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[NABOKOV-L] {THOUGHTS] Johnson, Nabokov and "morality"
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Dave Haan sent (off-list) a copy of a Feb.11, 2011 LRB article, by C. Burrow, on a new edition of Johnson's lives* noting that: "with respect to "Pale Fire," I've been led up to by consideration of all those poet-critics cited through Shade's book-titles (e.g. Matthew Arnold via 'Dover Beach' to 'Night Rote'), and of course there's Shade's Pope scholarship (and Boyd has highlighted Eliot and Browning). But one prime suspect has generally escaped consideration in this light: Samuel Johnson himself. What struck me was the depth of Nabokov's involvement with Johnson, and how morality and psychology overlapped (or non-disassociated) in their aesthetic viewpoints, and how that was both a weakness and a strength. So another light shone upon Shade, and perhaps on what constituted psychology for Nabokov..."
JM: Dave Haan's ideas that "morality and psychology overlapped in Johnson's and Nabokov's views about art" and that this sheds a new light upon Shade,. are intriguing, probably because I ignore how morality and psychology are here defined. I remember that Proust was once very critical of Ruskin's "moral aestheticism" because, for him, Ruskin sacrificed truth for the sake of beauty. And I don't think that "truth," matters much to the novelist Nabokov, although I don't mean to say that he would falsify it in any way but that, most probably, he simply wasn't concerned with Ruskin's kind of "truth" or "morality". Nabokov's his strictly moral attitude towards "truth" derives from a different source. Although he values factual and lovingly detailed descriptions that are scientifically and objectively true to "reality", it also happens that they belong to that kind of "reality" which he insists should be surrounded by "quotation marks." The close link he finds between art and science, as I understand it, is what opens the way to explore a personal "truth" that encompasses natural objects, people, society and even the transcendent.
In my opinion, the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction in his novels enable the reader to respond to "truth" according to a subjective re-appraisal of what he experiences as a reader. He is made responsible for his interpretations and thereby, he gain the opportunity to find out more about himself by realizing how he reacts to cruelty, perversion and to the aesthetic pleasure afforded by Nabokov's "ecstatic writing" without having to follow any embedded educational precepts. There is, actually, something very Freudian in that!
Besides, without resort to any theorizing, Nabokov's respect for the reader in this aspect (inspite of authorial control and intromission), represents a deeply moral stance and a valid demonstration of his anti-totalitarian position ... and this is another angle for what might only have seemed to conform to "art for art's sake."
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* On a new edition of Johnson's Lives, Sudden Elevations of Mind by Colin Burrow, London Review of Books, 17Feb11, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vols XXI-XXIII: The Lives of the Poets, edited by John Middendorf, Yale. Excerpts: "Very little English literary criticism has lasted as long or worn as well as Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. It shaped the canon of English poetry and set the terms for critical discussion of Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope over at least two centuries[...]The first life in the collection, that of Abraham Cowley, includes Johnson's classic excursus on 'a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets', which describes a tradition and then relentlessly anatomises its faults: '...nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs..." The literary-critical sections of the Lives enabled Johnson to express and refine taste by making judgments on particular poems...some principles, some preoccupations and some simple prejudices... Johnson's affection for 'nature' and for direct expression meant that he hated poems that were encrusted with allusions to pagan deities or rehearsed second-hand pastoral conventions... His notorious attack on Milton's 'Lycidas' ... is the most extreme manifestation of this prejudice. The inept use of personification can also prompt the cortex-crunching Johnsonian boff to the head... Johnson's ...particular style of iconoclasm was in part the product of his own biography...His social awkwardness was profound, and it lies behind his wish to be at once an unassailable authority and a person of earthily rooted good sense. It also influences his taste...The way Johnson masks his own modest origins beneath a display of critical fearlessness is also one reason for the exceptional influence of the Lives on English literary criticism....unaristocratic yet aggressively free from servility.[...] Johnson saw in Swift's mental decline a parallel to his own battles with 'vile melancholy'.[...].Never extenuating but never carping at faults, Johnson describes the slippage of a mind into catastrophe, and he describes it in such a way that you could imagine it happening to anyone, including the author...Every so often he scours off the rust that accumulates in the soul from repeatedly enacting a cycle of biographical paraphrase, judicious moral assessment and literary critical condemnation, simply to glory in a poem. It's usually at these moments of self-awakening that Johnson is at his most remarkable as a critic [...] Sometimes, indeed, he can seem to be pulling literary criticism towards a new age.[...]
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JM: Dave Haan's ideas that "morality and psychology overlapped in Johnson's and Nabokov's views about art" and that this sheds a new light upon Shade,. are intriguing, probably because I ignore how morality and psychology are here defined. I remember that Proust was once very critical of Ruskin's "moral aestheticism" because, for him, Ruskin sacrificed truth for the sake of beauty. And I don't think that "truth," matters much to the novelist Nabokov, although I don't mean to say that he would falsify it in any way but that, most probably, he simply wasn't concerned with Ruskin's kind of "truth" or "morality". Nabokov's his strictly moral attitude towards "truth" derives from a different source. Although he values factual and lovingly detailed descriptions that are scientifically and objectively true to "reality", it also happens that they belong to that kind of "reality" which he insists should be surrounded by "quotation marks." The close link he finds between art and science, as I understand it, is what opens the way to explore a personal "truth" that encompasses natural objects, people, society and even the transcendent.
In my opinion, the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction in his novels enable the reader to respond to "truth" according to a subjective re-appraisal of what he experiences as a reader. He is made responsible for his interpretations and thereby, he gain the opportunity to find out more about himself by realizing how he reacts to cruelty, perversion and to the aesthetic pleasure afforded by Nabokov's "ecstatic writing" without having to follow any embedded educational precepts. There is, actually, something very Freudian in that!
Besides, without resort to any theorizing, Nabokov's respect for the reader in this aspect (inspite of authorial control and intromission), represents a deeply moral stance and a valid demonstration of his anti-totalitarian position ... and this is another angle for what might only have seemed to conform to "art for art's sake."
............................................................................................................................................................
* On a new edition of Johnson's Lives, Sudden Elevations of Mind by Colin Burrow, London Review of Books, 17Feb11, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vols XXI-XXIII: The Lives of the Poets, edited by John Middendorf, Yale. Excerpts: "Very little English literary criticism has lasted as long or worn as well as Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets. It shaped the canon of English poetry and set the terms for critical discussion of Donne, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope over at least two centuries[...]The first life in the collection, that of Abraham Cowley, includes Johnson's classic excursus on 'a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets', which describes a tradition and then relentlessly anatomises its faults: '...nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons, and allusions; their learning instructs..." The literary-critical sections of the Lives enabled Johnson to express and refine taste by making judgments on particular poems...some principles, some preoccupations and some simple prejudices... Johnson's affection for 'nature' and for direct expression meant that he hated poems that were encrusted with allusions to pagan deities or rehearsed second-hand pastoral conventions... His notorious attack on Milton's 'Lycidas' ... is the most extreme manifestation of this prejudice. The inept use of personification can also prompt the cortex-crunching Johnsonian boff to the head... Johnson's ...particular style of iconoclasm was in part the product of his own biography...His social awkwardness was profound, and it lies behind his wish to be at once an unassailable authority and a person of earthily rooted good sense. It also influences his taste...The way Johnson masks his own modest origins beneath a display of critical fearlessness is also one reason for the exceptional influence of the Lives on English literary criticism....unaristocratic yet aggressively free from servility.[...] Johnson saw in Swift's mental decline a parallel to his own battles with 'vile melancholy'.[...].Never extenuating but never carping at faults, Johnson describes the slippage of a mind into catastrophe, and he describes it in such a way that you could imagine it happening to anyone, including the author...Every so often he scours off the rust that accumulates in the soul from repeatedly enacting a cycle of biographical paraphrase, judicious moral assessment and literary critical condemnation, simply to glory in a poem. It's usually at these moments of self-awakening that Johnson is at his most remarkable as a critic [...] Sometimes, indeed, he can seem to be pulling literary criticism towards a new age.[...]
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/