Reblogging this passage from the Brothers Karamazov, inspired by spring:
""I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. ""
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Monday, April 25, 2011
On Novels in Time
Today as I was out having a smoke on the red, rainy Mac-quad picnic table, someone looked at the copy of Infinite Jest I had in my lap. The book is a stout thousand pages, and I am a little more than halfway through; I read the first five hundred pages on winter break and am finally, finally getting back to it. Anyway, this boy asked: "Are you reading that for one of your classes or for fun? It's huge."
I have had a fair amount of experience reading through huge novels "for fun." I put 'fun' in quotes because reading a big, fat novel tends to be a commensurately big and complicated experience for me. Everything about these novels, these fat-ass, inflated, mostly nineteenth-century novels is big (except the print): big characters, big, involved storylines, big voices narrative or otherwise, big arcs. Each one of them has a different set of experiences attached. One thing that runs consistent through an array of novels as diverse as The Adventures of Augie March and Anna Karenina, though, is the length of time it takes me to read them.
I've shopped Phillip Fisher's class "The Classic Phase of the Novel" twice in my almost-three years here, each time dropping out after the first lectures, too intimidated to read a Big Fat Novel every week. I can't remember if Phillip Fisher said it or my brilliant friend Spencer Lenfield did, but something also rankles my nerves about trying to cram all that prose into my head every week. It's entirely possible that I am making a virtue out of my own vice of slow reading, but something strikes me as a little off about trying to apply the values of industry and desperate effort into the act of novel-reading. Which is not to say that I haven't had to do my fair share of reading under duress--that's definitely an integral part of my experience as a comparative literature student. But something about Big Fat Novels demands the succor of an extended period of time, at least for me. It took me eight months to read Augie March in senior year of high school; I would dip into Bellow's dense, antic, rolling prose for an hour each night, or less, with many-week intervals in which I simply went around the business of my life and came back to it when I remembered.
The result of that attachment is a kind of sentiment that links the book, somehow more intimately, with the time I read it. It's true that rapid reading, which I often engage in and allowed me to devour The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, hungrily, on buses in one weekend and practically lick my fingers, leaves a vivid and dreamlike impression. The product of years of writing falls feverishly on you, leaving a knotted jumble of images and incidents, a muzzy sense of "style" enveloping your memories of the book without individual phrases and sentences. But slow reading--lazy reading, unindustrial and casual, spread out over months--confers an unseen benefit. Reading Augie, I had the sense of a life running parallel to mine. Neatly in the confines of the book, Augie had the air of an occasional confidante, someone I checked in with once in awhile. I was desperately enraged at that book at one point: Augie spends the first three hundred pages or so in dense, urban Chicago, pinging like a stoop-ball through the city having unlikely adventures. Then midway through the book he follows a black-haired woman to, no shit, write about iguanas in Mexico. This was practically the last straw for me; I threw the book across the room and let it lie dormant for a few months. Then I came back, penitent, and sat with Augie through Mexico and the iguanas and his flight to France. At the end of the book Augie is sitting on a train. He left me then--on the train past the end of the book, perpetually in motion. The feeling I had then was a feeling of bereavement--that Augie, my antic, nomadic hero, was finally still.
The Magic Mountain, a Thomas Mann mammoth which took me a similar period of time the next year, had a different feeling almost. The book takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and chronicles in exasperating detail the experience of one Hans Castorp, in the sanatorium for seven years. Almost nothing happens. He speaks to the woman of his dreams, a fellow patient, exactly once. In untranslated French. He smokes cigarettes without relish (all the tuberculosis patients smoke, gotta love the 1800s) and has interminable conversations about ideas. I complained bitterly about this book (my family will attest to how much I complain over my books) but finished it out of some dogged sense of duty and curiosity. In the end, Hans also leaves the sanatorium. On a train. Indefinably changed. I read the book on my year in Israel, miserable over the expectation that I would learn Torah for twelve hours every day and even more miserable at my failure to live up to that. The big, humpy mountains, like dried-out breasts, lowered their slanted brows at me, and the date trees withered under the sun. The plows were grey with dust and the cowbarns were biley with shit. I liked to dip in to Hans's sanatorium, watch him eat platters of smoked meats and steal the X-rays of his beloved and babble on and on about philosophy. It was a kind of exasperating peace, a restless stillness to contend with mine. I battled that book to the quick through three consecutive copies (one fell apart and one was lost and one remains on my shelf at home, with the rest of my spiny conquests). A novel read over time creates a sense of parallel universes. Creates a distilled past that enters the bloodstream of your present, and makes your life a queer amalgam of both.
Reading, in the conventional wisdom, will shortly be or already has become a rare experience precisely because of the time it takes. In a digital era of ease and leisure so it goes, the time that a novel takes up has become demode, burdensome, impossible. I guess it's no surprise to anyone that I am a Luddite about everything and especially my books (no surprise Kindle presents please), but to me it's precisely that burden--or gift--of parallel time that give novels their value. It reminds you of the arc of your life, present as it passes, logs the growth of its characters in a way that reminds you of your own growth.
One of my favorite Big Books as a kid was "Sophie's World," a novel that was also an introduction to some of the major ideas of Western philosophy. Fittingly for a book that dealt with the quandaries of being, the novel ends with the heroine discovering she is in a book and having an attendant crisis that dissolves the narrative. Reading that growing up -- well, it freaked me out, but also made me wistful. Like a lot of articulate and highly self-centered people, I've often imagined being a character in a book, with the end of the novel being my death. But something that intrigues me about these novels is that the novel doesn't end in death; the death is implicit, in metaphor, but it isn't written out. The fact that the novels end before the life does--just as I finish a novel before I finish my own life--implies that there is living beyond what can be captured on the page, any page, even a perfect one. I cherish the illusion that Augie and Hans Castorp and Vronsky and Levin are all alive somewhere, animated by the act of my reading, like Neil Gaiman's idea that gods we believe in are physically created by that belief. Regardless, I've had the pleasure of living in their lives as well as in mine for awhile, a gift granted to me in exchange for the time I put in, the months I colored with their adventures. To me, great novels (although Fat Novels are not always great novels) retain their relevance precisely because they demand an outmoded sacrifice of time. I hope to always be ready to give that to them.
I have had a fair amount of experience reading through huge novels "for fun." I put 'fun' in quotes because reading a big, fat novel tends to be a commensurately big and complicated experience for me. Everything about these novels, these fat-ass, inflated, mostly nineteenth-century novels is big (except the print): big characters, big, involved storylines, big voices narrative or otherwise, big arcs. Each one of them has a different set of experiences attached. One thing that runs consistent through an array of novels as diverse as The Adventures of Augie March and Anna Karenina, though, is the length of time it takes me to read them.
I've shopped Phillip Fisher's class "The Classic Phase of the Novel" twice in my almost-three years here, each time dropping out after the first lectures, too intimidated to read a Big Fat Novel every week. I can't remember if Phillip Fisher said it or my brilliant friend Spencer Lenfield did, but something also rankles my nerves about trying to cram all that prose into my head every week. It's entirely possible that I am making a virtue out of my own vice of slow reading, but something strikes me as a little off about trying to apply the values of industry and desperate effort into the act of novel-reading. Which is not to say that I haven't had to do my fair share of reading under duress--that's definitely an integral part of my experience as a comparative literature student. But something about Big Fat Novels demands the succor of an extended period of time, at least for me. It took me eight months to read Augie March in senior year of high school; I would dip into Bellow's dense, antic, rolling prose for an hour each night, or less, with many-week intervals in which I simply went around the business of my life and came back to it when I remembered.
The result of that attachment is a kind of sentiment that links the book, somehow more intimately, with the time I read it. It's true that rapid reading, which I often engage in and allowed me to devour The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, hungrily, on buses in one weekend and practically lick my fingers, leaves a vivid and dreamlike impression. The product of years of writing falls feverishly on you, leaving a knotted jumble of images and incidents, a muzzy sense of "style" enveloping your memories of the book without individual phrases and sentences. But slow reading--lazy reading, unindustrial and casual, spread out over months--confers an unseen benefit. Reading Augie, I had the sense of a life running parallel to mine. Neatly in the confines of the book, Augie had the air of an occasional confidante, someone I checked in with once in awhile. I was desperately enraged at that book at one point: Augie spends the first three hundred pages or so in dense, urban Chicago, pinging like a stoop-ball through the city having unlikely adventures. Then midway through the book he follows a black-haired woman to, no shit, write about iguanas in Mexico. This was practically the last straw for me; I threw the book across the room and let it lie dormant for a few months. Then I came back, penitent, and sat with Augie through Mexico and the iguanas and his flight to France. At the end of the book Augie is sitting on a train. He left me then--on the train past the end of the book, perpetually in motion. The feeling I had then was a feeling of bereavement--that Augie, my antic, nomadic hero, was finally still.
The Magic Mountain, a Thomas Mann mammoth which took me a similar period of time the next year, had a different feeling almost. The book takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and chronicles in exasperating detail the experience of one Hans Castorp, in the sanatorium for seven years. Almost nothing happens. He speaks to the woman of his dreams, a fellow patient, exactly once. In untranslated French. He smokes cigarettes without relish (all the tuberculosis patients smoke, gotta love the 1800s) and has interminable conversations about ideas. I complained bitterly about this book (my family will attest to how much I complain over my books) but finished it out of some dogged sense of duty and curiosity. In the end, Hans also leaves the sanatorium. On a train. Indefinably changed. I read the book on my year in Israel, miserable over the expectation that I would learn Torah for twelve hours every day and even more miserable at my failure to live up to that. The big, humpy mountains, like dried-out breasts, lowered their slanted brows at me, and the date trees withered under the sun. The plows were grey with dust and the cowbarns were biley with shit. I liked to dip in to Hans's sanatorium, watch him eat platters of smoked meats and steal the X-rays of his beloved and babble on and on about philosophy. It was a kind of exasperating peace, a restless stillness to contend with mine. I battled that book to the quick through three consecutive copies (one fell apart and one was lost and one remains on my shelf at home, with the rest of my spiny conquests). A novel read over time creates a sense of parallel universes. Creates a distilled past that enters the bloodstream of your present, and makes your life a queer amalgam of both.
Reading, in the conventional wisdom, will shortly be or already has become a rare experience precisely because of the time it takes. In a digital era of ease and leisure so it goes, the time that a novel takes up has become demode, burdensome, impossible. I guess it's no surprise to anyone that I am a Luddite about everything and especially my books (no surprise Kindle presents please), but to me it's precisely that burden--or gift--of parallel time that give novels their value. It reminds you of the arc of your life, present as it passes, logs the growth of its characters in a way that reminds you of your own growth.
One of my favorite Big Books as a kid was "Sophie's World," a novel that was also an introduction to some of the major ideas of Western philosophy. Fittingly for a book that dealt with the quandaries of being, the novel ends with the heroine discovering she is in a book and having an attendant crisis that dissolves the narrative. Reading that growing up -- well, it freaked me out, but also made me wistful. Like a lot of articulate and highly self-centered people, I've often imagined being a character in a book, with the end of the novel being my death. But something that intrigues me about these novels is that the novel doesn't end in death; the death is implicit, in metaphor, but it isn't written out. The fact that the novels end before the life does--just as I finish a novel before I finish my own life--implies that there is living beyond what can be captured on the page, any page, even a perfect one. I cherish the illusion that Augie and Hans Castorp and Vronsky and Levin are all alive somewhere, animated by the act of my reading, like Neil Gaiman's idea that gods we believe in are physically created by that belief. Regardless, I've had the pleasure of living in their lives as well as in mine for awhile, a gift granted to me in exchange for the time I put in, the months I colored with their adventures. To me, great novels (although Fat Novels are not always great novels) retain their relevance precisely because they demand an outmoded sacrifice of time. I hope to always be ready to give that to them.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
it's official
I have bought my tickets to Odessa, and there I shall be, from June 10th to August 17th. The thought is unbearably exciting, if terrifying. I will be alone in a city by the sea, one that by all accounts hit its heyday in the nineteen-twenties, but for the time being is full of beaches, nightclubs, and monuments to dead writers. I'm bursting with excitement for the hundred stairs that loom up from the sea, for the stuffy environs of the Jewish museum, for the soft lime buildings, for the black and winsome decrepitude of Babel's infamous Moldovanka neighborhood, the site of Judaism's most colorful criminals. I'm excited to see the old offices of Ha-Shiloah, the first real Hebrew periodical, if they still exist.
I'm excited -- scared, excited-- to write my first novel, which is my plan for the time. I'll be writing the story of Moyshe Berger, Hebrew poet, born, like Xena Warrior Princess, in the heat of battle -- or, at any rate, pogrom. I'll be landing in two thousand eleven and writing my ears off back into the nineteenth century, borne (as Gatsby) ceaselessly back into the past. The waves beating on the port, the bazaar you have to hide your wallet so carefully when you walk through, the mayonnaise-doused food, slippers on your feet when you're a guest, and some apartment I haven't rented yet and can scarcely imagine -- the stuff of lonely and marvelous adventure. I seem to always undertake my adventures alone in the summers--or at any rate with no one I know along. Everything feels slightly unreal, sun-crisped and very un-Cambridge, and I take all the colors back with me to be sorted through at a later date.
Ten days or so after I arrive -- as if to punctuate the foreignness of the endeavor--is the Eve of Ivan Kupala, which I've seen depicted with beauty and nostalgia in the films of Dovzhenko already.
Here's the Wikipedia description:
"Kupala Day (Feast of St. John the Baptist; Russian: Иван-Купала; Belarusian: Купалле; Ukrainian: Іван Купала; Polish: Noc Kupały or Noc Świętojańska) is celebrated in Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine currently on the night of 6/7 July in the Gregorian or New Style calendar, which is 23/24 June in the Julian or Old Style calendar still used by many Orthodox Churches. Calendar-wise, it is opposite to the winter solstice holiday Korochun. The celebration relates to the summer solstice when nights are the shortest.
...
Bonfire festivals! Wreaths in the hair of Ukrainian maidens! And me, little chubby dark Jew, catapulting herself into the middle of it. I can hardly wait. Maybe a fern will flower just for me.
I'm excited -- scared, excited-- to write my first novel, which is my plan for the time. I'll be writing the story of Moyshe Berger, Hebrew poet, born, like Xena Warrior Princess, in the heat of battle -- or, at any rate, pogrom. I'll be landing in two thousand eleven and writing my ears off back into the nineteenth century, borne (as Gatsby) ceaselessly back into the past. The waves beating on the port, the bazaar you have to hide your wallet so carefully when you walk through, the mayonnaise-doused food, slippers on your feet when you're a guest, and some apartment I haven't rented yet and can scarcely imagine -- the stuff of lonely and marvelous adventure. I seem to always undertake my adventures alone in the summers--or at any rate with no one I know along. Everything feels slightly unreal, sun-crisped and very un-Cambridge, and I take all the colors back with me to be sorted through at a later date.
Ten days or so after I arrive -- as if to punctuate the foreignness of the endeavor--is the Eve of Ivan Kupala, which I've seen depicted with beauty and nostalgia in the films of Dovzhenko already.
Here's the Wikipedia description:
"Kupala Day (Feast of St. John the Baptist; Russian: Иван-Купала; Belarusian: Купалле; Ukrainian: Іван Купала; Polish: Noc Kupały or Noc Świętojańska) is celebrated in Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine currently on the night of 6/7 July in the Gregorian or New Style calendar, which is 23/24 June in the Julian or Old Style calendar still used by many Orthodox Churches. Calendar-wise, it is opposite to the winter solstice holiday Korochun. The celebration relates to the summer solstice when nights are the shortest.
...
Many of the rites related to this holiday within Slavic religious beliefs, due to the ancient Kupala rites, are connected with the role of water in fertility and ritual purification. Youths would jump over the flames of bonfires. Girls would float wreaths of flowers often lit with candles on rivers and would attempt to gain foresight into their relationship fortunes from the flow patterns of the flowers on the river. Men may attempt to capture the wreaths, in the hope of capturing the interest of the woman who floated the wreath.
There is an ancient Kupala belief, that the eve of Ivan Kupala is the only time of the year when ferns bloom. Prosperity, luck, discernment and power would befall on whoever finds a fern flower. Therefore, on that night village folks would roam through the forests in search of magical herbs and especially the elusive fern flower Chervona Ruta."
Bonfire festivals! Wreaths in the hair of Ukrainian maidens! And me, little chubby dark Jew, catapulting herself into the middle of it. I can hardly wait. Maybe a fern will flower just for me.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
HOLY CRAP WHOA SCHOLAR MOMENT
so i'm up at 3am after working on my junior paper for basically two days straight, freakin out too hard to really write, reading myself into corners upon corners.
finally I am translating in lieu of getting perhaps to the meat of my paper and I come across this ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND RADICAL QUOTE by the dude I am writing about, Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, called by some the Hebrew Nietzsche, a guy who was forced to divorce his first wife at the age of nineteen for reading forbidden books,
a guy who learned german and french and hebrew et alius and produced a troubling and magnificent corpus largely untranslated into english,
and here i am just working away at him like a devil on a handsaw for my obscure reasons
and here is this marvelous countermyth against all those stagnant narratives of rabbinic judaism
this argument for strength that was to closely prefigure some of the ideals surrounding the early pioneers of Israel, obviously somewhat derived from Nietzsche whom he read a lot of but just INTERESTING AND AWESOME especially for people familiar with biblical narratives as i have been lucky or strange enough to have my head soaked in CHECK THIS OUT especially jews especially:
haunting.
amazing.
finally I am translating in lieu of getting perhaps to the meat of my paper and I come across this ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND RADICAL QUOTE by the dude I am writing about, Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, called by some the Hebrew Nietzsche, a guy who was forced to divorce his first wife at the age of nineteen for reading forbidden books,
a guy who learned german and french and hebrew et alius and produced a troubling and magnificent corpus largely untranslated into english,
and here i am just working away at him like a devil on a handsaw for my obscure reasons
and here is this marvelous countermyth against all those stagnant narratives of rabbinic judaism
this argument for strength that was to closely prefigure some of the ideals surrounding the early pioneers of Israel, obviously somewhat derived from Nietzsche whom he read a lot of but just INTERESTING AND AWESOME especially for people familiar with biblical narratives as i have been lucky or strange enough to have my head soaked in CHECK THIS OUT especially jews especially:
We had two kings. One ruled over all of Israel, and the other began his command as king of Judah: David and Saul! Saul was head and shoulders taller than the rest of the nation, a man of sentiment, great and brave of spirit. …when he fell upon his sword before the Philistines could abuse his body, then all in us was silent, astonished at his fortitude of spirit. And David, a small youth, ruddy, was not fated to be chosen as king by the people. He was taken from his flock of sheep and rolled in the filth of rebellion, until he rose to greatness; he brought down the tribe of Saul in blood, ousting one and burying another. He made promises and broke them, bloodshed was in his house, malice and separation between him and the people. … And hark to this: Saul did not sing a song to God, on the day God saved him from his enemy David; and when the spirit of God was upon him, he commanded another to take the lyre in his hands and play before him. –But David the king was the sweet singer of Israel, and the creator of prayers for innumerable generations. Who understands this contradiction—perhaps the greatest sinner is also the most prayerful. Prayer comes to man for his mistakes! He who kills the shepherd and takes the flock—it is his heart that strikes at him and he who pours out his heart.
I see before me Saul the King of Israel, sitting and leaning upon his spear, and his eyes gazing at the hills of Israel. Many great thoughts are in his heart, of his throne, of his kingdom and of the future of the nation, which differs from that which secures its path by the ways of the histories of our people, and he sees the shadow coming from a distance, the shadow of David. –What a song would have remained of his divulgence, had the king opened his mouth and given us from his soul a song of his terrible strength. And David inherits him in life, and after his death is our mouthpiece… God, what I have loved and what I have hated! The lyric of the sinner and he who causes others to sin comes to cleanse our lives. The songs of our man became our prayers. Instead of the song of expansion and conquest of life in strength, the song of outpouring and the fracture of life. We shall not sing, unless we pray; we shall not live in trumpet-blasts of strength, but in lament… … Our weeping, our entreaties, are abundant; but of the songs of expansion, that which does not come out of the suffering of life, but conquers life—we have not one of its attributes. We cannot live; but how quick and resourceful we are at blessing and cursing…
haunting.
amazing.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
nabokov and me
I am an unabashed Russophile. Anyone who knows me knows it. Chances are if you see me in the street I will be wearing my roommate's frayed herringbone coat, smoking a cigarette with one side of my mouth and with the other side muttering absently in Russian--whether recently memorized vocabulary words, lines from movies, songs from Kazan' (the Russian city in which I spent last summer), or just a simple muttered "nu, chto eto takoe?!" ("What the hell is this?!)" --the latter provoked by Boston's hyperfickle weather.
As to why I love Russia so much--the language and the culture--despite the former's difficulty and the latter's abundance of problems... This is something hard to answer, like any complex love developed over a number of years. I do know why I started studying it -- the literature. Ruslit is a glorious discipline unto itself, and its wealth is surprising, given that it developed relatively late. Russian literature was largely nonexistent until the nineteenth century; something about the largely illiterate population (but then again, most world populations were illiterate relatively recently), or the way nobles were so fiercely subject to the tsar, or the relative isolation from the influences of the West until Peter the Great had its way... regardless, Ruslit's first real hero was arguably Gogol, anyway a Ukrainian, vernacular and pungent, born in 1809 and matchlessly adept at pissing off the tsar. Russian literature was an infant compared to English literature, German lit, or French lit; and yet somehow even in its infancy it came out dancing. A clumsy Cossack reel. Reeking terribly, and speaking fiercely, an extreme and volatile condition of humanity. Dostoevsky's heroes are gnomic and coarse, wheeling, blind-sided and half-drunk, into their terrible fates. When I read these guys in high school, and also especially the bitter tonic of Soviet poets, I knew I had to learn the language they could pulse and be in. So I plunged into six cases and a set of phonics I described in a freshman-year blog post as "a glorious mouthful of throat cold." I haven't looked back since.
But all this brings me back to a certain Nabokov. He's always on people's lips, especially studiers of Russian, and especially around here, where he did something private and fetishistic with collecting butterflies; a friend unsuspecting of my animosities sent me an email when the Crimson (our newspaper) was doing an article about him, asking whether, given the sympathies mentioned above, I studied Nabokov.
Well.
I hate Vladimir Nabokov. I mean, insofar as you can hate someone who is (a) dead and (b) not a known committer of heinous crimes and (c) taught at Harvard and collected butterflies.
I am a compulsive finisher of books. It is near-physically painful for me to put down a book before I've finished it, and especially given how bumbling I am with objects this has resulted in more than one tearful loss on my part. I have finished books that took me eight months to a year to finish; I have finished books that I put down for seven months for a breather in the interim; I have finished books I actively and outwardly scorned, complaining all the while. But I just couldn't finish Lolita.
I got past all the tricky bits, too--the whole car chase, the florid word games, the steamiest of the rapes. But something in me snapped when poor pregnant Lolita was taking her stand and I just couldn't go on.
I guess in my head Nabokov is always, oddly, paired with Steinbeck--someone he would have undoubtedly scorned. Nabokov was all about scorning--there's one magnificently crabby interview with him in the Paris Review which is more than worth a full read.
A choice quote is here:
etc.
Anyway, what's in common between Nabokov and Steinbeck? Arguably nothing, besides some passion for cars in an American milieu, a kind of restlessness. No doubt Nabokov would have condemned Steinbeck as a simpering American--with his cutting word, "poshlost," about which more later in a subsequent post. (The quick definition, also in that interview: " Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ") I find pairing the two, Steinbeck and Nabokov, in my head is most intriguing because of a fundamental opposition. Maybe one I invented. I read them in subsequent summers--I read East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath on my farm-summer, working out in the fields and reading into the setting sun. And I tried to stumble through Pale Fire and quit, puttered out, in my summer in Russia.
I guess what really bugs me about Nabokov--something I can't be mollified in by his stylistic pyrotechnics-- is ... well, the cumulative effect of reading too much of his work is a kind of attrition for your respect for humanity. At least mine. Nabokov is a jeerer; which is all well and good, there's a lot to jeer at in every society. But too much jeering and your face gets stuck in a grimace...Tolstoy always said that he intended Anna Karenina to be a very different book; Anna became so sympathetic a character almost of her own accord. In a piece of Nabokov's writing, everything feels very tightly controlled. And the jeer shows through everything. Tanned Lolita, the embodiment of temptation, is a cruel joke; the one book of his I've managed to finish, Laughter in the Dark, tellingly culminates in a man being blinded, then shot, by his kittenish sixteen-year-old lover. At the end of the day, the fate of the poor lecher is meant to be funny--his guts spilling on the floor, and the little lady absconding with the gun, into the sunset with the man he's been inadvertently financing her flings with. But I find it hard--maybe I take myself too seriously, am too easily offended--I find it hard to view a human being as a punch line. The joke falls flat, hollow, and makes a ghastly echo. I'm too ready to forgive the poshlost in others, recognizing it so fully in myself.
Which is where Steinbeck comes in. What made Steinbeck so powerful for me, in a very lonely summer when I tripped all over myself in a grotesque parody of manual labor and chopped rhubarb until I couldn't see straight, was the power of his forgiveness. For every crude broad character, for every archetypical exchange, there was a bracing dose of that powerful love, that redeeming love. When Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man at her breast at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, it's puzzling, jarring, even shocking--but it's not a punch line. The force of love courses through the breasts of the girl, as through human hearts suddenly reminded of their purpose.
Perhaps it's a flaw of mine that I look to literature for that kind of moral renewal. And there are a lot of writings I enjoy for their stylistic merit or pure entertainment value, outside of any spiritual resonance. But there's something about the active negation of that resonance in Nabokov--that willingness to utterly write off those who don't fit into his criteria, both in personal consideration and in his works, that makes me shudder in repulsion. Then any stylistic innovation feels like adding insult to injury; the ugliness of the statement is not made more palatable by its added fripperies, in fact the opposite. I guess I feel that literature, too, has an element of moral responsibility--one that it can evade but not utterly abdicate, or actively renege. I recognize that I might be part of a prudish minority on this, and lumped in with the poshliest of the poshlusty. But I think literature undermines its own relevance, already precarious, when it denies its own responsibilities.
Which is not to say I think that literature needs to be all sweetness and light--far from it. I will gladly climb down into the pit with Ivan Karamazov, and wallow in his importunate drunkenness. As long as I can stand with him and say to Aloshya,
"I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. "
As to why I love Russia so much--the language and the culture--despite the former's difficulty and the latter's abundance of problems... This is something hard to answer, like any complex love developed over a number of years. I do know why I started studying it -- the literature. Ruslit is a glorious discipline unto itself, and its wealth is surprising, given that it developed relatively late. Russian literature was largely nonexistent until the nineteenth century; something about the largely illiterate population (but then again, most world populations were illiterate relatively recently), or the way nobles were so fiercely subject to the tsar, or the relative isolation from the influences of the West until Peter the Great had its way... regardless, Ruslit's first real hero was arguably Gogol, anyway a Ukrainian, vernacular and pungent, born in 1809 and matchlessly adept at pissing off the tsar. Russian literature was an infant compared to English literature, German lit, or French lit; and yet somehow even in its infancy it came out dancing. A clumsy Cossack reel. Reeking terribly, and speaking fiercely, an extreme and volatile condition of humanity. Dostoevsky's heroes are gnomic and coarse, wheeling, blind-sided and half-drunk, into their terrible fates. When I read these guys in high school, and also especially the bitter tonic of Soviet poets, I knew I had to learn the language they could pulse and be in. So I plunged into six cases and a set of phonics I described in a freshman-year blog post as "a glorious mouthful of throat cold." I haven't looked back since.
But all this brings me back to a certain Nabokov. He's always on people's lips, especially studiers of Russian, and especially around here, where he did something private and fetishistic with collecting butterflies; a friend unsuspecting of my animosities sent me an email when the Crimson (our newspaper) was doing an article about him, asking whether, given the sympathies mentioned above, I studied Nabokov.
Well.
I hate Vladimir Nabokov. I mean, insofar as you can hate someone who is (a) dead and (b) not a known committer of heinous crimes and (c) taught at Harvard and collected butterflies.
I am a compulsive finisher of books. It is near-physically painful for me to put down a book before I've finished it, and especially given how bumbling I am with objects this has resulted in more than one tearful loss on my part. I have finished books that took me eight months to a year to finish; I have finished books that I put down for seven months for a breather in the interim; I have finished books I actively and outwardly scorned, complaining all the while. But I just couldn't finish Lolita.
I got past all the tricky bits, too--the whole car chase, the florid word games, the steamiest of the rapes. But something in me snapped when poor pregnant Lolita was taking her stand and I just couldn't go on.
I guess in my head Nabokov is always, oddly, paired with Steinbeck--someone he would have undoubtedly scorned. Nabokov was all about scorning--there's one magnificently crabby interview with him in the Paris Review which is more than worth a full read.
A choice quote is here:
NABOKOV
... Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.
...INTERVIEWER
What have you learned from Joyce?
NABOKOV
Nothing.
etc.
Anyway, what's in common between Nabokov and Steinbeck? Arguably nothing, besides some passion for cars in an American milieu, a kind of restlessness. No doubt Nabokov would have condemned Steinbeck as a simpering American--with his cutting word, "poshlost," about which more later in a subsequent post. (The quick definition, also in that interview: " Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ") I find pairing the two, Steinbeck and Nabokov, in my head is most intriguing because of a fundamental opposition. Maybe one I invented. I read them in subsequent summers--I read East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath on my farm-summer, working out in the fields and reading into the setting sun. And I tried to stumble through Pale Fire and quit, puttered out, in my summer in Russia.
I guess what really bugs me about Nabokov--something I can't be mollified in by his stylistic pyrotechnics-- is ... well, the cumulative effect of reading too much of his work is a kind of attrition for your respect for humanity. At least mine. Nabokov is a jeerer; which is all well and good, there's a lot to jeer at in every society. But too much jeering and your face gets stuck in a grimace...Tolstoy always said that he intended Anna Karenina to be a very different book; Anna became so sympathetic a character almost of her own accord. In a piece of Nabokov's writing, everything feels very tightly controlled. And the jeer shows through everything. Tanned Lolita, the embodiment of temptation, is a cruel joke; the one book of his I've managed to finish, Laughter in the Dark, tellingly culminates in a man being blinded, then shot, by his kittenish sixteen-year-old lover. At the end of the day, the fate of the poor lecher is meant to be funny--his guts spilling on the floor, and the little lady absconding with the gun, into the sunset with the man he's been inadvertently financing her flings with. But I find it hard--maybe I take myself too seriously, am too easily offended--I find it hard to view a human being as a punch line. The joke falls flat, hollow, and makes a ghastly echo. I'm too ready to forgive the poshlost in others, recognizing it so fully in myself.
Which is where Steinbeck comes in. What made Steinbeck so powerful for me, in a very lonely summer when I tripped all over myself in a grotesque parody of manual labor and chopped rhubarb until I couldn't see straight, was the power of his forgiveness. For every crude broad character, for every archetypical exchange, there was a bracing dose of that powerful love, that redeeming love. When Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man at her breast at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, it's puzzling, jarring, even shocking--but it's not a punch line. The force of love courses through the breasts of the girl, as through human hearts suddenly reminded of their purpose.
Perhaps it's a flaw of mine that I look to literature for that kind of moral renewal. And there are a lot of writings I enjoy for their stylistic merit or pure entertainment value, outside of any spiritual resonance. But there's something about the active negation of that resonance in Nabokov--that willingness to utterly write off those who don't fit into his criteria, both in personal consideration and in his works, that makes me shudder in repulsion. Then any stylistic innovation feels like adding insult to injury; the ugliness of the statement is not made more palatable by its added fripperies, in fact the opposite. I guess I feel that literature, too, has an element of moral responsibility--one that it can evade but not utterly abdicate, or actively renege. I recognize that I might be part of a prudish minority on this, and lumped in with the poshliest of the poshlusty. But I think literature undermines its own relevance, already precarious, when it denies its own responsibilities.
Which is not to say I think that literature needs to be all sweetness and light--far from it. I will gladly climb down into the pit with Ivan Karamazov, and wallow in his importunate drunkenness. As long as I can stand with him and say to Aloshya,
"I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. "
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