Mind the heart

(Notes on Dostoevsky's Underground)

I finished Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground earlier this semester. I have been meaning to discuss it here for a few days, but have not had the time until now.

The book is a novel comprising two distict main parts. The first is a series of rambling first-person essays that lay out the protagonist's worldview. The second is a narrative that dramatizes the wretchedness of his lonely existence. Dostoevsky sketches a picture of the mediocre and isolated mind; the protagonist is confident in his ability to think (and only his ability to think), but he is painfully conscious of his inability to exercise his intellect for any particular positive cause. He is unable to conquer his selfish and cowardly nature.

It was not only that I could not become spiteful, I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything. Yes, a man in the nineteenth century must and morally ought to be pre-eminently a characterless creature; a man of character, an active man is pre-eminently a limited creature. That is my conviction of forty years.

This narrator, however, is quite well aware that his attitudes are absurd. He satirizes his own miserable pride, recounting his elaborate schemes to achieve vindication on insignificant points of honor. He describes despising men of superior rank simply because they were less intelligent than he, but being exposed to shame by his pathetic attempts to claim their respect; his desperate pleading for esteem demonstrated anything but a greatness of mind. He describes how he condescended to preach nobly of freedom and dignity to a prostitute he had just taken, but was reduced to misery by her later arrival at his doorstep; he was ashamed to have her witness the prison of loneliness in which her philosopher-redeemer lived. He had fallen in love with the girl, but was too proud to let her see his ignoble condition. In his selfishness, even love begat hate.

"Liza, do you despise me?" I asked, looking at her fixedly, trembling with impatience to know what she was thinking.

She was confused, and did not know what to answer.

"Drink your tea," I said to her angrily. I was angry with myself, but, of course, it was she who would have to pay for it. A horrible spite against her suddenly surged up in my heart; I believe I could have killed her. To revenge myself on her I swore inwardly not to say a word to her all the time. "She is the cause of it all," I thought.

... "Save you!" I went on, jumping up from my chair and running up and down the room before her. "Save you from what? But perhaps I am worse than you myself. Why didn't you throw it in my teeth when I was giving you that sermon: 'But what did you come here yourself for? was it to read us a sermon?' Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your hysteria--that was what I wanted then! Of course, I couldn't keep it up then, because I am a wretched creature, I was frightened, and, the devil knows why, gave you my address in my folly. Afterwards, before I got home, I was cursing and swearing at you because of that address, I hated you already because of the lies I had told you. Because I only like playing with words, only dreaming, but, do you know, what I really want is that you should all go to hell. That is what I want. I want peace; yes, I'd sell the whole world for a farthing, straight off, so long as I was left in peace.

Dostoevsky knows his audience. He does not make the mistake of so many modern anti-intellectual evangelicals: he does not rail against the use of the mind. Rather, he criticizes modern rationalism by satirizing his own rationality. The author does not avoid intellectual engagement. His erudition and literary skill are obvious. He explores the reach of his intellect, however, in order to expose its limitations.

Oh, gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a harmless vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?

The protagonist-narrator is not given a name. We know him as the Underground Man. He says that he has spent his life underground -- that is, isolated from the community of man, left alone in bitterness.

Apart from the one fundamental nastiness the luckless mouse succeeds in creating around it so many other nastinesses in the form of doubts and questions, adds to the one question so many unsettled questions that there inevitably works up around it a sort of fatal brew, a stinking mess, made up of its doubts, emotions, and of the contempt spat upon it .... Of course the only thing left for it is to dismiss all that with a wave of its paw, and, with a smile of assumed contempt in which it does not even itself believe, creep ignominiously into its mouse-hole. There in its nasty, stinking, underground home our insulted, crushed and ridiculed mouse promptly becomes absorbed in cold, malignant and, above all, everlasting spite.

Dostoevsky, a disillusioned former radical of the nineteenth century, writes in defense of a believer's worldview. Attacking both determinism and individualism, Dostoevsky uses Notes from Underground to argue that meaning will not be found in human reason or self-direction. Man cannot find purpose or guidance within himself; he knows perfectly well that his own nature will betray him. Isolation is alienation, and alienation is ugliness.

The book offers very few glimpses of beauty, but its brightest moments come in the context of community. The men whom the Underground Man despises are far less repulsive than he, simply because they associate with one another. The darkness of Liza's room is the most beautiful scene in the book, simply because the protagonist attempts abstractly to share someone else's heartache for once. Dostoevsky has no intention of making life easy on his protagonist, however. The story does not end happily. There is nothing the Underground Man can do to redeem himself from the nightmare of himself.

As for what concerns me in particular I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what's more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men -- men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalised man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea.

| Posted by Wilson at 19:00 Central | TrackBack
| Report submitted to the Humanities Desk