Aspects of the novelForster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
History
Aspects of the novel
Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan)
English fiction -- History and criticism; Fiction -- Technique
That is the gulf between Hetty and Mitya, though they inhabit the same
moral and mythological worlds. Hetty, taken by herself, is quite
adequate. She is a poor girl, brought to confess her crime, and so to a
better frame of mind. But Mitya, taken by himself, is not adequate. He
only becomes real through what he implies, his mind is not in a frame at
all. Taken by himself he seems distorted out of drawing, intermittent;
we begin explaining him away and saying he was disproportionately
grateful for the pillow because he was overwrought--very like a Russian
in fact. We cannot understand him until we see that he extends, and that
the part of him on which Dostoevsky focused did not lie on that wooden
chest or even in dreamland but in a region where it could be joined by
the rest of humanity. Mitya is--all of us. So is Alyosha, so is
Smerdyakov. He is the prophetic vision, and the novelist's creation
also. He does not become all of us here: he is Mitya here as Hetty is
Hetty. The extension, the melting, the unity through love and pity occur
in a region which can only be implied and to which fiction is perhaps
the wrong approach. The world of the Karamazovs and Myshkin and
Raskolnikov, the world of Moby Dick which we shall enter shortly, it is
not a veil, it is not an allegory. It is the ordinary world of fiction,
but it reaches back. And that tiny humorous figure of Lady Bertram whom
we considered some time ago--Lady Bertram sitting on her sofa with
pug--may assist us in these deeper matters. Lady Bertram, we decided,
was a flat character, capable of extending into a round when the action
required it. Mitya is a round character, but he is capable of extension.
He does not conceal anything (mysticism), he does not mean anything
(symbolism), he is merely Dmitri Karamazov, but to be merely a person in
Dostoevsky is to join up with all the other people far back.
Consequently the tremendous current suddenly flows--for me in those
closing words: "I've had a good dream, gentlemen." Have I had that good
dream too? No, Dostoevsky's characters ask us to share something deeper
than their experiences. They convey to us a sensation that is partly
physical--the sensation of sinking into a translucent globe and seeing
our experience floating far above us on its surface, tiny, remote, yet
ours. We have not ceased to be people, we have given nothing up, but
"the sea is in the fish and the fish is in the sea."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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