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{"id":17985,"date":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2800"},"modified":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T00:00:00","slug":"dostoevskys-archetypes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/03\/dostoevskys-archetypes\/","title":{"rendered":"Dostoevsky’s Archetypes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Lonny Harrison\u2019s forthcoming Archetypes from Underground<\/a> suggests that Jung, as well as literary treatments of archetypes (Frye), are useful for understanding Dostoevsky\u2019s characters, plots, themes, and poetics. Harrison makes a good case for the comparison of Dostoevsky and Jung, noting that they both draw on German Romanticism \u2013 especially Schelling and Carus \u2013 and on Kantian idealism. <\/p>\n

Like mythic archetypes, Dostoevsky\u2019s world is full of doubles and opposition. \u201cAll archetypes have a positive and favourable side that points upward as well as a partly negative and unfavourable, partly chthonic side that points downward.\u201d So too Dostoevsky, whose \u201cunderground is the territory of this downward-pointing dimension, the subterranean, the unconscious. Its opposite is the upward-pointing process of transformation, numinous experience, and discovery of authentic self\u2014also Dostoevsky\u2019s terrain.\u201d This binary is overcome, though, in a mystical\/alchemical coincidence of opposites that produces transformation.<\/p>\n

Harrison sees this working, for instance, in Notes from Underground<\/em>, which is neatly connected with Dostoevsky\u2019s revisions of his psychologically and archetypally simpler The Double<\/em>. The underground is associated with the unconscious. It carries a negative charge, yet it also represents a force that confronts the \u201cabove ground\u201d world of modern mechanical, materialist rationalism: \u201cIn Dostoevsky the liminal space just beyond the barrier of consciousness\u2014the underground\u2014is the subterranean catalyst for the psychological dramas that fester, boil, and suddenly erupt.\u201d<\/p>\n

Harrison sees this at work in Raskolnikov whose subconscious rebels \u201cagainst his whole way of life. His illness is an infection both psychological and physiological in nature, spread throughout his body and mind. For healing, he needs repentance\u2014a total remedy for his unconscious ills through spiritual redemption.\u201d Where the conscious mind has been convinced there are no ideals, the unconscious breaks out with a desire for wholeness, harmony, and beauty that cannot be wholly suppressed. Explaining the structure of Notes from Underground<\/em>, Harrison observes, \u201cIn dualistic terms, the \u2018underground\u2019 of his notes is the counter-ideal, the negation of idealism itself. It is the overdetermined, rational, material reality that undermines the subjective compulsion to strive for the unattainable. Thus, the divide between egoism and idealism is most acutely felt in the underground\u2014the Underground Man knows the \u2018good\u2019 but does not believe in the possibility of achieving it. He rejects idealism outright, embracing egoism as the only viable frame of self-definition. Yet his underground cynicism still carries the potential, by negative example, to call out for the transcendent ideal for which the higher self strives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The underground is a place of shadows, but in those shadows Dostoevsky finds hope of redemption, of freedom and of a restoration of true humanism, because from the shadows comes the human impulse to challenge the straight-jacket of scientific rationalism.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"