Ian Craig

Dr. Zoja Pavlovskis-Petit

Comparative Literature 531A

5/18/2018

Notes from the Underground and the Self-Destructive Eiron

Irony is destructive; it necessarily involves negation. As described by Booth, classical/rhetorical

irony (i.e. what Booth calls irony that is both stable and covert) requires the reader to reject the

literal meaning of what is said and then reconstruct the contrary meaning intended by the author.

According to this formula, there is still an “objective” truth value to be reconstructed. If the

eiron reveals any truths, he does so through negation, a la via negative. In the case of what booth

calls “unstable” ironies, there is no concrete truth value: the author invites the reader to reject a

literal meaning as ironic but there is no clear alternative meaning meant to be reconstructed. An

awareness of unstable metaphysical ironies puts the eiron in a difficult position. In Notes from

the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky presents us with the predicament of an eiron. Dostoevsky

reveals the self-destructive potential of an ironic position where the eiron himself becomes the

victim of his own ironic awareness.

Irony has a firm place in the pursuit of knowledge: an ironic rhetoric can effectively cut

through specious arguments by revealing contradictory premises. Socrates famously used irony

to this hand: by feigning ignorance and pressing an interlocutor to explain his argument,

contradictory premises and untenable assumptions would be revealed. One might say that

Socrates was the first eiron. Zoja Pavlovskis tells us that “eiron, eironeia, and related words

seem[ed] to be terms of abuse” before Plato made use of these terms in describing Socrates (22).
 As represented by the Socrates, irony become not only an empowering rhetorical device,

but a kind of vantage point—a way of seeing the world, a mode of thought, a way of being. In

reference to an ironic “way of being,” Ernst Behler brings to our attention an image of Socrates

derived from Plato’s Symposium, specifically from the speech of Alcibiades: “In public, I tell

you, his whole life is one big game—a game of irony. I don’t know if any of you have seen him

when he’s really serious” (68). Through Alcibiades, Plato paints an ambiguous and ambivalent

picture of the eiron. For one, Alcibiades brings into relief the fact that there are “victims” of

irony, and Alcibiades is one such victim. Alcibiades is tortured by Socrates: his ironic vision cuts

through those things that are valued by Alcibiades and conventional society, including physical

beauty and political ambition: “He always traps me, you see, and makes me admit that my

political career is a waste of time…” (67). Alcibiades complains that “he [i.e. Socrates] makes it

seem that my life isn’t worth living!” (67). Alcibiades’ primary function in the Symposium is to

complicate our reception of Socrates and his speech, and he adumbrates the negative/destructive

qualities of the modern eiron. The difference between Socrates and underground man is that in

the case of the later, irony becomes an end in itself, negating the eiron. Underneath the ironic

dissimulation there is no positive attributes, no truth value, only emptiness and doubt. Alcibiades

compares Socrates to a statue of Silenus that holds valuable figures of gods within, behind its

outer surface: “…I once caught him when he was open like a Silenus’ statues, and I had a

glimpse of the figures he keeps hidden within: they were so godlike—so bright and beautiful, so

utterly amazing—that I no longer had a choice—I just had to do whatever he told me” (68).

Alcibiades conveys that there is something incredibly valuable beneath Socrates ironic mask.

This is not the case with the underground man, who can never even be sure that he is telling the

truth.
 At one point the underground man describes himself as “a nasty official,” only to

withdraw the claim two paragraphs later:

I was lying just now when I said I used to be a nasty official. I was having fun at the

expense of the petitioners and that officer, but deep down, I could never really be nasty. I

was always aware of many elements in me that were just the opposite of wicked. I felt

that they’d been swarming inside me all my life, trying to break out, but I refused to let

them” (86).

The contradictory “elements” within the underground negate each other; he “refuses” to express

any of these qualities swarming within himself, leaving him with no positively identified

attribute. Elsewhere he tells us that if he were to act on his own subjectivity he would feel he was

lying because he can find no objective reason to act on his subjectivity:

And, if I did try to follow my feeling blindly without thinking about primary causes, if I

managed to keep my consciousness out of it, even temporarily, if I did make myself hate

or love just to avoid sitting with folded arms—then, within forty-eight hours at the most,

I’d loath myself for deliberately sinking into self-deception. And everything would burst

like a soap bubble and end in inertia. (97)

The underground man cannot reconcile his objectivity with his subjectivity; it seems that his

affect cancels out reason and vise versa.

The underground man claims that he is the “victim” of his own lucidity number of times:

“I swear that too great a lucidity is a disease, a true, full-fledged disease” (87). As Peter Dain

Suber explains, when the eiron can become the “victim” of his own ironic perspective, he

becomes dependent on enemy, his would-be ironic victims:

 When the victim of an irony grows larger than an individual or type of individual, to a

whole class, or the whole of mankind, and even to the whole of existence, the ironist

begins to see himself as a victim with the others. In these larger ironies, the act of

victimization carries no sense of superiority or pride. Instead of feeling superior and

conveying a sense of superiority, the ironist feels humble and tries to convey this sense of

humility. Kenneth Burke makes this type the ‘true’ irony. “True irony…that really does

justify the attribute of ‘humility,’ is not ‘superior’ to the enemy…True irony, humble

irony, is based upon a sense of fundamental kinship with the enemy, as one needs him, is

indebted to him, is not merely outside him as an observer but contains within him, being

consubstantial with him.” (29)

This “fundamental kinship” can be observed in the pseudo-dialectic form of Notes from the

Underground: the underground man cannot express himself except in opposition to his “enemy”

and thus manufactures reactions, responses, and refutations on behalf of his “enemies” (i.e. his

imagined audience, conventional members of society). Sacvan Bercovitch describes this

“fundamental kinship” between the underground man and his would-be ironic victims as follows:

The underground man’s contempt for “the conclusions of natural science” seems to sound

a proud and courageous note for humanity; but the inverted dialectic of his self-assertion

reveals that his defiance is a delusion. His “strength” stems entirely from negation. The

stronger the obstacle, the more humiliating, oppressive and hateful “they” are, the greater

his self-exaltation…. Mechanistic society and his egotism alternate not as opposites but

as interrelated states of mind; together they from the total nature of the unreality into

which he withdraws” (286).

These “interrelated states of mind” become apparent though his contrapuntal argumentative

style: point and counterpoint are so tightly woven together that he must designate for whom he is

speaking: “You say…this is still you talking…. it’s me speaking now…. This is me speaking

again” (102-103). This “kinship” or dependency is perceptible to the reader but never realized by

the underground man himself: this is the essential dramatic irony beyond the reach of our

narrator, and consequently he can never quite resolve himself to a position of humility in relation

to his “enemy.”

A sensitivity to irony can be a claim to superiority. “It is almost a cliché,” writes Peter

Dain Suber, “that irony is elitist and selective, that it creates the illusion of the ironist’s

superiority, an illusion that extends to the codebreaking reader” (19-20). By perceiving life’s

ironies, the underground man might have been able to set himself above other people—if only he

was not aware of this “illusion” and the irony therein. An “elitist” sense of irony is easily

detectable in the underground man but always coincides with a self-conscience negation:

You still don’t know what I have in mind? Well, then it looks as if you have to grow up

and develop your comprehension so that you can grasp all the twists of this

voluptuousness. That makes you laugh? I’m very happy it does. Of course my jokes are

in poor taste, inappropriate, and confused; they reveal my lack of security. But that is

because I have no respect for myself. After all, how can a man with my lucidity of

perception respect himself? (95)

The underground man makes an elitist claim on superior comprehension but imagines this claim

will be received ironically, he himself being the victim of delusions and laughter. He tries to

wrestle out from under this irony with another irony: he is “happy” to be laughed at. He would

like the reader to know that he knows the ironic significance of his jokes and what they “reveal.”
This line of reasoning leads the underground man into a paradox: in order to respect himself, the

underground man must believe in his superior faculties and his “lucidity of perception,” but a

lucid man cannot respect himself because, on account of his “lucidity,” he will be aware that his

superiority is illusory. The ironies multiply and negate any “advantage” (to borrow the

underground man’s own terminology) that might have been realized through the original ironic

realization.

It is of course significant that the underground man is never named: despite his efforts, he

is never able to establish a stable sense of identity. An ironic self-awareness cripples the

underground man and undermines his attempts to define himself. He does not respect himself

enough to take himself seriously; irony becomes a defensive expression of insecurity and self-

doubt. In this way his ironic posturing differs from that of Socrates, who was confident in his

knowledge. The first lines of Notes from the Underground announce the narrator’s intent to

define himself through writing: “I’m a sick man…a mean man. There’s nothing attractive about

me” (84). The first sentence might be the most revealing: most readers can agree that the narrator

is a “sick” man. In a sense everything that follows is an attempt to define this sickness. The

second line may function to disavow a heroic position; being “unattractive,” we do not

necessarily expect a hero to be revealed or a redemptive narrative to follow. The second line is

also a negative statement: he tells us what he is not. His attempts at defining himself are often

undone or destabilized immediately, as we can see in third and fourth sentences: “I think there’s

something wrong with my liver. But, actually, I don’t understand a damn thing about my

sickness; I’m not even sure what it is that’s ailing me” (84). The underground man attempts to

localize his “sickness” within his body only to immediately negate his assay in frustration. His
rhetoric mode is often more destructive than creative, and the text is rife with negation and

disavowal.

The underground man claims that he has failed to become a man of either good or bad

character, belonging on neither side of binary characteristics: “I couldn’t manage to make myself

nasty or, for that matter, friendly, crooked or honest, a hero or an insect. Now I’m living out my

life in a corner, trying to console myself with the stupid, useless excuse that an intelligent man

cannot turn himself into anything” (86). Micheal David Yates describes the underground man as

“stranded” in a “middle region of moral ambiguity:”

While self-confessed "paradoxalist" seems to recognize the imperative, existential

choicconfronting him, because he is unwilling to actively confront this duality (and

thereby balance these aspects of his fractured identity) the underground man is precluded

from becoming anything but divided. (18)

It is ironic that the underground man claims that is his intelligence that prevents him from

actualizing himself: intelligence is supposed to be empowering. Intelligence may be one of the

only qualities the underground man is willing to make a definite claim on. It is true that his

“intelligent” reasoning often leads the underground into a supposedly “rational” state of

paralysis. Whether intelligence in general leads one into a divided, amoral state is one question.

The underground man reveals to us that intelligence can be an ironically crippling attribute.