WHETHER epic, myth, romance or novel, narratives have rested on the presence of the "hero" as a manifestation of the human pursuit of an ideal. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, two modern truths arise and forever change the concept of "hero." First, expanding population and economic development beget the modern city, a place of the disequilibrium and discontents so well defined by the likes of Georg Simmel, Emile Durkheim, Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud. The labyrinthine city and its frenzy magnify temptation and vice, and the overcrowding, exploitation, greed, and filth of industrialization consequently create a social norm of cynical indifference and an urban mentality vitiating the very substance of the hero. (1) The notion of "hero" appears to dissolve into the past as the individual becomes increasingly alienated from environment and as, in Georg Simmel's terms, mental life becomes separate from social life. Second, the very notion of the ideal becomes subject to doubt, and consequently any would-be hero must contend not merely with the challenge of pursuing the ideal, eternally a difficult and perhaps impossible quest, but also with the proposition that the ideal might not exist at all.
Narrative forms become an arena for this crisis of modernity, and two closely aligned works from divergent traditions, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, depict a persona which is alternately a variation, a corruption, and an inversion of the idea of the hero. Both works construct what Burton Pike terms a "literary city" or "word-city"--that is, an archetypal topos in a narrative of the individual and the mass, where the "mass" forms "a peculiar kind of anti-community within the dissociated culture" (Pike 100). A series of paradoxes defines the persona placed into this setting and defines, by extension, a new universal truth: isolation and anonymity amidst a dense population, an alienation from others which grows with increasing proximity, a simultaneous disgust with and fascination for the magnified profligacy and depravity of the city, and finally a pathological psychology and anti-social behavior paradoxically born of the pursuit of ideals. Dostoevsky's The Underground Man and Scorsese's Travis Bickle, the protagonists of the two novels, see metropolitan society as an earthly hell in an age of a dying or already dead God (or gods). They place themselves in an adversarial relationship with the world at large, and they pursue the ideals of spiritual reconciliation and self-realization in ironically repugnant actions. Both, moreover, maintain a perverse sense for the sacred, and this perverted holiness or piety is evident in their discourse reminiscent of the confession genre, in their wrath for an iniquitous society, and in their compassion for the exploited and downtrodden (archetypally rendered in both cases in the form of a prostitute). Ultimately, the reader/spectator, sympathizing and recoiling in the same moment, defines this "hero" by his or her unsettling ambivalence. We are drawn to the quest for ideals in an age when ideals have been trampled on and disposed of, but are simultaneously repelled by the urban grotesque of the modern underground man.
Notes from Underground and Taxi Driver share a host of structural qualities, some of which may be the product of direct influence and many of which appear independently of influence. In a broad sense one should note that Dostoevsky's protagonists loom as an inescapable subtext for any subsequent tale of a marginalized urban figure, and the influence of Notes on Taxi Driver results from a literary and cinematic lineage of underground men leading from Dostoevsky to Scorsese. We also have a more immediate influence apparent in the fact that Scorsese approached Paul Schrader specifically with the intention of adapting Notes from Underground into a film. (2) In terms of common structure, both works contain a profoundly unsettled and withdrawn first-person narrator. Although their backgrounds differ (we could never conceive of Travis alluding to Byron or Kant), their psychological motivations come from very similar dispositions. Both settings, inextricably bound to the character of the protagonist, consist of the metropolis and a small, squalid apartment in a dilapidated section of that metropolis. Finally, while the works conclude quite differently, the plots combine a lament on urban decrepitude, an attack on an ideologue, an indictment of urban predation, and the would-be "salvation" of a prostitute victimized by society. (3)
Scorsese's intention of adapting Notes entices one to probe comparative questions even more engaging, significant, and subtle than the matter of influence. First, a viewing of Taxi Driver informed by Notes provides us with grounds for positioning this film in a lasting tradition of underground men. If Travis Bickle fits into the paradigm of Dostoevsky's underground "antihero," then our reading of Travis gains greater depth both in pure critical terms and in terms of the history of narrative. This second point implies that this comparative reading comprises a study in the evolution of the type, particularly an evolution in the form of presentation. We are here primarily concerned with the perversion of ideals and of an idealistically motivated character, and not with the more general phenomenon of the evolution of narrative from the nineteenth-century novel to the twentieth-century film. Yet because this character is so deeply rooted in the phenomenon of the city, we see this character's "anthropological" evolution, so to speak, as he proceeds into the age where cinema "is the paradigm of public life in the modern metropolis" (Donald 66). (4) Finally, one must consider how the comparative study informs our understanding of Notes from Underground, and here something quite interesting comes to light. By virtue of Scorsese's motivation in making the film, Taxi Driver becomes an exegesis of Notes, and Scorsese's picture provides the modern reader with a vehicle for applying the critical language of film to Dostoevsky's landmark text.
Both works have a clear consciousness of their immediate context in cultural history. Dostoevsky's Underground Man as a type in nineteenth-century Russian literature emerges most notably out of the literature of Nikolai Gogol, specifically Gogol's Poprishchin of "Notes of a Madman" to whom the Underground Man specifically refers (5: 126; Notes 32), (5) and the boorish, maladroit, and spiteful characters of Dead Souls to whom he also alludes (cf. Jackson, passim). Dostoevsky also casts this character as an inversion and a parody of typically Romantic heroes such as Pushkin's Silvio ("The Shot"), Lermontov's Arbenin ("Masquerade"), and even Byron's Manfred (5: 133, 150; Notes 40, 58). Taxi Driver reflects the influence of French Existentialism, and the mise-en-scene, lighting, and setting--particularly in the gloom and darkness of the film--owe a debt to film noir. Finally, the monomaniacal obsession with the "salvation" of a victimized adolescent girl further suggests Ethan Edwards of John Ford's The Searchers (Schrader Taxi Driver xvi; Kolker 239; Friedman 67).
Nonetheless, the Underground Man and Travis Bickle are not only social types (a marginalized Russian civil servant and a marginalized Vietnam veteran), but as aspiring archetypal heroes they exemplify a collective consciousness experiencing a shift in its foundation. Their archetypal nature suggests the archetypal criticism defined by Northrop Frye, and while the characters and their narratives speak to "the social" (the interactive), they move past this point and speak to new facts about the interior of the modern self, a new universal truth (Frye 99). Our heroes want to position themselves in the realm of Jung's universal "common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature," derived from the Platonic ideas and predicated on a sense of the divine (Jung 4, 75). Yet in the nexus of industrialization, modernity, and the Nineteenth-century philosophy there arises the possibility that the world needs no divinity in order to function. Thus we encounter a fundamental shift in the axis mundi--or perhaps an elimination of it--and a shift in any "common psychic substrate." What elevates these works to enduring prominence lies in the primal realities of modern horror and bitter disillusionment in "the underground." (6) One must now contend with the horror …
