Notes on Notes from Underground
Fools Russian where angels fear to tread
I speed-read the last half of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground today. I seldom make time for fiction, but it was short enough—I’d encourage anyone to invest the time.
The narrator is all too familiar. Completely relatable: a cross-section which cuts straight through the middle of me. Cross-sections, I’ll self-consciously remind you, are flat representations which exclude dimensions orthogonal to their plane.
The narrator is ill-proportioned, socially and materially. Liza accuses him, after his first long monologue at her, of sounding like a book. Books, I’ve said before, are plainly the primary antagonist in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
When the narrator manages to overcome the paralysis of his over-thinking, he can converse only in two ways. He can give to others only extremely controlled, affected performances on the one hand, or wild and spontaneous outbursts on the other.
I am reminded of the injunction of 1960s humanist psychology to release everyone from their own “repression.” If this narrator is the archetypal patient to be treated, trapped in his own head, buried in performances to manipulate the perceptions of others, then of course it is forgivable to conceptualize a “real self” to be brought into expression from beneath layers of repression.
The narrator lives almost fully as a subject to his own scrutiny; as the object of his own thought. I don’t know that I’ve said that right, because subject and object are collapsed. What I mean is that he lives most of his life with his strange loop short-circuited. He considers this dignity. The unnatural connection opens and closes sporadically, leaving him dipping in and out of reality. From an outside vantage, he freezes for minutes and hours.
He speaks and acts virtually, first. Only seldom do these silently rehearsed speeches or actions actually swell to fill his hand-puppet body to animate his thinking into doing. In fact, when they do, they swell so violently that they exceed the bounds of the situation. He overflows into histrionics. His ego, his endlessly rehearsed virtual mode of being, straddles his mid-action body like a novice rider straddling a bucking horse.
Abstractly speaking, the complementary nature of all and nothing make for an equality of magnitude and nature. The narrator spends the whole book flipping between the equality of these polarities without resistance (but still with the heat of the friction). Every tiny decision he is forced to make in company means either absolutely nothing, or it means a life-changing everything. The threshold to which one’s spirit rises from within from thought to action is, in him, a barricade to be charged with full force of will—nothing is done lightly.
The narrator can only despise, with envy, those of the higher class to which he bars himself any permission to fraternize or join. He fantasizes joining them only to better them, to humble them, to be a hero. But of course, when he musters the courage to dare prove his fantastical potency, it blows up wildly. The “lifting” of his own self-”repression” is met with immediate scorn and violence—rightly so.
Today, the world will provide so, so, so much more rope before the sudden hanging at the end. Slack, we might call it. Why let delusional people hit reality too quickly when there is profit in extending their plank a few more meters? Please pardon the mixed metaphor. But whether it is performed on a gallows or on the deck of a ship, it is either way a very, very slow execution that we sentence lost people to today.
The narrator’s mind is a beautiful filigree of delicate words which he jealously hordes for only himself. The story itself is said to be his private writings, meant for no audience. Of course, he also regularly addresses the reader(s) as “ladies and gentlemen.” He is alive only in an imagined posterity. He obsesses over how others will forever remember him. He obsesses over how he’ll, as we say today, live rent-free in the lives of those he touched. Of course, everyone whose life he has touched lives rent-free in his.
Today, however, that rent will be collected. He who hesitates is lost… and found! Rejoice!
We see great value people like the narrator now—but do not pretend it is out of benevolence. When I say value, I mean it like we value gold teeth in a corpse. When Notes from Underground was written—a century and a half ago—there is no global and public stage to swell into. There was no easy passage to the private sanctum of the alien, no way to harness the tides of their oceanic interiors. Cyberspace is our latest, most versatile catchment area for oversized minds in marginalized bodies. Any act of the mind, now, can be materially captured in a way what the narrator could only waste in daydreams. Great turbines, today, are driven by the force of his wasted passions.
We are an efficient society.
Walter Mitty—the Walter Mitty of Walter Mitty’s imagination, that is—is now an embodied being. A reckoning. An energy source. He can live to exhibit, to some audience big or small, all the dream things he truly is. Because, long ago, what was once the global village became transformed into the global theatre. Words and dreams attract attention, and attention is a lucrative trade.
So what does that mean? That Dostoevsky’s narrator can now be more a man of action today than yesterday’s man of action? More active and consequential in the world when disembodied than when embodied?
At least, it means that the dimensions and proportions of cyberspace, or Fairyland, when detected in our social and aesthetic architecture, must be taken seriously. What we used to consider delusion is now very-much supported by convention and institutional design. The world continues to reshape itself to accommodate characters precisely like Dostoevsky’s narrator. It anticipates the outbursts and performances of out-sized egos, milking them for sour sustenance.
The trick the world plays, then, is in prescribing action. In visibly lengthening the rope, extending the plank, clearing a way for a few more meters downward or seaward. In argument and in war, I hear it said that the best course of action is to always leave your enemy a route of escape. This path of least resistance, this retreat, is always sold as a battle. Its travel is lauded as a brave action on behalf of the coward who, like the narrator, mirrors every trivial action as, simultaneously, the most momentous turning point in their lives.
“It may seem like a small thing, but what you’re doing right now is huge!” says the vampire to the precocious middle-aged blood donor.
Further thoughts on the book will be melded inseparably into future writings. As Dostoevsky illustrates at many levels in this story, a small hit of lit` will send anybody tripping! So read with care.