelief is
very close to belief, just as in many of Dostoyevsky's
other characters, love is close to
hate, punishment to sin, and buffoonery
to confession. "Religion, Ivan says, "tells
us that in a future paradise the lamb will lie
down with the lion. That we shall live in harmony. But, if everyone
must suffer in order to buy eternal harmony with
their suffering, pray tell me, he says, what have
children to do with it? Why do they get
thrown on the pile to manure someone's future
harmony with themselves?" He continues, "I absolutely
renounce all higher harmony. It is not worth one
little tear of even that one tormented child. They've put too high
a price on harmony. We can't afford to pay
so much for admission, and therefore I hasten
to return my ticket." He gets Alyosha, the true
Christian, to agree with him. "If one could build the
edifice of human destiny with the object of making people
happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last,
but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture
just one tiny child and raise your edifice
on the foundation of her unrequited
tears, would you agree to be the architect of
such conditions," says Ivan. Alyosha says he would not. "But," replies Alyosha,
"there is Christ who can forgive everything. Forgive all, and for all." To which Ivan responds
with his now famous legend. It and the preceding chapter
are deservedly revered. The writing here has the
ferocity, the august vitality, the royal perspective,
of scriptural writing. It is truly a visited prose. In the legend, Christ is
upbraided for allowing humans too much freedom. Humans don't want freedom,
says the Inquisitor to Christ. Humans are afraid of it. They want, really, to
bow down to an idol. To subject themselves. They have no desire
to live in the freedom to choose between good and evil,
between doubt and knowledge. You, says the Inquisitor, made
things too hard for us humans. In these two
chapters, Dostoevsky mounts perhaps the most powerful
attack ever made on theodicy. And he makes it by
telling a story-- a legend. In particular, Dostoevsky
challenges those two elements of theodicy that we
looked at earlier. That we suffer
mysteriously on earth, but will be rewarded in heaven. And that evil exists
because freedom must exist. We must be free to
do good and evil. To the first defense, Ivan
says, the future harmony is not worth present tears. And to the second, to my
mind more devastating, Ivan says, in effect,
why is God so sure that man even wants to be free? What is so good about freedom? After all-- Ivan doesn't
say this but it's implicit-- we will probably not be very
free when we get to heaven, and heaven sounds like
a pretty nice place. So, why are we so ragingly
and horribly free on earth? If there are no
Hitlers in heaven, why should it have
ever been necessary for there to be
Hitlers on earth? Dostoevsky gave the
attack on theodicy its most powerful
form in the history of anti-religious writing. And that's why many readers
think that the novel never manages to escape these pages. That the Christian Dostoyevsky,
in allowing such power to anti-Christian
arguments, really produced not a Christian novel
but an unconsciously atheistic one. The Russian philosopher
Lev Shestov, for instance, thought that Dostoevsky,
for all his orthodoxy, was so corroded
by doubt that when he came to imagine
the doubter Ivan, he couldn't help
giving him a vitality and appeal far beyond the
saintly and bland Alyosha. Those of Shestov's mind
think that even if the novel demonstrates that atheism
is finally a murderous idea, because it kills old
Theodore Karamazov, religion is so damaged by Ivan's
onslaught that it cannot mount a proper reply. So Dostoevsky quite literally
interrupts his novel by arguing against himself. We know from a letter
to his publisher that he wanted his last
novel to be a vindication of the Christian position. He worried, in that letter,
that saintly Father Zosima and saintly Alyosha,
would not be what he called a sufficient
reply to the atheistical side of his book. Well, can there be a
reply to Ivan's arguments? It is just this question
that Dostoevsky's novelistic
self-interruptions raise. I mean, the fact of those
interruptions raises, I think, the question of whether
there can be a reply. Alyosha says what
any Christian must. That Christ forgives all of us. That he suffered for us
so that we may not suffer. That we do not know why the
world is being constructed the way it is. Depending on our beliefs, we
will find this adequate or not. But the novel, and I think
Dostoevsky intends this, enshrines in its very
form a further argument. It is that Ivan's ideas cannot
be refuted by other ideas. In debate, there is no
way of defeating or even of matching Ivan. And Alyosha doesn't really
try, if you remember, Just as Sonia at no
point in the novel tries to reason Raskolnikov
out of his murderous nihilism. At the end of Ivan's
legend, Alyosha simply kisses his brother, repeating
the kiss that Christ does to the inquisitor. The only way we can
refute Ivan's idea, as the book seems to
say, is by maintaining that Christ is not an idea. Socialism is an idea,
and Dostoevsky had plenty to say about socialism,
because it's reasonable. Atheism too. But Christianity, so
profoundly unreasonable-- what Kierkegaard called lunacy-- is not an idea. This is surely the only way
to explain the intellectually nonsensical behavior of Dimitri
Karamazov, who though innocent of his father's murder, is
willing to be found guilty for all and before all,
and goes to prison for it. Or Father Zosima's advice, that
we should ask forgiveness even from the birds. That's the quote. Or of Alyosha's final words
that closed the novel. That resurrection
does indeed exist, he says, certainly
we shall rise. Certainly we shall see. And gladly, joyfully tell one
another all that has been. This kind of dialogical
freedom, in which we're allowed to see ideas
defeat, if necessary, Christianity, only then
to see Christianity make its own reply, but in a manner
that seems to have stepped out of the realm of ideas, and
not an equivalent reply, is obviously one of the
qualities Bakhtin referred to when he called Dostoevsky's
novels dialogical. Actually Bakhtin
went further when he came to revisit his
earlier Dostoevsky book, and actually argued
that Dostoevsky in his authorial relationship
to his characters was like an ideal god who
watches over his characters as god does his creatures,
quote, "Allowing man to reveal himself
utterly, to judge himself, or to refute himself." My argument is just that
Dostoevsky's novels propose responses to the
problem of suffering which are distinctive
to the novel form, and which circulate alongside
the more formal theological solutions. The narration and picturing
of suffering, the interruption of theological argument, and
the suggestion of the limitation of ideas in the face
of images and stories-- the image of Christ
and of heaven. Interestingly, Camus' writing
offers a neat test case of my proposal, of this
distinctively novelistic response to suffering. And Camus, I don't
need to tell you, was in lifelong dialogue
with Dostoevsky. We've only to compare the
relative frailty as argument of his essay The
Myth of Sisyphus with the power of
his novel The Plague, I think, to see the
advantages narrative can claim in this area
over argumentation. In that essay,
you'll recall, Camus tries to see how we might
live without appeal. If we don't believe
in God, how might we live fully facing the
meaninglessness of life, with its useless suffering,
its death, its repetition, and above all, its
material finality-- that we will simply die
and that will be that. This condition is what
Camus calls the absurd. Little more strongly
marks Camus' apparently anti-religious
thought as secretly religious than his
sense that death poses a metaphysical
problem for life. For many rationalists or
atheists, the fact that we die is not such a big problem. Death is merely a
dark continuation of the general meaninglessness. It's merely, as it were,
the even smaller print to the already
small print of life. Death only becomes a problem-- that word again-- for those
who see life as something more than material existence, which
is why Christians must announce that death has been
conquered by Christ. Inverting this, but still
obsessed with this question of life coming to an
end, Camus tells us that death conquerors us. He believes death is a
problem, because he works, I think, within the essentially
religious apprehension that life, if it is to have
meaning, must in some way be extended. As I say, the religionists
has a solution to this, and locates that extension
in heaven, in eternal life. Camus' secular solution lies
in an extension of life itself, a kind of adoration of life. Camus eventually
finds the figure of this extension,
for better or worse, in the idea of repetition. And especially, in
Sisyphus' repeated task of rolling his rock
up and down the hill. But that's really a figurative
or metaphorical extension-- something a little like the
idea of repeated curtain calls, or of adding extra
songs to a concert. And indeed, Camus announces
that the absurd person must concentrate on a greater
quantity of experiences. What he actually says is,
the religious tradition prizes a greater
quality of existence. Purity, spiritual purity,
goodness, and so on. The pagan, as it were, the
absurd man fully facing a godless existence, should
turn that on its head and try to expand life
with greater quantity. Do more. Live more fully, and so on. Camus can't evade
death, of course. Instead, he will, in both senses
of the word, entertain death. Keep it busy. I like this figurative
solution, but it always seems to me when I read
the Myth of Sisyphus, a figurative solution that's
been misplaced-- that actually belongs in fiction, in some
way, and I feel its inadequacy when I come to it as a
picture or as a parable. What Camus essentially does
throughout his work is propose a kind of stoicism, I guess. There must be no resignation. Always an endless
signing on to new tasks. Obviously, says Camus,
the absurd person can't commit suicide. And you'll remember that
the Myth of Sisyphus has, as its origin,
the question posed right at its beginning,
what should we do with the question of suicide-- which obsessed Dostoevsky, too. Obviously, says
Camus, you can't just commit suicide
because you realize that life is meaningless. For suicide, he says, like
the leap of religious faith, is acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over,
and man returns to his essential history. To kill oneself is to
allow both life and death to have had dominion over one. Determining to live in the
absurd, on the other hand, is what he calls simultaneously
awareness and rejection of death. So, the absurd man
begins his battle. What does he do? Camus proposes, in
the Myth of Sisyphus, as sort of heroic models
of rebellion, the seducer, the actor, the conqueror-- who is always engaged in
a campaign in which he is defeated in advance,
is what Camus says-- and the writer. You can see why
Camus would choose these particular categories. They seem somewhat painfully
limited by their epoch. Decidedly French masculine. Well, what's the solution
to the meaninglessness? I'll go and be a
seducer, or a writer. And if that fails, I'll be
an actor or a conqueror. These, says Camus, are examples
of people who live many roles. So it's that quantity
idea over quality. And who, in living so much,
flourish a pagan provisionality in the face of
the narrow absurd. In other words, these people
are rebelliously alive, and in being so they
defy the absurd. For the absurd man must
substitute the quantity of experience for the quality. What counts is not the best
living, but the most living. One has the suspicion
that although Camus is writing as if he's
forsaken the figurative and the rhetorical for
the literal and the usable when he proposes
these role models, he's merely applying the
figurative and the rhetorical to actual lives. Indeed, what he seems
to like about the roles he's chosen is that
they involve acting. They involve an inhabiting
of the metaphorical, a dressing up in likenesses
of various kinds. And one notices that as soon as
Camus describes the strategies of these lives of
rebellion, he merely repeats the larger
exhortations of his earlier theoretical passages. The seducer, the conqueror,
the actor, and the writer are symbolic figures on which
to hang symbolic possibilities of revolt. And in the end-- and this is the terrible irony
I think of Camus' non-fiction writing-- this is only a
religious assertion, despite its
anti-religious basis. It's a determination of faith. Camus says, I don't know
that God doesn't exist. I will believe that
God doesn't exist, and that will be my faith
and I will go out every day to live in that faith. He proves nothing, nor can he. Nor is he necessarily
right, even within the terms of atheism. Perhaps Camus is
right that to kill oneself would be to allow
death to have dominion, and that to live rebelliously
is to both be aware of and to reject death. But these are the
essentially religious terms that Camus has himself
inherited and adapted. The difficulty of Camus'
proposal for rebellion is that at times he seems
merely to be describing life itself, which is tautological. He seems, in effect, just
to be saying live, but live more fully. Live more. And if he's only
describing life itself, he's also describing
it in these images-- metaphorically, at a remove-- as an endless campaign
of defeats, or choosing between roles of vigilance,
living like the condemned man, and so on. A series of possible similes. But turn to his
fiction, and one finds that these images are
powerfully worked as images, as stories, and scenes. And in particular, the
people who are rather uncomfortably types
than mere roles at the end of the
Myth of Sisyphus are now embodied characters. Enacted roles. In The Plague, for
instance, clearly the most Dostoevskian novel written
in this century, the doctor-- the narrator, Rieux,
who tells Tarrou that he went into
medicine abstractedly until he saw people dying. "I've never managed to get
used to seeing people die." He goes on to define plague
as a never ending defeat, and Tarrou asks him
who taught him this. Suffering, he replies. And in that novel, some
of you will remember, the priest, Father Paneloux,
gives two wonderful sermons. The first is sort of rote, in
which he says the plague is God's punishment on us. A sort of Jerry
Falwell approach. The second is long and
very eloquent, I think. A very eloquent defense of God,
in which Father Paneloux argues that we must believe
everything, or deny everything. Since it is God's will, he says,
that we suffer, we too must will it. It's wrong to say
this I understand, but that I cannot accept. We must go straight to the heart
of that which is unacceptable. We must choose either to
hate god or to love god. Or there is Tarrou speech at
the end of the book, which wonderfully modifies
everything we've read up until that moment. He insists, to
Rieux, that life is itself is plague, that
all of us have plague, and that we must keep
endless watch on ourselves, lest in a careless moment we
breathe in somebody's face and fasten infection on him. It's a wonderful modification,
because in a stroke, the healers of the novel,
Grand, Rieux, Tarrou, become the potential infectors. In particular, the
idea that Camus finds hardest to convey in
the Myth of Sisyphus, the idea that life is absurd repetition
and that we must somehow turn this Sisyphean repetition
to our own absurd advantage-- finds its proper incarnation
in a long narrative that doesn't shirk from
enacting the repetition of never-ending defeat. By the end of the
book, we have ourselves lived through that
experience of repetition. We've seen suffering
narrated, in that book too. There's a gruesome
scene in which we are forced to watch the
awful and pointless dying of a small child, and we've
experienced argument interrupt itself, as it so rarely
does in essayistic argument. We've also witnessed
ideas hang their heads in the face of the concrete. Camus knew this, I think. He wrote that, "The work of art
is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph
of the carnal. It is lucid thought
that provokes it, but in that very act, that
thought repudiates itself." Dostoevsky and Camus,
then, looking at each other from opposite sides of the
aisle, so to speak, propose-- insofar as they do-- very different final
theological solutions to the problem of suffering. One was a Christian, and
one was emphatically not. But their answers to
the problem of suffering seem to me provokingly similar. Thank you.
