Subject
Re: THOUGHTS re-Woodward on VN lectures
From
Date
Body
On 16/04/2008 15:59, "Jay Livingston" <livingstonj@MAIL.MONTCLAIR.EDU>
wrote:
> At http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/04/critical-library.html
> The National Book Critics Circle regularly posts a list of five books a critic
> believes reviewers should have in their libraries. We recently heard from
> writer and critic Richard B. Woodward. Here is what Rick pointed out as worth
> keeping in your library at all times.
>
>
> Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature
> <http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lectures-on-Literature/Vladimir-Nabokov/e/97
> 80156027755> , edited by Fredson Bowers (1980)
>
> Nabokov is a dangerous writer to emulate. In college I revered his books and
> sought to imitate his casual majesty until I realized his linguistic or formal
> brilliance was beyond my reach. As a result, I abandoned any hope of trying to
> be a novelist myself.
>
> His critical standards toward literature can be no less inhibiting.
> Periodically I have to banish him from my mind as an icy, out-of-touch
> aristocrat in order to enjoy in good conscience Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner,
> and others crushed beneath his weighty judgments. Then, someone will quote him
> in a review and, remembering the glinting precision of his intelligence, I am
> forced to bring him back from exile.
>
> These two volumes collect his college lectures from the 1950s on seven works
> of fictionMansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of
> Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Walk by Swann¹s Place, The Metamorphosis, and
> Ulyssesand on a select group of Russian writers, not necessarily his
> favorites. (Dostoevsky and Gorky are included.)
>
> Nabokov¹s analytic vocabulary can sound musty as he discusses ³themes² and
> ³symbols.² He was unpardonably chauvinistic toward women writers. But his zeal
> for literature is contagious. Above all he wanted his students to appreciate
> the array of special effects novelists keep in their bag of tricks.
>
> He was unafraid to throw around the word genius, being one himself.
>
> Those who regard themselves as attentive readers should take two of his sample
> exams. When I totaled my humiliating score, I realized how much of a novel¹s
> detail I ordinarily miss in my haste to finish and arrive at an opinion. In an
> essay here titled ³The Art of Literature and Commonsense,² he attacks mundane
> realism and argues that ³a seemingly incongruous detail² always trumps ³a
> seemingly dominant generalization.² Or as he puts it in a more Nabokovian
> fashion: ³I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and
> saves his neighbor¹s child, but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering
> a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its
> favorite toy.²
> -------
>
> Grammaci, Jay Livingston for passing on Richard B Woodward's percipient
> insights. They arrived as I was re-playing the audio-book of Bleak House and
> re-reading VN's life-changing (well, _my_ life) Lecture on Dickens. No
> 'mustiness' here, RBW, except in the sense of 'must-read!':
>
> "All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines
> take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is
> between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the
> highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and
> pure science [my bold emphasis -- skb]. Let us worship the spine and its
> tingle."
>
> May I submit these comments in response to our ListMeisters' request for
> Nabokov-birthday celebrations? Ideally, I should be snail-mailing this note
> using the new UK's Royal Mail Endangered-Insect postage stamp: A BLUE
> (Nabokovian?) Butterfly
> http://www.royalmail.com:80/gear/shop/html/shopProductPopUp.jsp?catId=9300091&
> product=prod63130016&communityId=900003
>
> As an EX-Red, I hear Robeson's Joe Hill singing "But I ain't dead!"
>
> VN rightly equates the tingles (spinal taps?) of pure art and pure science,
> bringing us back to the two-culture challenge of E O Wilson's Consilience*
> Here we must pause to ponder another challenging dichotomy: pure and applied.
> Certainly in Mathematics (the Queen Mother F***er of all the Sciences) much of
> the traditional snobbery (looking down one's donnish nose at those applied
> grease-monkeys) has vanished. There's a real historical tingle in the mystery
> that the purest, most abstract and least worldly equations can suddenly
> surface in nuts'n'bolts applications. Pacifist mathematician G H Hardy (a
> Cambridge [UK] contemporary of VN) never expected that his Number Theory would
> one day help decipher cryptic Jihadist emails.
>
> Is a similar, uneasy convergence possible with pure and applied art? VN seems
> to shun such, certainly in the sense of 'applied' literature: all those
> overtly politically-agenda'd, banner-waving, mundanely 'realistic' novels!
> Yet, I sniff a faint parallel with Hardy's 'inadvertent' Number Theory. One
> cannot read VN's corpus 'in vacuo' away from the momentous, blood-stained
> upheavals of the 20th century. My own political 'salvation' owes as much, if
> not more, to Vladimir/Vera/Dmitri as to, say, Orwell or Solzhenitsyn. And this
> reminds us that agreeing with or justifying every 'Strong Opinion' is a most
> UN-Nabokovian thing to do.
>
> One last discussion-point: was VN's Lepidoptery pure or applied Science? The
> very question hints at a false dichotomy?
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle.
>
> * I've now found a few references to EOW & Consilience on the VN-archives.
> Interestingly, Prof D Barton Johnson notes wonderful direct EOW-VN
> connections, both literary and scientific:
>
> Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 10:09:01 -0700
> Reply-To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sender: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> From: "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gte.net>
> Organization: International Nabokov Society
> Subject: E.O. Wilson & LOLITA
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r
>
> Instead of more pressing things I am in the midst of E.O.Wilson's
> _CONSILIENCE. The Unity of Knowledge_.
>
> In a chapter on the arts, he writes:
>
> "The arts are eternally discursive. They seek maximum effect with novel
> imagery. And imagery that burns itself into the memory, so that when
> recalled it retains some of its origninal impact. Among examples I
> especially appreciate is the perfect opening of Nabokov's pedophilic
> novel. 'Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps
> down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' Thus with
> anatomical accuracy, alliterative t-sounds, and poetic meter Nabokov
> drenches the name, the book title, and the plot in sensuality." (p. 222)
>
> Had their dates been a bit different, Wilson, who is (inter alia)
> Honorary Curator in Entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative
> Zoology, might have been VN's boss.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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wrote:
> At http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/04/critical-library.html
> The National Book Critics Circle regularly posts a list of five books a critic
> believes reviewers should have in their libraries. We recently heard from
> writer and critic Richard B. Woodward. Here is what Rick pointed out as worth
> keeping in your library at all times.
>
>
> Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature and Lectures on Russian Literature
> <http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Lectures-on-Literature/Vladimir-Nabokov/e/97
> 80156027755> , edited by Fredson Bowers (1980)
>
> Nabokov is a dangerous writer to emulate. In college I revered his books and
> sought to imitate his casual majesty until I realized his linguistic or formal
> brilliance was beyond my reach. As a result, I abandoned any hope of trying to
> be a novelist myself.
>
> His critical standards toward literature can be no less inhibiting.
> Periodically I have to banish him from my mind as an icy, out-of-touch
> aristocrat in order to enjoy in good conscience Dostoevsky, Mann, Faulkner,
> and others crushed beneath his weighty judgments. Then, someone will quote him
> in a review and, remembering the glinting precision of his intelligence, I am
> forced to bring him back from exile.
>
> These two volumes collect his college lectures from the 1950s on seven works
> of fictionMansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, The Strange Case of
> Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Walk by Swann¹s Place, The Metamorphosis, and
> Ulyssesand on a select group of Russian writers, not necessarily his
> favorites. (Dostoevsky and Gorky are included.)
>
> Nabokov¹s analytic vocabulary can sound musty as he discusses ³themes² and
> ³symbols.² He was unpardonably chauvinistic toward women writers. But his zeal
> for literature is contagious. Above all he wanted his students to appreciate
> the array of special effects novelists keep in their bag of tricks.
>
> He was unafraid to throw around the word genius, being one himself.
>
> Those who regard themselves as attentive readers should take two of his sample
> exams. When I totaled my humiliating score, I realized how much of a novel¹s
> detail I ordinarily miss in my haste to finish and arrive at an opinion. In an
> essay here titled ³The Art of Literature and Commonsense,² he attacks mundane
> realism and argues that ³a seemingly incongruous detail² always trumps ³a
> seemingly dominant generalization.² Or as he puts it in a more Nabokovian
> fashion: ³I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and
> saves his neighbor¹s child, but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering
> a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its
> favorite toy.²
> -------
>
> Grammaci, Jay Livingston for passing on Richard B Woodward's percipient
> insights. They arrived as I was re-playing the audio-book of Bleak House and
> re-reading VN's life-changing (well, _my_ life) Lecture on Dickens. No
> 'mustiness' here, RBW, except in the sense of 'must-read!':
>
> "All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines
> take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is
> between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the
> highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and
> pure science [my bold emphasis -- skb]. Let us worship the spine and its
> tingle."
>
> May I submit these comments in response to our ListMeisters' request for
> Nabokov-birthday celebrations? Ideally, I should be snail-mailing this note
> using the new UK's Royal Mail Endangered-Insect postage stamp: A BLUE
> (Nabokovian?) Butterfly
> http://www.royalmail.com:80/gear/shop/html/shopProductPopUp.jsp?catId=9300091&
> product=prod63130016&communityId=900003
>
> As an EX-Red, I hear Robeson's Joe Hill singing "But I ain't dead!"
>
> VN rightly equates the tingles (spinal taps?) of pure art and pure science,
> bringing us back to the two-culture challenge of E O Wilson's Consilience*
> Here we must pause to ponder another challenging dichotomy: pure and applied.
> Certainly in Mathematics (the Queen Mother F***er of all the Sciences) much of
> the traditional snobbery (looking down one's donnish nose at those applied
> grease-monkeys) has vanished. There's a real historical tingle in the mystery
> that the purest, most abstract and least worldly equations can suddenly
> surface in nuts'n'bolts applications. Pacifist mathematician G H Hardy (a
> Cambridge [UK] contemporary of VN) never expected that his Number Theory would
> one day help decipher cryptic Jihadist emails.
>
> Is a similar, uneasy convergence possible with pure and applied art? VN seems
> to shun such, certainly in the sense of 'applied' literature: all those
> overtly politically-agenda'd, banner-waving, mundanely 'realistic' novels!
> Yet, I sniff a faint parallel with Hardy's 'inadvertent' Number Theory. One
> cannot read VN's corpus 'in vacuo' away from the momentous, blood-stained
> upheavals of the 20th century. My own political 'salvation' owes as much, if
> not more, to Vladimir/Vera/Dmitri as to, say, Orwell or Solzhenitsyn. And this
> reminds us that agreeing with or justifying every 'Strong Opinion' is a most
> UN-Nabokovian thing to do.
>
> One last discussion-point: was VN's Lepidoptery pure or applied Science? The
> very question hints at a false dichotomy?
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle.
>
> * I've now found a few references to EOW & Consilience on the VN-archives.
> Interestingly, Prof D Barton Johnson notes wonderful direct EOW-VN
> connections, both literary and scientific:
>
> Date: Mon, 2 Apr 2001 10:09:01 -0700
> Reply-To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sender: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> From: "D. Barton Johnson" <chtodel@gte.net>
> Organization: International Nabokov Society
> Subject: E.O. Wilson & LOLITA
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=koi8-r
>
> Instead of more pressing things I am in the midst of E.O.Wilson's
> _CONSILIENCE. The Unity of Knowledge_.
>
> In a chapter on the arts, he writes:
>
> "The arts are eternally discursive. They seek maximum effect with novel
> imagery. And imagery that burns itself into the memory, so that when
> recalled it retains some of its origninal impact. Among examples I
> especially appreciate is the perfect opening of Nabokov's pedophilic
> novel. 'Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps
> down the palate to tap, at three on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' Thus with
> anatomical accuracy, alliterative t-sounds, and poetic meter Nabokov
> drenches the name, the book title, and the plot in sensuality." (p. 222)
>
> Had their dates been a bit different, Wilson, who is (inter alia)
> Honorary Curator in Entomology at Harvard's Museum of Comparative
> Zoology, might have been VN's boss.
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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