Fyodor Dostoevsky: Notes from Underground
(One note that I should probably make here: when I write about a book, I give no heed to whether or not my post will make sense to someone who has not read the book (if you've read my other write-ups you already know this). That being said, it may not be impossible to follow or at least to get something out of it, but it would probably be better to at least have a pretty good idea of what I'm writing about first for a lot of it to be understood. Carry on.)
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Over the past summer I read Crime and Punishment, and just now I am starting The Brothers Karamazov. These three will all form a part of an essay I will be writing in the future for my class on Existentialism. Dostoevsky has long been noted as an Existentialist thinker. What I have noted, having read thus far, is the type in his novels that becomes the Existentialist thinker.
Raskalnikov (from Crime and Punishment), Ivan Karamazov, and the underground man are all of course different people in different situations, and are the subject of rather different stories. But they are all also very much the same. These three represent Dostoevsky's existentialists. They are the three who stand against society, against the objective, and try to embrace a personal reality where one is the only true judge of one's self and must live up to a personal sense of worth, not society's sense. Society itself is at best ignorant, at worse deceptive and destructive to the better, more honest impulses in man. In different ways these three men share these same basic thoughts. They share more than that, however, and here is where we pinpoint what is for Dostoevsky the cause of existential problems and therefore the source of concern in modernizing society. In the reviews of these three books I will focus not so much on their ideas and theories but on who they are, how they developed, and what that means in terms of understanding Dostoevsky's diagnosis of societal change and the problems that result (this is of course because, as I said before, the existential import of these characters is reserved for a future essay).
Notes from Underground is the shortest of these three works, not even breaking a hundred pages, but it is the short stories like these ones that perhaps best demonstrate Dostoevsky utter mastery in the area of human psychology and human nature. In fact, in this story about a quarter of the text itself is merely the underground man expressing his doctrine of himself contra humanity without any actual story appearing. He starts with, "I am a sick man," a statement far more telling than one realizes. In fact, all his theory and doctrine, his rejection of the world of "common men," his attacks upon organized theories of humanity and human progress, his sarcastically masked vitriol against anything and everything outside of himself is all linked to one essential fact: the underground man is utterly alone. Every so often he notes it. Not loudly, as he doesn't want to attract attention. Or at least, he doesn't want to look like he is attracting attention. But every so often you see a statement like, "I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society." The way it is put it sounds like some sort of unconscious tick, something that you brush off and ignore. Indeed his language makes it sound trivial, though the tone belies the less subtle word choice. For the fact remains that he is truly, utterly, alone.
When the underground man was a boy, he tells us, he never had much for friends. The fact was simply that he didn't fit. He looked upon others as something separate from himself. This is not so much a literal statement about identity as a social one. When a normal person spends time with friends, there is normally not much thought of how one composes one's self, what words one chooses, or how exactly one must act. Time spent with friends simply comes naturally. You don't teach yourself how to spend time with a friend, it's simply something you do. The underground man cannot do this. It may be a difficult point to understand, but it must be understood to be able to really know anything about the underground man. Basic human friendship, for the underground, is like some kind of thing, some kind of skill that one has or does not have, or can perhaps develop with time. The basic nature of human communication, then, is lacking. Without it, actual friends don't exist. As a result our underground man is alone. Everyone looks at him like some kind of oddity, for he is. He tells us that he blames it on his appearance, but he very well knows (and also notes) that the problem is his countenance. He cannot be a relaxed, assertive identity around others. In social situations he panics. What is for human beings simply a part of nature he cannot do. This is exemplified in the evening the underground man shares with old schoolmates. Before the meeting he is in a state of terror over how he looks, how he must compose himself, what he must say and do, in a way that is completely unnecessary and probably only damaging. At the meal itself he does the only thing he can do in social situations: he shuts down. What stops the underground man is fear, fear of his image, the impression he makes, the past, everything. As a result he is helpless, and for hours says nothing at all, for there is nothing he can say. No human conversation comes to him, only forced words and an attempt to salvage his already lost image.
The underground man is no fool. He knew exactly how the evening with his schoolmates would turn out. His worries, we realize, were not in fact unjustified, because his very nature turns them into self-fulfilling prophecies. He worries himself into such a state over his behavior that his behavior suffers terribly as a result. But then, why did he go? Indeed, as he recalls the events that led to his inviting himself to the meal in the first place, he is aware that he knew he had no good reason, and would have been better off not saying anything. But we must return to his words, "I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society." We see this sentence in a more pronounced sense now.
Perhaps the reference to dreaming is a bit confusing, and so I will take a moment to clear it up. His dreams were not of anything in particular as he describes them, but only good. But to be so consuming as he describes them as being we can probably say that they weren't merely the dreams that come during sleep. He would likely daydream for long stretches (did he have anything else to do with his time?) of accomplishing things, making friends, generally being a person. When we have such feelings we yearn to express them, to be with others. But he had no one. And so, even knowing his outcome before hand, he grasps at any opportunity to be with humanity, anything to avoid the loneliness that was and remained his sickness that he could not recover from. It was his sickness, a sickness of consciousness. For as he framed it the "normal man" was not conscious. But the normal man was also not alone as he was. That is the price of consciousness.
Being alone for so long has its effects, one can gather. Lacking friends towards which one can achieve, he used the system. He read, and read, and learned, and did well on the formal scale of achievement. He became over-intellectual, with a taste for fine description and a hatred for anything "common". This combined with his lack of reality to create a fictional self in a sense. He mentions more than once the "literary" way of acting, of speaking, of living. What is the literary way, if not the way that he has learned through his books, away from humanity? Ultimately his intellectualism becomes his shield, even against himself. If one truly understands the underground man, one sees that everything he says, literally everything, is a front. His story of his past is not just to drop an old memory that was bugging him like he claims, but an attempt to justify himself. But that was obvious. He goes much, much further. When he reflects on himself, on his foolish mistakes of youth, one can tell by his attitude that he really hasn't changed. He is decrying his own past to give the impression that he has moved beyond it. Yet he is now forty years old and still thinks about the one person he ever opened himself up to, who he encountered only twice in his life more than a decade before. Any claim against himself, any description at all, is the underground man creating an identity outside himself to point at, a straw man identical to the real self, but not the selfsame one. This way he can avoid even his own criticism by announcing it before anyone else gets the chance. Such a method can only be perceived by and therefore affect one person, which is himself. And it fails, for he knows it is a straw man. He knows his flaws; he's the one that points them out. To think that he doesn't see what he is doing at that very moment, then, is foolish. But he can't change. For such a fundamental change as to affect him must come from within, and he refuses to do any more than make an image of that self. He is completely aware that it is a straw man he is criticizing, but he refused to acknowledge it. Perhaps he cannot. Thus the underground man is truly damned.
I will stop here, having made my observations about the underground man. Once I have completed The Brothers Karamazov (who knows when that will be...) I will start to draw the comparisons and points to defend my thesis about these characters and Dostoevsky's beliefs, assuming I don't get distracted by something else, at least. But with Dostoevsky, I doubt that will happen.
---
Over the past summer I read Crime and Punishment, and just now I am starting The Brothers Karamazov. These three will all form a part of an essay I will be writing in the future for my class on Existentialism. Dostoevsky has long been noted as an Existentialist thinker. What I have noted, having read thus far, is the type in his novels that becomes the Existentialist thinker.
Raskalnikov (from Crime and Punishment), Ivan Karamazov, and the underground man are all of course different people in different situations, and are the subject of rather different stories. But they are all also very much the same. These three represent Dostoevsky's existentialists. They are the three who stand against society, against the objective, and try to embrace a personal reality where one is the only true judge of one's self and must live up to a personal sense of worth, not society's sense. Society itself is at best ignorant, at worse deceptive and destructive to the better, more honest impulses in man. In different ways these three men share these same basic thoughts. They share more than that, however, and here is where we pinpoint what is for Dostoevsky the cause of existential problems and therefore the source of concern in modernizing society. In the reviews of these three books I will focus not so much on their ideas and theories but on who they are, how they developed, and what that means in terms of understanding Dostoevsky's diagnosis of societal change and the problems that result (this is of course because, as I said before, the existential import of these characters is reserved for a future essay).
Notes from Underground is the shortest of these three works, not even breaking a hundred pages, but it is the short stories like these ones that perhaps best demonstrate Dostoevsky utter mastery in the area of human psychology and human nature. In fact, in this story about a quarter of the text itself is merely the underground man expressing his doctrine of himself contra humanity without any actual story appearing. He starts with, "I am a sick man," a statement far more telling than one realizes. In fact, all his theory and doctrine, his rejection of the world of "common men," his attacks upon organized theories of humanity and human progress, his sarcastically masked vitriol against anything and everything outside of himself is all linked to one essential fact: the underground man is utterly alone. Every so often he notes it. Not loudly, as he doesn't want to attract attention. Or at least, he doesn't want to look like he is attracting attention. But every so often you see a statement like, "I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society." The way it is put it sounds like some sort of unconscious tick, something that you brush off and ignore. Indeed his language makes it sound trivial, though the tone belies the less subtle word choice. For the fact remains that he is truly, utterly, alone.
When the underground man was a boy, he tells us, he never had much for friends. The fact was simply that he didn't fit. He looked upon others as something separate from himself. This is not so much a literal statement about identity as a social one. When a normal person spends time with friends, there is normally not much thought of how one composes one's self, what words one chooses, or how exactly one must act. Time spent with friends simply comes naturally. You don't teach yourself how to spend time with a friend, it's simply something you do. The underground man cannot do this. It may be a difficult point to understand, but it must be understood to be able to really know anything about the underground man. Basic human friendship, for the underground, is like some kind of thing, some kind of skill that one has or does not have, or can perhaps develop with time. The basic nature of human communication, then, is lacking. Without it, actual friends don't exist. As a result our underground man is alone. Everyone looks at him like some kind of oddity, for he is. He tells us that he blames it on his appearance, but he very well knows (and also notes) that the problem is his countenance. He cannot be a relaxed, assertive identity around others. In social situations he panics. What is for human beings simply a part of nature he cannot do. This is exemplified in the evening the underground man shares with old schoolmates. Before the meeting he is in a state of terror over how he looks, how he must compose himself, what he must say and do, in a way that is completely unnecessary and probably only damaging. At the meal itself he does the only thing he can do in social situations: he shuts down. What stops the underground man is fear, fear of his image, the impression he makes, the past, everything. As a result he is helpless, and for hours says nothing at all, for there is nothing he can say. No human conversation comes to him, only forced words and an attempt to salvage his already lost image.
The underground man is no fool. He knew exactly how the evening with his schoolmates would turn out. His worries, we realize, were not in fact unjustified, because his very nature turns them into self-fulfilling prophecies. He worries himself into such a state over his behavior that his behavior suffers terribly as a result. But then, why did he go? Indeed, as he recalls the events that led to his inviting himself to the meal in the first place, he is aware that he knew he had no good reason, and would have been better off not saying anything. But we must return to his words, "I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society." We see this sentence in a more pronounced sense now.
Perhaps the reference to dreaming is a bit confusing, and so I will take a moment to clear it up. His dreams were not of anything in particular as he describes them, but only good. But to be so consuming as he describes them as being we can probably say that they weren't merely the dreams that come during sleep. He would likely daydream for long stretches (did he have anything else to do with his time?) of accomplishing things, making friends, generally being a person. When we have such feelings we yearn to express them, to be with others. But he had no one. And so, even knowing his outcome before hand, he grasps at any opportunity to be with humanity, anything to avoid the loneliness that was and remained his sickness that he could not recover from. It was his sickness, a sickness of consciousness. For as he framed it the "normal man" was not conscious. But the normal man was also not alone as he was. That is the price of consciousness.
Being alone for so long has its effects, one can gather. Lacking friends towards which one can achieve, he used the system. He read, and read, and learned, and did well on the formal scale of achievement. He became over-intellectual, with a taste for fine description and a hatred for anything "common". This combined with his lack of reality to create a fictional self in a sense. He mentions more than once the "literary" way of acting, of speaking, of living. What is the literary way, if not the way that he has learned through his books, away from humanity? Ultimately his intellectualism becomes his shield, even against himself. If one truly understands the underground man, one sees that everything he says, literally everything, is a front. His story of his past is not just to drop an old memory that was bugging him like he claims, but an attempt to justify himself. But that was obvious. He goes much, much further. When he reflects on himself, on his foolish mistakes of youth, one can tell by his attitude that he really hasn't changed. He is decrying his own past to give the impression that he has moved beyond it. Yet he is now forty years old and still thinks about the one person he ever opened himself up to, who he encountered only twice in his life more than a decade before. Any claim against himself, any description at all, is the underground man creating an identity outside himself to point at, a straw man identical to the real self, but not the selfsame one. This way he can avoid even his own criticism by announcing it before anyone else gets the chance. Such a method can only be perceived by and therefore affect one person, which is himself. And it fails, for he knows it is a straw man. He knows his flaws; he's the one that points them out. To think that he doesn't see what he is doing at that very moment, then, is foolish. But he can't change. For such a fundamental change as to affect him must come from within, and he refuses to do any more than make an image of that self. He is completely aware that it is a straw man he is criticizing, but he refused to acknowledge it. Perhaps he cannot. Thus the underground man is truly damned.
I will stop here, having made my observations about the underground man. Once I have completed The Brothers Karamazov (who knows when that will be...) I will start to draw the comparisons and points to defend my thesis about these characters and Dostoevsky's beliefs, assuming I don't get distracted by something else, at least. But with Dostoevsky, I doubt that will happen.
posted by Derek at 11:31 PM
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