Subject
[NABOKOV-L] Following Twiggs's indication of Gaitskill's
"Inspiration"
"Inspiration"
From
Date
Body
Mary Gaitskill "My Inspiration: Vladimir Nabokov": http://www.salon.com/12nov1995/feature/nabokov.html.
"... readers apparently interpret the very beauty of his prose as cruel -- and there is a hyper-refinement, an airy, curiously high-pitched quality to its beauty that can feel cruel simply because it throws the whole beastly, mundane, plodding corporeality of human beings into such grotesque relief....the unbeautiful human personified with a fastidious shudder.What such critics forget is that a certain kind of detachment permits the most intense feeling, and that intense feeling is not always moral. It is this detached, aerial view that allows a wide range of feeling in all its unpredictable, oscillating movement...a writer who is completely engaged with the emotionality of her characters -- or even her own point of view -- is in danger of writing from a very small, static and even self-righteous position." [...] "Far from being cold or inhuman, Nabokov's writing is suffused with a great joy that is supremely human, and that can take in all facets of being at once -- although many humans may never allow themselves to experience this. In his own words: "It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the nonego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner -- who is already dancing in the open."
JM: Gaitskill's points are crystal clear: (a) intense feeling is not always moral, it is a detached aerial view; it is not static nor self-righteous;
(b) Nabokov's writing...can take in all facets of being at once.
Nevertheless, in such a "detached aerial view," where can we find a place for "pity"? Borrowing (and altering) Shakespeare's MV III, I ask -Tell me where is pity bred, Or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourished?
In my opinion human truth, deceit, pity,cruelty, love,hate, misery - lie in the interaction between an original stimulus/art-work and a receptor/reader. Nabokov doesn't need to be a humanist, nor to feel pity for beastly mankind, because of his "detached aerial view" which, for Gaitskill, permeates the beauty of Nabokov's style: his writing invites the courageous reader to learn something about himself and other fellow humans. Her conclusions are enriching.and felicitous ("take in all facets of being at once"...)
On Nabokov's short-story "Sounds," Gaitskill notes: "it is intelligent, finely-tuned rhapsodizing, describing an early experience of passion with a profound and glorious ambivalence. A young man enjoying a quiet love affair with a married woman suddenly realizes that "[she] alone is not my lover but the entire earth," and experiences an intense and subtly erotic understanding of his metaphysical connection with everything that lives -- all the while retaining his piquant sense of self. Oblivious to this, his mistress tells him that she wants to run away with him. He responds with trivial talk about her cigarette case...He rides off on his bike, still enrapt in his new vision. Superficially, this is about a blithe young man, selfishly obsessed with beauty and his own perceptions. But in a deeper way, the story is about a budding apprehension of life in all its layers, any of which can be experienced as beautiful and vital. On one hand, his desertion of the woman seems callow. But even in his detachment, he cherishes her:.. the story bears the seed of a parallel universe in which the woman, realizing that the entire earth is also her lover, rises out of her sorrow to meet the narrator in his place of detached perception, if only to wave goodbye." and, here, I differ from Gaitskill, because she became kind of apologetic. Even if parallel universes exist, one inhabits only one (if they are to remain parallel), inspite of any help from mystic trances, mathematical formulas and (Philip Pullman's) subtle knife, keys which would then allow us to cut through the separation between these two worlds, now to gleefully inhabit the other and cancel sunsets and clumpy characters...
In "Sounds" VN's character shows all the signs of becoming a misanthrope. As readers, like Nabokov's character, we can imaginarily inhabit two or more worlds, without becoming "selfishly obsessed with beauty and (our) own perceptions" or "callow," but Gaitskill is arguing her point as if she, herself, could break away from a prison wall of the ego to dance outside it and go on writing her review with - what? - detachment?*
....................................................................................................
* Wiki: "Socrates argues that "art" would have allowed the potential misanthrope to recognize that the majority of men are to be found in between good and evil. Aristotle follows a more ontological route: the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god, a view reflected in the Renaissance of misanthropy as a "beast-like state."
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"... readers apparently interpret the very beauty of his prose as cruel -- and there is a hyper-refinement, an airy, curiously high-pitched quality to its beauty that can feel cruel simply because it throws the whole beastly, mundane, plodding corporeality of human beings into such grotesque relief....the unbeautiful human personified with a fastidious shudder.What such critics forget is that a certain kind of detachment permits the most intense feeling, and that intense feeling is not always moral. It is this detached, aerial view that allows a wide range of feeling in all its unpredictable, oscillating movement...a writer who is completely engaged with the emotionality of her characters -- or even her own point of view -- is in danger of writing from a very small, static and even self-righteous position." [...] "Far from being cold or inhuman, Nabokov's writing is suffused with a great joy that is supremely human, and that can take in all facets of being at once -- although many humans may never allow themselves to experience this. In his own words: "It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the nonego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner -- who is already dancing in the open."
JM: Gaitskill's points are crystal clear: (a) intense feeling is not always moral, it is a detached aerial view; it is not static nor self-righteous;
(b) Nabokov's writing...can take in all facets of being at once.
Nevertheless, in such a "detached aerial view," where can we find a place for "pity"? Borrowing (and altering) Shakespeare's MV III, I ask -Tell me where is pity bred, Or in the heart, or in the head? How begot, how nourished?
In my opinion human truth, deceit, pity,cruelty, love,hate, misery - lie in the interaction between an original stimulus/art-work and a receptor/reader. Nabokov doesn't need to be a humanist, nor to feel pity for beastly mankind, because of his "detached aerial view" which, for Gaitskill, permeates the beauty of Nabokov's style: his writing invites the courageous reader to learn something about himself and other fellow humans. Her conclusions are enriching.and felicitous ("take in all facets of being at once"...)
On Nabokov's short-story "Sounds," Gaitskill notes: "it is intelligent, finely-tuned rhapsodizing, describing an early experience of passion with a profound and glorious ambivalence. A young man enjoying a quiet love affair with a married woman suddenly realizes that "[she] alone is not my lover but the entire earth," and experiences an intense and subtly erotic understanding of his metaphysical connection with everything that lives -- all the while retaining his piquant sense of self. Oblivious to this, his mistress tells him that she wants to run away with him. He responds with trivial talk about her cigarette case...He rides off on his bike, still enrapt in his new vision. Superficially, this is about a blithe young man, selfishly obsessed with beauty and his own perceptions. But in a deeper way, the story is about a budding apprehension of life in all its layers, any of which can be experienced as beautiful and vital. On one hand, his desertion of the woman seems callow. But even in his detachment, he cherishes her:.. the story bears the seed of a parallel universe in which the woman, realizing that the entire earth is also her lover, rises out of her sorrow to meet the narrator in his place of detached perception, if only to wave goodbye." and, here, I differ from Gaitskill, because she became kind of apologetic. Even if parallel universes exist, one inhabits only one (if they are to remain parallel), inspite of any help from mystic trances, mathematical formulas and (Philip Pullman's) subtle knife, keys which would then allow us to cut through the separation between these two worlds, now to gleefully inhabit the other and cancel sunsets and clumpy characters...
In "Sounds" VN's character shows all the signs of becoming a misanthrope. As readers, like Nabokov's character, we can imaginarily inhabit two or more worlds, without becoming "selfishly obsessed with beauty and (our) own perceptions" or "callow," but Gaitskill is arguing her point as if she, herself, could break away from a prison wall of the ego to dance outside it and go on writing her review with - what? - detachment?*
....................................................................................................
* Wiki: "Socrates argues that "art" would have allowed the potential misanthrope to recognize that the majority of men are to be found in between good and evil. Aristotle follows a more ontological route: the misanthrope, as an essentially solitary man, is not a man at all: he must be a beast or a god, a view reflected in the Renaissance of misanthropy as a "beast-like state."
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/