Shelley: Frankenstein

Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus; Penguin Classics, London, 2003

Mary Shelley grew up in a household composed of her father, noted rationalist philosopher and writer William Godwin, her step-sister Fanny (who was the 1st daughter of Mary's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft and her American lover, financier Gilbert Imlay) as well as Godwin's 2nd wife and her children.  Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had died 10 days after Mary's birth, due to complications from the birth.  According to Maurice Hindle's introduction, Mary grew up with a father who espoused the view that a "new system, based on 'universal benevolence', could create a just and virtuous society," maintaining that this virtue "would naturally emerge from the exercise of reason and free will, as developed in an 'enlightened' society."  Hindle quotes Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and writes "knowledge, and the enlargement  of intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy...and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society."

Hindle mentions the Gothic imagery popular at the time Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and the use of monster imagery to demonize anything challenging the status quo.  Hindle notes that this style even permeated the writing of conservative political philosophers such as Edmund Burke, and in his introduction he includes a passage from Burke commenting on the French Revolution where he wrote that "vice assumes a new body. The spirit transmigrates; and, far from losing its principle of life by the change in its appearance, it is renovated in its new organs with the fresh vigour of a juvenile activity.  It walks abroad; it continues its ravages..."  Godwin himself was commonly described as a monster.  Walpole described him as 'one of the greatest monsters exhibited by history' and Burke called Godwin's opinions "pure defecated atheism...the brood of that putrid carcase the French Revolution."

Hindle ends his introduction by quoting physicist Brian Easlea in Fathering the Unthinkable who raises the issue of "Mary Shelley's indictment of masculine ambition" and her exposure of "the compulsive character of masculine science."  Hindle tells us that in her last novel, Shelley ends by having the hero say "This...is Power! Not to be strong of limb, hard of heart, ferocious and daring; but to be kind, compassionate and soft." In Frankenstein, Shelley certainly seems to want to highlight the hubris and the danger of the purely intellectual approach to science, something that still resonates today when the newspapers are full of reports of people trying to manipulate DNA to create new, "better" beings, implanting uteruii into women so that they can bear children, manipulating our environment on a scale that is truly earth-shattering and then proposing to mine the solar system for our short term benefit...  The awareness that today these reckless experiments in the name of 'science' are being driven by greed rather than by the intellectual thrill of discovery, or by a thirst for power via domination over nature, just makes mankind's hubris that much more unbearable.

The original frontispiece for Frankenstein, contains a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost.  This poem has been referenced in so many texts we've read the last couple of months that I am going to have to finally read it.  Echoes of this poem come up again and again in this text.

pg 96 "Alas...when falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness?"

Shelley writes alot about nature.  "When happy, inanimate nature had the power of bestowing on me the most delightful sensations.  A serene sky and verdant fields filled me with ecstasy." [pg 71].  The nature in Switzerland, where she and P.B. Shelley were living when she conceived of and wrote Frankenstein, contributes an enormous amount to the Gothic - as well as the elemental - feel of the book.  I couldn't help but compare her descriptions of the area around Geneva with her mother's descriptions of Denmark, Norway and Sweden when she travelled through those countries in the 1790s.  I find her writing particularly her choices of adjectives (imperial, vast, glorious, immutable and especially the overused adjective 'sublime') overwrought but I did appreciate the scenery she evokes, and the sense of place.

The abrupt sides of vast mountains were before me; a few shattered pines were scattered around; and the solemn silence of this glorious presence-chamber of imperial Nature was broken only by the brawling waves or the fall of some vast fragment, the thunder sound of the avalanche or the cracking, reverberated along the mountains, of the accumulated ice, which, through the silent working of immutable laws, was ever and anon rent and torn, as if it had been but a plaything in their hands.  These sublime and magnificent scenes afforded me the greatest consolation ...  [pg 99]

...Mont Blanc, the supreme and magnificent Mont Blanc, raised itself from the surrounding aiguilles, and it's tremendous dome overlooked the valley. [...] The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal nature bade me weep no more.  [pg 98] 

Shelley was particularly affected by her hikes around the Mer de Glace near Chamonix.

The sea, or rather the vast river of ice, wound among its dependent mountains, whose aerial summits hung over its recesses.  Their icy and glittering peaks shone in the sunlight over the clouds.  My heart, which was before sorrowful, now swelled with something like joy; I exclaimed - 'Wandering spirits, if indeed ye wander, and do not rest in your narrow beds, allow me this faint happiness, or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life.'

I can't help but contrast this paean to the joys of life with the perspective Shelley offered some 25 pages earlier.   Frankenstein's youngest brother William is murdered by Frankenstein's nameless monstrous creation. Frankenstein's friend Henry, in an excess of exclamation points and overblown sentiment, tries to console him:

Dear lovely child, he now sleeps with his angel mother! Who that had seen him bright and joyous in his young beauty, but must weep over his untimely loss! To die so miserably; the feel the murderer's grasp!  How much more a murderer, that could destroy such radiant innocence!  Poor little fellow! one only consolation have we; his friends mourn and weep but he is at rest.  The pang is over, his sufferings are at an end forever.  A sod covers his gentle form, and he knows no pain.  He can no longer be a subject for pity; we must reserve that for his miserable survivors.

Truly a bleak outlook on life.  I'm not sure that I would have found Henry's words comforting in the face of the loss of a child.  This is always something I have never understood about many religions: the Christian religions which preach about living your life in such a way that you may ascend to heaven but regardless you will have to spend time in purgatory (and as Dante showed us in his Inferno, there was no section except the outermost part of the circles of Hell where you would want to spend even one second); the Vedic texts and Buddhist philosophy which counsel people to aim for the almost unattainable Nirvana; the Greeks describing an unattainable perfection of forms; to the Islamic texts with their promises of the companionship of pure ones in paradise.  Why should there be any sorrow or resistance to death if what comes later is what you are supposed to be aiming for, if life is just something to be endured and suffered through.  I can understand that, if day-to-day life is hard, people would dream of something better after they die but in that case, why fear it or grieve its coming?

Frankenstein is a Gothic story.  Shelley describes the scientist's dark arts; and the original concept for the story came to her in a dream when she saw the image of the pale creator bent over his awful creation.  She describes his research:

Darkness had no effect upon my fancy; and a churchyard was to me merely the receptacle of bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worm... I saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; I beheld the corruption of death succeed to to the blooming cheek of life; I saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. [pg 52-53]

Even the 'monster' says that "Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it." [pg 102] - though he had far more reason than Frankenstein himself to find life unbearable.  "So much does suffering blunt even the coarsest sensations of men." [pg 168]

Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.  I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy [he says to Frankenstein] and I shall again be virtuous. [pg 103]

The monster pleads a good case for the torment of his misery and, aside from his quickness to wreak revenge, he seemed to have the possibility of goodness as well as baseness within him - just as mankind does.  Yet Frankenstein, despite his initial agreement to create a companion for the monster, deems him "a fiend whose unparalleled barbarity had desolated [Frankenstein's] heart." [pg 170] I don't find the monster, other than his physical abilities, to be any more malignant, evil, depraved, barbarous etc than mankind.  The media and history books are full of people far more evil, depraved and ill-intentioned than Frankenstein's monster.  To this day.  So far civilization does not seem to have extracted or cured any of these tendencies from human nature.

At the end of the story the monster laments:

Once my fancy was soothed with dreams of virtue, of fame, and of enjoyment.  Once I falsely hoped to meet with beings who, pardoning my outward form, would love me for the excellent qualities which I was capable of unfolding.  pg 223

Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all human kind has sinned against me?  pg 224 

Society still judges people by appearance, forgiving the beautiful and engaging and condemning the ugly, the odd, the different.

Frankenstein is a good example of reason gone bad.  His scientific curiosity and his hubris took him into dangerous territory and like the scientists today who push the envelope either to see if they can or because of greed, he didn't engage his intellect to consider what the results of his actions might be, nor his humanity to care about the consequences.  Shelley seemed to want to offer a warning about the dangers of actions untempered by humanity or by those human feelings which we tend to think are desirable (compassion, fellow feeling, mercy, unselfishness, affection etc).  She has Frankenstein say:

A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind, and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.  I do not think that the  pursuit of knowledge is an exception to this rule.  If the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken your affections, and to destroy your taste for those simple pleasures in which no alloy can possibly mix, then that study is certainly unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind. pg 56

He goes on to say that had this rule been observed Greece would not have been enslaved and the Americas would have been discovered more gradually and the existing empires (Mexico and Peru are the examples given) not destroyed.  In Frankenstein's case he allowed his reason to be a slave to his passion (which Hume has said is how it always has to be).  The consequences of reason being the slave of dark passions (greed, jealousy, hate, envy) often seem to be the most terrible.  The narrator [pg 29] notes that Frankenstein "appeared to despise himself for being the slave of passion"but here he is just speaking about allowing his equanimity to be affected by despair or grief.  In the rest of the book however, Frankenstein reminds me of Werther in his self-absorption and lamentations about how his feelings are affecting him.  Page after page about his anguish, shame, guilt, despair, wretchedness, suffering, melancholy etc etc etc. Ah poor me!!

After moping around for years, worrying and depressing everyone around him, Frankenstein has the gall to say to Elizabeth, his patiently-waiting childhood companion, on their long-delayed wedding day:

You are sorrowful, my love. Ah! if you knew what I have suffered, and what I may yet endure you would endeavour to let me taste the quiet and freedom from despair that this one day at least permits me to enjoy. [pg 197]

The self-absorbed, whiny, arrogant man! His sufferings?!?  He caused the death of his youngest brother and allowed the execution of an innocent young family servant unjustly blamed for the murder.  He's kept his family and especially Elizabeth waiting and in the dark about how he is doing - and WHAT he is doing - for almost his entire adult life.  He has unleashed a monster and treated it in such a way that its only aim is to wreak revenge on Frankenstein by taking away anyone he loves (as Frankenstein has prevented the monster from having any loving companion in his life) - and he doesn't warn any of his 'loved' ones of the danger they are in because he is too afraid to own to the enormity and the consequences of his actions.  And he then has the audacity to chastise Elizabeth for being melancholy on their wedding day.

Towards the end, Frankenstein speaks to Captain Walton about reason and passion.  He asks him to "undertake [Frankenstein's] unfinished work; and I renew this request now, when I am only induced by reason and virtue. [...] I dare not ask you to do what I think right, for I may still be misled by passion.

Shelley also has the monster suffer the effects of passion:

I knew that I was preparing myself for a deadly torture; but I was the slave, not the master, of an impulse, which I detested, yet could not disobey.  pg 222

Both Frankenstein and his monster allowed their passions to take over their lives and this weakness consumed their lives and laid waste to the lives of everyone around them.

At the end, Shelley imbues the monster with all the mixtures of qualities we find in mankind.

My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy; and when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change, without torture such as you cannot even imagine.  [pg 222]

Shelley wrote these words in 1816 yet today we are still trying to figure it all out.  There was an article in the newspaper today reporting the results of some experiments into humans behaving in mean or bullying ways. Situations were set up with research subjects where they were told or induced to ostracize or gang up on or to make things difficult for a few other participants.  When they assessed the feelings of the people who had been bullied and compared it to the people who had done the bullying behaviours, they found that it was psychologically more traumatic for the person acting badly or meanly than for the victimized or oppressed person.

I didn't like Shelley's overwrought writing style but the situation she imagined and the themes she wove into her work still hold resonance today - and her imagery has endured and kept a firm place in people's imaginations and in our roster of bogeymen.

Discussion: DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover

This text is being read in the section called Politics & The Body, along with The Communist Manifesto, Freud, Thoreau and Frankenstein.  Professor Thomas Grieve led the class this time, a specialist in literature from the modern period (1910-1930)

Grieve listed some of the themes in the book:

• Loss of pastoral world
• Class system
• War

He quoted from Wordsworth

"THE WORLD IS TOO MUCH WITH US; LATE AND SOON"

          The world is too much with us; late and soon,

          Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

          Little we see in Nature that is ours;

          We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

          The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;

          The winds that will be howling at all hours,

          And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;

          For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

          It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be

          A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

          So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

          Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

          Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

          Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

Mellors represented the world that is being lost.  He is scornful of upper classes so he retreats to dialect, Lady Chatterly has to meet Mellors on his terms, in his world: in the woods (nature), having him speak in dialect to her though he can speak the same "King's English" that she speaks.  His virility is linked to nature and in many ways he is portrayed as the "Noble Savage".

We discussed why Connie chose or connected with Mellors.  It began with compassion, when Mellors saw her as vulnerable and as compassionate.  They each saw each other as distinct human beings - he saw the "woman" in her, not just the person.

Lady Chatterly's Lover is emphatically a post WWI war novel.  They had just experienced a horrendous war; one which made civilization realize that it had not advanced as far as they had been thinking.  This aspect of a damaged generation comes up several times.  At Mellors and Connie's 1st sex encounter, she is crying with all the anguish of her generation's forlornness pg 125
Going back to the 1st lines of the book, Lawrence begins with the "tragic age"

Ours is essentially a tragic age..We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

We discussed how Mellors is an early "angry young man", a manifestation we are not one with yet, though the youth are getting angrier and the abilities to demonstrate or act on their anger are much more global.  The situation in many European countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy and Spain, with 60-70% unemployment for men in their 20s, as well as the lack of possibilities for many immigrants in countries such as France, are leading to a build up of rage and despair.

Grieve provided us with some background to the writing of the novel.  How does this match DHL's life? He came from lower classes in mining town; ran off with married woman, an aristocrat; at the time he was writing LCL he was impotent because of his TB, his wife Frieda was sexually voracious and taking lovers, and making sure he knew it.  For Lawrence, depressed because of the state of the world, tender-hearted fucking is what will save us.  His hero, Mellors holds the power.  Lawrence has been accused of being misogynistic and we found this hard to assess just from one novel.  He writes ostensibly from a woman's point of view yet his writing is very much a man's perspective with its emphasis on the phallus.  It's the man who liberates the woman.  He educates her, guides her, he is the teacher, the wise experienced one, who frees and awakens her sexually.  For me it was quite paternalistic.  I don't know if I would call Lawrence misogynistic or whether he is just, unavoidably, male in outlook and focus.

Lawrence sees sex as a preventative or as protection against the decay of the world: against mechanization, industrialization, the weakening of men.  Some of his concerns are right on the money: the blight of industrialization, the lure and destruction of both Mammon and the bitch-goddess (much as I don't buy into the female characterization of this) of Success.

Lawrence: Lady Chatterly's Lover

Lawrence, D.H.: Lady Chatterly's Lover; Bantam Classics, New York, 2007

This edition is a Bantam re-issue of the "Original Unexpurgated 1928 Orioli Edition" with a 1968 preface by Lawrence Durrell and a newer introduction by Ronald Friedland.  The backstory and explanations about this book were almost as fascinating as the book itself.  Because of the language and the subject matter, Lawrence knew it would have trouble getting it published in England so it was published in Italy.  I remember reading this book in either my late teens or early 20's.  I don't remember finding the book to be anything special at the time - though I was probably equal parts titillated and made anxious by the language and sex scenes, having been an obedient and overtly conforming child.

Reading this book now, from the vantage point of well-established adulthood, I found the descriptive language enthralling and the perspective on the industrial age fascinating.  The use of dialect - and I'm more tolerant of the use of words like fuck and cunt now - not because I'm more tolerant to crude language (I still think it's lazy, limiting and monotonous) but because I'm open to the idea that Lawrence needed to use these words to communicate the point he was trying to make.  This changed viewpoint no doubt owes something to the years I've accumulated but also something to the course texts I've been reading and discussing since September.  I also think it reflects how the world has changed in the last few decades, that is, even within my lifetime.

The book starts out with Sir Clifford and Lady Chatterly [Constance] married; and though they feel during their one month's honeymoon that they are intimate, it's not a physical intimacy.

this intimacy which was beyond sex, and beyond a man's "satisfaction. ... No, the intimacy was deeper, more personal than that. And the sex was merely an accident, or an adjunct: one of the curious obsolete, organic processes which persisted in its own clumsiness, but was not really necessary. pg 9

 After the honeymoon in 1917 Clifford ships off to war.  He is shipped back home in 1918, "smashed", paralyzed and with no interest in any physical intimacy with Connie.  Their life is one of her supporting him in his efforts to achieve fame and fortune as a writer.  His dependence and her subservience as 'helpmeet' create a life they both initially deem intimacy.  Connie eventually looks for something more and begins a sexual love affair with Sir Clifford's gamekeeper, Mellors.  Mellors is a Tevershall man, born into a collier family but raised above his 'station' during his service during the war, in India.  He comes back, somewhat physically damaged by the war, emotionally damaged by his unhappy marriage to a local woman, and determined to live a quiet life in the woods, alone.

Lawrence expounds upon 2 main themes in his novel: the evils of industrialization and the redeeming power of sexual connection.  His descriptions of the Nottinghamshire countryside, where he grew up, are evocative of the blight that descended upon the green countryside of England.

but alas, one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit, with its clouds of steam and smoke, and on the damp, hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village, a village which began almost at the park gates, and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for long and gruesome mile: houses, rows of wretched, small, begrimed, brick houses, with black slate roofs for lids, sharp angles and wilful, blank dreariness.  pg 10

The people were as haggard, shapeless, and dreary as the countryside, and as unfriendly. pg 11

...up a dark, damp drive, burrowing through gloomy trees, out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding... pg 11 

Sir Clifford's friends are all a bit effete, snobs with various character gaps and hangups, prejudices and damage.  The most appealing of these for me was Tommy Dukes, his bachelor friend who, when asked whether he believes in anything, replies:

"Me? Oh, intellectually I believe in having a good heart, a chirpy penis, a lively intelligence, and the courage to say 'shit!' in front of a lady."  [pg 40]

Lawrence writes well about the class system and its inflexibility.   He describes the gulf between Wragby Hall, seat of the Chatterly's, and the village people of Tevershall, writing on page 12

Gulf impassable, breach indescribable, such as is perhaps non-existent south of the Trent.  But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable, across which no communication could take place.  You stick to your side, I'll stick to mine! A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

The character of Michaelis, Lady Chatterly's 'upstart' Irish lover gives Lawrence a chance to show the relentless class system in England, in Clifford's contempt for his presumption and for being, despite all his success and his polish, the "wrong sort", an arriviste and a "Dublin mongrel."  Connie feels some sympathy for him, the outsider - "and when her sympathy was awakened she was quite devoid of class feeling."  [pg 23]  Michaelis doesn't reach her as a woman though, despite the sex - he doesn't love her.  For Lawrence, achieving orgasm at the same time is a key feature of true union between a man and a woman.  While I admired his attempts to describe love, sex etc through a woman's viewpoint, the main perspective in the book seemed very much male, with this being just one example.

Clifford is an unsympathetic character.  I initially felt sorry for him, gone to war to do his duty and returned home broken and empty.  However he is very self-absorbed, and becomes increasingly selfish - with a child's selfishness - as the years passed.  He is a snob and a man who, even without the excuse of injury and paralysis, would have self-restricted himself to a shallow, cold life empty of human connection.  Though sexual intromission is not possible for him, he has no desire for any physical intimacy with his wife, no physical connection.  His sense of entitlement due to his class, heritage and position are accepted by him to be his god-given birthright.

"No wonder the men hate you," she said.

"They don't!" he replied. "And don't fall into errors: in your sense of the word, they are not men. They are animals you don't understand, and never could.  Don't thrust your illusions on other people.  The masses were always the same, and will always be the same.  Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our collier or the Ford motorcar workmen...It is the masses: they are the unchangeable.  It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.  Panem et circenses! Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus.  What is wrong today, is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme, and posioned our masses with a little education."

[...] "And what we need to take up now," he said, "is whips, nor swords.  The masses have been ruled since time began, and till time ends, ruled they will have to be.  It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves." [pg 200]

Despite Sir Clifford's opinion that the masses and the class system are immutable, and not only should not be changed but cannot be changed, he is just as fully convinced that, give him a son fathered by anyone, and he can bring him up a proper Chatterly, ready and able to assume his rightful position.

"I don't care who his father might be, so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.  Give me the child of any healthy, normally intelligent man, and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterly of him.  It is not who begets us, that matters, but where fate places us.  Place any child among the ruling classes, and he will grow up, to his own extent, a ruler.  Put kings' and dukes' children among the masses, and they'll be little plebeians, mass products.  It is the overwhelming pressure of environment."

"Then the common people aren't a race, and the aristocrats aren't blood," she said. 

"No, my child! A; that is romantic illusion.  Aristocracy is a function, a part of fate.  And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.  The individual hardly matters.  It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to. It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy: it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.  And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is."

"Then there is no common humanity between us all!"

"Just as you like.  We all need to fill our bellies.  But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning, I believe there  is a gulf and an absolute one, between the ruling and the serving classes.  The two functions are opposed.  And the function determines the individual." [pg 201]

Lawrence also speaks insightfully about the emotional trauma or damage to the psyche that can persist or which can take years to manifest (he likens it to a slowly developing bruise).  This must have been something seen in returning soldiers after WW1 but it also makes me think of Freud's research and that of other psychoanalysts of the previous 50 years.  This slow persistent trauma crops up in both Sir Clifford and in Mellors, both damaged in the war.  He has a great passage about decay and time marching on:

all the brilliant words seemed like dead leaves, crumpling up and turning to powder, meaning really nothing, blown away on any gust of wind.  They were not the leafy words of an effective life, young with energy and belonging to the tree.  They were the hosts of fallen leaves of a life that is ineffectual.  [pg 52]

Lawrence wrote many passages celebrating nature and "Olde England" and decrying industrialization and the pace of change of modernity.  While this mainly manifests itself in Mellors, the gamekeeper, Clifford too longs to preserve the old ways:

Clifford loved the wood; he loved the old oak trees [of the wood around Wragby Hall].  He felt they were his own through generations.  He wanted to protect them. He wanted this place inviolate, shut off from the world.  [pg 43]

The air was soft and dead, as if all the world were slowly dying.  Grey and clammy and silent, even from the shuffling of the collieries, for the pits were working short time, and today they were stopped altogether. The end of all things!

In the wood all was utterly inert and motionless, only great drops fell from the bare boughs, with a hollow little crash.  For the rest, among the old trees was depth within depth of grey, hopeless, inertia, silence, nothingness.

Connie walked dimly on.  From the old wood came an ancient melancholy, somehow soothing to her, better than the harsh insentience of the outer world.  She liked the inwardness of the remnant of forest, the unspeaking reticence of the old trees.  They seemed a very power of silence, and yet a vital presence...  [pg 69]

There is also much phallic imagery in the book, Sex, potency and especially male sexuality are used as the barometer of a healthy life, a true life, of humanity.  Some examples of Lawrence's powers of imagery [pg 92]:

Constance sat down with her back to a young pine tree, that swayed against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up.  The erect, alive thing, with its top in the sun!  

Today she could almost feel it in her own body, the huge heave of sap in the massive trees, upwards, up, up to the bud-tips, there to push into little flakey oak leaves, bronze as blood. It was like a tide running turgid upward, and spreading on the sky. [pg 132]

I found it interesting that Lawrence chose to write the book from a woman's point of view.  Some of his  passages seem awkward and like what a man would think a woman might feel.  Some seemed more discerning, such as when Michaelis the Irish lover is half-heartedly trying to convince Connie to leave Clifford and live with him.

Connie looked at him amazed: and yet she felt nothing.  These men, they were all alike, they left everything out.  They just went off from the top of their heads as if they were squibs, and expected you to be carried heavenwards along with their own thin sticks.     [pg 54-55]

Nature is used as the antithesis of the industrialization, the civilization, the modernity of the world.  Lawrence sees that movement away from the natural to be the main cause and symptom of man's decay and eventually his destruction.  Mellors is his voice in this.

When the last real man is killed, and they're all tame: white, black, yellow, all colours of tame ones: then they'll all be insane.  Because the root of sanity is in the balls. Then they'll all be insane...they'll make their own grand little act of faith. They'll offer one another up."

"You mean they'll kill one another?"

"I do...! If we go on at our present rate then in a hundred year's time there won't be ten thousand people in this island: there may not be ten.  They'll have lovingly wiped each other out. [...]  To contemplate the extermination of the human species and the long pause that follows before some other species crops up, it calms you more than anything else.  And if we go on in this way, with everybody, intellectuals, artists, government, industrialists and workers all frantically killing off the last human feeling, the last bit of their intuition, the last healthy instinct; if it goes on in algebraical progression, as it is going on: then ta-tah! to the human species... "[pg 239]

"...when I feel the human world is doomed, has doomed itself by its own mingy beastliness, then I feel ... the moon wouldn't be far enough, because even there you could look back and see the earth, dirty, beastly, unsavoury among all the stars: made foul by men. [...] [I]t's a shame, what's been done to people these last hundred years: men turned into nothing but labour-insects, and all their manhood taken away, and all their real life.  I'd wipe machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake. [pg 242]

Lawrence also makes frequent mention of Mammon and the bitch-goddess of success.  Mellors the gamekeeper is a damaged man who has decided that retreat into solitude and nature are all he wants out of life.  When he connects with Lady Chatterly he is dragged back into the world of feeling, connection, relationship.

But he knew that the seclusion of the wood was illusory.  The industrial noises broke the solitude, the sharp lights, though unseen, mocked it.  A man could no longer be private and withdrawn.  The world allows no hermits.  And now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom.  For he knew by experience what it meant.

It was not the woman's fault, not even love's fault, nor the fault of sex.  The fault lay there, out there, in those evil electric lights and diabolical rattlings of engines.  There, in the world of the mechanical greedy, greedy mechanism and mechanised greed, sparkling with lights and gushing hot metal and roaring with traffic, there lay the vast evil thing, ready to destroy whatever did not conform...

He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman. Poor forlorn thing.... And they would do her in!  As sure as life, they would do her in, as they do in all naturally tender life.... But he would protect her with his heart for a little while.  For a little while, before the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanized greed did them both in, her as well as him.  [pg 129-130] 

Lawrence is equally pessimistic about society: "...conscience was chiefly fear of society, or fear of oneself. [...] He was quite consciously afraid of society, which he knew by instinct to be a malevolent, partly-insane beast."  [pg 130] and about civilization:

The young ones get mad because they've no money to spend.  Their whole life depends on spending money, and now they've got none to spend.  That's our civilization and our education: bring up the masses to depend entirely on spending money, and then the money gives out...The women are the maddest of all.  But then they're the maddest for spending, nowadays. [...]  [pg 220]

 If you could only tell them that living and spending are not the same thing!

Money poisons you when you've got it, and starves you when you haven't. [...] I feel great grasping white hands in the air, wanting to get hold of the throat of anybody who tries to live, to live beyond money, and squeeze the life out.  [pg 331]

Some of his writing and themes reminded me of Hemingway and trying to get back to basic pleasures, lives of action and simple motivations.  It fit in well with what we've been reading of Darwin and of Freud as well as the class concerns and angst of Dostoyesvsky.  I'm finding all the books we're reading swirling around in my brain and it's hard to pick out one thread or trail that I want to explore.  I wish I had unlimited time to explore all these thoughts and questions.

Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and its Discontents, Tr. David McLintock; Penguin Modern Classics, St. Ives 2002.

These week we are reading a work of Freud's and an essay of Thoreau's.  Knowing only the most minimal and banal information about each of these (Freud as psychoanalyst with a fixation on the Oedipus complex and blaming the mother for any difficulties in an individual's life; and Thoreau as a simple-living backwoods philosopher who wrote Walden) I didn't immediately see a connection between the 2.

The book of Freud's we are reading is about Civilization, something I have never spent much time thinking about but, if pressed, would probably have said is a good thing.  I had a hard time with the introduction as it plunged me immediately into the deep end of psychoanalytical jargon and concepts, territory unknown to me.  I immediately found myself floundering in the murky depths of concepts about the anal eroticism of young human beings, primitive sniffing men on all fours and the repression of olfactory stimulation when mankind evolved from all fours to standing erect, discussions of the id, ego and super-ego, Eros, the totemic phase, and oceanic feelings.  I was having a hard time relating this to civilization but once I got into Freud's text itself, I found much there to make me think and reflect.

Freud's discussion was a bit challenging for someone lacking any previous knowledge of his earlier works (this text being written in 1929 and Freud lived from 1856 to 1939).  What was interesting to me is what I've been exposed to, via books and media culture (TV, movies etc), during my lifetime of western society's reaction to Freud's findings during the remainder of the 20th century (and now into the 21st century).  I found his discussions (about the exigencies of civilization, the role of religion, the conflict between the individual and society) were really thought-provoking and made me want to read more in this area - though what I really wanted to read, being lazy, was a text from some learned person assessing mankind and society in the 21st century in a manner similar to Freud's processes in the late 19th and early 20th century.  I was very curious, as I read about sexual repression, the constraints civilization imposes on an individual's appetites or drives, the importance of various innate human drives, about what this now looks like for someone growing up in the 21st century.

Freud writes quite a bit about why mankind may have developed and submitted to civilization.  In return for increased security (controlling nature, decreasing risk of physical harm including starvation, exposure to the elements, mitigating against intra-species aggression etc), mankind had to give up or constrain basic human pleasure-seeking drives, most notably for Freud (and according to him, man - though it is not always clear to me when Freud means "Mankind" and when he means "man") the drive for sexual gratification.  

[...] Civilization designates the sum totals of those achievements and institutions that distinguish our life from that of our animal ancestors and serve the dual purpose of protecting human beings against nature and regulating their mutual relations. [pg 27]

Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual...The replacement of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization."  "Its essence lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction [...] The next requirement of civilization is justice. [pg 32]

Much of mankind's struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable...accommodation between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization. [pg 33]

What has occurred since Freud wrote this text, is a large body of research on animals, animal behaviour, animal societies, interactions, learning etc - and I'm fascinated by what we have learned about mankind vs the animal kingdoms in the last 100 years.

Freud goes on to discuss civilization and writes on pg 39 how, though women "1st laid the foundations of civilization with the claims of their love," men are set the difficult task of maintaining it and forced to "sublimate their drives," given that women have "little aptitude" for this and indeed soon resent men's distraction from their "duties as a husband and father."

Again, in the year 2013, almost 1/2 century since the early days of 'women's lib', I would really like to read a modern take on this from someone who has studied Freud and his field over the past few decades.  One jarring note, from a perspective 100 years later than when Freud was writing, lay in a footnote to Section IV where he notes:

... erotic relations are so often associated with a degree of direct aggression, quite apart from the sadistic component that quite properly belongs to them.  Faced with such complications, the love-object will not always be as understanding and tolerant as the farmer's wife who complained that her husband no longer loved her because he had not beaten her for a week.

Freud looks at several tactics mankind has experimented with to try and cope with the realities of civilization.  I found it interesting to read his opinion of communism, given that we read The Communist Manifesto just last week.  Freud writes about communism and the contention that mankind's "nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property." [pg 49]  He contrasts this with Christianity's grandiose and, Freud maintains, impossible commandment to 'Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee.'  Freud states that communism's attempt to redress inequality by abolishing private property rights and rights of inheritance don't take into account the 'natural' inequalities that will always occur due to varying genetic physical attributes and innate and unequal mental abilities.  Freud writes that:

Aggression was not created by property; it prevailed with almost no restriction in primitive times, when property was very scanty. [pg 50]

Freud considers aggression "an indestructible feature of human nature."

It was also interesting, on pg 50, to read Freud's comments about one outlet for mankind's natural aggression which is found within small tight cultural units, where aggression is directed outwards to outsiders.  Freud calls this the 'narcissism of small differences.' pg 51

As a scientist I enjoyed Freud's simple description of the goal of science.

...What we strive for in scientific work - a simple answer that neither neglects nor does violence to the facts.

In Part VII Freud speaks about internal controls that civilization instills to curb mankind's innate aggression, such as guilt and the need for punishment.  I'm sure I could pick up almost any book from the pantheon of literature and find this as one of the themes in the book.

Professor Zaslove sent along various extracts to consider as we read Freud this week.  One of these contained some responses Freud had communicated to Theodor Reik in 1926, when asked by Judge Emil Desenheimer of a Germanic Supreme Provincial Court for his views on capital punishment.  Freud raised the issue of 'talion' as an early legal principle, a term I'd never heard of.


According to Britannica Online Encyclopaedia: Talion:  A talion is a legal principle originating back in Babylonian times and in Palestine, based on the "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" concept.  The law makers in those times, and extending through the early Roman times and occasionally resurfacing in the middle ages, felt that the punishment should more literally match the crime.  Eventually the injured party could also choose to be compensated financially instead.  The Latin term was lex talionis.

Reading about it in Britanica Online, it made me think of my recent trip a couple of weeks ago to Todos Santos Cuchumatan, in northwestern Guatemala.  I've been there yearly since 2009, working on a canine population and rabies control project for Veterinarians Without Borders Canada.  It's a Mayan community which has been able to maintain a strong sense of identity and culture and resist the pace of change experienced elsewhere in the last century.  Though I'm seeing changes even in just 4 years, due to the availability of cellphones and the internet, it is still quite traditional.  This year we had one team member interviewing some of the people in the community.  One interesting thing to come out was a different concept of justice.  I knew that the municipal leaders spend much of their time mediating property disputes and other areas of conflict but one woman's story really brought it home to me.  Most of the dogs in Todos Santos, owned or otherwise, run loose in the community.  One woman told us that her dog, while running loose, had got into her neighbour's house and had eaten some of the neighbour's food.  The neighbour complained to the municipality and asked to be compensated for her loss.  The decision, and this was not deemed unusual by the community, was that the dog-owning woman had to either poison her dog or else pay a significant amount to the neighbour to make up for the lost food.  Being poor, the woman had to poison her own dog, something she is still heart-broken over months later.  This to me is an odd way of dispensing justice but it seems to fit with the ancient concept of 'talion'.

Freud seems to have a pessimistic tone in his book.  Having recently experienced WWI in the decade prior to this book being published, Freud must have been disillusioned about the earlier bright promise of civilization and the industrial revolution.  The aggression, territorialism, brutality and carnage that occurred during the war would have seemed an enormous fall from the civilized heights promised by the advances of the 19th century.  In this book Freud proposes that mankind may 

gradually carry out such modifications in our civilization as will better satisfy our ... demand for a form of life that will make us happy with[out] allowing so much suffering, which could probably be avoided. [pg 52]

In the year 2013, I'm finding it hard to judge whether civilization/culture or society have advanced in a desirable way from where we were at the beginning of the 20th century or whether we have lost our way.  This is probably a significant factor in my decision to embark upon this Master's program and explore the works of bright people over the preceding centuries and up until today.  I'll see if I'm able to come to any decisive conclusion 4 years hence.

Discussion: Marx and Brecht

Our session this evening considered Marx's famous work The Communist Manifesto  along with a play by Bertold Brecht, situated during WWII but based on the ancient Greek play Antigone.  

We began with Marx.  Chris led the discussion with contributions from Stephen.  One aspect that was mentioned was that Marx based his analysis of the dialectical issue of human history on Hegel's work (which we haven't read); and that communism and a revolution by the proletariat will eliminate this constant conflict between something and its antithesis because the proletariat includes everyone and will not have an antithetical entity.  Marx would go on to define a dialectic that was different from Hegel's, Marx even referred to his dialectic as the opposite of Hegel's.  This dialectic became defined as 'dialectical materialism' or the primacy of the material way of life over all forms of social consciousness.

Marx felt that all inequality was due to property ownership, which was also the control of the means of production.  At the time that he was envisioning a workers' revolution, his worker's paradise, Marx did not contemplate power issues occurring in a communist system, issues such as we have seen in countries such as China and Russia and to some lesser degree Cuba, in the century following the publication of the Manifesto.

Marx and Engels went back to try and look into the origins of class structure and see whether in other societies such as aboriginal societies, tribal societies etc they functioned differently from 'civilized' societies.  They concluded that the problems stemmed from ownership of property (which became ownership of the means of production especially during the industrial revolution).

Chris showed us a brief video of an early Soviet 'cartoon' which would have been shown in various villages after the revolution, to try and convince the peasants of the value of collectivization.  In jerky animation it showed the evils of capitalism and the benefits of working together for the good of all.  It reminded me of the old posters we would still see which had been popular in the 1920s - 1940s.

These posters would show strong austere workers working hard or with fists upraised in support of the revolution.  

I remember seeing idealistic students, decorating their university dorm rooms with these old posters from Russia.

I don't remember seeing many from China but they have the same flavour:

Even western posters had the same look at the time. 

When I see images from North Korea today I see the exact same style and imagery: urban scenes in the background (man's achievements) and in the foreground men and women lined up at attention in 'heroic' poses.

ANTIGONE

Bertold Brecht 10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956

Brecht wrote this play just after the end of the second World War, in 1947/1948.  Brecht had spent the war outside of Germany, moving around the Scandinavian countries and then to the USA until he was blacklisted and called to appear before the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee).  He then returned to Europe, to Switzerland where he lived until moving to East Germany after the war.

The discussion of Brecht's play Antigone was interesting.  Jonas led the discussion which I always find interesting since when he is not leading the discussion he tends to be very quiet in class.  He had sent us out a list of questions, I've attached a few of them and our discussion here:

1. Who is the real hero of the play, Kreon or Antigone?
Kreon was a dynamic character, & Antigone was more static. Antigone is more heroic here. I felt Kreon was more static in this version than in Sophocles whereas Antigone seemed more heroic here compared to Sophocles' version where she just seems to have a martyr-complex and to value her dead, flawed brother above her live, vulnerable sister. Creon in the Sophocles version was more appealing to me - when he was at his most rigid I could still understand why he was the way he was.

2. Given that the play opens in post-war Germany, are we to view Kreon as Hitler? Was Argos the Soviet Union that bounced back from a Nazi invasion to utterly shatter Germany?
We didn't discuss this much but I saw a lot of WWII symbolism in the play.

3. After reading the Communist Manifesto, do you see Kreon as a Bourgeois imperialist and autocrat? Do you see Antigone and Hamon as rebellious Proletarians?
There is a hint of this when Kreon refers to Hamon as being Antigone's "comrade" (p 43). Hamon retorts, "Not only hers, but of all that's just, wherever I see it." It was very interesting to read this at the same time as Marx. There is so much from the manifesto that even if not directly referenced, obviously influenced the thinking of the following century.

4. Brecht changes the Ode from Love to a Bacchanalian orgy. As Antigone was preparing for her death, the city was literally in the throes of a drunken hedonistic orgy. Why did Brecht do this?
We discussed how this is likely to show that people continue on with their lives despite horrors. We have an enormous capacity to "move on" from things, to tolerate, adjust, forget, forgive.

Again, we could have taken up the entire time available just to discuss any one of these.  The influence of Marx and the rejection of prussianism and naziism were very apparent in this play, though unlike Anouillh, Brecht did not spend the war in either Germany or an occupied country.  I find it somehow reassuring that artists return to old stories to try and say something about the world they live in.  I don't know why this seems different than the endless plundering of previous movies that Hollywood does - maybe because when Hollywood remakes a movie they don't seem to bring anything new to the works, nor to have anything much to say.

  

Discussion: Dostoyevsky & Nietzsche

DOSTOYEVSKY
Dostoyevsky lived 1841-1881.  Russia had been Christian from about the 10th century.  The Tzars took power from the nobles but gave them increased power over their serfs.  The nobility became very oppressive.  Huge downtrodden serf population.
19th century.  In 1812 Napoleon had invaded Russia and was defeated but not through any superiority of Russia, more vanquished by the elements, deprivation.  Much tension in 19th c., paranoia, fear of uprisings.  Michael Vacunin, father of uprising, nihilism, Turgenev: questioning of the old values.

Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow, father was a doctor, an alcoholic.  He came from a religious, strict family, raised on hospital grounds and would talk to the patients.  Well-read.  Small of build, strong personality, hot-headed but pale and introverted at school.  Suffered from epilepsy.  Psychological writer.  Was a socialist and early existentialist.  Was a member of a writer's club and was arrested and ended up on the firing line.  Eventually the execution was called off (it's thought the calling off was planned from the beginning). He then was sent to Siberia for 4 years hard labour and then had to join the army. Following this, Dostoyevsky became a journalist and went to western Europe.  Became a gambler and addict.

Dostoyevsky was very affected by the people he met in prison and in Siberia as well as by his addiction to gambling and the degradations this brought him to (lying, pleading, debasing himself, importuning family and friends).  He also had numerous sexual intrigues throughout his life.

Every Dostoyevsky novel has a woman at the end as a Christ-like figure who saves (or, in the case of Letters from the Underground, tries to save) the "hero/narrator."

What is better - cheap happiness or exalted sufferings?  Why is it limited to these 2 choices, or to these qualifiers?
Dostoyevsky was a Christian writer and Christianity has a belief in redemption through suffering.  The narrator does not believe in Christianity but Liza is trying to save him by offering love.  Dostoyevsky felt that the threat to mankind was science (The Crystal Palace of science and technology at the London Exhibition of 1851) and reason, and the salvation was Christianity - if you accept the message.  Science tells you that you are going to die but offers you nothing else whereas Christianity offers you life after death. (Other religions offered other options such as reincarnation).

Normal man is "man of action" vs the acutely conscious man who is tormented by doubts, questions and emotions.  Men of action are the doers, the inventors, the scientists, the warriors etc.
The book is a critique of material progress..."cheap happiness."
Romantics believed that through nature and beauty you could find meaning/happiness.  Developed towards pantheism which believed God was in everything.

Liza's situation is much more dire than the Underground Man's yet she bears it, accepts it, she doesn't lament her lot, she still has hope.

NIETZSCHE - Dr. Samir Gandesha led this discussion.
On the Genealogy of Morals is most accessible of his texts.  Hermeneutics of Suspicion - geared towards unmasking language, culture, morals
Freud and Marx also included
French philosopher Paul Mercure

Nietzsche born 1844 - Marx wrote manifesto 1847
Radical humanist, critique of property - social and economic, trained as philologist

1889 - breakdown, dies 1900
Freud publishes Interpretations of Dreams in 1900
Sister Elizabeth cares for him after breakdown.  She was very right-wing and portrayed him as a German nationalist, a proto-Nazi, which he was not.

His relationship to Plato - wants to understand philosophy.  Criticizes socratism on 3 fronts -

1. in the Republic, devises an ideal state, banishes poets and tragedians.
2. ideal state based on theory of forms - world around us is illusory, comprised of copies of an ideal world located elsewhere
3. in the notion of a justice hierarchy, reason sits at top and governs with assistance of the passions - argument of the philosopher-king

Feels socratism is working its way, via christianity (St Aquinas, Emmanuel Kant) into the Western Civilization (phenomenal world and ideal world), critical of Kantian morality

110.14-25 - locates his issue in Plato/Christian ideal that god is truth, that truth is divine

"the truthful one, in that audacious and ultimate sense presupposed by the belief in science, thus affirms another world than that of life, nature, and history; and insofar as he affirms this "other world", what? must he not, precisely in so doing, negate its counterpart, this world, our world? ... It is still a metaphysical belief on which our belief in science rests -- we knowers today, we godless ones and anti-metaphysicians, we too still take our fire from that great fire that was ignited by a thousand-year old belief, that belief of Christians, which was Plato's belief, that God is truth, that truth is divine ... But what if precisely this is becoming ever more implausible, if nothing proves to be divine any longer, unless perhaps error, blindness, lie -- if God himself proves to be our longest lie? -- --- At this point it is necessary to pause and to reflect for a long time.  Science itself now is in need of  a justification...

Nietzsche's conclusion was that a noble class/caste identified good qualities and bad qualities was derived from his philological studies.
Transvaluation and priestly class (slave-revolt) takes the reverse of this valuation
It is the slaves' feeling of weakness that leads them to this shift - their lack of power

Dark side of civilization (hermeneutics) - based on system of cruelty

Science includes cultural sciences as well as technological - systematic investigation

What does he mean by mastery, by will to power?
Are the masters those who control money, the state?

Nihilism - a process where the highest values are in the process of devaluing themselves
The sovereign individual -
Man is left with "will" and a question of where we derive our values from.
It's a will to power - this is how you counter will to nothingness (nihilism) - denial of the body, denial of the senses.

Nietzsche wants life-affirming ideals not life-denying as the ascetic ideals are.
What is the basic force?
Will to live but not in a metaphysical sense, not in a 'hereafter' sense.
Truth but not a propositional truth based on the state of the world but a Truth.
Will to power (based on his later writings but heralded in GM) - the ability to impose the aspect of being on becoming - if life is this constant process of becoming.
Role of Art, of style, fixes and establishes certain interpretations of the world
Justice is the right of the stronger, Nietzsche was influenced by the Renaissance and Machiavelli.

Heraclitus - Reality is this river, this constant state of becoming, you never step in the same water twice in a river.

52.19-25
"...life itself is defined as an ever more purposive inner adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer).  In so doing however, one mistakes the essence of life, its will to power; in so doing one overlooks the essential pre-eminence of the spontaneous, attacking, infringing, reinterpreting, reordering and formative forces, upon whose effect the "adaptation" first follows; in so doing one denies the lordly role of the highest functionaries in the organism itself, in which the will of life appears active and form-giving."

Will to power through naming and renaming, those who master language, the artists, now it's the media.  The creative people, enable us to see the world differently.
Italians futurists, over-powered by Roman empire, urged active forgetting.

Some people try to expand their minds by chemicals (Timothy Leary), or physically (other cultures use physical deprivation to achieve this as a rite of passage).  Any new ventures are often very quickly co-opted by greater society, mass culture.

Live your life knowing that everything you do will live on for ever and be repeated. Every moment must be lived to its fullest - the artist is always creating new value.
Nietzschean ideals taken up by European modernists at the turn of century (19th c. to 20th c.)
Innovation, avant-garde,

Sarah Kofman, a French philosopher - tried to appropriate Nietzsche from a feminist perspective.

Dostoyevsky: Notes from the Underground

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: Notes from the Underground, Dover Thrift Edition,

I found this book depressing but it seemed SO familiar.  The main character, the underground man himself with his self-pity and his determination for self-sabotage was someone I felt I had read about before.  Maybe it's just a Russian archetype.  He was quite frustrating but Dosteyevsky wrote it all so beautifully: what he thought and felt, how he appeared to others, his opportunities for redemption and how he would throw it away.  I actually thought he might allow things to work out with Liza and get out of his funk but he was determined to keep himself down.  I loved the character of Appollon, so passive-aggressive, he must have driven the neurotic underground man crazy.

On pg 31, he is thinking back on his younger days and how he has come to be where he is now.  he scoffs at Romanticism "We Russians, speaking generally, have never had those foolish transcendental "romantics" -- German, and still more French -- on whom nothing produces any effect; if there were an earthquake, if all France perished at the barricades, they would still be the same, they would not even have the decency to affect a change, but would still go on singing their transcendental songs to the hour of their death, because they are fools."  He goes on to describe what the Russian 'romantic' is and it's quite a humorous description as he describes quite pragmatic romantics, always with an eye out for advantage.

"That is why there are so many 'broad natures' among us who never lose their ideal even in the depths of degradation; and though they never stir a finger for their ideal,..., yet they tearfully cherish their first ideal and are extraordinarily honest at heart." pg 32

He really is a sad character and though he is pitiful, there is something of his insecurity in many of us.  He says pg 31 "Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike everyone else.  'I am alone and they are everyone'.

He describes himself as pitiful, loathsome, hysterical etc. He is very untrustworthy as a narrator and he tells us so frequently (pg 33, pg 26, pg 27, pg 22, pg 25)
After he tries to pick a fight and get thrown out of a window [he is unsuccessful in his defenestration attempt], he says "I never have been a coward at heart, though I have always been a coward in action." pg 34
He starts to stalk an officer he has become obsessed with.  He refers to himself several times as a fly (pg 34 "I had been treated like a fly"; pg 36 "that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all this world, a nasty, disgusting fly -- more intelligent, more highly developed, more refined in feeling than any of them, of course -- but a fly that was continually making way for everyone, insulted and injured by everyone."; "All of them took scarcely any notice of my entrance, which was strange, for I had not met them for years.  Evidently they looked upon me as something on the level of a common fly." pg 42)

The underground man indulges in fantasies about how life could be where he was admired and loved.  "Everyone would kiss me and weep (what idiots they would be if they did not), while I should go barefoot and hungry preaching new ideas and fighting a victorious Austerlitz against the obscurantists. pg 40

He runs into old school friends and they are planning a party for Zverkov, a rich friend (who came in for an estate of 200 serfs while still a school).  The underground man hates him because of his advantages, what he calls being "favoured by the gifts of nature."

He didn't do well at school.  He was intelligent and knew the material but couldn't get along.  "Once indeed I did have a friend.  But I was already a tyrant at heart; I wanted to exercise unbounded sway over him..." pg 47  He is so insecure about everything combined with false bravado about his superiority.  He invites himself along to a get-together.  He wants everything to go perfectly, to be able to redeem himself in their eyes.  He sneaks away from work 2 hours early to be able to get ready  "The great thing, I thought, is not to be the first to arrive, or they will think I am overjoyed at coming.  But there were 1000 of such great points to consider , and they all agitated and overwhelmed me." pg 47.
He overthinks and obsesses about everything.

Of course it all goes terribly wrong, and where he can make it worse he does.  It's horrifying to observe him sabotage himself with absolutely everyone he encounters.

It was interesting to think about what Dostoyevsky would have been thinking and feeling as he was about the same age as his protagonist when he wrote this.  It's very dark but then I find so many Russian stories have this same dark fatalism.