In this week's TLS there is a review of Alfred
Appel's "Jazz Modernism" by David Schiff. It can be accessed online at http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.asp?story_id=29031.
Nabokov and synaesthesia are mentioned in it. Here is a little
passage:
Jazz Modernism might be retitled “confessions of a
recovering academic modernist”. Professor Appel, famed as a Nabokov scholar,
herein repents for a lifetime spent explaining Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to the
young and restless. It turns out that their resistance to Joyce’s arcana (even
Nabokov instructed his students to skip the densest chapters) was wiser than
their professor’s advocacy. Near the beginning of the book, in one of many
cross-disciplinary zigzags worthy of Nabokov’s Professors Kinbote and Humbert,
Appel admits that he misread the basic plot of Ulysses despite years of
teaching. Leopold Bloom, Appel finally realizes, is no Ulysses. Distracted by
“coprolagnia, masochism, sodomy and anal eroticism”, he will never return to
normal sexual relations with Molly. The hard-core modernism of Joyce and Eliot
similarly remains sterile, perverse and impenetrable – but rhythm may still save
the world.