Reviews

Curso de Literatura Europea by Vladimir Nabokov

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sidharthvardhan's review against another edition

5.0

“A writer might be a good storyteller or a good moralist, but unless he be an enchanter, an artist, he is not a great writer.”

I have always wanted to know Nabokov the reader – who hates allegories (say Animal Farm), novels where characters act are just what mouth pieces for different kind of opinions (Magic Mountain - not a fan either), moral tales (can’t agree more), allusions to other works and signs and symbolisms unless they are directly related (not a fan either), sentimental readings (chick-lit romances) and finds detective novels boring (because of their poor prose).

On Allegories

It is his dislike of allegories including those like Animal Farm which shocked me. I can see why it might be annoying when critics or readers are matching the elements in the allegories to real world but best of allegories can stand on their even if you didn’t know the real world parallels which they originally used as supporting structures. Even people who know nothing about Russian revolution can enjoy Animal farm while people knowing nothing about Odyssey can enjoy Ulysses. Rushdi's works which began like Allegories are often capable of losing themselves to natural growth of their chracters. Nabokov himself argues that Dr. Jeckyll and Hyde (a minor classic according to Nabokov) is not an allegory (I agree) and would have failed if it was one. According to him, same goes for Kafka’s Metamorphosis (don’t agree).

Nabokov's Spine

The thing is he frowns upon readers who read to gain knowledge (I do that) or/and sentimental pleasure(I do that too). So what kind of satisfaction he seeks from reading?

“It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic 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.

And thus a Tolstoy (Anna Karenina gets repeated allusions even though he wasn’t teaching it) or a Dickens (Bleak House) are kind of authors he admires – because of their ability to carry on several chains of a lot of characters and themes at the same time. And if the author is able to bring these chains of stories to a satisfactory end, the author is a genius. According to him the correct way to reading Metamorphosis is by looking at how Kafka maintains a balance between Gregor’s insect and human behavior (!!!).

This love for juggling several characters, themes and stories need notonly be fr novel as whole though, it can be shown in a single scene with lots of characters and story threads going at same time- examples being agricultural fair scene from Madame Bovary (Llosa also admired that scene) and the chapter 10 (one with several vignettes and characters) of Ulysses – with first getting a much higher praise from Nabokov.

To be honest, I think this whole juggling thing is a technical aspect which can only fascinate a writer who is trying to achieve something similar. A common reader won’t have a spine sensitive to the perfection of art and is more likely to love characters from Dostoevsky’s imperfect scenes who provide emotional and intellectual food. Nabokov thinks of such readers as bad readers but in this, he sounds very snobbish to me.

On Prose

Now some things we do agree on.

Nabokov also wants you to pay attention to details. He is someone who actually drew a sketch of bug Samsa turned into ( he was really knowledgeable about insects and bugs) as well as the design of his house as well as twin houses of Dr. Jekyll and Hyde. He wants authors to focus on all corners, and triffle spots – and work them into perfect prose, there should be no weak sentences or, Devil forbid, passages. :

“Some readers may suppose that such things as these evocations are trifles not worth stopping at; but literature consists of such trifles. Literature consists, in fact, not of general ideas but of particular revelations, not of schools of thought but of individuals of genius. Literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist.”

He uses graphs to show Jekyll wasn’t a perfectly good person. He goes into depths of how those two last got their names. He can quote – the lectures are 70% quotes – whole passages, sometimes whole pages. And not quotes that stand out for themselves but descriptions, descriptions like those describing Jekyll turning into Hyde. That is what he wants you to work on as an author – on prose, to keep on writing it and rewriting it until everything is perfect. If you ask him, when it comes to descriptions, no one beats Flaubert with his Madame Bovary (which Im willing to bet is Nabhokov’s favorite book along with another book on famous cheating wife of literature – Anna Karenina) and Proust with his Remembrance of things Past ( “the greatest novel of the first half of our century”) though he only discusses Swann’s Way.

On character aspects and sketches

Nabokov wants you to keep a distance from characters and so there is not a lot of time spent analyzing them (though few insights he does give are brilliant). His analysis of Emma Bovary’s is disagreeable to me (but would be agreeable to Flaubert). Same with psychology, he cracks a lot of jokes at expense of Freud (“ that medieval quack”). He doesn’t spend much time commenting on the sensitivity of Proust’s protagonist either (who and Freud unknowingly reflected much on each other’s works).

He loves Joyce’s work too but is not particularly impressed by Joyce’s “Incomplete, rapid, broken wording rendering the so-called stream of consciousness, or better say the stepping stones of consciousness” giving reasons like

“First, the device is not more "realistic” or more "scientific" than any other. In fact if some of Molly’s thoughts were described instead of all of them being recorded, their expression would strike one as more "realistic,” more natural. The point is that the stream of consciousness is a stylistic convention because obviously we do not think continuously in words—we think also in images; but the switch from words to images can be recorded in direct words only if description is eliminated as it is here. Another thing: some of. our reflections come and go, others stay; they stop as it were, amorphous and sluggish, and it takes some time for the flowing thoughts and thoughtlets to run around those rocks of thought. The drawback of simulating a recording of thought is the blurring of the time element and too great a reliance on typography.”

I agree and I agree again when he says that Molly’s thoughts in last chapters of Ulysses would read just as good as they do now if Joyce's editor had introduced punctuation marks in those run-on sentences. Although I wonder what he would have said about Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in which thoughts are described instead of being recorded as Nabokov would prefer them. The only female author that is included is Jane Austen with her Mansfield Park towards whom Nabokov takes a patronizing attitude as if to a younger artist. And oh, while we are on Joyce, he declares Finnegans Wake to be one of the greatest failures in literature.

On Reality

"Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.”

My best take from the book is his ideas on the use of words like realism and naturalism in criticism. He doesn’t understand the habit of dividing books into fantasies or realist ones- according to him all novels including those like The Trial, The Overcoat and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are realist as well as fantasies.

A very long quote (– must be impact of Nabhokov’s company) in spoiler about how Nabokov understands novelist’s reality

Spoiler

Let us take three types of men walking through the same landscape. Number One is a city man on a well-deserved vacation. Number Two is a professional botanist. Number Three is a local farmer. Number One, the city man, is what is called a realistic, commonsensical, matter-of-fact type: he sees trees as trees and knows from his map that the road he is following is a nice new road leading to Newton, where there is a nice eating place recommended to him by a friend in his office. The botanist looks around and sees his environment in the very exact terms of plant life, precise biological and classified units such as specific trees and grasses, flowers and ferns, and for him this is reality; to him the world of the stolid tourist (who cannot distinguish an oak from an elm) seems a fantastic, vague, dreamy, never-never world. Finally, the world of the local farmer differs from the two others in that his world is intensely emotional and personal since he has been born and bred there, and knows every trail and individual tree, and every shadow from every tree across every trail, all in warm connection with his everyday work, and his childhood, and a thousand small things and patterns which the other two—the humdrum tourist and the botanical taxonomist—simply cannot know in the given place at the given time. Our farmer will not know the relation of the surrounding vegetation to a botanical conception of the world, and the botanist will know nothing of any importance to him about that barn or that old field or that old house under its cottonwoods, which are afloat, as it were, in a medium of personal memories for one who was born there.

So here we have three different worlds—three men, ordinary men who have different realities—and, of course, we could bring in a number of other beings: a blind man with a dog, a hunter with a dog, a dog with his man, a pamter cruising in quest of a sunset, a girl out of gas-In every case it would be a world completely different from the rest since the most objective words tree, road, flower, sky, barn, thumb, rain have, in each, totally different subjective connotations. Indeed, this subjective life is so strong that it makes an empty and broken shell of the so-called objective existence. The only way back to objective reality is the following one: we can take these several individual worlds, mix them thoroughly together, scoop up a drop of that mixture, and call it objective reality. We may taste in it a particle of madness if a lunatic passed through that locality, or a particle of complete and beautiful nonsense if a man has been looking at a lovely field and imagining upon it a lovely factory producing buttons or bombs; but on the whole these mad particles would be diluted in the drop of objective reality that we hold up to the light in our test tube. Moreover, this objective reality will contain something that transcends optical illusions and laboratory tests. It will have elements of poetry, of lofty emotion, of energy and endeavor (and even here the button king may find his rightful place), of pity, pride, passion—and the craving for a thick steak at the recommended roadside eating place.

So when we say reality, we are really thinking of all this—in one drop— an average sample of a mixture of a million individual realities. And it is in this sense (of human reality) that I use the term reality when placing it against a backdrop, such as the worlds of "The Carrick,” "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” and "The Metamorphosis," which are specific fantasies.