Review: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

A mysterious narrator presents the first part of this book as a series of essays about the nature of suffering, ethics, and reason. His rhetoric is passionate and intuitive, conveying the thinly veiled implication that his words stem from pivotal emotional experiences in his own life. He describes himself as having lived underground for forty years, until in the moment of his speaking he has finally come forth to share his insight with an audience whose attention and agreement is not guaranteed.

The second part describes a series of embarrassing events in the narrator’s early life. Driven by a fragile ego and an obsession with honor, he socially disgraces himself in front of coworkers, then runs straight into the bed of a random prostitute. Her candid innocence is unprepared for his dramatic raving, especially as she grows to love him.

19^th-century Russians never produced light bedtime reading, and Dostoevsky was no exception. I was entranced by two of his classics, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, for their exploration of light in the darkest corners of the human soul. Notes from the Underground displays the same capacity, but unlike those later and longer novels, there is little story to match it. My guess is that this work laid the philosophical groundwork for Dostoevsky’s later and greater writing, and in that regard it is essential to an understanding of his messages. The trouble is that it’s downright uncomfortable to read.

Like much European literature of this era and later, the narrator is heavily unreliable. His initial essays vacillate widely, which is partly prevarication and partly the self-contradiction that comes from a troubled but insightful mind. This is a man who aches to be a hero but considers himself lower than a worm. His intense self-focus borders on narcissism, but for the fact that he is harshly critical of many of his actions and does not deflect the blame for the implied straits in which he has found himself. The central paradox of this half is, for me, the contrast between his stated age and the maturity of all the lesser paradoxes he writes, which fit perfectly into a troubled adolescent consciousness. To feel so vile and yet so self-important, with an urgency of life or death, would more accurately describe a teenage psyche, and without true narrative we have no knowledge of any late-blooming coming of age for our sad narrator.

The second half, while easier to understand for its narrative cohesiveness, is that much more painful for the narrator’s social awkwardness. He is a man of little consequence, and his typical social relationships leave him in shambles and the other parties more or less unaffected. This tendency is illustrated by his obsession with an officer who once moved him out of the way without acknowledgement in a crowded bar; the narrator schemes like a maniac to collide with the officer in the street to reassert his self-worth. Such desperate pettiness in a narrator, a position with whom the reader naturally identifies on some level, is difficult to swallow, and it only gets worse. His buffoonery culminates when Liza, the prostitute mentioned earlier, becomes the first person to take him seriously. His reaction toward her attempt to understand him is great tragedy, a gem of interesting relationship amid a shipwreck of unsettling gaffes.

The elements of human introspection in this book are fundamental and worthy of study, but their conveyance comes up short, at least in the English translation. I recommend this book to any dedicated fan of Dostoevsky, but not to anybody else.

Logan (2017 film) and superhero violence

"There's no living with the killing..." -Shane (1953 film)

Throughout the 20^th century, humankind gave birth to a class of genetic mutants with fantastic powers, who were generally hated and feared by ordinary humans. Now in the mid-21^st century, mutant births have ceased, and most mutants have died out, along with the bloodshed done to and by them. Two surviving mutants are a clawed drifter named James Logan “Wolverine” Howlett and a telepath named Professor Charles Xavier, who once ran a school for young and exiled mutants. Logan is finally losing his ability to heal from any injury, and Charles’ advancing ALS is making his telepathy a danger to those around him. Together, with Logan as caregiver and Charles sliding into a second childhood, the two old men are quietly preparing to die in Mexico. But the discovery of an impossibly young mutant named Laura, with abilities and a temper much like Logan used to have, forces them into their last chance to be role models in a world that hated, then forgot them. The resulting journey is a test of how much they would sacrifice to save not the world, but one young life.

I don’t normally review movies, but this one deserves an entry for two reasons: it captivated me, and it gives me a chance to talk about superhero violence.

Superhero comics are an inescapable part of the body of modern speculative fiction. They have one key difference from novels, including most graphic novels: they are designed to continue forever. This requires them to embrace a bizarre marriage of predictability and ever-increasing flashiness in order to keep selling issues. (Or it did until comics became a way to market movies.) It also requires that superheroes always defeat their villains in the end. Typical comic book heroes refuse to kill their conquered villains both as a statement of moral superiority, and as an opportunity to recycle those villains in years to come.

Superhero movies are different. Because they are iterated with far less frequency than comic books, they pack their punch by killing the villain. Even the more moral heroes who, like Spider-Man in his first two film iterations, try to minimize casualties, are nevertheless burdened by a villain who accidentally dies as a result of his own hubris or sacrifices himself as an act of redemption. A notable exception to this rule is the X-Men’s Magneto, whose death would have martyred him.

Into this same franchise steps Logan, whose abandonment of the codename “Wolverine” has come with a humanizing of a character who, unusual among comics when he was first introduced, was unafraid and sometimes even eager to kill. He was animal-like by nature and enhanced to be a military weapon, leaving little room for any human personality but a gruff, cool exterior and the occasional current of passion for romance and saving innocent lives (by killing antagonists). In the movies, of which he has appeared in nine, his signatures are stabbing faceless foes with his unbreakable metal claws, and receiving sickening wounds that heal before he has a chance to bleed.

This changes in Logan, which features blood aplenty. The former Wolverine is old and tired. He does not eagerly leap into battle like superheroes are supposed to do. Of the three main characters, he is the most battle-hardened, yet actually the least deadly; Laura fights with sickening savagery, and Charles’ condition can cause him kill anyone around him regardless of moral categories. The audience is invited to question our own appetite for violence by sequencing the deadliness of these protagonists. Our opening scene features a drunk Logan beaten half to death before he sloppily dismembers his attackers. Charles’ first seizure is emotionally depressing, full of grating lights and sounds. Finally, once Laura bares her claws for the first time, we receive the heart-stopping, choreographed action we’ve learned to expect from a Wolverine movie—only to realize the scene we’ve been anticipating shows a child being gored with a harpoon, among other atrocities.

Kurt Vonnegut has written that writers should put their characters through hell in order to see what they’re made of. Logan does this to all its characters, “good” and “bad” alike, and many new sides surface to characters who have remained essentially the same for over a decade of films. It also does this to its viewers, who watch superhero movies to experience the catharsis of watching seemingly relatable characters perform incredible feats and beat the snot out of people who deserve it. I acknowledge that this kind of release is a major reason I enjoy comics. Logan does nothing of the kind, but it does offer the catharsis of knowing that no matter how bleak things get, redemption is always possible in the pursuit of simple acts of kindness for the people you least expect.