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[Quotes] Literature, Painting and Musicality: readers and writers
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Sandy Klein sent "Are rereadings better readings?" [ http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/11/are-rereadings-better-readings.html#ixzz1cqVzRycc .] on Sat, 5 Nov 2011, with various quotations from Nabokov.
I decided to add a fresh set of quotes, with the intention of comparing Nabokov's different experiences as a reader and as a writer, equally instigated by a paragraph by Edythe C. Haber [NOJ, vol.III, 2009] about de La Durantaye's Style is Matter - although the focus will remain on what the initial article about "rereading" has suscitated in me.
E.C. Haber observes that de La Durantaye "argues forcefully for his belief that the artist, through the power of his imagination, creates his own "entirely subjective" reality...He contrasts this view to that of Brian Boyd, who,. armed with his own Nabokov quote, asserts that the writer, like the scientist, far from rejecting external reality, takes as his task the most minute examination of the sensory world with the goal - however unattainable - of plumbing to its very essence..."
It almost looks like a battle of citations (for example, the mention to Durantaye's and Boyd's being "armed" with their own Nabokov quotes...) I wonder now if Nabokov's answers and comments set in a particular sequence will be able to let him speak for himself.
From the New Yorker article sent by S.Klein I extracted only one item:
(1) When "we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right...this complicated physical work [...] stands between us and artistic appreciation..When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way [ ...] But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting."*
From Strong Opinions and On a Book titled Lolita, I got another item:
(2) For the writer, the still abstract novel's "entire structure, dimly illumined in one's mind, can be compared to a painting, and ...you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception." (Strong Opinions,Vintage, 31-32).
However, as VN notes: "I'm afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to"(SO, Vintage.69).
Actually, the "serious writer...is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence...This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows...I have not reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze.." (On a Book Titled Lolita ,1956).
However, on rereading his different interviews together with bits of Pale Fire, I was surprised to discover that the creation of a poem sometimes results from yet another experience, apparently unrelated to the visual sensation about the novel's presence - both before it is written and after it was published. It happens when, besides spacial images and visual metaphors, sound and rythm predominate over the panorama that is encompassed by the eye:
"I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation." (Strong Opinions,Vintage p.44)
This conclusion became possible only after John Shade's detailed explanation of his "method A" was added to Nabokov's report. In the latter he chose to emphasize the difference between writing the novel and the poem. The "first real pang of the novel, a rather complete vision of its structure in miniature," was felt by Nabokov "while sailing from New York to France in 1959," whereas he admits that the "American poem discussed in the book by His Majesty, Charles of Zembla was the hardest stuff I ever had to compose. Most of it I wrote in Nice, in winter, walking along the Promenade des Anglais or rambling in the neighboring hills." (SO,Vintage, p.55)
Shade's two methods of poetical composition(lines 840-873):
"...A, the kind/Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,/A testing of performing words, while he/ Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,/The other kind, much more decorous, when/ He's in his study writing with a pen.[...] The abstract battle is concretely fought.[...] But method A is agony! The brain/ Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain./A muse in overalls directs the drill/ Which grinds and which no effort of the will/ Can interrupt [...] In penless work there is no pen-poised pause [...]Having to choose the necessary rhyme,/ Hold the completed line before one's eyes,/And keep in mind all the preceding tries?/Or is the process deeper with no desk/ To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?..."
Nevertheless there must be many other aspects which were not considered here, mostly related to how Nabokov's "divine details" impose themselves upon him.For example, after he recognizes that, when one looks at a painting, the "element of time does not really enter in a first contact" since the eye "takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details" and suggests that the muse (or inspiration) offers him a similar imaginary visual experience that can set him free from the need to "write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end" As he says: "I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind..." (SO,Vintage,16-17). Apparently, it is when VN "fills in the gaps" with verbal fluff and pebbles that the more objective and standard "reality" imposes itself into the picture. Perhaps the quality of the scientifically observed material itself helps to stimulate his muse.
Nabokov says that "at a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, of if he visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it [...] I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer [...] I may direct my flashlight at any part or particule of the picture when setting it down in writing.( SO,Vintage,31-32).
He reasserts what he's said before, now from a different perspective, concerning the interplay of subjectivity (engendering the whole picture of the novel) and objectivity (ordering the collection of carefully collected details): "the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one's book." It is when he mentions the role of "rereading", namely what only the rereaders may fully discover, "the nerves of the novel" and "its secret points, the sub-liminal co-ordinates.." (On a Book Titled Lolita , 1956).
Readers may glimpse how the distinction between objectively perceiving and emotionally reacting to the world may operate when Nabokov holds that the thrilll of writing may be mostly cerebral and not always produce the typical spinal tingle the completed novel is expected to engender. For Nabokov Lolita was his "most difficult book - the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, com my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real" (SO,Vintage,11) He considers that "Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow - because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived (1964, SO,Vintage,47). And there's something that readers and writers may share after one understands that the pleasures of writing correspond "exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader [...] by the artist grateful to the unknown force in his mind that has suggested a combination of images and to the artistic reader whom this ombination satisfies" (SO, Vintage,40).
It seems to me that Nabokov was not really a monist, at least not entirely,. when he accepts that the reader doesn't always emerge as the product of a writer's invention but he is allowed to follow an independent existence in an independently existing reality.
.......................................................................................................................
* - "When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting." (from the TNY quotations)
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I decided to add a fresh set of quotes, with the intention of comparing Nabokov's different experiences as a reader and as a writer, equally instigated by a paragraph by Edythe C. Haber [NOJ, vol.III, 2009] about de La Durantaye's Style is Matter - although the focus will remain on what the initial article about "rereading" has suscitated in me.
E.C. Haber observes that de La Durantaye "argues forcefully for his belief that the artist, through the power of his imagination, creates his own "entirely subjective" reality...He contrasts this view to that of Brian Boyd, who,. armed with his own Nabokov quote, asserts that the writer, like the scientist, far from rejecting external reality, takes as his task the most minute examination of the sensory world with the goal - however unattainable - of plumbing to its very essence..."
It almost looks like a battle of citations (for example, the mention to Durantaye's and Boyd's being "armed" with their own Nabokov quotes...) I wonder now if Nabokov's answers and comments set in a particular sequence will be able to let him speak for himself.
From the New Yorker article sent by S.Klein I extracted only one item:
(1) When "we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right...this complicated physical work [...] stands between us and artistic appreciation..When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way [ ...] But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting."*
From Strong Opinions and On a Book titled Lolita, I got another item:
(2) For the writer, the still abstract novel's "entire structure, dimly illumined in one's mind, can be compared to a painting, and ...you do not have to work gradually from left to right for its proper perception." (Strong Opinions,Vintage, 31-32).
However, as VN notes: "I'm afraid to get mixed up with Plato, whom I do not care for, but I do think that in my case it is true that the entire book, before it is written, seems to be ready ideally in some other, now transparent, now dimming, dimension, and my job is to take down as much of it as I can make out and as precisely as I am humanly able to"(SO, Vintage.69).
Actually, the "serious writer...is aware of this or that published book of his as of a constant comforting presence...This presence, this glow of the book in an ever accessible remoteness is a most companionable feeling, and the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows...I have not reread Lolita since I went through the proofs in the spring of 1955 but I find it to be a delightful presence now that it quietly hangs about the house like a summer day which one knows to be bright behind the haze.." (On a Book Titled Lolita ,1956).
However, on rereading his different interviews together with bits of Pale Fire, I was surprised to discover that the creation of a poem sometimes results from yet another experience, apparently unrelated to the visual sensation about the novel's presence - both before it is written and after it was published. It happens when, besides spacial images and visual metaphors, sound and rythm predominate over the panorama that is encompassed by the eye:
"I would be inclined to define a good poem of any length as a concentrate of good prose, with or without the addition of recurrent rythm and rhyme. The magic of prosody may improve upon what we call prose by bringing out the full flavor of meaning, but in plain prose there are also certain rhythmic patterns, the music of precise phrasing, the beat of thought rendered by recurrent peculiarities of idiom and intonation." (Strong Opinions,Vintage p.44)
This conclusion became possible only after John Shade's detailed explanation of his "method A" was added to Nabokov's report. In the latter he chose to emphasize the difference between writing the novel and the poem. The "first real pang of the novel, a rather complete vision of its structure in miniature," was felt by Nabokov "while sailing from New York to France in 1959," whereas he admits that the "American poem discussed in the book by His Majesty, Charles of Zembla was the hardest stuff I ever had to compose. Most of it I wrote in Nice, in winter, walking along the Promenade des Anglais or rambling in the neighboring hills." (SO,Vintage, p.55)
Shade's two methods of poetical composition(lines 840-873):
"...A, the kind/Which goes on solely in the poet's mind,/A testing of performing words, while he/ Is soaping a third time one leg, and B,/The other kind, much more decorous, when/ He's in his study writing with a pen.[...] The abstract battle is concretely fought.[...] But method A is agony! The brain/ Is soon enclosed in a steel cap of pain./A muse in overalls directs the drill/ Which grinds and which no effort of the will/ Can interrupt [...] In penless work there is no pen-poised pause [...]Having to choose the necessary rhyme,/ Hold the completed line before one's eyes,/And keep in mind all the preceding tries?/Or is the process deeper with no desk/ To prop the false and hoist the poetesque?..."
Nevertheless there must be many other aspects which were not considered here, mostly related to how Nabokov's "divine details" impose themselves upon him.For example, after he recognizes that, when one looks at a painting, the "element of time does not really enter in a first contact" since the eye "takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details" and suggests that the muse (or inspiration) offers him a similar imaginary visual experience that can set him free from the need to "write consecutively from the beginning to the next chapter and so on to the end" As he says: "I just fill in the gaps of the picture, of this jigsaw puzzle which is quite clear in my mind..." (SO,Vintage,16-17). Apparently, it is when VN "fills in the gaps" with verbal fluff and pebbles that the more objective and standard "reality" imposes itself into the picture. Perhaps the quality of the scientifically observed material itself helps to stimulate his muse.
Nabokov says that "at a very early stage of the novel's development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff, and eat pebbles. Nobody will ever discover how clearly a bird visualizes, of if he visualizes at all, the future nest and the eggs in it [...] I feel a kind of gentle development, an uncurling inside, and I know that the details are there already, that in fact I would see them plainly if I looked closer [...] I may direct my flashlight at any part or particule of the picture when setting it down in writing.( SO,Vintage,31-32).
He reasserts what he's said before, now from a different perspective, concerning the interplay of subjectivity (engendering the whole picture of the novel) and objectivity (ordering the collection of carefully collected details): "the better the book has conformed to its prefigured contour and color the ampler and smoother it glows. But even so, there are certain points, byroads, favorite hollows that one evokes more eagerly and enjoys more tenderly than the rest of one's book." It is when he mentions the role of "rereading", namely what only the rereaders may fully discover, "the nerves of the novel" and "its secret points, the sub-liminal co-ordinates.." (On a Book Titled Lolita , 1956).
Readers may glimpse how the distinction between objectively perceiving and emotionally reacting to the world may operate when Nabokov holds that the thrilll of writing may be mostly cerebral and not always produce the typical spinal tingle the completed novel is expected to engender. For Nabokov Lolita was his "most difficult book - the book that treated of a theme which was so distant, so remote, com my own emotional life that it gave me a special pleasure to use my combinational talent to make it real" (SO,Vintage,11) He considers that "Lolita has left me with the most pleasurable afterglow - because it is the purest of all, the most abstract and carefully contrived (1964, SO,Vintage,47). And there's something that readers and writers may share after one understands that the pleasures of writing correspond "exactly to the pleasures of reading, the bliss, the felicity of a phrase is shared by writer and reader [...] by the artist grateful to the unknown force in his mind that has suggested a combination of images and to the artistic reader whom this ombination satisfies" (SO, Vintage,40).
It seems to me that Nabokov was not really a monist, at least not entirely,. when he accepts that the reader doesn't always emerge as the product of a writer's invention but he is allowed to follow an independent existence in an independently existing reality.
.......................................................................................................................
* - "When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting." (from the TNY quotations)
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/