Dostoevsky's shameful subject: a psychoanalytic reading of The Double and Bobok

Abstract

If Dostoevsky's underground man, who prevails in differing forms across his work, had been the 'portrait' of a 'true' psychological 'type' or character for the age, based on Dostoevsky's own subjectivity as claimed by Freud in Dostoevsky and Parricide, then we could agree that Dostoevsky's fiction may be viewed as symptomatic of the author's aetiology. Similarly, if this subjectivity had been related to the functions of the narrative, as claimed by Bakhtin in The Problem of Dostoevsky's Poetics, then the complexity of both narrative and protagonist, or more broadly the 'excess' and inhabiting function of language in its constituting role in subjectivity would have been lost. The strength of the above interpretations however, is that they are both thoroughly modern, and that they situate Dostoevsky's work in the modern tradition. At the intersection of these two theoretical models must sit not only the Dostoevskian 'hero' as a literary figure, but the representation of this intersection as integral to modern poetics and that of the modern subject. This thesis argues the structure of Dostoevsky's poetics moves extensively around the phenomenology of shame, which has been largely ignored, in Dostoevsky's works generally, and in his shorter fiction specifically. This inquiry will read Dostoevsky's two texts The Double and Bobok through Lacanian psychoanalysis to explicate the nature of shame in Dostoevsky's short fiction as well as the inverse, to call psychoanalysis to account for its adherence to the essential affect of shame. In this sense Lacan is a 'reader' of Dostoevsky but one who formalises the structure of the gaze as ontological, and what thesis argues, is a reading such that shame must become the primary affect through this ontological structure of the gaze. In this sense Dostoevsky is read with Lacan: Dostoevsky's text is the shame of the Lacanian gaze. Through close textual analysis and the use of the psychoanalytic concepts, of shame and the gaze, this thesis will also analyse the function of the death drive as both the ultimate 'end-point' of shame, not in the sense of its inevitability but in its excessive, logical and constituting structure, similarly to what Dostoevsky introduces as the end-points of his dialogic texts. Shame will be shown to be central to Dostoevsky's narratives and shame will be re-centred as the lost affect that both psychoanalysis and Dostoevsky's work illustrate as the primary condition, both ethical and ontological, for the subject, which shifts from honour to the pathological and finally to the shameless subject.