UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA: 'A BRAVE NEW WORLD' AND THE CASE OF JM COETZEE

Abstract

In this paper, I make a case for the need to re-evaluate JM Coetzee's novel, The Master of Petersburg, in the global context of today, a context of ever increasing authoritarian populisms and erratic acts of violence. Published in 1994, the novel by the Nobel Laureate is set in Russia of the 1860s, against a backdrop of anarchist opposition to the Tsarist state. Critics have been puzzled by the writer 's apparently 'escapist' choice offictional setting at a time when his own country was in a turbulent transition from one dispensation to another. Central to my analysis is the danger of living in radicalised political times, while treading a precarious path between the utopia of revolutionary fervour and unpredictable dystopian unfoldings.

Headnote

Abstract: In this paper, I make a case for the need to re-evaluate JM Coetzee's novel, The Master of Petersburg, in the global context of today, a context of ever increasing authoritarian populisms and erratic acts of violence. Published in 1994, the novel by the Nobel Laureate is set in Russia of the 1860s, against a backdrop of anarchist opposition to the Tsarist state. Critics have been puzzled by the writer 's apparently 'escapist' choice offictional setting at a time when his own country was in a turbulent transition from one dispensation to another. Central to my analysis is the danger of living in radicalised political times, while treading a precarious path between the utopia of revolutionary fervour and unpredictable dystopian unfoldings.

Keywords: dystopian unfoldings, political radicalization, utopia of salvation

1. Introduction

Let me start by asking: Why return to The Master of Petersburg today, a novel written a quarter of a century ago? Published in 1994, the year of the first democratic elections in South Africa, critics were somewhat puzzled that JM Coetzee had this landmark novel set in another century, another country, at precisely the time when the international community was focused on the birthing of the 'new' South Africa. The novel does not engage with such a question directly, and JM Coetzee's tacit refusal to offer a recognisable represention of the South African/ international context of the early 1990s - a period of turbulent political transitions, post-Apartheid and post-Soviet - has left critics guessing.

I argue that - although set against an alien background (anarchist movements threatening the survival of Tsarist Russia in the 1860s) - The Master of Petersburg offers a reading congruent with the temper of today. The contemporary international scene, too, is turbulent and unstable. With increasing global unrest and deep dissatisfaction around economic inequalities, several countries have entered full economic collapse, while others may be called failed states, especially in the Middle East, parts of Africa and Asia. Such states have produced terrorist groups of random and spectacular violence, such as ISIS, Al-Qaida, Boko Haram. As Roger Griffin has poignantly suggested (2012), what appear to be acts of criminal barbarism are seen by fanatical fringes as necessary steps of systematically destroying a materialist, fallen western modernity, together with its entire value system. Most acts of terrorism are executed by angry young men who believe themselves to be on a mission of "destroying the world to save it" (title of a book by Robert Jay Lifton, 2000). According to such utopian, Millenarian beliefs, violently nihilistic destruction is believed to be indispensable in reconstructing a higher-order life purpose. As illustrated by SN Eisenstadt (2000), apocalyptic fanaticism, which is aimed at so-called salvation or paradise, is steeped in the terrorists' belief that they are impersonations of the 'New Man' of the 'End Times', emissaries of the divine, awaiting the rewards of martyrdom.

Central to my analysis are Coetzee's intimations around the potential dangers of living in radicalised political times, whether past or present; these are times marked by the utopia of salvation, often followed by uncontrollable dystopian outcomes and unfoldings. Without my wishing to transport any particular manifestation from one country to another, I suggest that in recent times we have been witnessing a dangerous mix of perverted religious and political radicalisation, whether in ISIS beheadings, mass shootings, or, less bizarre, in cult figures and followings. It is thanks to Coetzee's uncanny prescience regarding the toxic mix of utopian 'salvation' and social 'anarchy' that The Master of Petersburg derives its stamp beyond its initial publication date. Had Coetzee already seen beyond the greater optimism of the early 1990s?

The novel offers a story of idealism deformed by a vision of anarchy and "moral chaos" (Pechey 1998: 62). The setting is Russia in 1869, the protagonist is a fictionalised Fyodor Dostoevsky, who returns from exile to Petersburg to mourn the unexpected death of his stepson, Pavel Isaev. The story follows Dostoyevksy's painfully insistent investigations into his stepson's mysterious fall from a tower. There is speculation that the young man might have been murdered by a group of radical anarchists with whom he had become involved, with Sergei Nechaev (a notorious anarchist hell-bent on destabilising the Tsarist state) being the main suspect. Such ominous thoughts provoke Dostoevsky's soul-searches into his own guilt, fears, failures and desires; into reflections on the position of the individual/writer in totalising times. What forms of social emancipation/salvation are available?

My own focus is on the echoes, both religious and political, that the novel invokes in the reader today, at a time of toxic religious-cum-political demagoguery and populism, both locally and globally. A useful starting point is to remind ourselves that, at bottom, we are responding to a father-and-son story (or, in this case, a stepfather/ stepson story), not in itself anything new in Coetzee's oeuvre. The specific instance, of course, may have archetypal resonances, as father/son rivalry invokes the "psychomachia" of old and new, good and evil; indeed, we enter a quasi-religious quest tale that distorts (perverts) the trajectory of the Christic quest for a "new Kingdom" and a "New Man"; the religious reference abounding in the insistence on salvation and betrayal, Jesus and Judas, redemption, atonement and resurrection. This is not to deny the connection of the spiritual and the secular. Dostoevsky is equally concerned to connect with the ghost of his dead stepson as he is to understand the perils and, as he interprets it, the delusions of the "new man": that is, the new man forged in radicalised political times and treading a precarious path between revolutionary fervour and criminality. Not an unfamiliar figure to our news-screens of the last few years.

2.Father and son: the utopia of salvation

Coetzee has always been preoccupied with the difficulties of bridging divides between generations, often allowing private drama to illuminate the historical context; whether it is Mrs Curren (^ge of Iron, 1990) writing to her daughter in Canada about her uneasy relationship with the social movements in South Africa of the late 1980s, or David Lurie (Disgrace, 1999), who, finding himself in a now democratic South Africa, is unable to understand his daughter's muted response to her rape. In two novels written nearly twenty years apart - The Master of Petersburg (1994) and The Childhood of Jesus (2013) - the intergenerational tension has a masculine orientation, in which the pairing of 'father and son' propels the action. Interestingly, both novels involve quests for the "new man" (New Man) in times of social fracture and turbulence. In both cases, the yearnings for social utopias are tested against the values of more foundational societal norms. Again, in both novels, an element of postmodernist qualification of master narratives (the Jesus story) does not dislodge an urgent attention to religious allusions and parallels.

In The Master, the father figure (the fictionalised Dostoevsky) represents an older, moderately liberal bourgeois order, the humanist values of which he desperately defends in the face of an insurrection that is perceived as a threat to the social fabric and the concept of self. While trying to understand, even embrace, an unsettling new order, the 'father' desperately attempts a synthesis between old and new values, which he wishes to share with his 'son' as member of the new generation. However, the new order, more specifically the "new man", remains out of his reach. Despite the suffusion of its religious symbolism (Jesus, the Saviour), salvation remains elusive and spiritual intimations are not permitted to expand into outright expressions of belief. Balancing aspiration against parody, deconstruction against reconstruction of purpose, this is a postmodernist quest, in which the real of the mundane is held in tension with an impulse to transcendence: with good and evil, old and new, father and son continuously clashing with each other. From beyond the grave, Pavel refuses to respond to his stepfather's persistent pleadings for reconciliation. Dostoevsky muses: "Is it always like this between fathers and sons: jokes masking the intensest of rivalries? And is that the true reason why he is bereft: because the ground of his life, the contest with his son, is gone, and his days are left empty?" (108). Later on in the novel, his son will re-appear in the disturbing incarnation of the political anarchist, Sergei Nechaev, to whom I shall return.

In the meantime, the quest assumes the mythical dimension of a battle of the souls. In dreams and during recurrent epileptic fits, Dostoevsky attempts to 'parent' an ideal, imagined version of Pavel, thus hoping to alleviate the fathomless remorse he feels for having neglected the boy during his formative years. His hope of obtaining forgiveness is likened to a vision of the Resurrection: "a playing with death, a play of resurrection" (63); an attempt to believe in the impossible: "I believe in the Resurrection. [...] I believe in the resurrection of the body and in life eternal" (122). Yet he is beset by doubts, oscillating between hope, despair and cynicism, even as authorial sympathy does not undermine the value of the quest. Indeed, the novel suggests, almost paradoxically, the value of what we might term a reconstructed postmodernism, in which deconstructive suspicion is permitted reconstructive intent. While parallels with Christ's Incarnation and Resurrection are constantly undermined by scepticism, the textual undercurrent emanates from a non-conventional religious sensibility. It is a sensibility not so much sourced from belief in divine entities or articles of faith, as an expression of what Coetzee (1992: 261-62) has referred to as "attentiveness and responsiveness to an inner impulse that Tolstoy calls an impulse toward God; [a form of] truth-directedness [born out of] a crisis that brings about an illumination [. ] a sense of urgency that the crisis brings about [...] the single-mindedness of the quest for truth." Do such expressions of urgency and anguish suggest that Coetzee's work represents, actually, not the profile of a postmodernist, but rather of a "late modernist" (Coetzee 1992: 198), for whom hopes of lost stabilities balance precariously against fragments of the myth? To turn a modernist discourse towards the religious dimension, we have what André Comte-Sponville (2007) calls "atheist spirituality": the capacity to transcend the material condition; to embrace affective experience without the support of institutional dogma, as a heightened state of attention to the extra-ordinary in the habitual; a call, a provocation, a partially glimpsed fragment of knowingness. In his response to The Master, Graham Pechey (1998: 58) has summed up the paradox: "[I]t is at the heart of the ordinary that the extraordinary is to be found". By drawing on an analogy with Bakhtin's dialogism, the critic also suggests that Bakhtin/Coetzee revels in "the pluralizing and carnivalizing spirit of modern writing, and finds there not faith cancelled in a vertiginous relativism, but faith eternally problematized" (Pechey 1998: 61).

Critics find it intriguing that Coetzee can hold in equilibrium a resistance to, and an engagement with, the possibility of religious thought. If this is an expression of faith, then faith in what? Dostoevsky is haunted by visions in which Pavel appears to him as the ghost of "a boy weaving through the reeds" of memory (53), a spectre in search of a home; the spectre, however, resists Dostoevsky's attempts to save him. This is a novel of waiting that is rooted in a sense of empty expectation of the invisible, the unknown. Derek Attridge (2005: 124-5) points out that Dostoevsky does not know "what he is waiting for under the name of Pavel [...] He allows himself to be determined by impulses, attractions, obscure desires, though without fully trusting in any of them". In his desperation, he reaches out to Anna Sergeyvna, Pavel's landlady, in whom he invests irrational hopes: that through her and her daughter, Pavel's orphaned spirit might find an incarnated, imaginary home. During his sexual intercourse with Sergeyevna, Dostoevsky has an other-worldly, sublime encounter with the spectre of his dead son, but immediately seeks to counter this uncanny feeling with a vision a happy ("holy") family comprising Anna and her daughter, himself and Pavel - "a family, only a fourth required and we will be complete" (62).

The religious allusion here is based, again, on the symbolism of the 'incarnation', of rootedness in the body as index of reality and "ontological certainty" in a world of simulacra (Petrolle 2008: 29). Dostoevksy imagines Pavel as being re-incarnated, and thus resurrected: the broken life becomes whole again, by being homed in a new matrix, the family. Dostoevsky's carnal relationship with Sergeyevna invokes in him a dream vision which makes him feel "like a child at Easter [...] 'Christ is risen!' he wants to call out, and he wants her to respond 'Christ is risen!'"; the vision of a happy family that also includes "the ghost of [Pavel] weaving between them, clumsy, newborn, released from the tomb" (67-68). None of this, however, is dogmatic or doctrinaire. Rather, as John Caputo (1997: 63; italics in the original) puts it, such faith is, paradoxically, "a faith without faith [...] a certain faith in the impossible". The matter of belief in The Master, therefore, persistently links the physical to the metaphysical. Accordingly, we may choose, as I have chosen, to 'read religiously'. To read religiously is not necessarily to subscribe to an article of faith. Rather, as Petrolle (2008: 165) says, it is to submit "to wonder, a possibility of transcending ordinary operations, a reverence for partially glimpsed fragments of knowing". This is another way of pointing to a life in which religion grants credence to practices and processes of experience. Paradoxically, it is a "transcendence [that] is always rooted deep in ordinary life" (Foley 20l2: 83). Writers like Joyce, Proust, Rilke, Kafka, Dostoevsky - and, as I argue, Coetzee - while "rejecting] the idea of a transcendent divinity, retained a transcendent sense" of the real (Foley 2012: 75).

Such a "religious" understanding echoes Walter Benjamin's (1973: 246) earlier formulation of "weak messianic power", a concept through which he suggested that the sacred is glimpsed as an affective experience: an experience perceived in the proximity of material things and in moments of involved, epiphanic attention. It is this understanding of religion as a "weak power" - an aspiration for transcendence in the most unlikely of places - that provides my basis of introspection. Questions, nonetheless, arise: how does one endorse such a reading without either naivety, or resignation? Are allegorical representations of the sacred acceptable to postmodern, or indeed modern, sensibilities? Frederick Ferré (1998) suggests the need to allow for shades of trust in people's textual hunger for the affective, for meaning and relevance, and also for the co-existence of scepticism and quests of wholeness. Such fusions, in their own way, are manifestations of the religious: of post-secular attempts at creating meaning while, paradoxically, problematising the very nature of meaning. As Petrolle (2008: 4) has said, "postmodernist scepticism about the true and the real can, and does, coexist with religious thinking": that is, with religion defined earlier, as a "weak force", a cognitive and experiential process anchored in reality. Instead, we may choose to embody such apparent paradox more comprehensively - at least, in the realm of literary response - by substituting modernist, for postmodernist, frames of interpretation. Nonetheless, as in many works of modernist inclination (TS Eliot's The Waste Land comes to mind), folk motifs are re-arranged in secular modernity, as the quest must face its testing.

3."The epidemic" of Nechaevism: the dystopia of collective salvation

The protagonist has to overcome "temptation": Dostoevsky's vision of himself as Pavel's "savior" is challenged by Sergei Nechaev, the leader of a band of anarchists-cum-insurrectionists. From the police, Dostoevsky learns that his son had clandestine political involvements with Nechaev's band, a revelation suggesting that Pavel may have been assassinated by the anarchists. Through various manoeuvres and acts of impersonation, Nechaev insinuates himself into Dostoevsky's life, a life that the anarchist typifies as bourgeois, decadent and, as such, representing the life of a class enemy. The leader of the so-called People's Vengeance Party, Sergei Nechaev, as cynically pointed out by Dostoevsky, demonises free will, rationality and creative imagination "in the name of a principle of equality [even if] equal misery for all" (Coetzee 1994: 36). Caught in a total war with the old social order of late 19th century Russia, Nechaev is an angry, resentful young man who, in the words of Pascal Bruckner (2010: 54), aims to transform the "language of victimhood" into a "language of executioners". It gradually dawns on Dostoevsky that the "epidemic" of Nechaevism (42) must have been a pernicious influence on his son. Allegorically speaking, therefore, the clash between Dostoevsky and Nechaev, vis-á-vis their authority over Pavel's evolution, is a classic example of "psychomachia": an allegorical enactment of conflict between competing ideals. The tug-of-war between the two men constitutes itself as a religious wager for the supremacy of mastery or authority over opposing forms of cognition; a battle-ground of good and evil (good mentor/ bad mentor for Pavel). Dostoevsky's own utopia of salvation is shown to clash with Nechaev's collective utopia. What frames this competition for influence, self-defeatingly, is a perverse version of the New Testament story of salvation and resurrection.

It is not easy for Dostoevsky to fathom the ideology of his nemesis, Nechaev, in his over-zealous seeking of revenge. He concludes that "Nechaevism is not an idea. It despises ideas; it is [...] a dull, resentful and murderous spirit [that] gives a voice to something dumb and brutal that is sweeping through young Russia" (44; 111-112). This anarchist/Nihilist movement, known as Nechaevism, existed at the time, and was based on a Millenarian vision of the world as irredeemably corrupt and, therefore, in need of a radical intervention that would culminate in the social redemption of apocalypse. In order to achieve collective redemption, society would have to undergo a process of purging, the end of which - the demolition of the establishment - would justify the means. There would be no middle way; innocent or naive people would inevitably become collateral victims. (One may choose one's 21st century equivalents: the Talibans, ISIS, Boko Haram.)

The distraught father intuits that many impressionable young people, including Pavel, might have been seduced by Nechaev's "demon" of vengefulness (112); "absorbed in a single and total passion: revolution, [this man], in the depths of his being, has cut all links with the civil order, with law and morality. He continues to exist in society only in order to destroy it" (61). The more Dostoevsky learns about Nechaev's evil utopia, the more nauseated he becomes with the latter's understanding of 'equality' as a ruthlessly pursued end-vision: "Christ in his wrath: that is who he models himself on. The Christ of the Old Testament, the Christ who scourged the userers out of the temple" (103). In short, Nechaev is a fanatic who, in his mania of grandeur, models himself on his own construed story of Jesus (the New Man). He even prods Dostoevsky to report him to the police - or, in New Testament parlance, to 'betray' him - so as fully to live out the parallel: "They say you are treacherous by nature - Dostoevsky is told by one of Nechaev's acolytes - like the man who betrayed Jesus" (106). As the tension between Dostoevsky and Nechaev rises, Dostoevsky's determination to cling to his belief in Pavel's innocence (and in his own ability to 'save' his stepson) is gradually eroded. Nechaev mercilessly intensifies the psychological pressure on his nemesis, thus weakening Dostoevsky's resolve to avoid participating in a self-destructive cycle of violence ("I don't want to be poisoned by vengefulness", 111). Led by Nechaev to the top of a tower where Pavel was presumably thrown to his death, Dostoevsky feels "the approach to the edge, the glance downward, the lurch of the soul" (118), even as he grasps at his own cognitive capacity to make sense of the tragic event: "To gather the broken body and embrace it: That is what it means to believe. To believe and to love [...] 'I believe in the resurrection of the body and in life eternal'" (122). It is a kind of "grasping" that one finds in Franz Kafka's stories, where 'hope' amidst absurdity inspired an intriguing commentary by Albert Camus: "The more tragic the condition described by Kafka [or Coetzee, I might add], the firmer and more aggressive that hope becomes. Like other existentialist novelists, Kafka [Coetzee] embraces the God that consumes him" (Camus 1962: 152-153).

In the chapter "The Cellar", we find the most eloquent illustration of this persistent pursuit of the "impossible" amidst the shards of the "real". Here, Nechaev takes Dostoevsky to a place of refuge for the outcasts of Petersburg, where prostitute-mothers are surrounded by "starving, hollow-eyed children" (191). These are the 'cellar people', that is, humanity reduced to human animality, or "creatureliness" (Santner 2006: 12). Here, Nechaev, the self-styled protectorcum-saviour of the cellar people, accuses Dostoevsky of belonging to a class of people who indulge in the comforts of "a contemptible bourgeois existence" [while ignoring the social] "forces" that determine the lives to which these people are condemned" (180). Nechaev dreams of the cellar people "emerging from their cellars, [with] food and clothes and housing, proper housing for everyone" (182). Ostensibly well-meaning, the vision floats free of economic realities; indeed, floats free of human complexity. A social utopia based on a simplistic understanding of equality as levelling in misery would mean "the end of everything, including fathers and sons, [a condition] when everything is reinvented, everything erased and reborn: law, morality, the family" (189-190). Dostoevsky is provoked to consider what will happen after "the tempest of the people's vengeance has done its work and everyone has been levelled" (184). Will there be a place for individual free will in this utopia?

By contrast, Dostoevsky's vision is based on a nuanced interpretation of life's complexities: "I see only the stars that watched over us when we were born [...] no matter how we disguise ourselves, no matter how deep the cellars in which we hide" (185). But, to Nechaev, such musings are but the evasions of a discredited bourgeois class. So, stalemate. The self-styled prophet of the new order (or "Kingdom") accuses Dostoevsky of being an irredeemable defender of the dying bourgeois world, a voyeuristic writer and "bloodsucker" of the people's suffering (183). In turn, Dostoevsky thinks of Nechaev as another "creature of Doctor Frankenstein's" (177), what Slavoy Žižek (2011: 314; 296) has referred to as an "'autistic' monster [...] a new form of subjectivity: autistic, indifferent, deprived of affective engagement". Yet, it is Dostoevsky who undergoes an autistic collapse.

Nechaev, "the devil" figure, tempts Dostoevsky to descend to his own (Nechaev's) level of hatred and vengefulness: Dostoevsky ends up denouncing the anarchist to the police as the assassin of Pavel. Being so "betrayed", Nechaev emerges as a martyr, a messiah of Russia's poor, as Dostoevsky cynically deploys Christian reference against his own, naked soul: "You behave like a Jesus outside Jerusalem [...] You fancy yourself the martyr waiting to be called. You want to steal Easter from Jesus" (187; my emphasis). Feeling threatened in his yearning of becoming his son's 'saviour', Dostoevsky now realises the impact that Nechaev's rhetorical power might have had on the impressionable Pavel, a power at least equal to his own as a 'master' rhetorician (writer): "What a charlatan! Yet he no longer knows where the mastery lies - whether he is playing with Nechaev, or Nechaev with him. All barriers seem to be crumbling at once" (190). In a moment of sublime insight, the older man lunges at the younger one, embracing the boy. This is an epiphanic moment, a turning point in Dostoevsky's quest, a moment of openness to the radical Other in himself (he, too, as a younger man had had revolutionary ideals): "[Nechaev] is like me, I was like him - only I did not have the courage. And then: Is that why Pavel followed him: because he was trying to learn courage?" (193; emphasis in the original). Once he has accepted that Nechaev may have been an authority figure in Pavel's life, he feels like a father figure to both angry and rudderless young men. However, these are but fleeting moments of forgiveness amidst brokenness: good and evil, father and son, old world and new world, reconciled in fragile gestures of finding alternatives in a world of polarities. The full truth painfully sinks in: "[e]verything is collapsing: logic, reason" (202), as Dostoevsky realises that Nechaev has gradually manoeuvred him into writing a letter denouncing the anarchist as his son's assassin. By turning his own best beliefs (in salvation and reconciliation) to anger, Dostoevsky realises that he has stooped to a lower moral order, having failed the 'test' of his nemesis' provocation. Having thus "sunk to the pettiest vengefulness" (206), Dostoevsky feels that he has become "a Judas [leading] a life without honour; treachery without limit" (222).

His attempts at recapturing his old belief, his 'utopia of salvation' - this time, as a form of salvation from "the death of innocence" (213) - sees him, once again, seeking (through extravagant gestures) groundedness in the body as anchor of reality. This 'master of Petersburg' proposes to Anna Sergeyevna, for example, that they conceive a child together, with the aim of bringing about "the birth of the saviour" (225; my emphasis). A scene of sublime eroticism culminates, perversely, in the realisation that the child to be born might turn out to be a "devil" (230). Is this Dostoevsky's assessment of his own fallen self? Or, yet again, a glimpse into states beyond good and evil, states in which saviour-and-devil is one entity? This is Dostoevsky's attempt of going beyond the disgrace of betrayal; from being a body "within whose core a plunge into darkness is taking place, [to becoming] a body which contains its own falling [so that he can] turn the falling into a flying [and] live where Pavel died" (234-235). Such insights, once again, offer the potential of liberation from hatred, the reconciliation of opposites.

However, these insights remain momentary glimpses of hope within Dostoevsky's entangled states of dark despair, over-determined as they are by selfhatred and the "voluptuous immersion in one's own depravity [as well as the arrogant] paternalism of a guilty conscience" (Bruckner 2010: 33-4). In spite of his efforts to overcome his self-loathing, Dostoevsky is unable to forgive himself for capitulating to vengefulness. "In self-blame, there is no place for the Other" (Bruckner 2010: 101), and so, Dostoevsky's mourning for Pavel rapidly turns to mourning for himself: "once, Pavel was lost, now he himself is lost" (237). He cannot mourn Pavel any longer, because a new vision of Pavel reveals itself: as "Nechaev's comrade and follower [a man of 'the new world' who inhabits] a field of indifference tremendous in its force, like a cloak of darkness" (238). It is a vision of Pavel "beyond childhood and beyond love [a stranger who] has retreated into stone, [b]ut the figure before him is not that of Christ. In it he detects no love, only the cold and massive indifference of stone" (240). Dostoevsky can no longer envision himself as 'parenting' Pavel's memory. His only path is to deliver himself, in full vulnerability, to the future as envisaged by the New Man, to become Pavel-cum-Nechaev's follower, to regress to being "a babe again" (241). Following this symbolically suicidal impulse, "following this shade, he will go naked as a babe into the jaws of hell" (241), into the uncontrollable 'brave new world'. The ending of the novel is suggestive of multiple possible interpretations.

4.Conclusion

One interpretation of the novel's end suggests that Dostoevsky has fallen into a state of disgrace: "I have lost my place in my soul" (249). Having become a spiritually fallen being, he can no longer hope for a reconciliation between 'fathers and sons', or between generations: "Fathers and sons: foes to the death" (239). This status, perversely, gives him the license to engage in depraved acts of betraying his son's memory through his writing (242-245). What started out as a utopian quest of 'saving' a young man's innocence in his own memory, therefore, may be interpreted as the death of innocence. Attridge (2005: 132), for example, has suggested that the ending of the novel points to betrayal at many levels - of political vision, of a child's innocence, of paternal obligations. Žižek, for his part, might interpret the protagonist's moral disintegration as that of a "post-traumatic, disengaged subject which survives its own death, the death (erasure) of its symbolic identity" (2011: 294).

One can offer yet another approach to interpreting the end of the novel. This approach, rather than bemoan loss of meaning, would seek to emphasize the urgency, the anguish, of the protagonist's insistent search for meaning in a chaotic, anarchic world. Such an interpretation would see the ending not as an anti-climax of the quest, but as yet another stage in Dostoevsky's persistent search for meaning-making in a fragmented world. Such a search demands of the protagonist the humility of total exposure to the other, including the 'radical other'. Having given up the naive task of saving others, Dostoesvky has settled for the radical exposure of his self and precarious vulnerability in relation to others. This is an exposure that demands all the attention that he can give it, thus cracking him open to the enigmatic address of the other, and the slight new possibility of transforming disgrace into a state of grace. We may recognise here an acknowledgment of human vulnerabilities and resilience in iron times. As Coetzee (2007: 172) said about Samuel Becket's philosophy of life: "this is a vision of life without consolation or dignity or promise of grace, in the face of which our only duty, inexplicable and futile of attainment, but a duty nonetheless, is not to lie to ourselves."

Intriguingly, Dostoevsky faces moments of grace and disgrace, as he both engages with, and resists, religious language and practice, in a tension between his persistent hope for salvation and the urge for total exposure of self-doubt. This is a journey from naive grace and consolation, to authenticity, which includes the potential of transforming disgrace into meaning. I do not claim that this novel is religious, and neither would I claim that it is secular, for such extreme positions would assume that an either/or response to Coetzee's work is possible. Rather, I have pointed to Coetzee's propensity to transcend binary thinking, whether secular or religious. Paradoxically, it is precisely in the protagonist's undecidability between rationality/ doubt and imagination/ faith, and through postmodernist adumbrations of 'unfaith', that the novel embodies its religious impulse. It is to this tension of extremes that Dostoevsky abandons himself: to the elusive and incomprehensible future of the new world, the "new man". The Master of Petersburg is a novel which we should re-read in this troubled new millennium.

Sidebar

Ileana Şora Dimitriu is Professor of English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa. She has published widely on postcolonial and South African literature and intercultural studies. Her publications include large editorial projects, chapters in books, novels in translation, and the critical study Art of Conscience: Rereading Nadine Gordimer.

E-mail address: [email protected]

References

References

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