Duped By Fools? Nay! Duped By The Best

After last night's "spoofed dupe" I decided that if I'm to be made a mockery it may as well be by someone I esteem.  So I sat down and started reading the author for whom the phrase "contempt for his readership" hardly does justice to the cruelties he inflicts on it: Vladimir Nabokov.  (Why do we become intellectual masochists when suffering from mental fatigue?  I only hit the dizzingly self-conscious shelf when I'm physically beaten and mentally drained.  There must be an explanation.  If I could string three thoughts together I might even be able to smoke it out.)  As I lazily re-read Pnin and Speak, Memory I tried to ignore my marginalia lest its cataloguing of authorial shenanigans interfere with the languid movement of my eyes across the page.

The man cannot tell an unvarnished truth.  He was mad for varnish and refused to write a single sentence which failed to embelish aurally its plain meaning.  (On which more shortly.)  He also despised prepackaged symbolism.  Here he counters the psychoanalytic account of his work in Nabokov's Deceptive World by objecting that:

Mr. Rowe's manipulating my most innocent words so as to introduce sexual "symbols" into them.  The notion of symbol itself has always been abhorrent to me, and I never tire of  retelling  how I once failed a student—the dupe, alas, of an earlier teacher—for writing that Jane Austen describes leaves as "green" because Fanny is hopeful, and "green" is the color of hope.  The symbolism racket in schools attracts computerized minds but destroys plain intelligence as well as poetical sense. It bleaches the soul. It numbs all capacity to enjoy the fun and enchantment of art.  Who the hell cares, as Mr. Rowe wants us to care, that there is, according to his italics, a "man" in the sentence about a homosexual Swede who "had embarrassing manners" (p. 148), and  another "man" in "manipulate" (passim)? "Wickedly folded moth" suggests "wick" to Mr. Rowe, and "wick," as we Freudians know, is the  Male Organ.  "I" stands for "eye," and "eye" stands for the Female Organ.  Pencil licking is always a reference to you know what. A soccer goal hints at the vulval orifice (which Mr. Rowe evidently sees as square).

I can think of no author whose words are more "guilty" than those of Nabokov . . . unless I think of Joyce.  But Nabokov's words move in a more familiar register than Joyce's.  You don't need fluency in forty-five languages to know when Nabokov pulls your leg.  You need only experience the tingling Hey . . . wait a second which so many of his sentences induce to know that his sentence-level meaning is far from "innocent."  You don't even need to read the books to know he's about to dupe you.  The titles alone tell all.  Speak, Memory?  Why must he enjoin his memory to speak instead of simply remembering?  Especially considering his infamous hostility to "the talking cure":

I have ransacked my my oldest dreams for keys and clues—and let me say at once that I reject completely the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world of Freud, with its crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works) and its bitter little embryos spying, from the natural nook, upon the love life of their parents.

So from all of this you gather that he's no fan of Freud.  But look closely at that sentence and consider its sound sense: "Baconian acrostics" signifies an established method of disproving Shakespeare's authorship of Shakespeare's plays . . . but the phrase also has a shuffled effect.  It reads almost as if Nabokov took the soundscape of the first word and repeated it in the latter and that that had been his intent all along.  Gamesmanship defined his synesthetic relation to language.  He could not refuse to play games because his sense of the sound and color of language made his relation to it necessarily playful.  If your writing produced not only sounds but colors you wouldn't want it to clash either.  This external constraint not only warped his prose but his relation to what it communicated.  (Unlike the lot of us who merely hear language.)   He toys with us the way language toys with him.  His response to Freudian critics is more understandable in light of the fact that he already had an entirely separate set of associations with every word he wrote.  The Freudian "reading" couldn't capture them or could only do so inadequately because it neglected half the compositional experience.  To wit:

In the case of a certain type of writer it often happens that a whole paragraph or sinuous sentence exists as a discrete organism, with its own imagery, its own invocations, its own bloom, and then it is especially precious, and also vulnerable, so that if an outsider, immune to poetry  and common sense,  injects spurious symbols into it, or actually tampers with its wording (see Mr. Rowe's crass attempt on his page 113),  its magic is replaced by maggots.

[snip]

One can excuse a critic for not finding "stillicide" and "ganch" in his abridged dictionary and concluding that I invented those words;  one can  understand a dull reader of Invitation to a Beheading thinking that the  executioner develops a homosexual tenderness for his victim when actually that affectionate look reflects only the lust of a glutton coveting a live  chicken;  but  what I find unpardonable, and indeed unworthy of a scholar, is Mr. Rowe's twisting my discussion of prosody (as appended  to  my translation of Eugene Onegin) into a torrent of Freudian drivel,  which allows him to construe "metrical length" as an erection and "rhyme" as a sexual  climax.  No less ludicrous is his examination of Lolita's tennis and his claim that the tennis balls represent testicles (those of a giant albino, no  doubt).  Passing on to my reference to chess problems in Speak,  Memory Mr. Rowe finds "sexual analogies" in such phrases as "mating devices" and "groping for a pawn in the box"—all of which is as much an insult to chess as to the problemist.

I should wrap this up with something resembling a conclusion . . . but not tonight.  More thoughts on this tomorrow.  (Sometime soon I'll also polish what I've written about AI in Stone.  I'm increasingly unsatisfied with it but such is the nature of blog.  You write in one evening what you'd otherwise invest many days in.  If you actually invest many days in it . . . then all your familiar censors step into place and prevent you from hitting post.)

Comments

[woody pulps]

Scott, Scott, Scott,

Vladimir (rhymes with redeemer) has pulled one more leg (yours).

As in all his writings, while he denies and decries the use of symbolism (and at times puns, allusion, etc), he metaphorically continues to use them in his analyses and I would suppose in everything he said or did. Were he a standup comic, no one would get his punchline until a day after the show while mowing the lawn, getting a hair cut, or having an eyebrow wax.

I like the fact that such matters draw your attention and the fact that you read Nabokov in a world that thinks "Lolita" is a dirty book (if it knows anything about it at all).

By the way, Humbert thought Lolita's tennis game was as beautiful as the curve of her neck (no symbolism implied).

[Ancrene Wiseass]

Hmm. I think, perhaps, that you're pulling your readers' legs. "If I could string three thoughts together," you lament, and then you write this interesting and insightful post?

Uh-huh.

[Belle Lettre]

This really is a great post. You join the esteemed company of Edmund Wilson in nailing Nabokov's hat to the ground.

You could indeed be a law school professorin Law and Literature or Law and Cultural Studies (you can start your own niche). More on this in my comment at my own blog (yes I'm trying to drive up my traffic).

[Rich Puchalsky]

"Sometime soon I'll also polish what I've written about AI in Stone."

We're still throwing stones? Then what do you think of the similarities to _Pale Fire_, given that you're on Nabokov anyway?

In the category of meaningless gossip about fellow commenters, guess who has been looking up Adam's pricy ($95 US) new history of science fiction (which I looked at before deciding that the budget would not bear it, alas). What did customers who viewed this book also view? Guess for a moment. Billion Year Spree? The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of? Nope, the linked commonly viewed five are:

Theory's Empire : An Anthology of Dissent by Daphne Patai
Tuff Fluff : The Case of Duckie's Missing Brain by Scott Nash
Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (Post-Contemporary Interventions) by Walter Benn Michaels
Stone (Gollancz SF S.) by Adam Roberts
The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by Vincent B. Leitch

Clearly Adam must be rolling in dough as the ten people who buy stuff that they see on the Valve and here do their shopping.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Woody, I think we point to the same aspect of his prose: he lies, then lies about lying, then does what he lied about saying he didn't do, then condemns anyone for doing and/or lying about doing or not doing what he said he did or didn't do. After a while it confuses me.

AW, maybe it's because that post seemed serious that I felt myself so seriously rambling, but I suppose what doesn't fly in dissertations is perfectly suited for blogs, so maybe I did underestimate my thought-stringing capabilities yesterday. But I swear to you it felt like fluff.

BL, see my reply over yonder and/or my follow-up here tomorrow night.

Rich, I see Stone's "commonly viewed" has a similar gravitational pull:

The History of Science Fiction (Palgrave Histories of Literature) by Adam Roberts

The Secret Epidemic : The Story of AIDS and Black America by Jacob Levenson

White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. by Catherine Jurca

The Roberts is self-explanatory, but the Levenson's a book I linked to earlier vis-a-vis weekend job-search committee reading, and the Jurca's one I've linked to a couple of times now in a couple different posts.

And I think we have had an impact on the sales of Stone, since it's Amazon rating jumped into the 200,000 range for a week or so there and seven people bought it by clicking through from here.

[Rich Puchalsky]

There's something inexpressibly sad about a book's synthetic popularity number jumping up by who knows how many tens of thousands because seven people bought it. It makes me a imagine a future Hirschian (_Social Limits To Growth_) world where an author throws a party whenever someone buys their book and often can't resist sending the possible reader anxious whatevermail queries to see whether they've read it yet.

I think that we're already approaching the point where book writing is no longer really an economic activity. One of my favorite author stories concerns Glen Cook, a fantasy author who writes amusing pulp. According to an interview that I dimly remember, he writes several books a year, and they usually sell in the 50,000 range. Despite this high productivity and solid mid-list status, this makes him about $30,000/year in advances and royalties. Although this is enough to put a family of four over the U.S. poverty level, it is not quite enough for the middle class. Therefore, he also works as a unionized truck assembler making something like $80,000/year. Apparently he writes on a scrap of paper while waiting for the next truck to come down the line, and types up his jottings on weekends.

[Adam Roberts]

50,000 copies sounds like a huge sale to me (these things go bigger in the U. S. I daresay). I'm delighted with the seven extra copies sold, for which I thank the viral marketing of the UnHead. Thank you.

But, yes: I publish several books a year, and don't sell too badly by Brit standards (not too well either, alas): but I couldn't afford the mortgage on my semi without a day job at the University of London. Those amongst my acquaintances who do nothing but write have (a) money already, from family etc, or (b) film deals. Sell your book to Spielberg and you'll see serious money. Or (a synonym that I've always thought really ought to be an antonym)silly money.

I don't see that this marks the end of book publishing as a viable concern; I think it's the same in most of the culture industries -- actors who have to work teaching acting workshops (or waiting at table); musicians who scratch together as much money as they can by selling t-shirts and albums online but still have to work in a shop three days a week, that sort of thing. The exceptions (film stars, Madonna, J K Rowling) are precisely as exceptional as ever they were. This doesn't worry me, neither: nobody puts a gun to anybody's head and commands: 'write a gnarly SF novel about genocide or else, you hound'. And piddly UK law prohibits me from putting a gun to the head of browsers in a bookshop and telling them 'buy that novel over there, the one with the red cover, or else.' So there you go.

Sorry about the price of the Critical History, Rich; you're right, $95 is an absurd amount of money, but it wasn't my call. If only 'commonly viewed' lead automatically to 'common purchased ten copies for home use, and a further ten each for every member of my extended family'. Ho hum.

All of which is preliminary to my original intent, to add my tuppence-worth to Scott's excellent Nabokov (NabOHkov) post. I revere Nabokov. He is as a writerishly god to me. Most of my novels include at least one layer of reworking a favourite Nabokov novel in them somewhere. And I have, accordingly, several thousand things to say about him ...

But I've got to go lecture now. Curse this day-job. One thing I'll say before I run off: we're not, of course, obliged to believe in this slightly ogrish, or schoolmasterish, persona that he so often presented as his authorial and indeed narratorial self. There are features of his writing that are over-controlled, cruel, mercilessly playful, intellectualised (over-intellectualised even), show-offy and perhaps pompous. But these dazzling or gaudy tricks are not the marrow of his novels; they are layered over, and in their way inflect and articulate, a base which is profoundly emotional. It's how, I think, he stops himself from becoming sentimental (which I don't think he ever is); and it doesn't in the least erode the novelistic affect ... Pnin is, behind the slapstick and satire, a really moving book. The whole of Lolita bears down upon that heartbreaking moment at the end when you realise that Humbery genuinely loves this girl he has abused. Sunt lachrimae rerum and all that.

Got to go ...

[Rich Puchalsky]

"I don't see that this marks the end of book publishing as a viable concern [...]"

Not the end of book *publishing*, no, but it seems pretty clear that

a) Most writers, actors, musicians, etc. are willing to do this work because of a combination of inherent satisfaction and desire for attention, not because it's a solid job;

b) Because of a), distributors can make money on even low-volume cultural products by paying the authors/artists a pittance.

There's a similar effect in the nonprofit world, where salaries are generally about 2/3 what they would be for similarly skilled empolyees elsewhere. Why? Because people are willing to work in part for satisfaction.

I'm not entirely sure that this is a good thing. We seem to already be at a stage where an author can both write and sell several novels a year and still have this amount to a fourth of their cash income. That's not what my union forebears worked for. Of course in this case the "scab" willing to work for less is internal.

Of course I'm writing this on a blog, an activity where people get paid even more derisively small sums. Which again is a perfectly Hirschian sort of result...

[nnyhav]

Back on topic: Synesthesia may have colored Nabokov's Russian poetry, but his English prose is more a matter of finding a register that did not come naturally, so that at least one aspect of the game is in figuring out the rules, or more precisely the implications of the rules. The varnish is not a stylistic overlay, but a highlighting of the underlying grain; thus the interest in idiom, the odd turn of phrase, the attention to detail and craft that creates possibilities, exploits opportunities, that might otherwise be overlooked. It is the telling detail that has the capacity to astonish, to demand a careful reconsideration of the whole -- an aesthetic Nabokov analogised to chess problems (cf. my earlier musings), where the placement of each piece is critical by design. His objection to symbolic interpretation, as to Freud (and his followers, prehaps more due to what they made of him), is the imposition from above that pre-establishes the mode of interpretation, that limits these possibilities, that allays the element of surprise, but that also provides a matrix within which the detail can tell, the apparent theme dupe the sophisticated down a misleading and devious path. Nabokov playfully presents a puzzle; is it then a game?

[sania]

All parts of novel "Harry Potter "are intersting especially 1 part

[sania]

I love this novel and I have read all parts and inshalla i will also read the parts.
"COOM SOON THE PARTS''

[sania IQBAL]

wHEN WILL OTHER PARTS COME.