Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is a writer who has long been extremely important to me. During my teens, before this blog existed, I devoured the great novels, one after another, and then over and over. The Brothers Karamazov, without exaggeration, changed my life. Ultimately, its author became the embodiment of what I took to be a distinctively Russian approach to literature – an approach that treated what I then took to be the most important questions in life directly, without encrusting them with layers of social drama and squabbling over inheritances that I associated then (as now) with fiction from my own country. In Dostoevsky’s works people said exactly what mattered to them, and did the things that showed it mattered to them – they murdered, they threw tantrums, and sometimes even took their own lives. Dostoevsky inspired me precisely because he was clumsy, lazy, and disorganised in his writing. He showed a budding writer, dangerously, that so long as characters felt sufficiently, they became real and nothing else need matter. 

The Idiot, however, was never one of my favourites among Dostoevsky’s works. For one, it is Dostoevsky at his strangest. With its story of jealousy and obsession in love it is also a comparatively less interesting work, at least at first glance, to someone lusting after ideas. (At the time I was a Dostoevsky maniac I went to a boys’ school and didn’t know what a girl looked like, let alone how something like obsessive love worked.) Still, I’ve returned to this work after many years away because I believed it might be essential to a writing project of my own. The idea of the central character, a kind of Christ-like innocent, thrust into the world of scheming men and women, was what drew me back. But what turned out to be still more interesting was a kind of higher-order thematic framework here of logic and disorder, coherence and chaos.   

I am obliged to you to provide a summary of the plot, but unfortunately I do not have any idea what actually happened and I’m not sure Dostoevsky did either. Or rather, I know he did not. Gary Saul Morson, among other academics, has noted that after finishing the novel’s first part Dostoevsky’s notebooks show he didn’t know where he was going. Even after finishing the novel’s penultimate part he still had not worked out whom, if anyone, the “idiot” Prince Myshkin would marry. Besides these plot uncertainties, many characters have motivations which were not merely complex and contradictory, but outright impenetrable. I also regularly found myself asking myself, for a given group of characters, how on earth they knew one another well enough to haunt one another’s living rooms. I have no answer to any of this but will do my best to at least tackle the plot’s outline.  

Prince Myshkin (the name makes him kin to mice), a young man suffering from epilepsy, returns from Switzerland to Russia, somewhat cured of his ailment. On the train he meets another young man, Rogozhin, who has just inherited significant wealth. Rogozhin wants to use the money to win the heart of the beautiful Nastasya Philippovna. Nastasya is capricious and flighty and captivates the prince too, who seems to want to save her from her own self-destructive decisions. At the same time, the prince meets and falls in love with the Epanchin family, especially one of their daughters, Aglaya. Several hundred pages somehow pass and characters come in and out, but really there are few who matter. Money-mad Ganya, the drunken clerk Lebedev, and Ippolit, a young man dying of consumption, are the only others ones I discuss here.  

Before the characters, the first thing I noticed about The Idiot when I came to reflect upon it was the atmosphere, which is nothing less than apocalyptic. Dostoevsky wrote much of the novel in Italy while escaping debts back in Russia. The home of Catholicism, a religion he has the prince describe in an outburst as being worse than atheism, no doubt caused him psychic strain that is reflected in the writing and its moods. The novel begins on a train, and as with Anna Karenina or Effi Briest, this modern conveyance is not a neutral taxi by any means. We learn much later that Lebedev, who styles himself a hobbyist interpreter of the Apocalypse, (itself not a hobby one has in a healthy age), considers “the railway network spread across Europe” as in fact the “Star Wormwood”.  

Trains and musings on the Apocalypse are not the only things establishing a gloomy mood. Another relatively modern mistake freshly arrived in Russia is the newspaper. Characters are genuinely fascinated and disturbed by the news, which seems to reveal a more fallen world than had existed previously. Multiple murders in the papers are discussed to prove or disprove some speculation on human nature. Then there is illness, for the prince with his epilepsy is far from the only one suffering. Ippolit has consumption, Rogozhin’s jealousy and Ganya’s money obsession are both certainly a kind of illness, while it almost goes without saying that a vast number of characters are alcoholics too. What’s noteworthy is that the distribution of illness does not seem itself to be a moral statement about the sick as individuals. Instead, if everyone is ill, it makes their world ill.  

Into this atmosphere of fragility and decay comes the prince. I had remembered, or rather imagined, that the plot involved the prince’s kindness and simpleheartedness acting to reveal the moral failings of others by providing a contrast, but that is not what happens here. Instead, he is a more directly moral person than that. In his first encounters with the Epanchin daughters he discusses the sufferings of people undergoing capital punishment without any prompting, while at another point after being slapped he refuses to fight back or consider a duel, saying to the slapper “how ashamed you’ll be of what you’ve done.” Hence, the prince is more directly and strangely a voice of conscience. He draws our attention to violence we ignore – state violence, the cyclical violence involved in honour questions – albeit a little too naively, like someone at university home for the holidays who has just learned what critical theory is but not yet how to persuade anyone it makes sense.  

The prince may be the voice of conscience, but it is important to consider whether he can succeed at this within the story. While one phrase used to describe him is Christ-like, among the first words actually used in the novel is yurodivy  or “holy fool.” These historical, largely Russian figures, were typically poor itinerants who had dedicated their lives to Christ without a formal role within the Church. Their behaviours were often shocking and insane, but enough of society acknowledged them as having mysterious wisdom that they were largely left alone, only occasionally brought in as quirky dinner guests by nobles. To call the prince a holy fool says that his message and concerns may be important; it also, however, provides a framework for characters to ignore him as merely raving. So, too, does the designation of “idiot” on account of his illness. In short, while he wants to save, he’s not viewed as a saviour: even his famous assertion that “beauty will save the world” is quoted back at him in mockery. 

The Prince thus has the challenge of altering others’ perception of him if he wants to persuade others to do good in this world. But just as great a difficulty is the treatment of causation within the novel – the ideas of “logic” and “nature”. If we believe humans are supremely rational, The Idiot is a novel that will make no sense to us. At a key moment the Prince asks Rogozhin of Nastasya, “who consciously throws himself into the water or onto the knife?” The Prince is expressing a viewpoint that Nastasya refutes by her own existence and repeated, free, choices that harm her wellbeing – she chooses Rogozhin over the Prince, time after time. Lebedev states this point generally: “the law of self-destruction and the law of self-preservation are equally strong in mankind! The devil rules equally over mankind until a limit in time still unknown to us.”  

With Nastasya’s character, and not only, the novel makes Lebedev’s argument real. One of the murders reported in the newspapers provokes heated discussion among the characters precisely because the defence lawyer argues that the six murders committed by the man at trial were “natural”, due to his poverty. This is illogical, but perhaps at least partly true. Yet for the characters it is one more suggestion that their world is falling apart. At least for some of them. For others, they are themselves this decay. At Nastasya Philippovna’s birthday party, the highpoint of the novel’s first section, characters compete in telling the most bad things they have done. It is not a sequence to inspire hope about the human condition, but it also shows what the stakes of the lawyer’s assertion are – if we normalise the world as being illogical and morality as being a secondary concern, we enable further decline. 

One of the places where this sense of the consequences of bad thinking and a bad world are most obvious is in the case of Ippolit, the young man dying of consumption. In his multi-chapter “Necessary Explanation”, he explains just what it feels and what it means, to have death hanging over him. He can hardly do anything, because so much requires time and practice – like learning an instrument. It is only with death coming that he has a sense of the value of life, while all those who are alive but with the sound of ticking fainter place no real value upon their days. At first he uses his sense of life’s remaining possibilities to do good, helping out a stranger he meets on the street. But then he becomes angry with the idea of God, specifically why he should “praise that which has eaten me” with this death sentence. Finally, he decides that the only remaining action he can take, the “only thing I still have time to begin and end of my own will”, is precisely to head off this death sentence by taking his own life first.  

Dostoevsky is not an author we can easily call rational, but with these examples we can see that if human illogicity is a fact, there must be limits to our willingness to support it, or we will all end up like Ippolit or Nastasya and turn against life itself. In a letter Dostoevsky once wrote that “If someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside of Christ, then I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than with the truth.” He did not say that anything else was preferrable to the truth. If irrationality is not bounded, the pathway to God gets narrower, not wider. It is into this irrational, illogical world, that the prince comes preaching goodness, only to find that it seems beyond his own redemption. The murder the novel ends with brings a sense of bleakness and total defeat that I was shocked to rediscover – it was even more horrific than the end of Demons.  

Perhaps this triumph of chaos and irrationality is foreseeable from the very first words, for it is also intimately linked to Dostoevsky’s writing style as well. Dostoevsky is not a gifted stylist, but his themes are well served by his style. For one thing, there’s a layer of uncertainty and confusion built into the narration. At the end of the novel’s first part, the prince leaves for Moscow for six months, but even though it is clearly important what takes place there, the narrator declares “we can supply very little information” about what happened. (One theory is that Dostoevsky had such a miserable time living in Moscow himself that he refused to ever write about it in his fiction – itself an insane reason for sabotaging his story.) At other points, the narrator admits to an impossibility in understanding other characters’ motivations. This makes the impossibility of saving the world feel not just like it’s the prince’s fault, but somehow more general. It is such a mess that not even the narrator can keep it together. 

And it is precisely the whole world that somehow feels like it needs saving here. It may have been simply because Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot while stuck in Europe, but it is as if almost nothing exists solidly in the book. There are no smells, there are very few sights, there are no noises except that of the squabbling people. And furthermore, these people do not talk like humans – they give unprompted speeches, they refuse to shut up. I had the feeling that they had to be like this, because as soon as a character stops talking, like one of Beckett’s narrators in his Trilogy, they seem to cease to exist. If Tolstoy’s characters all exist with a uniform vitality, however minor their role, due to his use of leitmotifs and physical descriptions, Dostoevsky’s characters gain all their vitality only through victory in the contest of voices and their silencing of others. This is therefore the perfect style for conveying desperation and egoism. 

The Idiot is my first Dostoevsky for about five years. Coming back, what shocks me is exactly what I expected to, even in spite of that expectation – the obsessive drive of his characters towards meaningful utterances. Characters talk about what matters to them, because it matters to them. They act and live as if they are in the last days, when almost all decorum is dead. Compared to, say, Mann’s Magic Mountain, there is far less sense of the characters holding back part of themselves, or of their ideas not being immediately bindable to real-world things. The Idiot is not the reflection of the isolated upon a Swiss mountain, but a work with one attempted murder, one real murder, and an attempted suicide. Mann’s work is brilliant too, of course, but in its directness Dostoevsky’s is incomparable.  

I read the novel again because I wanted to see what I might learn for my own little novel of ideas with an idiot, of a sort, at its centre. But what I see now is that I have so far not emphasised enough the desperation associated with beliefs that makes them fresh and vital to the bystanding reader, nor yet plotted enough scandals or actions where a decision is necessary, one that would make these beliefs feel like they have a real-world importance. As for Dostoevsky’s style, whether I want to take anything from that is a harder question to answer. But there are plenty more of his works out there to help me decide.  

Is Flourishing Forestalled? Reflections on AI and Fiction

In recent months there have been at least two controversies relating to AI-content and literature. In the first, Olga Tokarczuk, the Polish Nobel Laureate, said she used ChatGPT for her creative process (“How could we develop this beautifully”), noting “that in literary fiction this technology is an advantage of unbelievable proportion”, before having to walk back some her statements later following online outcry, stating AI was only ever used by her for research. In the second controversy, Granta published a prizewinning story which it seems may have been written by AI, and which may even have been reviewed by AI too. (Granta was neither prize-giver nor reviewer here)

These controversies made me realise that I had a different view from most commentators on these topics. At the time I considered AI, by which I mean here large language models (LLMs) largely deployed as chatbots, to be a neutral or possibly even positive tool for fiction writers, indeed for literature as a whole. At the same time, I acknowledged that it seemed obviously a negative thing for readers.

This divergent impact of the technology is a serious challenge for literary production and consumption, one which I am on both ends of as writer and reader. I wanted to work out if giving the topic some proper thought might allow for a more harmonious view of LLMs’ impact, and this blog post is the result of that initial thinking.

But before we begin, three things. One, these are not deep convictions. I would be happy to change them if I read or heard something that suggested I should. I have already changed, and nuanced them, as I wrote and revised this piece. Two, while this post is certainly more “pro-AI” than most voices on the topic, I do not use AI while writing my blog and have no intention to change that. Nor have I yet used it for my fiction. Here, now, you are reading me. My posts are proofread by my partner, who is like me a human being.

Finally, my focus here is on the use of AI by writers like Tokarczuk, rather than attempts to create an entire work of art through prompting alone. In other words, it concerns the writer’s possible augmentation rather than their substitution. I think this is a more interesting area, because the latter remains for now a relatively distant prospect. The former, meanwhile, demands our attention right now.

The Reader’s Perspective

For the reader, I would identify the chief problems with the involvement of LLMs in fictional production as centring on three interconnected topic areas: authenticity, dignity, and complicity in the systematic harms associated with data centre buildout.

Authenticity

While in and out of the ivory tower we might talk about the “Death of the Author”, readers in general want to feel they are reading a real person’s work. The disregarding of authorial intentions in interpreting a work is not the same thing as saying the author does not matter. Their individuality does not, but their abstract personality does. We want the words to feel chosen, otherwise the act of their interpretation stops seeming worth the time. Hence the relative lack of literary interest which the formulaic backs of milk cartons offer. The best books have the greatest sense of chosen-ness behind their words, whether that comes from the painstaking craftsmanship of a Flaubert or the abstract workings of genius that produced Dostoevsky’s more hurried, yet no less haloed, works.

Perhaps this is why ghost-writing appears a lesser crime than the use of LLMs. Even if it is obvious that this political or sporting figure hardly picked up the pen except to place their name upon the cover, we know that someone did. This is also why the overzealous editor, such as in the famous case of the editor Gordon Lish’s treatment of Raymond Carver’s stories, where Lish chopped and chopped and chopped at the texts until we readers ended up with the bare and brutal masterpieces we read today, is upsetting to those who know it without fundamentally compromising the texts themselves.

Perhaps Carver’s authenticity is compromised, but the texts’ authenticity is not – they still stem from a human source. In a similar way, I wrote in an earlier draft that newspapers and social media compromise authorial authenticity by placing heavy pressures upon them to write a certain way. But the end products in those cases are still texts produced by people. Compromised people, confused people, but nonetheless human beings like you or me. They are authentically human documents, reflecting human emotions and human struggles.

Dignity

Depending on the degree of AI infiltration into a work’s creation, of which more below, that’s not necessarily the case with a text today. A work whose words are not entirely an author’s own is no longer an entirely human document in the same way. This matters to many readers. Its importance is not at the level of the text, however. Students often read unseen passages and may well be unable, if not already now then at least soon enough in the future, to differentiate between human and hybrid or even machine-generated documents. Yet once we return to the document as a whole the distinction is more important. The problem with what Tokarczuk may have done, if I understand people’s complaints correctly, is that she denigrated herself as a writer. If you do not respect writing enough to want your own to be your own, the argument goes, you probably should not do it. And if you do not respect writing, why should a reader waste time reading you?

This argument does not have anything to do with the output upon the printed page, but about the context surrounding it. In that sense, it’s a moral accusation, a purity test. But it is one that is very different from being reluctant to read writers who were “bad” people. The alcoholics, the violent, the cruel – literary history is filled with such writers, and ever being replenished in its stock. We regret that Rimbaud stopped writing to be an adventurer, or that Nietzsche’s syphilis meant he was no longer able to write (in a way that made sense), or that Lermontov and Pushkin thought duelling for temporal honour was better than surviving to put more pen to more paper and buttressing their immortal honour.

Such failings fill us with regret for the missed works and unhappy families, but do not change what we have, those eternal masterpieces that fill us with gratitude for their creation. LLM use can make for an entirely different reaction. Usage does not reflect life getting in the way of art, but a kind of disinterest in art. If you don’t want to do the research for your book, why bother writing it? The implicit view behind this is that writing works of literature must be a holistic activity, where the artist must do all of it or none of it. It is a shame for a writer not to do something, not merely a moral failing. To find the traces of LLMs in a novel suggests a flourishing forestalled. The writer could have attained a more full writerly potential through efforts that have instead been replaced by a machine.  

This is why the books can seem far more tarnished by association with LLM use than by an author’s personal misbehaviour. The latter means we get fewer books, but the former means we get less humanity in the books. It is quite fair, given this, for a reader to turn away, and refuse to read.

Complicity

The last set of reasons why LLM use is unpleasant for a reader rest upon the assertion that LLM use in itself is immoral because of the associated data centre buildout and therefore should be avoided as far as possible. These arguments are not so convincing to me, but they are important to others, and so I am setting them down here.

AI is driving a significant global infrastructure buildout through new data centres and the power systems needed to support them. Mothballed power plants, including those fuelled by fossil fuels, are being brought online provide electricity. New power plants are being built too, many using particularly energy inefficient but rapidly deployable technologies, such as the reciprocating engines and aeroderivative turbines used at xAI’s Colossus plants in Tennessee. While it is true that some of the new capacity being built is renewable and there is a resurgence of interest in nuclear power plants, gas is the primary fuel source due to the operating profiles of data centres. Gas is a fossil fuel. If you care about avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions, you can easily make the case that writers should write the old fashioned way. (The moderately old-fashioned way that is – by themselves, with a laptop or pen and paper.)

A similar situation obtains for water use. We live in increasingly water-stressed environments and should not contribute to this with avoidable LLM use. But just as there are different ways of producing electricity, there are different ways of cooling large industrial enterprises. While closed-loop cooling essentially limits the water use of a data centre by reusing it repeatedly and air cooling uses big fans to achieve the same result, other cooling types can see more wastage and impact on end consumers. (More details in this article from The Atlantic.) If you do not want to contribute to poor use of water, you can argue similarly that writers should avoid LLMs, and you should avoid those who do not. But this water argument, though popular, is weaker than the carbon argument. Near-to-mid-term economic gas alternatives are basically unavailable for data centres, whereas this is not the case for wasting water.

Other problems with the data centres themselves involve their impact on local communities. Power quality decreases (think flickering lights), and then there are things like headaches and other health issues. As with oil and gas production and refining, it seems that data centres are creating sacrificial zones around them, where society supposedly accepts local harm in exchange for global benefits. As with mining and oil and gas, however, there is the problem of environmental justice. This is the issue that such “local harm” tends to be concentrated in areas where people are less able to defend their interests, being poor or of minority groups. If you care about this local impact, you would be warranted to be critical of a writer who used LLMs thoughtlessly.

Finally, there are also impacts on local and regional power prices. But while it might seem as though data centres are entirely negative in their impact here, matters are likely more complicated, so it is perhaps best to focus on the other factors above, especially when their negatives are clearer. (For details on power prices, see section 8 in the International Energy Agency’s “Key Questions on Energy and AI”)

The above are general problems with data centres, ones that we have to think about personally every day unless we consciously add an “-ai” to all of our Google searches and are lucky enough to have jobs where there is no pressure to use the tools. More specific to writing, however, is the matter of copyright abuse. There are ongoing lawsuits against Meta and others over their use of literary (and other written) creations for training purposes without the consent of the creators or their compensation. A writer using an LLM is showing a certain lack of solidarity to their own people, and a reader who wants to show solidarity to the creatives displaced and stolen from by LLMs should not read those who are blasé about the tools’ impact.

The problem with these arguments, except the last one, is that the focus is on our and the writer’s contribution to the bad thing, rather than on the work. This allows the counterpoint of scale to be made. Your average programmer’s agentic workflow is several orders of magnitude worse than a writer asking an LLM a question – for the climate, for water, and for local communities. It becomes too much a matter of purity, rather than possible harm mitigation. I myself find only the dignity, authenticity, and writerly solidarity points convincing here.

The Writer’s Perspective

The previous section was an attempt to explore the arguments about why writers should not use LLMs from the perspective of a reader. The voices against LLMs are significant, strident, and seem to be growing in importance. Yet the problem with all of these arguments is that the closest they get to the text is the thing as a whole. They do not touch the words themselves. Yet adopting the perspective of a writer, I see huge opportunities in LLMs, which would place me on a collision course with readers of my fiction, if I had any.  

One result is that until readers change their minds, those writers who use LLMs (and in a recent survey, it was already 33% of novelists in the UK who do) will take heed of Tokarczuk’s pillorying and simply keep their use a secret. If they do their job well, the readers will never find out. If a reader wants certainty of their book’s purity, the only way will be to return to the old ones. Faced with a cunning-enough writer – and good writers should be cunning – the search for tells will be epistemically hopeless.

But enough of that. What actually are these great opportunities? I see them as three – research, review, and (re)writing itself.

Research

Literature has, at best, a tenuous relation with the kind of truth found in history books. Yet while fiction is false, its truths are not. These truths, literature’s defenders claim, are higher. That’s why we read great works to begin with. You do not, or rather should not, read War and Peace or Life and Fate to learn about the facts of the Campaign of 1812 or the Soviet experience of the Second World War, though Tolstoy researched his epic extensively and Grossman was a journalist within the Red Army.

We read these and other books for a truth about human nature and human experience. Stalin or Napoleon may feature and strut about the stage, but their words are not their own. However historical or accurate a writer may try to be, a physical truth of what happened in the past is unreachable, merely a shadow cast upon the wall.

If we take a pessimistic or reasonably cavalier attitude towards truth in fiction, something that is done by most writers except for dedicated historical novelists, what obstacle to using AI for research could there be? What stone would my country house be made of in this location? What would a woman at a ball in 1843 typically wear? What on earth did people eat? These are questions where a specialist might have an answer, or they might have an opinion. A writer, determined, with unlimited or even limited time, should be able to find adequate answers to all of these. But for a “good enough” answer, the regurgitations of an LLM are fine. The fact is that regurgitations allow a writer to get on with the business of writing, not scene decoration. Later, should the writer feel a certain guilt before the truth, they can do their fact checking.

I am not saying that writers should cease the search for knowledge. I know, from experience, the joy of stumbling upon a thread or marginal detail in a history book that has inspired the mind to race to spin together a new story. Simply put, you cannot get inspired if you don’t keep your eyes open to the world’s offerings, whether in book or brick before you. The output of an LLM is limited, a thin stream of light upon a fact (or fabrication) that misses entirely that the real fascination lies just beyond the glowing rim in the half-darkness. But that same limitation nevertheless gives quick answers – not the telling detail but the good-enough background detail – which allows action, broadens the space for writing even as it narrows the space for inspiration. The overall effect is at least neutral, when used responsibly.

Again, to speak from experience, so many of us are crushed by the weight of jobs and responsibilities that writing is often only really possible about what lies in front of us. Relationships, workplaces, mental health. To research properly something else, or other lives, takes too much time to be practical in many cases. It is the domain of those with wealth, with working and well-earning or very patient spouses, or of a few professions like some of those in academia. LLMs allow imaginative but time-pressed contemporary authors to write something which retains a modicum of accuracy in its details beyond more sad girl fiction and professors having affairs with their students. Not everyone can be Kafka, after all.

Review

I noted in the first half of the post that almost any book you read today will have been through many hands before it reaches your own. At minimum, that’s agent and editor. It’s still an authentic document; it’s just not really entirely the writer’s authentic work.

Most books do not get that far, however, drowning under the weight of so many rejection letters no more helpful to the recipient than a rejection letter to a recent graduate for their hundredth job application. How on earth can a writer improve in such circumstances, when they hardly know where they are going wrong? Through feedback, among other things. An established writer may have writerly friends to review their work. In the 19th century, at some literary salon, they all may have read their work aloud by a crackling fire. Yet try finding a group for writing literature online. Not a group for fantasy epics or erotic vampire tales, but actual literature. (And when you find it, let me know). It’s not at all straightforward.

I dislike using this “democratisation” argument about AI because I am a snob and disagree with it temperamentally, but it is absolutely legitimate here. An LLM can give feedback, just as it lets you research in a way that might otherwise only be possible to the very privileged. With sufficient prompting it can be loaded up with whatever personality or perspective you need and can focus on exactly what you want attention focused on. It won’t be perfect, but no beta reader is. What matters is the accumulation of perspectives, and LLMs can provide this. A writer, looking to improve, can now access far more feedback than ever before. If they are willing to take it on board, their potential achievement should also be greater.

A counterargument might be that the writer who claims they have no readers should go outside, maybe call their mother. But most friends and family are poor readers. Even if they seriously read fiction to begin with, which in this day and age is by no means guaranteed, they will be prejudiced by their acquaintance with you. Criticism will be voiced softly, misdirected, take months to arrive, or be left unsaid. With an LLM you can force it to give proper feedback instead of mere flattery, though of course many users do not.

In sum, unless you are already very much established, this is a clear instance where the machine is far better than the human alternative.

Write and Rewrite

Beyond reviewing, a writer can use AI to rewrite their texts, with as much variety as Queneau’s Exercises in Style. Indeed, they can use LLMs to generate text itself, a little or a lot. Tuhin Chakrabarty, an academic, caused something of a scandal when he and his colleagues published a paper suggesting readers preferred the output of AI trained on expert writers to the writers themselves. I struggle to defend either writing or rewriting using LLMs, but the point is that one can do it, and a writer may reasonably think it’s a good idea while they work.

Each person, writer and reader, needs to think about what authenticity and the dignity of the work means to them and at what point they would admit that to have been unfairly compromised. For me as a writer, the words must be my own or the accepted suggestion of another. The research can be from an LLM, but not the written words themselves. Otherwise, I’d be ashamed to call myself a writer to begin with. AI could provide suggestions, but anything rewritten or generated too much. For me, the use of the rewritten (“make this dialogue more punchy”) can only be to force me to reconsider what I’ve written, never to replace it.

Yet just because I do not like it, that does not mean this should not be an option, or that it is a bad one. This blog is written, after all, by someone who believes in writing as a skill and method, that even great texts can be torn apart and analysed, and that training can bring writers closer to them. I cannot, therefore, deny that LLMs can do a lot of the work for us. Henry Gifford, in “On translating Tolstoy”, noted the Russian’s preference for adjectival constructions indicating action (“freshly-picked strawberries lay on the table”.) I’ve written (without originality) about Conrad’s adjectives and Tolstoy’s physicality, while others have noted the way the latter’s characters contradict themselves.

Trained on all this and more, an LLM should be able to do a reasonably good job, especially if we focus on the individual paragraph or sentence, and are ourselves clear about the output we desire. LLMs probably cannot make a bad reader into a good writer. But I think they certainly can make a good reader into a better writer.

The result of this LLM use and misuse will not be strictly original, but then what is? I don’t fundamentally believe writers create works devoid of the impact of others. Most of us are under the “Anxiety of Influence”, as Harold Bloom called it. Flaubert, who hated cliches, makes me feel like every sentence is a discovery. But the vast majority of writers, including very great ones, do not. There are enough metaphors and images and similes out there that seeking a truly original one is probably a poor use of time. Why not instead bash out a mediocre novel, then go through it, page by page, asking a friendly LLM to make it like your favourite writer – in my case Tolstoy – with the following or similar prompt: “rewrite this to include more adjectives associated with labour, and remove all similes and metaphors. Add additional focus upon body parts and separately identify instances where characters can organically contradict themselves.”

You can do it easily enough.

But should you?

Originality and Atrophy

Well, that’s really up to you, writer. Readers will hate you for it if they ever find out. Before you do, though, think back. Did you become a writer to write, because you loved language itself, or because you’re a little Napoleon wanting to control some small corner of the world? (I worry it’s the second for me). It seems awfully unfair and uncool that we can outsource a lot of work to the machine. At the same time, it also seems hard to argue that partial outsourcing is a not an effective way of building something that is impactful as a work of fiction. Increasingly so, given the pace of advancements in AI over the past few years. It’s a real dilemma.

Tokarczuk, possibly, was asking AI for ideas. Which is a great way of forgetting how to have them for yourself, but it’s probably not a bad way of getting a few of them to begin with. Again, the writer has to decide how much to give up for this, not the reader.

I am a person who thinks it’s important to take care of myself, and the last thing I want is for my brain to atrophy, as it seems is happening to many that rely overmuch on AI, whether friends, family, or colleagues. Yet I still use LLMs during the course of my day job, when I have to and sometimes when I do not. AI use is only one thing, alongside my sugar and vitamin intake, the amount of sleep I get, the amount of sport I do, the number of interesting conversations I have, and how much time I spend on my phone, which has an impact upon my becoming the person I want to be. A thing to be monitored, analysed, and motivate remedial actions as necessary.

But these are decisions for me as a writer and human to make, based on the outputs I want from my limited time on earth, and me alone.

Conclusion

I’ve tried to approach the AI topic here from two angles – that of the reader, and that of the writer. Readers want to feel that they are reading a writer, not a machine’s output. They value authenticity and the sense that they are reading something that has had thought and care put into it. The writer who is blasé about LLM usage can, fairly I think, be criticised for not caring enough about their calling. And if they do not care about their books enough to write them themselves, why should a reader care enough to read them?

For the writer, however, AI offers significant benefits, as long as they are willing to use it sparingly and carefully. It can help with reviewing, help with research, and possibly even help with rewriting. At the same time, the writer needs to take care not to become too reliant on it, lest they lose their ability to be inspired or think. We come back to the classic question about cyborgs and transhumanism. How far can we change before we give up who we are? I think that AI is suddenly forcing writers to think about this question with real urgency, and the answers are far from clear.

Still, I want to end by going back to the Cambridge study I linked, which indicated that many writers feel significant anxiety about their livelihoods in an age of LLMs, whether they use it or not. I am reasonably confident that we will see the quality of literature becoming better with the assistance of LLMs. But literature is written by people and for people, and for writers and readers as a whole, the technological ascendency of LLMs is far from benign. We are sinking into a sea of slop and gradually losing our ability to value what is truly good. Perhaps, terrifyingly, a hundred years from now, a few of us will look back and find that the most brilliant tool for writing was created, but that that very same tool destroyed the readers and the writers needed to make proper use of it.

Anyway, those are my first thoughts. As this is a highly emotive topic, and if you’ve read this far you’ve hopefully been prompted to have some thoughts of your own, so what do you think about all this?

Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an extraordinary work of fiction and at points probably the most fun I’ve had reading in a long while. It is also a great challenge to your blogger qua blogger. Should you take a (spoiling) glance at Wikipedia you would see that some of the major critical questions surrounding the work concern whether half of the cast of characters even exist within its world, or whether they are instead the ravings of the probable madman who is our narrator. When I write about literature I try to grasp onto what is solid – I focus, as this blog’s name suggests, upon stories. Here, therefore, I have my work cut out for me with all this confusion. Or I would, if the work did not at the same time contain such a holistic richness, where language, form, structure, and apparent plot, work together to deliver ideas and thoughts with the maximum impact, that there remains plenty to say.

With Pale Fire the challenge of writing about it comes not only from an atmosphere of uncertainty, but also from the very structure of the work. I write long-ish blog posts, but I try to spare readers whole monographs. Yet Pale Fire contains multitudes. It is not only a poem of 999 lines in rhyming couplets by a murdered author. It is also accompanied by foreword and commentary and index by another man, one who claims to be friends with the author, and whose commentary, besides being some five times the length of the author’s work, also seems to be as much an adventure story as attempt at close analysis. It is a confession, a tale of daring escape, and an academic satire, even before we try to think about its relation to the poem itself.

Even working out how to read the book is a choice and challenge. In the “Foreword”, Charles Kinbote, our guide and colleague of the deceased poet John Shade at an American university, describes how we are best to read Pale Fire. First, he tells us, we read his commentary, and only then do we read the poem with the notes, before we finally read the notes a third time on their own again. I ignored this bizarre suggestion and read the poem first, then put the book down for a month, then read the poem again, before reading the commentary in isolation afterwards. Such an approach I think makes sense, because in essence Pale Fire is two stories in contention – the poem and Shade’s narration fight the tale and narration of Kinbote in his critical apparatus, where Kinbote is actively trying to control our understanding of the former.

Here I’ll begin with the poem, then the commentary, and try to suggest how they fit together.

Poem

Pale Fire is a poem of 999 lines, broken into a mirrored four-canto structure (166-334-334-165) with the last line remaining unwritten at the time of John Shade’s murder. It is rhymed throughout in heroic couplets (AABB etc, iambic pentameter), which provides an ironic contrast with the relative mundanity of its autobiographical contents. (Here I should note that I am assuming Shade is telling the truth, that his narrator is himself, rather than some distanced figure, which is not really something one is normally supposed to do with poems these days). John Shade describes topics like his early life, his family and his views on life after death. At its centre lie his love for his wife and his grief over his daughter’s death by suicide.

Probably the most sensible critical approach to the book as a whole is to see it as showing the interplay of reflection and masking, self and other. Hence the two sides of the work, Shade and Kinbote, the mirrored structure of the poem, and plenty besides. In the poem, Shade shows more ambivalence to the topic of reflection and deception than his editor. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”, the poem’s first couplet, describes the death of a bird from a false assumption regarding transparency. In trying to recover the memory of his parents, who died young, Shade can only create shadowy images that have no substance – many reflections, but not the real thing. Shade’s poem shows him holding on to a sense of the real which poetic reality disappoints, at least to begin with.

Disappointment and pessimism come across elsewhere in the poem too. Madness stalks Shade, even before we get into the “outside” world of Kinbote, such as through the figure of his Aunt Maud, who suffers from dementia and can speak, but never find the right words. The greatest cause for sadness, however, is his daughter Hazel, whose ugliness and ungainliness seem to curse her to her early doom (“no lips would share the lipstick of her smoke”), and who on the night of her death is betrayed cruelly by a date. But it is here, unlike with his parents, Shade succeeds in recreating his daughter’s life. Poetry helps him to build a parallel image to his experience of her final evening as he watches television and waits for her to come home, one where he imagines her final moments. And this allows the positive couplet in Canto 4, where “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / and that my darling somewhere is alive”.

While the poem is a place of unsatisfactory reflections, that is far from the whole story, as his eventual hope for Hazel shows. Its most moving passages are when the poet does strike out in love and successfully grasps on to his object:

And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years. 

This might, to an expert, be bad poetry. I find it moving. It’s a dance in time and reference between mundanity and the heavenly. And whereas pessimism might have lines supporting it elsewhere, here we have anything but that. It is not resignation in the face of the world – note the active verb “I’ll turn down”, and words like “passion” and “pain” which speak of emotions not blunted by the hardships of life. While Nabokov’s work is filled with irony – Shade expresses hope about waking up on the 22nd July as normal but in real life he is shot and never sees the day) – the poem, taken as Shade’s testimony, is free of this. Instead, it is connection, which indeed is the other value of the couplet structure – the iron bond of rhyme that links each line to line. Couplets might be humorous in essence, but sometimes we need them.

If I were to try to sum up the poem, then, which is difficult because as with all poetry it’s unfairly dense and could handle a much deeper analysis than what I’ve provided, I would say this: in a world of distorting and uncertain reflections and pain, through focused love towards those nearest him – his wife and daughter – Shade manages to create a work that ends with hope.

Solus Rex

The novel Pale Fire takes its name from the poem, Pale Fire, but it could easily have had another title – Solus Rex. This is the title that our commentator, Charles Kinbote, admits he would have given it. Kinbote is a larger-than-life figure, a madman in the Nabokovian mould. He is many things, and possibly none of them – a professor, an exiled king, a menace to his students and his colleagues, and an inveterate inventor of fictions. He claims to be protecting Shade’s legacy by publishing his poem, but then admits that Shade’s wife Sybil refuses to answer his letters, and he speaks of himself as of a man in flight from dangerous pursuers – he refuses to go to a library to check anything and is writing his notes in a remote log cabin.

His commentary is as multiple as he is. The one thing it is not is good academic criticism. Kinbote states the obvious and calls it analysis with the same brazenness as a certain blogger; at other times he simply refuses to do his job altogether – “my readers must do their own research” he declares. His index cheerily damns his colleagues by mentioning them in their connection with Shade and then noting “Not in the index” to show they aren’t worth any further consideration. In places his interpretations are so bizarrely off the mark that I found myself writing things like “no, I don’t think so”, in the margins. Towards the end of the book, faced with a momentary upsurge of academic integrity, he admits that a fair few of Shade’s “discarded drafts” were lines he simply made up. It would be a shock, except that his attempts don’t even manage to mimic the iambic pentameter correctly. No great poet, this editor.

All this, however, is secondary to the real part of the commentary – Kinbote’s description of his own life as exiled king of the north-European country of Zembla. More than academic score-setting, this is the reason for his notes’ existence. Kinbote believed that, over the course of his short “friendship” with Shade, he had convinced him to write this story as his poem. Shocked to discover that “Pale Fire” has nothing to do with this, Kinbote first attempts analytical pirouettes to find connections, then abandons the attempt, leaving the commentary an almost-standalone narrative of the life of Charles “the Beloved” of Zembla, from boyhood sexual escapades to the revolution that forces him to undertake a daring escape into exile. How much of any of this is true is the big academic question, indeed whether Zembla exists within the story to begin with.

Throughout, there are clues towards deeper truths, hints scattered among the pages. Kinbote is a lover of masks and subterfuge, unlike Shade – indeed, “King Charles” fled Zembla with the help of a disguise. Whereas in the poem, Shade tries to define the truths of his life among the many reflections and distortions of it, Kinbote’s section almost seems an attempt at the opposite – a befuddling of the truth which, somehow, still pokes out here and there. The reason why this works is that Kinbote has a certain amount of conscience, as mentioned above. He would prefer to omit than to lie outright, and sometimes he fails to omit things. Hence the occasional allusions to sexual misbehaviour, such as “his penetrating into the bedroom where his friend sat and shaved in the tub”, which is an index entry under his own name. Hence also the hints that his friendship with the Shades is not exactly all he claims it is. For example, regarding dinner parties he notes that “of the dozen or so invitations that I extended, the Shades accepted just three”. Then there is his reported speech to Sybil on one occasion, which begins as a benign monologue, only to be increasingly sullied with phrases like “do not interrupt me”, or “let me speak”, all within one long run-on sentence, as if he hopes we will not notice.

The two together

“Pale Fire”, the poem, has been published separately. The commentary, to a certain extent, could be too. What then, is the purpose of their cohabitation in one book, beyond merely providing the scaffolding for some academic satire? The treatment of grief within the work is what led me onto my own answer. Shade and his wife grieve the loss of their daughter. Those other poems of Shade’s which Kinbote quotes in the commentary all mourn for her too, directly or less so. His long poem itself is, at its heart, a working out of that grief, a transition from pessimism to hope for the future.

Kinbote’s relation to grief is entirely different. The high point of Shade’s grief within the poem he criticises as stylistically weak (“too laboured and too long”), then he steals the manuscript, convincing a weeping Sybil Shade on the day of her husband’s death that he ought to be the one to edit and publish his last poem.

Stepping back, then, we have two kinds of interaction. Kinbote scorns reality and is obsessive, sexually so even, about his favourite poet. The repeated suggestion regarding his past loves is that he has used and discarded them and that at no point has consent been anywhere in his thoughts. His relation to his colleagues is inimical – he seeks to crush or manipulate them, as he ultimately seeks to do to Shade himself by forcing him to write a poem about his (probably invented) past as a king. For Kinbote, simply, people don’t really exist.

Shade comes across as someone who is the opposite. His love for his wife and daughter are fundamentally unself-centred. His relationship with Kinbote, what we can read of it anyway, seems to be further evidence of a kindness and tolerance that Kinbote lacks. At one point Kinbote lets himself in to the Shades’ abode through a door left ajar, causing Shade to utter “an unprintable oath”. Shade had (apparently) mistakenly thought Kinbote was a travelling salesman. But still the Shades invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. The walks the two men take, likewise, seem more like the poet is humouring the annoying (and lonely) foreigner Kinbote, than truly forming the deep friendship with him which Kinbote claims for himself.

In other words, the book is contrast of isolation versus connecting – the binding couplets placed against the commentary which is largely disconnected from the commented. This is perhaps the work’s most moral message, one that brings together all of its elements – the different forms, the trickery and disguises, the reflection. One life succeeds, another fails – it’s simply the case that the wrong man died. Nabokov liked his irony, of course. I have also failed to give any indication of how funny this book is. There’s not just the fun of puzzling it all out, but actual belly-laugh humour here. I think that’s why Pale Fire is so impressive. While I did find the Zembla story tedious at times, the novel as a whole is peerlessly readable. It’s funny, it’s allusive, it’s thoughtful, it’s moral. It’s basically impossible to read without finding at least one moment you can celebrate.

In short, it’s one of those books that is truly inspirational. It is quite simply a reminder of the heights that truly the best literary works can reach.