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11 - Conclusion

reading Dostoevskii

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

By
Gary Saul Morson
Edited by
W. J. Leatherbarrow
W. J. Leatherbarrow
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
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Summary

You had to be there

‘At the very moment when our professor was insisting that life is thoroughly unpredictable and unplannable, and I was wondering “then why are his lectures so perfectly structured? ”, this person came in from the hallway and shouted rudely that the professor was lecturing too loudly and he couldn’t study next door. I wondered if that was part of the lecture, too, but the professor was so surprised it clearly wasn’t. Well, you had to be there.’

‘Yes, well something similar happened to me. Our philosophy professor told us grandly that the most important thing to remember in reading Nietzsche is that God is dead! – and just at that minute …’

‘Don’t tell me. There was a giant thunderclap.’

‘Well, you had to be there.’

(Overheard)

You had to be there: when do we say this? It is usually when we narrate an incident that is just like a story even though there was no author. It really happened! If the professor had planned the rude student's interruption, he would not have created the same experience of life actually turning out like a story. Such events are striking because events happen as if already narrated and so evoke the eerie suspicion that we are like fictional characters.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii , pp. 212 - 234
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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