‘Je ne parle pas français’: Reading Mansfield's Underground Man

Summary

‘I do not see how we are to come by knowledge & Love except through pain.’

Katherine Mansfield, 13 July 1922

Exiled to the south of France at the start of 1918 in an attempt to recover from tuberculosis, Katherine Mansfield sent her partner John Middleton Murry a copy of a story that she was working on called ‘Je ne parle pas français’. He was very impressed: reading it, he said, made him feel that her writing was ‘dangerous’ in an exciting, unprecedented and difficult to define way.In search of a comparison that could do justice to Mansfield's startling achievement, Murry hit upon Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. She was delighted by such an enthusiastic and insightful response to her story, but also frightened by having written something so different, something that she too saw as an important advance in her writing. As she put it, ‘I have gone for it, bitten deeper & deeper & deeper than ever I have before.’

Murry's invocation of Dostoevsky was for both of them high praise indeed. He had just published a study of the Russian writer in which he praised Dostoevsky extravagantly, hailing him as sui generis, someone whose work transcended all our ordinary notions of what constitutes important fiction. ‘Dostoevsky's novels are not novels at all,’ Murry notes in his introduction, in that they have little to do with verisimilitude or conventional ideas of representation. He argues that, in Dostoevsky's fiction, a sort of anti-realism rules: ‘Causes are monstrously inadequate to their effects, and the smallest actions of every day take on the character of portents.’ The same is true of the ostensibly human beings Dostoevsky represents: his characters ‘pass beyond human comparison, and are no longer to be judged by human laws’. The bitterness of his struggle with the everyday made Dostoevsky a revolutionary and, according to Murry, he ‘carried this spirit of conscious rebellion against life to its last extremity’. For these reasons his heroes are never free from what Murry describes as ‘the gnawing terror of the timeless world’.

Murry's large claims are of a piece with the rapturous case for Dostoevsky's work that he goes on to make in his book, but such an approach entails certain risks.