Notes from the Underground

Notes from the Underground was the subject. of our Swarthmore course Uncanny Journeys last Wednesday. It is an early novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I had never read it before. At a certain stage of my life I read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, but not this work. Back then, I was reading on my own, so I had no teacher to provide background. So this work. and the discussion, was something of a revelation. Notes is primarily the ravings of "the Underground Man," a very disturbed person. The opening lines are: I am a sick man ... I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don’t consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. What is disturbing is that the more the Underground Man raves, the more you begin to see that he is not all that different from us - from people I know and even myself. Maybe his extreme views are not all that extreme - he is just saying things out loud that we have all thought at times, but kept to ourselves. What was particularly interesting is how at times it felt like I was looking into the heart of an avid folllower of Donald Trump. Take this outburst: "....that man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one POSITIVELY OUGHT (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very ‘most advantageous advantage’ which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that man must want a rationally advantageous choice? What man wants is simply INDEPENDENT choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice." In other words, when circumstances (economic, social, cultural, personal) have pushed you into a corner, you are not going to do the rational thing. You are going to do what you want to do! There was a lot packed into Wednesday's session, so much so that both Ellen and I feel we would like to listen to it again. It was recorded, and that is probably an option, once we figure out how to do it!

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)