The Spectral Body: Theology and Economy in Dostoevsky and Melville's Fiction

Gordon, Maximilian

doi:https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-7pch-b850

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The Spectral Body: Theology and Economy in Dostoevsky and Melville's Fiction

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The Spectral Body: Theology and Economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s Fiction This dissertation examines the intersections and tensions between religion and economy in Dostoevsky and Melville’s fiction. I argue that Christian theology of the body—as the site of both salvation and economic production—is at the center of their concern. These two profoundly theological writers were, moreover, unaware of each other, and, moreover were immersed in two different religious traditions with very different attitudes toward capitalist development in the nineteenth century: American Protestantism and Russian Orthodoxy. Despite this, there are uncanny parallels between them: comparing them reveals that, despite their ostensible differences, both wrestled with the same economic metaphorical underpinnings of Christianity, e.g. sin as debt, salvation as redemption, faith as credit. These economic metaphors are often, though not exclusively, centered on the body: the crucified body of Christ as a “ransom payment” for human sin is, as Saint Paul writes, a sort of debt transferred onto our own bodies, which are, therefore, not truly “ours.” Both Dostoevsky and Melville have characters who perceive material, embodied existence itself as a sort of divine or cosmic debt. One of the uncanny parallels between Melville and Dostoevsky is their concern with “spectral bodies” or “spectral flesh”—a paradoxical sense that material flesh encloses or coincides with its own ghost-like negation. My second and third chapters are largely devoted to this phenomenon. Both writers created characters who are caught somewhere between material flesh and ethereal ghostliness, or torn between longing for ecstatic bodily human contact and disembodied transcendence, or spectral precisely in their fleshy materiality. I situate both writers in their respective religious traditions to demonstrate that this phenomenon of spectral flesh is an extension of theological attitudes toward the body coming into contact with the capitalist development in the nineteenth century. Both writers perceived that, under this emerging capitalist economy, flesh and bodies are always entangled in economic transactions which often reflect in unsettling ways the sacrificial dynamics and cosmic debt within Christian theology. They thus provide a way to think through and articulate the current tensions between capitalism and Christianity across nations and denominations.

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