ABSTRACT:
My article contends that Dostoevsky's short novel, The Gambler, is marked by a fundamental conflict of temporalities. While the novel seems to embrace bourgeois optimism and the hopeful narrative temporality that serves as its most resourceful literary embodiment, it also seems to adhere to a strikingly anti-teleological and circular narrative structure. This affirmation and denial of temporality as linear, purposive movement is the appropriate narrative emblem of the peculiar world of Roulettenburg and its inhabitants, a world where beginning and end continually risk equivalence and where the parameters of structure have therefore begun to dissolve. What emerges is an acceptance of inevitable boredom, of permanent failure to resolve conflict, that is both constricting and liberating. As an artistic principle of form, this failure declares a "poetics" of hesitation whose temporal dimensions brilliantly reflect the fundamentally ambivalent eras of the gambler, the letter's inability to accept or escape from a debilitating presentness. In creating this kind of narrative conflict, Dostoevsky reverses the characteristic romantic obsession with the allure of pregnant immediacy that is an illusion of god-like vision to which only a most ungod-like being could succumb.
The Gambler is a novel of insouciant irony that adopts traditional narrative teleology, the causally seamless Aristotelian progression from beginning through middle to end, only to undermine it. Dostoevsky creates a deceptive narrative that appears to affirm but in fact tends to impair teleological temporal progression; beginning and end repeatedly converge in intractable hesitation, obscuring the simplest parameters of temporal identity. Hesitation thus serves to express a fundamental conflict of temporalities at the heart of the narrative that animates the peculiar trajectories of the novel's romantic profusion of riotous gamblers and desperate lovers. This conflict supplies the perfect means to represent the world of the gambler, a world of irremediable boredom grasped as the inability to master time by giving perdurant form to the over-rich openness of the present.
In this article, I shall examine this central conflict of temporalities as a conflict between apparent movement and actual stasis, between the appearance and denial of narrative progression or plot, as it manifests itself in a complex of different forms within the text. I shall then proceed to discuss this dynamic briefly from two perspectives: that of eros, the essential notion of erotic striving that through Romanticism had such enormous influence on nineteenth-century thought, and that of hesitation where the confluence of freedom and boredom becomes a central question. I shall conclude by suggesting that The Gambler constitutes an intriguing experiment in Dostoevsky's oeuvre, being a far more devious and estranging production than the relatively scant critical reception suggests.
I. TIME AND TEMPORALITY
Before proceeding, I should briefly outline what I mean by temporality in order to clarify the notion of a conflict of temporalities. The first step is to elucidate the difference between time and temporality: What is time as opposed to temporality? The question turns on which of these two terms is more basic-is time a kind of temporality or is temporality a kind of time? Martin Heidegger provides an indispensable point of reference for this question when he argues that the "ontological condition of the possibility of being is temporality,"3 tersely suggesting that temporality is the more inclusive term, the very condition without which being is impossible.4 For Heidegger, an interpretation of time, a specific temporality, lies at the heart of being; indeed, it first brings being as such into the light. Hence, a conflict of temporalities means a conflict over the specific interpretations of time that determine the possibilities of being.
This view of temporality admits that time is the result of interpretation, and, to that extent, it is a "construction" relative to a given context. But of course the problem is that temporality is not a "thing" like others but rather that in which all things appear, the condition of their possibility. For what exists without time? Therefore, to give shape to time by constructing a temporality seems to impose structure illicitly on that which, by its very nature, cannot have structure. More importantly for the present purpose, this argument also seems to hold that time is analogous to a "raw material" which can be shaped almost at will. This conclusion assumes, however, that time must be somehow prior to temporality and not the reverse, thus turning the argument around once more. Since the notion of temporality does not encompass these different possibilities-it cannot be both prior and posterior to time6-there must be some original sort of perception that never crystallizes into a temporality because it never assumes a specific shape; its essence is to be shapeless, a sort of inchoate openness or nothingness. We typically call this perception the "present" or "moment."
Such a conclusion leads to the surmise that temporality and time emerge together as a sort of escape from an essentially undefined and indefinable presentness, an original "moment" that traps being in pure immediacy. Such immediacy can be recognized only once it is surpassed by mediation, a temporality of some kind that reveals both immediacy and being.7 And this is the sense in which Heidegger refers to temporality as the condition of being, as the means that opens up being as time-for without mediation of any kind what is there to grasp? Ironically this way of thinking also entails that the raw material of temporality comes to light only as "a nothing" or, rather, the nothingness of the that has been a feature of thought about the nature of time since antiquity.
Temporality is thus an interpretation conferring significance on the ineffable "present" by integrating it into a structure that by its very nature must transcend the present. The creation of this structure is a profoundly erotic act, an expression of the desire to master the present by overcoming its shapelessness-its inherently and deceptively open character-in favor of a specific structure or plot, a narrative form that subsumes the present into an overarching structural identity. Here temporality and narrative come together as building the horizons for being, the basic coordinates that define its possibilities as courses for the fulfillment or frustration of desire.
II. CONFLICTING TEMPORALITIES
The Gambler is divided into three main sections. The first, comprising chapters 1-9, introduces the world of Roulettenburg through the unreliable lens of the narrator, Alexei Ivanych.10 The second stretches into chapter 13 and describes Grandmamma's visit. The third begins with the narrator's wild gambling spree and ends with his move to Paris. On the final pages of the novel, we find Alexei Ivanych at another gambling spa, Bad Homburg. If he is destitute, he has not abandoned gambling or the fabled hope of winning.
From a synoptic view, the plot line of the novel showcases the qualities of temporal conflict or confusion I have outlined. While there is movement from one location to another, and a moral descent of sorts, there is also a remarkable series of repetitions as Alexei Ivanych continues to gamble and lose. The hope of achieving the goal of winning, of reaching an end, is continuously undercut; the straightforward irony is that Alexei Ivanych does not abandon his path but embraces it despite its evident futility.
This somewhat obvious pattern is the main conceit of the novel, its richness concealed by its simplicity. The following interpretations aim at recovering this richness by looking at how the pattern functions on different levels of the novel. The first interpretation deals with the opening chapter and, in particular, with how the novel's temporal ambiguity is insinuated into the simplest layers of the text. The second interpretation focuses on the ironic fact that the characters appear to seek to give definitive form to their lives through a means, gambling, wholly unsuited to that end. The third interpretation reinforces the second by examining two extremely significant gambling sprees in the novel, that of Grandmamma and that of Alexei Ivanych following upon Grandmamma's departure.
In all these cases, the novel displays the impotence of its main characters and, indeed, of its own overarching narrative, to achieve a linear rather than a circular temporality, a plot that conforms to a recognizable teleology, on anything more than an apparent basis. Ends emerge as deceptions, as tempting (or taunting) possibilities that are not fulfilled.
The opening of the novel
The first chapter of the novel provides an intriguing introduction to its conflicting temporalities. The narrative is deceptive-it seems to make a series of promises that will not be kept. The deception thus lies in the manipulation of expectations that the narrative itself raises. This kind of manipulation should not be confused with the notion of thwarting expectations dear to the parodist, although this aspect of parody plays a significant role in the novel as well.
The questions that arise are in fact of a different variety, for one of the crucial ideas of the novel is the hollowness of expectation, the radical weakness of the hopes that the gamblers all seem to entertain in one way or another and which they believe will be realized by means of gambling. The key point here is to cast expectation in its properly temporal role. Expectation is inherently futural; it is fueled by hope. And this is the vital difference. Only a temporality that offers a real change in state, the arrival of a new state, can engage hope, otherwise there would be no reason to hope, since nothing would ever be different. Hence, frustration of expectation in the novel is not merely the play of the parodist, but rather an indication of the greater problem, the inherent conflict between expectation and disappointment that reveals a central conflict of temporalities.
The first paragraph of the novel is a remarkable example of apparent forward movement that turns out on closer inspection to be much more questionable, to be more appearance than reality, a mere semblance of movement. The structure of the paragraph is marked by the prominent use of the contrastive conjunction odinakozh which is roughly equivalent to the English "however" and, in each case the contrast is one of disappointed expectation. Here are the relevant sentences:
(1) I am back at last after my absence of two weeks. Our party has been in Roulettenburg since the day before yesterday. I thought they would have been expecting me with inexpressible impatience, 1 was however mistaken. The general looked at me with coolest detachment, uttered a few condescending words and sent me to his sister. It was evident that they had borrowed some money somewhere.
(2) Marya Filippovna was extremely busy and held only a short conversation with me; she took the money, however, counted it and listened to everything I had to report.
(3) Polina Alexandrovna, when she saw me, asked why I had taken so long, and then walked away without waiting for an answer. Of course she did it on purpose. We shall have to have a talk, however.11
The importance of this feature of the narrative lies not so much in which particular expectation is not fulfilled, but in the mere fact that it is not, that the narrator holds out a specific notion of how things will transpire that is shown to be false. This characteristic, announced in the very first paragraph of the novel, will extend a long shadow over all his actions, because the narrator will continually project a future that does not come to pass, a pattern that becomes more and more exaggerated.
A telling variant of this pattern comes to the fore in Alexei Ivanych's comic narrative about "spitting in the monsignor's coffee" that serves as a sort of centerpiece to the first chapter. This Gogolian narrative of insignificance is a powerful confirmation of the narrative wantonness of Alexei Ivanych, his inability to meet the expectations he raises about creating a successful narrative. Since Alexei Ivanych is also the ostensible narrator of the novel as a whole, its author, this tale reflects back on the overarching narrative itself and, as such, is another sort of commentary on the latter from within.
The motivations for this brief tale are as trivial as the tale itself. Alexei Ivanych is at a festive dinner with the General and some of the General's friends. He wishes to pick a fight with one of the latter, the "little Frenchman" (FrantsuziK) de Grieux, to embarrass the General and create a fuss:
I was in a strange mood; of course, even before half-way through dinner I had managed to ask myself my usual invariable question, 'Why do I hang about around this general, why haven't I left them long ago?' Occasionally I glanced at Polina Alexandrovna; she took absolutely no notice of me. I ended by getting annoyed and making up my mind to behave badly (p. 21/210).
This apparently rebellious move recalls the similarly unusual behaviour of the underground man during the infamous dinner party in Part II of that work. But it also launches the narrator into a most unusual narrative, one that seems to have very little connection with the discussion among other members of the dinner party; this lack of connection being part of its provocative challenge. Yet, while Alexei Ivanych seems to have an intention to pique the others, his narrative is most disturbing on account of its strangeness, the fact that it not only does not fit the situation but also that it fails to stand up on its own or proceed in any direction whatsoever-and this is precisely the point. Whereas the narrative promises by the very expectations it raises some semblance of an orderly progression to an end, it neither fits into the order of the specific social context, nor does it impose any new order; it neither obeys a specific set of conventions nor does it depart from them in a productive way.
The meeting with Polina Alexandrovna that ends the chapter further confuses expectations. The opening paragraph of the chapter seems to promise a rather important "explanation" between Alexei and Polina. Nothing of the kind comes to pass. While the narrator did indeed obtain money for Polina Alexandrovna, the reasons for needing the money are much less clear. The background given by the narrator is in fact so exiguous that it is difficult to be sure about the exact nature of their relationship. While the narrator of course hints at a romantic relationship, the explanation also glides over this and, in so doing, muddies the waters.
The problem of deception
These primarily comic contrasts are covert textual signals about the peculiar nature of the initial narrative, and it may well be useful to try to understand why the novel does not make this point more directly, why there is a contrast between surface form and internal content that must be interpreted out of the text.
The covert nature of this contrast is in fact the very essence of Roulettenburg, a world in which the two fundamental grounds that confer concrete reality on any thing, time and space, are subverted while retaining enough connection with the world they subvert so as not to appear completely and abysmally unfamiliar. If time is subverted by the distance between the model of Ideological temporality that is both relied on and undermined from the very beginning, spatial relations are similarly undermined by the amusing identity of Roulettenburg as both a city in a real country in a real culture and an abstraction that has never existed. Roulettenburg is very much an illusion, a deception, a world that seems to conform to lived reality but which does not; in a word, it ironically parades its fictionality, its distance from the reality to which it superficially seems to conform.13
Deception also takes many forms among the characters, almost all of which seek to overcome the bonds of imposed identity by searching for a new narrative, a new identity that is more attractive, that offers a freedom more pure than what they hitherto enjoyed. It is surely no coincidence that Alexei Ivanych's faltering tale is linked to his desire, a manifestly negative one, not to be merely an outchitel in the General's suite. But the fact that his desire ends up in the mangled form of a narrative that collapses in and of itself, suggests that he is unable to exercise the authority he must as an author to achieve the freedom he wants. The General too wants to pass himself off as a more powerful and substantial individual with enough money to encourage mademoiselle Blanche to marry him. Like Alexei Ivanych, he is comically unable to express himself-he cannot complete his sentences or make sense in most social situations. He is in fact even farther "gone" than Alexei Ivanych. Mademoiselle Blanche for her part is a dubious creature of the demimonde who simply has no clear social status other than the one she assumes through obvious deception. Polina Alexandrovna searches for a way to escape from her subservient status and, in this regard, she superficially resembles Alexei Ivanych.
These characters are brought together by a common desire to obtain the freedom to create their own plot lines, to become authors of their own narratives and thereby masters of their identity. They seek such freedom also through a common means, money. And, thus, their quest is a rather wicked parody of bourgeois hope, of the notion of bourgeois "salvation" through acquisition of wealth.14 Every character at Roulettenburg is obsessed with money, and they gamble because they desire money. But money is of course not the absolute end; it is a means. The General wants money in order to marry mademoiselle Blanche who wants money herself in order to live the identity she desires, that of being a comtesse. Both Alexei and Polina Alexandrovna appear to want money as a way out of their humiliating situations.
Here the train of the discussion comes to a halt because, if the characters gamble as a means to an end, their behaviour may initially seem more rational, and their desire perhaps justified, by the end towards which it strives. But again the deceptive quality of the narrative prevails because it becomes increasingly obvious that the desire to gamble is not based in any sort of rational calculation, and this pushes the question of motivation to a deeper level. In this respect, the novel does have an interesting structural cohesion, for it brings together a sort of fictional argument that is an investigation into the motives for gambling that throws off the husk of rationality the characters use to disguise their motivations for gambling. If the first chapter prepares the way for this argument, the latter begins to gain intensity in the chapters leading to Grandmamma's visit where the notion that there can be any rationality in gambling is comically refuted. The juxtaposition of this sequence with Alexei Ivanych's subsequent spree suggests that the real ground for gambling is not mastery or new identity but the desire for pure oblivion, immersion in the endless present, which is rather the opposite of mastery.
Now, that gambling is not a rational activity may seem an utterly trivial point, and as a naked assertion it surely is. But Alexei Ivanych announces a different view at the beginning of the second chapter:
I was certain and indeed determined, as I have been for a long time, that 1 would not leave Roulettenburg the same man as 1 arrived there; some radical and decisive change in my destiny will inevitably take place. It must and will. However comical it may be that I should expect to get so much out of Roulette, the routine opinion, accepted by everybody, that it is absurd and silly to expect anything at all from gambling seems to me even more comical (pp. 28/215-216).
Alexei Ivanych challenges the view that gambling for profit is absurd, that the expectations of the gambler are not rational. On what basis does Alexei Ivanych make this assertion? This basis is, not surprisingly, rather obscure, and he in fact never succeeds in giving a convincing account of why he makes this claim. What remains important is that Alexei Ivanych tries to ground his behaviour in a rational explanation. Yet, while he holds out some semblance of rationality behind his desire to gamble, this semblance is misleading and weak. He deceives, and perhaps, he deceives himself most of all.
Masks of desire and the pretense of rationality
The importance of this attitude should not be underestimated, for deception emerges in the novel as so many masks of desire, as the screen behind which desire runs rampant and uncontrolled. What do I mean by this? To win by gambling, to master chance, to create one's own identity, invokes a great paradox of freedom, since the desire for mastery must lead to the transforming of chance into necessity, the obj edification of the world (that cannot explain its source within its own terms) and, hence, the extirpation of desire. It is the very paradoxical self-limitation of freedom, the desire not to have to desire.
This is precisely the problem experienced by the gamblers who seek to fashion a new identity by enchaining the freedom they seem to crave; by extension, this is also the narrative problem of the novel itself, for the novel must reduce and give form; that is, it must turn chance into necessity to be a structure, to have form. To hesitate continually before this choice leads to a sort of paralysis, one that descends into the pure night of unrestricted freedom, of pure desire. The immersion in pure desire is the essence of the gambler, the need to disguise that desire is his pragmatic surface.
The novel's peculiar structure and its seemingly heavy emphasis on an obvious point, that gambling is not rational, serve to give entry to this more complex and recalcitrant dynamic that lies beneath the surface, whose very essence is to conceal itself within some proper garb. In this respect, it is not so much the supposed absurdity of gambling that is important but the desire for the absurd and the forms it takes, all of which are manifestly inadequate and must be so.
This crucial aspect of the novel may be clarified by taking a careful look at two of its central events, Grandmamma's visit and Alexei Ivanych's subsequent gambling spree. Here, back to back, we have two different kinds of gambling bouts, the former resolutely destroying the illusion of rationality, the latter revealing the essential dynamic that hides behind the pretense of rationality. In both cases, apparent purpose-the striving to create a viable narrative, a new identity or plot line-contrasts with a denial of the very possibility of doing so. The conflict of temporalities, of basic possibilities for being becomes ever more outrageous.
The narrative sequence describing Grandmamma's visit opens with a striking description of Grandmamma, which exudes an energy and force particularly evident in the Russian text because of a buoyant and euphonious string of adjectives and present participles (boikaia, zadornaia, samodovol'naia, sidiashchaia, krichashchaia, braniashchaia) (p. 73/250). Grandmamma scolds everyone and has what appears to be an exceptional memory. She is distinguished both by alertness and intelligence. In brief, she is hardly the figure of enfeebled old age. Her "lynx eyes" (rys'ii vzgliad) provide a rich metaphoric confirmation of these qualities by evoking associations with an alert and supple predatory animal.
This is but one aspect of the initial description of Grandmamma. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes her relentless and omnivorous inquisitiveness. Her immense curiosity in things large and small along with her apparent faith that there are answers (why else ask questions?) wryly recall Leibniz's maxim, nihil est sine ratione, or nothing is without a reason. After all, for Grandmamma, if one cannot answer the question, one is simply a "blockhead (bolvan)" Of course, it may seem extravagant to regard Grandmamma's attitude as a reflection of a formal philosophical principle, but, in fact, this so-called principle is fundamentally no more than an aphoristic formulation of the most daring conviction of modern rationalism and the scientific thought that emerged with it. From this perspective, Grandmamma really does seem to represent a view equivalent to the ostensibly naïve proposition that there is a reason for everything, that the world is in fact accessible to human reason. Far from indulging in a crude reduction of an ostensibly formal philosophical principle, the narrator accurately and humorously identifies its humble root, in all its essential arrogance and innocence. As the others say of Grandmamma-"elle est tombée en enfance."
The narrator's initial description of Grandmamma establishes the framework in which he proceeds to weave a rich tissue of ironies and contradictions by describing Grandmamma's encounter with roulette. One has only to recall the fact that Grandmamma's insatiable curiosity ironically leads her to want to gamble and, hence, into the debacle which ends in her utter defeat and humiliation, a distinctly modern and grotesque echo of Oedipus' tragedy.
The narrator describes Grandmamma's first encounter with roulette in a key passage:
Grandmamma listened carefully, remembered, asked questions, and learned bits by heart. It was possible to show an example at once of every method of staking, so that learning and remembering a great deal was both quick and easy. Grandmamma was very pleased.
"And what is zéro? That croupier there with curly hair, the head one, called out zéro just now. And why did he rake in everything that was anywhere on the table? Such a heap; why did he take it all for himself. What is it?"
"Zéro means the bank wins, Grandmamma. If the little ball falls into zéro, whatever has been staked goes to the bank. It is true, there is one coup that neither wins nor loses, but the bank doesn't pay anything out."
"Well, well! and I don't get anything?"
"Yes, Grandmamma, if you had staked on zéro, you get paid thirty-five times as much when zéro comes up."
"What? thirty-five times, does it often turn up? Why don't they stake on it, the fools?"
"The odds are thirty-six to one against it, Grandmamma."
"Rubbish! Potapych! Potapych! Wait, I have some money with me-here!" (p.
90/263)
Grandmamma's practically unhesitating choice of zéro is most interesting. There are several ways in which one might interpret this choice, and they depend in large part on an interpretation of zéro.
The rather obvious interpretation of zéro is that it starkly represents the "all or nothing" alternative. Yet it does so in a peculiar way. As a play choice, zéro is fundamentally no different than any other: the player merely wins or loses. Yet, win or loss here is not restricted to the player who makes the choice. As the narrator describes the rules, there is in fact an imbalance. If the player chooses zéro and wins, he or she certainly wins a quantitatively greater amount, but, conversely, everyone else who did not make that choice not only loses, but loses everything on the table. Zéro is indeed a rather strong "all or nothing."
One might also look to the properties of zero as a number, for zero is no ordinary number. It is in fact distinguishable from all other numbers. It is the only number that cannot be resolved by division or multiplication into a number other than itself. Moreover, addition or subtraction of any single number from zero will always give that same number. These two examples only indicate that zero is not an identity in itself as understood in the sense of the other numbers. Rather zero is a sort of limit that partakes in the combinatory operations characteristic of the system of numbers while remaining fundamentally different. This quality reflects zero's function as a necessary beginning or foundation for the other numbers: the similarity to metaphysical or epistemological conceptions of an ultimate ground, prime mover or first cause is both suggestive and parodie. A potentially infinite system requires a ground that is not itself wholly "within" the system, but rather transcends it, in order for its elements to be susceptible to finite manipulations rendering them rationally intelligible and deducible.
Grandmamma's choice of zéro has an intriguing affinity with assumptions inherent in the modern privileging of mathematics as offering the only route to certain knowledge.18 She incorporates the essentially Cartesian procedure of assuming that the apparent grounding element, zéro, offers in turn the possibility of deducing a winning strategy of the game. She does so regardless of the fact that this strategy entails loss for any player who should not also chose it. Her reality takes precedence. One should perhaps not take this analysis too far, but it seems plausible that Dostoevsky, in having Grandmamma make the choice of zéro, is indulging in a rather wicked commentary on the mathematical origins of the modern notion of science and rationality initiated by Descartes.
This choice is so intriguing because Grandmamma never subjects her rational assumptions to analysis. If her assumptions are indeed rational, this seems quite difficult to understand insofar as a game of chance like roulette by its very nature rules out the possibility of deducing a winning strategy. There simply is no fixed constant or indubitable ground permitting a deductive determination of the results of each turn of the wheel. Roulette is in fact what one may define as an inductive game in opposition to a deductive game like chess. The difference lies in the determinacy of the rules of chess that allow a definite series of combinations to be deduced from every move whereas in roulette all possibilities of combination are available at any one time. The operational variables cannot be precisely defined by necessary relations, and this is, of course, the essence of chance. As a consequence roulette may be rationally analyzed only on the basis of inductive treatments of empirical data, yielding results that are merely probable, but never necessary. This irreducible undecidability of roulette therefore indicates that Grandmother's rational attitude is fundamentally flawed, that her attitude is hardly rational at all.
This absurd absence of rationality becomes only too clear when her strategy of placing bets on zéro fails. At this point Grandmother seems to think that her strategy is perhaps mistaken and consults de Grieux whose advice is as ridiculously ineffectual as her own initially optimistic strategy (pp. 108/276-277). But Grandmamma refuses to abandon her assumption that the game yields itself to a rational winning strategy. She concludes that de Grieux simply does not know what he is talking about-he is a "blockhead." In so doing, she rejects out of hand the obvious possibility evidenced by de Grieux's fumbling attempts to teach her a strategy to the game: that there in fact can be no strategy to the game. This exchange represents a sort of "turning point" for Grandmamma precisely because she explicitly refuses to acknowledge this possibility. Indeed, she only plays the game in greater earnest.
One need not indulge in a detailed analysis of Grandmamma's increasingly absurd spiral into defeat and humiliation. Suffice it to say that she ever more desperately seeks to find the "winning strategy" to such a degree that she dismisses the narrator and avails herself of the assistance of several disreputable Poles. With the collapse of her fortunes the narrative relating to Grandmamma closes. Having lost enormous sums, she is compelled to give a promissory note in order to obtain even enough money to return to Russia. After signing the note she says to the narrator: "It is true that God visits the sin of pride even on the old" (p. 124/288). Grandmamma seems repentant.
The perfect corollary to Grandmamma's humbling experience is Alexei Ivanych's wild spree that immediately follows her departure from Roulettenburg. In this episode, the narrative depicts the intoxication of the gambler as never before and thereby points to a different way of grasping the only ever apparent rationality of gambling.
That this chapter is one of the most overtly sensual is surely no accident, for the experience of gambling that the narrator attempts to convey is one of unbridled sensuality, almost the kind of frenzied rapture or Rausch that marks the Dionysian spirit of dissolution (and creation).19
The striking encounter between Alexei Ivanych and Polina Alexandrovna that opens the chapter establishes this atmosphere of sensuality. Their strange relationship reaches its highest intensity in this chapter where Polina Alexandrovna finally decides to risk all and give herself to Alexei Ivanych. She announces this intention by coming to his room and revealing her betrayal by de Grieux. Alexei Ivanych's reaction to her is curious. Rather than simply taking advantage of what seems to be a long awaited opportunity to possess her, Alexei is suddenly gripped by the impulse to gamble. His own explanation of this urge is most interesting:
Yes, sometimes the wildest notion, the most apparently impossible idea, takes such a firm hold of the mind that at length it is taken for something realizable... More than that: if the idea coincides with a strong and passionate desire, it may sometimes be accepted as something predestined, inevitable, fore-ordained, something that cannot but exist or happen! Perhaps there is some reason for this, some combination of presentiments, some extraordinary exertion of will-power, some self-intoxication of the imagination or something else-I don't know: but on that evening (which 1 shall never forget as long as I live) something miraculous happened to me. Although it is completely capable of mathematical proof, nevertheless to this day it remains for me a miraculous happening (p. 128/291; my ellipsis).
This miraculous happening is Alexei Ivanych's gambling spree during which he constantly wins.
How is one to read this sudden impulse? One aspect is quite clear-Alexei Ivanych in his explanation confuses chance with necessity, thus ending further thought about his behaviour by invoking a compulsion that may be subject to mathematical proof, but which never is so proved in the novel. And this cannot come as a surprise, since no such proof could be forthcoming. By conferring on his apparently spontaneous choice the subsequent seal of mathematical certitude, Alexei Ivanych repeats the novel's distinctive pattern of rationalizing acts whose rationality is at best contestable and at worst positively marginal. The incorrigible tendency to give form as an excuse, as a way of justification is clear; the rejection of chance is merely a surface judgment, a nod to the conventions of understanding, that conceals the problem of understanding, the desire to overcome understanding, to deny and delay.
To describe the pattern is one thing, to grasp what this particular variant means (other than to note the obvious conclusion that Alexei Ivanych indulges in self-deception) is somewhat trickier. Before grappling with this question, it is important to examine Alexei Ivanych's wild intoxication while gambling-the end of gambling will only become evident if we look at how Alexei Ivanych acts during his spree.
Alexei Ivanych's description of the spree is suitably vague. He constantly qualifies his narrative with terms that suggest intoxication and delirium, a state of ecstasy. He feels like he is "delirious with fever" and "tingling with fire." His narrative is a delirium:
Black turned up. After that I remember neither the amount nor the order of my stakes. I only recall, as if it was a dream, that I had already won, I think, about sixteen thousand florins; then I suddenly dropped 12,000 in three unlucky coups; then 1 pushed my last four thousand on to 'passe' (but by now I hardly felt anything at all; 1 only waited, almost mechanically, without thinking)-and won again; then I won four more times in succession. I can only remember scooping up money in thousands, and I am beginning to remember also that the middle twelve numbers, to which I had become positively attached, turned up most frequently of all (p. 130/293).
The narrator contrasts dissolution and order. He uses the framing phrases "after that I remember" and "I can only remember" to indicate just how unclear his memory of the spree must be, while at the same time retaining a vivid memory of certain details collected apparently at random. And this contrast is of course a signal fact, since memory is the successful imposition of order on the present in order to preserve the present into the past, conferring the character of being, of transcendence, on the apparent openness of the present. Alexei Ivanych's ultimate inability to impose a clear order on what happened-simply put, his inability to tell a clear story of what happened-also shows the lie in his adherence to rational explanations for his behaviour: the animal rules over the rational, "remarkable regularity" surrenders to the jests of fate.
And here the mocking grin of pure animality, the satyr's face, emerges into daylight in the narrative. The end of gambling is of course not winning, not the production of income (even to impress Polina Alexandrovna)-a nod to bourgeois utility-but pure immersion in animality, in the release from all inhibition that is the pure life of the animal before any morality, any obstructing form is imposed. This immersion is thus also a forgetting, a release from the past into the nothingness of pure presentness, a state that cannot be described, that maximally resists structure, that is indeed the purest freedom of all.
The end of gambling is this kind of ecstasy, a "standing out from" all categories, all mediations; an experience of the purely physical, which cannot retain its purity in any description. Here is a freedom that parodies the freedom of sexual ecstasy, if not also the unio mystica, the otherworldly communion with God that mystics, following Plato, have described as an erotic ascent. And, indeed, not even the brief sexual encounter with Polina Alexandrovna after the spree has comparable significance, other than as parody.
III. JANUS-FACED EROS AND BOREDOM
Alexei Ivanych's gambling spree points to the erotic nature of gambling as well as its peculiar goal, the complete immersion in the physical, in the emptiness of the "now," which, according to Aristotle's path-breaking analysis of time, seems to have no being. Soon after this spree, Alexei Ivanych takes up with mademoiselle Blanche whose less complex allure is a perfect complement to Alexei's own increasing dissolution.21 The obvious reading is that Alexei's journey in the novel is the converse of Grandmamma's. Where Grandmamma rejects dissolution, Alexei seems to embrace it, finding a freedom in dissolution that was otherwise not available to him. If Polina Alexandrovna is a more demanding object of desire, one that requires the attentions of Alexei Ivanych, a certain discipline and adherence, mademoiselle Blanche is nothing of the sort-her only demand is that Alexei not worry about how his money is being spent.
The final irony is that Alexei cannot be satisfied by this life. The ambivalence that he has shown through the entire novel re-asserts itself at the end, where Alexei Ivanych returns to gambling ostensibly with the same hopes that animated his original gambling bouts.
But it is surprising that Alexei Ivanych remains so purely ambivalent. He cannot throw off the language of rational explanation, of a well-founded quest for freedom, nor can he fully accept the impossibility of that quest. Towards the end of the novel, he clothes his erotics of descent in the language of an erotics of ascent. The difference between the two is absolutely essential.
The former is an eros of immersion in the pure presentness of sensual life, the life that is presented to us through the body. The latter is an eros of transcendence, an eros whose origins are essentially Platonic; as such, this eros is one of ascent to that world of eternal verities that is beyond the present, that is beyond the cycle of generation and decay that defines the existence of the body. If in both cases the end sought is freedom, the type of freedom is radically different. The eros of descent seeks freedom from the limitations imposed by rationality, by the fictions of being-here we have a beautiful example of what Nietzsche calls the "innocence of becoming." The eros of ascent seeks freedom from the limitations imposed by corporeality, by our fatal physicality.
Hesitation between descent and ascent is the burden of indecision, of the gambler's incorrigible evasiveness. In this sense, the notion of the gambler is more than apt; it is a precise way of describing one who is unable to stake everything on thisworldliness or otherworldliness; the burden of choice must be tolerated even though it is intolerable. That the novel allows the possibility of two readings, one ignoring and one emphasizing the metaphysical challenge, the question whether metaphysics is in any way tenable, is only appropriate. The novel presents Alexei Ivanych's indecision, its structure grows out of it, and any reading that purports to be a complete one must take into account the fact that both readings are present at the same time.22
Freedom and Boredom
The freedom so passionately sought in The Gambler ends up being indistinguishable from boredom, from the complete absence of reasons to do or not to do anything. The question "Why?" has lost its sense. Every question "why?" seeks out a reason, and the hesitation of the narrator, Alexei Ivanych, is a de facto rejection of reasons, of purposes.
The narrator turns out to be the enemy of all teleological structures and, thus, of structures itself, since what sort of structure exists that has no end, i.e., that is constructed for no reason at all? Indeed, for the gambler the absence of reasons empties choice of meaning. No longer can one inquire about the significance of choice-all choices are equally significant and equally insignificant. If the situation were otherwise, the gambler would not be free; he would not be released from the requirement of making a choice. And indeed the gambler retains an appearance of decisiveness, of readiness to play, which is hardly convincing.
Yet, the real interest of this characterization of the gambler lies in its implications for understanding the paradoxical nature of desire. The gambler seems to desire the freedom that results from mastery, from the freedom to be a "law unto oneself," to be able to exercise the ultimate power of autonomy. But this is only the cover for a more fundamental desire to be free fi-om any governance, from restriction of freedom that the striving to mastery must impose-any striving to obtain an end is the imposition of a teleology, a return of a state of subservience, even if one is made a servant to one's own ends. Freedom must then suffer, desire must restrict itself, and this runs contrary to desire's greatest impulse, which is self-perpetuation, the continued possibility of desiring, for desire seeks only itself.
IV. CONCLUSION: AN UNDECIDABLENOVEL
This pattern is a remarkable projection of the underground man's thoughts about desire and its relation to freedom. The underground man suggests that the ultimate end is freedom understood as an absence of all ends, as a sort of indifference to all ends that allows desire to run freely and randomly.23 Hence, the peculiar logical trap in which the ultimate end of striving is to have no end, a fundamentally contradictory paradigm for action that affirms and voids striving at the same time.
This similarity is the clearest indication that The Gambler is an important exploration and elucidation of metaphysical problems posed in Notes from Underground, hardly a fresh suggestion in itself, but one that needs to be made given Joseph Frank's recent polemic against this sort of reading of the novel.24 Indeed, it seems to me that the self-consuming logic of the gambler, the delight and despair in possibility at the expense of actuality, is a crucial pre-figuration of the ambiguous responses to the collapse of metaphysics that have shaped the most important and influential debates of the twentieth century. On the one hand, there is the delight in liberation from metaphysics, a delight announcing itself in the Derridean "infinite play of the signifier" and a final escape from the oppressive structures of Platonic thought. On the other hand, there is despair over the decay or destruction of values, the dissolution of the tradition that forms the dark center of many twentieth-century fictions indebted to Dostoevsky like Céline's Journey to the End of the Night, Broch's Sleepwalkers and Kafka's The Castle.
But it would be somewhat of a misstatement to claim that The Gambler is a post-modern text avant la lettre because it hesitates to ally itself firmly with either of these positions; rather it begins to expose the horns of a dilemma, that of desire, without responding to that dilemma in one definite way. In this sense, it seems to me that The Gambler lacks some of the tendentiousness of Dostoevsky's later works where the dilemma is exposed only to be condemned (at least on the surface) as resulting from the loss of God. While it may be tempting indeed to consider The Gambler an allegorical treatment of human life exposed to the vicissitudes of fate and to view the novel primarily as a didactic fiction, the complex tensions within it render the text essentially undecidable, and this undecidability confers upon the novel a particularly open and experimental quality.
Hence, The Gambler's place in Dostoevsky's works is not, and likely cannot be, wholly clear, for even here the deceptive quality of the work tends to obscure matters. If one might argue that the book is a perfectly conceived novel on the surface, obeying the unities of construction that, outside of several notable and radical experiments, were the mainstay of nineteenth-century fiction, the underlying refutation of these unities, the dismantling of structure, points to much more radically experimental tendencies that are subtly transformed and muted in the great novels through their stabilizing dialogicity. In this sense The Gambler remains a work apart, a narrative at once familiar and disorienting, plain and deviously experimental.
1 This conflict is internal to the text, a representation of time within the novel that is reflected in its structure-there is thus a homology between the 'how' and 'what' of representation. 1 put questions of the other crucial layer of temporality involved-that of the reading process itself-aside for the moment as well as those concerning discrepancies between story (erzählte Zeit) and narrative time (Erzählzeit). Genette's discussion of these features of narrative is penetrating and representative of the highest achievements of structuralist narratology. See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay on Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980) 33-85.
2 See Robert L. Jackson, The Art of Dostoevsky: Deliriums and Nocturnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) 208-236; Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993) 170-183; D. S. Savage, "Dostoevsky: The Idea of the Gambler," Dostoevsky: New Perspectives, ed. Robert Louis Jackson (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1984) 111-125. Many standard works, such as those by Bakhtin, Mochulsky and Grossman give surprisingly little attention to the literary qualities of the novel. see M.M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 170-172, Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Michael A. Minihan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967) 314-333, and Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, trans. Mary Mackler (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975) 297-301.
3 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) 228. Here Heidegger extends the Kantian foundations that grant enormous significance to time as an a priori form of intuition without which no cognition would be possible. Time is thus revealed to be a crucial pillar of cognition, of our taking hold of the world, and of recognition in so far as we recognize ourselves, as beings "having being," through an apprehension of time.
4 In Heidegger's existentialist language, temporality is ontological, not ontic. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1962) 28-35.
5 I assume that it is possible to claim that even eternal essences exist only in terms of time, since eternity is by definition a temporal category.
6 Kant deals with this problem in his discussions of time and space in the Critique of Pure Reason which determine the contours of all subsequent debate. (Indeed, Heidegger's notion of temporality and Bakhtin's idea of a chronotope are in some sense glosses on Kant.) See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1989) 74-82 [A30-41/B46-58].
7 See the chapter in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled "Sense Certainty," where Hegel argues that immediacy is itself only comprehensible as mediated, and it is this meditation that permits access to the present, first grounding the notion of a present as such. See G. W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) 58-66.
8 See Aristotle, Physics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) 369-370 [217b29-224a17], and St. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991) 230-244 [XI (xiv-xxx)]. Also see Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984) 5-87.
9 See Stanley Rosen, "The Lived Present," in his Metaphysics in Ordinary Language (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999) 15-38.
10 For more careful examination of the narrator's peculiarities as narrator, see Frank 172-173.
11 Fyodor M. Dostoevsky, The Gambler, trans. Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin, 1966) 19. All further references to the text refer to this edition with a corresponding reference to volume 5 of Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Nauka, 1973). In this case the latter reference is to page 208. Also, I have modified Coulson's translation where necessary to clarify the tenus of my arguments.
12 The similarity between the two works has been noted by Frank, among others. See Frank 172.
13 This form of irony is typically Romantic. For a particularly good discussion of the varieties of Romantic irony, see Anne K. Mellor, English Romantic irony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980). The plot peculiarities of the novel have many affinities with ironic conceptions of narrative as essentially deceptive, as offering a Ideological model of time that is the imposition of an illusion. Ricoeur seems to agree with this assessment when he claims that narrative is a means of reconciling the essential discontinuities of our experience of, and thought about, time. see Ricoeur 5-87.
14 See Frank's important discussion of this issue in the context of the relation between The Gambler and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. Frank 182.
15 But one has to be careful about the notion of rationality implied in this context which has more to do with practical considerations of profit than with the mathematical kinds of thinking used to analyze a game such as roulette (now the property of probability and game theory). see Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
16 In chapter 22 of Voltaire's Candide a formidable "grande dame" of the demimonde, humorously called the marquise de Parolignac, watches a game of faro being played at her house with "lynx-like eyes" (des yeux de lynx). Despite the traditional association of feline predator and untrammeied greed, the coincidence of the adjective and context is a suggestive one, especially since Candide raises some of the same issues of narrative in its polemic against optimism as The Gambler, albeit from a rather different perspective. see Voltaire, Romans et contes, ed. Frédéric Deloffre and Jacques van den Heuvel (Paris: Gallimard, 1979)203.
