TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters

[Richard Ryan]

That's a good point, Richard, and I believe that Coetzee is leading is us towards a view of HIS Dostoevsky as a character in one DOSTOEVSKY's own novels.  In other words, it's as though Coetzee asked the question - "What if Dostoevsky had been the protagonist of one his own novels?  What would that novel have been like?"  Which is why TMoP reads so much like a loving pastiche of a Dostoevsky novel, especially in certain places.

One of the things that Coetzee seems to be doing is going back to the old saw about each person's life being the novel he or she is writing and taking it one step further by posing, in Dostoevsky's case, the question: "What if he had been his own character?"  It's the kind of more-than-merely-clever literary trick (more-than-merely-clever, that is, if a writer can actually pull it off) that makes Coetzee emphatically post-modern, despite his seemingly earnest and somewhat old fashioned high style.

--- On Mon, 9/22/08, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters
> To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Monday, September 22, 2008, 1:59 AM
> Richard Ryan wrote:
> >By the end of Chapter One ("Petersburg") of
> The Master of 
> >Petersburg, we've met the four of the characters
> who will be crucial 
> >to this story - namely:
> >
> >. . . For those who know the details of the historical
> Dostoevsky's 
> >biography, Coetzee immediately begins leaving clues
> that the novel's 
> >Dostoevsky is emphatically NOT to be identified with
> his "real 
> >world" counterpart. . .
> 
> I'm confused. Certainly the Dostoevsky of TMoP is as
> alienated as any 
> of the real world Dostoevsky's characters and in the
> very same 
> ways.  Difference that I can see is that TMoP is not a
> tragedy since 
> the main character is renewed through art.