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Word games and psychologizing
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A friend compared a couple of bilingual word games he encountered in a recent novel by Jonathan Franzen to those that were favored by Nabokov. I think there are no two more different writers than Nabokov and Franzen.
Once Alfred Appel Jr. asked VN: “You have said that Alain Robbe-Grilet and Jorge Luis Borges are among your favorite contemporary writers. Do you find them to be at all similar? Do you think Robbe-Grillet's novels are as free of "psychology" as he claims?” and VN answered: “ Robbe-Grillet's claims are preposterous. Those manifestos, those dodoes, die with the dadas. His fiction is magnificentlv poetical and original, and the shifts of levels, the interpenetration of successive impressions and so forth belong of course to psychology-- psychology at its best.” (Cf. nabokov’s interview (06), Wisconsin Studies, 1967.)
Nabokov may have despised psychoanalysis but he valued some of the resources psychology has to offer to a talented writer ( and wasn’t Van Veen a psychologist?). However, this doesn’t mean that it was OK for him to exchange the dimension of fantasy and imagination (the wider horizon of the human mind and its peculiar reality), in a novel, for the literary reproduction of the quotidian psychological quandaries of lovers born in a dysfunctional family, their manipulations and lies with resulting anxieties or guilt feelings (and their equally peculiar reality). In too many of the present day novels that I happened to read in the past few years even the unconscious processes seem to have been transformed into a flat gossipy chatter.
What’s in a few word games, I asked myself. Nevertheless, a little research in the internet showed me how often Nabokov’s and Franzen’s names happened to be mentioned in close proximity:
Things Nabokov Hates by Maria Popova Why you should never, ever use the phrase “the moment of truth” in your writing.
Vladimir Nabokov — celebrated author, butterfly-lover, no-bullshit lecturer — was never afraid to have strong opinions. In this short and delightfully curmudgeonly excerpt from a vintage French documentary, Nabokov pulls a Jonathan Franzen and shares some of the things he detests, including: italicized passages in a novel, which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudburst of thought; background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, minstrel music, inflicted music…; journalistic cliches… ‘the moment of truth’ — ‘the moment of truth!’
<http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/29/things-nabokov-hates/> http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/29/things-nabokov-hates/
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The Literary Life of Things CASE STUDIES IN AMERICAN FICTION
BABETTE BÄRBEL TISCHLEDER Distributed for Campus Verlag , © 2014 ,North American Studies
Whether in the street or the microcosm of the home, the life of things conjoins human subjects and inanimate objects. This material culture has long played a vital role in the American literary imagination, yet scholars in literary and cultural studies have only recently (re)discovered the object world as a subject of critical inquiry. Engaging a great range of American literature—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edith Wharton to Vladimir Nabokov and Jonathan Franzen—The Literary Life of Things illuminates scenes of animation that disclose the aesthetic, affective, and ethical dimensions of our entanglement with the material world.
<HTTP://PRESS.UCHICAGO.EDU/UCP/BOOKS/BOOK/DISTRIBUTED/L/BO17952342.HTML> HTTP://PRESS.UCHICAGO.EDU/UCP/BOOKS/BOOK/DISTRIBUTED/L/BO17952342.HTML
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BOOK REVIEW ‘I Think You’re Totally Wrong’ by David Shields and Caleb Powell
Both men are prickly, occasionally arrogant [ ] Shields is especially cutting on the paragons and defenders of the novel. The New Yorker’s James Wood is “a sea captain for nineteenth-century novels.” Vladimir Nabokov has “a really bad ear.” They both rag on Jonathan Franzen as a mock-Wallace, all erudition and no heart. <https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2015/01/03/book-review-think-you-totally-wrong-quarrel-david-shields-and-caleb-powell/eogdOd5VvpiEBIQwPPz14K/story.html> https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2015/01/03/book-review-think-you-totally-wrong-quarrel-david-shields-and-caleb-powell/eogdOd5VvpiEBIQwPPz14K/story.html
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Literature and the Moral Question, by David L. Ulin. Los Angeles Times
The issue is that art is not, cannot, be a matter of doctrine, no matter how much we might wish it were so. Art, rather, is most effective when it surprises us, leading to affinities, empathies, we might not otherwise allow.
Perhaps the most famous contemporary example of this is Humbert Humbert, the pedophilic narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” who literally seduces us with his voice. It is only when we look up from the page that we realize with whom we’ve identified — and the shock is in our recognition of his terrible humanity, which renders him as (yes) a lot like us. Is Nabokov’s novel morally offensive? Patently, it is not. We live in a universe of treacherous choices, of corruption and degradation on both the individual and the collective level. To pretend otherwise is the true moral offense, to write as if it were possible to reduce the nuance, the ambiguity, of experience to stark shades of black and white. This is what Jonathan Franzen meant, I think, in his remarks, from an interview also posted over the weekend, about moral simplicity, which have been widely read as a dig at young adult literature. Maybe so — but more to the point, he was getting at the difficulty of navigating a world with no clear markers, in which it’s all we can do, much of the time, to make it through the day. “People don’t want moral complexity,” Franzen argues. “Moral complexity is a luxury. You might be forced to read it in school, but a lot of people have hard lives. They come home at the end of the day, they feel they’ve been jerked around by the world yet again for another day. The last thing they want to do is read Alice Munro, who is always pointing toward the possibility that you’re not the heroic figure you think of yourself as, that you might be the very dubious figure that other people think of you as. That’s the last thing you’d want if you’ve had a hard day. You want to be told good people are good, bad people are bad, and love conquers all. And love is more important than money. You know, all these schmaltzy tropes. That’s exactly what you want if you’re having a hard life. Who am I to tell people that they need to have their noses rubbed in moral complexity?” That, I want to say, is the true morality of writing, the willingness to expose ourselves, to open our strange and idiosyncratic centers to the world. That is the only way not to be aesthetically offensive — or ethically, as well. There is no morality in art except the morality of speaking honestly, even (or especially) when that means saying something we can’t bear to hear. Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times
<http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-literature-and-the-moral-question-20150217-story.html> http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-literature-and-the-moral-question-20150217-story.html
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Best-selling author Jonathan Franzen discusses his long-awaited fourth novel Freedom. (2010)
Readers have had to wait nine years for his next book Freedom, which has had most reviewers falling over themselves in ecstasy. The American Times calls it a masterpiece of American fiction and elsewhere Mr Franzen's been likened to Tolstoy, Dickens and Updike, among others.The author does have his critics, though, and the backlash against his work even has its own name - Franzenfreude.
LEIGH SALES: I recently read an interview with Vladimir Nabokov from 1967 in which he's told that E.M. Forster says his characters often take over and dictate the course of a novel. And after a scathing critique of Forster, Nabokov says "my characters are like galley slaves". Are yours galley slaves?
JONATHAN FRANZEN: I'm with Nabokov on being intensely irritated by that remark of E.M. Forster's. It's as if to say, you know, "I'm such a special genius that my creations have such enormous vividness, such passionate life that I really have no control over them".That's a weird thing for a fiction writer to say because it first of all can't possibly be true. But also it would seem to suggest that that kind of writer is abdicating a responsibility for meaning, because what the characters do has everything to do with what the story means and if it's like you're letting the characters say "well no, sorry, I don't like the story you're trying to tell". You've somehow - if you could do it, which I don't think you can - you would be abdicating the primary responsibility of the story teller which is to create something that means something.
<http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s3081008.htm> http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s3081008.htm
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BEA 2015: Franzen says 'It gets harder to write novels, not easier.' By Gabe Habash | May 27, 2015 "A capacity crowd of approximately 1,000 people turned out to watch BEA's curtain-raising event, a highly anticipated conversation between bestselling novelist Jonathan Franzen and Laura Miller of Salon.com. The discussion centered on Purity, Franzen's fifth novel and his first since 2010's Freedom, which will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in September [ ] "It gets harder to write novels, not easier." Over a writer's career, he said, "you use up the easy and surface stuff" first, and then dig deeper and deeper on each subsequent project. Miller and Franzen touched on a number of different subjects, including journalism, privacy in the modern age, free speech, writing from the perspective of young people ("They know what the world is like better than I did at their age"), and science fiction's early influence on him. <http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/66874-bea-2015-franzen-says-it-gets-harder-to-write-novels-not-easier.html> http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bea/article/66874-bea-2015-franzen-says-it-gets-harder-to-write-novels-not-easier.html
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