MODERN LITERATURE
31
Underground
is a restatement of the essential idea of Diderot's
dialogue
in
terms both more extreme and less genial. The
Nephew is still on the defensive-he is naughtily telling secrets
about the nature of man and society. But Dostoevsky's under–
ground man shouts aloud his envy and hatred and carries the
ark of his self-hatred and alienation into a remorseless battle with
what he calls "the good and the beautiful," mounting an attack
upon every belief not merely of bourgeois society but of the
whole humanist tradition. The inclusion of
Notes from Under–
ground
among my prolegomenal books constituted something of
a pedagogic risk, for if I wished to emphasize the subversive
tendency of modem literature, here was a work which made all
subsequent subversion seem like affirmation, so radical and so
brilliant was its negation of our pieties and assumptions.
I hesitated in compunction before following
Notes from
Underground
with Tolstoy's
Death of Ivan llytch,
which so
ruthlessly and with such dreadful force destroys the citadel of
the commonplace life in which we all believe we can take refuge
from ourselves and our fate. But I did assign it and then two of
Pirandello's plays which, in the atmosphere of the sordidness of
the commonplace life, undermine all the certitudes of the com–
monplace, common-sense mind.
From time to time I have raised with myself the question of
whether my choice of these prolegomenal works was not extrava–
gant, quite excessively tendentious. I have never been able to
believe that it is. And if these works do indeed serve to indicate
in
an accurate way the nature of modem literature, a teacher
might find it worth asking how his students respond to the
strong dose.
One response I have already described-the readiness of
the students to engage in the process that we might call the
s0-
cialization of the anti-social, or the acculturation of the anti–
cultural, or the legitimization of the subversive. When the term–
es;ays come in, it is plain to me that almost none of the students
have been taken aback by what they have read: they have
