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Dostoevsky and the Literature of Process: What Open Time Looks Like

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Narrative, Philosophy and Life

Part of the book series: Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life ((BSPR,volume 2))

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Abstract

This essay examines two images of time that have persisted in Western thought: one pictures time as closed, the other as open. Time is open if, at least at some moments, more than one event could take place. The essay looks especially at examples of intention and temporality in Dostoevsky’s writings, which represent time in an open and processual way.

What I am really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.

(Einstein)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See William James, “The Dilemma of Determinism,” “The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Psychology” and “Human Immortality” (New York: Dover, 1956), 145–183.

  2. 2.

    As quoted in The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 254.

  3. 3.

    Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972), 5.

  4. 4.

    Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Pete Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 119.

  5. 5.

    Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher, as reprinted in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory Since Plato (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 53.

  6. 6.

    I discuss foreshadowing in detail in Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

  7. 7.

    Caryl Emerson and I discuss outsideness, aesthetic necessity, and related concepts in Morson and Emerson, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

  8. 8.

    As cited in the article on “Time” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies in Selected Pivotal Ideas, ed. Philip P. Weiner (New York: Scribner’s, 973), 4: 393.

  9. 9.

    Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man,” I: 289–294, in Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William K. Wimsatt, Jr. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1965), 137.

  10. 10.

    As cited in the article on “Time” in The Dictionary of the History of Ideas, IV: 394.

  11. 11.

    As cited in The Yale Dictionary of Quotations, 443.

  12. 12.

    Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities (New York: Dover, 1951), 4.

  13. 13.

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 783.

  14. 14.

    Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, trans. Mary Morris (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), 6.

  15. 15.

    Stephen Toulmin, “Economics, or The Physics That Never Was,” Return to Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 47–66.

  16. 16.

    Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 27–28.

  17. 17.

    Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species: A Facsimile of the First Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 185.

  18. 18.

    See the many illustrations in Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built (New York: Penguin, 1995).

  19. 19.

    See Gary Saul Morson, “Narrativeness” in New Literary History, vol. 34, no. 1 (Winter 2003), 59–73.

  20. 20.

    John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (New York: Dover, 1959), vol. 1, 349.

  21. 21.

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, volume 1, 1873–1876, trans. Kenneth Lantz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 476.

  22. 22.

    Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, volume 1, 476.

  23. 23.

    Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, volume 1, 477.

  24. 24.

    Dostoevsky, A Writer’s Diary, volume 1, 477.

  25. 25.

    These features of the novel are discussed in more detail in Morson, “Tempics and The Idiot” in Celebrating Creativity: Essays in Honour of Jostein Bortnes on the Occasion of His 60 th Birthday, ed. Knut Andreas Grimstad & Ingunn Lunde (Bergen: Univ. of Bergen, 1997), 108–134.

  26. 26.

    Dostoevsky, Karamazov, 99 (translation modified).

  27. 27.

    As cited in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 271.

  28. 28.

    Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Modern Library, 1962), 475.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Northwestern University, 2215 Payne Street, Evanston, IL, 60201-2509, USA

    Gary Saul Morson (Frances Hooper Professor of the Arts and Humanities)

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  1. Gary Saul Morson
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Correspondence to Gary Saul Morson .

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  1. Institute for Philosophy & Religion, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA

    Allen Speight

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Morson, G.S. (2015). Dostoevsky and the Literature of Process: What Open Time Looks Like. In: Speight, A. (eds) Narrative, Philosophy and Life. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9349-0_8

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