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Fw: [NABOKV-L] MR re: American v. European
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----- Original Message -----
From: jansymello
To: jansymello
Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 2:32 PM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] MR re: American v. European
MR writes: both verbose and concise writers appear in great, if not equal, numbers everywhere...It may be more productive to talk about prolixity as it relates
to literary traditions, which span nationalities... it isn't hard to see the ghost of Romanticism in many of the more indulgent writers (Ginsberg, Pynchon, John Irving, Graham Swift, Charles Kinbote) while Realism/Naturalism can still be seen as holding sway in others (Carver, Elizabeth Bishop, Seamus Heaney, Tobias Wolff, John Shade). Nabokov's sensibility always seems uniquely eastern European to me... these writers still lean a bit on the Romantic tradition, but the hardship of their political and social situation doesn't allow them to be as indulgent of that tradition as either Brits or Americans.
JM: You employed the word "indulgent" twice, once to describe verbose early modern romantics (such as Kinbote) and next, to contrast writers suffering under political stress and those Brits and Americans inclinded to democratic prolixity and exuberance. Indulgence may also be considered from the stand-point of individual symptoms, as a way of both gaining ascendancy and losing a battle against obsessive neurosis or, according the old-fashioned expression, "temperament". There certainly will be readers that fall into this category and so garantee their success.
Verbosity, when opposed to concision and realism ( did you put T.S.Eliot close to John Shade under this item? Did you approach VN and Kinbote in the other?), indeed, toils under no specific nationality or epoch, but may be more inhibited under various cultural pressures.
MR adds:I don't imagine VN had much tolerance for the French Surrealists, but some of the revolutionary spirit of Surrealism, particularly as it relates to the subversion of oppressive order, obtains in VN's work.
JM: Surrealists, without abandoning narcisisstic gratifications, nevertheless gave up the tag of authorship ( usually a kind of Godly central point that, in infinity, is to be found in all places, as in SB's reference), recognizing "automatic writing" and the unconscious. Nevertheless, I don't think that Nabokov's subversion, or works about oppressed individuals is comparable to the aims of the surrealists.
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