It has always been a marvel to me how certain authors are capable of putting aside their own selves and portraying the fictional mind of their characters in such vivid and believable detail. Here, I consider whether an explanation for this ability can be found in the shamanic traditions and processes at the root of our human culture.
Hello readers,
As a sort of pinnacle to my recent deep dive into the introspective tundra of Russian realist fiction, I am currently (and finally) reading through Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. I was once told that there is nothing on earth quite like reading Dostoevsky’s novels for the first time, and having read three (well, two and a half) myself, I could not agree more.
Frankly, I may go as far as to claim that Dostoevsky is the most gifted and successful writer in the genre of realism that I have ever read, and as far as I am concerned that suggests he may be the greatest novelist to ever put pen to paper.
The greatest realist works of literature obviously need to perfectly capture the individual, idiosyncratic experience of a fictional human being, thoughtfully and vividly evoking the complexities of the interior being and how it interacts with the material external world. However (and this is perhaps where the naturalists took their striving for scientific authenticity too far) there is undeniably an immaterial component to the human experience as well, one that searches for the spiritual within the secular. It is the side of us that feels awe whenever witnessing a great piece of art or architecture, the side that murmurs a quick prayer before a moment of risk, the side that puts great value in a possession otherwise materially insignificant, the side that is overwhelmed by a solemn reverence whenever one steps through a quiet, shaded graveyard, a plot of land that is rationally a few old stones above unrecognisable clumps of decomposing matter.
As such, the truly great realist writer must not only portray the rational elements of genuine human experience, but the irrational as well. Dostoevsky, being both a prolific journalist and firm (if somewhat unorthodox) Christian, was in a perfect position to capture these seemingly juxtaposed halves of the human constitution. Not only does he completely embody the personalities of his various characters, some of whom feel more real than the very people who walk our earth, but through them he also manages to capture a sense of the sublime spiritual nature to which we are all implicitly subject.
Raskolnikov’s struggle is so pitiable because it seems that he is puppet tangled in the strings of malevolent, destructive forces far beyond the secular, and he has no choice but to descend further into his own insanity. Prince Myshkin is a point of wholly innocent, selfless light, that threatens to be devoured by the desperate, dark chasms of nihilism opened up by the misery of those around him. And Alyosha Karamazov, as quite literally a holy fool, is sent away from his monastery by his beloved Elder on a mission to steer those around him back onto a path of virtue. There is an interplay between the human and the numinous in Dostoevsky on the level of the Greek tragedy, and yet here it is largely played out not on the plains of Troy or the streets of Thebes, but in the battleground of the mind.
I wish to write on The Brothers Karamazov in greater detail, whenever I finish reading (however long that may take). Now, though, I am interested in considering what exactly the process could be for a writer such as Dostoevsky to fully embody the being of an entirely fictional individual, and to translate that person onto the page. For that, I will turn to something much, much older than the novel itself.
The shamanic tradition is one almost undoubtedly inherent in the psychological makeup of the human, and its influence stretches back across the ages to our roots as hunter gatherer tribespeople. They were an elder to their tribes, whose spiritual wisdom and deep connection to the natural world would guide their people through the hardships of primitive existence. Today, to witness such traditions in person they would have to travel to one of the indigenous tribes around the world who still practise such things— in our modern societies, its concepts now merely appear in media, its spiritual guides watered down into the figures of Gandalf, of Dumbledore, and of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
The shaman had many pivotal roles within a tribe, one of which being their significance in the hunting of animals. In order to guide the hunt, the shaman would do something very intriguing; they would endeavour to shed their own mental state and instead adopt the psychology of the animal that they were tracking. This was achieved through a number of different practises, including sleep deprivation, ethereal dances, the wearing of masks and various psychedelic substances— the purpose of all of these was to disrupt the natural rhythms of conscious cognition, the psychological borders of the shaman’s own perception of themselves, and to instead achieve a higher, transcendent understanding of the world around them.
By embodying the psychology of the animal, they would be able to successfully predict that creature’s movements, and guide their people to a successful hunt.
The shaman, obviously, is not literally becoming that animal. Even to ancient hunter gatherers, such an attempt would likely be seen as absurd. Instead, by shedding the boundaries of their own individual, material existence, they achieved a metaphorical embodiment of the natural world around them– via the complex human ability of abstract, projected thought, the skill of imagining lives outside of our own, such skilled spiritual leaders could alter their very states of consciousness and gain a higher wisdom.
This is all well and good, but what does this have to do with Dostoevsky, or any other realist author, for that matter? Well, when learning about the shaman’s ability to disrupt their own individual consciousness and project themselves into the metaphorical embodiment of another, it struck me as rather reminiscent of the realist author’s endeavour to accurately portray a fictional human experience as deeply and as vividly as they can manage.
I am not, obviously, claiming that such figures as Dostoevsky are shamans. The figure of the shaman is one far more complicated and multifaceted— indeed, it may be one of the most archetypal figures we know of— and it would take one far more knowledgeable than myself to point to a modern-day embodiment of this ancient tradition. However, my interest has been piqued by the similarity between the process of shamanic embodiment, and the authorial process.
I have written before about Henry James’ account of the process by which he composes a novel, and as it feels pertinent to this line of thought, I will bring it up again. James described the experience of formulating a narrative in the mind as one that requires very little active agency from the author themselves— after all, in realist fiction the plot is driven entirely by the actions of the characters, and so if those characters are of enough substance, then they quite organically drive the plot forward themselves. All the author needs do is faithfully record how each character acts and reacts, while the events of the novel fall into place ‘as by the neat action of their own weight and form’, as James put it in the preface to his ‘The Ambassadors’
As such, the realist author is not the progenitor of the plot, merely its scribe. The act of successful authorship appears, at least to James, to be one not of imposition but of surrender, of allowing oneself to lose their own consciousness in the fictional minds of their characters. The more completely one surrenders themselves to the foreign influence of this other individual, the more genuine and believable and affecting the account of that character will be. Like the shaman, the author does not literally embody their characters, but they do metaphorically surrender themselves to them, becoming not a master, but a vessel. In the process, they are able to achieve far greater insight into the human experience as a whole— remember the cross-section within Dostoevsky of the mundane and the sublime— than if they chose to stubbornly remain tethered within the confines of their own egoistic perceptions.
Dostoevsky, of course, is not the only realist writer who achieved such levels of cognitive perception, and there are other authors who managed to capture the many facets of the human experience with masterful clarity and sympathy as well. Currently gripped in the rapture of reading The Brothers Karamazov as I am, the Russian writer is simply the first that springs to my mind. But what we can learn from reading Dostoevsky, at least from an authorial point of view, is that the process of successfully capturing a convincing and authentic character is one of metaphorical embodiment, and of individual surrender. Like the shaman, the author must be prepared to disrupt their own consciousness in order to personify that of another.
Thank you for reading,
The Watchful Scribe