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Re: Melville, Goethe, and more
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Trying to keep up with the consistently stimulating contributions of this
list is in danger of becoming a full-time pastime; nevertheless I can’t resist
making a few more scattered remarks.
Following through on Suellen’s mentions of Melville, Pierre, and Ada, and
with the aid of her very stimulating essay The Weed Exiles the Flower, I have
become immersed in Pierre. It has reminded me of Goethe’s Die
Wahlvervandtschaften, 1809, which Wikipedia describes as ….. a landmark both in the
history of the novel and relations between science and literature. ….. Its
central theme is human desire represented as ‘an indescribable, almost magical
force of attraction’ that overcomes social and moral bonds. Also his Zur
Farbenlehre, 1810: which: ….. contains some of the earliest and most accurate
descriptions of coloured shadows, refraction, dioptrical colours, and
achromatism/hyperchromatism.
I couldn’t find any reference to either in the list archives, but can only
suppose that VN was familiar with both, whether in the original or in
translation. The ‘almost magical force of attraction’ that overcomes social and
moral bonds brought Lolita strongly to mind.
Pierre’s ancestry seems to me to include, as does much of Poe, something of
the late C18th English Gothic: it appears to me quite un-American, but “
American” requires definition. Suellen has pointed out to me off-list that: …
the New England literary tradition differs significantly from the Southern
American tradition to which [VN] never warmed (hated Faulkner, never mentions
Tennessee Williams). He also fundamentally disliked Hemingway.
Thinking casually about immigrants from the Old World, who came totally to
embody and project American personae, I thought of Gary Cooper, Cary Grant,
Bob Hope [all English-born]. Others, such as Chaplin, Stan Laurel, and,
notoriously, Roman Polanski, were somewhat less fully integrated: it naturally has a
lot to do with the person’s age at immigration. These are non-literary; but
the most interesting literary figure, for contrast and comparison with VN,
that occurred to me was Raymond Chandler, whose writing has always struck me as
highly sophisticated, and exceptionally American in flavour. I would say
that Chandler, who greatly admired Hemingway, is much more widely and deeply
influential than VN, in the same way that Daniel Defoe was far more influential
than any of the elegant Augustans that were his contemporaries. I’d always
thought of Chandler as another transplanted Englishman, but noted that he was
born in Chicago and moved to England at the critical age of 7. This is
perfect timing for someone to become genuinely bi-lingual, and Chandler, it strikes
me, was bilingual in American English and English English. The first language
has to be firmly in place, and is so by age of about 7, and the second
language has to be fully and instinctively absorbed before about age 14. There is
an interesting essay on Chandler’s writing entitled The Dialectic Aspect of
Raymond Chandler’s Novels, here
_http://home.comcast.net/~mossrobert/html/criticism/newman.htm_
(http://home.comcast.net/~mossrobert/html/criticism/newman.htm)
It quotes Levin: “The union of opposites, after all, is the very basis of
the American outlook: the old and new worlds, the past and present, the self
and society, the supernatural and nature.” This could no doubt also be well
applied to VN.
Some of the characteristics of American writing in general seem to me to be
repetitiveness, and indiscriminate prolixity. Why use five words, when fifty
will do: never leave anything out, which obviates accusations of undemocratic
selectivity. Although VN is not repetitive, and is very discriminating, he
is nevertheless prolix. So was Shakespeare, of course. It occurred to me that
Jim Twiggs’ reduction of the heavily examined Pale Fire passage, from
A blurry shape stepped off the reedy bank
Into a crackling, gulping swamp, and sank.
to
A shape stepped off the reedy bank
Into a gulping swamp, and sank.
doesn’t quite go the full Monty, which would be:
A shape stepped off the bank
Into a swamp, and sank.
As Humpty Dumpty remarked: “Adjectives you can do anything with, but not
verbs.”
The links between Martin Gardner and VN are interesting. While enjoying
Gardner’s annotations on the whole, I have to say that some of them fairly make
me wince. Quite often they make me feel as if I, and the society I grew up in,
are quite extinct, and belong to some dead civilization like Sumer, replete
with quaint and curious, ancient, unfamiliar customs.
Apologies yet again for causing what I fear will be outrage in some
quarters.
Charles
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