Trilling on Nabokov

Thank you you-tube

An interview of Trilling and Nabokov talking about Lolita

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ldpj_5JNFoA

I like how they change seats a little bit of the ways through from the book room to the parlor or something.

$$$ ₤₤₤ ₣₣₣ ℳℳℳ

H0w much of the particular character of Modernism can be accounted for by major transformations in the world economy in the first 30 years of the century: e.g., the Panic of 1907 and subsequent bail-out by J.P. Morgan (see Williams' poem on this subject in Spring and All); the slow collapse of Germany's national economy under the mountain of national debts incurred after the First World War; and, climactically, the stock market crash of 1929? Think of some of the individual modernist authors who experienced drastic changes in their financial positions during this period, for these and a variety of other reasons: Proust; Eliot; Yeats; Woolf; Stephen Spender; George Oppen; Nabokov. (You'll have to help me out with the Americans, Adrienne. Didn't Faulkner's family lose a bunch of money? Or was that during Reconstruction?) For these writers, all of whom were raised in an atmosphere of affluence that was later significantly reduced or threatened, how could the expression of despair and cynicism one normally associates with the Modernist moment not also be, in some way, a panic fear about a change in their personal situations? (Others, of course, improved their situations in this period, notably Pound and Joyce — mostly because they were both relatively poor to start with. And how significant is it that, despite living until almost the end of WWII, Joyce never wrote any fiction set later than 1904, when all of these catastrophes were still on the horizon?)

Thus those who become writers during the time of Modernism often give the impression not of entering a new, higher rentier class (which would be the typical role of the author in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) but of giving expression to a certain loss of value, a certain fall from grace. (In contrast, the postmodernists — the Americans, anyway — are largely back in the upwardly mobile position, though at this point they are competing for smaller slices of the cultural capital pie, and those usually attached to positions at major American universities. In this context, Nabokov, who grew up as the child of liberal aristocrats, becomes an impoverished European émigré, moves to the U.S. and gets on the academic-job treadmill, and finally finds himself accidentally a Great American Author and rich and famous culture hero, cuts a particularly interesting figure.)

With these circumstances in mind, I can see why Anglo-American Modernism displays such a cautiously exploratory attitude toward the radical positions of Continental Modernism (Surrealism in particular), which by 1920 had largely accepted that important literature was now the province of either the radical Bohemian fringes or the future Marxist state.

So I think we need (if it doesn't exist already) a financial history of these and other relevant figures: an audit of Modernism, as it were. Who got poorer, who got richer, who was in danger and who was not, and how do these various positions affect their writing?

Yes, this has got me thinking.

Surrealism

So, Surrealism. This was a fun week, and more cohesive and immediately relevant to the rest of my reading than I expected (or feared) it would be. The thing to realize about the Surrealists is that their intellectual background is, despite the language barrier, in many ways much closer to our own than that of many of the English and American Modernists: they are products of the same French tradition of philosophical education that would later produce Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and all the other sacred monsters of High Theory that have been forcibly absorbed, for better or worse, by our discipline in the past forty years. So we are part of the same intellectual tradition, at least by proxy; and even if we don't consider ourselves experts on Descartes or Hegel, the odds are we've picked up more of the gist of their systems and ways of thinking than we have of, I don't know, F.H. Bradley or C.H. Douglas or something.

Add to this the French emphasis on rhetoric and you have a pretty good explanation for the high caliber of the Surrealists' programmatic writing (seen primarily in Breton's manifestoes, of course, but this tone tends to infect their more strictly literary output as well). Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Moore, Lawrence, and Williams, despite their various levels of formal schooling, were all sort of (and of necessity) autodidacts, a fact that accounts for much of the continuing strangeness of their work and their ways of justifying it. By contrast, Breton and Aragon are like confident schoolboys: they know they can encase their artistic efforts in a watertight carapace of theory, and for this reason their self-justifications feel natural in a way that the Modernists' rarely do, in fact more natural than some of the writing it justifies. Even Lautréamont — whose work pre-dates Surrealism proper by about forty years and as far as I can tell was absolutely fucking insane — is just flat-out convincing, able to put together a series of declaratory sentences or marshal a quotation or an epigram in a way that puts most full-faculty-possessing American academics of our time to shame. (The one Anglophone Modernist who shares this tendency, of course, is James Joyce, thanks to his Jesuit training I suppose. No wonder he's always been so big in France.)

The ironic implication of this is that, for me at least, Surrealist writing today often says more about the culture that they supposedly hated so much than it does about their individual campaigns of revolt against it. How much of the attraction of Paris Peasant or Nadja, or even The Magnetic Fields or Soluble Fish, has to do with their "pooling" of a communal poetic subconscious (as Breton puts it in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, 179) and how much of it has to do with the particular debris floating around in that pool, and the fact that it was filled in a time and place that now seems so romantically alien (Paris in the 20s… sighs)? Of all of them, Aragon was probably the most aware of this contradiction, which is why he grounds Paris Peasant in the particulars of the group's milieu; and certainly Walter Benjamin, in his fantastic essay on "Surrealism" from 1929, realizes that it's their specific attitude toward Paris itself ("the most dreamed-of of their objects") that constitutes the Surrealists' real originality. (My pet theory is that the New York School, and particularly Ashbery, was also especially attuned to the culturally exemplary aspect of Surrealism, and it's this that accounts for his strange marriage of insurrectionary European absurdity with homely American sentimental pragmatism. Which in turn has significant effects for contemporary American poetry, much of which is running with one or the other half of Ashbery's synthesis.)

The other thing that fascinates me about the Surrealists is their constant propping up each other's proper names, in a way that would seem to belie Breton's repeated insistence that the individual is of no significance, that none of them have any talent in the usually accepted literary sense. One could certainly (someone probably already has) write a very interesting book on homosociality and Surrealism; Exhibit A would have to be Breton's little phantasmagoria in the first Manifesto about an imaginary castle "in a rustic setting, not far from Paris … [where] a few of my friends are living … as permanent guests," surrounded by "gorgeous women," where "[t]he spirit of demoralization has elected domicile," a place which sounds like a cross between Axel's castle and the Playboy Mansion. (Speaking of guys who live together: this reminds me, I decided that the four major Surrealists each correspond to a Beatle. In case you're interested, here's what I came up with:

ANDRE BRETON = PAUL McCARTNEY
Always trying to keep everything together. Talks a lot about love but you just know he's an asshole.
LOUIS ARAGON = JOHN LENNON
Most realistic, most cynical, perhaps most brilliant. Eventually decides he doesn't really like his friends.
PAUL ELUARD = GEORGE HARRISON
Spiritual, and a little remote.
ROBERT DESNOS = RINGO STARR
The silliest one; the one who has the most troubled solo career.

PHILIPPE SOUPAULT = PETE BEST
Kicked out of the band early on.

I'll add that I tend to think of any grouping of four people in Beatles terms. Anyone want to try this with Joyce, Pound, Eliot and Williams?)

A few other random observations:

Surrealists were the first hipsters (and hippies). In the countercultural realm as well as the academic, the Surrealists seem more our contemporaries than the Modernists. Breton shops at flea-markets for "objects that can be found nowhere else: old-fashioned, broken, useless, almost incomprehensible, even perverse" (Nadja, 52); Aragon drolly observes the ravages of gentrification without being interested in doing much about it; Eluard drops a lot of names ("Max Ernst," "Pablo Picasso," "Arp"); and Desnos, and for that matter all the rest of them too, elevate "love" to the state of a ridiculous transcendental abstraction. We (OK, I) may recognize these attitudes as unsavory, hypocritical, or stupid; but they're certainly familiar.

Surrealism often overlaps with pastoral. Subjects for further study: Lautréamont (op cit.), Aragon's "A Feeling for Nature," Desnos' "Of the Flower of Love and the Wandering Horses," and various passages in Breton's first Manifesto and Soluble Fish. Also: of all animals the Surrealists seem to prefer birds (Eluard) and fish (Breton). Both are small, familiar, and difficult to anthropomorphize, one of them identifiably "poetic," the other conventionally "weird." Compared to the Americans, like Moore and Pound, a surprising dearth of dogs and cats: why? Because they're too domesticable?

Breton may have influenced Nabokov. This never occurred to me before, but the style of Breton's Nadja seems in many ways to be a model for Lolita: an anecdotal first-person account of a love affair with an obviously inappropriate partner (insane woman, underage girl) who is very dubiously portrayed as the chief instigator and controller of the situation, which ends with an extended bout of moral and intellectual self-justification on the part of its self-involved narrator. They even have a similar way of mixing aesthetic, emotional, and dramatic registers, all under a slightly detached, man-of-the-world tone; and they also both use fate and coincidence as the basic framing-device for their narratives (maybe more so in other Nabokov novels, like Pale Fire, than Lolita). The crucial difference is that Breton claims to be writing about himself, and offering us random episodes and coincidences taken from his everyday life, trusting that there is some pattern which neither he nor the reader can immediately perceive; whereas Nabokov uses an unreliable narrator, and reverse-engineers the ephemera from a pre-arranged pattern (I wonder if the link to Breton can be tied in with his famous hatred of Freudian analysis somehow.) Still, the similarities are striking. I don't know off-hand if VN ever made any statements on Surrealism (which I would guess he'd have been skeptical about: then again, he loved Queneau), but he lived in Berlin in the 20s and Paris in the late 30s and presumably would have been aware of the Surrealists in some capacity. In any case, it'd be an interesting avenue to explore, and if I'm right it would be another way Surrealism snuck in through the back-door of the American literary establishment.

Saul Bellow-Me

So I have an on-again off-again relationship with Saul Bellow. First Bellow I read was Humboldt's Gift as a sophmore in high school. Fed up with the few to none 20th century American courses that dealt with post-war fiction, I tried to do it on my own. I remember reading snippets of Humboldt's Gifts for months, between other books and things. It's so long, so so long...that's mostly what I remember about it. But I thought the prose was so beautiful. Certain lines I wrote down because I thought they were lyrical and unique and powerful. (these quotes are long lost now, however) Bellow, at the sentence level, is one of the geniuses of the 20th century. I see some of this in Michael Chabon, who can turn a sentence in just the right way at the right moment that it's kind of breathtaking.

So I read Augie March last year...another epic tome that took me months to read in snippets in between the avalanches of other novels I was reading. I had studied the opening in a creative writing class before and I was happy to return and read the whole thing. Like Humboldt's Gift, there were some amazing sentences. The plot turned me on more than Humboldt as well...a romp through the slums of Chicago into Mexico with antics by Trotsky thrown in. It's got everything I was looking for...commentary on the wonders of new urban spaces, the treatment of immigrants pre-homogenization of whiteness, ghostly black figures who haunt the text in weird ways, the interesting quasi-colonial relationship depicted between Americans and Mexicans in Mexico...it's a great coming of age story. Fiedler talks about the adolescent American 20th century novel (after the 19th century books written for kids) and praising that the novel is slowly growing up while he was writing in the 50s. Bellow is Fitzgerald of the hard knocks, the greaser to his prep. Same adolesence, however (even old Bellow, still writing about 50 year old men, wrote about them as if they were teenagers, in a perpetual mid-life crisis)

So I read Bellow this week. I made a last minute decision to swap Herzog for Henderson the Rain King, the least critically talked about of Bellow's works and I can see why. It's kind of an anti-book. Typical Bellow (anti)hero who is in a philosophical frenzy throughout most of the book with an almost manic fever that overwhelms the plot. But this time it also overwhelmed the sentences and there's none of the lyrical beauty of later Bellow. The characters oddities and actions move so quickly with so little reflection or completeness that there is little time for the nice sentences later Bellow perfected.

So Henderson the Rain King is about the white Wasp millionaire who doesn't care about his wife (his second), can't remember how many kids he has, turns his estate into a pig farm and is dealing with this voice in his head that constantly tells him "I want, I want" and won't let him be satisfied. He decides to solve his problems by going to Africa and learning how to "live" and not fear death and find satisfaction. Coming from an author who grew up poor and oppressed, before it was cool to be Jewish and a writer, it's easy to read this as a parody. However, right before it came about, Bellow wrote this article in the Times about how whacky readers are for looking too hard for symbols in literature. And then comes out with a book that could be read as a complete and utter allegory.

The book is absurdist (For example, Henderson tries to help an African tribe who has refused to use their water supply because it was infested with frogs, so he makes a bomb to kill the frogs and ends up destroying their levee, and Henderson quickly jumps town). Henderson runs around trying to "help" Africans but usually with terrible consequences, sometimes bumbling and sometimes deadly. There's no moralizing in the book, which is okay by me, but there's nothing else either, no interesting aesthetic in its place, no time or no thought anywhere. It's just a book of nothing. We follow a completely unsympathetic character in the first person for 350 pages. It kind of reminds me of the second Ace Ventura movie (i SWEAR some of the gags are the same)

Bellow majored in anthropology and sociology, so he knew what was up with the Other and the problems of primitivism. So is the book just a big joke...laughing for those who go in for the idea of this white rich man who becomes best friend with a well-educated English speaking African King who hates his own people? Is he purposefully laying red herrings throughout the book (in the first part, his daughter finds a colored baby in the back seat of a car and adopts it. After ignoring the baby's screams for weeks (SYMBOL) he finally sends his daughter back to boarding school and they return the child. He then escapes to Africa,--subtext being he didn't want to hear the cries of civil rights) But this red herring quickly gets lost in the millions of others. The whole book, I was just thinking "IS HE FUCKING WITH US??" No symbols, but symbols everywhere. What writer is this cruel?

We have no guide through the book but the likeable and hateable Henderson (and his African guide is silent most of the book and when not silent, praying for deliverance from the mad schemes his boss gets him into) It's an anti-book in the sense that it offers you zero fulfillment, a plot that leads nowhere (with an empty 'hopeful' ending, and a character who claims to be changed but you have a feeling his desires for an Other to show him the secrets of life are nowhere near to being quenched) When it's funny, it's funny in that roll-your-eyes kind of way of "is he serious??" followed by discomfort because you don't know if he or isn't and whether the joke's on Henderson or on you.

What makes this all the more troubling is that Henderson was Bellow's favorite book he wrote. And that he got into such hot water because of his comments on Africans later in his career:
"Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." And it doesn't help that in general, Bellow was just kind of a dick. And that this book was rated #21 on the Modern Library's Top 100 Books. (whaaa?)

It's weird because its obvious Bellow is trying to change the novel in the same way that Nabokov is, but Nabokov hated Bellow, referring to him as a "miserable mediocrity". It's like Ellison's critique of Hemingway... Ellison critiques Hemingway for trying to unhinge Twain's dialect and style from Twain's content of the interrogation of the problems of America. And thusly, Hemingway is somewhat less than Twain for taking one lesson without the other. Hemingway's style is nice but comes across even deader than its meant to because of his lack of interest in social relationships outside of a closed system (versus Faulkner and Twain, Ellison says, whose interest in stereotypes involves accepting them in order to explode them. Hemingway doesn't even get around to accepting them, he just brushes past brutally)

While Bellow and Nabokov try to uproot the novel from it's modernist/academic swings, Nabokov does it with complex style and as well as complex content that tries to articulate something in a new way; Bellow does the beautiful style with muddled unreadable content beneath it with all the complexity and none of the moral meat to make you want to understand more. The content is complex, but instead of trying to articulate in a new way something meaningful, it tries to articulate nothing in a new way...and it's just not that good.

It's also so strange to me that so many writers praise Bellow so much. James Wood writes in his eulogy:

I judged all modern prose by his. Unfair, certainly, because he made even the fleet-footed—the Updikes, the DeLillos, the Roths—seem like monopodes. Yet what else could I do? I discovered Saul Bellow's prose in my late teens, and henceforth, the relationship had the quality of a love affair about which one could not keep silent. Over the last week, much has been said about Bellow's prose, and most of the praise—perhaps because it has been overwhelmingly by men—has tended toward the robust: We hear about Bellow's mixing of high and low registers, his Melvillean cadences jostling the jivey Yiddish rhythms, the great teeming democracy of the big novels, the crooks and frauds and intellectuals who loudly people the brilliant sensorium of the fiction. All of this is true enough; John Cheever, in his journals, lamented that, alongside Bellow's fiction, his stories seemed like mere suburban splinters. Ian McEwan wisely suggested last week that British writers and critics may have been attracted to Bellow precisely because he kept alive a Dickensian amplitude now lacking in the English novel. [...] But nobody mentioned the beauty of this writing, its music, its high lyricism, its firm but luxurious pleasure in language itself. [...] [I]n truth, I could not thank him enough when he was alive, and I cannot now.

For me, the weird thing is that all these writers mentioned by Wood are better than Bellow. I feel I should read some of the short fiction to make sure this is true, but I think it's odd that a writer that tries so hard to leave his audience cold should be the inspiration for so many writers whose goal is to make readers feel in an intellectual manner. (I dont know why this is underlined, by the way, i can't turn it off) I think Bellow was some of these writer's version of Salinger...teenage fiction that beautifully written, all aesthetic roar without an explict moral that leaves one feeling maudlin and coddled. Beat fiction without the dirty lifestyle and icky liberalness.

I need an angle

So I just read Pale Fire. And it's too much for me, i can't pick an angle on it. I know too much about it, but I don't really KNOW anything about it, ya dig? And I know Benj will ask me about it. But I dont' know what to say. It's impossible to talk about for me, I think its a book that defies any attempt to render it knowable through speech acts (I guess that's an angle??) Is it postmodern or fully represent the crisis of modernity? (is there or a difference?) or does it represent the academic crisis of modernity? I'm gonna read Mikey Wood's book in a bit, so maybe salvation is around the corner.

It's weird cause I'm perfectly okay with Lolita, I can talk about it from different angles, what have you. I'm okay with all the authorial problems and questions there. But Pale Fire makes my brain explode. And once I started reading criticism (serious criticism!) about how a ghost is guiding the book, I lost it. I think I share Michael Wood's avoidance of all the verbal/linguistic stuff in Nabokov in favor of questions of ethics and feeling. And Rorty's introduction to Pale Fire is beautiful...but not quite right all the way, I feel.

Here's Yaron's helpful words to me:
pale fire is hands down my favorite nabokov novel. i think it is so
fantastic. let me see what i remember from when i read it last, whihc
was 4/5 years ago:

-pale fire is in part abt nabokov's obsession w/homosexuality, which is
impt in many of his novels and esp in this one and lolita. nabokov wrote
PF, L, and Pnin at basically the exact same time, and they have a lot in
common, all being abt ex-pats, academia, violence, etc
-in part pale fire is abt graphic fictional violence. kinbote's story is
in a sense a retelling of nabokov's own family fleeing russia (vlad's
older brother and uncle were gay btw) and the assassination of shade is
a retelling of nabokov's father's murder
-the story is also abt authorial control, the author vs. the critic, and
who has the 'final' say on the author's work, and what's at stake in
that say, in keeping with this pale fire is in part abt the power of
naming, lolita is more obviously abt this, but i'd bet pale fire would
be interesting to read w/the part abt naming in butler's excitable speech
-the ghost is spelling out the scientific name of a butterfly, and its a
warning to john shade, a butterfly passes him right before he's killed
-the poem pale fire has a lot of references to previous poetry, esp
pound's cantos i remember
-its also in part an attack on the beats through an attack on Dostoevsky
(also an attack on freud - nabokov would say he put a lot of stuff in
the book to make you think its freudian but it really isn't, but well, i
guess probably also a very psychoanalyticaly interesting book - it is
all abt fantasy space)

that's all i can recall, my favorite line the whole book is "even the
climate seemed to be improving," which is kinbote talking abt the reign
of peace and prosperty in zembla, its right after an emerald tower is
being erected