Behind the scenes of Chapter One (Part Two): I’m going to start this month’s section with a fun fact: I made my Shakespearean debut at age eight, wearing a giant hat shaped like a mushroom and doing my best impression of Denzel Washington as Don Pedro. It was doubtless an influence on my understanding of drama as genre! It also led to my lifelong love of Much Ado About Nothing: the second, and highly underappreciated, Shakespeare play we’ll consider.
Suggested Reading: Rowan Williams’ masterful Dostoevsky: Faith and Fiction is a great read as a background for this entire project. We’ll get to other Williams suggestions in due time: I was lucky enough to have him as a member of my committee, and he was a huge influence on the book. We’ll start touching on Mikhail Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics here, which is also a great read.
There will be a lot of narratology and genre nerdery in this section, but it will be summarized for you and lightly roasted in footnotes, so take heart, and don’t feel the need to track down The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative.
Chapter One: Narrative Selfhood, Part Two
The drama of Dostoevsky: considering genre
‘Hamlet [. . .] should have been a Russian, not a Dane,’ William Morris wrote in 1888.1 Notes from Underground arose from a nineteenth-century Russia both enthralled by and increasingly disillusioned with Hamlet as symbolic character:
The presiding sense of helplessness encouraged criticism of Hamlet as self-criticism. In the eighteen-sixties, however, when the drive for practical political reform had gained new impetus, the inactive and withdrawn Hamlet was viewed with less sympathy: ‘In the new historical context the “Hamlets” of the forties had degenerated into the so-called “superfluous men.” In other words, Hamletism became identified with self-centred individualism.’ . . . Shakespeare’s poetic influence was regretted by Russia’s growing school of realist writers, who wanted a return to ‘natural’ language (Dostoevsky in turn offered his own ‘fantastic realism’ as an alternative to what he saw as stifling realist prose.)2
In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky is holding up a Hamlet-like character as a mirror to his time: a time that was not unlike Shakespeare’s time, which in turn is not unlike our own time. What I am attempting here is a rapprochement between the existentialist literature of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries and the existentialist inclinations of our own time, suggesting that the angst of Hamlet and the Underground Man has moral and philosophical content that we can learn from in the present day.
The power of Dostoevsky’s work is in his ability to leave the tensions of his novels unresolved while still leaving room for the light of faith: he refuses pat moral answers while still opening a window onto a moral universe. As Rowan Williams observes in Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction,
The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other—the question standing behind all these critical contemporary issues—is left painfully and shockingly open, and there seems no obvious place to stand from where we can construct a clear moral landscape. Yet at the same time, the novels insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we—characters and readers—saw the world in another light, the light provided by faith. . . . But in order to put such a challenge, the novels have to invite us to imagine precisely those extremes of failure, suffering, and desolation.3
Notes from Underground is a compelling view into the questions of postmodernity specifically because Dostoevsky so faithfully portrays in it a man who is totally isolated and has lost the thread of meaning in his life. Partly held back by the censors, Dostoevsky does not make explicit the novella’s implicit culmination in religious questions, but they haunt the text in the way that they haunt contemporary life. The dramatic quality of Dostoevsky’s works, and of Notes from Underground in particular, means that they can be examined with the same attention to character and psychological realism that I have argued is an effective way to read Shakespeare.
‘As the actor stands spouting a manic torrent of self-deprecating judgments illuminating his character’s loneliness, pain, and despair, sweat drips down his bare chest and spittle forms at the corners of his mouth, only a couple of feet from the audience.’4 The performance a critic from Backstage describes so vividly is not a traditional play—it is Notes from Underground adapted for the stage. The same critic claimed that Notes from Underground and dramatic performance were ‘a match made in existential heaven, excusing the obvious incongruity of that statement.’ A writer for the LA Times said of another performance of Notes, ‘Dramatic adaptations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work should carry a warning to audiences that the characters and situations they’re about to encounter are likely to be disturbing in the extreme. . . . beware: Psychological turmoil isn’t just depicted — it’s incited.’5 Sometimes a solo performance, sometimes reimagined with a supporting cast, Notes from Underground is often performed for an audience, despite not being written as a play.6 The performances do not always meet with acclaim, however; members of the audience left the theatre, apparently in disgust, in the 2010 performance at La Jolla Playhouse.7 Adaptations have also extended to the screen, with a 1995 film starring Henry Czerny, Sheryl Lee and Jon Favreau opening on a frame that looks like a home video filmed by the Underground Man.
In Michael Goldman’s On Drama: Boundaries of Genre, Boundaries of Self, he suggests that drama is the original literary form:
Many problems not only in dramatic but in literary theory would take on a sharply new perspective if, just to clear the air, let us say, we were to reverse the process and think instead of drama as the most general case of literature, with poetry, the novel, and so forth as specializations. We might do well to imagine drama as the originary literary or artistic form.8
The performance of Notes from Underground as a drama suggests there is some truth to Goldman’s claim. Some of the earliest and most effective works of literature—for example, Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy—were dramas. Poems like the Iliad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, and even the earliest-known written piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, were originally recited or sung. Most narratives were shared through oral tradition, and most of the written narratives we have inherited today (including the Bible) have their roots in oral tradition, suggesting that drama broadly understood could be seen as the root of all subsequent literary forms. Among other reasons for this, drama has universal appeal, with almost no barriers to entry. Drama does not require a higher education or the ability to read; it requires a community, in the form of a cast and an audience.9 This fact is underscored by the widespread popularity of medieval mystery plays, but spread its roots long before the Middle Ages. Even before modes of writing existed, it was possible for a general public to share the experience of a dramatic performance without the capacity to read or write. Before the invention of writing, narrative was passed down exclusively in a performative mode.
The novel, on the other hand, is a late modern invention, reliant on cheap modes of printing for dissemination. Between these two genres are a variety of others, and they are succeeded by still more, but often the availability and popularity of genres depends on historical facts such as societal expectations and technological advances. Though there are, of course, ways of defining genre that seem less dependent on medium or historical accident—one could delineate different forms of epic poetry by metre and structure, for example, or place a hard line between the written poem and the written story—these often take place within a singular historical period, or already within what some would call a ‘genre.’
