"... 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."