Dostoevsky Part 1: Self-Reflexivity, Joy vs. Cynicism, etc.
This was supposed to be about Dostoevsky but it got way too long. Actual stuff about Dostoevsky next week.
One thing that’s hard about writing—fiction, essays, whatever—is that readers never experience your words the same way you do. Every reader’s brain is different; they each interpret your words differently. They draw different conclusions, paint different pictures. Even the most carefully crafted sentences mutate, bacteria-like, in the fizzing neuron-soup between a reader’s ears. Often, readers miss things you wanted to convey; other times, they latch onto subtext you didn’t intend. Readers even draw deeply probing and personal conclusions about you, the writer, based on the things you write. Umm, not cool?!?
This can all be really hard to predict. A deep-wired mental blind spot limits every person’s ability to read their own words as they would someone else’s. But since the goal is to write something that “works” in other people’s brains, not just your own, writers are expected to overcome that blind spot, by developing the ability to foresee how any given combination of words is most likely to be perceived. It’s a skill you can only acquire the hard way, by trying stuff, showing it to people, and asking what they think. (Also the reason everything turns out better when it goes through a good editor.)1
But if your goal is creative expression—and not, like, a bulletproof corporate press release—it actually gets even harder. That same literary self-reflexivity—the process of anticipating how one’s words will be perceived—which is fundamental to the construction of good writing—can be incredibly stifling if it gets out of control.
Here are three fat paragraphs on this subject from generational culture-critic genius Dean Kissick, on my birthday (9/12) back in 2020:
With everything I write, my main concern is: Will this land me in trouble? It’s always the last thing I think about, always, before hitting post or send. I worry that my opinions might be inappropriate, or, more likely, inadvertently offensive. I’m ever checking for meanings or subtexts I’ve missed or ways I could be misinterpreted. Though I try not to, I spend far more time worrying about causing offence than I do about whether what I’m writing is honest, or true, or interesting, or meaningful, or original, or funny, or beautiful, and this is common among many people I’ve spoken to. They’re also worried about putting a foot wrong. It’s a paranoid style. I used to think this great caution came from fear of being shamed, but it may have more to do with narcissistic self-reflexivity.
At the end of the 2010s a friend told me that self-reflexivity was a disaster for that decade’s culture. “Yeah, in terms of erasure,” he said. “It’s like a sickness that eats the good people away.” Not only do we write and write and post and post and make and make everything about ourselves, but while doing so we also think so much about how we’ll be perceived, and this sort of self-absorbed self-censorship is detrimental to all forms of creative expression.
It feels cowardly, or simply redundant, to adhere too closely to conformity of opinion or style in writing, or art, even if the conformist approach coincides with your beliefs. This may be a contrarian way of thinking. But what’s the point of speaking if you’re saying the same thing as everyone else? We shouldn’t worry unduly about getting things wrong. We shouldn’t be too wary of making mistakes.
So there you have it: another fundamental paradox of writing. You have to anticipate the effect your words will have on other people’s brains in order to write anything that works at all; but if you embrace self-reflexivity too much, anticipating all possible critical interpretations and minimizing “areas of potential critique,” you’ll wind up producing something totally lifeless and self-absorbed, a bland puddle of wet cardboard. Also, it’s the opposite of fun to work that way. It just plain sucks when you’re writing something and after every sentence you imagine all the ways a cynical reader could make fun of you.
But then, it’s hard not to imagine a cynical reader these days, because we live in an unbelievably cynical age. Scroll through Twitter, peruse some Reddit threads: it is really negative out there. A lot of people in 2022 seem to be crafting their entire personalities around pointing out the flaws in things. You know people like this: they are exhausting to be around. They just want to talk about how much everything sucks, how doomed the world is. Although, to be fair, the people on the opposite end of the spectrum can be just as annoying: the hyper-positive crypto shills, the superfans who take any criticism of a film from The Universe They Like as a personal attack…
Because yeah, there is a lot of stuff that sucks. There is a place in a healthy worldview for a certain amount of “taste,” for distinguishing good from bad. The new Black Panther movie was an incoherent mess. It was Bad. Vengeance, the B.J. Novak movie that I was kind of excited about, a much more “indie” movie with much more “intellectual” ambitions, also turned out to be Bad (by becoming the exact sort of vapid, patronizing thinkpiece it was trying so hard to skewer). Most attempts at creative expression fall short of their goal, and identifying stuff that doesn’t work is an important part of creating something that does.
I don’t know how to balance these things. I do think that joy is more powerful than cynicism, so maybe the superfans are on to something. Cynicism—which can perhaps be summarized as a belief that everything is rotten at its core—is a tempting shield; you can never be disappointed if you already expect the worst. Nobody can ever call you naïve for liking something if you don’t like anything. But the cynic is not only miserable, depriving themselves of everything that could be enjoyed about the world—they’re also arrogant, as Jordan Castro points out in this excellent essay:
The cynic, in his mind, doesn’t choose to be a cynic; he can’t help it if he sees reality the way it is. “Anyone would become cynical if they were honest and saw things honestly like me.” Life contains bleak evil. The modern cynic internalizes this and—first out of scandal, then out of fear—affirms this as the ultimate reality. The existence of self-centeredness is a kind of revelation for him: the curtain is pulled back, and voila! Reality! But one naïve view is simply replaced by another, and the cynic ultimately falls into another one-dimensional trap.
[…]
Cynicism is a knowledge claim. It claims to know everything ahead of time. But it is also a process: an attempt to continually unmask facades, to reveal the dark truth underneath. Cynicism is attractive because it is partially true. There is a lot of pain and suffering, caused by selfishness and malevolence, and people frequently cover it up. There are reasons to be cynical. The cynic uses this half-truth to adopt a passive, pessimistic disposition toward life.
I’ll admit that I’ve been sucked in and out of cynicism for most of my adult life. Look around: there’s plenty to be cynical about. But the stories I’ve tried to write in my most cynical phases have always been particularly horrible. Snide, limp, depressing. It makes sense. How are you supposed to write something beautiful if you believe that everything is fundamentally ugly?
The times I’ve gotten closest to writing something beautiful, I think I was writing most freely, with the least consideration for how I would be judged. Writing with a cynical reader in mind is stifling and unproductive. “Avoid anything that might get you made fun of” is not a pathway to success. I’m happiest, and I feel like I’m getting closest, when I’m writing with unselfconscious joy for the world, and for the simple act of stringing a story together.
This was supposed to be an essay about Dostoevsky, who despite the heavy themes of his books is ultimately a joyful writer, focused on exploring the beauty of human life even on an incredibly messed-up planet. Dostoevsky experienced tremendous personal hardship, and lived in a time just before the Russian Revolution that was easily as rife with cynicism and misery as today. But he didn’t succumb to the cynicism around him; he believed that people were fundamentally good at heart; that life was fundamentally miraculous and beautiful; and it was from this vantage that he constructed some of the best novels ever written.
I’m going to end this here before it gets too preposterously long. Over the holiday I plan to write the other half, about the three Dostoevsky novels I read this year.
2022 meant a lot of things to me. Most importantly, it was the year I got engaged (!!!!). It was also the year that the videogame I’ve been working on, Overwatch 2, released. But in terms of literature, this was the Year I Finally Read Dostoevsky. I’ve been terribly derelict in my newsletterly duties, but I am determined to write some stuff about this guy. It sounds trite, but I’m trying to worry less about whether I’m sounding trite, and the fact is: reading Dostoevsky changed my life.
unlike this newsletter, lmao