Debate: Crime and Punishment.

July

8

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 12:42 pm by Ken Valenti.
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17 Responses to “Debate: Crime and Punishment.”

1. Elizabeth Ganga July 8th, 2009 at 12:54 pm

   I recommend “The Brothers Karamozov” or “Anna Karenina” as much more readable. I just couldn’t get into “Crime and Punishment”

2. Randi Weiner July 8th, 2009 at 4:14 pm

   OK, so repeating what I have said about C&P—my college roommate, who (along with me, by the way) studied Russian in college, used to say that C & P was its own punishment, a turgid novel full of more words than anybody could read without falling asleep. And she likes Dostoevsky.
   Now, I like Dickens, I love Jane Austin and I’m a big fan of Dumas, all of whom, I think, knew how to write novels (and in the case of Dickens and Dumas, large, fat novels) and still make them interesting, still touch on the big topics and delve into the meaning of humanity without making you want to slit your wrists.

3. Ken Valenti July 8th, 2009 at 5:07 pm

   Who said making you want to slit your wrists is a bad thing for a novel to do?

   Please, show me novels that can inspire that kind of passion.

   Now, I like Dickens, too. The man could really entertain as he drew out his stories to serialize them. And, of course, it was more than just entertainment. I agree here — he could touch on larger topics while making us feel deeply for his characters. And nobody tops the names he came up with. Uriah Heep. Ebenezer Scrooge.

   But I’m not a huge fan of Dumas, as much as I loved The Three Musketeer movies as a kid. But I’ve tried to read the book a couple of times and I get bored very quickly.

   (A side note: Once or twice I was inspired to try reading The Three Musketeers while I was the New Rochelle reporter. There’s a connection here, because the first sentence in the book mentions the Huguenots, a religious group that settled what is now the city of New Rochelle. I’ll talk more about that in a separate post.)

   I also read The Count of Monte Cristo as a kid, but I found it a little offensive. I’m not crazy about tales of pure revenge unless it delves into the dark psyche of the person seeking the payback.

4. Randi Weiner July 8th, 2009 at 5:24 pm

   3 Musketeers has that wonderful scene at the end where Milady gets her head chopped off in a private ceremony by our four heroes. You can’t tell me that was boring?!? Or that race against time while D’Artagnan hightails it for England to ask the duke for another set of diamonds to confound the Cardinal? Not to mention all that swashbuckling swordplay? Although I’ve got to admit Count of Monte Cristo never did anything for me, either. But I’d prefer that—or even the Countess of Monte Cristo—than the Russian stuff with all the pointless agony.
   Who was that Russian author—the name escapes me right this sec—who said that all happy families are the same but all unhappy families are different? That’s nonsense. There’s as much variety and drama in happiness as there is in unhappiness. I think that writing about downers is the easy way out, frankly. Have a character you can’t figure out what to do with? kill him off…. don’t know how to resolve a situation? let them all hang … anyway, if all unhappy families are different in their unhappiness, then all killers or evil people are killers or evil in their own individual ways, and examining them is just an exercise in voyeurism.

5. Ken Valenti July 8th, 2009 at 5:42 pm

   Yes, that was the obscure Leo Tolstoy in his little-known work Anna Karenina.

   As for darker works, I don’t think we’re talking about simply killing off the characters for the heck of it. (OK, maybe in The Metamorphosis. But really, what else are you going to do with a giant beetle? Have him become well-adjusted?)

   Reading about them is no futile exercise that only appeals to our baser instincts. There’s a bit more to it than that. These books touch on the conflicts that go on in all of us.

   Not that I’m suggesting we imitate Raskolnikov literally. Please, leave the ax home. But to fail to relate to torment or anguish, I think, is to deny our nature.

   I disagree that there is a lot of drama in happiness. I remember in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, when the main characters reach Rivendell and are able to relax and recover from their earlier adventures. Tolkien actually writes — and I’m paraphrasing here — that he’s not going to talk much about their pleasant time recuperating because the times that are nice to live through are boring to read about.

   I have to say, though, that a novel called The Countess of Monte Cristo might intrigue me. You know how guys are drawn to lethal women.

   When is that one coming out?

6. Randi Weiner July 9th, 2009 at 7:51 am

   No, no, I’m not saying there’s no depth in agony; lord knows, the worse the train wreck, the bigger the crowds. ... and the only people who attend kindergarten plays are the parents. What I’m struggling to convey here is that high drama doesn’t necessarily equal good literature simply because it’s high drama. Following around an ax killer could be either a great read or just tiresome. Arguing that you’re connecting to some dark part of your mind by delving into his/her warped psyche is an easy high school or college essay. I don’t know exactly how relevant it is to people’s real world experiences. I’ll make the argument that very few people are that deep and dark. Most people skate through life barely skimming even the first layer of their consciousness. Right, those people aren’t going to read Crime and Punishment, but they will cluster around some slasher pic. It’s a different type of connection internally.
   Well, then, here’s a challenge. Write a story about happiness with some depth to it. Your stuff is a lot of strum and drang—saying happiness is boring is a cop-out. And although I adore Tolkien, the last time I read LotR, I noticed that he really got into the war and blood and treachery and whatnot, but seemed almost embarrassed to write about the romances between Aragorn and Arwen, or Aragorn (and then Faramir) and Eowyn. I put it down to that old stereotype, the British discomfort with openly expressing the positive emotions. Frankly, even though I read LotR a half dozen times before the movies came out, I never could keep his female characters straight. I think that might be why, in the movie, one was blonde and the other brunette!
   There actually is a Countess of Monte Cristo by Dumas; it’s billed as a companion to the Count and—after a quick search to recall the details—it was a 1934 movie staring Faye Wray. Who knew? I happen to have a copy is the only reason I knew about it.

7. Randi Weiner July 9th, 2009 at 7:52 am

   sorry, that was supposed to be “sturm and drang”—my fingers slipped

8. Ken Valenti July 9th, 2009 at 1:42 pm

   Most people skate through life barely skimming the first layer of their consciousness? Perhaps. But I thought most men live lives of quiet desperation.

   And no iPod can drown that out.

   True enough that high drama alone does not make for great literature. You also need a deep understanding of human nature. Let’s give Dostoevsky that, too.

   Here’s my point: Yes, a story of an ax murderer can be gripping or it can be boring. But here we may differ on what tips it one way or the other.

   For me, if it’s just a supposedly suspenseful yarn about how he hunts down one thinly drawn character after another, well, yawn. But if it delves into the workings of the killer’s mind, heart and soul — how he justifies it, reconciles it with his beliefs, and how it tortures him, then I’ve got something I can grab onto.

   And if that makes a good high school or college essay, well so be it. That doesn’t make it wrong.

   Because high drama alone might not do it, if you don’t have high drama, all you’ve got it, well, much ado about nothing. And there’s a reason Shakespeare’s tragedies enjoy more prominence than his comedies.

   We are far too quick to dismiss the darker parts of our nature, and we do that at our peril. This gets back to that piece in the New York Times a few weeks back about how teens and young adults these days don’t relate to The Catcher in the Rye, because they see Holden Caulfield as a whiny, spoiled rich kid.

   Or the young woman in my non-fiction writing class a year back who hated a moody Joan Didion essay about her early years living in New York City. My classmate thought: Who was this spoiled woman to complain about her situation when she’s got a decent job, she’s living in New York, etc.?

   I have to wonder, is there no room left for people who are disaffected? People who might get a good job, might even get married, have kids and two SUVs, but still feel like they’re missing something?

   Isn’t there a note of denial in those who turn their nose up at people who might be unhappy even with all the trappings of a modern American life?

   Sure, there are people who are happy. But it’s not so clear cut as saying happy people don’t need darker literature, but depressed people might. Happiness is not a state, it’s a process. And, as the kids in The Breakfast Club so ably wrote to their punisher, Mr. Vernon: “We think you’re crazy to make us write an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us — In the simplest terms and the most convenient definitions. You see us as a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess and a criminal. Correct? That’s the way we saw each other at 7:00 this morning. We were brainwashed. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain and an athlete and a basket case a princess and a criminal.”

   So you can try to write a story about a happiness with some depth to it. And you might be able to tap into that depth. But if you start with the goal of conveying something happy, then that depth will be partial at best. And you might find that you don’t really have a story.

9. Randi Weiner July 9th, 2009 at 1:59 pm

   One of the interesting things about human experience is the whole concept of putting things in proportion/perspective.
   I just finished interviewing a mom who put her 18-month old daughter to bed on a Sunday, and got up that Monday morning to find her daughter suffering from what later was diagnosed as viral encephalitis. The child was paralyzed on her left side and after weeks in the hospital, came home essentially a newborn.
   The mother has spent the last five years doing intense therapy with her daughter, including having the good fortune of being able to participate in a robotics therapy program at Blythedale. The child is able to move her left arm these days (her hand is still not useable but its deathgrip is loosening) and her robotic therapy is being extended to the wrist. Outside of the child’s daily seizures, she’s coming along nicely and appears to be a typical 8-year-old.
   OK, so compare that with your statement that ’ isn’t there a note of denial in those who turn their nose up at people who might be unhappy even with all the trappings of a modern American life? .... is there no room left for people who are disaffected? People who might get a good job, might even get married, have kids and two SUVs, but still feel like they’re missing something?”
   I dunno. Compared with what I might consider real tragedy, their unhappiness does come off as simple whining.

10. Ken Valenti July 10th, 2009 at 11:21 am

    I think we fall into a silly, one-downsmanship sort of snobbery when we start comparing problems and saying, “You think that’s bad? Look at this person’s problem.”

    Does it mean we should rate problems on a scale? If I lose a leg to I get to complain half as much as the man who lost both of his?

    And when you start looking at people with physical ailments, it’s just too easy to dismiss very real problems that others face.

    It’s like watching Casablanca and saying, “Why do Rick and Ilsa look so tormented? It’s not like they have cancer.” Rick even says, quite famously, that their problems “don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

    But still we care. Because everyone knows that being unable to be with the one you love is not just a hill of beans. It’s a cause for real human heartache.

    Well, the same goes with being unhappy with things around you, even if others might tell you that you’ve got it good. (Here I’m thinking again of The Catcher in the Rye.)

    With Crime and Punishment, it’s a little different. Raskolnikov has a very real money problem. It’s his solution — to murder a pawnbroker, an act that leads him to also slay a second woman — that’s a tad extreme.

    But that brings me to my second point: I don’t think it’s productive to head down the path of what they should have done. To me, all that matters is whether we understand the character well enough to see why he did what he did.

    Raskolnikov had neither a therapist nor friends who might have told him, “Buck up, dude. So you’re short on cash. At least you’ve got your health.”

    Even if he did, he might still have gone ahead with his plan. The point is, he did it, and we see why he did it, or how he justifies it. And it shows us something about human nature.

    By coincidence, I’m just finishing another book, this one non-fiction, called Forgiveness. The author, Paula Huston, is a converted Catholic and takes a Christian view, but she was also once a college literature instructor and in the book she talks about teaching Dostoevsky.

    Specifically, she taught Notes from the Underground, which she describes as “a first-person narrative by an anonymous and thoroughly despicable character.”

    She says that she had a student read the first lines out loud:

    “I am a sick man….I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”

    The students did not immediately identify with the guy.

    “The class snorted and rolled their eyes,” Huston writes. And when she tells them to write about the similarities between themselves and the narrator, things got worse. “They groaned, and someone — the reader — flung his pen dramatically to the floor.”

    But she pressed her class to put some thought into it, and soon found a much different reaction. They wrote for ten minutes and then “we looked up at each other, dazed. ‘Whoa,’ said the reader, fanning his face with spread fingers.”

    Then she asked them to share. Here’s what happened, as she writes:

    “In the back row, where on too many days of the week a group of hungover students slouched, a hand went tentatively into the air. ‘Yes?’ I said.

    “’Well,’ said the student, his voice gravelly from so rarely being used in a classroom. ‘I’m pretty sure my liver’s shot by now.’ He glanced up sadly at the chorus of appreciative snorts that followed his announcement. ‘No, really,’ he said. ‘I’m not kidding.’

    “The room went silent. People were looking at the floor, their journals, the palms of their hands — anywhere but at the young alcoholic, now so nakedly exposed, still slouching in the back row….(Then) another hand went up. ‘I’ll go,’ said a young woman. And proceeded to read to thirty of her peers a lengthy list of what could only be called sins.
    The session that followed was one of the more remarkable classroom experiences I have ever had. One by one, these self-assured young people, normally so pleased with themselves, revealed their darkest and most primitive urges, their nastiest habits, their secret envies and hatreds….We’d just gone through a communal confession, and I’d come to see that we were all in the same boat, those students and I.

    “This, in fact, was Dostoevsky’s great insight about human nature, which he wrote about in novel after famous novel. He saw that in every heart there exists a ‘slinking whisper,’ as the Muslims would put it, a sly, persuasive voice that tells us we are good when we are not and convinces us we’re acting rightly when we’re wrong. This is the nature of temptation — it is an insidious line of internal chatter that works to make us proud of what’s worst in us. Uncovering the worm at the core, especially in the cathartic way it had just happened in that classroom, can be shocking.

    “But it can also be freeing.”

11. Brian Monahan July 10th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    I am actually hesitant to join in this dialogue. You two are handling it so well. I read Crime & Punishment when I was a senior in high school. I actually remember the classes in which we discussed. That probably says something because I sure don’t remember most of my high school classes. Though, it may be that I had a teacher that I really like.

    My recollection is that I was fascinated early on. (We read it and discussed it in sections.) I remember being fascinated by the gore and the violence. I think that may have been because we didn’t read many books like that in high school. However, as the book moved more toward an interpretation of human nature and why Raskolnikov did it, I recall being less interested. I eventually became an English teacher and have done that for years. I have had a choice of novels to do with my classes and have never selected C& P. I suspect I would have trouble motivating students. That may be because of what Ken said relative to whether people with 2 SUV’s can still have real problems in the way that Raskolnikov. I have some experience that suggests they can.

    For whatever it’s worth, when I have free choice about one novel to read and discuss with a class, I usually choose Of Mice and Men—and not just because it is short.. Speak of Shakespeare—I have many interesting discussions about the “tragedy” in that novel.

12. Randi Weiner July 10th, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    Or it can be self-fulfilling. ick.
    I can wallow in self-defeat, one-downsmanship with how slimy I am; aren’t there whole religions built on the idea that confession is good for the soul? but sometimes you acknowledge your deepest fears, not your deepest sins, and there may be as much showmanship going on as naked truth. If everybody is confessing horrid things, what do I look like if I don’t say something just as bad about myself?
    My dad was fascinated by Adolf Hitler. He must have owned dozens of books, studied countless documents and first-hand accounts, trying to get inside the mind of someone who could do the things he did. If he could have melded with Hitler by delving into his deepest private evils, would that have been enlightening or just creating a second monster? If you understand, don’t you begin to apologize? Your axe-murderer agonized, so maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. He was just pushed into it. it wasn’t his fault, it was the fault of society, it was the fault of capitalism, of his boss… he mentally apologizes to his victims but it wasn’t really his fault—isn’t there a point at which you, as a reader, say, ‘ok, let’s be practical. do i want to really understand why this guy is a killer or could my time be better spent doing anything—anything—else?’
    There’s a reason why a lot of people feel like Crime and Punishment is deadly, and not because it’s written about a killer. People’s taste varies; this may be a wondrous tale to you. Me—I’ll go in another direction.
    And speaking of other directions, now that this horse has been pounded for a while—and I’ll give you last words if you would like—I’ll concede that we won’t agree on this issue, as usual.
    So I’ll post another we can debate for a bit. But here’s the rub. I’m off for a week’s vacation. I’ll posit the theme and you can make first response and we’ll see if we can entice other comments. If not, I’ll pick it up again when I get back next Monday.

13. Randi Weiner July 10th, 2009 at 1:10 pm

    Sorry, Brian; posted without refreshing and didn’t see your response. My opening line was in response to Ken’s last.
    I was considering the bit about tragedy in Shakespeare, as well. I’ll give that most people think of Hamlet or Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet when they think of Shakespeare, but they also think of Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night, all comedies.
    So come up to the next post and join in a discussion about whether literature is actually voyeurism …

14. Ken Valenti July 10th, 2009 at 1:51 pm

    Absolutely, anything worthwhile can also tip over into being self-indulgent. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.

    In fact, you can pick apart any human activity and show that there are elements of self-centeredness in how it’s carried out. That’s huge messiness is part of being human, and that’s why I like stories that show how complicated we are.

    “If you understand, don’t you begin to apologize?”

    No, if you understand, you understand. Whether to apologize, forgive or further condemn is your choice.

    We all know knowledge and information can be dangerous. But not as dangerous as the alternative.

    And, yes, when people think of Shakespeare, they think of the comedies. I even mentioned “Much Ado About Nothing” when I made my remark. My point was that there is a reason Hamlet and Macbeth enjoy much more prominence among his works.

    And that holds true even today, and in pop culture. Do this experiment: Check the Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com. Run searches on Hamlet and Macbeth, then on Taming of the Shrew and Midsummer Night’s Dream, and see which plays were made into movies and TV productions more often.

15. Emanon July 14th, 2009 at 4:32 pm

    Good afternoon, Y’all…
    I’ll confess up front that I’m not a fraction as well-read as all of you, but I’m really enjoying this discussion—or all-out war, if you will . So on that note, I’d like to weigh in with a quote from a writer I consider to be a master at understanding human nature, with all its nuances of good and evil, humility and egotism—the great Robertson Davies:
    “Everybody’s life is his Passion, you know, and you can’t have much of a Passion if you haven’t got a good strong Judas… it is generally acknowledged to be a fine, meaty role. There’s a pride in being cast for it… Has it ever occurrred to you that there might have been just the tiniest feeling in the bosom of the lesser apostles—Lebbaeus, for instance… that Judas was thrusting himself forward again? Christ dies on the Cross, and Judas also had his Passion, but can anybody tell me what became of Lebbaeus? ... If he had written an autobiography do you suppose that Christ would have had the central position?”

16. Rob Ryser September 4th, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    A terrific discussion (really)...especially considering that, as far as I can tell, these two good friends who are also colleagues of mine have not read the book.

    Perhaps this thread is not about the merits of the book (certainly, it could not be if the first point stands) but rather about the reason why we should or should not pick up a classic.

    I suppose in journalism and in life we (starting with me) judge a book by its cover too much.

    In my opinion it’s perfectly fine to avoid a classic on the advice of someone we respect. For years I avoided reading Ulysses on the strength of Forster’s description of it as ‘an epic of grubbiness and disillusion.’

    The truth is Forster was being kind. But I had to read Ulysses myself to be able to say so today.

    I am not suggesting that we must finish the liver on our plate before we can state that we don’t like the taste of liver, but I do believe we must do more as artists and as lovers of art than give the liver a mere sniff.

    I have a colleague who teaches Ulysses at Mercy College who gets tears in her eyes when she speaks about it, she loves it so much. But I need to know what I know for my own integrity. Isn’t that why we read? Isn’t that why we write? (Flannery O’Connor I hope you’re listening)

    To digress even further for the sake of another example, I too often encounter someone who knows “all about the Bible” and yet has clearly never read it.

    During a tour Soviet students were taking at the Hackley School that I was covering for the paper back before the wall came down, the Headmaster stopped a Soviet student in his tracks when the student questioned what a Bible was doing in a place of learning. The headmaster said “You can’t understand Dostoevsky if you don’t understand the Bible.”

    At the time I had read neither. But now I can say that the headmaster was correct.

    I think we have to be careful to verify conventional wisdom and other hearsay, especially when the fashion is to marginalize immortal works of art.

    Since I have been moved by this excellent exchange to add my own thoughts, I should say that Crime and Punishment is, as Ken suspects, a masterpiece of beauty and order.

    And I should say about Dostoevsky himself: it is true, as Forster says that ‘No English novelist has explored a man’s soul as deeply as Dostoevsky.’

    Einstein, Freud and Nietzsche agreed.

    But don’t take their word for it. Verify it for yourself.

17. Rob Ryser September 5th, 2009 at 11:36 am

    I failed to mention that Randi is correct, and that Tolstoy is mistaken: unhappy families are all alike; every happy family is happy in its own way.

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