Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2018 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2018 Word as Bond: Rhetoric and Performativity in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov Stephen Appel Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018 Part of the Comparative Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Appel, Stephen, "Word as Bond: Rhetoric and Performativity in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov" (2018). Senior Projects Spring 2018. 145. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2018/145 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Word as Bond: Rhetoric and Performativity in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Stephen Appel Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2018 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank Marina Kostalevsky for the invaluable support and guidance she has given to me throughout this whole thing. Her faith in me and her willingness to let me willfully dive off various philosophical cliffs here and there has meant the world to me. Secondly, I would like to thank my parents, Chuck and Erica Appel, for supporting me. My work here, and everywhere, testifies to the gift of life that you continue to pass on towards me. Thirdly, I would like to thank all friends, family members, lovers, and acquaintances that I have been blessed to meet over the years. And lastly, thank you to those individuals who have fed me time and time again at Kline. You know who you are! The breaking of all bread is sacred. Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………….…………………1 Chapter 1 “Performativity and Literature”………………………………………………………………………………………..16 Chapter 2 “Narrative Poetics and Rhetoric”…..……………………………………………………………………………………..48 Chapter 3 “Pro and Contra: Professions of Faith”…..……………………………………………………………………………………..90 Conclusion “A Final Word”…..……………………………………………………………………………………..28 Introduction Has there ever been a chapter of a novel that has been marveled over and scrutinized in isolation more than “The Grand Inquisitor”? Indeed, one may purchase printed copies of the chapter alone, perhaps having found oneself assigned to read it in some university seminar on Existentialism. But the words of “The Grand Inquisitor” do not mimic the dry monologue of an academic lecture. Rather, a scene of storytelling is reproduced within the novel. The Brothers Karamazov is framed as the written account of an anonymous, amateurish chronicler who attempts to assemble and present an account of a family drama from the anonymous and vague perspective of someone who lived in their town. Within this frame, the narrator’s own storytelling discourse is suspended in “The Grand Inquisitor,” giving way to the depiction of a conversation between the cryptic, atheist Ivan Karamazov and his earnest and deeply religious brother Alyosha. Ivan, aware of Alyosha’s urgent curiosity to know what Ivan believes in, ironically declares that “we green youths [...] need first of all to resolve the everlasting questions,” such as the cultural tensions between Russian Orthodox faith and the rationality of Western Enlightenment, or the tension between conservative traditionalism and liberal utopianism etc. (Dostoevsky, 233-234)1. Ivan, continuing with an ironical disdain, describes how the youth of Russia have become fascinated with the “fateful questions,” to the point of arguing about them with strangers in bars, only to never see each other again for “40 years” (Dostoevsky, 234). Ivan, who has already established his intent to leave for Moscow, thus comically underlines the absurdity of their desire to “resolve,” in the span of one conversation, the “fateful questions” that linger and return throughout the whole of The Brothers Karamazov. 1 Every Dostoevsky citation henceforth will be quoted from The Brothers Karamazov unless otherwise noted. Nonetheless, after Ivan proceeds to engage in a bizarre, conversational polemic against Christian theology, mentioning a lot about Euclidean geometry and suffering along the way. Ivan declares that while he accepts, as a logical proposition, the existence of both worlds and the truth of salvation, his own “Euclidean” mind, his own principled, proof-oriented brain, cannot approve of this logic, and thus finds itself to be morally offended by God’s design (Dostoevsky, 235). Ivan declares that, should there be Heavenly redemption for the cruel and senseless suffering perpetuated on Earth, he would reject salvation and “hasten to return [his] ticket,” insofar as this redemption would necessarily be predicated upon earthly suffering as the “manure of someone else’s future harmony” (Dostoevsky, 244-245). After Alyosha suggests that it is Christ’s own sacrifice, his own “innocent blood” upon which the “structure” of human salvation is built, Ivan reacts with joyful laughter and proceeds to recall Alyosha the famous prose poem “The Grand Inquisitor.” Although Ivan derides his legend as “an absurd thing,” a rather meaningless poem, he nonetheless tells it with fervor and passion and imbues the poem with subtle poetic allusions and figures (Dostoevsky, 246). The tale begins with Jesus Christ returning to Earth in Seville, Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. Immediately, the old, powerful “Grand Inquisitor” orders him to be arrested and takes Jesus to a dark prison for interrogation. While Jesus silently and earnestly looks upon the wrathful figure, The Grand Inquisitor begins to address the silent Jesus with a charged monologue that operates on the one hand as a condemnation of Jesus, and on the other as a confession to him. The Grand Inquisitor, as a stand-in figure for the worldly authority of the Catholic Church, tells Jesus that the Church has corrected Jesus’ idealistic and ineffective teachings of free love and devotion towards God. The Church, according to the Inquisitor, has understood that the only way to control the malcontented, rebellious nature of humanity is to supply them with food and comfort; only then will the masses accept the spiritual authority of their rulers. The Grand Inquisitor asserts that most men are not strong enough to maintain their faith in God, that men need to be comforted and fed their beliefs so that they won’t have to accept the grim, painful truth of their spiritual freedom in a world filled with senseless suffering. Although the Grand Inquisitor no longer believes in salvation, he preaches it solely out of the altruistic belief that people need to be provided with meaning and purpose in order to cope with their own suffering. At the end of the tale, Jesus approaches the Grand Inquisitor and kisses him on the mouth. The Grand Inquisitor, undoubtedly moved, decides to let Christ go on the condition that he leave and not disrupt the efforts of the Church to establish earthly order. Alyosha, confused and upset by the tale, asks what happens to the Inquisitor, to which Ivan responds: “The kiss burns in his heart, but the old man holds to his former idea.” “And you with him!” Alyosha exclaimed ruefully. Ivan laughed. “But it’s nonsense, Alyosha, it’s just the muddled poem of a muddled student who never wrote two lines of verse. Why are you taking it so seriously? You don’t think I’ll go straight to the Jesuits now, to join the host of those who are correcting his deed! Good lord, what do I care?” (263) This moment, brimming with ironies that fly off in all sorts of directions, gets to the heart of a particular concern in The Brothers Karamazov and ultimately the concern of this very project; what do we make of the disparity between Alyosha’s astonished reaction towards the poem as a reader and Ivan’s cynical, dismissive laughter towards the poem as an author? What causes Alyosha to identify Ivan with the protagonist of his poem? What is Dostoevsky, a renowned writer of great piety and faith, doing in inserting a polemical prose poem that condemns Christ within his own text? Who is the author here and what in the world are they trying to achieve? Is Dostoevsky laughing at us by reproducing the very problematics of interpretation and literary criticism within his very own novel? The Brothers Karamazov has for a long time been praised and canonized as a literary project of an ambition that mirrors the works of Dante, John Milton, Shakespeare, Goethe, and other writers whose works similarly dealt with the “everlasting questions” of salvation and theodicy. On the one hand, The Brothers Karamazov is a novel of a seemingly infinite thematic scope, a kind of “symbolic amplification” that allows his characters to allegorically embody cultural values and beliefs (Frank, 569). On the other hand, the novel appears decentered and without direction, filled with depictions of rambling narrators, awkwardly self-conscious characters, drunken rants, philosophical argumentation, poetic allusions, an inserted saint’s life biography written by Alyosha,