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  Summary: Life does not resemble that which is narrated in great novels, it resembles the shape of that book in your hands.

  But beware: Life doesn’t resemble the book itself, just its shape. Because this book cannot bring any story to a conclusion and cannot, in fact, make sense.

  Finale

  Life has no meaning, only this shape.

  We knew that already, so why did Sterne have to write a six-hundred-page book to prove it? If that’s what you’re asking, my answer is this:

  All great novels open your eyes to things you already knew but could not accept, simply because no great novel had yet opened your eyes to them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Victor Hugo’s Passion for Greatness

  Some authors we love for the beauty of their texts. This is the purest sort of reader-writer relationship, the closest to perfection. Other writers leave their imprint on us because of their life stories, their passion for writing, or their place in history. For me, Victor Hugo belongs to that second group. In my youth I knew him as a novelist, as the author of Les Misérables. I loved him for the way he conveyed the chemistry of great cities, the high drama of their streets, and for the way he could show the logic by which two entirely unrelated things could happen in a city at the same time (as Parisians are attacking one another’s barricades in 1832, we have the sounds of billiards coming from two streets away). He influenced Dostoyevsky; when I was young, and wedded to a melodramatic vision of cities as dark and dirty places where the poor and defeated congregate, he influenced me too. When I grew a bit older, Hugo’s voice began to annoy me: I found it pompous, affected, ostentatious, and artificial. In his historical novel Ninety-Three, he spends a great many annoying pages describing a loose cannon rolling back and forth on a ship in a storm. When he took Faulkner to task for being influenced by Hugo, Nabokov offered a cruel example: “L’homme regardait le gibet, le gibet regardait l’homme.” What has influenced me the most—and disturbed me most about Hugo’s life—was his use of emotion (in the negative sense of this romantic word!) to confect greatness through rhetoric and high drama. All French intellectuals, from Zola to Sartre, owe a debt to Hugo and his passion for greatness; his concept of the politically engaged writer as champion of truth and justice has exerted a deep influence on world literature. Overly aware of his passion for greatness—and mindful of the fact that he had achieved it—Hugo became a living symbol of his ideal, thereby turning himself into a statue. His self-conscious moral and political gestures gave him an artificial air, and that cannot help but make a reader uneasy. In his discussion of “Shakespeare’s genius,” Hugo himself said that the enemy of greatness was falseness.

  In spite of all his posturing, Hugo’s triumphant return from political exile endowed him with a certain authenticity, as did his flair for public speaking, and his heroes live on in Europe’s—and the world’s—imagination. Perhaps this is simply because France and French literature were for so long at the forefront of civilization. Once upon a time, and no matter how nationalistic they were, France’s writers spoke not just to France but to all of humanity. But it’s not that way today. Perhaps that is why France’s continuing affection for this strangest of great authors speaks above all of nostalgia for her lost days of glory.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground: The Joys of Degradation

  We all know the joys of degradation. Perhaps I should rephrase that: We must all have lived through times when we discovered it was pleasurable, even relaxing, to run ourselves down. Even as we tell ourselves we are worthless—over and over, as if repetition will make it true—we are suddenly freed from all those moral injunctions to conform and from the suffocating worry of having to obey rules and laws, of having to grit our teeth as we strive to be like others. When others degrade us, we arrive at the same place as we do when we take the initiative in humiliating ourselves. Then we find ourselves in a place where we can wallow blissfully in our existence, our smell, our filth, our habits, the place where we can abandon all hope of self-improvement and stop trying to nurture optimistic thoughts about other human beings. This resting place is so comfortable that we cannot help feeling grateful for the anger and selfishness that has brought us to this moment of freedom and solitude.

  It was this recognition that most struck me when I returned to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground thirty years after my first reading. But when I read the book as a young man, I was not so much alert to the joys and logic of degradation as inspired by the anger of the hero wandering alone through the great city of St. Petersburg, flaying all he saw with his razor-sharp wit. I saw the Underground Man as a variant of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, a man who had lost all sense of guilt. Cynicism gave the hero a beguiling logic and a compelling tone. When I first read it at the age of eighteen, I valued Notes from Underground because it openly expressed many of my own as-yet-unvoiced thoughts about my life in Istanbul.

  As a young man I could easily and instantly identify with one who had removed himself from society and retired into himself. Particularly resonant was his insistence that “to live beyond the age of forty is shameful” (Dostoyevsky put these words into his forty-year-old hero’s mouth when he himself was forty-three)—though I also agreed that he had been cut off from life in his own country owing to poisoning by Western literature, and that excessive self-consciousness—or, indeed, any form of consciousness—was a type of illness. I understood how he assuaged his pain by blaming himself, why he found his own face rather idiotic, and why he indulged in the game of asking himself, “How long can I bear this man’s gaze?” I shared all these idiosyncrasies; they bound me to the hero without my needing first to interrogate his “strange and alien nature.” As for the deeper thing that the book and its hero whispered between the lines, I may have sensed it at the age of eighteen but, disliking it—indeed, finding it disturbing—I refused to engage with it and soon erased it from my memory.

  Today, I can at last speak more comfortably about the book’s true subject and wellspring: It is the jealousy, anger, and pride of a man who cannot make himself into a European. Earlier I had confused the Underground Man’s anger with his personal sense of alienation. Because, like all Westernized Turks, I liked to think of myself as more European than I really was, I was inclined to believe that the philosophy expounded by the Underground Man I so admired was an eccentricity reflecting a personal despair. In no way had I connected it to his spiritual unease with Europe. Turkish literature, like Russian, had been influenced by European thinkers. In the late sixties, existentialism from Nietzsche to Sartre was as popular in Turkey as it was in Europe, so to me the words of the Underground Man expounding his strange philosophy seemed not idiosyncratic but quintessentially “European”—which distanced me even further from the things the book was whispering into my ear.

  To better understand the secrets that Notes from Underground whispers to those who, like me, live on the edge of Europe, quarreling with European thought, we need to look at the years during which Dostoyevsky was writing this strange novel.

  A year earlier, in 1863, Dostoyevsky had embarked on his second journey to Europe, spurred on by deep unhappiness and failure. He had in mind to escape his wife’s illness, the failure of Time (the journal of which he was an editor), and St. Petersburg itself. Also, he was planning a secret meeting in Paris with his lover, Apollinaria Suslova, who was twenty years his junior. (When at last they finally met in the same city, he would hide her from Turgenev.) In a burst of typically Dostoyevskyan indecision, he did not go straight to Paris to join his lover; he went first to Wiesbaden to gamble and lost a great deal of money. The delay precipitating this piece of bad luck also revealed the young and cruel Suslova’s true colors. For while waiting for Dostoyevsky, she had found another lover, and when Dostoyevsky arrived in Paris, she made no effort to hide this from him. Tears, threats, slurs, and entreaties; hatred, chronic anxiety, and misery—everything endured by the heroes in The Gambl
er and The Idiot: their self-abasement before strong, proud women, their total loss of self, their vain pantomines of suffering—Dostoyevsky first endured himself.

  Having admitted defeat and ended the affair, he returned to Russia to learn that his wife, who’d been suffering from tuberculosis, was on the brink of death. His brother Mikhail was struggling for permission to publish a new magazine to succeed one that was foundering, but he too kept meeting with failure. In the end he did gain permission, but money was scarce, and the January issue of Epoch did not come out until March; there were not enough subscriptions, and the typesetting was dreadful.

  It was in these straitened and undisciplined conditions that Epoch published Notes from Underground; it did not attract a single review in all of Russia.

  Notes from Underground was originally conceived as a critical essay. Dostoyevsky’s idea had been to write a critique of Chernishevky’s What Is to Be Done?, which had been published a year earlier. This book had a large following among the Westernizing, modernizing younger generation; it was not a novel so much as a textbook promoting a rosy version of positivist enlightenment. When in the mid-1970s it was translated into Turkish and published in Istanbul, it was accompanied by a preface that was highly critical of Dostoyevsky (calling him a dark and backward petit bourgeois); because this preface reflected the childish determinism and utopian illusions of Turkey’s young pro-Soviet Communists, Dostoyevsky’s anger against Chernishevsky was as real to me as if it had sprung from my own heart.

  But his anger was not a simple expression of anti-Westernism or hostility to European thinking: What Dostoyevsky resented was that European thought came to his country at second hand. What angered him was not its brilliance, its originality, or its utopian leanings but the facile pleasure it afforded those who embraced it. He hated seeing Russian intellectuals seize upon an idea just arrived from Europe and believe themselves privy to all the secrets of the world and—more important—of their own country. He could not bear the happiness this grand illusion gave them. Dostoyevsky’s quarrel was not with the Russian youths who read Chernishevsky and drew upon this Russian writer to elaborate a crude, juvenile, secondhand “determinist dialectic,” what bothered him was the way this new European philosophy was celebrated with such an aura of easy success. Though he was fond of castigating Westernizing Russian intellectuals for being cut off from the people, I see this as an evasion. For Dostoyevsky to believe an idea, the important thing was not that it be logical but that it be “unsuccessful”; not that it be believable but that it touch on some sort of injustice. Behind Dostoyevsky’s great anger and hatred for the Westernizing liberals and the modernizers who propagated Fourier’s determinist utopianism in Russia during the 1860s was his fury at the way they basked in the limelight of their ideas, embracing success unabashedly and without question.

  Here the matter becomes even darker and more confused—as it always does in places that waver between East and West or between the local and the European. For though Dostoyevsky hated Western liberals and materialists, he accepted their reasoning. Let us remember that Dostoyevsky had grown up with these very ideas; he’d had a modern education and had trained to be an engineer. His mind had been shaped by Western thought and he knew no other. We can suppose that he may have wished to reason in another way, to have recourse to another, more “Russian” logic, but Dostoyevsky did not choose to undergo this sort of education. Even at the very end of his life, when he was writing The Brothers Karamazov, we can see in the notes he made when he began to take an interest in the lives of Russian Orthodox mystics that his first discovery was how little he knew on such subjects. (Still, I like the pragmatic pose he strikes when blaming himself for being “cut off from the people.”) Following the same line of thought, it would not be wrong to conclude that Dostoyevsky accepted all these ideas coming from Europe, that his own views on individualism came from the same source, that he knew European ideas were sure to spread throughout Russia, and that he opposed them for these very reasons. But let me repeat that it wasn’t the content of Western ideas that Dostoyevsky opposed, it was their necessity, their legitimacy. He hated his country’s modernizing intellectuals because they used these ideas to legitimize their own importance; it was this that fed their pride. Let us remember that, in Dostoyevsky’s lexicon, pride was the greatest sin; he used the word proud only as a pejorative. In Winter Notes of Summer Impressions (published in Time), chronicling his first European journey two years earlier, he linked all the evils of the West (individualism, addiction to wealth, and bourgeois materialism) with conceit and pride. In one burst of anger, he declared that English priests were as proud as they were rich. In another, he described French families walking down the streets arm in arm as conceited, derisively declaring it a national characteristic. Eighty years later, in Nausea—a novel written with the soul of an Underground Man—Sartre would create an entire world from this single observation.

  The originality of Notes from Underground issues from the dark space between Dostoyevsky’s rational mind and his angry heart—between his acceptance that Russia stood to benefit from Westernization and his fury at the proud Russian intellectuals who peddled impartial materialist ideas. Let us remember what all Dostoyevsky scholars agree: Notes from Underground is the starting point for Crime and Punishment and the great novels that were to follow; it is the first book in which he finds his true voice. This makes it all the more interesting to explore the ways in which Dostoyevsky would reconcile the tension between his knowledge and his anger at this point in his life.

  Dostoyevsky never wrote the anti-Chernishevsky essay he had promised his brother. He was manifestly unable to write a critique of a philosophy that he himself accepted. Like all imaginative writers, who draw less from reason than from the imagination, he preferred to act out his ideas in stories and novels. That said, the first half of Notes from Underground is as much a sort of long essay as it is a novel; sometimes it is published separately.

  It takes the form of an angry monologue of a forty-year-old man from St. Petersburg who, having come into a small inheritance, leaves his job and rejects ordinary society, only to suffer from an anguished isolation he calls “underground.” Our hero’s first target is what Chernishevsky calls “reasonable egotism.” Chernishevsky views human beings as innately good; if with the help of science and reason they are “enlightened,” they will see that it is in their interest to behave reasonably; even when they are pursuing their own interests, they can create a perfectly rational utopian society. But the Underground Man maintains that human beings—even if they are in full possession of their reason and can clearly understand their own interests—remain creatures who cannot always act according to their interests. (This can be read as meaning, “Westernization might be in Russia’s interest, but I still want to stand against it.”) Later on, the Underground Man portrays the human uses of “reason” as even more confused. “The full strength of a person proves not that he is a cog in a machine but a person…. For this reason, we do not do what is expected of us; instead, we succumb to unreason.” The Underground Man resists even Western thought’s most powerful weapon, logic, disputing even that two times two is four.

  The thing we must note here is not the Underground Man’s cogent (or at least mature) argument against Chernishevsky but the fact that Dostoyevsky has created a character who can embrace and defend other ideas convincingly. The discoveries he makes while creating this character—so central to Dostoyevsky’s later works—are what make him a true novelist. To act against one’s own interest, to take pleasure in pain, to begin suddenly to defend the exact opposite of that which is expected of you—all these impulses that defy European rationalism, the pursuit of demands of an enlightened ego, and so on? It is perhaps difficult to appreciate how original this program was in its day, for it has been copied so often.

  Let us look at one experiment that the Underground Man performs to prove himself a creature who refuses to conform to the idea that all people act in the
ir own best interest.

  One evening, he is passing by a lowly tavern when he sees a fight break out around the billiard table. Later he sees a man thrown from the window. At once a great jealousy rises up in the Underground Man: He wants to be similarly degraded; he too wants to be thrown out of the window. He goes inside, but instead of getting the beating of his dreams, he is degraded in an entirely different way. An officer decides he’s blocking the way and so pulls him into the corner, but he does this in a manner to suggest he’s handling a nonentity, a thing not even worthy of contempt. It is this unexpected humiliation that will prey on him.

  I see all the elements that characterize Dostoyevsky’s later novels in this small scene. If Dostoyevsky went on to become a writer who, like Shakespeare, changed our understanding of humanity, it is in Notes from Underground that this new point of view begins to emerge, and if we study it closely, we can see how his great discovery was made. Failure and unhappiness had greatly distanced Dostoyevsky from the complacent winners and the spiritual world of the proud, and he had begun to feel anger toward the Western intellectuals who looked down on Russia. But though he wished to quarrel with Westernization, he was still a product of his Western education and upbringing and still practicing a Western art, the art of the novel. Notes from Underground was born of a desire to write a story that took the hero through all these states of spirit and consciousness, or an urgent wish to create a hero and a world that could hold together all these contradictions in a convincing way.