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[NABOKOV-L] Bend Sinister 1947 review by R.Watts.
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James Twiggs sends another review of Bend Sinister (the list received the abstract of Diana Trilling's a few days ago). The title is "Comic-Strip Dictator" by Richard Watts, Jr.(The New Republic Published: July 7, 1947).
Excerpts: "The story of the free man under the totalitarian state is still the classic tragedy of our age, and in Bend Sinister it is given striking and original treatment, at once impressive, powerful and oddly exasperating. This second novel in English by Vladimir Nabokov... has an eerie, nightmare quality and savage humor. They combine to make it considerably more than the warmed over Arthur Koestler it occasionally seems on the verge of becoming. Bend Sinister['s] chief fault is that an apparent fascination with his own linguistic achievement sometimes causes Nabokov to go in for verbal fanciness...It is simple in its tragic story, which is merely that of a world-famous philosopher--and it is one of the novel's successes that Nabokov has drawn, in Professor Krug, an intellectual hero whose status as an intellectual is completely credible...It is elaborate both in much of its style and in the manner in which Nabokov has constructed an abstract, totalitarian land which is both Russian and German in its language but decidedly more National Socialist than Communist in its history, theory and practice. Ekwilism was probably the only triumphant fascist movement that [employs the] comic strip as one of its chief inspirations. This was a daily cartoon dealing with the adventures of a Mr. and Mrs. Etermon, a name which the language of Paduk's country meant Everyman. "With conventional human and sympathy bordering upon the obscene," says Nabokov, "Mr Etermon and the little woman were follow from parlor to kitchen and from the garden to garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence which, despite the presence of comfortable armchairs and all sorts of electric thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car) did not differ essentially from the life of a Neanderthal couple" Not only did Etermon come to be regarded as man representing the proper sort of existence for a loyal member of Paduk's Ekwilism Party, but the Leader himself decided to dress, wear his hair and adopt a "sort of cartoon angularity" in the fashion of the comic strip...Ekwilism had its drama as well as its comic strip...In the immortal words of Professor Hamm, Ekwilist author of The Real Plot of Hamlet, Fortinbras' status as a hero is thus made irrefutable.* Nabokov is at his best in his bitterly humorous thrusts at the narrowness and stupidity of totalitarian thought and action and in his flights of satirical scorn. His scenes of horror, with their eerily distorted lights and shadows, can also be powerful, and his account of the slow, inexorable pressure exerted on Krug captures the terror of the police state in a manner not easy to forget...It is because Nabokov can achieve some of the ominous and comic effects he manages in Bend Sinister that his puckish weakness for affectation seems so outrageous."
JM: Here we find a direct reference to Nabokov's appreciation of comic strips. Also, like in Trilling's, a bitter criticism related to Nabokov's writing. R.Watts mentions that this novel is "oddly exasperating," because of "its apparent fascination with its own linguistic achievement" which leads Nabokov towards "verbal fanciness." For him, the author's "puckish weakness for affectation seems...outrageous" because it accompanies a kind of writing that is both "ominous and comic."
The summary of the plot Watts has offered highlighted elements I'd forgotten and could link to our recent postings about "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight": Bend Sinister was written not long after this first novel in English and it contains a satirical view of Hamm, an Ekwilist author who wrote "The Real Plot of Hamlet."#
Watts mentions the novel's setting as being closer to Nazi-Germany than to Stalin's Russia and references Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness At Noon" (wiki: "a seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary...Originally published in 1941... it is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.") Koestler's autobiography details a mystic experience while he awaited to be executed in Spain ("The invisible writing")**. Wiki informs that Koetler addressed "a major speech at the CIA-front Congress for Cultural Freedom held in Berlin,"*** an artistic movement to which Nabokov's musician cousin Nikolas belonged, among an impressive list of other artists.
I've been impressed by other works by Koestler in the past ( "The Sleepwalkers" and "The Reasons of Coincidence" are among those that I remember best), but I'd never seen any connection between his writings and Nabokov's. Rumors describe Koestler as a "serial rapist" and a misogynist (does anyone in the List know anything that could suggest that Humbert Humbert could carry traces of Koestler?) and Julian Barnes expressed doubts concerning Koestler's incluence on his wife (Koestler and his wife died together after having ingested barbiturates).
(Edmund Wilson's criticism of Bend Sinister has already been posted this year).
..........................................................................................................................
* "In this production the famous Elsinore ghost is not the phantom of Hamlet's father but of Fortinbras' father, and the idea of one ghost going about pretending to be another is a fine piece of Ekwilist strategy, since the ghostly imposter was spreading untrue rumors to soften the Danish morale [ and] it is clear that Osric was really Fortinbras' most brilliant spy, bent on creating trouble between two of his Leader's most dangerous foes."
**- Today Alexey Sklyarenko mentioned "Chekhov's story "???? ????? ?????" (The Night before the Trial, 1886) that I discuss in my soon-to-be-published article "Nabokov's Antropomorphic Zoo: The Leporine Family of Doctors in Ada". In its turn, the title of Chekhov's story reminds one of Blok's inspired poem "????? ?????" (Before the Judgment Day, 1915) addressed to the poet's wife.
A.S makes a fascinating connection bt. Blok's most famous poem and lines in ADA related to Krolik and a servant who, later, helped Van to put out Kim's eyes.
***- Wiki-link: "The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. In 1967, it was revealed that the United States Central Intelligence Agency was instrumental in the establishment of the group, and it was subsequently renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF). At its height, the CCF/IACF was active in some thirty-five countries and also received significant funding from the Ford Foundation."
# - Watts adds: "I cannot, by the way, resist quoting just one sentence to show the author's prose at its worst, after warning you that he is not often guilty of such things: 'They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellations--Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies--those mirrors of infinite space qui m'efjrayent, Btaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop--hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from Her heaving hot bosom-leaving more than her smile suggests-and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands'."
Actually, I kinda like this of "prose at its worst," for it serves to weave stunning alusions into his other novels ( "Pale Fire","Ada"...)
Our Ed, Sweeney, once mentioned "the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture"in one of her articles. It would be interesting to recover it and see it brought up in the list.
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Excerpts: "The story of the free man under the totalitarian state is still the classic tragedy of our age, and in Bend Sinister it is given striking and original treatment, at once impressive, powerful and oddly exasperating. This second novel in English by Vladimir Nabokov... has an eerie, nightmare quality and savage humor. They combine to make it considerably more than the warmed over Arthur Koestler it occasionally seems on the verge of becoming. Bend Sinister['s] chief fault is that an apparent fascination with his own linguistic achievement sometimes causes Nabokov to go in for verbal fanciness...It is simple in its tragic story, which is merely that of a world-famous philosopher--and it is one of the novel's successes that Nabokov has drawn, in Professor Krug, an intellectual hero whose status as an intellectual is completely credible...It is elaborate both in much of its style and in the manner in which Nabokov has constructed an abstract, totalitarian land which is both Russian and German in its language but decidedly more National Socialist than Communist in its history, theory and practice. Ekwilism was probably the only triumphant fascist movement that [employs the] comic strip as one of its chief inspirations. This was a daily cartoon dealing with the adventures of a Mr. and Mrs. Etermon, a name which the language of Paduk's country meant Everyman. "With conventional human and sympathy bordering upon the obscene," says Nabokov, "Mr Etermon and the little woman were follow from parlor to kitchen and from the garden to garret through all the mentionable stages of their daily existence which, despite the presence of comfortable armchairs and all sorts of electric thingumbobs and one thing-in-itself (a car) did not differ essentially from the life of a Neanderthal couple" Not only did Etermon come to be regarded as man representing the proper sort of existence for a loyal member of Paduk's Ekwilism Party, but the Leader himself decided to dress, wear his hair and adopt a "sort of cartoon angularity" in the fashion of the comic strip...Ekwilism had its drama as well as its comic strip...In the immortal words of Professor Hamm, Ekwilist author of The Real Plot of Hamlet, Fortinbras' status as a hero is thus made irrefutable.* Nabokov is at his best in his bitterly humorous thrusts at the narrowness and stupidity of totalitarian thought and action and in his flights of satirical scorn. His scenes of horror, with their eerily distorted lights and shadows, can also be powerful, and his account of the slow, inexorable pressure exerted on Krug captures the terror of the police state in a manner not easy to forget...It is because Nabokov can achieve some of the ominous and comic effects he manages in Bend Sinister that his puckish weakness for affectation seems so outrageous."
JM: Here we find a direct reference to Nabokov's appreciation of comic strips. Also, like in Trilling's, a bitter criticism related to Nabokov's writing. R.Watts mentions that this novel is "oddly exasperating," because of "its apparent fascination with its own linguistic achievement" which leads Nabokov towards "verbal fanciness." For him, the author's "puckish weakness for affectation seems...outrageous" because it accompanies a kind of writing that is both "ominous and comic."
The summary of the plot Watts has offered highlighted elements I'd forgotten and could link to our recent postings about "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight": Bend Sinister was written not long after this first novel in English and it contains a satirical view of Hamm, an Ekwilist author who wrote "The Real Plot of Hamlet."#
Watts mentions the novel's setting as being closer to Nazi-Germany than to Stalin's Russia and references Arthur Koestler's novel "Darkness At Noon" (wiki: "a seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary...Originally published in 1941... it is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.") Koestler's autobiography details a mystic experience while he awaited to be executed in Spain ("The invisible writing")**. Wiki informs that Koetler addressed "a major speech at the CIA-front Congress for Cultural Freedom held in Berlin,"*** an artistic movement to which Nabokov's musician cousin Nikolas belonged, among an impressive list of other artists.
I've been impressed by other works by Koestler in the past ( "The Sleepwalkers" and "The Reasons of Coincidence" are among those that I remember best), but I'd never seen any connection between his writings and Nabokov's. Rumors describe Koestler as a "serial rapist" and a misogynist (does anyone in the List know anything that could suggest that Humbert Humbert could carry traces of Koestler?) and Julian Barnes expressed doubts concerning Koestler's incluence on his wife (Koestler and his wife died together after having ingested barbiturates).
(Edmund Wilson's criticism of Bend Sinister has already been posted this year).
..........................................................................................................................
* "In this production the famous Elsinore ghost is not the phantom of Hamlet's father but of Fortinbras' father, and the idea of one ghost going about pretending to be another is a fine piece of Ekwilist strategy, since the ghostly imposter was spreading untrue rumors to soften the Danish morale [ and] it is clear that Osric was really Fortinbras' most brilliant spy, bent on creating trouble between two of his Leader's most dangerous foes."
**- Today Alexey Sklyarenko mentioned "Chekhov's story "???? ????? ?????" (The Night before the Trial, 1886) that I discuss in my soon-to-be-published article "Nabokov's Antropomorphic Zoo: The Leporine Family of Doctors in Ada". In its turn, the title of Chekhov's story reminds one of Blok's inspired poem "????? ?????" (Before the Judgment Day, 1915) addressed to the poet's wife.
A.S makes a fascinating connection bt. Blok's most famous poem and lines in ADA related to Krolik and a servant who, later, helped Van to put out Kim's eyes.
***- Wiki-link: "The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was an anti-communist advocacy group founded in 1950. In 1967, it was revealed that the United States Central Intelligence Agency was instrumental in the establishment of the group, and it was subsequently renamed the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF). At its height, the CCF/IACF was active in some thirty-five countries and also received significant funding from the Ford Foundation."
# - Watts adds: "I cannot, by the way, resist quoting just one sentence to show the author's prose at its worst, after warning you that he is not often guilty of such things: 'They separated and he caught a glimpse of her pale, dark-eyed, not very pretty face with its glistening lips as she slipped under his door-holding arm and after one backward glance from the first landing ran upstairs trailing her wrap with all its constellations--Cepheus and Cassiopeia in their eternal bliss, and the dazzling tear of Capella, and Polaris the snowflake on the grizzly fur of the Cub, and the swooning galaxies--those mirrors of infinite space qui m'efjrayent, Btaise, as they did you, and where Olga is not, but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop--hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from Her heaving hot bosom-leaving more than her smile suggests-and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands'."
Actually, I kinda like this of "prose at its worst," for it serves to weave stunning alusions into his other novels ( "Pale Fire","Ada"...)
Our Ed, Sweeney, once mentioned "the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture"in one of her articles. It would be interesting to recover it and see it brought up in the list.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/