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Today there were a series of terrorist acts in Paris so I was thinking I would skip publishing anything. Who wants to read about an over-a-century-old novel when everyday life is suddenly so real and horrid. But this chapter is so appropriate to a discussion of evil that I took it as a sign. I don't understand Lise, anymore than I understand the people who attacked random people in Paris; but I believe there is something to understand here.
The Brothers Karamazov
p671 [Lise to Alyosha] “I want to tell you of a longing I have. I would like someone to torture me, marry me and then torture me, deceive me and go away. I don’t want to be happy.”
“You are in love with disorder?”
“Yes, I want disorder. I keep wanting to set fire to the house. I keep imagining how I’ll creep up and set fire to the house secretly. They’ll try to put it out, but it’ll go on burning. And I will know and say nothing. Oh, what silliness! And how bored I am!”
What is this with wanting to set houses on fire? Did Muriel Barbery have this in mind with Paloma?
She waved her hand with a look of repulsion.
“It’s your luxurious life,” said Alyosha softly.
“Is it better then to be poor?”
“Yes, it is better.”
“That’s what your monk taught you. That’s not true. Let me be rich and all the rest poor. I’ll eat cake and drink cream and I won’t give any to anyone else. Oh, don’t speak, don’t say anything,” she shook her hand at him, although Alyosha had not opened his mouth. “You’ve told me all that before, I know it all by heart. It bores me. If I am ever poor, I will murder somebody, and even if I am rich, I may murder someone, perhaps -- why do nothing! But do you know, I would like to reap. Cut the rye? I’ll marry you, and you will become a peasant, a real peasant; we’ll keep a colt, won’t we? [This could be a reference to Levin in Anna Karenina] Do you know Kalganov?”
p672 “Yes.”
“He is always wandering about, dreaming. He says, why live in real life, it’s better to dream. One can dream the most delightful things, but real life is a bore. But he’ll be married soon, he’s been making love to me. Can you spin tops?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he’s just like a top; he wants to be wound up and set spinning and then to be lashed, lashed, lashed with a whip. If I marry him, I’ll keep him spinning all his life. You are not ashamed to be with me?”
“No.” [Alyosha has turned into the only monosyllabic character in Russian literature.]
“You are awfully cross, because I don’t talk about holy things. I don’t want to be holy. What will they do to one in the next world for the greatest sin? You must know all about that.”
“God will censure you.” Alyosha was watching her steadily.
“That’s just what I would like. I would go up and they would censure me and I would burst out laughing in their faces. . . . I would like to set fire to the house, Alyosha, to our house. You still don’t believe me?”
“Why? There are children twelve years old, who have a longing to set fire to something and they do set things on fire. It’s a sort of disease.” [This is the attitude Foucault reacted against. Calling something a disease is a way of trivializing it. Though of course if you are living with someone who wants to set the place on fire you just want a cure, not a deeper insight into her psyche or even the spirit of the times.]
“That’s not true, that’s not true. There may be children, but that’s not what I mean.”
“You take evil for good. It’s a passing crisis. It’s the result of your illness, perhaps.”
“You do despise me! It’s simply that I don’t want to do good, I want to do evil, and it has nothing to do with illness.”
p673 “Why do evil?”
“So that everything will be destroyed. Oh, how nice it would be if everything were destroyed! You know, Alyosha, I sometimes think of doing a lot of harm. I would do it for a long while secretly and then suddenly everyone would find out. Everyone will stand around and point their fingers at me and I will look at them all. That would be awfully nice. Why would it be so nice, Alyosha?”
I almost skipped this entire section with crazy Lise, but there’s really so much here. You can see Lise as representing the hobbled condition of women at this time. The options open to women of the better classes at this time in Russia were not that different from Regency England. Lise could be a literary descendant of Lydia Bennet. Or you could view Lise as representing not just her gender but her class, a precursor to similar characters in The Magic Mountain. And the desire to destroy everything is at the heart of Doctor Faustus.
“I don’t know. It’s a craving to destroy something good or, as you say, to set fire to something. It happens sometimes.”
“I not only say it, I will do it.”
“I believe you.”
...
“There are moments when people love crime,” said Alyosha thoughtfully.
“Yes, yes! People love crime. Everyone loves crime, they love it always, not at some ‘moments.’ You know, it’s as though people have made an agreement to lie about it and have lied about it ever since. They all say that they hate evil, but secretly they all love it.”
Of course here I see my interest in Story: “good” and “evil” are the plot devices that drive the action in fiction and life. And the alternative is indeed boredom. There’s remarkably little sex in this book, and what there is takes place not only off stage but in the past. But there is a murder that fuels the plot. I would be happy with a version of the book without Fyodor’s death, but I doubt that such a book would have been as popular. Would Anna Karenina be “Anna Karenina” if she hadn’t thrown herself under that train? I think not.
...p674 [Still Lise] “...Oh, I must tell you a funny dream I had. I sometimes dream of devils. It’s night, I am in my room with a candle and suddenly there are devils all over the place, in all the corners, under the table. And they open the doors, there’s a crowd of them behind the doors and they want to come and grab me. And they are just coming, just grabbing me. But I suddenly cross myself and they all draw back, though they don’t go away altogether. They stand at the doors and in the corners, waiting. And suddenly I have a frightful longing to revile God aloud, and so I begin. And then they come crowding back to me, delighted, and grab me again and I cross myself again and they all draw back. It’s awful fun, it takes one’s breath away.”
“I’ve had the same dream, too,” said Alyosha suddenly.
...
“...Is it true? You are not laughing?”
“It’s true.”
Lise seemed extraordinarily impressed and for half a minute she was silent.
...
I would be impressed, too, if my monkish-sort-of-boyfriend admitted to having the same sex dream. The obverse side to creating God in our own image is creating the Devil out of the part of ourselves we are less proud of. By taking sex away from God, we give it to the Devil, and for Lise and Alyosha and the crazy monk Ferapont the world is suddenly filled with devils, the manifestation of our secret desires.
p675 [Still Lise] “There’s a book here in which I read about the trial of a man who took a four-year-old child and cut off the fingers from both hands, and then crucified him on the wall, hammered nails into him, and crucified him. And afterwards, when he was tried, he said that the child died quickly, within four hours. That was ‘quickly’! He said the child moaned, kept on moaning and he stood admiring it. That’s nice!”
“Nice?”
“Nice. I sometimes imagine that it was I who crucified him. He would hang there moaning and I would sit opposite him eating pineapple jam. I am awfully fond of pineapple jam. Do you like it?”
Alyosha looked at her in silence. Her pale, sallow face was suddenly contorted, her eyes burned.
There are many ways to look at this passage. I suspect Dostoyevsky would have us see it as a kind of demonic possession, though that leaves open the question what “demonic possession” really amounts to. De Sade would have strong opinions about this, I suspect. And if you go back to the recurring statement that "everything is lawful" in what -- without God -- is a state of nature; then this is no more curious than some of the more loathsome (to us) activities of insects chronicled by Sallie Tisdale. Though the addition of “intention” makes this a bit more loathsome. Perhaps.
I would like to end with that last passage, but the next bit relates to, and is perhaps crucial to, the ongoing story of Ivan which we will return to soon.
“You know, when I read about that child, I cried all night. I kept thinking of how the little thing cried and moaned (a child of four understands, you know) and all the while the thought of pineapple jam haunted me. In the morning I wrote a letter to a certain person, begging him to come and see me. He came and I told him all about the child and the pineapple jam. All about it, all, and said that it was nice. Then he got up and went away. He was only here five minutes. Did he despise me?...
...
“Did you send him a letter?”
“Yes.”
“Simply to ask about that, about the child?”
“No, not about that at all. But when he came, I asked him about that at once. He answered, laughed, got up and went away.”
...
p676 “And did he despise me? Did he laugh at me?”
“No, for perhaps he believes in pineapple jam himself. He is very ill now, Lise.” [Ivan]
“Yes, he does believe in it,” Said Lise with flashing eyes.
“He doesn’t despise anyone,” Alyosha went on. “Only he does not believe anyone. If he doesn’t believe in people, of course he does despise them.”
“Then he despises me, me?”
“You, too.”
“Good. When he went out laughing, I felt that it was nice to be despised. The child with fingers cut off is nice and to be despised is nice . . .”
And she laughed in Alyosha’s face, a feverish malicious laugh.
“Do you know, Alyosha, do you know, I would like . . . Alyosha save me!” She suddenly jumped from the invalid chair, rushed to him and grabbed him with both hands. “Save me!” she almost groaned. “Is there anyone in the world I could tell what I’ve told you? I’ve told you the truth, the truth. I will kill myself, because I hate everything! I don’t want to live, because I hate everything... Alyosha, why don’t you love me?” she finished in a frenzy.
“But I do love you!” Answered Alyosha warmly.
“And will you weep over me, will you?”
“Yes.”
“Not because I won’t be your wife, but simply because . . . Thank you! It’s only your tears I want. Everyone else may punish me and trample me under foot...”
So... we get to see this from Alyosha’s Christian perspective and we also get a hint of how it must have seemed to the secular Ivan. I believe we are supposed to see that Alyosha is better prepared to process this without falling into brain fever like Ivan. Though, that doesn’t really work as, I just recalled, we are soon to come to the section from Ivan’s point of view that seems to have been an inspiration for the crucial scene in Doctor Faustus. Hmmm... Ivan is a bit of a Faust character -- though without the bargain with the devil. Ivan is like Goethe’s Faust at the beginning of the poem.
One final note from this section. After Lise sends Alyosha away with a letter for Ivan, she carefully slams the door on her own finger,
p677 ...Ten seconds later, releasing her finger, she walked softly, slowly to her chair. She sat up straight in it and looked intently at her blackened finger and at the blood that oozed from under the nail.
Her lips were quivering and she kept whispering to herself: “I am a wretch, wretch, wretch, wretch!”
If Lise were a complete invention by Dostoyevsky, we would have to ask what he meant by all this. But I read somewhere that Lise was in fact based on a woman he knew (now I can't find that). I was puzzled by that, what about the character was suggested by this real person, but I’m pretty sure this must be it. There remains the question of how he portrays her -- what he chooses to show us -- but I really do want to know more of the background of this real woman. I’m also reminded of George Gissing’s disastrous relationships with women. What was it with writers in the late 19th century that attracted them to apparently crazy women? Is this an improvement over the love ‘em and leave ‘em Romantic writers like Goethe and Byron? As with Goethe’s Faust, I find myself wishing for a feminist critique of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
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