Now, this being so, we should ponder the question how does the mind work when the sullen reader is confronted by the sunny book. First, the sullen mood melts away, and for better or worse the reader enters into the spirit of the game. The effort to begin a book, especially if it is praised by people whom the young reader secretly deems to be too old-fashioned or too serious, this effort is often difficult to make; but once it is made, rewards are various and abundant. Since the master artist used his imagination in creating his book, it is natural and fair that the consumer of a book should use his imagination too.
There are, however, at least two varieties of imagination in the reader's case. So let us see which one of the two is the right one to use in reading a book. First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature. (There are various subvarieties here, in this first section of emotional reading.) A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.
So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible. Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective. For instance, you sitting there may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare. But what I mean is that the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination and this he does by trying to get clear the specific world the author places at his disposal. We must see things and hear things, we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, the manners of an author's people. The color of Fanny Price's eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of her cold little room are important.
We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you right now that the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone is apt to be too subjective in his attitude towards a book, and so a scientific coolness of judgment will temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be reader is utterly devoid of passion and patience—of an artist's passion and a scientist's patience—he will hardly enjoy great literature.
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction only follows Nature's lead.
Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.
There are three points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that predominates and makes him a major writer.
To the storyteller we turn for entertainment, for mental excitement of the simplest kind, for emotional participation, for the pleasure of traveling in some remote region in space or time. A slightly different though not necessarily higher mind looks for the teacher in the writer. Propagandist, moralist, prophet—this is the rising sequence. We may go to the teacher not only for moral education but also for direct knowledge, for simple facts. Alas, I have known people whose purpose in reading the French and Russian novelists was to learn something about life in gay Paree or in sad Russia. Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a great enchanter, and it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the pattern of his novels or poems.
The three facets of the great writer—magic, story, lesson—are prone to blend in one impression of unified and unique radiance, since the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story, in the very marrow of thought. There are masterpieces of dry, limpid, organized thought which provoke in us an artistic quiver quite as strongly as a novel like Mansfield Park does or as any rich flow of Dickensian sensual imagery. It seems to me that a good formula to test the quality of a novel is, in the long run, a merging of the precision of poetry and the intuition of science. In order to bask in that magic a wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading. Then with a pleasure which is both sensual and intellectual we shall watch the artist build his castle of cards and watch the castle of cards become a castle of beautiful steel and glass.
Notes for Nabokov's introductory remarks to his students
JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)
Mansfield Park
(1814)
Opening page of Nabokov's teaching copy of Mansfield Park
Mansfield Park was composed in Chawton, Hampshire. It was begun in February 1811 and finished soon after June 1813; that is to say, it took Jane Austen about twenty-eight months to complete a novel containing some 160 thousand words divided into forty-eight chapters. It was published in 1814 (the same year as Scott's Waverley and Byron's Corsair), in three volumes. These three parts, though the conventional method of publication at the time, in fact stress the structure, the playlike form of the book, a comedy of manners and mischief, of smiles and sighs, in three acts made up, respectively, of eighteen, thirteen, and seventeen chapters.
I am averse to distinguishing content from form and to mixing conventional plots with thematic currents. All I need say at the present time, before we have plunged deep into the book and bathed in it (not waded through it), is that the superficial action in Mansfield Park is the emotional interplay between two families of country gentlefolks. One of these two families consists of Sir Thomas Bertram and his wife, their tall athletic children, Tom, Edmund, Maria, and Julia, and their gentle niece Fanny Price, the author's pet, the character through whom the story is sifted. Fanny is an adopted child, an impecunious niece, a gentle ward (notice that her mother's maiden name was Ward). This was a most popular figure in the novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There are several reasons why a novelist would be tempted to use this ward of literature. First, her position in the tepid bosom of an essentially alien family yields the little alien a steady stream of pathos. Second, the little stranger can be easily made to go the romantic way in regard to the son of the family and obvious conflicts can result. Third, her dual position of detached observer and participant in the daily life of the family make of her a convenient representative of the author. We fin
d the gentle ward not only in the works of lady authors but also in those of Dickens, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, and many others. The prototype of these quiet maidens, whose bashful beauty finishes by shining in full through the veils of humility and self-effacement—shining in full when the logic of virtue triumphs over the chances of life—the prototype of these quiet maidens is, of course, Cinderella. Dependent, helpless, friendless, neglected, forgotten—and then marrying the hero.
Mansfield Park is a fairy tale, but then all novels are, in a sense, fairy tales. At first sight Jane Austen's manner and matter may seem to be old-fashioned, stilted, unreal. But this is a delusion to which the bad reader succumbs. The good reader is aware that the quest for real life, real people, and so forth is a meaningless process when speaking of books. In a book, the reality of a person, or object, or a circumstance depends exclusively on the world of that particular book. An original author always invents an original world, and if a character or an action fits into the pattern of that world, then we experience the pleasurable shock of artistic truth, no matter how unlikely the person or thing may seem if transferred into what book reviewers, poor hacks, call "real life." There is no such thing as real life for an author of genius: he must create it himself and then create the consequences. The charm of Mansfield Park can be fully enjoyed only when we adopt its conventions, its rules, its enchanting make-believe. Mansfield Park never existed, and its people never lived.
Miss Austen's is not a violently vivid masterpiece as some other novels in this series are. Novels like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenin are delightful explosions admirably controlled. Mansfield Park, on the other hand, is the work of a lady and the game of a child. But from that workbasket comes exquisite needlework art, and there is a streak of marvelous genius in that child.
Nabokov's map of England locating the action of Mansfield Park
"About thirty years ago...." So the novel begins. Miss Austen wrote it between 1811 and 1813 so that "thirty years ago" would mean, when mentioned at the beginning of the novel, 1781. About 1781, then, "Miss Maria Ward, of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds [as dowry], had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton...." The middle-class flutter of the event ("good luck to captivate") is delightfully conveyed here and will give the right tone to the next pages where money affairs predominate over romantic and religious ones with a kind of coy simplicity.[*] Every sentence in these introductory pages is terse and tapered to a fine point.
But let us get rid of the time-space element first. "About thirty years ago"—let us go back again to that opening sentence. Jane Austen is writing after her main characters, the younger people of the book, have been dismissed, have sunk in the oblivion of hopeful matrimony or hopeless spinsterhood. As we shall see, the main action of the novel takes place in 1808. The bail at Mansfield Park is held on Thursday the twenty-second of December, and if we look through our old calendars, we will see that only in 1808 could 22 December fall on Thursday. Fanny Price, the young heroine of the novel, will be eighteen by that time. She arrived in Mansfield Park in 1800 at the age of ten. King George III, a rather weird figure, was on the throne. He reigned from 1760 to 1820, a longish time, by the end of which the good man was mostly in a state of insanity and the regent, another George, had taken over. In 1808 Napoleon was at the height of his power in France; and Great Britain was at war with him, while Jefferson in this country had just got Congress to pass the Embargo Act, a law prohibiting United States ships from leaving the country for ports covered by the British and French blockade. (If you read embargo backwards, you get "O grab me.") But the winds of history are hardly felt in the seclusion of Mansfield Park, although a little trade wind puffs at one point when Sir Thomas has business in the Lesser Antilles.
We have now settled the time element. What about the space element? Mansfield Park is the name of the Bertram estate, a fictitious place located in Northampton (a real place) in the very heart of England.
"About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward...." We are still at the first sentence. There are three sisters Ward, and according to the custom of the day the eldest one is called simply and very formally Miss Ward, while the two others have their Christian names prefixed. Maria Ward, the youngest sister, who seems to have been the most attractive one, a languorous, languid, listless lady, she is the one that in 1781 became the wife of a baronet, Sir Thomas Bertram, and is thereafter called Lady Bertram, the mother of four children, two girls and two boys, who are the companions of Fanny Price, their cousin. Fanny's mother, the rather insipid Miss Frances Ward, also called Fanny, in 1781 married, out of spite, an impecunious hard-drinking lieutenant and had in all ten children, of whom Fanny, the heroine of the book, was the second. Finally, the eldest Miss Ward, the ugliest of the Ward sisters, was married also in 1781 to a gouty clergyman and had no children. She is Mrs. Norris, one of the most amusing and grotesque characters in the book.
Having settled these matters, let us glance at Jane Austen's way of presenting them, for the beauty of a book is more enjoyable if one understands its machinery, if one can take it apart. Jane Austen uses four methods of characterization in the beginning of the book. There is, first, the direct description, with little gems of ironic wit on Austen's part. Much of what we hear of Mrs. Norris comes in this category, but the foolish or dull people are constantly characterized. The expedition to the Rushworth country place, Sotherton, is under discussion. "It was hardly possible, indeed, that any thing else should be talked of, for Mrs. Norris was in high spirits about it; and Mrs. Rushworth, a well-meaning, civil, prosing, pompous woman who thought nothing of consequence, but as it related to her own and her son's concerns, had not yet given over pressing Lady Bertram to be of the party. Lady Bertram constantly declined it; but her placid manner of refusal made Mrs. Rushworth still think she wished to come, till Mrs. Norris's more numerous words and louder tone convinced her of the truth."
Another method is characterization through directly quoted speech. The reader discovers for himself the nature of the speaker, not only through the ideas the speaker expresses but through his mode of speech, through his mannerisms. A good example is to be found in Sir Thomas's speech: "Far be it from me to throw any fanciful impediment in the way of a plan which would be so consistent with the relative situations of each." He is speaking of the plan to have his niece, Fanny, come to Mansfield Park. Now, this is a ponderous way of expressing oneself: all he means to say is, "I do not want to invent any obstacles in regard to this plan; it is consistent with the situation." A little further on, says the gentleman going on with his elephantine speech: "To make [this plan] really serviceable to Mrs. Price and creditable to ourselves, we must secure to the child [comma] or consider ourselves engaged to secure to her hereafter [comma] as circumstances may arise [comma] the provision of a gentlewoman [comma] if no such establishment should offer as you are so sanguine in expecting." (The such-as formula is still with us.) For our purpose here it does not matter what exactly he is trying to say, but it is his manner that interests us, and I give this example to show how well Jane Austen renders the man through his speech. A heavy man (and a heavy father, in terms of the stage).
Yet a third method of characterization is through reported speech. What I mean is that speech is alluded to, and partly quoted, with a description of the character's way. A good example comes when Mrs. Norris is shown finding out the faults of the new parson, Dr. Grant, who has replaced her dead husband. Dr. Grant was very fond of eating, and Mrs. Grant, "instead of contriving to gratify him at little expense, gave her cook as high wages as they did at Mansfield Park." Says Miss Austen, "Mrs. Norris could not speak with any temper of such grievances, nor of the quantity of butter and eggs that were regularly consumed in the house." And now comes the introduction of the oblique speech. "Nobody loved plenty and hospitality more than herself [says Mrs. Norris—this in itself an ironic characterizing implication, since Mrs. Norris loves it at other people's expense]—nobody more h
ated pitiful doings—the parsonage she believed had never been wanting in comforts of any sort, had never borne a bad character in her time, but this was a way of going on she could not understand. A fine lady in a country parsonage was quite out of place. Her store-room she thought might have been good enough for Mrs. Grant to go into. Enquire where she would, she could not find out that Mrs. Grant had ever had more than five thousand pounds."
A fourth method of characterization is to imitate the character's speech when speaking of him, but this is seldom used except in straight reported conversation, as Edmund telling Fanny the gist of what Miss Crawford has said in her praise.
Lectures on Literature Page 4