Jansy Mello writes:
Robert Alter on "Lectures on Literature:British, French, and German Writers by Vladimir Nabokov, with an introduction by John Updike", THE NEW REPUBLIC (October 5, 1985)
Alter sets great importance to the published testimony of several of Nabokov's students at Cornell during the 1950s, that describe him as "an extraordinary teacher-unorthodox in his methods, alternately beguiling and amusing in his manner, and above all compelling in the vision of literary art he conveyed to his classes" and his review will rely heavily on this particular talent of Nabokov, namely, his style and enthusiasm as a teacher. As he says: " Nabokov's striking success as a teacher might in itself raise questions about the quality of relentlessly self-admiring aloofness which certain critics have attributed to him. Few full-time writers make good teachers (Nabokov's friend of these years, Edmund Wilson, is an apposite case in point) for the obvious and understandable reason that they are too wrapped up in their own writing to exercise much attentiveness to the special intellectual needs and deficiencies of the young. Nabokov, however, once exile and poverty had cast him unexpectedly onto the lecturer's podium, was able to kindle his students with the carefully written texts he read out to them because, for all his witty playfulness, he felt, if I may use an appropriately old-fashioned phrase, a moral passion about what he was teaching."
Alter considers "the practical difficulty that must have made Nabokov hesitate about reworking his Cornell material" which, during the last years of his life, he intended to get ready for publication. Both books ( on European and Russian literature) "are very much class-room lectures rather than critical essays, complete with illustrations of Nabokov's pedagogic diagrams and drawings[...] Though Nabokov affirms an overriding interest in style and structure, and occasionally has interesting perceptions to share on these matters of form, his mode of exposition is demonstrative rather than analytic."
By considering the particular difficulties his students might have when confronted with Austen, Dickens, Kafka or Joyce Nabokov will devise a series of strategies. The main one, " for explaining Mansfield Park, Madame Bovary, "The Metamorphosis," Ulysses, and other works is to retell the story of each in
considerable detail, with frequent quotation of lengthy passages, often followed by the simple comment that the passage just read is 'wonderfully artistic'."
According to Alter, in his "engaging introduction," John Updike will stress the value of "Nabokov's vivid personal presence and his distinctive style of oral delivery" and thereby his method, has "a thoroughly magnetic effect." For the reviewer, though, "on the printed page the synopses, however gracefully written, are still synopses, and the quotations are,alas, no more than quotations." As an example of these limitations he refers to Nabokov's lecture on Proust, "a writer Nabokov loved dearly, and whom he saw as a model of what might be achieved through the art literature. Apart from a few nice observations on Proust's style and in particular on his use of metaphor, the lecture is a series of passages from the novel, with bridges of paraphrase by the lecturer from one large island of quotation to the next."
Even an experienced reader can profit from "some instructive perceptions in the lectures" because "Nabokov of course views these novelists
with the canny eye of a fellow craftsman, and at times he is acute in seeing how things are put together, how the writer leads up to a particular scene, synchronizes and intermeshes different subplots and groups of characters, announces a theme and then cunningly weaves it in and out of the fabric of his
fiction." ( returning to Flaubert, Alter indicates "Nabokov's practical feel for the difficulties of assembling a complex fictional structure that brings him to the shrewd detection of what he calls the "layers" theme in Madame Bovary, beginning with young Charles's grotesquely layered cap in the opening scene, resurfacing in Charles's and Emma's layered wedding cake, then in the elaborately described tiers of their house at Toste, and concluding wryly in the triple-tiered construction of Emma's coffin. This attention to the nuts and bolts aspects of great novels is combined with an exquisitely tuned sensibility that sometimes, even in the inertness of the printed page, justifies the demonstrative method. That is, in some instances the illustrative passages are so perfectly chosen, the brief commentary on them so apt, that one gets a renewed and refined sense of the particular novel's special magic."
Another example presented by Alter derives from "when Nabokov shows us a magisterial description in Bleak House of the fog rising like a curtain above the Thames to reveal a sun shining through clouds and 'making silvery pools in the dark sea' which bustles with the motion of ships coming and going." The effect arises more intensely after "Nabokov quotes a paragraph of the description, then comments for another paragraph on the visual precision, the musical felicity of what he has quoted, and on the place of the scene in the artistic economy of the novel." For the reviewer, this entails in a "lovely exercise of critical tact, and it communicates, as more conventionally academic analyses might not, the sheer pleasure of reading."
What turns Nabokov's lectures on Literature a book into something "to be cherished, despite its longueurs of summary and citation, is the moving sense it conveys of what great fiction is for. Nabokov articulates here not a poetics but a metaphysics of fiction."
Observing that the writer, as Nabokov repeatedly proclaims, is above all else an enchanter carries "a certain polemic edge, cutting against the stolidly representational function ascribed to the novel-"the epic of bourgeois society"-by most critical schools until the advent of French structuralism. But if Nabokov rejects simple representational views of the novel, shrewdly showing how even supposedly realistic novels casually flaunt the laws of quotidian reality, or invent their own laws, he does not move in the direction many readers might expect, toward the notion of the self-referentiality of the literary text so fashionable among followers today of the nouvelle critique. There is, as he sees it, a definite relation between fiction and reality but it is not so much reflective or mimetic as constitutive. This is the ultimate justification of his conceiving the artist as magician: the magician is someone who at once performs tricks by sleight of hand and calls things into being, conjures them up out of seeming thin air."
For Alter, "in the compact essay, "The Art of Literature and Commonsense," ...the one perfect gem of the volume, Nabokov brings an "antithetical image of bad writing may make clearer what lies behind this notion of fiction and reality." and relates to Nabokov's "protest against didactic and documentary fiction." Here he quotes Nabokov: "The writer's pulpit is dangerously close to the pulp romance, and what reviewers call a strong novel Is generally a precarious
heap of platitudes or a sand castle on a populated beach, and there are few things sadder than to see its muddy moat dissolve when the holiday makers are
gone and the cold mousy waves are nibbling at the solitary sands,"to consider now "the brilliance of the wit, the elegant interlocking of alliterative sound and cadence in order to realize the figurative scene of course constitute a counter-example of something made out of words that will stand a while in time," although it is necessary to pay attention "to what is implied by the imagery," for Nabokov understands reality as "what each of us makes of it in the darkroom of his mind." and that the average mind "however, being lazy or fearful or both, prefers to work with stock concepts...shared by multitudes, and it is to this tacit conspiracy of intellectual sloth or cowardice that the popularity of popular literature, from the cheapest sentimental fiction and pornography to the bogus idealism of middlebrow poshlost, can be traced. The producers of such literature not only build on sand, but, childlike, with sand, slapping together what comes to hand; and their work, lacking the strong cement of imagination, is no more than seeming structure, doomed in a moment to slide back into formlessness." For Robert Alter those "mousy nibbling waves at the end of Nabokov's little vignette suggest what, in his view, the serious writer is faced with. The sea is ultimately an image of chaos, and chaos is an active, menacing presence, undercutting every moment we breathe with impermanence and the negation of meaning. Chaos is invoked explicitly at the beginning of the introductory lecture in a most Nabokovian refashioning of Genesis I: The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says 'go!' allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer does not settle for fragments and random particles, building sand castles, but, on the contrary, makes his own whole out of the jumbled elements of experience; and so the aim of his enterprise is not to recuperate reality but to achieve it. There is a complicated paradox here that can be fully understood only by following Nabokov's readings of particular novels, and especially of Bleak House (in several respects the best of the lectures). On the one hand, he insists on the primacy of fantasy in constituting the work of fiction; on the other hand, he clearly does not assume that any old fantasy will do, that the writer's power to make worlds out of words is absolutely arbitrary."
Stopping to consider one of Nabokov's epithets ("the Precision of Poetry and the Excitement of Science"), Alter notes that both "the precision and the excitement...point simultaneously to the fashioning of the artwork itself and to the materials of the world out of which it was fashioned. That is, the excitement is obviously the excitement of discovery, but this is both the discovery of the cunning interrelation of parts in the work (like the recurrence of layered things in Madame Bovary) and the discovery within the work of something perfectly seen that we may have glimpsed briefly and badly in our extra-literary experience (like the cloud-veiled sun silvering the surface of the water in Bleak House). Similarly, poetry is precise both because of the exquisite internal adjustment of its minute parts and because it uses just the right word, sound, rhythm, image to catch the desired nuance of feeling, visual value,
moral relation, or whatever the case may be."
The reviewer apparently agrees also in relation to Nabokov's arguments that "there can be no accepted reality for the writer to represent," and that "literature nevertheless constantly deals with realities, focusing them, crystallizing them, giving them permanence through its power of artistic definition, which might be succinctly characterized as the architectonic exercise of bold fantasy sustained by close observation." He adds another decisive element "to this picture of Nabokov's physics of fiction, and that is time....given a special poignancy and urgency by the temporal catalysm through which he lived, the whole world in which he had grown up being swept away irrevocably by the Russian Revolution at the moment he was entering manhood. We all are trapped by time, Nabokov came to feel, we are all time's victims, unless we can find a way to prevail against it through art." This is why the "rodent sea, nibbling away fragile structures - one thinks of the remembered Riviera beach idyll in Speak,Memory! and of its transmutation in Lolita-might also be an image of tempus edax, time devourer of human things." making memory into "an essential component in the process of artistic creation." In contrast with Proust, for Nabokov it will be "memory dynamically interacting with unconscious feeling, with lucid perception of the present, and with the ordering sense that produces coherent artistic form. The writer does not recapture the past but rather incorporates it into the transcendence of time's terrible flux which he experiences through his writing: 'it is the past and the present and the future (your book) that come together with a sudden flash; thus the entire circle of time is perceived, which is another way of saying that time ceases to exist.' Interestingly, these climactic moments of creation engender in Nabokov not a feeling of godlike elevation but an almost mystic sense of merging with the world himself: It is a combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe around you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away with the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner-who is already dancing in the open. "
Alter believes that the reason "why Nabokov took his lectureship as an urgent occasion for demonstrating to students the supreme importance of literary art, and why he associated art not only with lucidity and harmony but also with compassion and - he does not shrink from the word - goodness. Art is man's articulate refusal to acquiesce in the reality of chaos, whether chaos is embodied in the blind rush of time, the imbecilities of mass culture, or the murderous reign of totalitarian states. It is that vision of art realized in fiction which accounts for the underlying moral seriousness,amidst all the stratagems and games, of The Gift, Invitation to a Beheading, Lolita, Pale Fire, and makes them deserve to stand with the enduring achievements of the novel in our century."
LETTER to the Editors by Mario Maurin, Nov.15, 1980: "Annotated Nabokov"
"I find Robert Alter, in his stimulating review of Nabokov's so-called Lectures on literature, far too charitable for what is essentially a fraudulent publication (TNR, October 4)" For Maurin "this handsome volume is a steal. From the reader, that is." Although he concurs that Fredson Bowers, the editor, "scrupulously lists the various kinds of manipulation to which he has had to resort in order to produce a readable text" and that "the numerous photographic reproductions of VN's annotated copies do reveal the extent of the salvaging operations that were undertaken," for him in truth "there are no Nabokovian Lectures on Literature. They were once delivered, with the help of notes, charts, reminders, quotations, and they have vanished forever into thin air...It would have been far more honest, albeit less profitable, to offer the volume as The Notebooks of VN, or better still, as 'VN's Annotated Anthology of Modern European Novels. For without extended quotations, the book would have appeared like a modest treasure-trove of bones, flints, refuse, and, here and there, a lucent colored bead. I would guess that a third or more of the volume consists of quotations (and now we understand the function of the large, spacious type, a Greek gift to the reader). What we have here is something like a collection of European butterflies lovingly skewered on the page with Nabokovian pins."
NB: I wish someone could set me straight about my clumsy paraphrastic attempts to circumvent and obey copy-rights demands (whose strictures I ignore in connection to scholarly List-discussions, such as Nab-L is expected to be) to be able to rend most of the original text intact. For me, joining efforts with Jim Twiggs who sends me the entire review, it would be much better to re-apresent them in full.