From Charles to Carolyn

 

……whiff of Ayn Rand, if you'll allow me.

 

I associate Rand with a number of –isms, principally something called Objectivism, but I reject any personal identification with her ideologies, such as I perceive them. I did read The Fountainhead when I was about 20, and can remember it made a big impact at the time, but I’ve forgotten what it was all about, and don’t have a copy. About 4 or 5 decades later I met a Rand fanatic, a bookseller, and tried to read Atlas Shrugged, but it was so badly written I soon gave up, and I don’t have any real idea what it was wanting to say. Helen Mirren gave what struck me as a brilliant portrayal of Ayn Rand in a film, which permanently turned me off her as a personality. Perhaps the film misrepresented her.

 

Who after all was the "true artist" - - Lolita? or Humbert?

 

I can’t follow this point. Are you saying that Lolita was the American, Humbert the European, and that Lolita was the “truer artist”? I don’t think of either as an “artist” in any sense at all. VN was the “artist”. Perhaps you are saying that Lolita was the innocent, and Humbert was the swine, but I don’t see that this has anything to do with either character as “artist”.

 

not to forget that VN was as much observer, scholar, scientist and teacher as anything else.

 

I suggest that VN will be remembered 1^st as a writer; 2^nd as a research lepidopterist.  He does not seem to me to expound any “theories”, but I may be wrong when it comes to lepidoptery. Does he have any over-arching “theory” about literature?  Actually, “theory” is rather a vague word. There is something called “chess theory”, but it is no “theory” at all, and consists entirely of an accumulation of knowledge derived from chess “practice”. Every new chess champion follows his own deeper understanding of the game, and demolishes this accumulation by inventing a new style of play which causes “theory” to be re-written.

 

Yes, VN was a teacher, off and on, but I suggest that his time spent teaching was faute de mieux, and that immediately the necessity for it ceased he abandoned it as drudgery. I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t any dedicated, selfless teachers who can have a highly beneficial effect on their students. Usually their teaching consists not of creating a coterie of worshippers at their feet, but of encouraging the students to think for themselves.

 

let me stand up for Formalism, which I doubt VN rejected

 

Formalism, which I had to look up, apparently  “describes an emphasis on form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy.”  I wouldn’t agree that VN can be categorized under such a heading. It seems to me that there is a search for “meaning” in all his works: or, at least, that a reader is encouraged to seek a meaning in them. But perhaps you have something there.

 

Sergey Karpukhin wrote:

 

One British intellectual suggested that the calculatedly “difficult” idiom of 20^thC English literary modernism was an anti-egalitarian conspiracy to keep the common reader out. Lovely Joyce and lovely Beckett, both arch-Europeans, are elitist; VN is democratic and even populist in comparison to them.

 

Was this the British critic, now working in the US, who attacked the gobbledy-gook of academic literary theorists, and suggested that the inaccessibility of their verbiage was turning ordinary people away from literature? I can’t remember his name for the moment. I wouldn’t agree that a writer’s readability is the same as populism.

 

To be more accurate, VN draws on both European elitism and American populism at will, and combines them to produce the necessary artistic result. His main, artistic criteria are, I’d suggest, lifted clear of nationality or geographical affiliation. It’s we who need him to be Russian, European, or American. The thing is he was all of those, and more. So we shouldn’t be surprised to hear one day that he was the archetypal Transatlantic writer.

 

I’d agree that artistic criteria are above nationality. However, the artist is nevertheless necessarily the product of his own personal inheritance and environment, and in VN’s case these are essentially non-American.

   
And I should say that theory itself is “doing,” at any rate it can be sublimely creative.

 

Well, this depends on what is meant by “theory”. When it comes to literary theory (ie excluding something like Einstein’s theory, which is indubitably creative) I think it is purely parasitic, and nothing but a fairly barren spin-off from the creativity of genuine practitioners. I have an old friend who was quite recently bewailing his fate of coming under the cosh of F.R.Leavis when an undergraduate at Cambridge, and how the benighted “theories” of that eminent academic had ruined English literature for him.  

 

Charles