-------- Original Message --------
"Writers, Visible and Invisible", Cynthia Ozick in Sept '08 Standpoint
(adapted from PEN lifetime achievement award acceptance):
http://www.standpointmag.co.uk./node/390/full
The relevant excerpt:
... these eruptions of sudden mufflings and posthumous silences must be
ranked entirely apart from the forced muteness of living writers who
work in minority languages, away from the klieg lights of the lingua
franca, and whose oeuvres linger too often untranslated. The
invisibility of recently dead writers is one thing, and can even, in
certain cases (I would be pleased to name a few), bring relief; but the
invisibility of the living is a different matter altogether, crucial to
literary continuity. Political shunning – of writers who are made
invisible, and also inaudible, by repressive design – results in what
might be called public invisibility, rooted in external circumstance:
the thuggish prejudices of gangsters who run rotted regimes, the
vengeful prejudices of corrupt academics who propose intellectual
boycotts, the shallow prejudices of the publishing lords of the
currently dominant languages, and finally (reductio ad absurdum!) the
ideologically narrow prejudices of!
some magazine editors. All these are rampant and scandalous and
undermining of free expression. But what of an intrinsic, delicate and
far more ubiquitous private invisibility?
Vladimir Nabokov was once an invisible writer suffering from three of
these unhappy conditions: the public, the private, the linguistic. As
an émigré fleeing the Bolshevik upheavals, and later as a refugee from
the Nazis, he escaped the 20th century’s two great tyrannies. And as an
émigré writing in Russian in Berlin and Paris, he remained invisible to
nearly all but his exiled compatriots. Only on his arrival in America
did the marginalising term “émigré” begin to vanish, replaced first by
citizen and ultimately by American writer – since it was in America
that the invisible became invincible. But Brian Boyd, in his intimate
yet panoramic biography, recounts the difficulties, even in welcoming
America, of invisible ink’s turning visible – not only in the
protracted struggle for the publication of Lolita, but in the most
liberal of literary journals.
It was the otherwise audacious New Yorker of the 1950s that rejected a
chapter of Pnin, the novel chronicling Nabokov’s helplessly charming
and self-parodying alter ego, “because”, according to Boyd, “Nabokov
refused to remove references – all historically accurate – to the
regime of Lenin and Stalin”. (The phrases in question included
“medieval tortures in a Soviet jail”, “Bolshevik dictatorship” and
“hopeless injustice,” characterisations which the editors apparently
regarded either as excessive or as outright falsehoods.) Certainly the
politically expelled chapter did not languish in invisibility for very
long; and as for Lolita, decades after its electrifying and enduring
triumph it burst out once again, dazzlingly, in the title of Azar
Nafisi’s widely admired memoir linking Lolita’s fate to the ruthless
mullahs of Teheran. (Still, even today, even in New York, one can find
a distinguished liberal journal willing to make a political pariah of a
writer: an instance of or!
dinarily visible ink rendered punitively invisible.)
And here at last is the crux: writers are hidden beings. You have never
met one – or, if you should ever believe you are seeing a writer, or
having an argument with a writer, or listening to a talk by a writer,
then you can be sure it is all a mistake.