Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Not just wicked, no, I never even managed to become anything: neither wicked nor good, neither a scoundrel nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect.  And now I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and utterly futile consolation that it is even impossible for an intelligent man seriously to become anything, and only fools become something.  Yes, sir, an intelligent man on the nineteenth century must be and is morally obliged to be primarily a characterless being; and a man of character, an active figure--primarily a limited being.

Last week I had an infected wisdom tooth, because I, a 32-year old man, never had them removed like I should have.  It was a bad infection, and the worst toothache of my life.  But it's hard to disagree with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, who tells us there is even pleasure in a toothache.  The pleasure comes from the "moaning" and "craftiness" that continues even after the toothache has abated, a moaning which no one believes but the injured party persists in anyhow.  Our gripes are artificial, Dostoevsky says, but our own knowledge of their artificiality, and our rottenness in persisting in them, is a kind of gripe also.  The moan of the man with the toothache is as much about his spirit as his body.

Notes from Underground is split it into two sections: "Notes," which purports to provide reasons for why the narrator has shut himself up underground--literally--for twenty years, and "Apropos of the Wet Snow," which gives the actual narrative, or at least part of it, for how he ended up there.  Philosophically, both are a reaction to the leading philosophies of the day, which have arrived in Russia from Europe.  The Underground Man rails against the trendy notion that man can be "anatomized" by scientists and his society engineered by utopians to fulfill his every want.  For the Underground Man, free will is the essence of man's existence.  If you could mathematically anticipate and cater to his every want, what he would end up wanting is to be free of the "little table."  Wanting is for wanting's sake, even to the point where it is unfulfillable, and our unfulfillable desires redound to make us sick of our own needy selves.

That's about as much as I can say about the novel's philosophy.  I don't really have enough background in it, and I'd need to read the thing again at least once to really say much more.  The Underground Man's style is frenetic and digressive--as far away from the "little table" or the "crystal palace" as one can get, stylistically.  What interested me more, on this single reading, was his strange character, especially as evidenced in the second section.  His story goes basically like this: he goes to visit an old friend on a whim, whom he discovers is trying to throw a farewell dinner for a man the narrator hates.  The narrator insists on being included, even though he can't pay for the dinner and doesn't like anyone involved, and he ends up making a complete ass of himself.  Later, he wanders into a brothel where his intelligence impresses a prostitute, but when she does what he asks and comes to visit him at home, he's embarrassed of his weakness and his poverty and lashes out at her.

The Underground Man is not nice.  He's not admirable, he's not a hero, though these are things he'd very much like to be.  Before going underground, he lives a life of fantasy, imagining himself standing up to bullies and more successful people and commanding their respect.  When these fantasies peter out, or bump up against the hard wall of reality, he goes on long jags of self-loathing.  He considers himself to be intelligent, but his intelligence is a curse, because he knows how futile and meaningless social success really is, even as he envies those who have it.

The Underground Man is an incel.  That's what I couldn't help thinking the whole time.  His regard for his own intelligence becomes a pretext for removing himself from society.  His hatred for successful civil service officers is not so different from hatred of "Chads."  His ideology doesn't have quite the same contours when it comes to gender, although he does end up projecting his failures with other men onto a woman.  And philosophically, it's all backwards, because it's the utopians who come up with schemes like government-mandated girlfriends.  But the psychology, the way that self-loathing is tied up with hatred of systems, well, that seems not so different to me.

If that comparison seems weak, I think it's because the "incel" is very much a creature of our time.  There are other creatures, no less timely, that share similar traits--4channers, Pepe frogs, god, the whole bunch--but in the end, Notes seems to me to suggest that these beasts are manifestations of a kind of animal that can be seen throughout modern history.  That Dostoevsky is sympathetic toward his Underground Man (he's right about the utopians, and the civil service officers are pretty shallow) is only right; it's an acknowledgement, perhaps, of what our most shameful and pathetic impulses can lead to if unchecked.  The despair that the Underground Man feels in the face of modernity is genuine, but the way that it is enacted--making a scene at the dinner, going out of your way to bump a guy in the shoulder on the street to prove you're there--is pathetic.  And the fact that you know it's pathetic doesn't make it less pathetic.  Our world might be better if the Underground Men retreated into their own holes, and wrote undelivered manifestos, instead of finding each other on Reddit.