Week 13, Nov 28: The Curse of Modern Existence
Readings: 1.
Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Notes From Underground
.
(Vintage Classics edition.)
a.
Read Part One, and move ahead into Part Two
as far as you can
.
2.
Recommended: Heinrich Boll, “Action Will be
Taken: An Action Packed Story.”
>>>> within Part 1, chapters 7, 8, 9 can be read through more quickly if needed. They are the most obscure or digressive in a way
Chapter 1: most crucial
Chapts 2, 3, 4: on suffering and pleasures of suffering
Chapts 5, 6: inaction and inertia and insecurity and anxiety over that…failure to be a man of action….
Preface to lecture:
Talking to him/her-self, looking around furtively, perhaps freaking out on occasion—and alone, definitely alone….? If you accidentally bump into someone, or they bump into you and they start mumbling and complaining—it could be an underground man or woman. But perhaps the larger point is the unhappiness and misery over just being alive or ‘in existence’ due to our heightened consciousness—of ourselves in relation to others. This is not a harmonious or peaceful relation but one that is competitive, insecure, fraught. Read the headnote here:
What we see is a man glancing at
us out of the corner of his eye, very much aware of us as he speaks, very much concerned with the impression his words are making. In fact, we do not really see him, we only hear him, and not through anything so respectable as a window, but through a crack in the floorboards. He addresses the world from that
crack; he has also spent a lifetime listening at it. Everything that can be said about him, and more particularly against him, he already knows; he has, as he says in a typical paradox, overheard it all, anticipated it all, invented it all. ”I am a sick man . . . I am a wicked man.” In the space of that pause Dostoevsky introduces the unifying idea of his tale:
the instability, the perpetual
“dialectic”
of isolated consciousness
. The nameless hero – nameless “because I is all of us,” the critic Viktor Shklovsky suggested — is, like so many of Dostoevsky’s heroes,a writer. Not a professional man of letters (none of Dostoevsky’s “writers” is that), but one whom circumstances have led or forced to take up the pen, to try to fix something in words, for his own sake first of all, but also with an eye for some indeterminate others — readers, critics, judges, fellow creatures. He is a passionate amateur, a condition that marks the style and structure as well as the content of the book. Where the master practitioner would present us with a seamless and harmonious verbal construction, the man from underground, who literally cannot contain himself, breaks decorum all the time, interrupts himself, comments on his own intentions, defies his readers, polemicizes with other writers. The literariness of his “notes” and the unliterariness of his style are both
FD is one of the great writers and illustrators and thinkers of psychology or in other words the study of mental life; the unconscious and one’s conflicts with social identities or ego and super-egos. In fact much psychoanalysis (attributed to the discovery by Sigmund Freud) stems from him, Dostoevsky. — also, later on, Fredric Nietzsche the influential German philosopher (also a big fan of Dostoevsky)
He is a pioneer of diagnosing the ills of modernity and its effects on us all. Or put another way—if you want to know what makes people tick (how they work sometimes) FD is one of the people you must read. What is the “human experience”? Why does it suck to be alive sometimes? Well, read FD to figure that out or at least to have it illustrated.
Stylistically the UM is memorable as a:
1. First-person, UNRELIABLE narrator. He is a character in the story but still the narrator. Yet he is not a reliable one. We cannot take what he says at face value. He says he is sick but then cannot or will not say of what he is sick. Then he denies he is sick. Then he seems clearly mentally unbalanced or upset.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/10/baddies-in-books-dostoevsky-notes-from-underground
Is this a Underground Man from HK? I’ll let you consider that. . …. “Bus Uncle’ from years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsYRQkmVifg i.e. people who live among us and are suffering from some type of extreme alienation, mental unhealth, and so on. (I’m not trying to mock Bus Uncle – he’s emotionally disturbed and that calls for sympathy. I’m pointing to a broader social phenomenon/issue of society or living amongst other people……. It is not always pleasant and neither is ‘society.’ Think about the younger man who did nothing it seems…) The UM is more than just a psychological type/victim, but he is definitely disturbed.
FYODOR Dostoevsky and Notes From Underground :
Pub. 1864. The famous Russian communist revolution of 1917 is a bit far but it has its roots already in the 19th century and FD’s era. There is much debate and agitation about installing a new, modern era of
progress and getting rid of the monarchy/feudalism, which also implies a moving away from religion and the church (Russian orthodox Christianity).
Below are some links with more info and background material if you are interested. The Intro to the Vintage edition that you have is also long and good, so check it out too (e.g. p. iii)..
http://www1.umn.edu/lol-russ/hpgary/Russ3421/lesson8.htm
http://community.middlebury.edu/~beyer/courses/previous/ru351/novels/UGMan/ugman.html
The Underground Man is one of the most famous of all Western/global literary characters. He ranks alongside Hamlet, Don Quixote, Ulysses or Spartacus, Robinson Crusoe, Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost, etc. ( He is also an inspiration for Lu Xun’s famous “Diary of a Madman” story (and perhaps Ah Q), as is another Russian story by the writer Gogol. The Russian influence on Chinese and other modern cultures is actually huge, if forgotten today. Later the UM is an inspiration for Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, an African American classic.)
The UM is the first modern classic anti-hero. He’s crazy and nasty and awful and miserable but also compelling. You can relate to him or understand him. He indicts the modern world by implicit comparison with real heroes and ‘mean of action.’ He is completely honest, harsh on himself as much as others, and very disarming…… very human and contemporary. Or so his fans would say.
He also has lots of 20th 21st century parallels in popular culture…. anti-heroes; ‘goths’; neurotics;
eccentrics; misanthropes; and so on
READING FD:
“WICKED” in this translation might better be rendered as “NASTY”…. The emphasis is personal nastiness/meanness and spitefulness.
Consciousness and hyper-consciousness. Or hyper self-awareness. Hyper as in “too much” of it. P.4
Suffering and the enjoyment of suffering
Inaction—constantly moving back and forth in his own mind… can’t make decisions even for a second., let alone take action. SAT word for grad school: vacillation (indecision/changing meaning or action over time and location.
Theories of logic and the mind etc.— read it but don’t dwell on the details. It is more the fact that is shows how smart he really is—he’s an intellectual, not a solider-hero-man of action.
Part II – “Apropos of the wet snow”……. this is the actual story, the narrative….it works to help explain the UM of Part 1, before he was really the UM and so disturbed.
See his obsession with the military officer…. 35-36. Ends pathetically. PATHOS? Do you feel sorry for the UM? Should we?
Obsessions/attractions to his former schoolmates… Simonov and Zverkov…
Then the LIZA story….
******
Start here:
Very first page--- “I am a sick man...” and p3 and p 9 for example and 10—11, and p.17. What does he mean by wicked, do you think in the first line? Immoral? Mean? Sinner?
CONSCIOUSNESS. Action. Laws of nature. “to be overly conscious is a sickness” on page 3….
After walking thru the text a bit….. One familiar and one unfamiliar word for today:
1. MODERNITY: culturally/ideologically (beliefs, values) a crisis of faith (religious of course but also wider—of faith in progress, the future, happiness, selfhood, and so on: a crisis/loss of meaning or meaninglessness in human life. FD is way, way ahead of his time in dwelling on this and representing this era as a crisis in some psychological and mental/emotional way. Recall Stevens and the need for reimagining the world in modernity. He’s anti Christian but Dostoevsky wd agree that modern = crisis.
This is actually before World War I and the crisis of capitalism/imperialism/impending collapse that others wrestled with in the early decades of the 20th century-- including in China. Whereas
FD and the UM are thinking about Russia getting sucked into Europe and the rise of ‘scientific’ and middle-class, materialistic society, Lu Xun and Liang Qichao and others in China were concerned with the collapse of the dynastic order, Confucianism, and so on. Different responses here but similar problems. On “science” – pages 7 and 15 for example. “Europe” on 17. The UM does not say he is a Christian but the loss of that (“faith” versus reason/logic/rationality) is also in play in this novel. The emphasis on “consciousness” is part of this, and the “Men of action”.
Reason and freedom. Rationalism and science [progress]. RATIONALITY, including self=-consciousness and individuality; but taken, in this novel, to extremes. In other words, the UM represents an outcome of modernity and a type of rationality. Pps 18, 25, many places. Part of modernity but also what lead to its crisis—historically new and also corrosive to older beliefs and cultures and lifestyles. They can be seen to implode or turn against us—too much technology, science leading to mass death (war), and so on. Politically, liberalism and radicalism are not progress but regress—FD is an early and rare skeptic about radicalism and liberalism alike. Hates modernity and hates Europe, but in a Russia-peasant-people kind of way. 2. MERE EXISTENCE. aka “existentialism” Simply: the curse or misery and meaninglessness of being alive. Compare the difference between saying “I’m alive” or “life” with saying “I exist” and ‘existence.” The latter already sound depressing! Almost scientific or cold. This is embodied by the UM’s condition. More simply: the curse of modern existence. Of seeing through everything and realizing that life is meaningless and essentially unfair. Feeling alienated from others who do not see though it like this, but who seem stupidly happy or not miserable. I am simplifying here, and the novel pre-dates the later philosophical term and movement. But it influenced it in a big way (this novel). As a French writer (the famous existentialist JP Sartre) later said: “Hell is other people.” It sucks to be alive and surrounded by others. Who are better than you or who think they are (or whom you think they think they are……!).
Another way to see this: not just misery but the Absurdity of existence/being alive. Not a choice we made. No transcendence to come. Bitterness over this—trapped. We are utterly isolated and alone, whether we realize this or not. So, heaps of individual alienation/separation from other people and from happiness and conventional beliefs and values. Another related term Nihilism: all things and knowledges are unreal and ‘fake,’ including the self. There is no meaning of life or the universe. Ideas and values are not natural or objectively existing. Conventional ideas and institutions are all bad/fake too. We do not need to introduce the term existentialism in any detail for this class—and the story itself tells us all we need to know about it. But just fyi you can see: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/existentialism
Curse of Modern Existence: so FD’s novel and the UM character illustrate both things—the
the real action or value of the novel, you may feel, lies in the creation of him as a character and “type” of human being. And an anti-hero. He is the result of……many things. He or the novel or the author all are pre-cursors to the 20th century’s “existentialism.” but in some ways this is just a trivial point
The UM is a ‘modern individual” who suffers from modernity—a human/self in existential crisis. One of his specific illnesses is precisely his ability to analyze himself and others around him—and his society. Self-knowledge and introspection and constant rational, logical analysis is deadly. It can be taken to extremes. Reason is a double-edged sword at best, as compared to moral feeling and compassion and the like. Wang Anyi and Rousseau comparisons/contrasts can be made here. EGOISM or too much self-talk, self-focus. Compare to, say, Confucius, as much as to Mao Zedong (whom emphasize thinking
of/serving others and the larger community and system)…..
****
Too much self consciousness, too much rationality or logic chopping, too much competitive ness or comparison with others ie society. ---- the curse.
“Hell is other people” vs “Hell is your self”
***
Other notes below…… plot synopsis
Part I lays out, in the form of a complex and memorably voiced monologue and dialogue with “us”, this existential/modern condition.... Notice how many times he addresses us personally, as it were, drawing us in and making us want to listen.
PART II Here the chronology is reversed. Part II happens much earlier in his life. Therefore we assume that Part II actually helps explain Part I. i.e. what made him like that…..
Part II is quite different and takes us back to his earlier years and thus why he is like the way he is. His friend Simonov and his unrequited love, Eliza the prostitute. Recall Rousseau on prostitutes as well here... R says it would be fake and unpleasurable to be with one; UM is with one, falls in love with her, and treats her awfully. It isn’t fake, it is more real and human (she is kind to him) than anything else. What might this contrast say?
****************************
The anonymous narrator of
Notes from Underground
is a bitter, misanthropic man living alone in
St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1860s. He is a veteran of the Russian civil service who has recently
been able to retire because he has inherited some money. The novel consists of the “notes” that
the man writes, a confused and often contradictory set of memoirs or confessions describing and
explaining his alienation from modern society.
Notes from Underground
is divided into two sections. The first, “Underground,” is shorter and
set in the 1860s, when the Underground Man is forty years old. This section serves as an
introduction to the character of the Underground Man, explaining his theories about his
antagonistic position toward society.
The first words we hear from the Underground Man tell us that he is “a sick man . . . a wicked
man . . . an unattractive man” whose self-loathing and spite has crippled and corrupted him. He
is a well-read and highly intelligent man, and he believes that this fact accounts for his misery.
The Underground Man explains that, in modern society, all conscious and educated men should
be as miserable as he is. He has become disillusioned with all philosophy. He has appreciation
for the sublime, Romantic idea of “the beautiful and lofty,” but he is aware of its absurdity in the
context of his narrow, mundane existence.
WET SNOW:
The Underground Man complains that man’s primary desire is to exercise his free will, whether
or not it is in his best interests. In the face of utilitarianism, man will do nasty and unproductive
things simply to prove that his free will is unpredictable and therefore completely free. This
assertion partially explains the Underground Man’s insistence that he takes pleasure in his own
toothaches or liver pains: such pleasure in pain is a way of spiting the comfortable predictability
of life in modern society, which accepts without question the value of going to the doctor. The
Underground Man is not proud of all this useless behaviour, however. He has enormous
contempt for himself as a human being. He is aware that he is so overcome by inertia that he
cannot even become wicked enough to be a scoundrel, or insignificant enough to be an insect, or
lazy enough to be a true lazybones.
The second fragment of
Notes from Underground,
entitled “Apropos of the Wet Snow,”
describes specific events in the Underground Man’s life in the 1840s, when he was twenty-four
years old. In a sense, this section serves as a practical illustration of the more abstract ideas the
Underground Man sets forth in the first section. This second section reveals the narrator’s
progression from his youthful perspective, influenced by Romanticism and ideals of “the
beautiful and lofty,” to his mature perspective in 1860, which is purely cynical about beauty,
loftiness, and literariness in general.
“Apropos of the Wet Snow” describes interactions between the Underground Man and various
people who inhabit his world: soldiers, former schoolmates, and prostitutes. The Underground
Man is so alienated from these people that he is completely incapable of normal interaction with
them. He treats them with a mixture of disgust and fear that results in his own effacement or
humiliation—which in turn result in remorse and self-loathing.
The Underground Man’s alienation manifests itself in all kinds of relationships. When walking in
the park,
he obsesses about whether to yield the right of way to a soldier whom he does not
even know.
Then, in a confused attempt at social interaction, the Underground Man deliberately
follows some school acquaintances to a dinner where he is not wanted, alternately insulting them
openly and craving their attention and friendship. Later that same evening, the Underground Man
attempts to rescue an attractive young prostitute named Liza by delivering impassioned,
sentimental speeches about the terrible fate that awaits her if she continues to sell her body.
When Liza comes to visit the Underground Man in his shoddy apartment several days later, he
him
. The Underground Man continues to insult Liza throughout the visit. Hurt and confused, she
leaves him alone in his apartment.
Here the Underground Man decides to end his notes. In a footnote at the end of the novel,
Dostoevsky reveals that the Underground
Man fails to make even this simple decision
to stop
