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RES: [NABOKV-L] False Nabokov Quotes
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Concerning the quote related to “divine details” there’s a direct reference
to it in the Introduction written by John Updike to Lectures on Literature
(Harvest Book,Harcourt Inc, 1982,xxiii)
“A former student from the course, Ross Wetzteon, contributed to the
TriQuarterly special issue a fond remembrance of Nabokov as a teacher. “
‘Caress the details,” Nabokov would utter, rolling the r, his voice the
rough caress of a cat’s tongue, ‘the divine details!’”
While I was trying to retrieve other references to the importance of
“details,” now using search instruments, I came to a review that mentions
them and also discusses the short-story that has been chosen for discussion,
“Spring in Fialta,” among others.
I’ll set down a few excerpts from “Vladimir Nabokov – Reckless Triviality”
(a review thatÂ’s far from enthusiasticÂ…), by Tony McKibbin.
“Just as a critic once referred to Milan Kundera as a writer of reckless
brevity, can we level the phrase ‘reckless triviality’ at Vladimir Nabokov?
This is either to damn the Russian émigré with the faintest of praise or
offer the highest of compliments. Where the Czech émigré who settled in
Paris produced novels of ideas; the Russian who spent much of his later life
in the US despised their espousal in fiction form. Thus he could say of
Dickens in his Lectures on Literature that he was a great writer not at all
because the sociological side was interesting or important, but because of
the writing. “It is in his imagery that he is great.” It is here that
Nabokov would see what he so admired in literature: the “supremacy for the
detail over the general.” [ ]
Here are a couple of openings from Nabokov. “Spring in Fialta is cloudy and
dull. Everything is damp; the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper
shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery vista between jade
edges of pale blush houses, which tottered up from their knees to climb the
slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St George is more
than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since
1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the
tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps
of rock and the mantelepiece dream of seashells.” [ ] This is Mannerism as
Arnold Hauser describes it in a book of that name: “A mannerist work of art
is always a piece of bravura, a triumphant conjuring trick, a firework
display with flying sparks and coloursÂ…Beauty too beautiful becomes unreal,
strength too strong becomes acrobatics, too much content loses all meaning,
form independent of content becomes an empty shell.” [ ] Hauser is quoted
by John Calder in CalderÂ’s introduction to a Samuel Beckett Reader, but if
there is a basic difference between Beckett and Nabokov, it resides in one
sensing that while Beckett’s relationship with reality is to be “hopelessly
and helplessly at its mercy”, Nabokov would be more inclined to claim that
he is its master. “For me ‘style’ is matter”, he says in Selected Letters:
1940-1977. [ ] Over and over again we notice style as an absolute: this is
literatureÂ’s own metaphysics, but it is also a modern concern, hiding an
anxiety of potential meaninglessness that writers surely more significant
than Nabokov cannot quite deny [ ] But in Nabokov, theme and story are
abandoned for the specifics of the writing style. In ‘Spring in Fialta’, the
story ‘focuses’ on one man’s continuing fascination with a woman whom he
first met back in 1917 and whom he would intermittently see until the early
thirties. Though he is married with children, though she is married also, he
cannot ever forget her, nor be impervious to her affect on him when they
meet. “And regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never
discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals
in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all
its atoms were re-combined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium,
which was measured not by the lengthy separations, but by those few meetings
of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed.”
This is brilliantly descriptive writing, offering up a desire caught in
time. This is desire as duration outside of the tick-tocking of the clock
that dictates the rest of his life, as the narrator can lose himself in Nina
and in a time abstracted from duty and obligation. But can we really believe
he and Nina “never thought of each other in the intervals in our destiny,”
or does the phrase suit the style? Would a more plausible comment somehow
dilute the prose and also the weld between intoxication of feeling and
intoxication of style?
Perhaps more than any writer except Joyce, Nabokov wants intoxication of
feeling out of an intoxication of style, as if he were looking for an ever
expanding sense of onomatopoeia; of using language not only as a sign system
conveying feelings indirectly, but trying to create with language a sensuous
surface as words donÂ’t only imitate sounds, but also convey emotion through
the use of language as a system of sounds.[ ] Frank OÂ’Connor in an essay on
Joyce in The Mirror in the Roadway actually uses the term “associational
mania” to describe Joyce’s obsessive play on words, a phrase unlikely to be
levelled at Nabokov, who focuses much more on the rhythm of language over
its connotative possibilities; much more on sibilance and alliteration. The
opening of Lolita is a famous example: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my
loins, My sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of
three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
This seems the raison dÂ’etre of NabokovÂ’s work: to make language sensual [
] Nabokov offers the pleasure of prose over any other pleasure, as though
trying to create a synaesthetic weld between meaning and sound to create
language as smooth caress[ ] There seems to sit in NabokovÂ’s prose a
surface precision masking hidden mysteries that Nabokov did not quite
possess the depth of feeling to discover. Perhaps this helps explain
Nabokov’s obsessions with detail: “caress the detail, the divine detail” –
as if a positivist of prose, a person who could not trust or quite
understand anything that was not put in front of his eyes. There are some
astonishing observations in NabokovÂ’s stories, but very few revelations.[
]” ©Tony McKibbin <http://tonymckibbin.com/non-fiction/vladimir-nabokov>
http://tonymckibbin.com/non-fiction/vladimir-nabokov
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
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L
to it in the Introduction written by John Updike to Lectures on Literature
(Harvest Book,Harcourt Inc, 1982,xxiii)
“A former student from the course, Ross Wetzteon, contributed to the
TriQuarterly special issue a fond remembrance of Nabokov as a teacher. “
‘Caress the details,” Nabokov would utter, rolling the r, his voice the
rough caress of a cat’s tongue, ‘the divine details!’”
While I was trying to retrieve other references to the importance of
“details,” now using search instruments, I came to a review that mentions
them and also discusses the short-story that has been chosen for discussion,
“Spring in Fialta,” among others.
I’ll set down a few excerpts from “Vladimir Nabokov – Reckless Triviality”
(a review thatÂ’s far from enthusiasticÂ…), by Tony McKibbin.
“Just as a critic once referred to Milan Kundera as a writer of reckless
brevity, can we level the phrase ‘reckless triviality’ at Vladimir Nabokov?
This is either to damn the Russian émigré with the faintest of praise or
offer the highest of compliments. Where the Czech émigré who settled in
Paris produced novels of ideas; the Russian who spent much of his later life
in the US despised their espousal in fiction form. Thus he could say of
Dickens in his Lectures on Literature that he was a great writer not at all
because the sociological side was interesting or important, but because of
the writing. “It is in his imagery that he is great.” It is here that
Nabokov would see what he so admired in literature: the “supremacy for the
detail over the general.” [ ]
Here are a couple of openings from Nabokov. “Spring in Fialta is cloudy and
dull. Everything is damp; the piebald trunks of the plane trees, the juniper
shrubs, the railings, the gravel. Far away, in a watery vista between jade
edges of pale blush houses, which tottered up from their knees to climb the
slope (a cypress indicating the way), the blurred Mount St George is more
than ever remote from its likeness on the picture postcards which since
1910, say (those straw hats, those youthful cabmen), have been courting the
tourist from the sorry-go-round of their prop, among amethyst-toothed lumps
of rock and the mantelepiece dream of seashells.” [ ] This is Mannerism as
Arnold Hauser describes it in a book of that name: “A mannerist work of art
is always a piece of bravura, a triumphant conjuring trick, a firework
display with flying sparks and coloursÂ…Beauty too beautiful becomes unreal,
strength too strong becomes acrobatics, too much content loses all meaning,
form independent of content becomes an empty shell.” [ ] Hauser is quoted
by John Calder in CalderÂ’s introduction to a Samuel Beckett Reader, but if
there is a basic difference between Beckett and Nabokov, it resides in one
sensing that while Beckett’s relationship with reality is to be “hopelessly
and helplessly at its mercy”, Nabokov would be more inclined to claim that
he is its master. “For me ‘style’ is matter”, he says in Selected Letters:
1940-1977. [ ] Over and over again we notice style as an absolute: this is
literatureÂ’s own metaphysics, but it is also a modern concern, hiding an
anxiety of potential meaninglessness that writers surely more significant
than Nabokov cannot quite deny [ ] But in Nabokov, theme and story are
abandoned for the specifics of the writing style. In ‘Spring in Fialta’, the
story ‘focuses’ on one man’s continuing fascination with a woman whom he
first met back in 1917 and whom he would intermittently see until the early
thirties. Though he is married with children, though she is married also, he
cannot ever forget her, nor be impervious to her affect on him when they
meet. “And regardless of what happened to me or to her, in between, we never
discussed anything, as we never thought of each other during the intervals
in our destiny, so that when we met the pace of life altered at once, all
its atoms were re-combined, and we lived in another, lighter time-medium,
which was measured not by the lengthy separations, but by those few meetings
of which a short, supposedly frivolous life was thus artificially formed.”
This is brilliantly descriptive writing, offering up a desire caught in
time. This is desire as duration outside of the tick-tocking of the clock
that dictates the rest of his life, as the narrator can lose himself in Nina
and in a time abstracted from duty and obligation. But can we really believe
he and Nina “never thought of each other in the intervals in our destiny,”
or does the phrase suit the style? Would a more plausible comment somehow
dilute the prose and also the weld between intoxication of feeling and
intoxication of style?
Perhaps more than any writer except Joyce, Nabokov wants intoxication of
feeling out of an intoxication of style, as if he were looking for an ever
expanding sense of onomatopoeia; of using language not only as a sign system
conveying feelings indirectly, but trying to create with language a sensuous
surface as words donÂ’t only imitate sounds, but also convey emotion through
the use of language as a system of sounds.[ ] Frank OÂ’Connor in an essay on
Joyce in The Mirror in the Roadway actually uses the term “associational
mania” to describe Joyce’s obsessive play on words, a phrase unlikely to be
levelled at Nabokov, who focuses much more on the rhythm of language over
its connotative possibilities; much more on sibilance and alliteration. The
opening of Lolita is a famous example: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my
loins, My sin, my soul, Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of
three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”
This seems the raison dÂ’etre of NabokovÂ’s work: to make language sensual [
] Nabokov offers the pleasure of prose over any other pleasure, as though
trying to create a synaesthetic weld between meaning and sound to create
language as smooth caress[ ] There seems to sit in NabokovÂ’s prose a
surface precision masking hidden mysteries that Nabokov did not quite
possess the depth of feeling to discover. Perhaps this helps explain
Nabokov’s obsessions with detail: “caress the detail, the divine detail” –
as if a positivist of prose, a person who could not trust or quite
understand anything that was not put in front of his eyes. There are some
astonishing observations in NabokovÂ’s stories, but very few revelations.[
]” ©Tony McKibbin <http://tonymckibbin.com/non-fiction/vladimir-nabokov>
http://tonymckibbin.com/non-fiction/vladimir-nabokov
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
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L