A former student from the course, Ross Wetzsteon, contributed to the TriQuarterly special issue a fond remembrance of Nabokov as teacher. " 'Caress the details,' Nabokov would utter, rolling the r, his voice the rough caress of a cat's tongue, 'the divine details!' " The lecturer insisted on changes in every translation, and would scribble an antic diagram on the blackboard with a mock plea that the students "copy this exactly as I draw it." His accent caused half the class to write "epidramatic" where Nabokov had said "epigrammatic." Wetzsteon concludes, "Nabokov was a great teacher not because he taught the subject well but because he exemplified, and stimulated in his students, a profound and loving attitude toward it." Another survivor of Literature 311-312 has recalled how Nabokov would begin the term with the words, "The seats are numbered. I would like you to choose your seat and stick to it. This is because I would like to link up your faces with your names. All satisfied with their seats? O.K. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God's sake take notes." Before an exam, he would say, "One clear head, one blue book, ink, think, abbreviate obvious names, for example, Madame Bovary. Do not pad ignorance with eloquence. Unless medical evidence is produced nobody will be permitted to retire to the W. C." As a lecturer he was enthusiastic, electric, evangelical. My own wife, who sat in the last classes Nabokov taught—the spring and fall terms of 1958—before, suddenly enriched by Lolita, he took a leave of absence that never ended, was so deeply under his spell that she attended one lecture with a fever high enough to send her to the infirmary immediately afterward. "I felt he could teach me how to read. I believed he could give me something that would last all my life—and it did." She cannot to this day take Thomas Mann seriously, and has not surrendered a jot of the central dogma she culled from Literature 311-312: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash."
Yet even his rare ideal student might fall prey to Nabokov's mischief. When our Miss Ruggles, a tender twenty, went up at the end of one class to retrieve her blue book from the mess of graded "prelims" strewn there, she could not find it, and at last had to approach the professor. Nabokov stood tall and apparently abstracted on the platform above her, fussing with his papers. She begged his pardon and said that her exam didn't seem to be here. He bent low, eyebrows raised. "And what is your name?" She told him, and with prestidigitational suddenness he produced her blue book from behind his back. It was marked 97. "I wanted to see," he informed her, "what a genius looked like." And coolly he looked her up and down, while she blushed; that was the extent of their conversation. She, by the way, does not remember the course being referred to as "Dirty Lit." On campus it was called, simply, "Nabokov."
Seven years after his retirement, Nabokov remembered the course with mixed feelings:
My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with the students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations.... Vainly I tried to replace my appearances at the lectern by taped records to be played over the college radio. On the other hand, I deeply enjoyed the chuckle of appreciation in this or that warm spot of the lecture hall at this or that point of my lecture. My best reward comes from those former students of mine who ten or fifteen years later write to me to say that they now understand what I wanted of them when I taught them to visualize Emma Bovary's mistranslated hairdo or the arrangement of rooms in the Samsa household....
In more than one interview handed down, on 3 x 5 cards, from the Montreux-Palace, the publication of a book based upon his Cornell lectures was promised, but (with such other works in progress as his illustrated treatise on Butterflies in Art and the novel Original of Laura) the project still hovered at the air at the time of the great man's death in the summer of 1977.
Now here, wonderfully, the lectures are. And still redolent of the classroom odors that an authorial revision might have scoured away. Nothing one has heard or read about them has quite foretold their striking, enveloping quality of pedagogic warmth. The youth and, somehow, femininity of the audience have been gathered into the urgent, ardent instructor's voice: "The work with this group has been a particularly pleasant association between the fountain of my voice and a garden of ears—some open, others closed, many very receptive, a few merely ornamental, but all of them human and divine." For longish stretches we are being read to, as young Vladimir Vladimirovich was read aloud to by his father, his mother, and Mademoiselle. During these stretches of quotation we must imagine the accent, the infectious rumbling pleasure, the theatrical power of this lecturer who, now portly and balding, was once an athlete and who partook of the Russian tradition of flamboyant oral presentation. Elsewhere, the intonation, the twinkle, the sneer, the excited pounce are present in the prose, a liquid speaking prose effortlessly bright and prone to purl into metaphor and pun: a dazzling demonstration, for those lucky Cornell students in the remote, clean-cut fifties, of the irresistibly artistic sensibility. Nabokov's reputation as a literary critic, heretofore circumscribed, in English, by his laborious monument to Pushkin and his haughty dismissals of Freud and Faulkner and Mann, benefits from the evidence of these generous and patient appreciations, as they range from his delineation of Jane Austen's "dimpled" style and his hearty identification with Dickens's gusto to his reverent explication of Flaubert's counterpoint and his charmingly awed—like that of a boy dismantling his first watch—laying bare of Joyce's busily ticking synchronizations. Nabokov took early and lasting delight in the exact sciences, and his blissful hours spent within the luminous hush of microscopic examination carry over into his delicate tracing of the horse theme in Madame Bovary or the twinned dreams of Bloom and Dedalus; lepidoptery placed him in a world beyond common sense, where on a butterfly's hindwing "a large eyespot imitates a drop of liquid with such uncanny perfection that a line which crosses the wing is slightly displaced at the exact stretch where it passes through," where "when a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in." He asked, then, of his own art and the art of others a something extra —a flourish of mimetic magic or deceptive doubleness —that was supernatural and surreal in the root sense of these degraded words. Where there was not this shimmer of the gratuitous, of the superhuman and nonutilitarian, he turned harshly impatient, in terms that imply a lack of feature, a blankness peculiar to the inanimate: "Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies ..." Where he did find this shimmer, producing its tingle in the spine, his enthusiasm went far beyond the academic, and he became an inspired, and surely inspiring, teacher.
Lectures that so wittily introduce themselves, and that make no secret of their prejudices and premises, need little further introduction. The fifties, with their emphasis upon private space, their disdainful regard of public concerns, their sense of solitary, disengaged artistry, and their New-Criticism faith that all essential information is contained within the work itself, were a more congenial theatre for Nabokov's ideas than the following decades might have been. But in any decade Nabokov's approach would have seemed radical in the degree of severance between reality and art that it supposes. "The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales —and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.... literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf wolf and there was no wolf behind him." But the boy who cried wolf became an irritation to his tribe and was allowed to perish. Another priest of the imagination, Wallace Stevens, could decree that "if we desire to formulate an accurate theory of poetry, we find it necessary to examine the structure of reality, because reality is a central reference for poetry." Whereas for Nabokov, reality has less a structure than a pattern, a habit, of deception: "Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives." In his aesthetic, small heed is paid to the lowly delight of recognition, and the blunt virtue of verity. For Nabokov, the world—art's raw material—i
s itself an artistic creation, so insubstantial and illusionistic that he seems to imply a masterpiece can be spun from thin air, by pure act of the artist's imperial will. Yet works like Madame Bovary and Ulysses glow with the heat of resistance that the will to manipulate meets in banal, heavily actual subjects. Acquaintance, abhorrence, and the helpless love we give our own bodies and fates join in these transmuted scenes of Dublin and Rouen; away from them, in works like Salammbo and Finnegans Wake, Joyce and Flaubert yield to their dreaming, dandyish selves and are swallowed by their hobbies. In his passionate reading of "The Metamorphosis," Nabokov deprecates as "mediocrity surrounding genius" Gregor Samsa's philistine and bourgeois family without acknowledging, at the very heart of Kafka's poignance, how much Gregor needs and adores these possibly crass, but also vital and definite, inhabitants of the mundane. The ambivalence omnipresent in Kafka's rich tragi-comedy has no place in Nabokov's credo, though in artistic practice a work like Lolita brims with it, and with a formidable density of observed detail—"sense data selected, permeated, and grouped," in his own formula.
The Cornell years were productive ones for Nabokov. After arriving there he completed Speak, Memory. It was in an Ithaca backyard that his wife prevented him from burning the difficult beginnings of Lolita, which he completed in 1953. The good-humored stories of Pnin were written entirely at Cornell, the heroic researches attending his translation of Eugene Onegin were largely carried out in her libraries, and Cornell is reflected fondly in the college milieu of Pale Fire. One might imagine that his move two hundred miles inland from the East Coast, with its frequent summer excursions to the Far West, gave him a franker purchase on his adopted "lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country" (to quote Humbert Humbert). Nabokov was nearly fifty when he came to Ithaca, and had ample reason for artistic exhaustion. He had been exiled twice, driven from Russia by Bolshevism and from Europe by Hitler, and had created a brilliant body of work in what amounted to a dying language, for an emigre public that was inexorably disappearing. Yet in this his second American decade he managed to bring an entirely new audacity and panache to American literature, to help revive the native vein of fantasy, and to bestow upon himself riches and an international reputation. It is pleasant to suspect that the rereading compelled by the preparation of these lectures at the outset of the decade, and the admonitions and intoxications rehearsed with each year's delivery, contributed to the splendid redefining of Nabokov's creative powers; and to detect, in his fiction of those years, something of Austen's nicety, Dickens's brio, and Stevenson's "delightful winey taste," added to and spicing up the Continental stock of Nabokov's own inimitable brew. His favorite American authors were, he once allowed, Melville and Hawthorne, and we may regret that he never lectured upon them. But let us be grateful for the lectures that were called into being and that are here given permanent form, with another volume to come. Tinted windows overlooking seven masterpieces, they are as enhancing as "the harlequin pattern of colored panes" through which Nabokov as a child, being read to on the porch of his summer home, would gaze out at his family's garden.
LECTURES ON LITERATURE
My course, among other things, is
a kind of detective investigation of
the mystery of literary structures.
Good Readers
and Good Writers
"How to be a Good Reader" or "Kindness to Authors"—something of that sort might serve to provide a subtitle for these various discussions of various authors, for my plan is to deal lovingly, in loving and lingering detail, with several European masterpieces. A hundred years ago, Flaubert in a letter to his mistress made the following remark: Comme l'on serait savant si l'on connaissait bien seulement cinq a six livres: "What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books."
In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connection with the worlds we already know. When this new world has been closely studied, then and only then let us examine its links with other worlds, other branches of knowledge.
Another question: Can we expect to glean information about places and times from a novel? Can anybody be so naive as to think he or she can learn anything about the past from those buxom best-sellers that are hawked around by book clubs under the heading of historical novels? But what about the masterpieces? Can we rely on Jane Austen's picture of landowning England with baronets and landscaped grounds when all she knew was a clergyman's parlor? And Bleak House, that fantastic romance within a fantastic London, can we call it a study of London a hundred years ago? Certainly not. And the same holds for other such novels in this series. The truth is that great novels are great fairy tales—and the novels in this series are supreme fairy tales.
Time and space, the colors of the seasons, the movements of muscles and minds, all these are for writers of genius (as far as we can guess and I trust we guess right) not traditional notions which may be borrowed from the circulating library of public truths but a series of unique surprises which master artists have learned to express in their own unique way. To minor authors is left the ornamentation of the commonplace: these do not bother about any reinventing of the world; they merely try to squeeze the best they can out of a given order of things, out of traditional patterns of fiction. The various combinations these minor authors are able to produce within these set limits may be quite amusing in a mild ephemeral way because minor readers like to recognize their own ideas in a pleasing disguise. But the real writer, the fellow who sends planets spinning and models a man asleep and eagerly tampers with the sleeper's rib, that kind of author has no given values at his disposal: he must create them himself. The art of writing is a very futile business if it does not imply first of all the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes) but does not exist at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says "go!'' allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to map it and to name the natural objects it contains. Those berries there are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal or, more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain—and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.
One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz—ten definitions of a reader, and from these ten the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember .the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader:
1. The reader should belong to a book club.
2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine.
3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle.
4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none.
5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The reader should be a budding author.
7. The read
er should have imagination.
8. The reader should have memory.
9. The reader should have a dictionary.
10. The reader should have some artistic sense.
The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense—which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.
Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as dear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
Lectures on Literature Page 3