by Joseph Carter Milholland
Once, when I was asked who my favorite character in a Dostoevsky novel was, I replied Achilles. This is not as silly or as meaningless an answer as you might initially think; in fact, my response reflected one of my most deeply held beliefs about literature, a belief connected to what I think is a crucial feature of the entire literary canon.
Some years ago, the literary canon was almost always in my thoughts. Not just the books that are said to be in it, but the concept itself. Why should we read the canon, and what use was there in creating one? I knew almost instinctively that there was immense value in what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said,” but I struggled to pinpoint what exactly would be the result of studying the canon for an individual. Despite all the claims made for it, the literary canon does not make you morally better, nor does it provide any special insight into non-literary academic fields, nor is it of any help in most practical matters.
At the time, literary journalism provided no convincing answers to my questions. This was during the great glut of “Defence of the Humanities” discourse, when dozens and dozens of articles in magazines and newspapers and professors’ blogs were dedicated to why university students should study the humanities, with none of the answers securing a consensus even among academics. Studying the humanities, some claimed, could produce better citizens, could cause us to become more empathetic with others, or could benefit workplaces in some hard to quantify way. In these debates, the canon was frequently a major subject, although here too there was no prevailing view of the matter. Should the canon be defended, revised, or abolished? I can recall some commentators who argued for all three positions at once.
Arguments about why we should fund and study the humanities still continue, but I don’t see the subject of the canon come up as much in literary journalism anymore; the debate seems to have lost some of the heat and urgency it once had. If one can speak of a general consensus in our fragmented culture, it is that the canon is just one means of organizing and thinking about literature, with a proliferation of different canons for different circumstances. There are personal canons, canons of genre, national canons, regional canons, and more. A New York Times Magazine article from earlier this year entitled “Building a New Canon of Black Literature” is representative of this trend: there are many canons, and they are always being shaped and reshaped by individuals and groups.
I also think less about the canon these days, although the conclusions I have come to are slightly different (though not necessarily opposed to the mainstream view). The canon should be constantly debated, constantly revised, constantly examined and re-examined, for the essence of the canon lies not in the past but in the present and in the future: to me the canon is significant for what it tells us about books and writers of today. This is because canonical literature is fundamentally a product of other canonical literature: a seed which was planted in The Iliad and The Odyssey and cultivated by Virgil, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Yeats (among many others) is still growing today; as readers and critics, it is our duty and privilege to find the books which continue to give life to this plant. But this does not mean literature evolves, or goes in a certain direction. A literary canon does not create a timeline of literary history; it compresses that timeline as tightly as possible, so all the great authors are welded to one another, making it impossible to fully understand one without reference to the others.
In a strange way, this means that the canon has no beginning and no end: every canonical book is the pinnacle of all that has come before it, and at the same time the first stone laid in an entirely new literary edifice. All literature is contemporary literature when we read the canon.
Read The Portrait of a Lady and you will find it has been shaped in a thousand different ways by the novels that came before it, and that you can find its presence warped and expanded in many of the novels that followed it. The Portrait of a Lady is a singular novel, as different from Père Goriot and Sense and Sensibility as it is from Mrs. Dalloway or Their Eyes Were Watching God – yet how wonderfully it seems to build on the former two novels and predict the latter two novels! Even Homer, whose work may not have been entirely from a single author, did not emerge from nowhere, but from a rich tradition of oral literature – a tradition that scholars have been able to study through analyzing his works. And perhaps, if we want to understand the future of our culture, it is to Homer we should return once again.
So why is my favorite character from a Dostoevsky novel Achilles?
No one who reads Crime and Punishment can forget Svidrigailov’s suicide in chapter 6 of part 6. After an intense, spiritual revelation – one of the darkest nights of any soul in literature – Svidrigailov goes out in the early morning. He is still agitated, but the city is quiet. He walks to the outskirts of St. Petersburg and stands before a soldier guarding a tower; finally calm, Svidrigailov shoots himself in front of this soldier.
The soldier is wearing a type of Russian imperial military helmet that was nicknamed an Achilles helmet. After noting this fact, Doestevsky calls this soldier just “Achilles.” As the Constance Garnett translation has it: “They both, Svidrigaïlov and Achilles, stared at each other for a few minutes without speaking. At last it struck Achilles as irregular for a man not drunk to be standing three steps from him, staring and not saying a word.” They exchange a few words, but Achilles seems to only barely register Svidrigaïlov’s presence. Finally, “Svidrigaïlov took out the revolver and cocked it. Achilles raised his eyebrows.” At this point, Achilles becomes frightened and begins to grasp the situation: “‘You can’t do it here, it’s not the place,’ cried Achilles, rousing himself, his eyes growing bigger and bigger.” Ultimately, Achilles is unable to in any way affect Svidrigaïlov’s last moments of life.
The scene is immensely sad, immensely spiritual, and immensely funny. It is one part of Doestovsky’s genius to make an utterly anonymous and insignificant person witness to Svidrigailov’s self-slaughter (which only serves to remind us that in a universal context, no individual is anonymous or insignificant), and another part of Doestovsky’s genius to call this person Achilles.
The contrast that we focus on, however, is not between this anonymous soldier and his Homeric namesake, but between the Achilles of The Iliad and Svidrigailov himself. The difference between the two seems to be an epoch-defining one. Achilles is a man who kills others without remorse, and Svidrigailov is a man of such remorse he kills himself. Achilles never doubts his purpose, Svidrigailov has no purpose and can only doubt. The contrast between the brave souls of the pre-modern period and the anxious, depressed persons of the modern period is overwhelming.
Yet we should not settle on any too-easy conclusions. Achilles, as Homer portrays him, is not merely a soulless killer of the pre-Christian world. For one, Achilles has his own spiritual crises, particularly around the death of his friend Patroclus. An intensely emotionally expressive man, Achilles agonizes over his place in the universe in relation to the gods, leading to his “two jars” of Zeus speech in the final book of the Iliad. Even the decision of Achilles to choose a short but mighty life of heroism over a long peaceful life of quiet anonymity is a kind of act of suicide.
Both Achilles and Svidrigailov are immortal characters because their struggle transcends the physical plane and reaches into the spiritual. They live together in an immaterial region, which explains why the encounter in the material world between Svidrigailov and “Achilles” hits us with such ferocity. The sudden emergence of Achilles across time and language into Crime and Punishment – as if the submerged influence of Homer had suddenly forced itself onto the text – is the literary equivalent of a miracle.
These thoughts are getting too digressive, too abstract: I do not have any settled conclusions on Svidrigailov’s encounter with Achilles. The point is that the scene compels us to read The Iliad and Crime and Punishment side by side, and makes us read both books slightly differently. It takes us out of the narrow realm of studying a particular era of literature and towards studying literature as a whole.
I do worry, however, that this method of reading canonical works of literature will cause us to lose sight of the individual work of literature, and focus only on its place within literary history. Faced with this issue, I have another heuristic reading literature to balance my belief in the canon. I will dedicate my next column to discussing my method whereby we can identify and delight in a writer’s individual peculiarities even as we see its place in the canon.