Boogers in the Library

Have you ever known the rush of discovery and exploration of finding something in the library?  Something small captures your imagination and sets your mind on a search for a new idea, a new discovery, in the bowels of a library.  You wander among the quiet stacks looking, your eyes scanning the spines of books hoping to find the one you are looking for.  You pull two or three that hold promise, scan the table of contents, the index, or the chapter titles for a clue in your treasure hunt.  Then, on page 115 of a book that hasn’t seen sunlight since 1972 you see a word that ends your treasure hunt. On a yellowed page, marked with red ballpoint pen and a booger,  is the passage for which you have searched.  This journey is only for the brave of heart and, perhaps, stomach...boogers not withstanding.

Last week Gary Morson made a passing comment that somehow found an empty hanger in my brain, hung itself like a bright striped shirt, and wouldn’t let me leave the closet until I tried it on.  Morson, while lecturing on Dostoevsky’s profound understanding of human depravity, mentioned an essay by Aldous Huxley in which Huxley compares Dickens to Dostoevsky.  Huxley, he explained, argues that Dostoevsky is a profoundly better novelist than Dickens.  Why?  Because Dostoevsky understands the depth of human depravity and the problem of evil in a way that far surpasses Dickens sentimentality and emotional shallowness.  Morson moved on in his thoughts to other topics, but my curiosity was piqued.  I emailed him that night and received a quick response that Huxley’s critique was buried in a long essay titled “Vulgarity in Literature.”  Today, while Eleanor and Rynn searched for American Girl CDs, I found the book and the essay (Huxley, Aldous  Collected Essays “Vulgarity in Literature”).  Assuming that you’ve called upon you inner nerd, I am going to quote several passages from Huxley’s essay.  If I can’t convince you of the profound emotional, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual profundity of Dostoevsky (and I think Tolstoy even more) then maybe Huxley can.

“Literature is also philosophy, is also science.  In terms of beauty it enunciates truths...All that modern psychologists, for example, have done is to systematize and debeautify the vast treasures of knowledge about the human soul contained in novel, play, poem, and essay.  Writers like Blake, Shakespeare, and Dostoevsky, still have plenty to teach the modern scientific professional” (110).

“It is vulgar, in literature, to make a display of emotions which you do not naturally have, but think you ought to have, because all the best people do have them.  It is also vulgar to have emotions, but to express them so badly that you seem to have no natural feelings, but to be merely fabricating emotions by a process of literary forgery.  Sincerity in art...is mainly a matter of talent” (112).

Then, after Huxley spends a few paragraphs destroying Dickens for being sentimental and “mentally drowned and blinded by the sticky overflowings of his heart,” he turns to a comparison with Dostoevsky.  He writes of Dostoevsky, “Feeling did not prevent him from seeing and recording, or rather re-creating... Goodness and innocence and the undeservedness of suffering and even, to some extent, suffering itself are only significant in relation to the actual realities of human life.  Isolated, they cease to mean anything....That work of art which in its own way ‘says’ more about the universe will be better than the work of art which says less....Why is [Dicken’s work] a less admirable novel than The Brothers Karamazov?  Because the amount of experience of all kinds understood, ‘felt into,’... and artistically recreated is small in comparison with that which Dostoevsky feelingly comprehended and knew” (115).  

Maybe it was those years in a Siberian prison.  Maybe it is that Dostoevsky understands that goodness and evil exist in the ordinary, in the sublime, and in every heart.  Or perhaps his writing shows that the overflowing of the heart does not "drown the head or dim the eye"  but shows the truth more clearly.