JOSEPH FRANK
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which the author re-imagined the scene of execution-not so much the
event itself, which could well have held the victims up for admiration,
but the author's choice to stress unrelievedly an effort to humiliate and
degrade them as much as possible? Indeed, there seems to be such a sug–
gestion in the Coetzee text when Ms. Costello asks : "Where could West
have got his material from? Could there really have been witnesses who
went home that night ... [and] wrote down, in words that must have
scorched the paper, an account of what they had seen?" Manifestly not,
so far as we know: West was writing a novel. The details chosen to
evoke the scene are his own creation, and her horrified response cannot
simply be fobbed off as a private reader-reaction.
This whole discussion arose in connection with Dostoevsky; and
though Coetzee never mentions his name, it may not be overly specu–
lative to assume that the reflections of Ms. Costello also contain an
implicit reference to his novels. Indeed, in his own day the same sort
of charge was often made against Dostoevsky that Coetzee / Costello
makes against Paul West. The so-called "heros" of his major novels are
criminals who either commit murder themselves or motivate others (in the
case of
The Idiot,
unwittingly) to carry out their evil intentions. In
The
Devils,
the "hero" Stavrogin is not only guilty of incitement to murder but
also of pedophilia, leading to the despairing suicide of a hapless twelve–
year-old girl that he does nothing to prevent. (To be sure, the chapters
containing the pedophilia episode were not published in Dostoevsky's life–
time, but rumors about their scabrous content were widespread . They are
now published as an appendix
to
every edition of the text.) In any case,
there is no question that Dostoevsky was constantly skirting the moral
bounds that most serious writers in the nineteenth century imposed on
themselves, or the bounds imposed by the various censorships of the time.
If
reading Dostoevsky's novels can possibly lead to criminal conse–
quences, it is thus not simply, as Vargas Llosa might lead us to believe,
because readers have the option of using them any way they please. The
works do, after all, grippingly portray criminal impulses and criminal
deeds, and nobody depicted the horror of the murder of an innocent
more unsparingly than Dostoevsky in
Crime and Punishment.
He takes
us into much the same region as Paul West; yet the effect of Dosto–
evsky's unflinching explorations of evil turn out, for most readers, to be
quite the opposite of those that Ms. Costello finds unbearable. They
may have been brushed by Satan's wing, but only for a moment and not
indelibly. How does Dostoevsky achieve this result, which neither the
views of Coetzee nor Vargas Llosa help us to account for? The question
is worth examining here at a little more length.
