On 16/04/2008 15:59, "Jay Livingston" <livingstonj@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU> wrote:
At http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/04/critical-library.html
The National Book Critics Circle regularly posts a list of five books a critic believes reviewers should have in their libraries. We recently heard from writer and critic Richard B. Woodward. Here is what Rick pointed out as worth keeping in your library at all times.
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature <http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lectures-on-Literature/Vladimir-Nabokov/e/9780156027755> , edited by Fredson Bowers (1980)
Nabokov is a dangerous writer to emulate. In college I revered his books and sought to imitate his casual majesty until I realized his linguistic or formal brilliance was beyond my reach. As a result, I abandoned any hope of trying to be a novelist myself.
His critical standards toward literature can be no less inhibiting. Periodically I have to banish him from my mind as an icy, out-of-touch aristocrat in order to enjoy in good conscience Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner, and others crushed beneath his weighty judgments. Then, someone will quote him in a review and, remembering the glinting precision of his intelligence, I am forced to bring him back from exile.
These two volumes collect his college lectures from the 1950s on seven works of fiction––Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Walk by Swann’s Place, The Metamorphosis, and Ulysses––and on a select group of Russian writers, not necessarily his favorites. (Dostoevsky and Gorky are included.)
Nabokov’s analytic vocabulary can sound musty as he discusses “themes” and “symbols.” He was unpardonably chauvinistic toward women writers. But his zeal for literature is contagious. Above all he wanted his students to appreciate the array of special effects novelists keep in their bag of tricks.
He was unafraid to throw around the word genius, being one himself.
Those who regard themselves as attentive readers should take two of his sample exams. When I totaled my humiliating score, I realized how much of a novel’s detail I ordinarily miss in my haste to finish and arrive at an opinion. In an essay here titled “The Art of Literature and Commonsense,” he attacks mundane realism and argues that “a seemingly incongruous detail” always trumps “a seemingly dominant generalization.” Or as he puts it in a more Nabokovian fashion: “I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child, but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy.”
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Grammaci, Jay Livingston for passing on Richard B Woodward's percipient insights. They arrived as I was re-playing the audio-book of Bleak House and re-reading VN's life-changing (well, _my_ life) Lecture on Dickens. No 'mustiness' here, RBW, except in the sense of 'must-read!':
"All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science [my bold emphasis -- skb]. Let us worship the spine and its tingle."
May I submit these comments in response to our ListMeisters' request for Nabokov-birthday celebrations? Ideally, I should be snail-mailing this note using the new UK's Royal Mail Endangered-Insect postage stamp: A BLUE (Nabokovian?) Butterfly
http://www.royalmail.com:80/gear/shop/html/shopProductPopUp.jsp?catId=9300091&product=prod63130016&communityId=900003
As an EX-Red, I hear Robeson's Joe Hill singing "But I ain't dead!"
VN rightly equates the tingles (spinal taps?) of pure art and pure science, bringing us back to the two-culture challenge of E O Wilson's Consilience* Here we must pause to ponder another challenging dichotomy: pure and applied. Certainly in Mathematics (the Queen Mother F***er of all the Sciences) much of the traditional snobbery (looking down one's donnish nose at those applied grease-monkeys) has vanished. There's a real historical tingle in the mystery that the purest, most abstract and least worldly equations can suddenly surface in nuts'n'bolts applications. Pacifist mathematician G H Hardy (a Cambridge [UK] contemporary of VN) never expected that his Number Theory would one day help decipher cryptic Jihadist emails.
Is a similar, uneasy convergence possible with pure and applied art? VN seems to shun such, certainly in the sense of 'applied' literature: all those overtly politically-agenda'd, banner-waving, mundanely 'realistic' novels! Yet, I sniff a faint parallel with Hardy's 'inadvertent' Number Theory. One cannot read VN's corpus 'in vacuo' away from the momentous, blood-stained upheavals of the 20th century. My own political 'salvation' owes as much, if not more, to Vladimir/Vera/Dmitri as to, say, Orwell or Solzhenitsyn. And this reminds us that agreeing with or justifying every 'Strong Opinion' is a most UN-Nabokovian thing to do.
One last discussion-point: was VN's Lepidoptery pure or applied Science? The very question hints at a false dichotomy?
Stan Kelly-Bootle.
* I've now found a few references to EOW & Consilience on the VN-archives. Interestingly, Prof D Barton Johnson notes wonderful direct EOW-VN connections, both literary and scientific:
Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 10:09:01 -0700
Reply-To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
Sender: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
From: "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gte.net>
Organization: International Nabokov Society
Subject: E.O. Wilson & LOLITA
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r
Instead of more pressing things I am in the midst of E.O.Wilson's
_CONSILIENCE. The Unity of Knowledge_.
In a chapter on the arts, he writes:
"The arts are eternally discursive. They seek maximum effect with novel
imagery. And imagery that burns itself into the memory, so that when
recalled it retains some of its origninal impact. Among examples I
especially appreciate is the perfect opening of Nabokov's pedophilic
novel. 'Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps
down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' Thus with
anatomical accuracy, alliterative t-sounds, and poetic meter Nabokov
drenches the name, the book title, and the plot in sensuality." (p. 222)
Had their dates been a bit different, Wilson, who is (inter alia)
Honorary Curator in Entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative
Zoology, might have been VN's boss.