Problems of the will

"The real problems are the problems of the will" - the quote is from Giuseppe Mazzotta, in his book Reading Dante, but if like me you've watched his Yale lecture course on 'Dante in Translation' more than once, then you'll remember the idea. The full context of the quotation is this: "The body stands for one’s own reality, the passions. It stands for one’s own will. This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as the great intellectual adventure, which is one of knowledge, and Dante’s idea that the real problems are problems of the will. We may not know where we are, and we may understand that we are not happy with the situation in which we find ourselves, but we cannot quite solve these problems with knowledge alone because the problems here are problems of willing."

Dante himself was well aware of the centrality of the question of will in his Comedy. In his Epistle to Cangrande he writes: "Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitorii liberatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est" (If the work is taken allegorically, the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will  he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice."[bold face mine])

And of all the great writers, who better to understand this than the "problem-gambler" Dostoevsky? But of course it may well not have been until his second marriage that Dostoevsky would actually have felt any 'remorse' at succumbing to the 'weakness' of being addicted to gambling. If the character Alexei in The Gambler is anything to go by, then the young Dostoevsky possibly had his own theories about success and the positive power of human will, although Alexei - like Raskolnikov with his similarly cerebral theories about crime - seems quite incapable of actually attaining the rational control he extols.

Novels are like symphonies: they unfold in a linear sequence, but their parts stand in architectural relation to each other; main themes are announced and explored through their developments.  Crime and Punishment, for example, after a brief introduction which introduces us to Raskolnikov's fevered stream of consciousness, announces a grand theme of the failure of the will as presented in the recounted history of Marmeladov, who has drunk up everything, lost all opportunity, and sinks further and further into wretched hopelessness. He has been reduced to living off the earnings of his daughter who has been driven to prostitution.  We, in a sense, overhear this as he recounts his pathetic story to Raskolnikov, much as Raskolnikov overhears a student and a young officer theorizing over the merits of murdering the old pawnbroker. Of course, it is not many pages after Marmeladov's story that we learn that Raskolnikov himself has been the financial beneficiary of his elderly mother who subsists on a meagre pension, and his sister who had had to take up a very unpleasant serving position; all this bears a striking resemblance to Marmeladov's own circumstances. So we are now left having to revise our suppositions about how Raskolnikov felt about Marmeladov's story; a new light is cast backward over the narrative.  This uncertainty can start to infest the text; when, for instance, Raskolnikov sleeps suddenly in the bushes, and then on the way home, before falling into a deep slumber from which he cannot be woken, he chances to overhear a conversation in the Haymarket with Lizaveta, the unfortunate sister of the pawn-broker, revealing the exact hour at which she will be absent from the apartment, could this perhaps be a delusion? It is paired with the story of Raskolnikov chancing to overhear the student and the young officer, who just happen to be talking of the pawn-broker whom Raskolnikov himself has just visited, and furthermore, they are discussing the very thoughts of murder that he was already apparently thinking himself. How reliable really is this narrator? It starts to feel like the delusional otherness of Fight Club.

Failure of the will is Raskolnikov's own analysis of why most crimes are so readily solved: he believes that almost any criminal, at the moment of the crime, "подвергается какому-то упадку воли и рассудка" - undergoes some failure of the will and reason.