American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs by Wolf SchmidReview by: Joseph FrankThe Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Winter, 1974), pp. 434-435Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/306877 .

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434 Slavic and East European Journal

to be the first to render all of the major poems. But his best translations, in this book at least, are not from Tjutiev's Russian verse, but from his French prose. Tjutiev the lyric poet has still to be translated in quantity, in a faithful and an inspired manner.

R. C. Lane, University of Durham

Wolf Schmid. Der Textaufbau in den Erzdhlungen Dostoevskijs. Miinchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1973. 298 pp., DM 58.

This is a valuable and important contribution to Dostoevskij studies, but it is an exasperating and head-cracking book to read. The first part, a theoretical introduc- tion, is written in a highly abstract and technical style that makes no concessions to ease of comprehension. The second part, which applies the author's theories to se- lected works by Dostoevskij, is more down to earth, but marred by critical overkill. Perfectly simple points are illustrated over and over again with the aid of tedious formalized schemata which, luckily, can be skipped without any loss to the argument. All the same, the book is definitely worth the effort required to grapple with it, and it will certainly have an important effect on Dostoevskij criticism in the future.

In my view, the theoretical part is the best and most interesting. The author be- gins by objecting to the well-known theory of M. M. Baxtin that Dostoevskij created a new and wholly original form of the novel which is "polyphonic," opposed to the traditional "homophonic" novel. Schmid agrees with the critics of this view, of whom there have been many, that Baxtin is wrong in asserting the independence of charac- ters in the polyphonic novel from the will of the author. Schmid states-rightly, in my opinion-that "in Dostoevskij's work we cannot find any polyphony of auton- omous voices, emancipated from the creative author; such a structure in a narrative literary work, in view of its ontological stratification, is not conceivable" (p. 14). The formal singularity of Dostoevskij's works, according to Schmid, is characterized by what he calls "text-interference" rather than by a polyphony of independent voices.

As background to his inquiry Schmid sketches in part 1 of his book an extremely useful general model of the relation between author and reader in a literary work, drawing on semiotics and communications theory for his basic concepts. This model synthesizes the results of Russian Formalism, Czech and Polish Structuralism, and the less systematic efforts of German and Anglo-American theorists of the novel. The model is too elaborate to be discussed in detail here, but it constitutes a genuine con- tribution to the clarification of numerous issues that are of importance to contem- porary criticism. This section of the book is of great value by itself, quite aside from what Schmid does with it later in relation to Dostoevskij.

Once the model has been set up, Schmid narrows his focus to concentrate on the specific issue of text-interference, that is, the problem caused by the internal ambig- uity of a text where it is difficult to distinguish between a "narrator-text" (the point of view of an author or his surrogate) and a "person-text" (the point of view of one or another character in the work expressing himself directly). The difficulty of keep- ing these two texts apart in any particular work has greatly increased in modern literature since the beginning of the 19th century, and particularly since the advent of the stream of consciousness (erlebte Rede) as a commonly used narrative style. Schmid sets up nine categories in terms of which one type of text can be distinguished from the other and shows how text-interference can occur in a broad range of varie- ties within these nine types, erlebte Rede being only one of them. He sees Dostoevskij

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Reviews 435

as a precursor of a type of narrative style in which text-interference predominates; and he puts his categories to work in the second half of the book.

Part 2 begins with a chapter on text-interference in third-person narratives like The Double, Mr. Proxardin, and several other stories. Part 3 contains discussions of the same phenomenon in works with a first-person narrator (A Raw Youth, Notes from the Underground, "A Gentle Heart"). There is also a survey of the evolution of text- interference in Russian literature with examples drawn from Pu'kin, Lermontov, Gonaarov, and Gogol', leading up to Dostoevskij. Even though this stylistic phe- nomenon can thus be noted in earlier writers, Schmid argues, its effect was only to stress "the authorial pole" (p. 186) in each instance, as against the pole of the persona or characters; there was no real complication of the author-reader relationship result- ing in genuine ambiguity. It is only with Dostoevskij that such ambiguity begins, and this accounts for the failure of his work with the public in the 1840's.

In general Schmid's application of his theory is far less interesting than his pre- sentation of its concepts. The second half of the book documents the same point ad nauseam-text-interference is found in work after work-with the aid of schemata showing the nine categories gyrating in various permutations and combinations. All this is an expense of ingenuity in a waste of repetition. Moreover, while Schmid often makes perceptive remarks on individual features of the stories and gives good sum- maries of the critical literature, his approach to them is vitiated by his dominating Formalist conceptions. I do not have room here to develop my disagreements on spe- cific points of interpretation, but whenever Schmid touches on a thematic issue, he consistently tends to downgrade its importance or give it the narrowest possible read- ing. The views of the Underground Man, for example, are for Schmid simply an ex- pression of his personality, and the ideological component of the work is not assigned any significant role as a determining element in its creation. The reason of course is that Schmid wishes to leave the way clear for his own view of Dostoevskij 's dominat- ing artistic aim. This aim is defined in terms that Schmid borrows from both Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism. The first effect of text-interference on the reader, according to Schmid, is the well-known ostranenie, first defined as such by Viktor Sklovskij, the effect of strangeness caused by unfamiliarity. Mukafovsk? then pointed out that the result of ostranenie is to draw attention away from language as a deno- tative system and toward its purely aesthetic function. Schmid's final conclusion is that Dostoevskij's work does just this and that its meaning and value is thus a purely aesthetic one. "In the stories of Dostoevskij that we have considered," he writes, "neither the stratum of the denotata (the object world depicted) nor the stratum of signifiers (the phonemes and their arrangement) emerge in the foreground of aesthetic perception; what emerges is rather a consciousness of the relation between the de- notata and the signifiers. This relation is always being disturbed, hence brought into view, because the process of meaning is purposely made complicated." (p. 282.)

To reduce the "meaning" of Dostoevskij's works solely to the aesthetic function of text-interference seems to me monstrously anachronistic, the application of ideas perfectly valid for some kinds of modern poetry to a past in which nobody conceived of literature in this fashion, and to a genre (prose narrative) to which they are either internally irrelevant or of secondary importance. Schmid's ideas, if accepted, would reduce Dostoevskij's works to an empty shell, and it would be impossible really to tell the difference between Dostoevskij and Mallarm6. But the absurdity of such a con- clusion happily negates itself and does not lessen the merit of Schmid's analysis of the phenomenon of text-interference in Dostoevskij and elsewhere and of the theoretical issues that it poses.

Joseph Frank, Princeton University.

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