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Re: THOUGHTS: artists don't have to be consistent...or do
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Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2008 09:53:46 -0700From: vanveen13@SBCGLOBAL.NETSubject: Re: [NABOKV-L] THOUGHTS: artists don't have to be consistent...or doTo: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU.JA: Nabokov was just as prey to human foibles and mental lack as the next fellow who whistles while he puts on his shoes after sex.
LH :Of course artists are human beings but the greatness of a work of art depends on the extent of the multi-dimensional consistency an artist is able to master. BTW, Fyodor, who can be regarded at least partly as a reflection of one of VN's former selves, envies "the next fellow who whistles while he puts on his shoes after sex." (TG chapter3 p166, Vintage International: "But sometimes he envied the simple love life of other men and the way they probably had of whistling while taking off their shoes.")
JA: Nabokov often seems to equate poor physical hygiene with an innate philistinism-
It is not an observation. VN warned his readers again and again that great works of art are fairy tales and he meant it! It was not just an empty phrase to tickle critics and readers. A character in fairy tales has "attributes": poor physical hygiene is one of the "attributes" of the "villain"; another example of such "attributes" is the silver object the hero uses (Baron Wolfe's silver case -sorry, I can't help it!) or is given (V's silver pencil in RLSK) or is stolen (Herman's silver pencil in D !!) and which enables him to - or not to in Herman's case - go through the ordeal of death/mortality. Like Mozart's Das Zauberflöte.
JA: the narrator suggests that just because she's spiritually lacking there must be a corresponding lack in her physical appearance as well (this silly idea crops up again in his story Conversation Piece, where the narrator finds the fascist girls rather homely);
LH: This not so silly idea crops up again and again indeed, in many other VN's stories. RLSK chapter 16: "that if you looked well at the prettiest girl while she was exuding the cream of the commonplace, you were sure to find some minute blemish in her beauty" says Sebastian, which does not prevent him from being enslaved by precisely one of these "prettiest girl"(= death/ mortality), before being saved (by the silver pencil = art)and born again under the form of V.In fact, I think this is the basic plot in nearly all VN's stories, which he develops in all dimensions, imagining countless variations around this theme, some of them hardly recognizable.
JA: What about the characterization of the Toad in Bend Sinister?
LH: B Boyd wrote in VNAY chapter5: "The schoolboy Krug who could sit on Paduk's face not just once but a thousand's times is not merely a bully and a boor but a bore with no concievable relationship to the Krug of later years" True, Krug as a boy was a bully but I don't agree with Boyd that he has no concievable relationship with Krug the brilliant philosopher; I think VN may have wanted to show that Paduk, although he has become a loathsome tyrant, has been a child, a not very strong or bright or likeable child but a child all the same who was the victim of someone who misused his strength. Although I really admire B Boyd, I think he may have missed something here: BS, imo, is more about Krug's than Paduk's weaknesses.
Laurence HochardNabokv-L <nabokv-l@UTK.EDU> wrote:
LH: I don't agree!Great artists are great precisely because they are able to build fictionnaly, aesthetically, philosophically... coherent and consistent worlds.And it is the critic's task to unravel, explain, bring to light the deep coherence of the artist's work.What makes an artist like VN seem inconsistent is that the coherence of his work lies deeper than the ordinary coherence of ordinary thought: this is what makes it so intriguing and fascinating.For example, VN's attitude toward Darwinism (a subject which has been discussed recently) is NOT prisoner of the present day alternative: evolutionism versus intelligent design.I think it might be more interesting to consider it in the light of Nietzsche's criticism of utilitarianism.Another example is VN's lifelong denounciation of Freud's psychoanalysis: I've read countless comments to the effect that his views were some kind of whim, as great artists are wont to have and which can therefore be generously forgiven and henceforth disregarded by the "serious" critic.But no ! VN's opposition to psychoanalysis is grounded and deeply consistent with the rest of his work and is even instrumental in the very structure of many of his stories.Of course, a critic or a reader, even one who loves VN's fiction, is entirely free to disagree with VN's view of psychoanalysis or any other subject provided he fights it with arguments instead of being content with dismissing it as "inconsistent".
J.Aisenberg: considering that if you're human then you're simply going to be inconsistent, because humans are always inconsistent no matter how great they are as artists, it's kind of a that's all she wrote sort of deal. Nabokov was just as prey to human foibles and mental lack as the next fellow who whistles while he puts on his shoes after sex. His art's not always deep either; in fact it can be quite strange how shallow some of his observations are. For instance Nabokov often seems to equate poor physical hygiene with an innate philistinism--not until he entered the well-soaped world of America did he realize that baths might only be skin deep. In Laughter in the dark, characterizing Margot, the narrator suggests that just because she's spiritually lacking there must be a corresponding lack in her physical appearance as well (this silly idea crops up again in his story Conversation Piece, where the narrator finds the fascist girls rather homely); I don't think I've ever read one Marxist character in N. who had any dimensionality to them at all, unless we count Hermann Karlovich, not exactly a model communist, because if N. doesn't agree with people than they're wrong: period. What about the characterization of the Toad in Bend Sinister? Because he's a loathsome tyrant it turns out that in school, as a child, he was also a geeky weirdo loner whom the main character, the briliant philospher (????) used to torment on the playground--here Nabokov has suggested a nice formula for how to tell tyrants from the rest of us--they're mega-nerds!--thus neatly undoing so much of his touting of individualists against the common-hordes of the common-sensical; its not unlike those depictions we come across in "decadent" art films of the seventies and popular pot-boilers of Nazi soldiers as homosexual sado-masochists. In any case questions of "consistency" are always relative; I completely disagree with you that if a reader can't see the coherence then they're necessarily the ones with the problem, who should just look even deeper until the contradictions are resolved. Though I might agree with you that there is not a simple, "evolutionism" versus "intelligent design" dichotomy in Nabokov's work, clearly as a scientist he knows that adaptive evolution is going on, or at least he referred to it once or twice, there's no way you can argue that he didn't believe in Intelligent Design, and I think he dissed Darwinism based more on social implications people associated with the theory than the theory itself, but he doesn't want to say so, and that's why it's so confusing. Why? Why doesn't he precisely want to talk about his spiritual beliefs either instead of distributing little implications? And the reason many people think his lifelong denunciation of Freud was weird and can't take it at face value is probably for two reasons: 1. its quite odd for someone to bitch so much so often so vociferously about something they think is so damned wrong; 2. the Freud he brings up in things like Lolita don't seem that much deeper than what you'd pick up in a couple of film criticism classes--his Freud is a cartoon Freud, because he thought Freud was a cartoon, not that I'm all that sympathetic to Freud myself, but then I don't feel compelled to talk about him all the time and design everything I write to deliberately repel those who do. I just don't care what a Freudian would make of my stuff. Nabokov comes off like the fat kid who who yells that he isn't fat while he stuffs another heaping spoon of ice cream in his pie-hole, and you can be made a little uncomfortable by it.Laurence Hochard
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