Is There an Underground Man?: Depsychologized Interiority in Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein

Abstract: Enchanted and disturbed by the Dostoevskian soul, Virginia Woolf writes that, unlike the English novelist (or even Tolstoy), Dostoevsky proceeds “from the inside outwards.” This article takes up this suggestive but perhaps misleading characterization. Putting Wittgenstein’s reimagining of interiority in conversation with Bakhtin’s dialogic Dostoevsky—specifically the underground man—I examine the relation between first- and third-person perspective in both Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein. I conclude ultimately that Dostoevsky does not proceed “from the inside outwards,” for what it means to do so is predicated on a proto-philosophical temptation, a misleading picture of the inside. The intuitive picture of the inner life as the hidden life—that is still somehow ‘visible’ to the novelist—hampers our understanding of the fictional mind. Against the prevailing view of the underground man as a kind of ur-hero, I argue that this early Dostoevskian hero is importantly inchoate: the narrator-chronicler and hero not yet separated but merged impossibly as one. ‘He’ is less a deeply troubled ‘I’ than a grammatically incoherent, overburdened ‘he-I’-fusion .