SES: "Jansy mentioned an
essay in which I analyzed that very sentence singled out as Nabokov's prose at
its worst (in Watts's 1947 review of Bend Sinister) as an example of a distinct
kind of Nabokovian metaphor: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, “Nabokov’s
Amphiphorical Gestures,” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 11.2
(1987): 189-211."
JM: The same sentence that was
singled out as "Nabokov's prose at its worst" by Watts has
also been selected by Diana Trilling
(in her review of "Bend Sinister" published in "The Nation," June
14,1947) and for the same reason, observes James
Twiggs.
Diana Trilling writes: "But in point of fact, what looks like a highly charged
sensibility in Mr. Nabokovs style is really only fanciness, forced imagery, and
deafness to the music of the English language, just as what looks like an
innovation in method is already its own kind of sterile convention.Here is a
sample, a single sentence, of Mr. Nabokovs prose; the scene is on a staircase,
where Krug has to pass a young couple just come from a fancy dress party, the
boy dressed as a football player, the girl dressed as Carmen: [she now
quotes the sentence from BS*] Surely writing like this is elaborate
chicanery. It is not daring; it is merely wilful. It is not original; it is
anarchic in an established pattern. It bears the same relation to the prose of
the contemporary masters of innovation as the prose of, say, Gentlemans
Agreement bears to nineteenth-century prose. On the other hand, to
dismiss it simply as bad taste is to pass over a possible larger significance.
Mr. Nabokovs noveI is written in a claustrophobic style in which the readers
mind is allowed to do no work of its own, in which we are led by meaningless
associations into blind alleys and trapped in boredom. But after all, Mr.
Nabokovs story of the dehumanization of man under tyranny is a claustrophobic
story." She concludes the
review with: "But I do suggest that the passivity of mind and spirit
demanded by Bend Sinister is not as far removed as may appear from the
passivity of mind and spirit demanded by dictatorial governments, and that when
we submit ourselves to it we are perhaps betraying a disenchantment with more
than old literary methods." Trilling
notes that a certain public would welcome Bend Sinister: "This will be the
public that has become so tired of the arid prose and method of contemporary
naturalism that it welcomes any change as a change for the better." For
her, "If, then, Mr. Nabokovs book is praised as a new kind of literary
strength asserting itself against the weakness of the old naturalism, must we
not be reminded of the way in which a people who have lost faith in liberal
democracy welcome tyranny because it initially presents itself to them as a new
organizing strength?"
World War II had recently been won, Hitler
and Mussolini were defeated, but Trilling is wary and defensive: she
mentions a spirit of disenchantment which she relates to a loss
of faith in liberal democracy, or in the renovation of "old literary
methods". A prestigious emigr writing in English must have
appeared under a special light in her eyes (Trilling mentions what she
considers Nabokov's "deafness to the music of the English language"),
intent on the artistic, political and social atmosphere of her
times.
Nabokov's readers today can appreciate
(or detest) his style, now moved by a different set of
circumstances than Trilling's, and by their growing
familiarity with Nabokov's
metaphors and "amphiphorical" tactics, such as those Sweeney
encountered in Nabokov's early and later novels (which Trilling could not have
read when she wrote her review). Sweeney borrows the word "amphiphore" from
Bend Sinister to serve as a "model of a creative stragegy." At
least, this is how Marina Grishakova interprets Sweeney's
term, when she applies it to "a 'tripartite' present or timeless
'now'," - as it is found in Nabokov's writings - because "it
highlights the capacity of a metaphor to activate different, often contradictory
referencial frames, e.g, the semantic unity 'letters-butterflies' from
Speak, Memory."**
........................................................................................................................
* - "but where mythology stretches strong
circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck
instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop--hopping down again into this
urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle
and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobats amphiphorical
gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he
walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue
handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes
from her heaving hot bosom--heaving more than her smile suggests--and tosses to
him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands."
** - In her article Had I Come Before Myself, S.E.Sweeney
explores another kind of acrobatic reversions which, as it seems to me, are
equally related to time, texture and text. Sweeney explains that her title "derives from
that strange moment in the final chapter of Lolita when Humbert
imagines juddging his own case." Sweeney notes that
both Humbert Humbert (Lolita), and Hermann
(Despair) try to
escape the contingencies of their own
lives through fiction. In Despair, as Sweeney observes,
Nabokov proceeds to judge "his younger self as both writer and translator"
while "he imagines his younger self, in turn, approving the current
revision." For her, Nabokov's speculations about
"chronologically preceding himself in time" are expressed by his use
of "different conceptual frames" and by engineering "subtle
grammatical shifts in person, agency, mood, or
tense." Cf. Sweeney, S.E: "Had I Come Before Myself: Illegitimate
Judgements of Lolita and Despair", Actes du Colloque
Annotating Vs. Interpreting Nabokov Nice, 21-23 June 2006, vol
24 n.1, 2007 (Cycnos) Check also Marina
Grishakova in Tartu Semiotics Library, issue: 05 /
2006 -
www.ceeol.com/aspx/getdocument.aspx?logid=5&id=9b820ceb. Or in "The Models of Space,Time and
Vision in V.Nabokov's Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Culturas Frames" Chapter
I, Models of Time, p.133. Tartu University Press,
2006.