Notes from Underground (1864)

Part 2

When I first ingest the words of Notes from Underground’s narrator, the Underground Man, I think, “Wow, this guy is really eccentric.”  Then I keep reading, and I think, “Dostoevsky seems to be deliberately trying to make a personality that is as contradictory as possible—how can such a disjointed character even be believable?”  Then I keep reading . . . and I relate.  Not just to some occasional normal parts of the Underground Man—but I relate to him at his most bizarre.  Pretty soon I’m amazed by how bizarre I am.

Every person, the Underground Man informs me, “has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends.  He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret.  But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away.”

Notes from Underground is a book about the things about myself that I’m afraid to admit.  The experience of reading them is strange because I’m not used to reading books about them.  I’m not even used to hearing such things talked about.  So what at first seems mere affectatious weirdness turns out to be a level of honesty about what I’m like that I can’t even recognize until I take the Underground Man’s advice to “observe yourselves more carefully.”  

What makes this book so powerful is that it’s so unbookish.  It breaks the Catch 22 of writing.  In order to master the craft of fiction, I must immerse myself in books.  I must love words so much that I eat, breathe, and sleep them.  So difficult is this field that it requires an intense lifestyle of study.  Yet, in the midst of this lifestyle, I must not lose sight of the goal—a glimpse of real life—that elusive, living truth beyond mere books.  

What holds back most of my writing is bookishness.  My early drafts often contain little of real life—they’re mere regurgitations I’ve picked up second-hand through books, movies, conversations, etc.  What can be hard to face is that virtually every assumption I have about life I have because somebody at some point wrote a book about it, and those ideas have shaped how I view the world, perhaps especially if I’m unaware of the influence those ideas are having on me.

But the best books break through this bookish bond and help me contact something real.  Ironically, one of the greatest uses of books is to free us from the tyranny of books.  I think this is why Ezra Pound says:

“No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old, for to write in such a manner shows conclusively that the writer thinks from books, convention, and cliché, and not from life, yet a man feeling the divorce of life and his art may naturally try to resurrect a forgotten mode if he finds in that mode leaven, or if he think he sees in it some element lacking in contemporary art which might unite that art again to its sustenance, life.”

Great books help give me the ability to see the people in my life not as bookish abstractions (conservative, progressive, evangelical, worldly, sponging, spoiled, or any fill-in-the-blank category of person that I’m ready to dismiss) but as real people—that is to say, beings very much like me.  

But bookish abstractions don’t only keep me from seeing other people, they keep me from seeing myself.  One of my favorite things about Dostoevsky is his ability to reveal to me, through his characters, things about myself that I’d been previously unable to see.  I’d like to track a few ways he does startles me with a new view of myself in Notes from Underground:

1.  He doesn’t use the usual words

I often miss truths about myself because I am familiar with the usual ways of talking about inner problems.  So as soon as I hear someone begin, I already think I’ve heard it all before and there’s nothing new for me there.  But the way the Underground Man talks about himself startles me with its freshness.  Here’s an example:

“I reached the point of feeling a sort of secret abnormal, despicable enjoyment in returning home to my corner on some disgusting Petersburg night, and being acutely conscious that that day I had again done something loathsome, that what was done could never be undone, and secretly, inwardly gnaw, gnaw at myself for it, nagging and consuming myself till at last the bitterness turned into a sort of shameful accursed sweetness, and finally into real positive enjoyment!  Yes, into enjoyment, into enjoyment!  I insist upon that.”

When I first read this, I think, “What a weirdo.”  But if I pause to reflect, I realize that I’ve done the same thing.  This just isn’t how it’s normally described.  I would be more likely to think myself a victim to such feelings of shame, and only voice the part of myself that would like those feelings to go away.  Or if I were to admit that I get any enjoyment out of such an attitude, I might try to neatly describe it as “self-pity,” which still seems sanitized compared to the Underground Man’s description.  He goes out of his way to emphasize how twisted and baffling such behavior is.  I would normally do the opposite.  From the inside, it feels natural, but by underlining the odd features of such an experience, he brings me to a new level of self-honesty.

2.  He uses bald, shocking statements

I’m so used to my twisted motives, that if I were only to look at the facts of a situation, I might miss what’s going on beneath the surface.  For example, when he is trying to convince Liza to leave prostitution, he admits that he does so both because he cares for her and because he enjoys the power of manipulating her emotions.  He then throws in this commentary: “Knavery goes so easily with feeling.”

This tendency to craft paradoxical aphorisms is powerful.  It’s such an odd thing to say that it makes me pause to see if I’ve had any experiences that could prove it’s truth.  And again and again in this book, I find that I do.  These crooked aphorisms end up leaving me a little shocked with myself.

3.  He operates in extremes

The Underground Man says “I am as vain as though I had been skinnned and the very air blowing on me hurt.”  I can identify with being thin-skinned, but the Underground Man’s manifestation of vanity is so extreme that it becomes much easier to see what vanity looks like in my life.  The Underground Man’s vanity is so large that it makes it easier to to spot the vanity in me, much how if I were to put up yellow curtains, they would bring out the yellow parts of my rug.  The Underground Man does for vainglory what Othello does for jealousy.

4.  His honesty contains dishonesty

“You indeed want to say something,” the Underground Man says to himself, “but you conceal your final word out of fear.”  He is an odd mix of frankness and mystification.  This combination actually makes the honesty of the work more powerful.  Pure frankness wouldn’t ring as true.  The Underground Man says, “Heine insists that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to tell a pack of lies about himself . . . I am sure Heine is right.”  If the Underground Man were always sincere and entirely honest, I would learn less from him because I am not always sincere and entirely honest.  There is much in a human being that is contradictory and can only be expressed in contradictions.  Lev Shestov says, “How much the mere tone of Notes from Underground is worth!”  The Underground Man’s tone is so complex, so alive, so human, that it has a living truth apart from the facts he is presenting.

The Underground Man shows me that when I open myself up, I find a hunger for goodness so deep that its hole is more expansive than my ability to fill it.  His tragedy makes me long for change.  I think it no coincidence that Dostoevsky’s next major novel is Crime and Punishment, which concerns itself with the hope of transformation.