To recap. In the first instalment, we discussed the idea that literature is a mirror to life and rejected this idea, arguing that literature is concerned with ‘the interesting’. Rather than representing the life of its reader, the novel takes as its subject matter situations outside the reader’s experience (or perhaps only found on its periphery). In the second instalment we considered and rejected the idea that this interest could be rational self-interest. In fact, this step in the argument follows from the first. For, if people were indeed motivated solely by rational self-interest, wouldn’t they want to read books that simply reproduce their own lives? With advice?
Also in the second instalment, I lamented my lack of scholarship. I was unable to attribute the theory of rational self-interest to any particular critic. Fortuitously today I found one who comes close: Chernysaka who, in his novel ‘What is to be Done’, wrote
“…A man does evil only because he does not know his real interests; and if he is enlightened and his eyes are opened to his own best… interests, man will at once become noble, because when he… understands what will really benefit him he will see his own best interest in virtue, and… it is well known that no man can knowingly act against his best interests.
I found this quote, quite by chance, in the introduction to the 1972 Penguin edition of Notes from the Underground. Chernysaka’s statement may seem less anthropological (which tem I use to denote the study of human nature) than ethical. The last sentence, however, reveals its anthropological leanings: it is in the nature of man, Chernysaka argues, to act according to his self-interest; the only thing that prevents him being virtuous is that he is ignorant these interests. Cherynysaka’s novel, published in 1863, goaded Dostoyevsky into producing Notes from the Underground which is partly a rebuttal. In it, Dostoyevsky writes:
“One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed to the point of madness – †hat is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit into any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systems and theories to the devil. Where did all the sages get the idea that a man’s desires must be normal and virtuous? Why do they imagine that he must inevitably will what is reasonable and profitable? What a man needs is simply and solely independent volition, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.”
This quote, which I admit is quite lengthy, is valuable because it suggests, in other words, that a man’s interests may run directly counter to his self-interest. This is rather stronger than what I have been arguing, which is simply that interest is directed away from the self.
Dostoyevsky’s novel is important not only as a great work of literature, but as a precursor to existentialism. In place of rational (enlightened) self-interest, which we defined in the previous instalment as a concern to survive and thrive in the world, he makes independence, or as Satre would say ‘freedom’, the ultimate interest. This raises the question: can we build a literary theory on Existentialist foundations? I have an answer prepared but am mindful that this posting may be too long already. The question deserves an instalment (at least one) to itself.
I shall post it tomorrow.