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PHILIP RAHV
forget this injunction as the novel progressed. For
his
basic idea
of his hero's motivation is such as to identify it with the totality
of
his
consciousness, and to have changed that conception to a
more conventional one would have led to the withering of that
fine insight; and what that insight comes to, in the last analysis,
is that human consciousness is inexhaustible and incalculable.
It cannot
be
condensed into something so limited and specific as
a motive. The consciousness is ever obliging in generating a
sufficiency of reasons, but it is necessary to distinguish between
reasons and motives. Not that motives have no existence; they
exist, to
be
sure, but only on the empirical plane, materializ–
ing in the actual practice of living, primarily in the commit–
ment of action. Existentially speaking, the acting man can be
efficient and self-assured only insofar as his consciousness
is
non-reflective. Raskolnikov, however, is above all a man of
reflection, and
his
crime is frequently described in the book as
a "theoretical" one, "theoretical" not only in the sense of its
being inspired by a theory but also in the sense that theory,
that is to say abstraction, is of its very essence: no wonder
he carries out the murder in the manner of a sleep-walker or
of a man falling down a precipice. The textual evidence shows
that what his crime mainly lacks is empirical content, and that
is what some critics had in mind, I think, in defining it as a pure
experiment in self-cognition. Thus it can be said of this murderer
that he produces a corpse but no real motive. His consciousness,
time and again recoiling upon itself in a sickening manner,
consumes motives as fast as it produces them.
Crime and Punishment
may be characterized as a psycho–
thriller with prodigious complications. It is misleading, however,
to speak of it as a detective story, as
is
so often done. It
is
nothing of the sort, since from the outset we know not only the
murderer's identity but are also made to enter into some of
his innermost secrets. True, the story is almost entirely given
over to detection-not of the criminal, though, but of
his
motive. Inevitably it turns out that there is not one but a whole
