JM (a past
VN-L posting) "...In Pale
Fire, in a note by Charles Kinbote [to line 920:"little hairs stand on
end"] remarks: "Alfred Housman (1859-1936), whose collection The Shropshire Lad vies with the In Memoriam of Alfred Tennyson
(1809-1892) in representing, perhaps (no, delete this craven "perhaps"), the
highest achievement of English poetry in a hundred years, says somewhere (in a
foreword?) exactly the opposite: The bristling of thrilled little hairs
obstructed his barbering; but since
both Alfreds certainly used an Ordinary Razor, and John Shade an ancient
Gillette, the discrepancy may have been due to the use of different
instruments." Calasso writes
that Housman recommended that a person should check if a sequence of words,
pronounced in a soft voice while the razor glides, in the early morning, over
the skin of the face, can cause an erection of the hairs of the beard while, at
the same time, "a shiver runs down the dorsal spine." [
] Housman's words
in "The Name and Nature of Poetry" (9 May 1933) are: "one of these symptoms was
described in connexion with another object by Eliphaz the Temanite: 'A spirit
passed before my face: the hair of my flesh stood up'. Experience has taught me,
when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a
line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases
to act. This particular symptom is accompanied by a shiver down the spine;
there is another which consists in a constriction of the throat and a
precipitation of water to the eyes; and there is a third which I can only
describe by borrowing a phrase from one of Keats' s last letters, where he says,
speaking of Fanny Brawne, 'everything that reminds me of her goes through me
like a spear'. The seat of this sensation is the pit of the
stomach."
Jansy
Mello (another past VN-L posting, retrieved online, with
no date nor my name): "Expressions related to an emotion that was
stimulated by a great work of art ("a raising of the dorsal hairs" and a
"spinal tingle" - with variants) were favored by Vladimir Nabokov. In a more
general sense the "raising of the dorsal hairs" is employed by biologists to
indicate an aggressive response from an animal...However, whenever this kind of
physiological response is applied to a reaction to great art, I always thought
it had originated from Nabokov's precepts (in his fiction and in his
non-fiction). At times more recent writers employed it, but it always seemed
that then they were making a reference to VN. Today I found its use in a 1986
text, with no Nabokovian tag, authored by Ray Bradbury (the translation and
underlining are mine)." I wrote the title The Lake in the first page of
a story...two hours after I'd been sitting in front of my typing-machine in a
sunny verandah, with tears dropping from the tip of my nose and my dorsal
hairs standing erect. Why was there an erection of hairs and a running nose?
I perceived that, at last, I'd managed to write a really good story. The first
one, in ten years of writing."...I now wonder if these expressions are
regularly used in connection to "Art" - if they are a common idiom which as a
foreginer I mistakenly attributed to Nabokov due to his appurtenance to
the worlds of literature and science.(Cf. Ray Bradbury: "Run Fast, Stand
Still, or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds,"
How to Write Tales of Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction, edited by J. A.
Williamson, Writers Digest Books, 1986; collected in Zen in the Art of
Writing)
Jansy Mello (today): Calasso's
description of Housman's erection of (facial) hairs and a spinal
thrill led me to inquire, again, Nabokov's emphasis about his
aesthetic reaction by an "erection of (the small dorsal) hairs." I tried
to recover some of its occurrences in the internet. There are various curious
entries.* After being referred to Leland de la Durantaye's book "Style is
Matter, The moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov" (Cornell University Press,2007) I
found out that his research into the theme is very thorough. He indicates
AE Housman's "The Name and Nature of Poetry" in the bibliography.
In a footnote, LD explains the reasons why he
chose to dwell on the spinal issue and cites Rorty, who referred in
passing to Nabokov's "Housman tingles" and mentions Housman's idea that
"poetry indeed seems to me more physical than intellectual."
Kinbote has noted well: The difference between
Housman's bristlings and John Shade's must be related to their choice of an
Ordinary Razor or an ancient Gillette blade. Anyway,
Nabokov's and Bradbury's spinal reaction is independent of their relating
poetry and shaving, or to any aggressive animal neural
"horripilation"...
A few excerpts from LD's "The Phenomenology
of the Spine"(p.57-59):
" [Nabokov] describes how this spinal reaction
eclipses the colder, more cognitive aspects of reading. "In
order to bask in that magic [of a brillian novel], Nabokov says, " a wise reader
reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but
with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must
keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which
is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of
cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and
glass" (LL,6). The author notes that the "account above is anything but an isolated
instance....in his discussion of Kafka, he states that 'no matter how
keenly, how admirably, a story, a piece of music, a picture is discussed and
analyzed, there will be minds that remain blank and spines that remain
unkindled'."(LL,252)...In his lecture on Dickens... "All we have to do when reading with our minds, the seat of
artistic delight is between the shoulder blades.The little shiver behind is
quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when
evolving pure art and science...The brain only continues the spine: the wick
really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of
enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the
whole thing" (LL,54)..." I repeat again and
again it is no use reading a book at all if you do not read it with your
back" (LL, 64). ..."Appel remarked of Nabokov that "he would conclude a lecture with rhapsodic apostrophe to our
writer's style: 'Feel it in your spine..the upper spine, the vertebrae tipped at
the head with a divine flame!' "(Appel 1971,84). In Strong
Opinions Nabokov refers to "the spinal twinge which is
the only valid reaction to a new piece of poetry"... Leland de la
Durantaye quotes from SO, p.134,41 and the 1967 interview in
SO, 66. The author also recalls Pale Fire and Shade's
aesthetic views...reported by Kinbote (note to line 172 "books and
people",p;155) and Shade's final canto with "the shiver of
'a triple ripple' over the skin". LD mentions Nabokovs "The Poem" (1944)
and lines in Speak,Memory, p.212. There are references to it in
Ada (p.39), in Selected Letters,p.129, in Transparent
Things (TT,75) and in Lolita
(AL,52,172,36,126).
............................................................
*
1.:Delight is "the the sudden erection of your
small dorsal hairs ... www.somethingchanged.com.au/.../delight-is-the...." http://www.wired.
com/wiredscience/2011/07/why-does-beauty-exist/ "Ed Yong summarizes a new
investigation into the neural substrate of beauty:
Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir
Zeki from University College London watched the brains of 21 volunteers as they
looked at 30 paintings and listened to 30 musical excerpts. All the while, they
were lying inside an fMRI scanner, a machine that measures blood flow to
different parts of the brain and shows which are most active. The recruits rated
each piece as “beautiful”, “indifferent” or
“ugly”..."
2.
June 5, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition Section 7; Page 3,
Column 1; Book Review Desk SUMMER READING; TIME HAS BEEN KIND TO THE
NYMPHET: 'LOLITA' 30 YEARS LATER by Erica Jong: "..People
who cannot tell the difference between that sort of masturbatory stimulation and
imaginative literature deserve, in fact, the garbage they get. The erection of
small dorsal hairs is the issue here and not, as is commonly assumed, other
sorts of tumescence. he New York Times: Book Review
Search Article www.nytimes.com/books/97/07/20/.../16009.htm.