Dostoevsky, Marx, and the Crisis of Narrative

Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" and Marx's Communist Manifesto have at least one thing in common, which is that they both seek to impose a new narrative onto a reality that has lost its old force. As we move out of discussing works that arise of the Enlightenment, we are faced with the crises created by Enlightenment ideas - individual liberty, scientific discovery and exploration, Protestantism. Voltaire's response to the old order, the old narrative - the aristocracy, the church - is primarily satirical, at least in Candide, but his solution is arguably conservative, or at least not revolutionary: tend your garden. This solution places the nexus of the argument squarely on the shoulders of the individual, but this individual is not a revolutionary in the Marxian sense. Moliere's response to the old narrative is similarly satirical, at least in Tartuffe, but it ends on an even more conservative note than Candide. Tartuffe is "outed" by the king, who himself has donned the language of the Enlightenment, i.e. Right Reason.

The "Grand Inquisitor," on the other hand, while specifically concerning the Roman Catholic Church, is also about the problem of freedom. If we are all essentially equal, if there is no authority over us determining how we are to live and providing us with basic necessities, then how are we to satisfy our needs without killing each other, without anarchy? The English writer Thomas Hobbes, in the 17th Century, argued that we cannot. Such lives of freedom are "nasty, brutish, and short," he wrote in Leviathan; consequently, we require a ruler (a monarch) endowed with absolute power who can maintain order and provide for the well-being of the masses. Hobbes believed that we must even give our freedom of conscience over to the monarch, who will then decide what "we" are to believe.

The Inquisitor would agree. He argues that Christ offered freedom of belief to all humanity, essentially viewing all people as equal before God. The Inquisitor argues that by refusing the devil's temptations, Christ was asserting that one's love of God cannot arise out of fear or manipulation, but out of free choice. After all, is it love if one is forced to it? The problem, the Inquisitor argues, is that given freedom, humanity will revert to Hobbes' chaotic state. We will destroy each other. The Inquisitor's solution, then, is to provide the "millions" with the things they crave - bread, moral certitude, and universality. The church will demand absolute obedience, but in return it will provide the "millions" with peace, the peace of innocent children. In this way, the Inquisitor argues, the church is actually more benevolent than Christ himself, who misjudged human nature and assumed that we are essentially "good" when in fact we are essentially "bad."

This solution, however, is not simply to be dismissed as the solution of a corrupt church. Rather, it is the solution offered by every narrative - political, economic, and religious - that seeks to tell the "millions" how to live. Marx's narrative in The Communist Manifesto is another example of a narrative that seeks to justify a certain "will to power." And in this sense, it is the same narrative as that developed by one of the "Founding Fathers" of liberal democracy, John Locke. Locke argued that we are all naturally free, but he further asserted that capitalism and competition were right and natural. Marx would agree with the first part of this argument, but he would argue that capitalism and competition are finally barriers to real freedom, the freedom of the proletariat - the "millions" - from the oppression of the bourgeoisie. Such freedom, however, became a kind of oppression of its own, at least as practiced in the former Soviet Union. But in relation to the "lies" offered by the Inquisitor, the narrative offered by Marx seems almost refreshing.

In any case, what is clear is that in the 19th Century, Western and Russian literature were trying to deal with the problem of the proper relationship between the individual and society. Dostoevsky, in this chapter from The Brothers Karamazov at least, explores the central aspect of this problem for his time, a problem that was still to be very much at play in the run-up to the cataclysmic wars of the early and mid 20th Century. Of course it is a problem still with us, though since the Industrial Revolution, the narrative that has been developed to deal with it has been the narrative of National Exceptionalism, which itself, at least in America, contains within it the narratives of the church and of capitalism. And it is against this "new" narrative that much Modern and contemporary literature sets itself.