Tierras del SINAP y otras figuras de protección

As in the final section of Foe, when the narrative dives into the wreck of history and loses its voice, the theme of losing oneself recurs in The Master of Petersburg in the form of epileptic attacks. The “head beginning to swim” could be an auratic indicator for a seizure, but at this point only leads to the forgetfulness of sleep. The theme of “losing himself” is explicitly expressed in the narrative early on: “[…] breathing softly, trying to lose himself, trying to evoke a spirit that can surely not yet have left these surroundings.” (12) The loss of self is supposed to make room for the spirit of the dead son to take residence.

Another theme that resonates with the final section of Foe, in particular the notion of diving into deep waters, recurs prominently in The Master of Petersburg, as in one of Dostoevsky’s dream visions:

He knows what he is in search of. As he swims he sometimes opens his mouth and gives what he thinks of as a cry or a call. With each cry or call water enters his mouth; each syllable is replaced by a syllable of water. He grows more and more ponderous, till his breastbone is brushing the silt of the river-bed. (17)

The syllables being replaced by water are simply the name of his son: Pavel. As with Vercueil and with Friday, Pavel represents an other we learn very little about. In terms of the sympathetic imagination, leaving the other as a fairly blank space challenges the reader far more, even though it implies repeated frustration. In the end, this opens space for our sympathetic imagination to explore, and thereby allows us to practice our faculty of empathy, and there is no need to come to a final conclusion in regard to the other. Sam Durrant comments on the difference between what Elizabeth Costello preaches and what many characters in Coetzee’s fictions go through:

Costello’s lecture preaches the necessity of awakening to the reality of other lives, a passage from willed ignorance to willed wakefulness that only comes about through an act of volition, a conscious decision to open the heart. Coetzee’s novels, by contrast, describe a kind of fall into sleepfulness, a cessation of the will that leads to a dreamy or somnambulistic mode of attentiveness to other lives. And yet these trajectories may not be as far apart as they may appear. (Durrant 2006: 121f)

Whereas Elizabeth Curren actively sought to reshape her imagination, Dostoevsky’s opening up to the other takes place subconsciously.

In the case of Dostoevsky, the impossibility of closure in regard to his lost son becomes apparent in his thoughts, related to us in indirect discourse: “From somewhere to somewhere I am in retreat, he thinks; when the retreat is completed, what will be left of me?” (19) At this point Dostoevsky has not yet realized the futility of his work of mourning, of his work of losing himself. In the end he will remain himself more than he wishes to, and his self

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will be the inescapable Rubicon of his existence; the only way forward will be the words he writes on paper. But even at the early stages of his search, the metaphor of submerging himself into a realm of water points to this futility: “The stream that carries him still moves forward; but that purpose is no longer life. He is being carried by dead water, a dead stream.” (20) Later, it will come to him in more precise terms: “I am I, he thinks despairingly, manacled to myself till the day I die. Whatever it was that wavered toward me, I was unworthy of it, and now it has withdrawn.” (82)

Dostoevsky puts up resistance to the death he encounters again and again: “All day and all night he breathes life into the water.” (21) Only his thoughts can animate the waters, only the vision of a writer’s mind. The character is aware of his bookishness (a term also attributed to Coetzee by Coetzee in Summertime): “He tries to speak, but his voice emerges strangled. I am behaving like a character in a book, he thinks.” (27) We read “the strangled voice” of the grieving father, who is lacking the right words to conjure his son back to life. All relations he forms are connected to Pavel: Pavel’s landlady and her daughter; Councillor Maximov, who is in possession of Pavel’s private papers; Nechaev, a revolutionary comrade or possibly his murderer; finally Ivan and the dog, intermediaries of a third kind, empathetic foils for Dostoevsky. Through all of them he hopes to reconnect to his lost son.

In the case of Anna Sergeyevna, he longs for her to understand his soul-searching, hopes that together they might be able to hear Pavel’s voice:

How can he make her understand? To make her understand he would have to speak in a voice from under the waters, a boy’s clear bell-voice pleading out of the deep dark. “Sing to me, dear father!” the voice would have to call, and she would have to hear. Somewhere within himself he would have to find not only that voice but the words, the true words. Here and now he does not have the words. (110f)

He continues this thought and muses about whether these orphic “words” might not be found “in the breast of the Russian people [...]. Or perhaps in the breast of a child.” (111) This foreshadows the function Matryona will take as a character in Dostoevsky’s next novel, the child who loses her heart and life to Stavrogin. The lost child thereby appears threefold, once as Pavel, twice as Matryona – Coetzee’s character and Dostoevsky’s character. The author figure Dostoevsky struggles to maintain what he calls “the integrity of his grieving”:

He shakes his head as if to rid it of a plague of devils. What is it that is corrupting the integrity of his grieving, that insists it is nothing but a lugubrious disguise? Somewhere inside him truth has lost its way. As if in the labyrinth of his brain, but also in the labyrinth of his body – veins, bones, intestines, organs – a tiny child is wandering, searching for the light, searching to emerge. How can he find the child lost within himself, allow him a voice to sing his sad song?

Piping on a bone. […] Father, why have you left me in the dark forest? Father, when will you come and save me? (125f; original italics)

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The orphic, here paired with biblical undertones (Jesus in the Garden Gethsemane, Luke 22:39-46; Matthew 26:36-46), is imagined both as father’s duty and as child’s plea for help. Dostoevsky is determined to rescue what is left of Pavel’s spirit, to spare Matryona from ignominy and to relegate the imagined atrocity into his realm of fiction, where a child will be sacrificed to make a point about the elusiveness of salvation. Dostoevsky turns Pavel into the fictional Stavrogin, who remains in the care of the author figure Dostoevsky, miraculously extending his fatherhood. How much he cares for the stepson finds its expression in extending his lifeline by implanting his spirit in his forthcoming fiction. Dostoevsky imagines how dead Pavel feels and explains to Anna Sergeyevna: “[...]Pavel is above all lonely, and in his loneliness needs to be sung to and comforted, to be reassured that he will not be abandoned at the bottom of the waters.” (111) Instead of abandoning him, he chooses to betray him in an act of love and art.

Early on Dostoevsky hints at the dark ambiguity of his undertaking, for instance when he wears Pavel’s white suit:

He opens Pavel’s suitcase and dons the white suit. Hitherto he has worn it as a gesture to the dead boy, a gesture of defiance and love. But now, looking in the mirror, he sees only a seedy imposture and, beyond that, something surreptitious and obscene, something that belongs behind the locked doors and curtained windows of rooms where men in wigs and skirts bare their rumps to be flogged. (71)

The early “I” of Dostoevsky believed his bond to Pavel to be uncorrupted and pure, but as he moves from “I” to “He” his former beliefs are contested and doubt seeps in. The white suit can no longer satisfy his hunger for consolation and salvation, the rational enquiries will not deliver what he was hoping for; instead the search for the truth about his son’s death turns into a self-scrutiny, turns to his darker passions and liberates them, both in his emotional dealings with his landlady and her daughter and his artistic aspirations, which he comes to discuss with Maximov and Nechaev in regard to their political implications and with himself in regard to their moral implications.