The Problem of Moralizing in Jauss and Fish

The Persistence of the Individual in Social Formations and Interpretive Communities

In the final pages of the essays Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory and Interpreting the Variorum, Hans Robert Jauss and Stanley Fish each put forward a theory outlining the social influence latent in an individual’s reading of a text. Jauss proposes this influence occurs after the reading by means of a “socially formative function of literature,” through which the experience of reading has an effect on the individual’s “lived praxis” (951). Fish, on the other hand, suggests that the reader’s prior membership in an “interpretive community” determines his reading experience (989). Each proposes a different relation between the experience of reading and the rest of the reader’s experiences, either formative or affirmative. Despite the practical opposition of these theories, they operate on similar methodological grounds and can therefore move beyond questions of priority to illustrate the significance of assuming a functional relationship between reading experience and social experience.

While both theorists insist on a group’s shared influence or invention of a text, they also both highlight the role of the individual reader’s experience and continually refer to the act of reading as an “experience.” The categorization of reading as an experience not only makes it possible to causally connect it with preceding or subsequent events in one’s lived praxis, but it also establishes reading as an individual act, the experience of which can be different for everyone. The individual experience of the reader, though it would seem to contradict arguments that insist on a plurality of readers, is valid in these theories because each individual experience forms the social experience. However, the argument for the authority of the reader’s experience crumbles when both Jauss and Fish introduce examples that suggest moral, rather than social, change and influence. These textual examples (Flaubert and Milton) equate moral interpretations with correct interpretations, weakening their arguments for the experience of the reader as well as the compatibility of reading and non-reading experiences. Morality, supposedly a system of absolutes, takes away from the reader her interpretive freedom to be influenced by past experience (learned in Fish’s interpretive community), condemning her to sin and future failure in lived praxis if she misreads (Jauss’s socially formative function of literature). Jauss’s theory of socially formative literature falls short when he applies it to moral formation, as he does not take into account the singularity, subjectivity, and preformed experiential biases of the reader that form her reading. An application of Stanley Fish’s model, though, can provide Jauss with an understanding of preformed interpretive biases—the interpretive community. In combining the two theories one is left simply with a timeline that stretches the life of the individual reader or the reading society, and in which all experiences of reading and non-reading influence and are influenced by every other experience. This leaves the text precariously balanced between an individual’s past and future experiences and past and future communities, leaving moral choice too, when it is an issue, suspended between social constructs and individual interpretations. In the face of misinterpretation, the reader’s experience and her experiences, now justified in both future and past manifestations, invalidate altogether any proposition of morally right or wrong interpretation.

Jauss and Fish’s application of the term “experience” to the act of the reader is essential to their arguments and their belief in the individual reader. The “literary experience of the reader” and the “structure of the reader’s experience” are the formative terms of each essay, used almost consistently (951, 979). As Fish suggests, the experience of the reader does not need to be directed or constrained to techniques, but “to [be made to] signify; first by regarding it as evidence of an experience and then by specifying for that experience a meaning” (978). This suggestion reverberates with Jauss’s incitement to study the history of reception, which is both the evidence of an experience (book sales, reviews, court cases surrounding a text’s reception, etc.), and a way to specify meaning for an experience (analysis of these facts). The experience of the reader provides the basis of both arguments as wells as the basis for their critique.

The porous exchange between the experience of reading and other experiences suggest that one’s lived praxis and literary experiences occupy the same kind of time—a defensible argument. Overall, the classification of reading into a temporal system (an “experience”), rather than a spatial one, dismisses the persistence of a stable text over time (as Fish explains in Interpreting The Variorum) and replaces it with the action of the reader’s perception of the text. The “experience” of the text suggests a temporality connected with everyday experiences like going to the store, for instance, which might take you the same amount of time as reading a few chapters in a novel. The reading experience is subject to temporal practice (one can only read in time), a practice that reflects verbal utterance. Fish implies the connection between the act of reading and uttering in his inclusion of listening to poetry in discussions of reading it (“reading (or hearing) poetry”) (986). Reading, whether silently or aloud, implicates a speaker of some sort in order to activate the spatial text into a temporal existence. Because each text is subject to temporal reading, it is also subject to the voice of its reader, which can impose any subjective intentions it chooses. The experience of reading activates language into speech.

Reading—again like going to the store—involves a reader’s subjective relation to the world of the text, formed by previous knowledge. One will only buy wine if one has the intention to, an intention formed by the previous experience of enjoying wine or of being told to buy it. Units of the text are infused with the same bias of previous personal experience: “[Reading line 46 of Comus] is an experience that depends on a reader for whom the name Bacchus has precise and immediate associations; another reader…will not have that experience” (983). In admitting the varied and subjective nature of the reader’s “experience,” Fish introduces his understanding of the priority of an interpretive community to a literary experience. “These strategies [of interpretive communities] exist prior to the act of reading,” Fish explains in the final section of his essay (989). He goes on to suggest that these methods “for constituting [texts’] properties and assigning their intentions” are learned and can change over time (989). Mirroring the change of one’s experiences over time, interpretations are subject to change according to experiential knowledge. The individual experience of reading proposed here by Fish results in an interpretation subject to what previous experiences (either textual or lived) the reader uses to inform his utterance.

Jauss, on the other hand asserts the priority of the reading experience at the outset of his Thesis 7 in explaining the socially formative function of literature: “The literary experience of the reader…preforms his understanding of the world, and thereby also has an effect on his social behavior” (951). With the word “preforms” Jauss creates a causal relationship between the reading experience and an “understanding of the world,” suggesting that literature has just as much sway on experience as Fish proposes experience has on literature.

Regardless of the priority of read or lived experience, each theorist’s interpretation of the reader’s experience insists on its contextualization in society, rather than in a hermetically sealed, spatial interpretation possible in formalist conventions (expressly refuted by each theorist), a double assertion of the importance of the individual reader’s experience. Though Jauss states that the reader’s lived praxis is preformed by her reading experience, because the reading is an “experience” rather than study or exercise, the reader retains her interpretive authority as a member of society. The theory of the socially formative role of literature places meaning in the hands of all readers, not only of the time of publication of the text, but future readers as well, all of whom contribute to a ever-changing “literary evolution.” “The distance between the actual first perception of a work and its virtual significance…can be so great,” Jauss asserts, “that it requires a long process of reception,” in which multiple individual readers exert subjective interpretations that, when studied, form an objectively recordable reception or social influence (947). Both Fish and Jauss’s contextualization of the reader’s experience, whether socially formed or socially formative, allows for the subjectivity implied in the action of “experience” as the societal context of social formation and interpretive communities reinforces the authority of the reader’s subjective experience.

Through their textual examples, both Jauss and Fish demonstrate the similarity of the reading experience to a lived experience, in that the reader is bestowed with the free will to choose what she does, to choose an interpretation. Free indirect discourse in Madame Bovary, Jauss explains, has “the effect that the reader himself has to decide whether he should take the sentence for a true declaration or understand it as an opinion characteristic of this character” (953). Likewise in Fish’s interpretation of “Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son,” the undetermined definition of the word “spare” leaves the reader “not with a statement, but with a responsibility, the responsibility of deciding when and how often – if at all – to indulge in ‘those delights’” (978). Surely the reader’s experience shall be like her experience at the store—she is presented with choices and decisions to make, and in the end she will go home with what she wanted. Both theorists’ use of the verb “to decide” certainly reflects an openness of interpretation that confers all authority to the reader, She who decides, She who will make the final decision.

But, as Jauss and Fish walk the reader through her potential choices, they insinuate that the interpretive authority she has been granted may have moral consequences if she doesn’t make the right choice. The texts Jauss and Fish employ are used to generate interpretations that rest heavily on moral choices, weighing down the experience of reading with ethics imposed by the author or critic. The use of literature as a means of didactic moralizing destroys the previously established validity of the reader’s experience as capable of authoritative interpretation.

At this point in their arguments, Jauss and Fish contradict their previously established understanding of the reader’s experience. Fish’s example interpretations of The Variorum all hinge on a moral issue. “Lawrence of virtuous father virtuous son” involves the decision of whether or not to indulge in “those delights,” which may or may not be sinful. “Avenge O Lord thy slaughtered saints” involves an interpretive choice the belief in a vengeful or a benevolent God. Fish only implies morality through these passages, but Jauss suggests outright that literature has a morally formative function.

“The relationship between literature and reader can actualize itself in the sensorial realm as an incitement to aesthetic perception as well as in the ethical realm as a summons to moral reflection,” Jauss declares (952). This statement suggests that it is only through the ethics or aesthetics that one might relate one’s own experiences to those relayed in the novel. And, as aesthetic experience involves a distanced appreciation rather than active experience, only ethics are left for the reader to associate experience. He uses Madame Bovary to illustrate this moral decision, the reading of which “was able to jolt the reader…out of the self-evident character of his moral judgment, and turned a predecided question of public morals back into an open problem,” as if the reader were concerned only with questions of good and evil (954).

Though Jauss’s utilization of Madame Bovary proves instructive in the practice of employing the history of reception in understanding the full impact of Flaubert’s work on his initial audiences, Flaubert’s heroine herself demonstrates the exception to Jauss’s theory, bringing back into view the experience of the reader, conditioned by non-reading experiences. At first glance, Emma Bovary seems the perfect character with which to illustrate the theory that literature can be formative of a lived praxis: she leads her live in accordance with the novels she read as a girl, and often feels her woes equal to those of a lost sailor, whom she has only read about, though chooses as her simile: “Like shipwrecked sailors, she turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life, seeking afar some white sail in the mists of the horizon” . However, Emma’s novel reading does not bring her the kind of “moral” realizations Jauss suggests possible. Though she does not read Flaubert, she does read Walter Scott (among many others) , whose writings should give her an understanding of the equality of low and high class, as he wrote of both equally and tolerantly, which she certainly does not have. One may consider Scott’s famous line from Marmion, “Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!” Certainly Emma has ‘misinterpreted’ this very line perhaps by supplying a positive connotation to the phrase “a tangled web,” something to contrast her simple orderly life with Charles, and proceeds to form her lived praxis according to this line (deceiving her husband by having a lover). Likewise, when Emma thinks of the heroines of literature, she thinks mainly of their shared quality of possessing lovers , a prospect in which she must be interested before her experience of reading. Though the experience of reading does affect Emma’s lived praxis (to a fatal extent), her ‘misinterpretation’ of the texts relies on preconceived notions gained from experience, inherent in every individual’s reading, as every individual is necessarily a part of an interpretive community, according to Fish. Perhaps Emma’s “provincial education” has deprived her of the academic value of studying the history of literary reception, but even if she were to read Madame Bovary, one would be temped to say she would just find another heroine with a lover to admire (954).

In Jauss’s tracing of a moral lesson, or at least a moral question, that of “public morals,” onto Madame Bovary, he, like Emma, reverts to the authoritative experience of the individual reader (954). The passage that both the prosecuting attorney and Jauss employ focuses on Emma’s “glorification of adultery,” deemed immoral by the prosecution. However, as Jauss continues to explain, the prosecution had confused the ‘objective narrator’ with the “subjective opinion of the character, who is thereby to be characterized in her feelings that are formed according to novels” (953). But in this seemingly historical explanation Jauss reveals two important cases of an individual’s misinterpretation. First, the accusation itself arose from a misreading: “Flaubert’s accuser thereby succumbed to an [interpretive] error” (953). Second, Emma’s “immoral” feelings have been “formed according to novels,” a formation that Jauss has suggested is moral, rather than immoral.

Jauss also frames the trial through the dual interpretations of the two individual attorneys, Sénard and Pinard. The prosecuting attorney naively confuses the narrator with the main character, a ‘misinterpretation.’ The passage chosen for a demonstration of literature’s effect on society, curiously relates only to Emma, an individual. Were Pinard and Sénard to engage in an literary rather than legal dialogue, perhaps they would have chosen a passage more telling of the immorality of society, as, for example, the final state of the detestable Homais in the last lines of the novel. In referring back to Emma, they reinforce the power of the individual interpretation.

The possibility of moral misinterpretation suggests that a reading experience is both influential and influenced. Like the great social effect of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on the Muslim community, which Viking/Penguin declared was due to a “misreading of the book,” Jauss demonstrates in his utilization of what one might call “The Flaubert Affair” that acts of misinterpretation are valuable in progressing social and literary change and, using the words of Fish, must be made to signify. However, with the questions of morality that Fish and Jauss raise they forget that the individual determines society’s reading and misreading. If misinterpretation is to be taken as morally reprehensible, the importance of the reader’s “experience” in its dialogue with her other forms of experience is overturned. But in the heart of essentially social, rather than moral, theories that are based on the authoritative experience of the reader in her community, they demonstrate that reading and misreading alike are subject to the whims of the individual and the study of the theorist. In making her experientially biased interpretive decision, the reader comes away from her reading with acts with which to preform her lived praxis which may be moral or immoral, but the morality experienced is one free from judgment that needs only to signify. If it is possible for an interpretive community or socially formative effects to be created around one individual’s subjective life experiences, then—in a synthesis of Jauss and Fish—each individual’s misreading, regardless of morality, must be studied as a historical moment in the ontogeny of literary evolution.

Troubling Binaries in Shklovsky's "Art as Technique"

In his essay “Art as Technique,” Victor Shklovsky proposes the process of defamiliarization as a method of creating art and viewing reality in order to challenge the traditional understanding of poetry and imagery as quickly comprehensible. Along with this proposition of defamiliarization comes a system of binaries with which Shklovsky emphasizes the separation of the poetic from the practical in terms of imagery and perception. This system of binaries troubles Shklovsky’s argument in his attempts to reverse the direction of the causal relationship between poetic and practical and to modify the meaning of objects through imagery, both processes he deems necessary for the defamiliarizing of perception. Upon thorough examination of the many binaries throughout the essay, one discovers the troubled nature of the originating binary. Shklovsky’s inherent disregard yet seeming demand for the binary separation of art (or text) and reality troubles the rest of his separations. As thinking in binaries often proves natural, easy, and fruitful to both critics and readers, Shklovsky’s inconsistent yet required system mirrors the reader’s futile attempt to perfectly sort out a text.

Both Shklovsky’s preliminary refutations of the accepted definitions of imagery (Potebnya) and perception (Spencer, etc), and the “technique of defamiliarization” suggested in the title of the essay beckon the establishment of a system of binaries (723). In using the ideas of opposition and “defamiliarization” as the respective premise and purpose of the essay, the basal inspirations, Shklovsky’s need for binaries seems inherent in his thinking.

Through the juxtaposition and opposition of his ideas with others’, namely those of Potebnya and Spencer, Shklovsky creates the binary of self and other, promoting his ideas and their corollaries over those of the other. In beginning the essay with a quotation he plans to refute throughout the essay (“ ‘Art is thinking in images’ ”), the oppositional nature of the work takes a prominent place from the very first line (717). When Shklovsky continues the line, “This maxim…is nevertheless the starting point for the erudite philologist who is beginning to put together some kind of systematic literary theory” he indicates both his competitor and himself, both of whom are starting from the same notion, only Shklovsky provides its refutation. The refutation itself occupies the first three pages of the text, continuing until he suggests that “If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic,” the statement that leads him to propose the technique of defamiliarization (720).

Likewise, defamiliarization itself, the subject of the essay, suggests a binary in both its name and its application. The word “defamiliarization,” not found in common dictionaries , relies on the reader’s synthesis of the generally known word “familiar” with the prefix “de-” to create its opposite. It is only through a familiarity with the opposite of Shklovsky’s definition that one can understand “defamiliarization,” starting just as the essay does by defining its opposition to a binary. Quite similarly, it is only through the familiarity of an object that one can decide it should be or can be defamiliarized. This directional movement from the broad to the precise characterizes the ideal technique of artistic perception suggested by Shklovsky, a reversal of the practical or prose perception, in which one begins with the precise and characterizes it, through perception, as broad (as with the movement from the specific signified to the general signifier in naming; see Figure 1). In the case of practical perception, one is so familiar with the object that one sees it “as though it were enveloped in a sack. …[One sees] only its silhouette” (720). Though one is looking at an object with many unique characteristics, one perceives only the simplified “silhouetted” version of an object, seeing just enough to identify it and shout out the signifier, as one would to a shadow while chained in the depths of Plato’s Cave. Shklovsky calls this perception algebraic or automatized. Only through the recognition of this abstracted, algebraic, over-familiar perception can one begin to defamiliarize, as when Tolstoy realizes he’s forgotten if he had dusted the divan (720). Instead of perceiving the specific object and attributing to it a general form (as with practical name recognition in the Cave), one perceives the specific first as a general, recognizes automatization and then (reversing the directional movement of perception) reforms the general into its specific, oftentimes in through literary writing. Shklovsky calls this act of defamiliarization poetic perception. In these two opposing perceptions Shklovsky emphasizes the separation of the poetic and the practical.

Shklovsky suggests one outline a system of binaries with the statement, “The range of poetic (artistic) work extends from the sensory to the cognitive, from poetry to prose, from the concrete to the abstract: from Cervantes’s Don Quixote…to the broad but empty Don Quixote of Turgenev; from Charlemagne to the name ‘king’…” (720). In this extensive list of pairs, presented in corresponding order (poetry, concrete, Cervantes, Charlemagne to prose, abstract, Turgenev, king) Shklovsky suggests a binary system, comprised of a world of opposing sets of two . He associates this system with the previously established binary of Shklovsky’s ideas versus the others’. By calling Turgenev’s Quixote “broad but empty,” Shklovsky expresses a clear affiliation, inserting the abovementioned “self” and its corollaries into the system. In synthesizing his statements throughout the essay one may construct the set of relations presented in Figure 1.

While most of Shklovsky’s ideas can be easily mapped onto this system, the relation between the two sides is not always strictly oppositional. However much Shklovsky may suggest their disparity to the point of accepting one and dismissing the other (as with Potebnya and Spencer), the binary system exists because of an initial relationship and interaction between the two sides (as with the cognitive origin of the word “defamiliarization”). Likewise, Shklovsky definitively determines the “purpose” of both imagery and art to be the interaction and exchange between the binary terms: “[T]he general purpose of imagery,” Shklovsky writes, “is to transfer the usual perception of an object into the sphere of a new perception—that is, to make a unique semantic modification” (725). This statement reveals a number of methods with which Shklovsky breaks with his own system. In simply using the word “transfer,” Shklovsky suggests a physical movement or exchange from one side of the binary to the other, from one sphere of perception (practical, for example) to another (poetic). The “semantic modification” suggested here refers to changing the meaning of an object. In examining Figure 1, one realizes that an object, the signified, can only be modified through perceiving it practically as a signifier. This step away from the object toward the signifier (the signified’s signified or meaning in this case) is the initial “usual perception of an object” in the semantic modification Shklovsky suggests. In this same directional step the object may be transferred into the text.

However, the transferring of object to artwork is necessarily a poetic process, one not capable of being represented in this simple system of directional binaries. The second step is to transfer this perception back onto the initial side through poetic perception. By following the circular path of perception from the signified to the signifier and back to the signified, a semantic modification occurs. Whereas simple practical signification stops at the signifier or the name of the object, defamiliarizing perception continues back to the object itself. In coming full circle, one may compare the initial practical movement with the secondary poetic movement and synthesize a new perception of the signifier in its transitional position between one and the same signified. In this way, the broad nature of the signifier is challenged, or at least recognized with every perception. An example: You see a handsome car that looks nothing like all the others on the street, perhaps one you have never seen before but would like to have. You say as it drives by, “Now that’s a car!” By referring to the important specific signified with a general signifier, you are acknowledging that this car has changed your understanding, semantically modified, of the word “car.” However, this whole process ties the system of binaries up in knots. A signified must signify itself, thereby becoming a signifier (while necessarily remaining a signified).

On the other hand, Shklovsky attests that “[an image’s] purpose is not to make us perceive meaning, but to create a special perception of the object” (723), contradicting his suggestion above that imagery produces a “semantic modification.” In this contradiction of the purpose of the image, each argument lies on either side of the binary (imagery as cognitive [“semantically modifying”] or sensory [“specially perceived”]). However, both sides come to meet and mingle in their suggestion that one attains a special or new perception of an object through imagery.

The notion of attaining a perception of an object through imagery further confuses Shklovsky’s binary system in terms of the perceiver. As “objects” (i.e. material entities one can sensorially perceive) do not exist in texts, to which Shklovsky, as a literary critic, is supposedly referring (and to which he does refer) throughout the essay, he must then be referring to one’s experience in material reality. With this conclusion, yet another binary, between the text and reality, is set up, as if only for the purpose of becoming problematic. So, as objects can be perceived only by a viewer in reality, and imagery is necessarily a function of a text and its author, the suggestion of perceiving an object through imagery implies the middleman of the artist as a go-between for the perception of reality. In both of the quotations on semantic modification and special perception, one can easily replace the words “images” or “imagery” with their creator, “the artist”; in this convoluted kind of metonym, the artist’s creations are an extension of himself, and can stand in for him. The quotations would then suggest that a ‘special or new perception of an object is attained through the artist.’ This idea may be related to Shklovsky’s political understanding of the artist as liberator, however one cannot so easily forgive his unconcerned substitution of reality for art.
The tendency to bring in conceptions of reality in an essay about art presents itself throughout the piece. Shklovsky explains automatism: “The object is in front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it—hence we cannot say anything significant about it” (721). In this sentence he refers to an undefined first person plural. One may assume he refers to readers, himself included, but the reader is neither interested in reality (as by his appellation “reader” he presumably concerns himself with the text) nor interested in “saying anything significant about [the object],” as his main function and goal is reading, rather than writing or speaking . This “we” refers to none other than the artists who both perceive reality and transfer it into words and imagery. Shklovsky’s Tolstoy fits this description perfectly: “He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time…” (721). Tolstoy both perceives (“sees”) the object and says something about it. Thus the technique of defamiliarization is assigned to the artist, and refamiliarization assigned to the reader so that she may modify her understanding of objects through art.

In referring so frequently to reality in an essay entitled “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky reveals to the reader his tendency to both polarize and confuse. Just as endlessly cyclical as the inescapable reliance on the signifier in the ‘stoniness of a stone’ or the ‘artfulness of an art work,’ the process of signification involved in the study of language cannot so easily separate the signified from the signifier (720, 718). With the complete separation of art and reality, which results from the opposed nature of poetic and practical perception (on which Shklovsky bases his essay’s contradictory conception), paired with the instinctive relation of art with reality (based on his notion of the artist’s role in society), Shklovsky negatively demonstrates through his problematic binaries the impossibility of absolute classification in language. Like the author, the reader must surrender her conceptions of binaries if she is to consent to Shklovsky’s tacit understanding of the inextricable link between art and reality.

The Functional Role of the Artist in the Works of Daumier and Cameron

In his essay The Painter of Modern Life, Charles Baudelaire defines modern art (in both subject and method) as a balance and interaction between the dual principles of the ephemeral and the eternal, as well as to the material and spiritual, modernity and history, from which one can access eternal (historically accepted) beauty only through the particulars of material details and ephemeral moments of time. Through capturing the ephemeral details of the present, the artist both places them in history and validates their passing presence. Since through the act of representation the artist invests value in a subject (through his choice to portray it) and defines his relationship to his environment (through the manner of his portrayal), Baudelaire’s suggestion to represent the particular acts as a means of negotiating the problems of modernity. The anonymity of the masses, materialistic excess, and the passing of time with its promise of death for each trend, gesture, and person can be counteracted by the artist’s eternalizing act of depicting the specifics of those people and things around him.

The practices of caricature and photography, two rising mediums of the mid-nineteenth century, present the viewer with two contrasting views of modernity. In regard to detail description, caricature and photography parallel Baudelaire’s duality of general and particular: in one the artist’s discrimination of specific details individualizes, while in the other a “multiplicity of details” overwhelms and destroys harmony (16). Likewise, Baudelaire argues that photography cannot reconcile, but instead actually exemplifies and engenders modern problems by standardizing and mechanizing representation while objectifying and deindividuating the subject, as in the equating of subject with product in the commodified carte-de-visite portraits. This would lead a viewer to understand his environment as comprised only of material objects. Caricature, on the other hand, individuates through exaggeration of physiognomic detail while likewise retaining both the physical mark and the subjective, moralizing view of the individual artist.

However, in the examination of two specific artists, acclaimed caricaturist Honore Daumier and amateur photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, the opposition between the mediums is replaced by tendencies to portray content antithetical to their medium. While Daumier uses his spiritual ability to “distill from [the present] the mysterious element of beauty” along with non-mimetic drawing techniques to portray material social reality, Cameron manipulates a cold, mechanical medium based in the material to portray internal spiritual values. In departing from the norms of their medium and fusing ephemeral and eternal in their choices of subject and medium, both artists suggest a departure from Baudelaire’s strict definition of the modern artist. In attempt to react to and reconcile the problems of a new society through the examination of details, Daumier’s work models a disconnected material view of the subject, while Cameron’s suggests connection and transcendence.

Honore Daumier’s work, usually made for magazine or newspaper distribution, presents social reality translated into caricature, utilizing a detached view to comprehend modernity. By translating the whole realm of observed reality into the exaggerated language of caricature, he creates a one-to-one correlation between signifier (the drawing) and signified (the society). The viewer learns to follow this language, though the world of the signifier takes on a reality, with its fully developed repertoire of characters and situations. Baudelaire commends this distance between worlds: “The external world is reborn upon his paper, natural and more than natural” (12), suggesting the world of the drawing is complete in itself, independent of and, indeed, better than its depraved original.


Whether actively translating Daumier’s characters back into reality or leaving them in their own world, the viewer sees, through the artist’s semiotics and perspectival placement, a disconnection from the environment. This disconnection manifests compositionally and contextually, separating the viewer from the image, as the audience from at the theatre stage. The viewer is, like the audience, simultaneously transfixed by and separate from the actors, as they inhabit different representational worlds. Daumier’s painting The Drama (1878) sets up this relationship between audience and art. Instead of framing just the play or just the audience, Daumier includes both, compositionally drawing attention to the difference and separation between spectator and actor. The group of five spectators, in clumsy dress and manner, watch in suspense, mouths open and eyes wide, fixed on the dignified hero and damsel, who counter their inappropriate behavior. While the spectators’ movements are uncontrolled and awkward (they stand up, clap, and even shout), the gestures of the actors are choreographed and constrained. Likewise, the painting hanging on the set reflects a further separation between viewers and artwork, separating the action of the play and the calm control of what is most likely a traditional family portrait. Following this system, the viewer finds himself watching the audience members, in order to see his difference and feel his separation from their exaggerated features and behavior. The distorted and over-reactive spectators, grotesque with their gaping mouths and bulging eyes, are both physically closest to the viewer, sharing his seating, and the only details clear to him. So the viewer, distracted by the ridiculous spectators and unable to make out the drama, and finally directed into the empty space of the theatre above the heads of the audience, finds himself separated from the painting spatially and thematically though placed within it. This position of disconnected observer who watches not the play but the audience exemplifies the role of flaneur, which Baudelaire champions as the fundamental role of the modern artist. Daumier directs the compositional focus onto the spectator through the receding lines of the stage, as well as the strong gesture of the male actor, teaching the viewer how and where to look in such a public occasion. However, the gaze of the flaneur does not insure individuality for the subject. In his painting, the spectators are grouped together symbolically and spatially; because they look the same, act the same, and occupy the same cramped space, the spectators give up their individuality to the isolated flaneur.

Just as exaggerated details separate and constrain Daumier’s viewer, they attract and intrigue Cameron’s. Instead of functioning as a signifier for translation into another world, details act as a threshold between multiple worlds, connecting Cameron’s mechanically recorded reality to mythical history and eternal spirituality. In leaving most details out of focus, Cameron defies Baudelaire’s criticism of photography as a measured standardization, allowing a hazy subject in order to call forth a more general, universal, even Platonic form determined not by the machine but by the viewer’s imagination. Lacking the sharpness of image equated with mechanical measurement, the out-of-focus treatment of the individual nevertheless seems to support photography’s accused ability to steal one’s individuality, either through reproduction and sales or by taking a layer off of your livelihood to preserve on the metal plate, as Balzac thought. Due to the universally understood process of photography as a generally direct representation of reality, Cameron’s work can maintain its connection to experiential reality while simultaneously elevating and opening the image to signify multiple realities. In her emphasis of detail through selective focus, Cameron’s photographs train the viewer to search out intermediary details in reality, and explore it with the same curiosity as one would in a photograph.


Cameron’s use of focused detail as a connecting principle in her otherworldly works is only one of a range of methods that simultaneously draws the viewer into the photograph while asserting its roots in the material. In Cameron’s 1866 photograph Madonna & Child, a few locks of the child’s hair act as the intermediary between the Virgin Mary and Cameron’s parlor-maid Mary Hillier. The lock of hair as a meeting place between the material, physical Mary and the spiritual, allegorical Madonna subject takes root in its technical place as a visual convergence of two fields of focus, both equally out-of-focus, though occupying different spatial proximities to the camera. This detail provides the viewer with a clear frame of reference to his own experience, while simultaneously drawing him into the middle focused ground of the print in a reality other than his own. Working off the connection suggested by the focused lock, the viewer searches the rest of the composition for connection. The soft focus lends to the features of Mary and the Child the same smoky quality as DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. Likewise, the same desire to connect to the mysterious other drives the viewer psychologically closer to the subject. Composition provides a spatially closer connection to the subject, using close-up shots and tight cropping around the figures to hold the viewer’s gaze. The empty space above the stage in The Drama that allowed for the viewer’s eyes and mind to roam is not provided, and what appears black does not signify empty space, but rather a flat plane, that keeps us close to the subject. In Cameron’s photographs the viewer is directed not out towards material spaces, but into the subjects themselves. The vast interior realms of the subjects, accessed through the mystery of the Madonna’s downcast eyes, invite the same “luminous explosion in space” as the negative space around a caricature (18). In Cameron’s work, however, the viewer himself explodes into the picture instead of just watching caricatures explode through Daumier’s expressive line.

Daumier’s withdrawn focus out and Cameron’s connected pull in reflect each artist’s respective realm of didactic function. As Daumier occupies himself with primarily public, social concerns, an exaggerated material reality allows for a clear expression of these reactionary views. Cameron, on the other hand, addresses personal spiritual concerns accessed only through the portrayal of and the viewing by the individual. However, at the same, both artists make comments about the other realm: Daumier’s materialism comments on a general lack of spirituality and Cameron’s spiritual understanding of a new scientific medium demonstrates her refusal of the intellectual trends of the time.

In presenting the observed details of formal and circumstantial life, Daumier addresses himself to the viewer’s material life and modern problems. However, his presentation of the viewer’s detached relationship to artwork expresses a lack of faith both in his ability to transcend beyond the material in portraying the public, and the public’s ability to understand beyond the material. Though Daumier solves the problem of accelerated time by recording each trend in society as it comes, eternalizing it for the future before it passes unnoticed, he can address anonymity and material excess only through its representation in the context of society. Because he cannot escape the context, his solution to modernity’s problems lies simply in the distance created between the viewer and the environment, protecting him from anonymity by separating him from it. Daumier provides no artistic model for an active approach to changing conditions of modernity. Rather, he provides the viewer with a consciousness of his state, which only instills the guilt of original sin and an existential awareness of the futility of attempted change.


Daumier’s frequent representation of the misunderstanding of art confirms the futility of solving the material societal problems through a spiritual visual medium. In his lithograph The Amateur of Engravings (1878), he cites the proliferation of images in a society that does not appreciate them for their aesthetic or didactic value, instead equating art with material wealth, status, and distraction from the spiritual. Daumier quotes the gesture and composition of Quentin Massys’s The Moneylender and his Wife (1515) to emphasize society’s equation of art with money, identity, and mindless spectacle instead of spiritual internality. The wife’s distracted gaze and careless page flipping with her left hand sets the pose for the Daumier’s man on the right, while the man on the left is, respectively, consumed with admiring his potential profits. By substituting engravings for both money and the holy book, Daumier equates them with both great spiritual meaning and material value. However, like in Massys, the didactic meaning of the bible and the art is lost in the distracting spectacles of wealth and representation. Like the over-enthusiastic spectators in The Drama reacting only to the sensational and never the sublime, the two amateurs lose themselves in the materiality of the print before understanding its transcendental qualities. To emphasize the tactile, material quality of potentially transcendent artwork, Daumier maintains through defined line the same nimble fingers as Massys. Like the Moneylender couple, the amateurs define themselves by their possessions, which consist of not a variety of objects and books (as in Massys), but simply a wealth of paintings, ignored and unreadable, though gorgeously framed, neglected as dusty objects left upon a shelf. Again, through portraying the interaction between art and audience, Daumier puts forth the viewer’s lack of understanding for and distance from the work. He comments that in modernity, representational art, like the Wife’s illuminated bible, cannot attain transcendental ideas through physical forms, as the viewer will always become caught up in luminous details. Though Baudelaire is himself caught up in the “incomparable mastery of artificial forms,” art must nevertheless involve a crossover to the spiritual in order to have meaning. Though he relates this event of 19th century society to 16th century art, forcing his viewer into a moment of historical consciousness, it is nevertheless a consciousness of failure. The process of the artist becomes both a way of looking at the world and a tactile activity to distract him from the awareness of his entrapment within it.

Conversely, Cameron uses the connective detail description of her scientific medium to address modernity’s lack of spirituality. Springing from to the fabric of the living material world and signifying eternal characters of Shakespeare and the Bible, Cameron’s work has the ability to attain the spiritual through the material while solving problems of modernity through escape into the spiritual and emotional. Through her work she counteracts the modern viewer’s anonymity, mortality, and materialistic oppression by granting to the model individuality, perpetual life throughout history, and separation from the material realm. As just a friend, stranger, or handmaid of the photographer, occupying the same material world as everyone else, the viewer, substituting himself for the model, receives the answers to his problems. In using her servants and strangers as signifiers for the eternal, Cameron bestows upon the working class a spiritual significance. For instance, Mary Hillier, Cameron’s sitter for the Madonna & Child, came to be known as “The Island Madonna” on the Isle of Wight where the Camerons lived, showing the work’s ability to transform physical reality into something closer to her photograph.* Instead of seeing a “more than natural” portrayal of his society in a realm of exaggeration, the viewer sees a “real impression” of a person who is not only allegorically portrayed as, but really looks like a vision of the eternal. This satisfies both a modern need for connection and spirituality and while maintaining a basis in the age’s scientific material reality.


Though approaching modernity from opposite directions in an attempt to promote individuality, both Daumier and Cameron, in the end, share the fault of organizing people into typical roles, either as caricature or literary archetype. In Daumier’s The Drama, for example, the theatergoers both watch the archetypal hero, damsel, and dead lover, and themselves enact the stereotypical role of the working-class barbarians. Likewise, because his amateurs of prints occupy the same class and materialistic mindset they are grouped into a stereotype, robbed of their individuality. Though Cameron, too, typecasts her models, she has the intention of validating rather than of diminishing her individuals by casting them as eternal personages. Her celebrated portrait, Iago, Study from an Italian (1867) typecasts the individual even in the title, suggesting that all Italians share the traits of Iago. However, at the same time, the title suggests a merging of realities, and the darkened eyes Iago’s downward gaze invite the viewer to exploration a specific face in search of general, archetypal traits. Nevertheless, she and Daumier, in their selective treatment of detail, find it necessary to enter into another, more simplified realm in order to necessitate the negotiation of modernity’s problems.

If, as a viewer, one looks to artists to suggest ways of relating to the world that best responds to problems of the time, the nineteenth century presents two paths: alienating consciousness or uniting escapism. In the intellectual climate of the 1800s, with the rise of Realism, artists’ attention to the details of reality was crucial, leaving the conscious detachment of Daumier popular and effective. The tendency to classify ran rampant in the age, as seen in Honore Balzac’s Comedie Humaine, a sociological catalogue of the many species of Parisian society, for which Daumier was commissioned to illustrate. Though Cameron, too, falls to the trend of classification, her stereotypings are divorced from both socio-economic class and material decoration. In physiognomy and stature (the medium of the caricaturist) she saw the Madonna and King Arthur, using details not to constrict individuals within a social sphere, but to open them out into other realms, classifying them out of their context. This vision of the individual comes to the artist in reality and is recreated for the viewer in a photograph, from which one recognizes her devotion to Nature, on which she prided herself. Though working in the framework of a scientific medium with the human body (scientific ground since Darwin’s publishing of The Origin of Species in 1848), Cameron defied the constrictions of her medium and intellectual time. In her photographs, the eternal rises from the ephemeral, meaning rises from fact, art rises from science, and she demonstrates how to manipulate the language of the opposition in order to express, ironically, just those things that it denies.

Cameron’s reactionary impulses not only provide an effective model for dealing with societal progression, but also exemplify the artist’s ability to comment on his or her situation through integrating it into a language instead of direct criticism. While her work is less straightforwardly representative of her time, Cameron’s treatment of details as intermediaries between the present and the past or future places her work in time, without alienating her viewer or needlessly stereotyping subject. While the flaneur sits in observance of his time, stealing the individuality of his subjects to foster his method of historical classification, Cameron exemplifies Baudelaire’s connection of the real and the allegorical, in both subject and process. Not directly a representation of her time, Cameron’s work extends beyond her sphere to resurface, forever contemporary, as a historical demonstration of how to invest things with meaning even in times of futility.

The Epic Monologue: Giving a Name to a Nobody

How Odysseus Created Himself and Storyteller Spalding Gray

Epic tradition, in its self-assumed magnitude, demands not only a grandiose tale, but also a storyteller of equally epic proportions—sometimes, however, it’s really just the storyteller, of common breed, demanding an epic significance of his world. In The Odyssey, Homer introduces Odysseus not only as the fundamental epic hero, but also as the autobiographical storyteller, spreading the word of his grandeur to form his legendary reputation throughout the Greek world. In a sense, Odysseus, who, in the more communal and objective poem, The Iliad, was just another face in the fight, creates himself throughout The Odyssey, tossed from place to place by the gods, only to later tell about it. Often greeted with the words, “Tell us your story,” Odysseus, more like a traveling bard than an epic hero, talks himself home, much to the delight of his hosts, who oftentimes beg him to continue into the night. Shaped by Homer, modern citizens still savor the exchange of stories, not only in casual conversation, but in entertainment as well. The self-obsessed bard-hero Odysseus finds his perfect epic echo in the founder of the genre of autobiographical monologue, Spalding Gray. Rooted in an oral tradition, as the ancients, Gray, a nobody from Barrington, Rhode Island, tells his stories to captivated audiences across the country with the same near-fatal adventures, strange encounters, sexual exploits, portentous signs, and self-glorification laid out 30,000 years before him. Like Odysseus, Gray is literally a self-made hero, who establishes that heroism while seated behind his stage desk, revealing his experiences to anxious listeners. Comparing Gray and Odysseus, in all their eccentric similarities, a reader sees two storytellers, picked from the crowd to lead epic lives, traveling across space and time to creating the genre of epic monologue. Given the position of spotlight, each man, standing in for thousands like him, lives to tell and tells to know, bridging fact and fiction by assuming the alter ego of storyteller.

In worlds collapsing around them, the epic heroes must constantly retell all they’ve accomplished, imposing a form on the past in order to reassure themselves of the future. Spalding Gray, borrowing from Wallace Stevens, calls it his “rage for order” in a life plagued by thoughts of suicide, deteriorating health, and the perpetual plaguing stream of memories and anxieties eventually expelled through monologues. Odysseus finds himself in an equally uncertain position in his attempt to return to a changed homeland, aware of the trouble that awaits him and unable to reach the end of his story. The gods mock Odysseus’ hope for a direct voyage from Troy to Ithaca, and, in delaying his journey, leave him with only the ideal of home, and stories of triumphant episodes along the way. However, in the oration of these isolated victories, Odysseus expects, through synechdoche, a successful journey home. The epic form allows the storyteller adrift to organize the scattered, prosaic events of his past into a more meaningful meter with which to approach the uncertain future.

The form itself, referred to by James Leverett as the “epic monologue,” remains strikingly similar across time and culture. With titles like Swimming to Cambodia and Impossible Vacation, Gray’s stories follow closely in Homer’s wayfaring footsteps, creating a hero driven across countries by a self-seeking wanderlust. Like Odysseus’ circular journey home, Spalding Gray’s global travels lead only to into himself. In search of what he calls “the Perfect Moment,” Gray finds himself in Thailand, Ireland, Amsterdam, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, and, oftentimes, in his own memories. Gray’s Perfect Moment is the ideal that drives him forward, or rather back—as potent as Odysseus’ return to Ithaca. As circuitously circular as The Odyssey, Gray’s novel Impossible Vacation begins and ends with the same imagery of riding in a ‘38 Ford beach wagon driving out to the sea, though the second time it appears, Gray has returned home after they journey; he has had a Perfect Moment. He describes finding it while swimming in the Indian Ocean: “Suddenly, there was no time and there was no fear… There were no longer any outlines. It was just one big ocean. My body had blended with the ocean.” The collapse of ego boundaries between Spalding (the self) and the vast sea around him (the other) is central to epic tradition, as in The Iliad, which explores the whole community from which the singular Odysseus springs, one man standing for many. Odysseus, too, identifies himself as part of the whole while in disguise: “Nobody—that’s my name. Nobody” (223). They are, however, accompanied by a complimentary sense of self-importance bordering on hubris. Both men consider themselves as formidable as their stories, acting out the myth of their cursed lives, personally disfavored by the gods. Both Odysseus and Gray were born into disfavored lives: the Son of Pain and the son of Margaret Gray, who committed suicide at 52, they are left to fulfill their heritage, to come into their names. Though Gray kills no Cyclopes, he treats himself as an epic hero nonetheless, grappling with an eye surgery with equally wild abandon.

Though these epic autobiographical monologues are told in first person, revealing pains and hope to listeners, the exact relationship between the storyteller and his true identity remains nuanced, even dual, as the storyteller-personality, in lies and exaggerations, obliquely reveals the man behind the teller. In his monologue It’s a Slippery Slope, Gray pinpoints this confusion of identity: “They’ve seen my show last night, they’ve seen Gray’s Anatomy, I know it, I can tell by the way they’re smiling, like they think they know me.” As the listening audience can never distinguish man from teller, they must assume the man is his story. However, the dual persona of the storyteller cannot be discovered in just one sitting. Odysseus, for example, tells multiple “autobiographical” tales, most of which are complete fiction (as some of Gray’s work tends to be as well). However, it is oftentimes only in these fictional accounts that the tellers reveal themselves most. In Odysseus’ narration to Eumaeus the swineherd, his fictional character admits aspects of his personality that Odysseus would claim. In disguise, he states, “I had no love for working the land, the chores of households either, the labor that raises crops of shining children. No, it was always oarswept ships that thrilled my heart, and wars…” (308). In character, Odysseus is free to express his doubts at being home again to raise the child he’s never known and return to domestic life, void of the adventure he so easily (and somewhat enjoyably) bore his many years from home. He refers to this need for adventure later in the story: “No more than a month I stayed at home, taking joy in my children, loyal wife and lovely plunder. But a spirit in me urged, ‘Set sail for Egypt—’” (309). Odysseus foresees his own disenchantment with the selfsame Ithaca that was so often conjured up as ideal in his seafaring dreams. At sea his mind goes to Ithaca, at Ithaca his dreams, once again, set sail. Later, Odysseus points to his own skills of deceit, as he recounts how he saved himself by “[running] right into the path of the king’s chariot, and [hugging] and [kissing] his knees,” (310) a dramatic gesture requiring the best acting skills to have been taken pity on. Though disguised in the alter ego of storyteller, the man is revealed to the utmost degree.

Once the teller becomes aware of the powers of manipulation and creation associated with the storyteller, he begins to revel in the position, living solely to tell his story. “When I’m doing my monologue, I’m in my element,” Spalding Gray says in an interview. “I tell my edited life story with…more energy than the way I live my life.” Likewise, some of the most exciting scenes, identifiably Odyssean are found in his monologue to the Phaecians, one of which includes the tale of Circe’s spell. When considering the episode, one would think his first priority upon entering her halls would be to rescue his men turned swine, however, with little persuasion he first “[mounts] Circe’s gorgeous bed” as if only to tell about it. Spalding Gray asks the question early in his career, “I never wonder whether, if a tree falls in the forest, will anyone hear it. Rather, who will tell about it?” Extending Gray’s metaphor, one may come to the startling conclusion that if no one tells the story, the events may as well have not even occurred. Had Odysseus not told of Circe, his exploit would have been meaningless, lost in an untold history. In choosing what to tell and doing what he wants to be told, the storyteller truly creates his own path through history, giving a more literal meaning to the bards’ creating “paths of song” (207).

Despite all the failings of truth in both story and teller, storytelling never loses its potency, extending beyond the heroes to everyone they encounter, creating a constant exchange of stories across space and time. Both Gray and Odysseus are traveling storytellers, planting the seeds of their tales wherever they go, while simultaneously gathering stories from others and promoting the form of the autobiographical monologue. This monologue, however, stands not for one, but for the masses. Relevance to their time and identification with their culture distinguish the orators of the nobodies. Called “the one indispensable witness to our times,” Gray equates himself with the chroniclers of ancient Rome, using his story to comment on society and connect with those like him. Similarly, Odysseus stands for not only the homeward bound war hero, but also acts as a vessel for numerous other men’s stories, brought back with him from the underworld. This personal exchange of stories takes precedence in the poem, acting as both warnings and guides. Adamemnon warns Odysseus, “Never reveal the whole truth, whatever you may know; just tell…a part of it, be sure to hide the rest” (263), encouraging Odysseus to exercise his rights as a storyteller. One can admire this exchange in perhaps the most tender scene of The Odyssey, when Penelope and Odysseus finally lie down to “[revel] in each other’s stories,” (465) as the narrator stands between the reader and the telling, allowing him to marvel at the beautiful the act of storytelling from a distance, undisturbed by quotations. Just as the souls of the dead are given power to speak upon approaching Odysseus and the sacrificial blood, the same metonymic transfer of narrative occurs with a closeness to Gray, who runs autobiographical storytelling workshops across the country, tapping each soul that approaches, giving voice to the nobodies.

Though told in a prescribed form, either in dactylic hexameter or from behind a desk and microphone, Odysseus’ and Gray’s narratives are just dramatizations of everyday life: the telling of stories, oftentimes embellished, to place oneself in psychological space and cultural time, becoming part of a self-created reality verified by an audience of friends. But in the case of our own epic monologues, one must question to what extent magical realism can leave its realm of fiction to rear its head in fact. One may think dismiss all signs of mythic value, as Eurymachus, believing that, though “[f]locks of birds go fluttering under the sun’s rays, not all are fraught with meaning” (99). For Gray, however, like Odysseus, portents and prophecies rule one’s life, and an event is never just a coincidence, but a sign. Though it may seem unfit to compare Gray with Odysseus, as they belong to separate worlds of fact and fiction, but through monologue, Gray bridged the two, consciously placing himself into the same realm as the epic hero. “Life made a theme of itself and finally transformed itself into a work of fiction,” he writes. Having led a life of epic standards, Gray was not just another depressive to disappear into the icy New York Harbor, but a man drawn back to the water, a symbol from his youth, in an attempt to make sense of a profoundly dense world. Gray’s personal myth, with the power of Poseidon, had become inseparable from his biography, fact and fiction merged, and he stepped into the world of his predecessors, men of fiction, whose lives were determined not by the gods, but by the storytellers themselves.

The Pivotal Role of Ivan Fyodorovich in The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov satisfies Richard Peaver’s claim as “a joyful book” (xi) on two levels. On the base level, the story is seen as a religious proclamation, brimming with declarations of faith and quotably life-affirming passages which one can reference as the core meaning of the novel, a refutation of negative theory. Father Zosima’s “Talks and Homilies” drip with the theology of the author as studied and understood by biographically-versed readers. Keeping both with the novel’s biblical epigraph (“if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit”) and the central, oft-repeated prophesy that one must be “guilty before everyone and for everyone” (298), the story illustrates a path from sin to redemption through acceptance of suffering. These simply expressed, pure, and holy ideas, though unarguably the very heart of the novel, when at first examined, fit into the complex, multifaceted plot as convincingly as they do the ear of the skeptic. Upon finishing the novel, with each brother’s fate left unknown and a number questions unanswered, a first-time reader cannot help but hear these deafening doctrines ring in his ears like the pre-adolescent cries of Alyosha’s schoolboys. One must not unquestioningly accept what is known to be the author’s intention, but doubt this over-simplified interpretation, passing Dostoevsky’s and Father Zosima’s rightful “Hosannah” through a personal literary crucible of doubt. From this point emerges the second level of this joyful book, a level that encompasses the whole of a Karamazov, devil and all, bringing a palpable and frightening human struggle to the foreground to replace abstractions of suffering. Ivan Karamazov’s antithetical role in the novel provides the dynamics that drive both the physical and ideological plot. He proves the author’s ideas by negating them, the same way each man’s ideals and beliefs are proven and revealed to himself. This process of discovery—setting beliefs against each other to the point of mutual destruction—is what makes Ivan the most dynamic of the brothers through the course of the novel. Of all the brothers, Ivan, alone, changes. He, alone, abandons his former self, pushed from disbelief into madness. As the rebel, the middle child, the dynamic antithesis, and necessary evil, Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov illustrates through contrary action a weightier, tempered version of the novel’s joyful truth.

Ivan’s pivotal role starts most basically in an examination of the storyline. The three legitimate brothers are born in dialectic succession: Dmitri, the firstborn, represents the original thesis (body), Ivan, the negator, stands in antithesis to the former (mind), and Alyosha creates a bridging synthesis of the two (soul). Though the brothers are undoubtedly part of the same whole, each has his own separate breakthrough, cited by critics, defined in those passages strewn with inspiring phrases, begging to be underlined. For Dmitri, the hymn for the “wee ones” drives his ideals (Book IX, Chapter 4), for Alyosha, his visions of “The Cana of Galilee” and sudden decision to “sojourn in the world” (Book VII, Chapter 4), and for Ivan, it is said to be his love of the “sticky spring leaves” that fuels his will to live (Book V, Chapter 3). However, each of these situations, when considered with the whole of the plot (instead of being isolated in rapturous quotations), proves questionable. In Dostoevsky’s novels, all words can be second-guessed on psychological premises, leaving uncertain impressions that echo throughout the story. Though the powerful expressions in these passages should suggest a permanent change, in comparing the character’s actions a few chapters before and after the supposed breakthrough, one sees next to no change in manner and attributes these thoughts to a mere “fit of passion.” Dmitri still looks to escape his sentence even after he proclaims, “I accept!” (591). He emphasizes, “All of this came to me here…within these peeling walls” (591). Dmitri claims enlightened suffering after only two months in the small Skotoprigonyevsk prison, assuming that a lifetime of hard labor will be no comparison. The suffering leading up to his rapture is short-lived, just like Alyosha’s afternoon depression. Alyosha continues to do good, still acting as a messenger between family members, and immersing himself in brotherhood, this time not of monks, but of schoolboys. Though his developing clairvoyance counters his naivety, the reader may still assume the novice has not reached the full potential Dostoevsky planned to give him in the unwritten post-Karamazov work, The Life of a Great Sinner, in which Alyosha would truly live up to his title as the “hero” (3). At the conclusion of the novel, it can be assumed that Alyosha will continue to do good for the next generation and Dmitri will continue to drink of life with amazing passion but little elegance, while Ivan’s fate remains unresolved.

His initial confession on behalf of the sticky little leaves, the precious graves, and the blue sky is threatened by his pervasive, gnawing self-doubt that, repressed through pride, one senses in his laughing, twisted smile and condescending words to his brother Alyosha (“I see you’re feeling inspired. I’m terribly fond of such professions de foi from such…novices” [231]). Ivan’s confession turns out to be as fruitless as his brothers’, though his differs in that it was not in a complete “fit of passion,” but something of a planned out scheme to curb Alyosha’s thoughts before presenting his Legend. However, Ivan begins a second descent in the end of the novel in an internal battle more physically and mentally destructive than any other character’s. Ivan’s fatal meeting with the Devil both influences and confirms his growing madness, a force of the mind and body set on torturing the soul. At the close of Book XI, Ivan’s sickness renders him weak and incoherent. The mind the reader has come to know so well is on the brink of destruction. Sickness subdues his seemingly indestructible ideas and the man Ivan, for once, is painfully mortal: “The sick man lay fast asleep, without moving, breathing softly and evenly” (654). Only after the most intense sufferings that destroy one like a real death, can a true resurrection take place. The narrator authoritatively affirms Ivan’s condition: “God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit” (655). Ivan’s ongoing breakthrough, left in the stage of breakdown, cannot be put into rapturous words to underline and highlight; his physical condition speaks more clearly to the reality of the story than any speech.

This crucial breakdown comes about only through the will of rebellion and negation, the values of the devil. Ivan is living proof of the Devil’s words that “if everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen. Without [the devil] there would be no events…” (642). With this in mind, one accepts evil as an active part of life, a force—or even the force—of the material world. Without the serpent’s diabolical temptation, man would have remained in Eden; Smerdyakov would not have committed the murder around which each turn of the plot occurs. Without the devil’s influence on man, he would never rebel in order to gain a fuller understanding of his situation; he would ignorantly sit in thesis. There would be no “crucible of doubt” for Hosannahs to pass through and “everything would turn into an endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull” (642). The devil is appointed to negate. Ivan’s philosophy is rebellion (“…I will not accept it. That is my essence, Alyosha, that is my thesis” [236]). Ivan’s Devil must exist in order to create action, driving the plot and testing the philosophies of the characters.

The Devil’s chief objective is to convince Ivan of his existence in reality. This would allow Ivan to project his guilt for the intentions of murdering his father onto a separate entity. However, denying the Devil’s realism, Ivan repeatedly argues, “You are not in yourself, you are me, me and nothing else!” (642). His argument does not deny the existence of the devil, but his existence outside of man. Man accepts the devil in him, which is neither good nor bad but is life. Man accepts his necessity to rebel. He accepts his free will. The devil exists as a force with which to be dealt. The devil’s reality synonymously influences all negative deeds while taking the blame for them, leaving man forever in the right. Ivan is, by the nature of reality, condemned to believe in the devil.

Ivan’s Devil, however, does not live up to the descriptions presented by the Grand Inquisitor as “the dread and intelligent spirit” (251). He is something of a lackey, pretentiously spouting off scientific facts, banal anecdotes, quips of French, and dated opinions. Dostoevsky presents the Devil as an utterly human spirit, one that would be seen in a public bathhouse. He is even likened to the coarse Fyodor Pavlovich:
“Such spongers…are usually single, either bachelors or widowers, and if they have children, the children are always brought up somewhere far away, by some aunts, whom the gentleman hardly even mentions in decent company, as though somewhat ashamed of such relations” (636).
If the devil is a part of man, he is “the most loathing and stupid” (637) part. Precisely because the devil is in man but in such a repulsive form, he seems entirely conquerable. The responsibility for negative actions shifts away from the devil and back to man. By presenting negative ideas in a disagreeable way, Dostoevsky negates the negator, roundaboutly proving a positive truth.

The famous Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and its illustration of the disparity between man’s ideals and the life he must live are also, like the Devil’s profession of realism, subject to an enthusiastically bleak interpretation of life. The Devil’s final argument for a Marxist revolution parallels that of the Grand Inquisitor, describing a time without religion when “the man-god will appear” (649) and humanistic love will increase tenfold, creating earthly heaven, as it no longer has to be saved for the afterlife. This theory provides only the ideal for which to strive, so until the entire race reaches this revolutionary moment, the enlightened members of society may act on the amoral principles of the future class, as universal following will come in due time. In order to attain the specific ideals set out by this theory (the most important being atheism in this context), the Devil and the Grand Inquisitor, like so many political philosophers, declare that the end justifies the means. However, since this end in utopia is so far off (“…it may not be settled for another thousand years…” [649]), the means, in which everything is permitted, including bloody revolutions and sacrifices, becomes the ends, and the ideal of utopia gradually sours. Ideals of perfection abandoned due to the state of the material world pervade The Brothers Karamazov, forming most characters’ bases for dissatisfaction and corruption. Ivan suggests the ultimate (conflict) between ideals and reality in the Grand Inquisitor’s accusation that Christ set an unattainable standard for man by rejecting the devil’s temptations. The assertion that man can never attain these ideals points to his inevitable acceptance of the devil or, more likely, the devil’s inevitable sway on man. With this acceptance, man must either compromise his ideal, an event that will always leave him dissatisfied, or give up on it completely. Ivan wishes for an absolute belief in something, but the reality of his Euclidean mind prevents him from understanding God. Accepting the curse of reality, Ivan compromises his ideal (and therefore gives up on it) by taking on the belief that a similar end can be reached through faith by force, the devil’s version of religion presented in the third temptation. Now, with a clearly defined earthly means, the original ideal is forgotten and corruption ensues. (This explains the Grand Inquisitor’s dual love and hatred for mankind: he loves the ideals of the future generation, the utopia, and so, fighting for an ideal of mankind, he condemns living men. Likewise, Dmitri’s human sensuality corrupts his ideals of platonic love and Ivan sees that “it is precisely one’s neighbors that one cannot possibly love,” (236) as the love for the ideal neighbor spoils the love for the material one, and “as soon as he shows his face—love vanishes” (237).) Man takes pride in Ivan’s rebellion, for he must suffer the facts of an unjust world. The great following of this theory, this contrary chapter, still leads men into misinterpretation. D. H. Lawrence’s Preface to Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor illustrates the negative spin of the concluding actions: “Jesus kisses the Inquisitor: Thank you, you are right, wise old man! Alyosha kisses Ivan: Thank you, brother, you are right, you take a burden off me! So why should Dostoevsky drag in Inquisitors and autos-da-fe, and Ivan wind up so morbidly suicidal? Let them be glad they’ve found the truth again.”

Just as the Devil’s banal weaknesses open a path around his seemingly inevitable realism, an opposing interpretation of Ivan’s “poem” confirms the falsity of the Inquisitor’s statements. Ivan calls his Legend a poem, opening it up for interpretation beyond pure reason. The final, interpretable act of the poem is Christ’s kiss as an answer to the Inquisitor’s accusations. To this “the old man shudders. Something stirs at the corners of his mouth; he walks to the door, opens it, and says to him: ‘Go and do not come again…do not come at all…never, never!’” (262). The Inquisitor does not accept this gesture out of pride, though “the kiss burns in his heart…” (262). His actions reference a proud, enraged Ivan. When Ivan asks Alyosha if he will renounce him for saying everything is permitted, Alyosha mirrors Christ and with his kiss answers, ‘No, I will not renounce you for rejecting the world.’ Christ’s kiss approves of the Grand Inquisitor’s actions as an expression of free will, a necessary step in a movement towards something greater. Though “the old man would have liked him to say something, even something bitter, terrible” (262), Christ leaves him unsatisfied, accepting the Grand Inquisitor’s rebellious nature and encouraging him (and Ivan) to continue searching until an equilibrium is reached. Here Christ does not give up completely on attaining ideals in the horror of reality, but believes they can still be reached in some form. He, like Dmitri, suggests there can be “beauty in Sodom,” and “for the vast majority of people, that’s just where beauty lies” (108). Due to the revelatory power of poetry, Ivan’s main theory is enhanced by the fact that it may have multiple interpretations of which he is not even consciously aware.

Both the reevaluations of Ivan’s evil characters and the failure of facts in the trial illustrate a plurality of interpretation central to the novel. In the final chapters of Part Four, which Victor Terras calls “Dostoevsky’s Swan Song,” the concluding philosophical statements are made through the attorneys’ closing speeches. In the argument for the defense (or the argument for what the reader knows be the objective truth), Fetyukovich claims that because each supposed fact set out against Dmitri can be refuted, his guilt, the final truth of the novel, rests arbitrarily on “a stick with two ends” (725). The facts of life do not indicate good or bad, innocence or guilt, right or wrong. They simply exist. It is then man’s job to interpret these facts how he likes, subjectively creating his own “novel” of meanings. When “it all depends on whose hands it is in” (728), there seems to be no graspable objective truth, only man’s subjective judgment (embodied in the jury). For the final glorious time, the action of the novel belittles Ivan’s faith in the truth of reason, giving more veracity to the trial’s absurdities (for example, Alyosha’s fateful recollection of the 1,500 rouble amulet). Both he and the Devil were correct in believing “the world stands on absurdities, and without them perhaps nothing at all would happen” (243). Ivan rightly says, “If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact but I’ve made up my mind to stick to the fact…” (243). Precisely because Ivan sticks to the facts does he end up in delirium, for Dostoevsky proves well that facts are impossible to stick to without faith in the absurdities and “fits of passion” that make up the essence of existence. This most important truth acknowledged, Ivan himself is driven to abandon the facts around which he centered his beliefs, tossed into a more genuine madness. His Euclidean mind falters because it cannot reason in more than three dimensions, for the knowledge of reality is useless; each man must use at least four dimensions, and that fourth must be of his own making.

When the courtroom officials drag him off of the witness stand, Ivan “[keeps] shouting and crying out something incoherent” (687). This last dramatic sighting of the rebel seems only appropriate. The primary cerebral force of the novel is destroyed completely, making way for a new stage, assuring progression. Ivan will be truly reborn. The synthesis he reaches, however, is a matter of subjectivity. On one side of the stick is death, the synthesis of life’s pure and irreconcilable struggle; on the other side is life, one that has not yet been lived.