Posted by Bob on May 01, 19101 at 21:36:00:
In Reply to: Notes from the Underground posted by Brandy on May 01, 19100 at 23:00:34:
Dostoevsky's narrator at once announces to us how different he is from such traditional notions
of heroism. And the key metaphor declaring this difference is his own: he is an underground
person. He does not live in the world where actions matter. And he lives there by choice, a
willed refusal or inability to engage with other people in any significant way. This choice does
not satisfy him, but (and this is the crucial modern element) he has no intention of doing
anything about it.
Dostoevsky structures his story in two parts: in the first we get a long, detailed look at the
mature personality of Underground Man; in the second we get a story from his youth, an insight
into his psychological background (but, it is important to note, told to us from the mature man's
perspective). This structure has the effect of inviting us to see in the mature Underground Man
some important problem, the nature of that sickness he announces in the opening lines, and then,
in the retrospective glimpse into his youth twenty years before and (even more importantly) in his
attitude now to those distant events to find some clue as to why he should have turned out that
way.
Following that structure, I propose to say a few things about the mature Underground Man, to
attempt a partial diagnosis of his "sickness." Having done that, I'd like to explore what that odd
story might reveal about the sources of his difficulties. Finally I'd like to look ahead at another
well-known underground figure we are going to meet.
The Mature Underground Man
The immediate factual details about Underground Man are significant: he is forty years old, well
educated, literate, and financially independent. He lives in a modern urban environment,
Petersburg. He used to work, but remembers that time with so special affection. He now lives
alone and, again by choice, in a place he describes as unattractive ("dismal, squalid, and on the
very edge of town"). He is cut off from family and friends, without a name or any particular
group he can identify with. All this, we are given to understand, he has chosen for himself and
there is no sense that he is ambitious to change anything.
These details are important because they indicate that, whatever is troubling Underground Man,
it has nothing to do with an oppressive work situation, lack of money, or an absence of
opportunities for social interaction. He has time, money, and opportunity. And he is surrounded
by a complex social environment. In that sense, he has, on the surface at least, achieved two of
the most important ideals of the Enlightenment: he is free and independent.
His problem, we quickly learn, has nothing to do with his external cirstances and everything
to do with what's going on inside him. His disease stems from the fact that he doesn't feel
healthy, complete. There may be a good deal of specific medical talk about doctors, medicines,
bad livers, and so on, but it's clear that the real problems are emotional. In fact, the entire first
part of the story is an invitation to us to explore the specific emotional symptoms characteristic
of this invalid.
About the nature of Underground Man's ailment there has been and continues to be much
discussion. That, after all, is the major focus of the story. And one can enter it almost anywhere
to seize upon significant elements. So let me here offer an overall diagnosis, in a series of
observations (starting with the most general).
1. Underground Man is radically dissatisfied with the conditions of life itself. There is no one
particular element which he defines as the principle cause. True, he says repeatedly (at the
beginning) that the heart of the problem is consciousness, "excessive consciousness is a
disease--a genuine absolute disease" (5), and he demonstrates in his remarks about science and
all the optimistic hopes of the rational reformers an intellectual's scepticism about the robust
claims of the most ardent Enlightenment spirits. But his malaise does not stem from the
intellectual inadequacy of science, but from his sense that it doesn't meet the demands of his
spirit. Such rational constructions (the Crystal Palace) always leave something out of account,
the desire to defy them. Hence, they cannot adequately account for the full expression of the
human spirit.
This point is important to grasp, because many commentators have suggested that the real issue
here is freedom from the oppression of science. But that's not the case. Underground Man
makes it clear that he has a certain faith in science and would welcome a fully determined
existence, but only if it answered to his full desires. So he's not repudiating science; in fact, in
many ways his intellect has fully accepted material determinism. But (as I mentioned) such a
view leaves some of his feelings about life unaccounted for. Deterministic science can never
satisfy those feelings, simply because Underground Man senses that there is always a residual
desire, what he calls a whim, the desire to affirm that two and two equals five. The issue here is
not freedom from determinism but authenticity, the desire to be as fully human as one can be, to
have one's desires most satisfactorily fulfilled in action, because the essence of human life is
desire, not reason.
You see, gentlemen, reason is no more than reason, and it gives
fulfillment only to man's reasoning capacity, while desires are a
manifestation of the whole of life--I mean the whole of human life, both
with its reason and with all its itches and scratches. . . . I quite
naturally want to live in order to fulfill my whole capacity for living,
and not in order to fulfill my reasoning capacity alone, which is no more
than some one-twentieth of my capacity for living. (31)
It's worth noting the radically individualistic stance of Underground Man. He demonstrates no
interest whatsoever in social causes, justice in the wider community, and so on. His objections
stem from his sense of himself, and that sense does not include any link to other people,
individually or in groups, or to social and political ideas. In that sense, we can locate his most
basic urges in the Romantic quest for self-fulfillment. Part of his discontent with science (which
his reason accepts) is that it subsumes him under rational formulas, puts him in a predictable box,
something his moral-emotional self will not agree to.
[Parenthetically, one might observe that Dostoevsky himself had intimate personal knowledge of
the ways in which rational calculation or reasonable experience could never capture all the
elements of human nature, because he was an inveterate gambler. No human activity more
immediately reveals human beings' refusal to be guided by the authority of mathematics or the
results of experience, both of which indicate to anyone who thinks for a few moments about the
subject that casino gambling is a self-defeating activity, not suitable for those who cannot afford
to play a game where the result is so clearly stacked against them. Nonetheless, gamblers, then
and now, continue to rush to the betting tables.]
2. But when he looks around him, Underground Man sees nothing answering to his desires. His
intelligence tells him that simple actions in the modern world are stupid, that the laws of nature
stand around him like stone walls, determining the physical world, explaining the evolutionary
origins of human life, that the human beings around him are preoccupied with trivial things. He
sees nothing outside himself to which he can attach himself: no family, no significant
environment (here the notion of Petersburg as an "intentional" city is important—the urban
environment brings with it so sense of a long historical identity, no unique cultural tradition,
nothing he can call his own), no personal past, and (most important) no governing idea, no
framework of belief. Hence, he is driven inward, ceaselessly exploring his own nature, the only
world in which he has any interest or with which he has any intimate contact.
Another way of expressing this point is to say that Underground Man has nothing to attach
himself to, in the context of which he can understand himself or the world around him. He has
no ideals which are holy to him, so his thought processes are affirming and tearing down at the
same time (see Jones 59), in a never-ending restlessness. His life is thus characterized only by an
inner turmoil, with no obvious hope of external help.
One should note here that the disbelief that Underground Man expresses is very different from,
say, the urbane and earned skepticism of Montaigne, who can urge us to enjoy the delights we
have around us and practice the customs of our surroundings because there is no final answer to
anything. Underground Man cannot achieve this sort of equanimity, because he cannot repress
his deep unhappiness, his discontent with the situation in which he finds himself. Ironies do not
console him; they eat away at his consciousness. The most remarkable feature of his tirade
against his audience and the world he lives in is how much it indicates his loathing of himself and
his inability to reconcile himself to that state of affairs (more about this later).
[If we're looking for earlier parallels in the reading in Liberal Studies, we might like to make a
comparison with Hamlet. I have no wish to explore that here, but it might be useful to point out
that Hamlet's similar turmoil stems from a very particular set of family cirstances and from
the pressure, as a prince and son, to carry out decisive action in the political world of Elsinore.
Dostoevsky's Underground Man has no such distinctive position or lineage: he is very much a
product of his modern surroundings in the large, bureaucratic city, and his place is something he
has chosen, not a part of his inheritance]
That emerges clearly in the early discussion of revenge, one of the most basic and long-lasting of
human feelings and absolutely fundamental to any sense of justice (it's no accident that many of
our most important heroes, in high and low culture, are central figures in revenge narratives,
since those stories almost invariably link the most powerful human feelings about others to an
understanding of the nature of justice and personal responsibility). Stupid people (in his view)
are capable of acting on their feelings directly, in taking revenge or erting themselves.
Underground Man envies them this ability (9), but he himself is so caught up in all the doubts,
qualifications, and complexities of consciousness that he cannot follow their example. Lacking
the emotional strength and the intellectual conviction of a traditional revenge hero, he thus is
forced into a life in a "loathsome, stinking underground hole," where his existence is no better
than that of an animal (the imagery is important in bringing out this element of self-loathing:
insects, rodents, and so forth). There he spends his time resenting his situation, hatching
elaborate revenge plots but never acting on them.
[Of course, the animal imagery here is, from one perspective, inappropriate because Underground
Man cannot be a fly or other insect, precisely because he has consciousness, yet the imagery does
illuminate his frustration at being unable to work out the contradictions—he feels like an insect
(and there may be an element of wishing in this image, just as there is with J. Alfred Prufrock and
Gregor Samsa—to be an insect at least relieves one of living with the constant awareness of
one's own limitations and one is therefore permitted to simply give up)].
3. It is also made clear to us that as a Romantic hero, Underground Man is a complete failure.
Much of his discussion about science comes from a fairly standard Romantic standpoint. But
Underground Man is not repudiating science out of a strong sense of his own personality, out of a
desire to move out from under natural laws, out of some pionate faith in anything, least of all
in the transforming power of his imagination. He's quite aware that the Romantic views he
possesses are derived from books, that they are naive and thin. The opening of the second part
of the story explicitly condemns Russian Romanticism for its failure to transform any individual's
life: it is something that goes on inside, without providing the spiritual energies necessary to
engage the real world with courage and conviction. That's why he can say "Every decent man of
our time is and is bound to be a coward and a slave. This is his normal condition. I am deeply
convinced of that" (51). At the same time, of course, because of his heightened Romantic
sensibilities he can set himself above "normal" people and, when forced to think about dealing
with the "real" world derive a sense of what he will do from sentimental Romantic fictions.
4. The result of all of this is the picture of a personality hopelessly at odds with itself. The most
obvious feature of his personality is its instability. Even his attempts to explain to his readers the
nature of that instability are constantly shifting. We are not dealing here with what one might
call an integrated character, someone who has a firm sense of what he wants and how to set
about achieving it. His feelings are always at odds: the men he despises he envies; what most
disgusts him about himself gives him pleasure; he prides himself on his intellect and reveals his
frustrations that it leads him nowhere; the aggression in his desires is thwarted all the time by his
physical inertia; he has a compulsion to talk about himself but is unable to say anything firm; he
is filled with contempt for his readers yet is desperate that we understand; he reads widely, but
finds such writing shallow: the social thinkers are superficial optimists, the Romantics poseurs
(though he's not above using either style himself); he longs to collide with reality and is unable to
do so. His emotional life, like his writing, is "babbling--in other words, deliberately pouring
water through a sieve."
It might be worth pausing for a moment to wonder about one point: How are we supposed to
take this man? Is he a wretched victim of social injustice, someone we should feel sorry for? Is
he really what he says he is, some higher, more intelligent being, who has glimpsed something
acutely present in modern life? Or what?
On this opinions will differ, but I think we are meant to see Underground Man as ridiculous
(intelligent and pathetic, yes, but also ridiculous), as a satiric portrait of the modern urban
educated consciousness. He has many of the immediate advantages of the modern middle cl
but his deficiencies can be summed up in one phrase: he lacks eros. He has in him none of the
powerfully motivating love of life, the irrational joy in existence (and in other people's existence),
something which might motivate him to do anything. Lacking that, he is paralyzed by his inner
contradictions, different fragments which do not add up to a coordinating unity.
He has gone underground by choice because he has no idea how to deal with life other than to sit
on the sidelines with a sneer. He picks away at the sources of his discontent, the limitations of
others and his own degeneracy, because, as he tells us, at least that reminds him that he's alive. I
hate, therefore I am. From that he can derive his definition of a human being: "a biped,
ungrateful" (32). If we have to put some sort of label on him, he's a nihilist, and Dostoevsky's
portrait invites us to recognize the foolishness in such a stance (on this point see Joseph Frank's
essay, which places the emphasis in the right place, although with too much special pleading
about the context).
[It's interesting to note, in this respect, that many traditional heroes go underground—retreating
into madness or descending to Hades—but with them the experience is a temporary stage, often
a necessary one on their road to a fuller understanding (as with, say, Gilgamesh, Odysseus,
Aeneas, or Dante). The point of the trip is to learn something to take back into the world, so that
one can re-engage life more fully. In Dostoevsky's story the Underground is a refuge from the
world, deliberately chosen as a permanent fort from which one can safely take pot shots at what
lies beyond. This underground is a poorly furnished room in a poor district, with a door behind
which the Underground Man can totally control his own environment. It functions as a
protection against having to learn anything.]
Underground Man, however, does have one quality which, if it does not redeem him, at least
indicates that he is not entirely subterranean: he still has not lost the desire to find some overall
meaning to what he perceives as the cruel game of his life:
Oh, absurdity of absurdities! But how preferable it is to understand
everything, to be aware of everything, of all impossibilities and stone
walls, and yet refuse to reconcile yourself to a single one of those
impossibilities and walls if it sickens you to submit to them; how
preferable to reach, by the most irrefutable logical combinations, the
most revolting conclusions on the eternal subject that you are somehow
to blame even for the stone wall, though, again, it is entirely obvious
that you are not to blame at all; and, in consequence of all that, to sink
into voluptuous inertia, silently and impotently gritting your teeth and
wallowing in the idea that, as it turns out, you don't even have anyone
to rail at; that you can't find any object of blame and may never find
one; that all this is some sort of sleight of hand, a sharper's trick, a
swindle, a plain mess in which it is impossible to tell who's who or
what's what. And yet, despite all the uncertainties and confusions, you
are still in pain, and the more uncertainty, the more pain!
. . . I'd gladly let my tongue be cut out altogether, from sheer gratitude,
if things could be arranged in such a way that I myself would never
have the wish to stick it out any more. What do I care if this is
impossible to arrange, and we are expected to content ourselves with
apartments? Why, then, was I endowed with such desires? Can it be
that I was made this way simply so that I'd come to the conclusion that
my whole way of being is nothing but a fraud? Can this be the sole
purpose of it? I don't believe it. (42)
In the context of this quality we can understand the delights he takes at times in his own pain,
that curious strain of masochism running through his personality. It is hardly a moral sense, as
Frank calls it (41), for it does not enable him to make any significant moral judgments. But it is
something of an indication of a moral potential. He will, in the midst of his own confusion,
degradation, and inertia try to hang onto some sense of himself, some sharply individualized
feeling that he is still alive, still capable of being somebody and perhaps finding something. He
has not entirely given up on his desires for fulfillment, even if he has no idea of what to do in
order to make that remotely possible..
We know from Dostoevsky's letters that this element in Underground Man's personality was
originally given more prominence in the story, for evidently the author provided more emphatic
indications of how his fragmented consciousness might heal itself, specifically in a turn to
Dostoevsky's vision of Christianity. Inexplicably, the censors removed these pages, and
Dostoevsky never put them back. Hence, we have little sense from the story as it is that
Underground Man is going to find some form of redemption, even if we can see, in moments like
the ones I mention above, a glimpse of the emotional foundations for such a change.
On the Occasion of Wet Snow
The second part of Notes from Underground takes us back twenty years, to a few incidents in the
young life of Underground Man, told to us by the mature narrator. I don't propose to review the
details of this interesting story, but I would like to make some suggestions about links between
these events and the mature personality we have met earlier.
One central issue in this story is Underground Man's futile attempts to make contact with other
human beings (something which the forty-year-old man has given up on, other than through his
writing). At this stage in his life he has clearly not yet abandoned his ambitions to have some sort
of social life. The fact that he fails miserably, both with his old school chums and with Liza,
provides the most important indication as to why he has become the mature personality he is.
The reason is relatively easy to discern, at least its most obvious characteristics. Young
Underground Man has what we would call a completely false consciousness or, drawing on our
reading of Rousseau, he is so full of amour propre, that he is incapable of entering into the simplest
social activity, a conversation with friends. To these encounters he brings such a strongly
perverted ego, combined with a humiliating sense of how others see him, that his attempts to
make contact defeat themselves.
For he is filled with a naïve Romantic sense of his own value, his superiority over others, and yet
he cannot tolerate the thought that they might think ill of him. In other words, his Romantic
ertiveness, largely derived from sentimental fictions, is not strong, courageous, intelligent, or
creative enough to enable him to transform a social experience to meet his desires. He allows the
opinions of others (or their reactions as he imagines them) to dictate who he is. Even when he
criticizes himself for his cowardice, he does so from a shallow literary perspective (un point
d'honneur) rather than from any deeply held pionate sense of self.
Hence, he can dream for years about taking out his revenge on the officer by going out and
colliding with him or of slapping his old school chum Zverkov, but he can never carry out such
actions. In any case, the whole idea of insulting another person as a test of one's individuality
never seems to register with him as a very silly way to deal with the world, as if the officers even
care. Indeed, his basic metaphor for reality, that it is something he needs to rush out and collide
with as an ertion of his individuality, his identity, makes him ridiculous in the face of his abject
fear of how others will react. He sees life with a military metaphor (everyone is his enemy), but
has no courage to initiate combat.
One interesting expression of his point is the yellow stain in his trousers. The colour is
interesting: symbol of cowardice, sickness, and an inability to control one's own bodily
wastes—all on public display. The fact that he can think of no way of dealing with the stain, that
he cannot tolerate what others might think of it, that he cannot resist going out in a situation
where he is going to have to parade it around others, all of these bring out in a graphic way the
paradoxes at the heart of Underground Man's sickness, caught in the grip of contradictory desires
with no ability to act decisively to cope with those paradoxes.
Interestingly enough, the other prominent mention of yellow in the book comes at the end of the
first section, where the narrator refers to "an almost wet snow, yellow, murky" (46)--as if his
whole world is now enveloped in a continuously falling cold, yellow drizzle. What was once a
stain on his trousers now defines the entire atmosphere in which he lives. The colour of the
snow, however, is no mere metaphor. Snow can literally turn yellow, but it does so (like the fog
in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock") as a result of the pollutions created by the human
beings on which it is falling--the dreariness conveyed by the image is thus clearly linked to what
has made it: the urban human being.
Dostoevsky's brings out this feature of Young Underground Man repeatedly in the constant use
of romantic irony, that literary device (so prominent in modernist writing) in which the basic
emotional rhythm of a character is defined by a series of energetic ertions which are then
instantly cancelled:
The devil take it! I don't care if I lose the seven rubles! I'll go, right
now! . . .
Of course, I stayed. (89)
Now's just the right moment to throw a bottle at them all, I thought,
and, picking up a bottle, I . . . poured myself a full gl. (91)
. . . I'll sing too, because I have a right to . . . to sing . . . hum
But I did not sing. (92)
This romantic irony sets the basic rhythm of his inner self--rising determination instantly
cancelled out, all affirmations quickly denied. In the personality of Underground Man, as in so
many other modern heroes (especially in Beckett, for example), the technique defines a key
element in character: the constant frustration of desire, immediate thwarting of the will, as if the
effort required, even in the most everyday event, is too much to undertake. Though the world is
unsatisfactory, it is too recalcitrant or the hero lacks the power to act decisively in it.
The mature Underground Man, reflecting on these moments in his youth offers a severe
indictment of the shallow Russian version of Romanticism—strongly felt in private moments as a
consoling dream, but helpless before the stark reality of the world, especially the other people in
it. However (and this point, I think, is crucial) he fails to derive from that indictment any sense
of how he should cope with his mature life.
The incidents with Liza bring this out particularly strongly, because there Underground Man
inadvertently establishes for a moment pionate contact with another person. Interestingly
enough, he achieves this because for the first time, lying in the brothel bed, he relaxes, lets
himself just talk to someone else and, even more important, he enters into some dialogue with
someone else, a conversation in which he invites a stranger to share her thoughts with him. He
doesn't seek such a moment or consciously will it: the moment emerges from a situation where
for a brief time Underground Man is not caught up in the twisted tensions of his personality and,
as Donald Fanger notes "his own deep feeling is becoming engaged" (xxiii).
What's extraordinary about thi
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