Popular media eagerly links apropos music to the sensibilities of the present pandemic. Fans of pop-rock music will find “Living in a Ghost Town” by The Rolling Stones a representative choice. The lyrics mention having to go “underground.” The idea suggests two classic literary presentations of “underground,” namely Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
In both novels, “underground” is not just a physical location but a state of mind of the protagonists, a state of involuntary solitude amounting to alienation, disdain, and distrust of society. In Dostoevsky, the protagonist is a bitter man who cannot tolerate hypocrisy, and prefers his aloneness to the company of those he can no longer tolerate. He blames himself for chasing after them too long, for secretly admiring the station and haughtiness of this crowd whom he tried to impress and persuade to like him but failed miserably to win. So he has consciously decided to live “underground,” having nothing to do with them — though he still resents his failure.
In Ellison, “underground” is a method of self-salvation, a black man abused by both blacks and whites, of different political and social persuasions, all of the others flawed, unreliable, failing to understand the protagonist’s personal plight, or the plight of African-Americans in general (the novel was published in 1952). “Underground” to Ellison’s protagonist is safety, anonymity, the status of being an “invisible man,” meaning that he will no longer attempt to persuade others or justify himself to them, but dwell comfortably in his self-effacement. Ellison acknowledged his debt to Dostoevsky, but did not elaborate any analogy with the historical “Underground Railroad” of nineteenth-century United States history. After all, that underground was a physical pathway out of slavery, and such an equivalent social pathway did not exist in his day.
“Living in a Ghost Town” includes a line lamenting that if the lyricist wants to party during the lockdown, it’s a party of one. True. But it’s always a party of one. If the lockdown ends, if the pandemic ends, will society be any different in the eyes of the solitary,the urban hermit, or the one gone underground?
Anthony Storr, the author of Solitude, A Return to Self, quotes the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s 1958 essay “The Capacity to Be Alone,” where Winnicott notes the popular emphasis on “the fear to be alone or the wish to be alone [rather] than on the ability to be alone.” As Storr and others have since shown, this capacity is not pathological but, in fact, necessary and healthy. And the pandemic is reminding us of this fact.
URLs: Hermitary reviews: https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/dostoyevsky.html and https://www.hermitary.com/bookreviews/ellison.html; “Living in a Gost Town”: https://youtu.be/LNNPNweSbp8