"I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondered in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top floor of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles—no matter the imminent peril—these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good."
I fell in love with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) when I read Lolita earlier this year and felt my brain grow and expand at the combination of wit, poetry, and heart-wrenching emotion…and of course, the delicate, tender X-ratedness of it all. But one thought which dominated my reaction to Lolita, a thought I shared with everyone I talked to regarding the book, was that it was clearly written by a man who loved books.
Nabokov taught for almost two decades at Wellesley and Cornell (with brief periods at Stanford and Harvard as well) until Lolita made him rich enough to spend the rest of his days spending time with his beloved family, thinking about butterflies, and writing more and more. But like any great writer (which I definitely am not), he saved his notes and correspondence and the teaching copies of the books he lectured on…and the lectures themselves.
From this, editors have fully reconstructed Nabokov's lectures on the novel and short(er) story, and published them in two volumes. In January I acquired the first, which deals with non-Russians, and after my acceptance into graduate school promised myself to read the different books and their accompanying lectures.
The result is that, as a purely literary creature, I now worship at the altar of Nabokov. What he has to say about literature and its greatness and purpose should be shared with as wide an audience as possible.
Therefore, in addition to random musings, my first big project on this blog will be to post my own personal commentary on the first six of the seven lectures. Why not the seventh? Because it deals with Ulysses, and after hearing Carlee Tressel tell me about the joys of taking an entire course on Ulysses and reading and discussing it in a group week after week, I am waiting for a similar opportunity, the same way I waited twenty-two years until the Coolidge Corner showed Lawrence of Arabia on the big screen.
In any case, what is left is more than enough for months of discussion.
And why am I going to spend these months like this, writing what is essentially an expanded riposte with traces of argument and love-letter to a book I think no one else I know has ever read?
Lisa Huberman and I were talking on Friday about the difference between being academically involved with art and actually creating art yourself. My sentiment is that as a college professor (knocking on major wood here), when I teach a book or write an essay on books, I shall be engaged in an act of creation myself…the creation of new ideas in the minds of my students. Terry Eagleton wrote that the only theory we should really deal with in literature is the theory of rhetoric…of how and why a story is, first, told at all, and second, told the way it is told, and how together these considerations produce an intended response in a reader. If I can explain how a novel works, what was put into its creation, why chapters and sentences and characters brush up against each other in the order they do, how certain arrangements and word choices led to a very deliberate meaning, and how these texts were received at publication and in times afterwards and what those receptions said about humanity at that moment in history…I shall be teaching not only an appreciation of art, an appreciation which I think the world needs more than ever as science, technology, business, and meritocracy increasingly hold sway, but also a way to THINK, to analyze and criticize and react both intellectually and emotionally. One book can give one person one idea…which might shake the foundations of society to their core. This may be Romantic, but it is what I believe with all my heart and want to share with my students, that as writers and readers, they are always engaged in doing something important and meaningful.
Vladimir Nabokov, in his dry and whimsical way, was every bit as much a Romantic. The above quotation comes from one of his closing addresses to his classes, where he spoke of literature as a great weapon for goodness against "commonsense," the purely logical approach to life which holds so many people back from doing the extraordinary. He understood literature as an act of creation, a stepping out of time and space to create your own time and space which enchants people you probably will never meet…a way to touch the divine.
I feel a kindred spirit here…and I want to share a bit of what I've experienced with the world, the same way I wish all 8.5 billion of us could listen to Harry Chapin songs (sung by him or their 8.5 billion fathers) and watch Sir David Lean's movies on the big screen and sit in live theatres watching William Shakespeare's genius be enacted before your eyes and look at Monet and Rauschenberg paintings until the color and sense overwhelm us.
And, a bit selfishly, I want to put down how I think on paper so I can remember it this year when I'll need every bit of strength I have to survive in Chicago.
It should not be necessary to read Nabokov before reading these blog postings. In case you want to follow along, though, all references come from:
Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov, 1980, A Harvest Book from Harcourt, Inc., San Diego, New York, and London. ISBN 9780156027755
The first six pages contain Nabokov's ideas on what makes a good writer and a good reader. I mused on these before on my previous blog, and now share an edited version of those comments.
What leaps out at me from the first in this discussion is his insistence that one cannot read a book but only REREAD it. The first time we tackle a text, we are concerned with running our eyes across the page through time, working at getting it all down. In contrast, our eyes stay still and focused for fixed periods when observing a painting or a film. Only after we have fully covered a novel can we go back and stop at passages, linger, reflect, and grasp meaning. Recent excursions into re-reading favorite texts of my own have revealed this to be true. Boswell , Fitzgerald, and Trollope, all offer so much more rewards both in detail and textual analysis when we go back and reread them. I never noticed, for instance, the yearning style of Nick's criticisms of Gatsby or the way Hamilton Fisker's scruples stand in opposition to Augustus Melmotte's lack thereof in subtle pictures of card games and financial advice-giving, until I delved deeper into The Great Gatsby and The Way We Live Now. This leads to a disclaimer: since I have read all these books I'm about to comment on only once, Nabokov himself would say my commentary should be swallowed with several grains of salt. I would have to agree.
Nabokov also asserts that "the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." We cannot change the qualities of imagination or memory we were born with. We may always go out and buy a dictionary. Sense, Nabokov believed and I affirm, can be developed with committed aesthetic training and recognition. I could tell you exactly why Middlemarch is a great leap forward from The Mill on the Floss and why most young-adult novels, though good stories, are not candidates for "literature." Imagination and memory…people tell me I possess them in spades. Disney felt that they could die without exercise, so I try to exercise them as much as possible.
Thus, I want to believe I am a good reader. On the other hand, I have been guilty in the past of Nabokov's cardinal sin: imagination to the extent of recognition or identification, worst of all identifying with a character in a book. In the cases of the second and third best novels I ever read, Konstantin Levin and William Dobbin emerged as people I truly related to, much the same way my caring for Alvy Singer pushes Annie Hall to the top of my "favorite films of all time" list. I believe that the power of literature comes through in personal interpretation and grasp of meaning. Nabokov, I feel, agrees, but stops short of saying that the reader must turn the book into a completely personal text. This limits understanding. He suggests combining the passion of an artist with the detached, observant patience of a scientist when reading a novel or story, never letting one subsume the other.
The difference in our opinions might be semantic. Nabokov was born at the end of the 19th century, when people were rushing out to copy the behavior of the Romantics, and came of age in the 1920s when Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Miller were describing a new, easily adapted lifestyle. What Nabokov stresses is that fiction is great because it IS fiction—it is made up. It encompasses the details of a period but IN NO WAY should ever be taken as an accurate description of the period. The "truth" of fiction is in the theme and message. It is similar to Marcus J. Borg's brilliant interpretation of the Bible as stories where we're not sure if they happened that way, but we know they are true. When we identify with a story or a character to the point where we give all the more weight to their details, we run the risk of taking the least truthful part of a story and turning it into the MOST truthful. To use a cliché which I am sure will result in one day having Nabokov kick my ass in the hereafter, we overlook the forest for the trees.
I think personal identification with a character helps a reader find all the more rewards in a story, but I sympathize with Nabokov's perspective because I don't think I could spend years and years pining for a girl like Amelia Sedley (Dobbin) or ruining all my female relationships from neurosis (Alvy) or become so consumed with intellectual definitions of faith and love that it would become something of a self-centered ordeal to sit at my dying brother's bedside (Levin). And yet I still want to pursue their ideals of faith as a central tenet of existence and love as the most powerful of emotions, the one which must win the day despite it all.
In the end, Nabokov says a great writer writes great stories in the roles of inventor, teacher, and enchanter, combining poetry, lesson, and magic. We are captivated by what the Formalists would call the beautiful inversions of language, we draw philosophical insight and moral strength from their meanings, and ultimately fall under the spell of their creation. To bring this full circle to my talk with Lisa, all human beings need to experience such magic on a regular basis. Sometimes we need a little cultivation to be receptive to this possibility. I want to cultivate.
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