What It Is
The piano key, together with its counterpart, the pin of a mechanical organ's cylinder, is the image of a man reduced to a mechanical part, whose acts are played from outside by the laws of nature. The underground man uses it to say what man would be if there were a formula for his will: someone without desires, without will, without any wanting at all. The image comes from calculation, the table of logarithms up to 108,000 that science would make of human acts, and it is resolved into an act: that of proving that one is not a key.
Where It Appears
In chapter VII of Part One the piano key appears for the first time, in the mouth of future science: it will teach man that he has no will and no caprice, that he is a piano key or an organ pin, and that the laws of nature decide for him. There, against this, the narrator sets independent will.
In chapter VIII of Part One he takes the hypothesis to its end. If someday the formula of all our wills is found, man will stop willing.
тотчас же обратится он из человека в органный штифтик или вроде того; потому, что же такое человек без желаний, без воли и без хотений, как не штифтик в органном вале?, in that very instant he will turn from a man into an organ pin or something of the sort; for what is a man without desires, without will, and without any wanting, but a pin in the organ's cylinder?
The interlocutor responds with the reasonable objection, that our wills err by seeing the advantages poorly, and that once everything is calculated we will start reasoning instead of willing. The narrator acknowledges the force of the argument and separates what it leaves out.
рассудок есть только рассудок и удовлетворяет только рассудочной способности человека, а хотенье есть проявление всей жизни, то есть всей человеческой жизни, и с рассудком, и со всеми почесываниями. И хоть жизнь наша в этом проявлении выходит зачастую дрянцо, но все-таки жизнь, а не одно только извлечение квадратного корня., reason is only reason and satisfies only the rational faculty of man, while will is the manifestation of all life, that is, of all human life, with reason and with all its itches. And although our life, in that manifestation, often ends up as some little mess, it is life, and not merely the extraction of a square root.
Man, even if covered with goods, would make some mess out of ingratitude, to prove to himself that he is a man and not a piano key. If he is shown that he is a key, he will do the opposite, and if he lacks the means, he will invent destruction and suffering.
убедится, что он человек, а не фортепьянная клавиша!, he will be convinced that he is a man, and not a piano key!
In chapter VIII of Part Two the gesture returns in miniature, without the word. The narrator decides not to pay Apollon's wages just to prove that he can, and prepares to say that he does not want to because he wants to.
«не хочу, не хочу, просто не хочу выдать ему жалованье, не хочу, потому что так хочу», потому что на это «моя воля господская», I don't want to, I don't want to, I simply don't want to pay him his wages, I don't want to because I want it that way, because for that I have my will as master.
What It Means
The piano key is the form that the narrator's fear takes in Part One, that of being predictable. It explains why he defends, in chapter VIII of Part One, the right to will the foolish, and why the only argument left to him against calculation is an act that calculation does not foresee: the curse, the chaos, the honey cake risked out of ingratitude. Part Two puts this argument to the test. What the narrator does to prove that he is not a key, the collision, the dinner, the withheld wages, is each time a scene written in advance or dependent on the other person's response, and what has no script, Liza's embrace, is what he can only read as an exchange of roles. Two readings: heroism of refusal, which prefers to err rather than be played, or the mockery of a man who affirms himself only when he loses, and whose freedom is that of contradicting, and therefore also predictable. The text does not choose between them.
Relationships
- Themes: Fate and Free Will, Reason.
- Characters: the underground man, Apollon.
- Related symbols: the stone wall, the limit of the same arithmetic, and the crystal palace, where whoever was a key would live.