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tellectual, that is, the author himself. And where I think Mann, as
well as Gide, has gone astray is in failing to recognize that this is a
modern phenomenon, for man's image of himself as rootless and
conscience-laden first came into its own at about the time of the
French Revolution. Where Homer's wanderer simply made a journey
in space, Joyce's hero was from the beginning looking for a home in
the consciousness of humanity as a whole. Similarly, while Oedipus
faced his punishment after his transgression was proved, at least two
of the brothers Karamazov were committed to the agony of their
fate long before the crime had taken place, even before they were
aware of their psychological complicity- and in a formal sense they
were innocent.
If
such is the imaginative ideal of modern literature, one is forced
to speculate on the possibility that either our outstanding writers
have been endowed with a special psychology, or, what
is
perhaps
more likely, that the literary man in this period has projected his
neurotic disposition into his work to a greater extent than ever before.
Only in this way can we understand the remarkable coincidence
between Kafka's paranoia, for instance, and his portrait of the shrunk–
en man, the besieged non-entity, threading his way through all of
experience. Or the correspondence between the Byronic hero and
Byron's own footloose masculinity. Or the connection between Rous–
seau's paeans to self-realization and his life-long struggle to come to
terms with the darker side of his being. Such is also the case with
Dostoevsky, whose literary creations have at least one source in the
eruptions of his psyche.
I
A reader of Dostoevsky is at once struck by the volcanic atmos–
phere, by the incessant crescendo of conflicting emotions, by the char–
acters' constant turning of themselves inside out as they are catapulted
from one situation to another. Dostoevsky's world is one of obsessional
drives, guilt, expiation and futility, all part of a whirlpool that pro–
duces the life cycles of the various characters. And, superficially at
least, this is the drama of humanity that Dostoevsky throws into being.
But on closer examination, one discovers the basic pattern or meaning
of this unfoldment of man's plight. For one thing, every character
lives at the boiling point and is caught in the coils of some crisis–
in several cases a person's entire life is a protracted crisis so profound
as to bring into question his entire existence, since the decision he
