Farther Away : Essays

THE END OF THE BINGE

[on Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler]

To be all meat and raw nerve is to exist outside of time and — momentarily — outside of narrative. The crackhead who’s been pushing the Pleasure button for sixty hours straight, the salesman who’s eaten breakfast, lunch, and dinner while glued to a video-poker terminal, the recreational eater who’s halfway through a half gallon of chocolate ice cream, the grad student who’s been hunched over his Internet portal, pants down, since eight o’clock last night, and the gay clubber who’s spending a long weekend doing cocktails of Viagra and crystal meth will all report to you (if you can manage to get their attention) that nothing besides the brain and its stimulants has any reality. To the person who’s compulsively self-stimulating, both the big narratives of salvation and transcendence and the tiny life-storylets of “I hate my neighbor” or “It might be nice to visit Spain sometime” are equally illusory and irrelevant. This deep nihilism of the body is obviously a worry to the crackhead’s three young children, to the salesman’s employer, to the ice cream eater’s husband, to the grad student’s girlfriend, and to the clubber’s virologist. But the person whose very identity is threatened by such abject materialism is the fiction writer, whose life and business it is to believe in narrative.

No novelist ever wrestled with materialism more fiercely and intelligently than Dostoyevsky. In 1866, when his short novel The Gambler was first published, the stabilizing old narratives of religion and a divinely ordained social order were undergoing dismantlement by science, technology, and the political aftermath of the Enlightenment; already the way was being paved to the brutal materialism of the Communists (which, in Russia and China and elsewhere, would produce body counts in the tens of millions) and to the morally unchecked pursuit of personal pleasure (which would produce more subtle consumerist corruptions and melancholies in the West). Dostoyevsky’s mature novels can be read as campaigns against both kinds of materialism, which he had identified as a threat not only to his vodka-soaked, politically intemperate motherland but to his own well-being. His intemperate youthful idealism, for which he’d done five years of hard time in Siberia, provided the impetus for Crime and Punishment and The Devils; his sensualism and compulsive nature and caustic rationality were the personally destabilizing forces against which he subsequently erected the fortress of The Brothers Karamazov and lesser redoubts like The Gambler. Creating narratives strong enough to withstand materialist assault was at once a patriotic duty and a personal necessity.

Traveling in the Rhine Valley in the early 1860s, Dostoyevsky had discovered his proclivity for compulsive gambling, and the experience was still fresh in his mind a few years later, when, famously, he was forced to compose an entire novel in one month. Because of the speed with which The Gambler was produced, the book provides a kind of first-draft snapshot of a writer coming to terms with the void he’s glimpsed within himself while playing roulette. The action begins in media res; the mode of suspense is one of Crucial Information Withheld; in places, this information seems to be withheld from the author himself. Camping out in a grand hotel, as in a very untidy dreamscape, is a loose family group of desperate Russians and a few multinational hangers-on. The book’s narrator, Alexei Ivanovich, the tutor to the family’s younger children, is desperately if somewhat unconvincingly in love with an older child, Polina, whose allegiances and motivations remain murky throughout the book. Alexei Ivanovich’s romantic predicament, like the family’s financial difficulties, is basically stock nineteenth-century storytelling. What’s really vivid and clear and urgent in the book are the scenes in the casino. The stoicism of the gentleman gamblers there, the vileness of the Polish kibitzers, the attraction that Alexei Ivanovich feels to the “acquisitive sordidness” of his fellow gamblers, the fever in which he loses control of himself and starts placing bets in a mindless, automatic way, and the general delirium and timelessness of the casino are all gleefully described. In The Gambler, as in all his later work, Dostoyevsky makes the case for nihilism almost too well. A wealthy old Russian lady sits down at the roulette table, and soon the table has converted her fortune and the enormous narrative potential it represents — it could buy village churches, a granddaughter’s independence, a nephew’s obedience — into a pile of purely abstract, easily squandered counters. The old woman is described as “not outwardly trembling” but “trembling from within”; the world has receded; there is only the table. Similarly, when Alexei Ivanovich stops playing with Polina’s money and goes to the casino to play with his own, he is instantly severed from the anguished love of Polina that has occupied him day and night. What drives him to the casino is precisely his devotion to Polina, his wish to rescue her, but once he’s in the grip of his compulsion, there’s only one kind of suspense and no story at all:

I already scarcely remembered what she had said to me a little while ago and why I had gone, and all those sensations that there had recently been, only an hour and a half before, already seemed to me now something long past, revised, obsolete…

And the book itself enacts what it describes. A nineteenth-century novelistic edifice in which it matters whether General Z. will receive his inheritance, and how the French national character differs from the English, and who the beautiful young Polina is secretly in love with, is blown away by a modern story of addiction.

At the end of the novel, Alexei Ivanovich is still in the Rhine Valley; his delirium gives way to remorse and self-loathing, but this is only a prelude to the next round of delirium. Alexei Ivanovich’s creator, however, fled Germany and, in short order, sat down and wrote Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. For Dostoyevsky — as for such latter-day literary heirs of his as Denis Johnson, David Foster Wallace, Irvine Welsh, and Michel Houellebecq — the impossibility of pressing the Pleasure bar forever, the inevitable breaking of some bleak and remorse-filled dawn, is the flaw in nihilism through which humane narrative can slip and reassert itself. The end of the binge is the beginning of the story.