TMOP: Chapter 6 pgs 50 - 65
Richard Ryan
richardryannyc at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 7 15:01:57 CDT 2008
Very thorough and meticulous summary and analysis, Bekah - thanks!
In musing on these pages I notice the elaborate dance that's already underway between the living characters and the dead, the present characters and the absent. Because so many characters - most obviously Pavel - are absent, much of the action necessarily takes place inside D.s head. One question worth keeping in mind is to what extent ALL the action takes place inside of D.'s head...
--- On Tue, 10/7/08, Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
From: Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
Subject: TMOP: Chapter 6 pgs 50 - 65
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Cc: "Richard Ryan" <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2008, 3:40 PM
I've tried to send this twice before - I'm not getting through!
Anna Sergeyevna
[pages 50 - 51 Dostoevsky returns to the shop where Anna waits on
him - he buys sugar. She says soothing words to him although there
is a man who looks vaguely familiar there. He wonders why he bought
sugar. ]
* Because Matroyona offered him sugar with tea (pg 23). Because
sugar is innocuous and he's suddenly feels a bit amorous - and
although he has a devoted wife back in Dresden, he's truly grieving
his son and needs the emotional connection - a common phenomenon.
**********
[pages 51 - 52 - Dostoevsky writes a note to Apollon Maykov.]
* Maykov was a Russian poet and long-term friend of Dostoevsky.
Dostoevsky once wrote him a 12-page letter to asking borrow 150 rubles.
**********
[page 52: - D. is not grieving - he is paralyzed like a stone. ]
** I think he's wrong, but because D. says it's from his own
experience I can't really disagree. - Nevertheless, each
experience of grief is different. D. has no idea if he's grieving
or not. Imo, he is - and Coetzee is as well (at this point - this
book may have been cathartic for Coetzee - but that's not really
opening myself up to the pages, is it?) This shock and denial D.
seems to be experiencing is part of the grief process in many
cases. Just because it wasn't like this with D.'s first wife
( died about 4 years prior) or Sophia, his infant daughter who died
only months before, doesn't mean it's not grief just the same.
There might be some complications with this grief because he never
was Pavel's natural father - that bond was never there - he could be
seeking a substitute at this point, I suppose. (But now I feel I'm
definitely getting too far away from what Coetzee intended - see? I
do have my limits.) (heh).
[ Page 52 continues: "This is death, death coming before its time,
come not to overwhelm him and devour him but simply to be with him.
It is like a dog that has taken up residence with him, a big grey
dog, blind and deaf and stupid and immovable. When he sleeps the dog
sleeps; when he wakes, the dog wakes; when he leave the house , the
dog shambles behind him. "]
* Coetzee often uses dogs and other animals as metaphor - most
apparent in Disgrace - and beyond metaphor in Elizabeth Costello,
"The Lives of Animals" and I think, "Diary of a Bad Year."
- I
think D. is on auto-pilot, he's like an animal, he's lost his power
of reason, his dignity, his creativity, his soul?
[ page 52: And he thinks of Anna's fingers counting coins and
stitches - he asks, "what do they stand for?" ]
** they stand for movement - for creativity, for life. And
Matryona's mother in "At Tikhon's was a seamstress. Stitches of
time
- a common metaphor.
***********
[page 53: - He is sitting at his desk in his room remembering
children, dead and alive, visions - "He is not in control of
himself..." ]
"Why this plodding chase across empty country after the rumour of a
ghost, the ghost of a rumour?"
"Because I am he. Because he is I."
From Demons: “I also know that it was not you who ate the idea,
but the idea that ate you...”
Coetzee has his own demon and he's cannibalizing the dead and the
historical.
************
[ Page 54 - The axe of death is mentioned as well as an ox as
metaphor for the heart. Pondering the moment before the moment of
realization of imminent death. And thinking of someone he loves - ]
his wife? Anna?
[ He sleeps and goes downstairs. Anna asks him for tea. "He is not
in control of himself." ]
* Thus excusing his imminent adultery?
[She puts down her sewing.]
and she's available.
***********
[Page 55 - Dostoevsky and Anna approach each other aware of their
aging bodies.] -
Very aware of their mortality. They're both in their mid-40s.
*******
[Page 56 - They spend the night in Dostoevsky's son's room - probably
because Matryona is sleeping in Anna's room. Anna's body is very
hot to the touch - "it excites him that they should be doing such
fiery, dangerous work with the child asleep in the next room." They
sleep but when he tries to arouse Anna later, she is "like a dead
thing in his arms" but he goes ahead, forcing himself on her.
* This scene echoes "Stavrogin's Confession" where Stavrogin
rapes
the daughter, Matryona. The rape is not so clear in the second
version of SC, which is the one published today as an appendix.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/12/11/18813/944
[As he climaxes in the sleeping woman's body, the vision of Pavel
rises up. "It bursts upon him, possesses him, speeds on."]
* Sex as death by falling? An opportunity for a demon to overtake
him however momentarily? (more later)
- I'm quite sure that several here can do far more justice to this
section than I can. I know what's going on; I just don't have the
words or the allusions.
*******
[ Page 57 - When Dostoevsky wakes he's alone in the apartment and
is impatient and (metaphors deleted) to see Anna but at supper she is
cool and then goes to bed, not waking up when he calls her. She's
now sleeping with Matryona.]
*************
[Page 58 - He tries again and the "women" do not stir... ]
* Now here's a distinct sign as to his attitude toward the daughter.
- She's not a 14 year-old child at this point, she's a woman.)
[... but he notices that the girl sleeps with her eyes open as if
watching, with a slight smile and with an arm over her mother like a
bat.]
* A bat? Or a possessive child saying "Mine!"? Or maybe bat, as
in a flying creature of the night? Certainly no cherub or angel. -
yup - shades of The Master and Margarita here. And it must be
remembered that this is D.'s understanding (reading, if you will) of
her, not her mother's, for instance.
[ Anna comes to him on a future night and again the experience is
like going to where his son is - with others - to death. He tries to
tell Anna but she is not interested.]
Anna probably thinks D. is flipping out. Besides, I'm sure she's
not flattered by what he's using her for.
Cannibalization again -
*****
[Page 59 - Anna doesn't return to his room so he writes her a letter
which she doesn't open. He goes to the shop but she turns her back.
He asks her why the avoidance - she replies it's obvious - he was in
need, he used her and now it's done. He objects.
Anna - "You are using me to get to someone else... You have a wife
of your own." and "You were pleading."
[Page 50-60 D. remembers the words, "A wife of your own." and he
thinks - "My wife is too young...Too young for me as I am now!"
[ Italics from book.]
* D. is sooo aware of his tired, old mortality - his wife is about
the age Pavel was.
* and the words, "You were pleading" will come back to haunt him.
**********
[Page 60 D. realizes that when he returns to his wife he will want
Anna. He goes to his room and calls to Pavel. But the vision that
comes is of Nechaev. "Nechaev is no student hothead, no youthful
nihilist. He is the Mongol left behind in the Russian soul after the
greatest nihilist of all has withdrawn into the wastes of Asia." ]
* The Mongols invaded Russia in 1237 and generally occupied it until
1552. They moved the capital to Moscow, appointed or validated the
tsars and and didn't leave until Ivan the Terrible conquered them
in 1552 and became the Russian Tsar of all Russia. This era left a
huge cultural gulf between Russia and Western Europe. Russia was not
part of the Renaissance (14th-15th centuries throughout Western
Europe) or the Reformation (M. Luther- theses - 1521). They were
totally out of the loop when Peter the Great took the throne in 1682
and tried to catch up with Europe. And the Russians took to the
French influence and let that influence shape their aesthetics from
the time of Catherine the Great, 1762.
Dostoevsky considered the Mongol influence to be the origins of the
dark side of the Russian soul but after his stint in the Tsar's
prisons and military he was not enamoured of the West either. Like
other Russian intellectuals of the times, he was searching for the
Russian soul. (See Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes.)
From http://www.utoronto.ca/tsq/DS/01/003.shtml:
"... Gorkij's insistence in a letter ... in 1911 that Dostoevsky was
a writer who "with the greatest power and lucidity depicted the
spiritual illnesses grafted upon us from the Mongol, the mutilations
inflicted on our soul by painful Muscovite history."
And here Coetzee directly addresses Nechaev's Catechism by quoting:
[ " 'The revolutionary is a doomed man,' it began. 'He has
no
interests, no feelings, no attachments, not even a name. Everything
in him is absorbed in a single and total passion: revolution. In the
depths of his being he has cut all links with the civil order, with
law and morality. He continues to exist in society only in order to
destroy it.' and later, 'He does not expect the least mercy.
Every day he is ready to die.' "
Dostoevsky used the Catechism in Demons and Peter Verkhovensky was
pretty much true to form.
************
[Page 61 - * How can a child understand that? The vision of
Nechaev is present - Pavel, the image of him, cannot return.]
* The "child" is Pavel. D. doesn't consider him old enough or
mature enough to understand revolutionary thought. Pavel was 21
years old, almost 22. Pavel may be D's child but at 21, he's no
"child." Still, he probably couldn't have the same
understanding of
revolutionary thought that a man in his mid-40s would have. Excuse
me, Nechaev is only 22 at the time and Nechaev wrote it - at least
in part. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Nechayev
[ D. will meet Anna and Matryona after they go to church and the
three will go to Petrovsky Island.]
Petrovsky Ostrov is one of five islands that make up the part of St.
Petersburg called the Petrograd Side. The other four are Zayachy,
Kronverksky, Petrogradsky, and Aptekarsky islands. Together, they are
the oldest part of the city. Petrovsky Ostrov is where Petrovsky
Stadium, where the 1994 Goodwill Games were held, is located.
Insignificantly, Raskolnikov collapses there in "Crime and
Punishment."
A nice place: "View from Petrovskii Island in St. Petersburg" by
Silvestr Shchedrin, (1815)
http://www.rollins.edu/Foreign_Lang/Russian/shche.jpg
[ In the morning Dostoevsky trips over a tramp in the doorway and
curses. The tramp reappears at the church where Dostoevsky asks if
he is following him. The tramp ignores him and the tramp "sidles
off," leans against a post, feigns a yawn. No gloves, only a
blanket rolled into a muff. ]
* This tramp will show up again - he's Coetzee's version of Ivan
Ivanov whom Dostoevsky used as Shatov in Demons.
********************
Page 62.
[Voznesensky Prospekt ]
Dostoevsky lived on this street for many years.
http://www.russian-st-petersburg.com/photo/citytour/st-isaacs.jpg
[ D., Anna and Matryona go to the island where D. thinks of them as
being a family, "...only a fourth required and we will be complete."
]
* D. is missing Pavel because he's sure not looking to the future.
[ Matryona plays like a child and D. recognizes that she will be a
beauty. ]
* a little foreshadowing there?
* D. is concerned with what his wife would think - he's had prior
affairs and, without detail, "confessed," causing more grief than
the affair.
(Dostoevsky was a man of deep conscience which tortured his sensuous
and risk-taking side.)
* But in this case he feels no guilt -
[perhaps because he is grabbing Anna for his very life - for the life-
force she carries to counteract the death force impact of Pavel and
associated thoughts.]
***************
Page 63
*Anna's passion. "Falling, but never an irrevocable falling. No:
to fall and then come back from the fall new, remade, virginal, ready
to be wooed again and to fall again. A playing with death, a play of
resurrection."
[ Pavel fell to his death - Coetzee's son fell to his death. But
falling as Anna does is not irrevocable, the faller comes back,
resurrected. This is what D. wants for Pavel. ]
[ Because Pavel never died in real life - I believe that
inescapably there is much of Coetzee here. ]
* D. - "I could love this woman." ... "He and she are of the
same
generation. And all of a sudden the generations fall into place."
And he puts Pavel into the same generation as Matryona - They are
probably about 7 years apart. (Matryona is about 14, I believe.) He
takes this difference in generations into the physical sexual
experience they had with her body in flames fighting age.
* He ranks the generations: "The children against those who are
not children, those old enough to recognize in their lovemaking the
first foretaste of death. Hence the urgency that night, hence the
heat."
Page 64 *Anna brings up Siberia. D. offers the info that this is
where he met Pavel's mother - Pavel was about 7 then. They married
after Pavel's father died. Then a few years later Pavel's mother
died also.
* Anna says that Pavel described her as being "young." D. realizes
that his current wife, also named Anna, is in the same age category
as Pavel and Matroyona.
[ Dostoevsky met Maria Dmitrievna Isaev (wife #1) while part of the
Tsar's military stationed in Siberia near the border with China.
It's a fairly tortured story with Maria not in love with Dostoevsky
and Dostoevsky tortured by obsessive jealousy. They married in 1859,
she died in 1864. He started Demons under the original title, "The
Great Sinner," after reading about the death of I.I. Ivanov at the
hands of People's Vengeance (Nechaev).
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazo/bio05.html
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazo/bio09.html ]
[ Anna/wife was hired by Dostoevsky at the age of 20 in 1866.
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~karamazo/bio07.html ]
* Anna S. tells D. that Pavel was afraid of losing D. D. denies
this saying, "From the day I became his father I never once failed
him. Am I failing him now?"
She tells him children are jealous -
Page 65
* D. thinks of Matryona and her possible jealousy.
* Anna tells D. some of what Pavel told her - it's painful for D. but
he wants to know so he can ask forgiveness. She tells him Pavel was
lonely and would talk. He needed to talk.
* D. asks Matryona if she remembers anything. Anna stops him - it's
not right to ask a child something like that.
(Could be leading into "Confessions"?)
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