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Theory: CHW to CK and SK
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From Charles to Carolyn
……whiff of Ayn Rand, if you'll allow me.
I associate Rand with a number of –isms, principally something called
Objectivism, but I reject any personal identification with her ideologies, such as
I perceive them. I did read The Fountainhead when I was about 20, and can
remember it made a big impact at the time, but I’ve forgotten what it was all
about, and don’t have a copy. About 4 or 5 decades later I met a Rand fanatic,
a bookseller, and tried to read Atlas Shrugged, but it was so badly written
I soon gave up, and I don’t have any real idea what it was wanting to say.
Helen Mirren gave what struck me as a brilliant portrayal of Ayn Rand in a
film, which permanently turned me off her as a personality. Perhaps the film
misrepresented her.
Who after all was the "true artist" - - Lolita? or Humbert?
I can’t follow this point. Are you saying that Lolita was the American,
Humbert the European, and that Lolita was the “truer artist”? I don’t think of
either as an “artist” in any sense at all. VN was the “artist”. Perhaps you
are saying that Lolita was the innocent, and Humbert was the swine, but I don’
t see that this has anything to do with either character as “artist”.
not to forget that VN was as much observer, scholar, scientist and teacher
as anything else.
I suggest that VN will be remembered 1st as a writer; 2nd as a research
lepidopterist. He does not seem to me to expound any “theories”, but I may be
wrong when it comes to lepidoptery. Does he have any over-arching “theory”
about literature? Actually, “theory” is rather a vague word. There is
something called “chess theory”, but it is no “theory” at all, and consists
entirely of an accumulation of knowledge derived from chess “practice”. Every new
chess champion follows his own deeper understanding of the game, and
demolishes this accumulation by inventing a new style of play which causes “theory”
to be re-written.
Yes, VN was a teacher, off and on, but I suggest that his time spent
teaching was faute de mieux, and that immediately the necessity for it ceased he
abandoned it as drudgery. I don’t mean to imply that there aren’t any
dedicated, selfless teachers who can have a highly beneficial effect on their
students. Usually their teaching consists not of creating a coterie of worshippers at
their feet, but of encouraging the students to think for themselves.
let me stand up for Formalism, which I doubt VN rejected
Formalism, which I had to look up, apparently “describes an emphasis on
form over content or meaning in the arts, literature, or philosophy.” I wouldn’
t agree that VN can be categorized under such a heading. It seems to me that
there is a search for “meaning” in all his works: or, at least, that a
reader is encouraged to seek a meaning in them. But perhaps you have something
there.
Sergey Karpukhin wrote:
One British intellectual suggested that the calculatedly “difficult” idiom
of 20thC English literary modernism was an anti-egalitarian conspiracy to
keep the common reader out. Lovely Joyce and lovely Beckett, both
arch-Europeans, are elitist; VN is democratic and even populist in comparison to them.
Was this the British critic, now working in the US, who attacked the
gobbledy-gook of academic literary theorists, and suggested that the inaccessibility
of their verbiage was turning ordinary people away from literature? I can’t
remember his name for the moment. I wouldn’t agree that a writer’s
readability is the same as populism.
To be more accurate, VN draws on both European elitism and American populism
at will, and combines them to produce the necessary artistic result. His
main, artistic criteria are, I’d suggest, lifted clear of nationality or
geographical affiliation. It’s we who need him to be Russian, European, or American.
The thing is he was all of those, and more. So we shouldn’t be surprised to
hear one day that he was the archetypal Transatlantic writer.
I’d agree that artistic criteria are above nationality. However, the artist
is nevertheless necessarily the product of his own personal inheritance and
environment, and in VN’s case these are essentially non-American.
And I should say that theory itself is “doing,” at any rate it can be
sublimely creative.
Well, this depends on what is meant by “theory”. When it comes to literary
theory (ie excluding something like Einstein’s theory, which is indubitably
creative) I think it is purely parasitic, and nothing but a fairly barren
spin-off from the creativity of genuine practitioners. I have an old friend who
was quite recently bewailing his fate of coming under the cosh of F.R.Leavis
when an undergraduate at Cambridge, and how the benighted “theories” of that
eminent academic had ruined English literature for him.
Charles
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