NOTES ON FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
Our narrator is anything but reliable – he's persistently
unpredictable and perverse. A lot of
the passionate quirkiness in the arguments he makes comes from the threat of
being absolutely determined, of being devoid of free will and
unpredictable, even destructive desire thanks to 2 + 2 = 4, the laws of nature,
etc. For him (and for Dostoevsky
himself, I'd say), this emphasis on personality, will, and desire trumps the
grandest utopias and logical schemes.
But he can't really set forth any of his claims in terms of the sort of
primary causality that makes it possible for blockheaded "normal
people" to act. The Underground
Man can never act or speak or write in perfect faith in the justice of his
beliefs or words: he's a highly self-conscious mouse, as he admits. What Nietzsche admired so much about Dostoevsky
seems to be his unsystematic way of
proceeding – you can be at once unsystematic and yet precise, incisive, and
insightful. That fits Dostoevsky
perfectly when it comes to the exploration of psychological phenomena
such as resentment, spite, and so forth.
"The Underground" is both a physical place and a metaphor
for the narrator's thinking: whatever mustn't be said, whatever must be
repressed, and so forth.
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
Part 1: "Underground"
Part 1, Chapter 1
The first thing we find out about the narrator is that he is spiteful and physically ill. Moreover, he is very self-conscious, very aware of this spitefulness that belongs to him. He explains that he was a rather badly behaved civil servant who took pleasure in causing distress to others who needed his help. But he can't even really enter into his own spitefulness since as he tells us, it was all sort of an act: "I was not at all a spiteful man or even an exasperated man … (96 bottom and 97 middle). This narrator, it quickly becomes apparent, likes to make bold assertions and then take them back or at least modify them – he is obviously unreliable. He speaks of "contrary" elements (97 middle) in his nature, and these elements torment him.
The inability to act is the next thing the
narrator explains following upon his stated realization that he can't either
embrace spitefulness or become good – he is always uncomfortably somewhere
in between the hero and the rascal.
And here we are introduced to the notion that intelligence is more a
curse than a blessing – a smart man can't do anything or become anything,
while fools skate through life always certain of themselves. To be intelligent is to have no character
and therefore strangely unlimited and undelimited, while the man of action is
limited. He used to be a collegiate
assessor (8th of 14 in the C19 Table of Ranks, from the time of
Peter the Great, 1722 – with 8th rank you were accorded hereditary
nobility), but a relative left him 6000 rubles, so he retired last year, and
now lives in expensive St. Petersburg.
The first chapter ends with a tricky rejection of the discourse of
"a decent man" – the decent man takes pleasure in talking about
himself, and our narrator says, "I will talk about myself" (98 bottom).
Part 1, Chapter 2
To be overly conscious is a disease (99 top). The more conscious the narrator became about
the beautiful and the sublime, about the good, the less able he was to act, and
thus he became bitter. But finally,
after much struggle, this bitterness becomes sweetness and finally pleasure (100
middle). Is it the same for others? He wants to know. As for the pleasure he is talking about, we
are told that it came from the fact of being "intensely aware of my own
degradation" (100 middle). You
can't change, and you can't do anything, so why not be a scoundrel? He declares his aim to be explaining the kind
of pleasure he is talking about, the perverse pleasure in one's own
humiliation and incapacity to do anything about it. (100 bottom)
Part 1, Chapter 3
What do normal people do when they run into natural
limits, into a brick wall imposed upon them by nature itself?
Well, normal, probably stupid people, according to our narrator, simply
give up. He says these people are
marked by spontaneity or forthrightness in their attitude and conduct (102
middle), and says that the wall, for them, is definitive and meaningful, even
"mystic" (102 middle; see also 104 middle). It is not so for a mouse like our narrator –
for that is what he calls himself. This
mouse has what the narrator calls "intense sensibility" (103 top and
middle), meaning that he is highly self-conscious, self-aware. This mouse cannot even work up and execute a
plan for revenge the way the so-called "man of nature and truth" or
"homme de la nature et de la vérité" can; that is because the mouse
knows that revenge is wrong, or at least that it makes no sense to call it
justice. So our mouse cannot act, but
unlike the stupid person, he seethes with resentment (103 middle). This is the origin of spitefulness and
resentment, an important quality to our narrator, even though as his
reasoning progresses, he demonstrates a conviction that spitefulness, like
other supposed reasons, is ultimately hollow because it requires an agent
that the spiteful but intelligent man simply does not believe in.
But here things become even more complicated because
our mouse starts to take a certain pleasure in his own predicament, his own
feeling of being done an injustice and yet not having the ability to do
anything about it. See page 102-04 on
this, and 105 (top-middle) for the narrator's explanation: he doesn't care
about the laws of nature or that 2x2 equals 4; the thing is, he dislikes
such laws and that is what matters most.
It is better, he thinks, to refuse reconciliation with the laws of
nature, mathematics, natural science, and so forth, better to oppose them all
so long as you can maintain a certain independence of thought and will. Simply not to be an absolute dupe seems to be
his goal, and to achieve it he sets himself against the cosmos and other
men. There is bitter pleasure in this. The narrator is not asserting that he is
in possession of any grand systematic truth. Far from it.
Part 1, Chapter 4
The narrator insists further that
even consciousness of pain can lead to a kind of voluptuous pleasure –
it is precisely the fact that you know there's no one to blame for your
toothache that you betray by moaning about it.
Nature can inflict all sorts of injuries and humiliations upon you and
your body, even if you despise nature.
There's nothing you can do about it, and perhaps that is what eventually
leads to this strange pleasurable sensation or enjoyment. See page 105 bottom - 106 in particular: the
enjoyment becomes downright voluptuous, says the narrator, when, say, the 19th-century
man moaning about his toothache becomes fully aware that the moaning
accomplishes nothing but to annoy everyone around him. He knows he's just acting spitefully and
maliciously, and that is what he takes such great pleasure in: it is a kind
of knowledge, admirable or otherwise.
The narrator really drills home the point when he asks at the very end
of the fourth chapter, "Can a man of acute sensibility respect himself
at all?" (107 bottom) To be self-conscious makes it impossible to have
self-respect. Apparently, only healthy,
normal idiots respect themselves. So why
be normal? To be normal is to live
comfortably within one's petty performances, one's illusions, always to be
surrounded by the paper bag of unalterable reality.
Part 1, Chapter 5
The narrator describes boredom as central to his consciousness – he has always found himself stirring up trouble, getting emotionally involved in things he doesn't really care about, and so forth, simply to escape this boredom for a moment. The excess of consciousness that structures his being leads, as he says, to "thumb-twiddling," or inertia (108 middle). The normal, stupid person has little trouble finding a foundation or a secure basis for action in the world, but clever individuals understand that there is probably no such foundation, that there are most likely only "nearest and secondary causes" (109 top), at least as far as we can know. Justice would be a primary cause, but that is exactly the sort of thing our mouse can never find fully justified, cannot discover – there is only an infinite succession backwards of secondary causes. You might think spite could stand in for a primary cause, but the problem is that it disintegrates pretty quickly, and you are left with nothing but contempt for yourself for having believed it could serve as a foundation for action. Strong negative emotions, in other words, soon burn themselves out, and you can't really maintain them as the basis for sustained action. So we are back to inertia again. That is hardly surprising: the narrator can't set forth any of his claims in terms of the primary causality that makes it possible for "normal people" to act. The underground man can never act, speak or write in perfect faith in the justice of his beliefs or words. (109 middle especially)
Part 1, Chapter 6
If only, says the narrator, he could pinpoint the reason for his inactivity as laziness. But he cannot even do that. A person can make a fine career out of laziness, and be well respected for it. You could for example be a connoisseur or art critic who simply affirms what everybody else thinks constitutes "the sublime and beautiful" (110 bottom). That way, you could become part of a social system revolving around groupthink, aesthetical or otherwise. If you don't mind going along, it's very easy to get along and prosper.
Part 1, Chapter 7
Plato's notion that enlightenment is the key to the
good society because people always act in their own self-interest seems
ridiculous to our narrator (111 middle), who insists that history proves otherwise. What's the value in constructing utopias, in
that case? What if we're all just piano
keys being enlisted in the service of some grand concert beyond us? (117 top-middle) No value. The greatest advantage of all, the one "greater
and more desirable than all other goods" (113 middle), is "free and unfettered choice" (116
middle-bottom). To follow your own
will, even if it takes you off the edge of a cliff – that, I think our narrator
is saying, is the key to human existence and it annihilates all utopias,
all Crystal Palaces (115 bottom) like the one in the mid-Victorian
exhibition, from the time of Plato onwards.
Part 1, Chapter 8
But what if even free will, which the narrator
has been so energetically promoting, turns out to be an illusion? (116
bottom) What if science destroys any
possible belief in it? What if desire
itself is nothing but the slave of necessity?
Desire is irrational, and that is its chief virtue – the narrator
says that reason is only one dimension of life and that desire is much more
pervasive; it is "a manifestation of the whole of life" (118
middle). Another key statement: humanity
is defined as "a creature who walks on two legs and is ungrateful" –
but more particularly, perpetually badly behaved (119 middle-bottom). We really do not act in our own best
interests, either collectively or as individuals. The key to this chapter appears towards its
conclusion: even if we could predict and tabulate all the motions of human
desire, even if we turned out to be piano keys played upon by the alleged laws
of nature (121 top), we would go so far as to abandon sanity itself to escape
determination and predictability. Threatened
with being the slave of necessity, or 2+2, so to speak, man will curse, cause
disturbances, stir up trouble, defy and make those things the meaning of his
existence. What would be the point of
desire if it were not unpredictable, if it were reducible to an algorithm of
the laws of nature? 2+2 always make
4, even if your will has nothing to do with it, so why align yourself with the
laws of mathematics and nature? (121-122 top)
Part 1, Chapter 9
The narrator contrasts us with ants making their
anthills. The difference is that they
keep doing the same thing and their purpose is completely utilitarian. They're going to make good use of the
anthills that they build and will keep doing so until there are no more ants.
(123 top) But for us, achieving the
goal of our constructions is the beginning of death, just as 2+2 make 4 is
"the beginning of death" (123 middle). Consciousness is a curse, but at the same
time, we would not give it up, and it is "infinitely superior" to
"twice two" (124 bottom).
Part 1, Chapter 10
The Crystal Palace (which the narrator had
mentioned back in Ch. 7, 115 bottom) is really not as useful as a chicken coop,
says the narrator, and at least the chicken coop isn't terrifying in its
implications for free will and desire.
It is impossible to stick out one's tongue at such a palace (125 top),
which makes the narrator reject it. Even
so, if it represents the power of an ideal over against brute reality, then
maybe the Crystal Palace is worth more than the chicken coop after all. (124,
126) But if it's simply a naïve faith in
utopia, that's a problem, too: if it's an ideal of purpose and perpetual
progress that we buy wholesale and end up being its dupes, that can't be good,
either. (124 middle) The narrator
concludes this chapter by recognizing how dangerous his own brand of thinking is
to everyone who is not like him. (126 middle).
On the whole, though, his view is that destruction isn't such a bad
thing, not by a long shot -- who wants to be a dupe anyhow?
Part 1, Chapter 11
In this final chapter of the first part, the
narrator explains what to some degree he has meant all along by "the
underground": he apparently means by this phrase in part thinking itself,
but we should add that this thinking is dialogical, meaning that he imagines an
audience in response to it. To this
audience he declares that "it is much better to do nothing at all! Better passive awareness!" (126 bottom) There is something of the back
and forth of conversation going on in this so-called underground. The underground is everything that
healthy, normal people repress as they go about their waking lives and business
– they have no need of such philosophizing and agonizing over things like
purpose and free will. It's what mustn't
be uttered, perhaps even what shouldn't be thought, lest one suffer the
psychological consequences. The
narrator insists that he will never print his words and share them with the
public, which privacy-device creates a sense of intimacy as we read (128
top-middle) -- it is as if we are not the reading public but rather individuals
who have somehow come by this unpublished manuscript, which itself seems to be
the effusion of a man who has been underground for his entire life.
Why not just recall it in his head, if he doesn't
mean to publish? The narrator doesn't give
a solid answer to this question, but tells us that perhaps recalling old
memories will provide some relief and allow him to get rid of those memories
once and for all: "I really may feel easier in my mind" (129 bottom). This is an ancient concept of writing, in
which the act of writing cuts off a stream of thought from consciousness,
alienating it forever from its producer.
That is more or less what Plato makes Socrates say in Phaedrus about the invention and act of
writing. And of course the narrator is
simply bored, so setting down his tale will give him something to do: maybe in
that sense it is an act of mischief, just as he said earlier about how we deal
with boredom. Does the tale that
follows reinforce the philosophy that he has set down with such deliberate lack
of systematic rigor? That remains to
be seen, but in general, it seems to back up the first part of the text.
Part 2: "Apropos of the Wet Snow"
Part 2, Chapter 1
At the age of 24, the narrator was outwardly
conventional; the unsettling thing that comes out here is how much of the
"underground" was already within him, though it may have structured
his life at that point more or less in the form of social awkwardness, the
inability to meet the gaze of other people, etc. Even the normal activities in which the young
narrator engaged were already manifestations of his resentment and defiance of
all things conventional.
The section in which the officer
picks him up like a puffball and moves him aside is hilarious ( ). The
big fellow is like a force of nature: there's no point in resisting him because
he's a healthy, normal blockhead who probably wouldn't accept a challenge from
a resentful man-mouse like our narrator.
He didn't even seem to notice the actual bump that the narrator finally
managed to give him after two years or so, in an attempt to turn the affair
into something suitably romantic, suitably honorable and literary. In other words, he's trying to transform his
sordid, petty reality into something heroic, to create a situation in which he
would be the equal or superior of the blockhead officer. Along the way, there's the delicious, bitter
pleasure of his own self-conscious state of humiliation: all those abortive
attempts before the final impetuous one (
). If we can say there's a
pattern of behavior in this second part, it's something like the following:
self-reflection, resentment, boredom with it all, an attempt to get outside
one's head, an action at last taken, followed by consequent withdrawal and
return to inertia or some other escapist state of mind.
Part 2, Chapter 2
The narrator withdraws into a fantasy world of
romantic reveries about heroism. He goes
to see Setochkin and, more importantly for the rest of the narrative, visits
Simonov, his old friend from school days.
Part 2, Chapter 3
We learn quite a bit about the narrator's early
years: he was sent to school by distant relatives, and felt abandoned. Much of his present character stems from
those school years – his contempt for his fellow students and yet his desire
to be recognized by them, even to conquer them after a fashion. He becomes studious because they aren't. Even as he plans to attend the dinner for the
shallow, handsome officer Zverkov, he senses the hollowness of the whole
enterprise; that is, putting one over on his old "frenemies" by
insisting on attending a dinner to which he hasn't been invited. I love the fact that the friends already at
Simonov's for the initial meeting, Ferfichkin and Trudolyubov, scarcely
acknowledge his presence even though he hasn't seen them for years ( ). All of these so-called friends, of
course, and especially the as-yet absent Zverkov, represent stupid
acceptance of reality and the limitedness of all that is healthy and normal.
Part 2, Chapter 4
The narrator shows up early to dinner since he has
not been told about the one-hour time change (157 middle). The better part of the chapter centers on the
humiliation of this and indeed of the whole evening. Zverkov's infinitely stupid, lisping
condescension figures heavily (158-60), and so does the bickering of his other
friends along with the narrator's own attempt to insult Zverkov, which is
initially (163 middle) and then subsequently rebuffed (166 middle-bottom). In the end, the narrator is again ignored. He wrangles six rubles to follow his
frenemies to the brothel they have gone to, even though his request for
reconciliation has been refused by Zverkov.
Part 2, Chapter 5
The narrator's planned climactic confrontation with
reality (167-68, then 171) nets him not the opportunity to slap Zverkov and
end up in a duel but rather a chance meeting with Lisa (171 middle), a
humble prostitute. He realizes that he
is patterning his plans after great Russian literary works such as Masquerade by Lermontov (170). Life imitates art, or at least it would if
the narrator had any courage. So
instead, he will take out his anger and resentment on Lisa -- Zverkov is
unavailable since he and his companions had already left the establishment
before the narrator ever showed up.
Part 2, Chapter 6
After he has sex with Lisa at the beginning of
this chapter (172), the narrator begins conversation with Lisa, with an
inward realization of just how stupid his own debauchery is (173 middle). The narrator sets before Lisa the image of
a happy family life, and paints for her the horrid prospect of continuing
on in this lifestyle (175-76). The
conversation continues and his goal is to save Lisa after the manner of a
Russian hero (177 middle). At first he
fails to understand that Lisa's sarcasm is only a cover for genuine feeling --
she is young, after all, and cynicism is seldom more than a fashion with young
people. He knows that his own
rhetoric is what she says: something straight out of a book (183 top). It's cheap talk, and hardly sincere.
Part 2, Chapter 7
Lisa continues to be subjected to the narrator's
harangue, and the pitch reaches its sentimental crescendo (184-87 middle). The narrator even finds that he responds to
his own histrionic speech, saying he had rattled on out of "sporting"
enthusiasm (188 top). This rhetoric
is effective with Lisa since it seems to be what she needed to hear in her
real-life context. There is irony in the
sense the narrator has so often tried to pattern his life, unsuccessfully
enough, after literary texts. Lisa
touchingly shows the narrator the letter she received from a gentleman caller
who knows nothing of her sordid present (189 bottom). While leaving, the narrator realizes
"the truth" (190 bottom) about this whole encounter -- as he will say
in the next chapter, it has all been nothing but sentimentality, fundamentally
insincere.
Part 2, Chapter 8
The narrator writes to Simonov and pays his debt with borrowed
money. But he is still tormented by
thoughts about Lisa, about her pathetic match-light smile, and obsesses over
being found out in his cheap apartment (193 middle). He continues to spin absurd, romantic
stories about himself (195 top-middle).
But as it turns out, the narrator can't even be in charge as a master,
which we can see from his thoughts about and interactions with Apollon (196-97),
his condescending and infuriating servant.
Lisa enters just at the point where the narrator is exhausted from a
few pages' worth of arguing with Apollon over unpaid wages (200 bottom). It is a humiliating moment.
Part 2, Chapter 9
Infuriated with Lisa, the narrator mocks her in recalling their
previous encounter, informing her that it was all just an act. Why is he so angry at this unoffending young
woman? Probably because she has
confronted him with the gap between his self-image and his actual
identity. The Hegelian Master/Servant
dialectic may be a good thing to discuss here since for the German Idealist
philosopher Georg Hegel, the self is founded upon confrontational moments -- risk,
contradiction, dread. The self is established by struggle for recognition
and certainty, which entails withholding recognition from others, and
Hegel's famous representation of the founding of self-consciousness involves a
primal struggle to the death between two individuals, with the outcome being
the lordship of one and the enslavement or subjugation of the other, and a
consequent need for mediating their now-indirect relations through a
relationship to and with objects. But the Master/Servant dialectic can also be read, as
Alexandre Kojève and others have done, as a continuing struggle that happens internally,
inside the head of each individual rather than a physical struggle between two
individuals: a battle for self-recognition, authenticity, personal
autonomy. I suggest that success in this
endeavor would perhaps be constituted by an adequate fit between who one
really is and who one thinks one is.
If that's the right way to put it, it's clear that the narrator is not
succeeding. Lisa's is not a blockheaded
master-consciousness, and in fact the narrator says that the relative
position between himself and this young woman had been reversed: just as
she was in the subject-position at the brothel, the weeping nervous wreck of a
narrator is now in precisely that position relative to her. He takes her solicitude for pity, and
that is unbearable to him. She is a
sensitive servant-consciousness who seems to be offering him the very
recognition he craves but cannot abide.
The situation is intolerable.
Part 2, Chapter 10
The narrator says that for him, love has always been a matter of
dominating others, and it is the product of struggle. But then, his hatred of real-life makes it
impossible to deal with the "subjugated object" ( ). Lisa
takes her leave, having rejected the crumpled five ruble note the narrator
tried to give her as a token of his own spite, a symbol of his wish to see
her as nothing more than a prostitute in spite of her genuine affection for
him. In the end, writing this entire
story down seems to have been punishment rather than relief. The narrator has throughout cast himself as
the anti-hero, the man alienated from so-called real life. The underground seems to be the place
where an unquenchable desire to engage with real life perpetually battles an
equally strong desire to escape from it and forget it altogether, to disappear
into heroic fictions spun by others or by oneself.
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