In my presentation on Paris earlier in the semester, I mentioned that we go to literature for a lot of things, but not for the immediate knowledge of human psyches. We dig deeper not to understand the story, but to understand the characters. In popular, contemporary culture, we look to understand all of the characters, to identify with or to hate them as if they were real people.

Before I get into a contemporary work, I’ll show how mimetic approach has affected literature that we consider classics. One of my personal favorites is Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s most famous crime fiction. If you look at the contents of the characters in Crime and Punishment we begin to wonder how WE would react to such a crime.

In real life, the criminals who get away with a lot of crimes are criminals who know the law. The murderer, Raskolnikov is himself a law student that is “on a break from his studies 1.” It was with this information that Raskolnikov knew how to execute and cover up the crime. Trail and error just like a real person, huh?

Other characters show very complex attitudes. For example, Marmeladov as we all know is a drunk; however, he knows that he is a drunk. He quoted in the book into saying that:

“Poverty is not a vice, that’s a true saying. Yet I know too that drunkenness is not a virtue, and that that’s even truer . But destitution, dear sir, destitution is a vice.”

This is one of the few books, especially in this time period, that show the true life of addiction as a disease and not a choice. Marmeladov is fully aware of his situation: he has no job, and his daughter is a prostitute to support not only Marmeladov but her dying mother.

Crime and Punishment over history has been named a lot of things by different readers and different critics. There is one view however that is not welcomed very easily, which is the “fallen angel” factor. In all of the characters, there is a “good” quality to them that somehow turned bad, for example, Raskolnikov’s attack on the pawnbroker and her sister because of desperation. D.H Lawrence quoted in a letter about the book that “people are not fallen angels, they are merely people”. This supports not only a mimetic point of view, but also a postmodernist one. Nevertheless, Dostoevsky understood that real people, indeed, aren’t exactly nice.

Kevin Hinton