"the fruit of insomnia and migraine"

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum, with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: a toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine.

As I've noted previously, Nabokov often took great pains to ensure that readers would not read any ideas into his work, or any messages or political statements of any kind. On the other hand, he never missed a chance to take a potshot, as in the above passage, taken from his decidedly minor (and short) Russian novel, The Eye. The passage is a fairly typical Nabokovian aside, both in its content and its irrelevance. Its complete irrelevance to the fiction surrounding it signals to the reader an actual opinion, bordering on an idea, possibly even, heaven forbid, a political idea held by the author. As usual, when it comes to extra-literary matters, Nabokov had little idea what he was talking about. (And though I enjoy and admire much of Nabokov's fiction, I'm inclined to think his influence, at least on literary criticism, is rather pernicious.)

As fun as it is to make jokes at Nabokov's expense regarding his special pleading and other nonsense (and it is fun), I'd intended to use this passage to lead into a post about Marx and misreadings and his popular reputation. Nabokov is, alas, far from the only person to not understand the first thing about Marx, or to mistakenly believe he was a proponent of some kind of "economic determinism". In the event, I couldn't quite get going on it. Perhaps another time. But, since we're here, let's look at another quote from Nabokov:

Rowdies are never revolutionaries, they are always reactionary. It is among the young that the greatest conformists and Philistines are found, e.g., the hippies with their group beards and group protests. Demonstrators at American universities care as little about education as football fans who smash up subway stations in England care about soccer. All belong to the same family of goofy hoodlums--with a sprinkling of clever rogues among them.

This bit of silliness, we are told by Patrick Kurp, comes from the interview Nabokov gave Philip Oakes in The Sunday Times, in June 1969, which was later collected in Strong Opinions, which I have noted elsewhere, is surely one of Nabokov's worst books. Kurp, another writer whose literary sense I have great respect for, and who often makes similar claims to avoiding politics, unpleasantly saw fit to post this the day police evicted Occupy Wall Street from Zucotti Park in New York.

"As usual, I wish to observe..."

Speaking of Freud, as I was below, I was looking at the author forewards to the three Nabokov books I picked up in last week's library sale (about which, decent bounty, but: utter pandemonium) and was delighted to find our man upholding certain expectations, as noted in my little tweak of him in my recent post on Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year.

Here's a passage from the foreward to King, Queen, Knave:

As usual, I wish to observe, as usual (and as usual several sensitive people I like will look huffy), the Viennese delegation has not been invited. If, however, a resolute Freudian manages to slip in, he or she should be warned that a number of cruel traps have been set here and there in the novel.

And The Eye:

As is well known (to employ a famous Russian phrase), my books are not only blessed by a total lack of significance, but are also mythproof: Freudians flutter around them avidly, approach with itching oviducts, stop, sniff, and recoil.

And Nabokov's Quartet:

Kafka and Kafkaesque shall not be dragged in by the student in connection with "The Visit to the Museum," and as usual Freudians should keep out.

The two novels originally appeared in Russian, as did "The Visit to the Museum"; that is, he was, again, framing these works for the (apparently quite dim) American reader of the 1960s. Just for kicks, then, indulge me as I belabor the point by reproducing certain often amusing passages from Nabokov's forewards to his other Russian novels (other than Mary and Laughter in the Dark, which are now the only Russian ones I lack a copies of; while Bend Sinister is the only novel originally written in English that I'm missing, and haven't yet read, not counting the abomination that is the recent posthumous publication of The Original of Laura). Ok, to the novels.

The Defense:

In the Prefaces I have been writing of late for the English-language editions of my Russian novels [...] I have made it a rule to address a few words of encouragement to the Viennese delegation. The present Foreward shall not be an exception. Analysts and analyzed will enjoy, I hope, certain details of the treatment Luzhin is subjected to after his breakdown (such is the curative insinuation that a chess player see Mom in his Queen and Pop in his opponent's King), and the little Freudian who mistakes a Pixlok set for the key to a novel will no doubt continue continue to identify my characters with his comic-book notion of my parents, sweethearts and serial selves. For the benefit of such sleuths I may as well confess that I gave Luzhin my French governess, my pocket chess set, my sweet temper, and the stone of the peach I plucked in my own walled garden.

Glory:

Nowadays, when Freudism is discredited, the author recalls with a whistle of wonder that not so long ago--say before 1959 (i.e., before the publication of the first of the seven forewards to his Englished novels)--a child's personality was supposed to split automatically in sympathetic consequence of parental divorce. His parents' separation has no such effect on Martin's mind, and only a desperate saphead in the throes of a nightmare examination may be excused for connecting Martin's plunge into his fatherland with his having been deprived of his father. No less reckless would it be to point out, with womby wonder, that the girl Martin loves and his mother bear the same name.

Despair (which I believe was more drastically revised than the others, to the point of being almost a different novel entirely):

. . .in kinship with the rest of my books, has no social comment to make, no message to bring in its teeth. It does not uplift the spiritual organ of man, nor does it show humanity the right exit. It contains far fewer "ideas" than do those rich vulgar novels that are acclaimed so hysterically in the short echo-walk between the ballyhoo and the hoot. The attractively shaped object or Wiener-schnitzel dream that the eager Freudian may think he distinguishes in the remoteness of my wastes will turn out to be on closer inspection a derisive mirage organized by my agents. Let me add, just in case, that experts on literary "schools" should wisely refrain this time from casually dragging in "the influence of German Impressionists": I do not know German, have never read the Impressionists--whoever they are. On the other hand, I do know French and shall be interested to see if anyone calls my Hermann "the father of existentialism."

Invitation to a Beheading:

. . . is a violin in a void. The worldling will deem it a trick. Old men will hurriedly turn from it to regional romances and the lives of public figures. No clubwoman will thrill. The evil-minded will perceive in little Emmie a sister of Lolita, and the disciples of the Viennese witch-doctor will snigger over it in their grotesque world of communal guilt and progresivnoe education.

Only, alas, in his foreward to The Gift, his longest, and last, novel written in Russian, does Nabokov manage to refrain from poking at Freud or Freudians, nor any other figure, though he does take the time to steer the reader away from the crime of identifying the author with the main character in the book ("I had been living in Berlin since 1922, thus synchronously with the young man of the book; but neither this fact, nor my sharing some of his interests, such as literature and lepidoptera, should make one say 'aha' and identify the designer with the design.").

On the nature of "Strong Opinions": Diary of a Bad Year

J.M. Coetzee's new book, the quasi-autobiographical novel Summertime, a follow-up of sorts to his earlier semi-memoirs, Boyhood and Youth, has been receiving near-unanimous praise in the UK, including being shortlisted for what would be Coetzee's third Booker prize. Adding to this chorus in recent weeks have been three excellent bloggers, John Self, Mark Thwaite, and Stephen Mitchelmore. Since I have not yet read the book--it isn't published in the United States until after Christmas--I want to take the opportunity to finally deliver my long-gestating inquiry into certain aspects of Coetzee's last book, Diary of a Bad Year.

I note that in his review of Summertime, Stephen observes of its widespread adulation, that "The consensus is a conspicuous reversal" of the general critical response to Diary of a Bad Year. In this novel, an elderly author, "JC", writes a series of short essays for inclusion in a volume to be called "Strong Opinions". JC encounters a woman, Anya, who he hires to type the essays. The book is structured such that the top of the page features the text of the various mini-essays, the bottom JC's account of his encounters with Anya. After some time, the page splits further, with Anya's thoughts intruding on the page, including her relations with her husband, Alan. Midway through the book, the top of the page shifts to more personal essays, under the heading "Second Diary".

These "Strong Opinions" made many readers unhappy, not just professional reviewers. It seems to me that many readers have become impatient with Coetzee; for example, in the comments to John Self's review, readers are evidently on balance happier with the Coetzee of Disgrace and earlier, one commenter calling his intervening books--including Elizabeth Costello and Slow Man, along with Diary of a Bad Year--evidence of a writer "bored with fiction". Such readers have seemed to look on Summertime with considerable relief. The formal restlessness of these three books has, perhaps, ironically pushed readers to focus on the arguments generated by the characters in them. As with the whole of Elizabeth Costello, many readers of Diary of a Bad Year have insisted on reading the pieces appearing in the "Strong Opinions" portion of the book at face value, as essays with which we are supposed to agree or disagree on their merits. It is often further assumed that the quality of the novel depends in some way on the effectiveness of these pieces, as essays. To do this is to, again, assume that the "Strong Opinions" reflect the thinking of J.M. Coetzee himself. In fairness, Coetzee playfully encourages some of this. Asked to contribute an essay or a talk on a certain topic, he has, for example, instead presented fictions featuring Elizabeth Costello and her arguments, which may or may not resemble Coetzee's own. He publishes excerpts of his work in the The New York Review of Books, a venue known for focusing on ideas in fiction.

But Coetzee gives us a variety of signals that this is not the way to read these books, signals that help point the way toward what the books are doing, why they are written the way they are. One of these signals is the quality of many of the opinions themselves. That is, much of what JC writes in his "Strong Opinions" is nonsense. Mr. Waggish has made this point more consistently than anyone else:

[A]ny comparison of the "Strong Opinions" to his real opinions in his thoughtful, careful essays makes the difference blindingly apparent. (It does take something approaching guts for a Nobel Laureate to write something so profoundly trite and irritating and attribute it to his own ostensible fictional proxy.) As with many literary intellectuals, J.C.'s excursions into math and science are particularly stupid. By the time J.C. writes, "I continue to find evolution by random mutation and natural selection not just unconvincing but preposterous as an account of how complex organisms come into being" and invokes Heisenberg without knowing what uncertainty even is, it's obvious that Coetzee has no wish even to defend these opinions; he is making them transparently foolish so that readers examine the rhetoric rather than the opinions. Underneath the sanctimonious white male liberal pablum, including defenses of pornography, Adorno-esque cultural snobbery in indictments of rock music, latent sexism (captured especially well, complete with tired attack on Catherine MacKinnon), and sympathy with enemies of whom he knows nothing, there bleeds the personality that is revealed in J.C.'s internal voice lower on the page. With most would-be political commentators in the literati, it is not quite so obvious, but in J.C., Coetzee gives us tools for easily making the connection.

Again, Coetzee plays with these readers: the author of the "Strong Opinions" is called only "JC" and bears certain obvious resemblances to Coetzee. Excerpts, again, were printed in The New York Review of Books--for example, the piece dealing with the film The Seven Samurai, which is a fairly silly piece taken on its own, but which is leant gravity by appearing in the NYRB, appears to be serious (and, in fact, was taken seriously by the excellent and usually perceptive Helen DeWitt, who knows quite a bit about that particular film, here). Whether readers assume these essays contain the considered positions of J.M. Coetzee is secondary to the fact that they consider them worthy of consideration on their own, independent of the form in which they appear.

Another signal is the tone of the essays. Where Elizabeth Costello was an often obnoxious presence on the page, in both Elizabeth Costello and, especially, Slow Man, JC more closely resembles Coetzee ("except dumber", per Waggish), yet his tone in his essays is just as offputting. This point is made fairly blatantly in the novel itself, by Anya when she says:

OK. This may sound brutal, but it isn't meant that way. There is a tone--I don't know the best word to describe it--a tone that really turns people off. A know-it-all tone. Everything is cut and dried: I am the one with all the answers, here is how it is, don't argue, it won't get you anywhere. I know that isn't how you are in real life, but that is how you come across, and it is not what you want. I wish you would cut it out. If you positively have to write about the world and how you see it, I wish you could find a better way.

As Stephen Mitchelmore has observed (scroll to the comments), these essays thus call into question the "commanding spirit of the writer - his mastery over the world in the form of a book".

I believe this tone is intimately tied in with what I see as the third signal on how to read these essays: the very words "Strong Opinions". Most readers will probably know that Strong Opinions is the title of a collection of Vladimir Nabokov's non-fiction ephemera: reviews, interviews, articles, letters, and so on. When Diary of a Bad Year was still forthcoming, there was some blog-talk about the Nabokov connection, but I don't recall seeing any reviews that mentioned it.

Why does Coetzee call these items "Strong Opinions"? Is it just a throwaway title, a convenient name? Coetzee is too meticulous a writer for that. I believe that Coetzee intentionally names these essays "Strong Opinions" to draw attention to them, with Nabokov being a kind of target. Not Nabokov the writer, but Nabokov the literary persona, or the kind of authority so often invested in such an out-sized persona--that is, the authority we too often invest in it, whether or not it is claimed by the writer in question. This is, I think, reinforced by the end of Diary of a Bad Year, with JC's short tributes to Tolstoy and, most pertinent for my argument, Dostoevsky. Of Dostoevsky, he writes, in part:

Far more powerful than the substance of his argument, which is not strong, are the accents of anguish, the personal anguish of a soul unable to bear the horrors of this world. It is the voice of Ivan, as realized by Dostoevsky, not his reasoning, that sweeps me along.

To again quote Waggish on this section, this

is one of the most straightforward passages in any of Coetzee's books, so heartfelt and elegant that it shames the "Strong Opinions" even further. Having achieved some rapprochement with Anya, J.C. stands in relation to Dostoevsky and his books and not to the world, leaving those connections to those more qualified to make them.

In addition, these words, which are analogous to the argument that holds that the old great philosophers, though perhaps "proven wrong" in some particulars, nevertheless remain worth reading for the flow of their argument and the rhetorical power of their writing, also serve as a gentle rebuke to Nabokov, with his famous animus towards the fiction of Dostoevksy, an animus, I have argued elsewhere, the repetitiveness and virulence of which had more to do with maintaining his literary persona upon arrival in the United States, than with the actual target itself.

Nabokov was one of the great writers of fiction, but his book called Strong Opinions, though not without its charm or entertainment value, is not itself a valuable book. Is it not one of Nabokov's worst books? Though we can profitably read his Lectures on Literature, Nabokov was not much of a critic, in that he didn't really write criticism. Critical remarks, however, are everywhere. And the opinions in Strong Opinions are tonally more akin to his many jabs in his prefaces and introductions to his own novels, where he frequently takes the time to attack Freud or Sartre or whomever. I'm not going to quote from the book Strong Opinions; I own most of Nabokov's books, but I don't own that, and I read it years ago. But read the introductory remarks to just about any one of his novels and you will find something like what I'm talking about. (The ones that were written originally in Russian, such as Despair or Invitation to a Beheading, are perhaps the best places to look, since he is self-consciously "introducing" them or framing them for an American audience previously unfamiliar with them.) (But I should give at least a little flavor, shouldn't I? I can't remember whether the text of the interview Rake linked to here--which seems to no longer be available--is reproduced in Strong Opinions, but the remarks found there are typical of what I'm talking about, where he dismisses both Freud--"I think he's medieval, and I don't want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me"--and Faulkner--a writer of "corncob chronicles".) Whether his targets deserve scorn is irrelevant; it's the nature of the attack that counts here. While it's true that writers, in their offhand way in diaries and journals, are often more interesting critics than the critics themselves (witness Kafka on Dickens, for but one example that Gabriel Josipovici is fond of pointing out), with Nabokov this is rarely the case. He was such a guarded figure that his offhand remarks were never really offhand, the dismissive tone calculated for effect, their authority resting entirely on his own fame, the only reason he's being asked in the first place. Nabokov was such an out-sized figure, a dominant literary master with a personal history that intersected tragically with History itself, that one is seduced by him, one wants to give him credit. I know when I was knee-deep in my early Nabokov fixation, I took him seriously on virtually everything, even when I already knew enough to disagree, as I did on political matters and, say, Faulkner. You want to measure up to his greatness, even defer to it. It took me a long time to realize how unsatisfactory I found his rigid approach to translation, though I still take his side in his battle with the generally pompous Edmund Wilson over Eugene Onegin.

Nabokov's stature and his history likely inclined people, journalists in particular, to want to ask him all kinds of questions, literary or otherwise, even though there should be no particular reason why Vladimir Nabokov's opinions on Vietnam, or communism, carry any special weight, except that he's Vladimir Nabokov. If his opinions on such matters evinced carefully thought out positions and actually added anything, that would be different. Similarly, there is no reason why anyone should care what Diary of a Bad Year's JC has to say about evolution, or about mathematics, or feminism, or any number of other topics. He might have something valuable to say about them, but such essays would need to be approached more in the spirit of his "Second Diary" entries, pieces which show evidence of meaning more to their author than did the perfunctory, obnoxious "Strong Opinions" themselves. The latter exist because he is asked to write them, solely based on his position as Famous Author. Their authority relies on this and this alone, and they are written as if he believed that authority to be thus earned. It is not.

Other People on Kafka

I haven't had much blogging time lately, but I'm ducking in here with a couple short posts noting what some other people have been saying.

I was tempted to write something myself about Lee Rourke's post from two weeks ago about the new Michael Hofman translations of Kafka, but I didn't get to it and others addressed it brilliantly. Rourke praised the translations generally and specifically agreed with Hofman's use of the word "cockroach" in "The Metamorphosis". His post led to an interesting discussion in the comments section about what makes a good translation, as well as fantastic posts from Steve Mitchelmore and Ellis Sharp on why the choice of "cockroach" is wrong. Steve and Ellis may agree that the word is wrong, but Ellis otherwise disagrees with Steve's interpretation.

From Steve's post:

As he must have known, Nabokov's zoological points are irrelevant [in the comments to Lee's post, someone quoted a passage which had immediately occurred to me from Nabokov's Lectures on Literature on this point]. One has to read the word as it is before our eyes: vague and open to interpretation. Openness is everything. There's no need to make these detours into etymology. Yes, Walter Sokol makes a good case for "cockroach" by highlighting how it is nauseating and parasitical yet also defenceless and pathetic - which is certainly how Gregor appears to everyone - but "insect", as the Muirs had it, does all that too and retains the vagueness of Kafka's word.

More to the point is Lee's assertion that "Kafka wanted to denote the marginalised, detested individual". The insect is both real and symbolic, unreal and unsymbolic. However, even if we knew Kafka had intended that, it wouldn't tell the whole story. Gregor is marginalised and detested not only because he has become an insect but also because he is no longer the reliable salesman keeping his family afloat. He has been transformed into a threat to the family's petit-bourgeois world. How terrible is the banging on his bedroom door when he fails to leave for work, how sickening when his boss visits the flat to investigate a single lost day? It is, as we know still today, a world of fierce taboos resisting the forces of change, of decay, illness and death. Gregor has, in effect, died but not left the building. His death stains the parents' starched clothing, stinks out the flat. This is how he might be read from a Marxist perspective: Gregor is the harbinger of the social problems inherent to early modern capitalism. But change also afflicts Marxists. The hope of political redemption is soon also faced by despair.

Steve goes on to invoke Blanchot and our inability to "choose between hope and despair". Ellis objects to this reading:

In ‘Metamorphosis’ concealment is of the essence. Compartmentalisation is involved – thematically and structurally. ‘Metamorphosis’ is not a single fast-flowing river of prose but, like the body of an insect, divided into segments – three chapters. Gregor dies on the stroke of three. There are three doors to Gregor’s room: three ways in, three ways out. Not one way. There is no single way in and out of this story. You cannot exclusively capture it for a metaphysical reading. It slips free. In its multiplicity – in its totality – it resists the net of exegesis. The jacket cover on my edition calls it a ‘haunting parable on human reaction to suffering and disease’ which is both true and horribly limiting.

The reaction of everyone in the story to Gregor’s transformation is, surely, the exact opposite to despair. There is no despair. On the contrary, the story gives us characters learning to cope with an extreme situation, as humans do. One or two of the characters shun Gregor and depart; most stay. Their responses range from disgust, fear and irritation to compassion, curiosity and breezy acceptance. Nobody finally gives up on Gregor; nobody sinks into paralysis. Everyone grudgingly accepts his presence. No one despairs, not even Gregor. Everyone bravely, absurdly, comically, maintains the rigmarole of everyday life.

This is great stuff. For me, this is what blogging about literature is all about and is the kind of thing I was hoping to find when I started looking on the web for literary discussion.

Elsewhere recently, related to Nabokov and Dostoevski

At The Mumpsimus, Matthew Cheney on Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading. Along with a beautiful discussion of the novel, Matt says this, about people's general suspicions about imagination:

Inevitably, there were students who were convinced Nabokov was insane or a drug addict or both. This accusation comes up all the time when we read anyone who is not among the hardest of hardcore realists, because imagination is something that has come to be associated only with the stimulus of drugs or madness. That someone could think up a story like Invitation to a Beheading -- where a man is imprisoned for "gnostic turpitude" in a fortress of porous walls and fake windows and rules against improper dreams -- without being addicted to hallucinogens or lacking a couple of screws is at best inconceivable to many people, if not threatening. The people who issue these accusations would never think of such a story or such imagery themselves, and therefore they can't imagine how anyone else could, unless there was something wrong with their brains.

And Rodney Welch on giving Dostoevski another chance, finding something there, but still deciding that Dostoeksi just isn't his thing (link via The Reading Experience). He seems to notice that Dostoevski is capable of great artistic power:

A slight turn with Dostoevsky came some years after my initial attempt, and that's when I picked up Demons [aka The Possessed]. This story of Stavrogin and the band of bored nihilists of mid-century Russia was absolutely staggering, if only because it seemed to me so very, very prescient. It's a fantastic novel about how revolutions implode, and to reach that ending, where all the principals die, one dropping after the other very much like in the last scene of Hamlet, was staggering -- it was like reading this great, massive historical tragedy, written by someone with incredibly far-seeing vision, who somehow knew how the history of his country would play out. I thought maybe it was one of the greatest novels I'd ever read. And it was cinematic, too; there's a scene at the end where some character, I forget which, stumbles upon a dead body and holds a candle up to his dead face. It was a beautifully visual scene, and I didn't recall anything like it in anything else of Dostoevsky's.

But finally this "beautifully visual" stuff, along with suspense and mystery, "is not what really interests Dostoevsky. His interest, his focus, is a good deal more psychological". Rodney ultimately finds Dostoevski "weirdly interesting" but "painful" where "the attempt is more interesting than the execution." I tend to agree (though I cannot get behind his comparison to Ornette Coleman or Captain Beefheart, both of whom have made a lot of music that is simply wonderful).

Other notes on Despair

Here are a couple of other observations about Despair that I'd originally tacked onto the end of the previous post, but which are not much related to the balance of that post's content, and looked kind of random and lost there.

In his Lectures on Literature, these are Nabokov's opening and closing sentences in his (three-page) discussion of the portion of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park in which Fanny visits the Portsmouth relatives:

The novel, which shows signs of disintegrating, now lapses more and more into the easy epistolary form. This is a sure sign of a certain weariness on the part of the author when she takes recourse in such an easy form. [...] The Portsmouth interlude--three months in the life of Fanny--and the epistolary form of the novel is ended. We are back where we were, so to speak, but the Crawfords are now eliminated. Miss Austen would have had to write practically another volume of five hundred pages if she had wished to narrate those elopements in the same direct and detailed form as she had done in relating the games and flirtations at Mansfield Park before Fanny left for Portsmouth. The espistolary form has helped to prop up the structure of the novel at this point, but there is no doubt that too much has happened behind the scenes and that this letter-writing business is a shortcut of no very great artistic merit.

So it is amusing when, in chapter four, our narrator engages in a bit of literary criticism of the epistolary form:

There are in my possession two more letters written on similar paper, but all the answers have been destroyed. If I still had them [...] it would be possible now to adopt an epistolic form of narration. A time-honoured form with great achievements in the past. [...] The reader soon ceases to pay attention whatever to the dates; and indeed what does it matter to him whether a given letter was written on the ninth of September or on September the sixteenth? Dates are required, however, to keep up the illusion.

So it goes on and on, Ex writing to Why and Why to Ex, page after page. Sometimes an outsider, a Zed, intrudes and adds his own little contribution to the correspondence, but he does so with the sole aim of making clear to the reader (not looking at him the while except for the occasional squint) some event, which, for reasons of plausibility and the like, neither Ex nor Why could very well have explained.

A few pages later in the same chapter, there is what may or may not be an allusion to Proust:

But while I looked there started afresh that process of fusion, of building, that making up of a definite remembrance [...] I could not discover what the kernal was, around which all those things were formed, and where exactly the germ, the fount--suddenly I glanced at the decanter of dead water and it said "warm"--as in that game when you hide objects; and very possibly I should have finally found the trifle, which, unconsciously noticed by me, had at once set going the agent of memory...

Notes on re-reading Nabokov's Despair

Soon after starting this blog, I posted about revisiting Nabokov. I'd begun re-reading Despair, which had been one of the first few Nabokov books I'd ever read. Alas, I was in a total haze as I started reading it, so I put it aside for a bit. In the meantime, I mentioned having come across this interesting paper, in which the author, Alexander Dolinin, discusses parody in the book, as well as Nabokov's evolving critical attitude towards Dostoevski. So I decided to read some Dostoevski, something I hadn't done since I'd read The Brothers Karamazov some twelve years back (not long before I'd read Despair, as it happens), very early in my serious reading life. I read Notes from the Underground and then returned to Despair itself. I'd meant to post about that experience, but time got away from me. Time always seems to be getting away from me.

Around that time, I also started to dip into Michael Wood's The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction. In the preface to his wonderful book, Wood writes about Nabokov's self-imposed loss of the Russian language for the purpose of his prose writing. He says that what was ultimately important about this loss (which Nabokov saw as necessary) was that it produced a

...fabulous, freaky, singing, acrobatic, unheard-of English which (probably) made even his most marvelous Russian seem poor, and therefore meant that the terrible decision of his early years in America had been right, that the second language could flower for him only at the cost of the first; had to become itself a new language, a language to write in.

Wood closes his preface by telling us that he is focusing on the novels written in English but that "the shadow of his Russian helps us with the shadow of his English. The absent language reminds us of the many absences in Nabokov's seemingly so complete and confident later prose." Unfortunately, this means that he does not discuss Despair, which was originally published in Russian in 1932 and first translated into English (by Nabokov) in 1937. For the American release of the novel in the mid-1960s, Nabokov returned to the book and extensively re-wrote it. This is Nabokov not only after having given up Russian, but also after the major successes of Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire. It seems to me that Despair would have been an interesting novel to look at in this context, how the novel relates to Nabokov's English-language work. No doubt there is plenty of work out there comparing it with Nabokov's other Russian novels.

Ok, moving on to the novel itself; I'm not intending a cohesive review of it here, but I was leafing through my notebook recently and thought I'd share some of my observations.

Anyway, the story. On a business trip to Prague, our narrator, Hermann, encounters a man who he takes to be his twin. From the beginning he expends a lot of energy telling us how obvious it is that the man looks like him, could easily be mistaken for him. Eventually, he devises a standard-issue murder-for-insurance-money plan that he thinks is not only brilliant but will be a great work of art. I hope it's not giving too much away to say that things don't quite go according to plan. In and of itself, the novel is an entertaining thriller of sorts. But this being Nabokov, there's a lot more to it than that. Hermann is not only an unreliable narrator, but he virtually shouts "unreliable narrator" throughout, he's almost too obvious about being unreliable, from his declarations at certain points that he is lying, to the manner in which he repeatedly records, to his evident surprise, that no one has noticed the resemblance between him and his double (how convenient for his scheme!).

After reading Notes from the Underground, immediately it seemed clear to me that, in part, Nabokov is parodying it in Despair. This is how I put it before: "superficial similarities are obvious, from the 'confession' addressed to some unnamed accuser ("gentlemen" in Notes, "reader" in Despair), to the narrator's exaggeratedly high opinion of himself and repeated backtrackings and claims that he is lying." It also occurred to me that this novel is in some sense a dry run for Lolita, not in the latter novel's lurid subject matter (that dubious honor goes to the inferior novella The Enchanter), but in the form, as well as the character of Hermann, who seems like a prototype for Humbert--again, the apparently hyperliterate confession, the unreliable narrator who is quite full of himself (bragging about odd things that come off sounding like bullshit, for example claiming to "have exactly twenty-five types of handwriting" before proceeding to describe several of them). Hermann fancies himself smarter than everyone around him, as a keen observer of people, when in reality he is unable to notice many obvious things right in front of him (for example, an affair between his wife and the artist Ardalion). I say "apparently hyperliterate" because, while Hermann makes a number of overt literary references and goes on and on about art versus life, his allusions are inept. Nabokov gives us something of a hint on this front in his introduction to this edition where he provides the full text of the Pushkin poem that Hermann quotes partially in chapter four. Dolinin writes that the portion of the poem omitted by Hermann shows that Hermann misunderstands Pushkin's point, and he points out a similarly inept reference to Gogol.

Returning here to the idea of parody, in his discussion of Lolita, Wood spends some time exploring the ways in which Quilty acts as Humbert's double. Quilty is Humbert's "sleazy alter ego, his monstrous dream-double" but not a figment of Humbert's imagination; he is "an aspect of Humbert's self-image that has got loose, seceded, and taken over a part of the plot. Or he is Nabokov's answer to Humbert, the case Humbert can't make against himself." When Humbert recognizes with pleasure the name of his secret tormenter, his pleasure is weird, but Wood relates it to Kafka and "the pure perfection of everything going entirely wrong"; Quilty is "objective proof (in the world of the novel) of the conspiracy we thought we had only dreamed." And here is where Wood addresses the parodic elements of that novel, and makes me wish again that he had included a chapter on Despair in his book:

I seem to have slithered over the element of literary parody in all this, but that is easier to see. Lolita is not only a book with a manically material double in it, it is a joke about books which allow such creatures any sort of run. Nabokov would expect us to remember Dostoevsky, who wrote a novel called The Double and whose reputation in the West, Nabokov thought, was hugely inflated. That inflation itself might have seemed enough to secure the allusion, even if we didn't know that Stavrogin's almost unnameable sin, in The Possessed, is the molestation of a little girl; and Humbert himself, in case we need a hint, says he feels a 'Dostoyevskian grin dawning . . . like a distant and terrible sun'. The clue to Conrad, another specialist in doubling, is stealthier. Humbert imagines Quilty as 'that secret agent, or secret lover, or prankster, or hallucination, or whatever he was'. 'Secret sharer' is the phrase Humbert has left out, but he wouldn't want us to prompt him. When Humbert speaks of Quilty as 'my brother', the fun piles up in several tiers.

Etc. Nabokov obviously has great fun in layering this stuff like this. Naturally, I haven't read either The Double or The Possessed; even so, Nabokov provides enough surface references to make you wonder what he's doing in Despair. There are constant overt references to Dostoevski and to a "Russian psychological novelist".

Given Dostoevski's reputation as a great writer of the "novel of ideas" and Nabokov's famous disdain of same, it seemed obvious to me that the latter is poking fun at the concept in Despair. Hermann expresses and explores a lot of ideas, many of which are just plain idiotic, or if they aren't idiotic, he doesn't have anything interesting to say about them. For example, in chapter two, he describes his wife, Lydia, and her hatred for the Bolsheviks. He then says:

When I used to say that Communism in the long run was a great and necessary thing; that young, new Russia was producing wonderful values, although unintelligible to Western minds and unacceptable to destitute and embittered exiles; that history had never yet known such enthusiasm, asceticism, and unselfishness, such faith in the impending sameness of us all--when I used to talk like this, my wife would answer serenely: "I think you are saying it to tease me, and I think it's not kind." But really I was quite serious for I have always believed that the mottled tangle of our elusive lives demands such essential change; that Communism shall indeed create a beautifully square world of identical brawny fellows, broad-shouldered and microcephalous; and that a hostile attitude toward it is both childish and preconceived...

That a supporter of Communism would say this strikes me as highly unlikely--it sounds like a parody of Bolshevik claims as expressed by one with contempt for their ideas and methods. At first I thought this was an example of Nabokov allowing his own opinions to color his writing, but he probably knew what he was doing. That the narrator is something of a pompous idiot tells me that Nabokov knew full well that no real advocate of the Bolsheviks would use these kinds of words in support of them (microcephalous?).

But I think it's a little too easy to think that Nabokov is simply having a go at Dostoevski. There are several superficial digs; for example:

Did it actually go on like this? Am I faithfully following the lead of my memory, or has perchance my pen mixed the steps and wantonly danced away? There is something a shade too literary about that talk of ours, smacking of thumb-screw conversations in those stage taverns where Dostoevski is at home; a little more of it and we should hear that sibilant whisper of false humility, that catch in the breath, those repetitions of incantatory adverbs--and then all the rest of it would come, the mystical trimming dear to that famous writer of Russian thrillers.

As I read this, it occurred to me that Nabokov himself would not have found the conversations in Dostoevski "literary", would have found them staged, contrived, "political", characters as mouthpieces for so-called ideas. Or would he? Dolinin compares the American version of Despair with its Russian predecessor and identifies some clear differences in the object of Nabokov's parody. In the US, Nabokov is famously dismissive of Dostoevski, but Dolinin shows that it wasn't always thus. Dolinin cites a paper Nabokov wrote in 1931, while living in Berlin as part of the Russian emigre literary community, in which he praised Dostoevski's ability for "keen sight". For Nabokov "keen sight" is where the art lies in literature, the well-observed detail, for example, whereas "insight", into human psychology, or via other great ideas, is the province of Dostoevski at his worst, what he would have called "Dostoevskian stuff". It would appear that Nabokov, in 1931 anyway, thought highly of Dostoevski's abilities, but felt that he too often chose to work elsewhere, to lard his fiction with all of this psychological business. Dolinin suggests that Nabokov's position in the US compelled him to switch the object of parody from "Dostoevskian stuff" to Dostoevski himself. He writes:

The reorientation of the English Despair toward Dostoevsky was undoubtedly prompted by the Western cultural context of the 1960's in which (and for which) Nabokov was rewriting his thirty-year-old novel. By this time Nabokov had severed his ties to contemporary Russian literature, whether written by émigrés or Soviet nationals.[...]In America Nabokov wanted to play the role of the last survivor and representative of the great Russian literary tradition, the ambassador plenipotentiary of the mutilated Russian culture and language, the sole peer and interlocutor of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov rather than Pasternak (as the author of Doctor Zhivago) or Solzhenitsyn. This is why he was so enraged when in the 1950's and 1960's the American intellectual elite, under the influence of French existentialists, began to venerate Dostoevsky, whom they proclaimed the father of existentialism and the only Russian writer of genius. The main aim of Nabokov's individual crusade against Dostoevsky was not so much to dethrone the mighty predecessor as to undermine his uncritical cult in America, which tended to reduce all Russian cultural heritage to the soul-searching of Notes from the Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

I have not read a lot of the critical apparatus around either Dostoevski or Nabokov (pretty much just the ones I'm quoting here and stray other pieces), but the narrator of Despair, Hermann, is a doof, so perhaps by putting these comments in this idiot's mouth, he is sort of discrediting the ideas--maybe Nabokov was still not so down on Dostoevski as he claimed or he simply conceals the "good" he may have still found in Dostoevski. Or, he lampoons his own excessive dismissal of Dostoevski, while writing a novel that mimics the "Dostoevskian-stuff" he actually disliked in Dostoevski's writing--to the point of having Ardalion (an actual artist) criticize Hermann (who has artistic pretensions) for the Dostoevskian-stuff. Also, remember, Hermann thinks of his crime as a work of art, and accordingly he thinks that his "confession" is prime material for a great novel and claims to be unconcerned with whether he is credited or not. He writes about what a certain psychological novelist he has in mind might do with his book, referring variously to his "first reader" or "that Russian author to whom my manuscript will be forwarded when the time comes". Perhaps Nabokov here is having fun both with his character, who is not as smart as he thinks he is, while again skewering the idea that a crime can even be a work of art, as he does in Lolita (Humbert is monstrous, not an artist, no matter his refinements), and also nodding again in the direction of Dostoevski, positing one like him perhaps, who might try to make use of such material as this.

Also related to this question of Dostoevski and what might be the object of Nabokov's parody in Despair is some interesting stuff in Dolinin's paper about the differing literary camps in the aforementioned Russian emigre community in Berlin. He cites many examples of stories and novels that followed various trendy models, including those that were heavy on the "Dostoevskian stuff", the "inner 'irrepressible light' of Dostoevsky's insights", and he says that it is very likely that various aspects of Despair were specifically parodying some of these works. I often talk about my own anxieties about alluson, how I always worry that I'm going to miss something, and this would appear to be a case in point of a huge amount of allusion and intertextuality necessarily passing me by. But, of course, the American reader is highly unlikely to have any acquaintance with this stuff and Nabokov would have known it, and I suspect he modified his text accordingly to focus on Dostoevski, in the process bringing it more in line with his contemporaneous rhetorical stance. I think Nabokov is also having fun with those in America who venerate Dostoevski (and the existentialist or psychological treatment of art--he makes fun of Sartre in his introduction to Despair and is constanly railing against Freud)--either for doing so at all, or for missing what art there actually is in Dostoevski. He wants people to be able to notice the difference, but is happy to have a joke at their expense if they do not.

Pre-Honeymoon Fiction Round-Up

We're leaving for France tomorrow evening for our delayed and much-anticipated honeymoon, and it is highly unlikely that I will post anything here for the two weeks we are away. In the meantime, here is a brief round-up of some of the books I've read recently that I haven't commented on.

Murphy by Samuel Beckett. This was the first Beckett for me. Cursory glances at Molloy and Malone Dies had been daunting. Then, with all of the really smart things I was reading about Beckett marking his centenary this year, and the release of Grove's attractive new boxed set, I felt the time had come to take the plunge, and I decided to start at the beginning. Murphy proved to be both more and less difficult that I'd expected. There were several passages that made me laugh out loud and several others I needed to re-read a few times to comprehend and a few others that I never did. After completing the novel, I returned to the beginning and re-read the first 50 pages or so, clarifying some issues. I look forward to continuing with Beckett.

Rituals by Cees Nooteboom. After Murphy, it was an interesting coincidence to immediately be reading another novel about characters retreating from the world. I liked this book. See here for a couple of passages that struck me.

Things in the Night by Mati Unt. I had been looking forward to this Estonian (Dalkey-published) novel, and it got off, I thought, to a good start. It plays with narrative form, and seemed to be the kind of thing I would like, but by the end I was just reading to finish it. I find I don't have much else to say about it.

Phosphor in Dreamland by Rikki Ducornet. This is the third Ducornet novel I've read (Stain and The Jade Cabinet are the others). I quite liked it. As with the others, there is an element of the fantastic in this novel. It is a story that passes itself off as a scholarly account of a supposedly historical figure. As ever, Ducornet's prose is a delight to read, and some of her common concerns (questions of beauty and desire) are present. Worth a read. Incidentally, this book has some of the most overheated blurbs I've ever read. Her novel The Jade Cabinet is described as "Jane Austen meets Angela Carter via Lewis Carroll", Phosphor in Dreamland itself as "Jonathan Swift meets Angela Carter via Jorge Luis Borges" and, perhaps most unfortunately, Ducornet herself as "A drastically beautiful comic writer who stitches sentences together as if Proust had gone into partnership with Lenny Bruce." Seriously, settle down.

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald. My first Sebald. While there were passages of great power in this book, in the end I had to work to finish it. Nevertheless, I remain interested in Sebald's other books, Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, in particular.

The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction by Michael Wood. Earlier I mentioned revisiting Nabokov when I was re-reading Despair. (I still have a long-gestating post about Despair that I need to finish--as is no doubt clear, I like getting stuff out there as close to the reading as possible). I probably first heard about The Magician's Doubts via one of these posts at Tingle Alley. Before reading it, I'd already decided to embark on a major project to re-read Nabokov (I read a lot of Nabokov several years ago, and it's largely a blur in my mind). It's just as well, since Wood makes me feel as if I haven't read any at all. Not only that, it reminds me that somehow I have still not read Speak, Memory, which just seems wrong. So, now I look forward to re-reading The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Pnin and Pale Fire and Ada, not to mention Lolita for a third time (though now I want the annotated edition). And I now find myself interested in Nabokov's translation and commentary of Eugene Onegin. I am doomed. Anyway, Wood's book is marvelous.

The Woman Who Escaped from Shame by Toby Olson. I just finished this novel today. I had previously read,and liked, his novel from a couple years ago, The Blond Box. This one is a strange sort of adventure story involving miniature horses and incest and weird pornography and diamonds and stories within stories and meditations on narration. An enjoyable read, if occasionally clunky. Olson is best known, I think, as a poet, and usually his prose is quite good, but there were times when it was merely functional and dragged. Speaking of over-heated blurbs, this one featured enthusiastic, seemingly over-the-top blurbs from the likes of Paul Auster ("One of the shining outposts of recent American fiction... Rarely has a writer been willing to face the question of sexuality with such candor..."), Harry Mathews ("...at once harsh and tender, unrelentingly wicked and sovereignly just...tersely, perversely, painfully realistic...."), and Robert Coover ("Invites accolades that border on hyperbole...")... Indeed.

Detour from Despair

I got halfway through Despair, but had been reading it in a kind of haze, so I decided to start it over. In the meantime, came across this interesting essay, which in part discusses the idea that Despair is a parody of Dostoevsky. So, I thought I'd first read Notes From the Underground, which I've had sitting around.

With the opening pages, superficial similarities are obvious, from the "confession" addressed to some unnamed accuser ("gentlemen" in Notes, "reader" in Despair), to the narrator's exaggeratedly high opinion of himself and repeated backtrackings and claims that he is lying.

I may have some more to say about the essay and what it says about Nabokov's attitude toward Dostoevsky once I return to and finish re-reading Despair.

Another thing, at the beginning of chapter two, in the first section, is this passage:

I should like to tell you, now, gentlemen, whether you want to listen to me or not, why I've never been able to become even an insect. I declare to you solemnly that I've wished to become an insect many times.

I've often heard it said that Dostoevsky was a key influence on Kafka. Having not read much Dostoevsky nor any of the secondary literature about Kafka, I don't know how much this is true. But, I wonder, is it possible this passage inspired Kafka to write "The Metamorphosis"?

Revisiting Nabokov

I randomly pulled Despair off the shelf last night and began re-reading it. I first read it more than a decade ago (it was my second Nabokov, just after Invitation to a Beheading and before Lolita), and I seem to have virtually no memory of the book (I have some vague recall of a man sitting on a bench).

Two brief observations: First, now that I'm more familiar with Nabokov's critical biases, the bits on the different ways to narrate a story are quite amusing. Chapter three opens with "How shall we begin this chapter? I offer several variations to choose from" (reminding me of the opening of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds), after which the narrator presents the variations along with some literary criticism of the forms....

Second, I also re-read Nabokov's forward and am reminded of how droll his introductions and forwards were. I remember, too, that he always seemed to be at pains to, for example, attack Freud in passing and the novels of ideas, and attempts to find ideas or messages in his novels, among other common themes. When I was much younger and just starting out reading serious fiction, I gobbled up Nabokov's pronouncements as gospel, fairly uncritically. Over time, I'd like to think my critical faculties have improved, and there has been some divergence (for example, I once thought his view of translation was self-evidently correct, but now I find it strident and unhelpfully inflexible--I anticipate a future post about this, involving some intriguing stuff from Harry Mathews' essays on translation...) Nonetheless, I enjoy reading his Lectures on Literature, finding it helpfully illuminating.