Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism. Paul J. Contino
Godman, Christ, not in pursuit of “mangodhood.” It is rooted in the kenotic Christ and participates in the self-giving life of the Trinity. Incarnational realism is grounded in and directed toward this embodied ideal: “the ideal,” as Father Paissy puts it, “given by Christ of old” (152), revealed in “the precious image of Christ” (276), whose face is mediated by icons like that from Sinai.110 The saint reflects Christ’s image and descends into the prosaic particulars of responsibility with a pilgrim hope of eventual ascent and homecoming. The scriptural saints—Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Mary—hear God’s call and answer “Here I am.” Each responds not with an assertion of autonomous, imperial subjectivity (Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”) but with an acceptance of finite, particular circumstances—“Here”—and a willingness to conform to the infinite Divine—the God whose name is “I am” (Exod 3:14), who became flesh and dwelt among us. The saint’s “hineni,” “Here I am,” bespeaks the “deepest I,” the “true self.”
“On earth” (276) persons remain pilgrims—viator, “on the way.” Fully recovering the “lost likeness” and “deepest I” transpires on a farther shore. But “bound for beatitude,” persons are here granted analogies of “paradise” (259) in the “good taste of self” experienced in relationship with others and the Other, in the “joy” for which Mitya rightly claims we are compelled to give thanks (499–500). When a person’s self-respect is secure,111 the gazes and words he shares with others need not deteriorate into the “vicious circle” of “sideward glances” and self-justifying “loopholes” so often represented in Dostoevskian dialogue. He can speak without “cring[ing] anticipation” of the other’s judgment (Problems 196). Lacking such security, a person seeks validation in the eyes of others, and can do so in excruciatingly self-defeating ways. Fearing the judgment he imagines in the other’s eyes, he hates both himself for seeking it and the other for imposing it. The will of the “true self” is sufficiently grounded in a rational intellect and creaturely confidence in the love of his Creator, in whose image he is made. In contrast, the false-self reacts to the other person absurdly. He asserts his will perversely and hurts both himself and others. Like no previous or subsequent novelist, Dostoevsky depicted these capricious assertions of will, and exposes their compulsivity and falsity.
But, especially in his final novel, he also depicted the recovery of “the deepest I,” the “true self.” Dostoevsky believed that “the person in the person,” in all his or her particularity, shares with “all” a common grounding in God’s oceanic love. Zosima observes that “all is like an ocean” (299); sharing in common creatureliness, each person is sustained by the overflowing of trinitarian love, and called to participate in that love.
Confessional Dialogue and Kenotic Attentiveness
Given the reality of sin, a “good taste of self” can be difficult to achieve and sustain in ordinary life. Dostoevsky portrays characters who fail, and who experience the guilt and shame that separate them from others through projection, fear, and egotism. The novice reader of Dostoevsky can be baffled by the absurd contortions into which these characters disfigure themselves.112 Confession offers an exit, but it “cuts both ways” and is a “two-edged sword” (31).113 Dostoevsky sees the pathological turn confessional dialogue can take. But he also recognizes confession’s crucial role in recovering health, the root meaning of “salvation” (Ford 1). He portrays the possibility of interpersonal—or intercreatural114—relations marked by enlivening mutuality.
Salvific confessions evince incarnational realism in their integration of openness and closure. The confessant experiences openness by exercising freedom, both in choosing to confess and in the way that he confesses. He articulates his fault without the pressure of inquisitorial coercion. He reveals himself with a clear sense of both his limits and potential. He can acknowledge and thus quell the anxiety that may arise in the “visualization of the self from the eyes of another” (Bakhtin, “Reworking” 294). If the other seems to be looking at him with judgment—and the good confessor strives not to—the confessant need not internally conform to that judgment. For example: imagine that I’ve done something cruel, confessed it to you, and then catch your eyes looking into mine. I think, “You’re looking at me as if I were really cruel. I guess it must be true: I’m nothing but a cruel person.” Apart from the projection that may be distorting my apprehension of the confessor, such a conclusion would be false in its univocal closure, its too-easy submission to the “form” imposed in your attention to me. As Morson and Emerson note: “I can be enriched by the other’s ‘rhythmicizing’ of me because I know that a particular image of me does not define me completely. But I can only be impoverished if I try to live as if another could rhythmicize me completely; such an attempt would be another path to pretendership” (Prosaics 194)—that is, a flight from responsibility. I remain responsible for my cruel deed, but it doesn’t utterly define me. To say that it does so is to utter “a false ultimate word” (“Reworking” 294).115
Another way of finalizing oneself, and ruining a confession, is by wearing a mask formed by “visualiz[ing] the self from the eyes of another” (294). The mask-wearer knows that his personhood can’t be reduced to a single characteristic. But the mask proves hard to remove when he habitually wears it and plays the role others expect. The family’s patriarch, Fyodor Pavolovich, exemplifies this habit. Even in Zosima’s cell, Fyodor relishes center stage, playing the role of buffoon, and then “confessing” it to all. When Zosima “pierce[s]” Fyodor with his insight into the old man’s motivation—“above all, do not be so ashamed of yourself, for that is the root of it all” (43)—Fyodor responds with a rare moment of truthfulness: “I always feel when I meet people that I am lower than all, and that they all take me for a buffoon. So I say, ‘Let me really play the buffoon. I am not afraid of your opinion, for you are every one of you worse than I am’” (43).116 Fyodor is smart—but he’s also lazy and stubborn. He refuses to humbly resolve, “I’ve been a buffoon. I’ll stop.” He immediately reverts to his “deceitful posturing” (43) and, later, bursts into the Father Superior’s dinner, smashes the mask to his face in wild revenge: “His eyes gleamed, and his lips even quivered. ‘Well, since I have begun, I may as well go on,’ he decided suddenly. His predominant sensation at that moment might be expressed in the following words, ‘Well there is no rehabilitating myself now, so I’ll spit all over them shamelessly. “I’m not ashamed of you,” I’ll show them and that’s that!’” (79). Ivan differs from his father in many ways, but Smerdyakov cannily observes that in his shame, Ivan is “more like [Fyodor] than any of his children” (531). In court, Ivan will publicly confess—but then, in a defensive posture born of shame, falsely and publicly affix to himself the mask of full-fledged “murderer” (as we’ll see in Chapter 6). Old habits are hard to break; new ones kick in only after arduous work. Fyodor has worn a mask for years; sustaining an honest confession may be beyond his capacity.117 But with Ivan, as we’ll see, there’s hope.
In confessing, one must also accept closure by taking responsibility. Imagine a man confessing to his wife without evasion, using the active voice, “Two weeks ago I lied to you. I take responsibility for that lie, and I’m sorry.” The husband enacts two “signings”: the first for the lie he told, and the second for the present confessional utterance. In this sense confessional utterance is “performative”: the words do something by enacting a person’s taking public responsibility for a particular deed.118 Consider Raskolnikov’s public confession in Crime and Punishment: his words comprise an efficacious deed. They restore—or begin to restore—a communal bond his murders had severed.119
A true confession rejects “loopholes.” But like so much else in The Brothers Karamazov, loopholes can “cut both ways.” On the positive side, there’s a loophole of personal growth, that which enables me to exercise my unfinalizability. If I’ve been a coward in the past, and others justly see me as a coward, I need not act cowardly now. “Forgetting” the way others view me, I can utilize the “loophole” of my freedom to act bravely and thus grow in a new and healthy direction.120 But if I employ a loophole in order to evade responsibility, it corrodes my confession. Perceiving what I take to be judgment, I strain to pull off the mask of “coward.” I begin my confession accurately: “I deserted my comrades in battle.” The trouble