ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
Where the Underground Man succeeds in small fashion in making others share his
pain, Dostoevsky succeeds more broadly in conveying the Underground Man’s
existential angst. He does it so well, in fact, that it easily overshadows the example of
the young prostitute Liza who tries to love him despite knowing the depth of his
“disease” and his need to dominate others. If anyone is more degraded than he, it is
she, and yet she finds a way to rise above her situation morally and love the
Underground Man. However, he rejects her love and he misses his last chance to
emerge from the underground. From the first half of the novel, we know where he
winds up twenty years later. But her example does not mark us the way that his does.
We do not respond viscerally to it, merely intellectually, and therefore we fail to
respond to it as strongly because visceral, emotional reactions change us more – affect
our value-attributing self more – than intellectual or purely moral arguments can.25 As
Daniel Kahneman demonstrates, our quicker, but dirtier, mental faculties (what he
calls sys tem 1) take precedence over our slower, but more accurate faculties (system
2).26 The Underground Man pitches himself to system 1 and we focus immediately on
him. Liza’s actions must be appreciated with system 2 and so require focused
attention. Whereas our (presumably) negative reaction to the Underground Man is
instantaneous and unconscious, Liza requires specific conscious attention. We must
choose to think about Liza.
All authors want to have some effect on their readers, even if they claim their primary
readers are themselves. Dostoevsky clearly had larger-than-normal goals in this
regard. Although his plots were “ripped from the headlines,” to use the cliché, he used
the contemporary and the local to address what he thought was universal: the nature of
free will, despotism, murder, God, violence, suicide. At times he lays things on so
thick he can fall into self-parody, but his ethical concerns are unmistakable.
Dostoevsky wants to change Russia and even the world as a whole, but he understands
that to do that he has to change his readers. He likely did not worry about how exactly
such a thing was possible – indeed, as the epigraph makes clear, he would have
shuddered at the materialism of this approach – he just assumed that it was possible
based on tradition and past experience. Pushkin, Gogol, and Lermontov certainly had
achieved outsized influence on the Russian intelligentsia. With his sense of human
psychology he intuited that if the Underground Man can inflict some portion of his
angst not only on others in the novel (appealing to System 1), but on the reader as
well, his words would have a larger effect. Unfortunately, he may not have anticipated
that this would also lead to the novel’s positive message (which requires System 2)
being swamped by the negative.
Perhaps the most exciting thing about approaching the classics of world literature
from a cognitive perspective is not necessarily any new insight we can gain into the
texts themselves, but the appreciation we can gain for how those works engage us. An
understanding of the relationship between consciousness and narrative can give us an
appreciation of how an artist is able to change who we are. Thus, there is empirical
evidence for the contention that what we read becomes part of our self and this
therefore has ethical ramifications.
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