Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky's characters are often vile things, grotesques, caricatures of human beings. They do not belong to families or communities, but exist - abstractly, precariously - beaten back onto themselves, fixated and obsessed. "I am a sick man," begins the Notes from Underground. And yes he is: sick and sickening. "I never managed to become even an insect." Too bad, we might want to say: rather than bother us, he might have flown away or been squashed like Kafka's metamorphosized Gregor.

But Dostoevsky's "underground" people do exist, and they talk and talk and talk, and sometimes kill. They are gadflies and scorpions and - according to the philosopher Rene Girard - the darker side of ourselves as well. Taking the narrator of the Notes at his word,Girard proposes that Dostoevsky's characters only "push to extremes...what you yourselves would dare to take only halfway." They reveal the hidden, rotten truths good citizens like to paper over: as Girard also puts it, the logic of "tendencies and propensities present in all human beings."

Girard has been elaborating upon this thesis since the early 1960s. Indeed, there has developed over the last twenty years something of a "Girardian" system, propagated by a gang of "Girardians." Last year, in respective rites of consecration in France and in the United States (where Girard has lived for fifty years), the French Academy recognized his lifetime ceuvre, and Crossroad published a Girard Reader, edited by James G. Williams. Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, published in French in 1963, is the latest of his books to appear in translation. It is by no means, however, passe. Though Girard has gone on to bigger and better things, here his thinking is cutting and fresh. This book. not only illuminates Dostoevsky's novels, but provides us another perspective on Girard's career.

For Girard, "It is not the disincarnate thought that interests us but the thought embodied in the novels." He does not dismantle Dostoevsky's novels into philosophical propositions or ideas, but seeks to draw out the logic governing Dostoevsky's characters.

Girard begins with the fact that Dostoevsky's characters aspire to originality: They want to be somebody. But they suffer from a paradox. Though they fancy themselves to exist apart from the world - to be uniquely special - they need and crave its recognition. They can only be somebody if others play along. As Girard reflects, "[P]ride is essentially contradictory, self-divided and torn between the Self and the Other." They are catapulted, then, into an awful but all-too-everyday game of king of the hill.

It is Girard's signal insight that such "conflicts of desire keep occurring not because strongly individualized desires strongly oppose one another, but for the opposite reason." To be somebody, Dostoevsky's characters must do and say the things outstanding persons do and say. So they must copy the same desires. But copying engenders rivalry; "mimetic desire," as Girard calls it, terminates in violence or scapegoating, petty or not. What is sick here, though, is that "the against precedes the for." Dostoevsky's characters feel the need to distinguish themselves against others, but besides this principle cannot say what for.

Like Dostoevsky, Girard is unrelenting. He exposes, finally, the machinations of fanatical pride in apparent humility; he defrocks, as self-exalting, the piety of renunciation. In the end, Girard argues, Dostoevsky "reveals the exile, the rupture, the suffering" that flow from pride. But his art is also "literally prophetic." He calls us back from idolatry; he reminds us, writes Girard, that "[a]t the heart of everything there is always human pride or God." This book therefore anticipates both Girard's theological "turn" and the "Girardian" thesis that Christ saves us from the vortex of violence that is, otherwise, the first and last word of human culture. If we can believe that God so loved the world, and every one of us, that he became incarnate and suffered even death, then the need for recognition tumbles away.

Now this makes for an attractive apologia, but it is a hard pill to swallow. Is the cult of the self endemic to all cultures, or a sickness afflicting only particular ones? Girard acknowledges that, "in the course of history, Western individualism took over little by little the prerogatives that had belonged to God." But this is a historically and culturally specific claim. I wonder if Girard's thought is not, ironically, basically still "egocentric": Everything swirls back to the self, however "intersubjective" it has become. How the self goes, so goes the world. Of course it is we as selves who act, but there is little sense here of institutions as creative bodies - of families, communities, companies, countries fostering authentic interest, God or not. Dostoevsky gives the lie to the self's bad faith; but I am unwilling to agree that he thereby gives us the key to the riddle of life. Surely it is messier and more variant.

Whatever the persuasiveness of Girard's thinking, it demonstrates that being somebody is, at times, a more complicated and counterintuitive production than we might think. As Americans, we jealously guard our rights and cultivate our particularities. But who loses? In this regard, it is pertinent to recall that Ralph Ellison wrote, in his 1981 introduction to Invisible Man, "I associated [my narrator], ever so distantly, with the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground."

Bernard G. Prusak is Commonweal's 1996-97 editorial intern. He is currently translating Dominique Janicaud's The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology for Fordham University Press.