TMoP - Chapter Two - The cemetery

[Bekah]

I certainly wasn't criticizing Coetzee for apparently  fictionalizing  
a cemetery.  Rather,  now that I'm pretty well satisfied as to the  
fact Yelegin Island was probably never an actual cemetery in which  
Pavel might be fictionally buried,  I'm curious as to why Coetzee  
used it.

One of the aristocratic families in "The Idiot" has a home on the  
island, it's mentioned in passing and that's as much as their is  
about Yelagin Island in the works of Dostoevsky.

Yelagin Island is the turf of the aristocracy but they're certainly  
not dead or even dying in the mid 1860s.

Yelagin is minor character in Gogol's "Dead Souls" but this seems  
unrelated.  very much alive.

So that leaves the idea of an island surrounded by a river - the  
River Styx perhaps which is  the mythological  boundary between earth  
and hell - where D. seems to be.
Bingo (perhaps):

 From ON MOURNING:
THE TROPE OF LOOKING BACKWARDS
IN J. M. COETZEE’S THE MASTER OF PETERSBURG
  http://tinyurl.com/3tch39

"In the context of the novel, Yelagin Island, the island of the dead,  
plays the role of the place and space that sets off mourning. The  
river on the border of Petersburg separating the town from the  
cemetery on Yelagin Island literally and symbolically delimits/ 
separates (the world of) the dead from (the world of) the living.  
Gillian Rose argues that mourning is impossible within the city  
walls, it can only take place outside the walls of the city. Rose  
also adds that without commemoration (the coming of) an ending is  
impossible (102).[9] Performing the act of mourning (that of  
lamentation and crying) is (made) possible for Dostoevsky outside the  
walls of Petersburg. This is where he gives free rein to his  
feelings. Lying upon the mound, crying, he observes himself and  
ironically remarks: “what a Jewish performance” (Coetzee 9). The  
river that Dostoevsky crosses with Anna and Matryona to get to the  
cemetary on Yelagin island alludes to the river Styx. With their  
symbolic crossing through the river, Dostoevsky, Anna and Matryona  
walk neither among the dead, nor among the living; their crossing  
takes place in an in-between space and is an in-between state like  
that of mourning, “belonging” to two worlds at the same time. Also,  
the image of the dogs on the island “skulking among the trees waiting  
for the mourners to leave before they begin their digging” (Coetzee  
7) evokes the figure of Cerberus, the hound of Hades, the monstrous  
three-headed dog."

There's a lot more about this aspect and the use of mythology in TMoP  
at that url.  From the second paragraph:

"Reminiscences and traces of the myths of Daedalus, Penelope, and  
Orpheus are at play in the novel, informing Dostoevsky’s mourning and  
his “tale of Pavel.” These stories play a crucial role, as the  
fictional Dostoevsky himself remarks: “One by one, in fact, the old  
stories are coming back, stories he heard from his grandmother and  
did not know the meaning of, but stored up unwittingly like bones for  
the future. A great ossuary of stories from before history began,  
built up and tended by the people” (Coetzee 126, italics mine). The  
question to be answered then would be what the meaning of these  
stories is, why they are hidden behind the text and what their  
function is. I argue that these myths are there as subtexts to  
Dostoevsky’s mourning, their function being to aid the father’s work  
of mourning and help him embed the trauma of loss into stories."


Bekah

On Sep 25, 2008, at 8:47 AM, Richard Ryan wrote:

> I also have checked extensively and can find no evidence that it  
> has a cemetery on it.  For hundreds of years the island was home to  
> a manorial estate and private park - in the 20th century the  
> Soviets opened the grounds to the public and turned the palace into  
> a museum.  Today the palace and park are among the the city's major  
> tourist attractions.
>
> Coetzee often appears to be taking almost Joycean pains to recreate  
> 19th century Petersburg, so if in fact there has never been a  
> cemetery on Yelagin Island we might take it as one of his little  
> jokes on his more historically obsessive readership (or at least a  
> clue that we should take nothing in the novel too literally).   
> After all, none of the central events in TMoP actually happened, so  
> it shouldn't be surprising that one of the first locations  
> described doesn't exist.  Chapter Two is full of  tropes - the  
> ferryman, the stricken dogs - that suggest Coetzee is invoking a  
> mythical Land of the Dead, not an actual place.
>
>
>
> --- On Thu, 9/25/08, Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> From: Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>
> Subject: Re: TMoP - Chapter Two - The cemetery
> To: "Richard Ryan" <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Thursday, September 25, 2008, 10:03 AM
>
> I thought I looked and looked and could find no evidence of a
> cemetery ever having been on Yelagin Island. Anyone else?
>
> Bekah
>
> On Sep 24, 2008, at 7:40 PM, Richard Ryan wrote:
>
> > "They take the little ferryboat to Yelagin Island, which he has not
> > visited for years. But for the two old women in black, they are
> > the only passengers. It is a cold, misty day. As they approach, a
> > dog, grey and emaciated, begins to lope up and down the jetty,
> > whining eagerly. The ferryman swings a boathook at it; it retreats
> > to a safe distance. Isle of dogs, he thinks: are there packs of
> > them skulking among the trees, waiting for the mourners to leave
> > before they begin their digging?"
> >
> > To quote (from memory) William Carlos Williams's introduction to
> > HOWL: "Ladies and gentlemen, we are going through Hell."
> >
> > By page seven of TMoP, Coetzee has already deployed a set of
> > allusions which will continue to resonate throughout the book: to
> > Dante, to Rilke, and, of course, always and everywhere, to the
> > historical double of the book's fictional protagonist, Dostoevsky.
> >
> > The visit to the Land of the Dead in the second chapter - invoking
> > immediately so many classic visits to the Underworld (Orpheus,
> > Odysseus, Aeneas, Leopold Bloom....), and accompanied by all the
> > necessary signs (ferryman, dogs, widows) establishes a re-occuring
> > pattern in the novel: the Living in search of the Dead.
> >
> > I'd suggest we'll find, as the novel progresses, that TMoP is -
> > among other things, but perhaps pre-eminently - a mediation on
> > Necromancy, on way that the survivors attempt to resurrect the
> > people they've lost.
> >
> >
>