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BIRTHDAY: Lessons in Comparative Fiction in VN
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The following quotes offer what I would like to call “lessons in comparative
fiction” in VN. They not only serve to contrast his techniques from, or to
parody, those of his predecessors, but also to instruct the reader in the
evolution of fiction writing.
The chronological selection is of course far from exhaustive and owes more
to their memorable character than to a rereading of his entire oeuvre.
It is hardly surprising that most of these “lessons” are to be found in Ada,
or Ardor.
This pair of slippersÂ…our lovers kept in the lower drawer of the corner
chest, for life not infrequently imitates the French novelists. King Queen
Knave
She was the daughter of a well-known theatrical manager, a willowy, wispy,
fair-haired girl with colorless eyes and pathetic little pimples just above
that kind of small nose which English lady novelists call “retroussée” (note
the second “e” added for safety). Laughter in the Dark *
It [the street] rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post
office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel. The Gift
“Eez eet zee verity,” said Beuret, suddenly shifting to English…and speaking
it like a Frenchman in an English book, “eez eet zee verity zat…zee disposed
chef of the state has been captured together with a couple of other blokes
(when the author gets bored by the process –or forgets)… Bend Sinister
At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of
old novels. Ada
[Rattner] seemed as dull as the rain that could be discerned slanting in
parallel pencil lines against the darker background of a larch plantation,
borrowed, Ada contended, from Mansfield Park.**
Dr. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane
Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information
(you recall Brown, don't you, Smith?)
"C'est ma dernière nuit au château," she said softly, and rephrased it in
her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels.
"'Tis my last night with thee."
"I want to ask you," she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside
herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the
armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the
maid in Georgian novelsÂ…
That library had provided a raised stage for the unforgettable scene of the
Burning Barn; it had thrown open its glazed doors; it had promised a long
idyll of bibliolatry; it might have become a chapter in one of the old
novels on its own shelves; a touch
of parody gave its theme the comic relief of life.
She said: “Speaking as a character in an old novel, it seems so long, long
ago, davnĂŻm davno, since I used to play word-games here with Grace and two
other lovely girls. 'Insect, incest, nicest.'”
What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips?
Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought
they could explain everything.
"I remember the cards," she said, "and the light and the noise of the rain,
and your blue cashmere pullover—but nothing else, nothing odd or improper,
that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument
young ladies."
Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult
book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of
intercourse so seldom convey, because newborn and thus generalized, in the
sense of primitive organisms of art as opposed to the personal achievement
of great English poets dealing with an evening in the country, a bit of sky
in a river, the nostalgia of remote sounds—things utterly beyond the reach
of Homer or Horace. The Original of Laura
[S]he would bicycle through the Blue Fountain Forest to a romantic refuge
where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the
only signs of an earlier period of literature.
----------------------------
*A quick search through 19th and early 20th century fiction and magazines
shows that male novelists were as much guilty of writing “retroussée” as
lady novelists - if not more so: “He moved just a trifle, then, so that he
could see more of her face; how her extraordinarily long lashes swept her
cheek, and her adorable nose, which was ever so slightly retroussée.”
Francis Barton Fox, The Heart of Arethusa (1918) chapter XXII.
**The name Rattner brings to mind Julius Ratner, a would-be novelist in
Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930), “a dreadful dull and flat thing,” as
described by VN in his letter of July 23, 1944 to Edmund Wilson apropos his
dream of Khodasevich and Lewis and Wilson as a hybrid of Churchill and
himself.
A. Bouazza
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fiction” in VN. They not only serve to contrast his techniques from, or to
parody, those of his predecessors, but also to instruct the reader in the
evolution of fiction writing.
The chronological selection is of course far from exhaustive and owes more
to their memorable character than to a rereading of his entire oeuvre.
It is hardly surprising that most of these “lessons” are to be found in Ada,
or Ardor.
This pair of slippersÂ…our lovers kept in the lower drawer of the corner
chest, for life not infrequently imitates the French novelists. King Queen
Knave
She was the daughter of a well-known theatrical manager, a willowy, wispy,
fair-haired girl with colorless eyes and pathetic little pimples just above
that kind of small nose which English lady novelists call “retroussée” (note
the second “e” added for safety). Laughter in the Dark *
It [the street] rose at a barely perceptible angle, beginning with a post
office and ending with a church, like an epistolary novel. The Gift
“Eez eet zee verity,” said Beuret, suddenly shifting to English…and speaking
it like a Frenchman in an English book, “eez eet zee verity zat…zee disposed
chef of the state has been captured together with a couple of other blokes
(when the author gets bored by the process –or forgets)… Bend Sinister
At the next turning, the romantic mansion appeared on the gentle eminence of
old novels. Ada
[Rattner] seemed as dull as the rain that could be discerned slanting in
parallel pencil lines against the darker background of a larch plantation,
borrowed, Ada contended, from Mansfield Park.**
Dr. Krolik, our local naturalist, to whom you, Van, have referred, as Jane
Austen might have phrased it, for the sake of rapid narrative information
(you recall Brown, don't you, Smith?)
"C'est ma dernière nuit au château," she said softly, and rephrased it in
her quaint English, elegiac and stilted, as spoken only in obsolete novels.
"'Tis my last night with thee."
"I want to ask you," she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside
herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the
armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the
maid in Georgian novelsÂ…
That library had provided a raised stage for the unforgettable scene of the
Burning Barn; it had thrown open its glazed doors; it had promised a long
idyll of bibliolatry; it might have become a chapter in one of the old
novels on its own shelves; a touch
of parody gave its theme the comic relief of life.
She said: “Speaking as a character in an old novel, it seems so long, long
ago, davnĂŻm davno, since I used to play word-games here with Grace and two
other lovely girls. 'Insect, incest, nicest.'”
What constricted his heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips?
Empty formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who thought
they could explain everything.
"I remember the cards," she said, "and the light and the noise of the rain,
and your blue cashmere pullover—but nothing else, nothing odd or improper,
that came later. Besides, only in French love stories les messieurs hument
young ladies."
Only by identifying her with an unwritten, half-written, rewritten difficult
book could one hope to render at last what contemporary descriptions of
intercourse so seldom convey, because newborn and thus generalized, in the
sense of primitive organisms of art as opposed to the personal achievement
of great English poets dealing with an evening in the country, a bit of sky
in a river, the nostalgia of remote sounds—things utterly beyond the reach
of Homer or Horace. The Original of Laura
[S]he would bicycle through the Blue Fountain Forest to a romantic refuge
where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the
only signs of an earlier period of literature.
----------------------------
*A quick search through 19th and early 20th century fiction and magazines
shows that male novelists were as much guilty of writing “retroussée” as
lady novelists - if not more so: “He moved just a trifle, then, so that he
could see more of her face; how her extraordinarily long lashes swept her
cheek, and her adorable nose, which was ever so slightly retroussée.”
Francis Barton Fox, The Heart of Arethusa (1918) chapter XXII.
**The name Rattner brings to mind Julius Ratner, a would-be novelist in
Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God (1930), “a dreadful dull and flat thing,” as
described by VN in his letter of July 23, 1944 to Edmund Wilson apropos his
dream of Khodasevich and Lewis and Wilson as a hybrid of Churchill and
himself.
A. Bouazza
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/