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.

Discussion: Anatole France "The Gods Will Have Blood"

Stephen started the discussion off by mentioning his experience during the 60s at SFU where the revolutionary/Berkeley spirit was strong and students believed they would overthrow the old guard and change the world.  A friend of his told him that come the revolution they would have to shoot Stephen because he wouldn't be able to go as far as the extremists.  Anatole France's book "The Gods Will Have Blood" and especially the character Brotteaux spoke to Stephen and this very thrilling time in his life.

Bruce led the discussion and disagreed with Davies' suggestion that Gamelin was a modern-day terrorist.  He felt that Gamelin was an idealist, a fanatic and extremist but not someone who just wants to destroy, rather someone who believes in a new order to the exclusion of any other considerations.

Anatole France was known as a left-wing writer and he was unusual in attacking the French Revolution from the left.  Bruce spoke a little about the Dreyfus affair and France's support of Dreyfus.  He circulated the famous 'J'accuse' article by Emile Zola - an article in L'Aurore newspaper.
The Zionist movement arose from Jewish feelings about the Dreyfus affair.

Gamelin's unfinished painting of Orestes and his sister Electra was an important theme in the book and this led to a discussion about the myth, about Orestes as a symbol of a person forced to commit a sin in order to obey another duty.

Brotteaux and Longuemare, as well as Athenais, were like a Greek chorus - the voice of consience.  They don't fit in with the world of the revolution and so they are all doomed. They had a love for humanity whereas Gamelin loved France and the ideal of the Revolution but he didn't have  a love for humanity.

The rational abstracted from the real world can be dangerous - if a person (especially one with power) focuses in on theory and a structure, on laws and regulations and ignores the humanity, real evil can result.

Anatole France referred often to Rousseau in the novel - Rousseau probably represented the brutal, raw nature.  We discussed the country interlude - which was an odd break in the novel.  This was likely a bit of  critique of Rousseau who wrote about the healing effects of Nature.  France felt that you can't just go into Nature and have it change anything.  The odd character of Tronche could represent the peasantry of France and how it is used and abused by the aristocrats/intellectuals etc.

I would like to read a bit more about this time period and try to get a better understanding of the various people and the events.  It was such a dramatic upheaval in centuries of class structure and led to important changes that we are still dealing with today.

Barthes: A Lover's Discourse

Barthes, Roland: A Lover's Discourse - Fragments, tr. Richard Howard; Hill and Wang, New York, 2010

A telling instance of the narrowness of a North American science-based education is that I'd never heard of Roland Barthes before receiving the reading list for LS801, the 2013 edition.  I found this a challenging book to get through.  It took me quite a few chapters to get into the format, the structure of the book.  Though Barthes is dissecting love into its various manifestations, I still found that I wanted to argue against many of his declarations and conclusions - or at least ask for more exposition.  I really wanted to be sitting around a long dinner table, discussing his ideas and hearing him expound on his views.  I needed more, to really understand what he was trying to say.  I also didn't really feel that I had a good sense of Barthes as a man, what he would have been like in conversation with friends.

I've never had to look up so many words/jargon as while reading this book.  Barthes is writing his discourse from a lengthy background of study, discussion and theorizing.  I found the book was too referential for someone who has not been a student of philosophy.  I very much liked the structure of the book because I am a person who likes collecting bits and pieces and later trying to make a whole of them.  It's probably best a book to be dipped into in small doses with much time to ponder in between, not read straight through like a narrative.  I felt I needed to read Barthes' source material (of which I have really only read Werther, and Plato's Symposium & Phaedrus so far) - and then go back and reread Barthes' discourse again.

Sentences such as the following gave me much grief in trying to understand what Barthes was trying to say:
On pg 103 THE GHOST SHIP,

"errantry does not align - it produces iridescence: what results is the nuance. Thus I move on, to the end of the tapestry, from one nuance to the next (the nuance is the last state of a colour which can be named; the nuance is the Intractable)."

or when speaking about amorous exuberance, on pg 86 about EXUBERANCE which

"can be interlaced with melancholy, with depressions and suicidal impulses, for the lover's discourse is not an average of states; but such a disequilibrium belongs to that black economy which marks me with its aberration and, so to speak, with its intolerable luxury."

Barthes provides several introductory pages about how the book is structured.  Regarding the meaning of the "Lover's Discourse" on pg 94 NOVEL/DRAMA, Barthes writes:

"Enamoration is a drama, if we restore to this word the archaic meaning Nietzsche gives it: 'Ancient drama envisioned great declamatory scenes, which excluded action [...] 'Amorous seduction (a pure hypnotic moment) takes place before discourse and behind the proscenium of consciousness: the amorous "event" is of a hieratic order: it is my own local legend, my little sacred history that I declaim to myself, and this declamation of a fait accompli (frozen, embalmed, removed from any praxis) is the lover's discourse." 

Barthes goes to numerous sources, from the written realm but also from conversations with friends and acquaintances - and his marginalia is interesting.

Some random bits that I enjoyed or puzzled over:
Under JEALOUSY pg 145 he quotes Djeddi in La poesie amoureuse des Arabes Joseph yielded 'to the extent of a mosquito's wing.'  He writes that his references are "not authoritative but amical".
After Baudelaire and Ruysbroek "the gentleness of the abyss"
He writes that a sigh is "an expression of the emotion of absence."



In WHAT IS TO BE DONE, pg 62, Barthes speaks of

"Ethics, the unpersuadable science of behaviour."

And on pg 71 THE OTHER'S BODY

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words.  My language trembles with desire.

On pg 129  in IDENTIFICATIONS:

Identification [with other lost lovers] is not a psychological process; it is a pure structural operation: I am the one who has the same place I have.

In the section ATOPOS pg 34, defined as "unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,"
Barthes describes the beloved in one of the most succinct and beautiful ways I have ever come across:

"the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the specialty of my desire."  

 He goes on to say that:

"The other is the figure of my truth, and cannot be imprisoned in any stereotype (which is the truth of others).

This agrees with my perception that there is not "One" person, there are many possible people that may be potential lovers but it all depends on timing, circumstance, the many external as well as internal factors.
A potential lover's desirability is also affected by mass culture.  In SHOW ME WHOM TO DESIRE
on pg 136, Barthes describes love as an "affective contagion,"

this induction, proceeds from others, from the language, from books, from friends: no love is original.  (Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves.

If this was true in the 70s, I can only begin to imagine how much more this applies to the 21st century.

This is unlike the Ancient Greeks' conception of love, the androgyne.  Barthes refers several times to the idea of the androgyne as propounded by Plato/Socrates and Aristophanes.  This is an image and a concept that has stuck with me ever since we read The Symposium.  It's appealing to think that there is another out there who fills the missing bits in oneself - there's a inevitability and durability to that concept that can be reassuring when in the torment of the love gone wrong or faded away.  In I WANT TO UNDERSTAND pg 60, he reprises Zeus' command to Apollo to 

"turn the faces of the divided Androgynes...toward the place where they had been cut apart...'so that the sight of their division might render them less insolent'."

 - like Adam & Eve and the citizens with the Tower of Babel in Genesis, we mortals sometimes presume.

In UNION pg 226

"En sa moytie, ma moytie je recolle - to her half, I rejoin my own half...desire is to lack what one has - and to give what one does not have: a matter of supplements, not complements."

Barthe spends an afternoon trying to draw Aristophanes' conception of the original hermaphrodites (androgyne figure) and concludes it is a "farce figure" and "out of the mad couple is born the obscenity of the household (one cooks, for life, for the other)."

He was very perceptive in describing all the odd little facets of love relationships.  On pg 92  THE WORLD THUNDERSTRUCK he is speaking of writing about one's own love (in journals, correspondence etc) and notes

"the events of an amorous life are so trivial that they gain access to writing only by an immense effort: one grows discouraged writing what, by being written, exposes its own platitude.

He was also effective describing love relationship other than the romantic or sexual ones.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 

"The perfect [...] friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance? Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?"

I had a hard time with much of Barthes mention of his mother and mothers and sons.  He portrays his mother is such a 2-dimensional, childish way.  She is discussed only in relation to her effect on her child, not as a person, a lover in her own right.  I'm not sure if this is a mother-son thing or a gender thing (Barthes is less interested in women as individuals, especially insofar as love is concerned).  In discussing Werther, Barthes refers to the famous blue coat which he was wearing when he met Lotte.  On pg 128  in BLUE COAT AND YELLOW VEST, Barthes writes:

"This blue garment imprisons him so effectively that the world around him vanishes: nothing but the two of us: by this garment Werther forms for himself a child's body in which phallus and mother are united, with nothing left over.  This perverse outfit was worn across Europe by the novel's enthusiasts, and it was known as a "costume a la Werther."

This isn't an analysis that resonates with me.  Nor can I identify or agree with his statement on pg 133 in IMAGES

"I project myself there [into a romantic painting of a cold scene] as a tiny figure, seated on a block of ice, abandoned forever.  "I'm cold." the lover says, "let's go back"; but there is no road, no way, the boat is wrecked.  There is a coldness particular to the lover, the chilliness of the child (or of any young animal) that needs maternal warmth.

To me, a woman, Barthes seems to be condescending when he mentions women.  He doesn't mention women often but when he does, it often has a negative cast.  In DOMNEI pg 82

"I shall exasperate myself with the chatter of women in the drugstore who are delaying my return to the instrument to which I am subjugated"and in THE DEDICATION pg 76

"I have this fear: that the given object may not function properly because of some insidious defect...for example, the latch [of a box] doesn't work (the shop being run by society women)"

In GRADIVA pg 126

"I want to possess fiercely, but I also know how to give actively.  Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for . . . giving? So if a lover manages to 'love', it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Woman Who Love Enough to Be Kind."

The section which really resonated with me was THE UNKNOWABLE, on pg 134:

"I can't get to know you" means "I shall never know what you really think of me." I cannot decipher you because I do not know how you decipher me.

"To expend oneself, to bestir oneself for an impenetrable object is pure religion."
"To make the other into an insoluble riddle on which my life depends is to consecrate the other as a god."

This made me think of Elizabeth Smart who seems to have consecrated her life to orbiting around Barker.  Someone in our discussion noted that one of her sons said that all her life she regarded George Barker as a Jesus-figure.

Barthes goes on to write, in this section, that

"all the action of love obtains from me is merely this wisdom: that the other is not to be known." "I am then seized with that exaltation of loving someone unknown, someone who will remain so forever: a mystic impulse: I know what I do not know."

In THIS CAN'T GO ON, pg 141, Barthes describes suffering in love as pleasurable.
"Ever the 'artist', I make form itself into content" (echoes of McLuhan's 'the medium is the message').  It's not about what is causing the suffering, it's about the suffering itself.
Once the exaltation of suffering has dissipated, Barthes says he is "reduced to the simplest philosophy: that of endurance."  He quotes a folk poem that accompanies Japanese Daruma dolls:

Such is life Falling over seven times And getting up eight.

In JEALOUSY, pg 144

"As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being so, because I fear my jealousy will wound the other, because I allow myself to be subject to a banality: I suffer from being excluded, from being aggressive, from being crazy, and from being common."

Barthes includes the etymology of the word jaloux which interestingly is borrowed from the troubadours.

He very accurately describes many of the progressions and devastating aspects of love, the events that wear away at the foundations.  In NO ANSWER pg 167 he writes:

"When you were talking to him, discussing any subject at all, X frequently seemed to be looking away, listening to something else: you broke off, discouraged; after a long silence, X would say: 'Go on, I'm listening to you'; then you resumed as best you could the thread of a story in which you no longer believed."

Also in GRADIVA, pg 125 he describes much of the game-playing which drives me crazy within a relationship and which is supremely irritating to have to observe in other people's relationships.  If only we could keep the resolve and clear-sightedness we can have when outside of our relationships, for when we are in the throes of relationships' dark sides.

I found less agreement with his statement in THE HEART pg 53, that "only the lover and the child have a heavy heart" but as with many of the areas where I initially found I disagreed with Barthes or even felt really irritated by something he wrote, when I thought about it more and tried to dissect or even refute it, eventually I could distill my ideas and examples down into his truth.  The examples I could think of of non-love related angst and pain often could be reduced to a sense of isolation, of aloneness, of abandonment.  Perhaps this is where he gets his repeated return to comparisons with mother-son bonds.

In one section, GOSSIP, he unexpectedly (for me) compares passion and reason, and writes on pg 184,

the gossip is light, cold, it thereby assumes the status of a kind of objectivity; its voice...seems to double the voice of knowledge (scientia)...When knowledge, when science speaks, I sometimes come to the point of hearing its discourse as the sound of a gossip which describes and disparages lightly, coldly, and objectively what I love: which speaks of what I love according to the truth.

In an echo of Neil Young "It's better to burn out than to fade away"in THE INTRACTABLE on pg 23 Barthes affirms love as a value regardless of how it all works out in the end; that he can be happy and wretched at the same time.  When told "this kind of love is not viable" he asks: 

"Why is the viable a "Good Thing?  Why is it better to last than to burn?"and states that he has "withdrawn from all finality."

SOBRIA EBRIETAS

Barthes ends his discourse with this section and defines this as abandoning the "will-to-possess".  He quotes a zen saying:

"As I sit calmly, without doing anything, spring comes and the grass grows of its own accord."

On pg 8 in HOW THIS BOOK IS CONSTRUCTED Barthes specifies that he is not trying to set down a philosophy of love but merely to affirm it.  Such a philosophy would be a perversion of its elements, a monster, and he quotes from a mathematician that "we must not underestimate the power of chance to engender monsters," warning the reader not to draw conclusions from the order of the various sections.  It's not a book to be read as a narrative and it's a book I will come back to, to read a section here and there and think about it, then come back to it again after I've done further reading and studying.  I'll put it on the bookshelf near my bed with some of the other bits I want to re-read.

Discussion: Antigone and Phedre

On one level a play about conflicting laws, on another level a play about passion and duty.  The play ANTIGONE was full of dualism, a word I've never really thought much about prior to this class.

Youth [Antigone]  vs. Age [Creon]
Female [Antigone] vs. Male [Creon]
Ruler [Creon] vs. subjects [Antigone]
Passion [Antigone] vs. reason [Creon]
Duty to Family and Gods [Antigone] vs. duty to the State/Thebes [Creon]

Some of the group felt that Antigone was a rebellious teenager and the main conflict was between youth and age.  I didn't get that perpective from my reading of the text.  For me the main conflict was between the duty to the gods to bury a family member vs the duty towards the state to stand strongly against threats to the city state (and NOT bury the body of a traitor - as a warning to others who might try to attack Thebes).

Stephen set possible resolutions out as Aristotelian moderation vs a Hegelian requirement for synthesis (a better and more progressive solution, working out a way to have family loyalties AND loyalty to state).  Creon eventually did bend and decide to provide a proper burial and to pardon Antigone but too late.

Antigone is very single-minded: her duty to her family (brothers, parents) comes above all.  She even says that she would not go against the state for her husband or children as they can be replaced.  It's hard to know how she feels about her sister as she doesn't seem too concerned about any duty towards Ismene.  Creon feels equally strongly (though I'm not sure if he is equally passionate) about Thebes.

182    

But it’s even worse when he plays favourites

Puts family or friends ahead of fatherland.

Someone mentioned that in Greek plays, women are the holders of passion and men are the holders of reason but they get thrown off course by passion.
Lorraine mentioned that the cover of the text is a photo of Simone Weil.  I hadn't read the note about the photo.  Simone Weil died for holding to her principles, just as Antigone did.

Other than Creon, no one in the play seems to question Antigone's decision and actions.  At the end, Antigone who has been so strong, suddenly bewails her fate:

…They are taking me against my will.

Look at me O you lords of Thebes:
I am the last remnant of kings.
Look at what these wretched men are doing to me,
For my pure reverence!

Did Antigone feel that the gods would save her?  She seems to suddenly be fighting against her [self-induced] fate – being murdered for her reverence to the unwritten laws of the gods.

During the course of the play, Creon is the only character who really changes.  Unyielding and unwilling to bend at the beginning, before the end of the play he decides that holding to his original positions will lead to injustice.  He changes his mind but too late to avert tragedy.

In Phedre as well, passion seems much stronge than reason though those whose actions are most governed by passion seem to end tragically.  The play by Racine is based on a play called Hippolytus by Euripides.  Stephen mentioned that Racine was raised and educated in a Jansenist monastery in Port Royal.  Cornelius Jansen argued that since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, man has not possessed free will.  Our lives are guided or directed by "concupisentia" (ardent desire) and subject to grace.  Most people are driven by their desires with only a few being guided  by grace.  This was compared to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.  Neither the Jansenists nor the Calvinists wanted to admit they felt desire because that would show they were not one of the "elect".

We had a discussion about guilt.  Phedre resists her attraction to Hipploytus because she feels it is wrong but her life is blighted by the guilt she feels over her feelings (though she feels she has been cursed by Venus and this is why she makes poor choices in love).  Hippolytus was a strong character, upright, chaste, strong and brave but he becomes weak and doomed when he falls in love (with Aricia).

Finally we discussed Aristotles' championing of "moderation" and how his works would have been known to the audiences of both plays.  Both Antigone and Phedre would have demonstrated what happens when you go to extremes and don’t practice moderation.