Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  What do we mean when we speak of the form of a story? One thing is its structure, which means the development of a given story, why this or that line is followed; the choice of characters, the use that the author makes of his characters; their interplay, their various themes, the thematic lines and their intersection; the various moves of the story introduced by the author to produce this or that direct or indirect effect; the preparation of effects and impressions. In a word, we mean the planned pattern of a work of art. This is structure.

  Another aspect of form is style, which means how does the structure work; it means the manner of the author, his mannerisms, various special tricks; and if his style is vivid what kind of imagery, of description, does he use, how does he proceed; and if he uses comparisons, how does he employ and vary the rhetorical devices of metaphor and simile and their Combinations. The effect of style is the key to literature, a magic key to Dickens, Gogol, Flaubert, Tolstoy, to all great masters.

  Form (structure and style) = Subject Matter: the why and the how = the what.

  The first thing that we notice about the style of Dickens is his intensely sensuous imagery, his art of vivid sensuous evocation.

  1. VIVID EVOCATION, WITH OR WITHOUT THE USE OF FIGURES OF SPEECH

  The bursts of vivid imagery are spaced—they do not occur for stretches—and then there is again an accumulation of fine descriptive details. When Dickens has some information to impart to his reader through conversation or meditation, the imagery is generally not conspicuous. But there are magnificent passages, as for example the apotheosis of the fog theme in the description of the High Court of Chancery: "On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here—as here he is—with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog."

  "The little plaintiff, or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world." The two wards are ordered by the Court to reside with their uncle. This is the fully inflated summary or result of the marvelous agglomeration of natural and human fog in this first chapter. Thus the main characters (the two wards and Jarndyce) are introduced, still anonymous and abstract at this point. They seem to rise out of the fog, the author plucks them out before they are submerged again, and the chapter ends.

  The first description of Chesney Wold and of its mistress, Lady Dedlock, is a passage of sheer genius: "The waters are out in Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground, for half a mile in breadth, is a stagnant river, with melancholy trees for islands in it, and a surface punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock's place has been extremely dreary. The weather, for many a day and night, has been so wet that the trees seem wet through, and the soft loppings and prunings of the woodman's axe can make no crash or crackle as they fall. The deer, looking soaked, leave quagmires, where they pass. The shot of a rifle loses its sharpness in the moist air, and its smoke moves in a tardy little cloud towards the green rise, coppice-topped, that makes a background for the falling rain. The view from my Lady Dedlock's own windows is alternately a lead-coloured view, and a view in Indian ink. The vases on the stone terrace in the foreground catch the rain all day; and the heavy drops fall, drip, drip, drip, upon the broad flagged pavement, called, from old time, the Ghost's Walk, all night. On Sundays, the little church in the park is mouldy; the oaken pulpit breaks out into a cold sweat; and there is a general smell and taste as of the ancient Dedlocks in their graves. My Lady Dedlock (who is childless), looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a keeper's lodge, and seeing the light of a fits upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been 'bored to death.' " This rain at Chesney Wold is the countryside counterpart of the London fog; and the keeper's child is part of the children theme.

  We have an admirable image of a sleepy, sunny little town where Mr. Boythorn meets Esther and her companions: "Late in the afternoon we came to the market-town where we were to alight from the coach—a dull little town, with a church-spire, and a market-place, and a market-cross, and one intensely sunny street, and a pond with an old horse cooling his legs in it, and a very few men sleepily lying and standing about in narrow little bits of shade. After the rustling of the leaves and the waving of the corn all along the road, it looked as still, as hot, as motionless a little town as England could produce."

  Esther has a terrifying experience when she is sick with the smallpox: "Dare I hint at that worse time when, strung together somewhere in great black space, there was a flaming necklace, or ring, or starry circle of some kind, of which I was one of the beads! And when my only prayer was to be taken off from the rest, and when it was such inexplicable agony and misery to be a part of the dreadful thing?"

  When Esther sends Charley for Mr. Jarndyce's letter, the description of the house has a functional result; the house acts, as it were: "When the appointed night came, I said to Charley as soon as I was alone, 'Go and knock at Mr. Jarndyce's door, Charley, and say you have come from me—"for the letter." ' Charley went up the stairs, and down the stairs, and along the passages—the zigzag way about the old-fashioned house seemed very long in my listening ears that night—and so came back, along the passages, and down the stairs, and up the stairs, and brought the letter. 'Lay it on the table, Charley,' said I. So Charley laid it on the table and went to bed, and I sat looking at it without taking it up, thinking of many things."

  When Esther visits the seaport Deal to see Richard, we have a description of the harbor: "Then the fog began to rise like a curtain; and numbers of ships, that we had had no idea were near, appeared. I don't know how many sail the waiter told us were then lying in the Downs. Some of these vessels were of grand size: one was a large Indiaman just come home: and when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea, the way in which these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed, amid a bustle of boats pulling off from the shore to them and from them to the shore, and a general life and motion in themselves and everything around them, was most beautiful."[*]

  Some readers may suppose that such things as these evocations are trifles not worth stopping at; but literature consists of such trifles. Literature consists, in fact, not of general ideas but of particular revelations, not of schools of thought but of individuals of genius. Literature is not about something: it is the thing itself, the quiddity. Without the masterpiece, literature does not exist. The passage describing the harbor at Deal occurs at a point when Esther travels to the town in order to see Richard, whose attitude towards life, the strain of freakishness in his otherwise noble nature, and the dark destiny that hangs over him, trouble her and make her want to help him. Over her shoulder Dickens shows us the harbor. There are many vessels there, a multitude of boats that appear with a kind of quiet magic as the fog begins to rise. Among them, as mentioned, there is a large Indiaman, that is, a merchant ship just home from India: "when the sun shone through the clouds, making silvery pools in the dark sea...." Let us pause: can we visualize that? Of course we can, and we do so with a greater thrill of recognition because in comparison to the conventional blue sea of literary tradition these silvery pools in the dark sea offer something that Dickens noted for the very first time with the innocent and sensuous eye of the true artist, saw and immediately put into words. Or more exactly, without the words there would have been no vision; and if one follows the soft, swishing, slightly blurred sound of the sibilants in the description, one will find that the image had to have a voice too in order to live. And
then Dickens goes on to indicate the way "these ships brightened, and shadowed, and changed"—and I think it is quite impossible to choose and combine any better words than he did here to render the delicate quality of shadow and silver sheen in that delightful sea view. And for those who would think that all magic is just play—pretty play—but something that can be deleted without impairing the story, let me point out that this is the story: the ship from India there, in that unique setting, is bringing, has brought, young Dr. Woodcourt back to Esther, and in fact they will meet in a moment. So that the shadowy silver view, with those tremulous pools of light and that bustle of shimmering boats, acquires in retrospect a flutter of marvelous excitement, a glorious note of welcome, a kind of distant ovation. And this is how Dickens meant his book to be appreciated.

  2. ABRUPT LISTING OF DESCRIPTIVE DETAILS

  This listing has the intonation of an author's notebook, of notes jotted down but some of them later expanded. There is also a rudimentary touch of stream of consciousness here, which is the disconnected notation of passing thoughts.

  The novel opens thus, in a passage already quoted: "London. Michaelmas Term lately over.... Implacable November weather....Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.... Fog everywhere." When Nemo has been found dead: "Beadle goes into various shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants.... Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public loses interest, and undergoes reaction. Taunts the beadle in shrill youthful voices.... Policeman at last finds it necessary to support the law." (Carlyle also used this kind of abrupt account.)

  "Snagsby appears: greasy, warm, herbaceous, and chewing. Bolts a bit of bread and butter. Says, 'Bless my soul, sir! Mr. Tulkinghorn!' " (This combines an abrupt, efficient style with vivid epithets, again as Carlyle did.)

  3. FIGURES OF SPEECH: SIMILES AND METAPHORS

  Similes are direct comparisons, using the words like or as. "Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's [the lawyer's] learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity."

  The carriage taking the young people to stay the night at Mrs. Jellyby's turns up "a narrow street of high houses, like an oblong cistern to hold the fog."

  At Caddy's wedding, Mrs. Jellyby's untidy hair looks "like the mane of a dustman's horse."

  At dawn, the lamplighter "going his rounds, like an executioner to a despotic king, strikes off the little heads of fire that have aspired to lessen the darkness."

  "Mr. Vholes, quiet and unmoved, as a man of so much respectability ought to be, takes off his close black gloves as if he were skinning his hands, lifts off his tight hat as if he were scalping himself, and sits down at his desk."

  A metaphor animates one thing to be described by evoking another without the link of a like; sometimes Dickens combines it with a simile.

  The solicitor Tulkinghorn's dress is respectable and in a general way suitable for a retainer. "It expresses, as it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks."

  "The [Jellyby] children tumbled about, and notched memoranda of their accidents in their legs, which were perfect little calendars of distress."

  "Solitude, with dusky wings, sits brooding upon Chesney Wold."

  When Esther, with Mr.Jarndyce, visits the house where the suitor Tom Jarndyce had shot his brains out, she writes, "It is a street of perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out; without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame...."

  Snagsby, having taken over the business of Peffer, puts up a newly painted sign "displacing the time-honoured and not easily to be deciphered legend, PEFFER, only. For smoke, which is the London ivy, had so wreathed itself round Peffer's name, and clung to his dwelling-place, that the affectionate parasite quite overpowered the parent tree."

  4. REPETITION

  Dickens enjoys a kind of incantation, a verbal formula repetitively recited with growing emphasis; an oratorical, forensic device. "On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here.... On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be—as here they are—mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running their goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads against walls of words, and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players might. On such an afternoon, the various solicitors in the cause ... ought to be—as are they not?—ranged in a line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for Truth at the bottom of it), between the registrar's red table and the silk gowns ... mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them. Well may the court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the stained glass windows lose their colour, and admit no light of day into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance by its owlish aspect, and by the drawl languidly echoing to the roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank!" One should notice here the effect of the three booming on such an afternoon's, and the four wailing well may's as well as the frequent concorded repetition of sound that constitutes assonance, "engaged ... stages ... tripping ... slippery"; and the marked alliteration, "warded ... walls of words ... door ... deterred ... drawl ... languidly ... Lord ... looks ... lantern ... light."

  Just before Sir Leicester and his relatives gather at Chesney Wold at the election, the musical, sonorous so’s reverberate: "Dreary and solemn the old house looks, with so many appliances of habitation, and with no inhabitants except the pictured forms upon the walls. So did these come and go, a Dedlock in possession might have ruminated passing along; so did they see this gallery hushed and quiet, as I see it now; so think, as I think, of the gap that they would make in this domain when they were gone; so find it, as I find it, difficult to believe that it could be, without them; so pass from my world, as I pass from theirs, now closing the reverberating door; so leave no blank to miss them, and so die."

  5. ORATORICAL QUESTION AND ANSWER

  This device is often combined with repetition. "Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellors court this murky afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause, two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of solicitors before mentioned? There is the registrar below the Judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court suits."

  As Bucket awaits Jarndyce to bring Esther to accompany him in search of the fleeing Lady Dedlock, Dickens imagines himself inside Bucket's mind: "Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able, with an enchanted power, to bring before him the place where she found it, and the night landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he descry her there? On the waste, where the brick-kilns are burning ... traversing this deserted blighted spot, there is a lonely figure with the sad world to itself, pelted by the snow and driven by the wind, and cast out, it would seem, from all companionship. It is the figure of a woman, too; but it is miserably dressed, and no such clothes ever came through the hall, and out at the great door, of the Dedlock mansion."

  In the answer Dickens gives here to the questions, he provides the reader with a hint of the exchange of clothes between Lady Dedlock and Jenny that will for some time puzzle Bucket until he guesses the truth.

  6. THE CARLYLEAN APOSTROPHIC MANNER

  Apostrophes may be directed, as it were, at a stunned audience, or at a sculptural group of great sinners, or towards some force of elemental nature, or to the victim of injustice. As Jo slouches towards the burying ground to visit the grave of Nemo, Dicken
s apostrophizes: "Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon, or stay too long, by such a place as this! Come, straggling lights into the windows of the ugly houses; and you who do iniquity therein, do it at least with this dread scene shut out! Come, flame of gas, burning so sullenly above the iron gate, on which the poisoned air deposits its witch-ointment slimy to the touch!" The apostrophe, already quoted, at Jo's death should also be noted, and before that, the apostrophe when Guppy and Weevle rush for help after discovering Krook's extraordinary end.

  7. EPITHETS

  Dickens nurtures the rich adjective, or verb, or noun, as an epithet, a basic prerequisite in the case of vivid imagery: the plump seed from which the blossoming and branching metaphor grows. In the opening we have people leaning over the parapet of the Thames, peeping down at the river "into a nether sky of fog." The clerks in Chancery "flesh their wit" on a ridiculous case. Ada describes Mrs. Pardiggle's prominent eyes as "choking eyes." As Guppy tries to persuade Weevle to remain in his lodgings in Krook's house, he is "biting his thumb with the appetite of vexation." As Sir Leicester waits for Lady Dedlock's return, in the midnight streets no late sounds are heard unless a man "so very nomadically drunk" as to stray there goes along bellowing.

  As happens to all great writers who have a keen visual perception of things, a commonplace epithet can sometimes acquire unusual life and freshness because of the background against which it is set. "The welcome light soon shines upon the wall, as Krook [who had gone down for a lighted candle and now comes up again] comes slowly up, with his green-eyed cat following at his heels." All cats have green eyes—but notice how green these eyes are owing to the lighted candle slowly ascending the stairs. It is often the position of an epithet, and the reflection cast upon it by neighboring words, that give the epithet its vivid charm.