Subject
Bend Sinister 1947 review by R.Watts.
From
Date
Body
SES: "Jansy mentioned an essay in which I analyzed that very sentence singled out as Nabokov's prose at its worst (in Watts's 1947 review of Bend Sinister) as an example of a distinct kind of Nabokovian metaphor: Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, â?oNabokovâ?Ts Amphiphorical Gestures,â? Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 11.2 (1987): 189-211."
JM: The same sentence that was singled out as "Nabokov's prose at its worst" by Watts has also been selected by Diana Trilling (in her review of "Bend Sinister" published in "The Nation," June 14,1947) and for the same reason, observes James Twiggs.
Diana Trilling writes: "But in point of fact, what looks like a highly charged sensibility in Mr. Nabokov's style is really only fanciness, forced imagery, and deafness to the music of the English language, just as what looks like an innovation in method is already its own kind of sterile convention.Here is a sample, a single sentence, of Mr. Nabokov's prose; the scene is on a staircase, where Krug has to pass a young couple just come from a fancy dress party, the boy dressed as a football player, the girl dressed as Carmen: [she now quotes the sentence from BS*] Surely writing like this is elaborate chicanery. It is not daring; it is merely wilful. It is not original; it is anarchic in an established pattern. It bears the same relation to the prose of the contemporary masters of innovation as the prose of, say, 'Gentleman's Agreement" bears to nineteenth-century prose. On the other hand, to dismiss it simply as bad taste is to pass over a possible larger significance. Mr. Nabokov's noveI is written in a claustrophobic style in which the reader's mind is allowed to do no work of its own, in which we are led by meaningless associations into blind alleys and trapped in boredom. But after all, Mr. Nabokov's story of the dehumanization of man under tyranny is a claustrophobic story." She concludes the review with: "But I do suggest that the passivity of mind and spirit demanded by "Bend Sinister" is not as far removed as may appear from the passivity of mind and spirit demanded by dictatorial governments, and that when we submit ourselves to it we are perhaps betraying a disenchantment with more than old literary methods." Trilling notes that a certain public would welcome Bend Sinister: "This will be the public that has become so tired of the arid prose and method of contemporary naturalism that it welcomes any change as a change for the better." For her, "If, then, Mr. Nabokov's book is praised as a new kind of literary strength asserting itself against the weakness of the old naturalism, must we not be reminded of the way in which a people who have lost faith in liberal democracy welcome tyranny because it initially presents itself to them as a new organizing strength?"
World War II had recently been won, Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, but Trilling is wary and defensive: she mentions a spirit of disenchantment which she relates to a loss of faith in liberal democracy, or in the renovation of "old literary methods". A prestigious emigré writing in English must have appeared under a special light in her eyes (Trilling mentions what she considers Nabokov's "deafness to the music of the English language"), intent on the artistic, political and social atmosphere of her times.
Nabokov's readers today can appreciate (or detest) his style, now moved by a different set of circumstances than Trilling's, and by their growing familiarity with Nabokov's metaphors and "amphiphorical" tactics, such as those Sweeney encountered in Nabokov's early and later novels (which Trilling could not have read when she wrote her review). Sweeney borrows the word "amphiphore" from Bend Sinister to serve as a "model of a creative stragegy." At least, this is how Marina Grishakova interprets Sweeney's term, when she applies it to "a 'tripartite' present or timeless 'now'," - as it is found in Nabokov's writings - because "it highlights the capacity of a metaphor to activate different, often contradictory referencial frames, e.g, the semantic unity 'letters-butterflies' from Speak, Memory."**
........................................................................................................................
* - "but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop--hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom--heaving more than her smile suggests--and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands."
** - In her article Had I Come Before Myself, S.E.Sweeney explores another kind of acrobatic reversions which, as it seems to me, are equally related to time, texture and text. Sweeney explains that her title "derives from that strange moment in the final chapter of Lolita when Humbert imagines juddging his own case." Sweeney notes that both Humbert Humbert (Lolita), and Hermann (Despair) "try to escape the contingencies of their own lives through fiction." In Despair, as Sweeney observes, Nabokov proceeds to judge "his younger self as both writer and translator" while "he imagines his younger self, in turn, approving the current revision." For her, Nabokov's speculations about "chronologically preceding himself in time" are expressed by his use of "different conceptual frames" and by engineering "subtle grammatical shifts in person, agency, mood, or tense." Cf. Sweeney, S.E: "Had I Come Before Myself: Illegitimate Judgements of Lolita and Despair", Actes du Colloque Annotating Vs. Interpreting Nabokov Nice, 21-23 June 2006, vol 24 n.1, 2007 (Cycnos) Check also Marina Grishakova in Tartu Semiotics Library, issue: 05 / 2006 - www.ceeol.com/aspx/getdocument.aspx?logid=5&id=9b820ceb. Or in "The Models of Space,Time and Vision in V.Nabokov's Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Culturas Frames" Chapter I, Models of Time, p.133. Tartu University Press, 2006.
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/
JM: The same sentence that was singled out as "Nabokov's prose at its worst" by Watts has also been selected by Diana Trilling (in her review of "Bend Sinister" published in "The Nation," June 14,1947) and for the same reason, observes James Twiggs.
Diana Trilling writes: "But in point of fact, what looks like a highly charged sensibility in Mr. Nabokov's style is really only fanciness, forced imagery, and deafness to the music of the English language, just as what looks like an innovation in method is already its own kind of sterile convention.Here is a sample, a single sentence, of Mr. Nabokov's prose; the scene is on a staircase, where Krug has to pass a young couple just come from a fancy dress party, the boy dressed as a football player, the girl dressed as Carmen: [she now quotes the sentence from BS*] Surely writing like this is elaborate chicanery. It is not daring; it is merely wilful. It is not original; it is anarchic in an established pattern. It bears the same relation to the prose of the contemporary masters of innovation as the prose of, say, 'Gentleman's Agreement" bears to nineteenth-century prose. On the other hand, to dismiss it simply as bad taste is to pass over a possible larger significance. Mr. Nabokov's noveI is written in a claustrophobic style in which the reader's mind is allowed to do no work of its own, in which we are led by meaningless associations into blind alleys and trapped in boredom. But after all, Mr. Nabokov's story of the dehumanization of man under tyranny is a claustrophobic story." She concludes the review with: "But I do suggest that the passivity of mind and spirit demanded by "Bend Sinister" is not as far removed as may appear from the passivity of mind and spirit demanded by dictatorial governments, and that when we submit ourselves to it we are perhaps betraying a disenchantment with more than old literary methods." Trilling notes that a certain public would welcome Bend Sinister: "This will be the public that has become so tired of the arid prose and method of contemporary naturalism that it welcomes any change as a change for the better." For her, "If, then, Mr. Nabokov's book is praised as a new kind of literary strength asserting itself against the weakness of the old naturalism, must we not be reminded of the way in which a people who have lost faith in liberal democracy welcome tyranny because it initially presents itself to them as a new organizing strength?"
World War II had recently been won, Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, but Trilling is wary and defensive: she mentions a spirit of disenchantment which she relates to a loss of faith in liberal democracy, or in the renovation of "old literary methods". A prestigious emigré writing in English must have appeared under a special light in her eyes (Trilling mentions what she considers Nabokov's "deafness to the music of the English language"), intent on the artistic, political and social atmosphere of her times.
Nabokov's readers today can appreciate (or detest) his style, now moved by a different set of circumstances than Trilling's, and by their growing familiarity with Nabokov's metaphors and "amphiphorical" tactics, such as those Sweeney encountered in Nabokov's early and later novels (which Trilling could not have read when she wrote her review). Sweeney borrows the word "amphiphore" from Bend Sinister to serve as a "model of a creative stragegy." At least, this is how Marina Grishakova interprets Sweeney's term, when she applies it to "a 'tripartite' present or timeless 'now'," - as it is found in Nabokov's writings - because "it highlights the capacity of a metaphor to activate different, often contradictory referencial frames, e.g, the semantic unity 'letters-butterflies' from Speak, Memory."**
........................................................................................................................
* - "but where mythology stretches strong circus nets, lest thought, in its ill-fitting tights, should break its old neck instead of rebouncing with a hep and a hop--hopping down again into this urine-soaked dust to take that short run with the half pirouette in the middle and display the extreme simplicity of heaven in the acrobat's amphiphorical gesture, the candidly open hands that start a brief shower of applause while he walks backwards and then, reverting to virile manners, catches the little blue handkerchief, which his muscular flying mate, after her own exertions, takes from her heaving hot bosom--heaving more than her smile suggests--and tosses to him, so that he may wipe the palms of his aching weakening hands."
** - In her article Had I Come Before Myself, S.E.Sweeney explores another kind of acrobatic reversions which, as it seems to me, are equally related to time, texture and text. Sweeney explains that her title "derives from that strange moment in the final chapter of Lolita when Humbert imagines juddging his own case." Sweeney notes that both Humbert Humbert (Lolita), and Hermann (Despair) "try to escape the contingencies of their own lives through fiction." In Despair, as Sweeney observes, Nabokov proceeds to judge "his younger self as both writer and translator" while "he imagines his younger self, in turn, approving the current revision." For her, Nabokov's speculations about "chronologically preceding himself in time" are expressed by his use of "different conceptual frames" and by engineering "subtle grammatical shifts in person, agency, mood, or tense." Cf. Sweeney, S.E: "Had I Come Before Myself: Illegitimate Judgements of Lolita and Despair", Actes du Colloque Annotating Vs. Interpreting Nabokov Nice, 21-23 June 2006, vol 24 n.1, 2007 (Cycnos) Check also Marina Grishakova in Tartu Semiotics Library, issue: 05 / 2006 - www.ceeol.com/aspx/getdocument.aspx?logid=5&id=9b820ceb. Or in "The Models of Space,Time and Vision in V.Nabokov's Fiction: Narrative Strategies and Culturas Frames" Chapter I, Models of Time, p.133. Tartu University Press, 2006.
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/