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[snip]
> This comment appeared in Wikipedia:
> H. L.
> Mencken called Carl Sandburg "indubitably an American in every
> pulse-beat."
> This led on more page-flipping in pursuit of Mencken, with whom I
am
> really
> totally unfamiliar. It seemed to me these two figures actually
> exemplified
> what I was dimly trying to get at.
> Looking at Sandburg’s poem Chicago I felt that it expressed
> everything that
> I would regard as truly American: even more American than April in
> Arizona.
In fact, it's determinedly American. Maybe just a tiny bit
excessively American (though I like it). On the other hand,
Sandburg's other poem known to every American who took college-
prep English, "Fog", could have been written by Harold Monro
(in my opinion).
Jansy remarked that there are American elitists and European
populists as well as the other way around. I agree and
would extend that to any classification--except that I
can't think of a British equivalent to Whitman's and sometimes
Sandburg's esthetic of "Don't stop when you're on a roll."
My inability to think of one doesn't mean there aren't any,
though. And many American writers haven't worked that way.
Nabokov didn't, but that doesn't say anything about whether he
was an American writer (a question I have no opinion on).
[snip description of "Chicago"]
> It is this kind of composition which makes me think of VN as
> profoundly un-American, and unshakably European. European society
has
> been, and maybe
> still is, to an extent, hierarchical and pyramidal: American
society,
> in
> spite of its skyscrapers, is still flat. VN, although not (I
believe)
> technically an aristocrat,
I'd be very interested in comments on whether Nabokov was
technically an aristocrat or "from an aristocratic family", as
I got into an argument elsewhere about the latter phrase.
> was certainly a patrician, and displayed
> patrician attitudes
> throughout his life. I submit. The only American literary
patrician I
> can think of, who even approaches this position, is Gore Vidal.
Wallace Stevens? Anthony Hecht? James Merrill? Poets named
Lowell, of one of whom Nabokov praised the poetry and criticized
the translations? The sf writer Gene Wolfe (who I've recommended
here)? Are we counting Pound and Eliot as Americans?
(Speaking of Pound, when you linked his prolixity with Whitman's
I assume you were talking about the Pound of the Cantos, not
the Pound who compressed "In a Station of the Metro" into
incomprehensibility.)
> Matthew mentions Digressionism, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism,
> Imagism,
> Surrealism, and although I recognize the need for literary
academics to
>
> categorize literature in this way, I would say that if anything is
> consistent
> about VN it is his adamantine rejection of all –isms; starting
with
> Totalitarianism, and continuing on to encompass Fascism,
Communism,
> Anti-Semitism,
> Socialism, Freudianism, and any other –ism, literary or
otherwise,
> one might think
> of. I would regard this as the only acceptable position of a true
> artist, but
> I have to say that it is also elitist, proud and self-sufficient. I
> find
> these things admirable.
> I would also suggest that literary theory means very little to
genuine
> practitioners; and the same goes for truly great practitioners in
any
> field.
> Theory is for observers and teachers, not for doers.
Nabokov was of course also an observer and teacher, and in his
non-fiction he makes a lot of general statements of the kind that
consititue theories. The best example may be his extensive
theoretical treatment of prosody (or so I'm told). For another
example, we are to enjoy the emotions of the writer, not the
characters. And then there are the implicit statements: We are
/not/ to enjoy the fiction writer's satisfaction at brilliantly
arguing for a general idea, or creating a monolith, or putting a
character at all the most dramatic moments of Napoleon's Russian
campaign, or even making dialect dialogue ring true.
Has anyone tried to put Nabokov's general statements and
implications together to see to what extent they form a
theory--and to what extent they contradict each other?
Nabokov's theories may even influence his fiction on occasion.
That "responsible character" John Shade sees the similarities
between prejudice against blacks and against Jews in visual
esthetic terms: "tensing of simian nostrils, simian dulling
of eyes". Otherwise "this way of alluding to two kinds of bias
in one breath was an example of careless, or demagogic,
lumping (much exploited by Left-Wingers)". Is this a reflection
of Nabokov's theoretical commitment to specific detail as
against Main Ideas? Certainly the same fallacy underlies both
kinds of bias, and I suspect there are psychological
similarities too.
I'll agree that he had little use for /other/ people's
theories of literature (except Bely's, or so I'm told).
Jerry Friedman
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EDNote: I've written somewhere about the affinity Nabokov had for the
"theory" of literature propounded by his friend in emigration, Iulii
Aikhenvald. Aikhenvald spent much of his ink belittling and
contradicting the sociological, historical, and psychological theories
of his day. His essay "The Writer and the Reader" anticipates some of
Nabokov's statements in various lectures, as does part of the
introduction to his Silhouettes of Russian Writers.
Unfortunately, his writings, which were very popular during his
lifetime and after, are only available in Russian to date. After my
current project I will probably return to my idea of translating some
of his works.