There has been criticism against literature of this nature, where the mix of good and evil is depicted without moral instruction, and I believe Twitter and other reductive forms of media are to blame. I deactivated my account a few weeks ago, but I had been hacking down my ideas to fit into tweets for so long that it will take some time to recover.
The fundamental difference between politics and fiction is very nicely (beautifully, I dare say) described in this post.
It's a salutary reminder that life and the world cannot be reduced to black and white (it has a 'mixed quality' as this post suggests), and that even in the most depressing situations, as individuals who are part of a collective, there are other recourses to us than seek the 'comfort' of common cause.
'[Even] The personal is political' has become something of a credo in our times and it is genuinely liberating to seriously consider others' problems ours too. Where fiction / literature perhaps differs is in imagining that the way to connect with, empathise with and seek solutions to others' problems needn't always be collective, let alone prescribed.
yes! keeping heroic actions the actions of fallable imperfect humans is crucial. i believe as Brecht did that we are only as heroic as our last act of courage.
Thank you for this - I really enjoyed it. I have loved the Nabokov story for years, without fully 'understanding' it. I just know it says something universal that moves me every time I read it.
Frank O Connor's short story 'Guests of the Nation' is also a story that you might like in terms of a rich and complex human portrayal of what it is to be caught in political forces that bring people into places that are very dark - and yet, at the end of the story, places the events in a broader, kind of 'cosmic' setting. I read it at school (I'm from Ireland) when I was 15 - it still remains one of my favourite stories. For a lot of people of my generation in Ireland it has huge resonance.
Excellent, thoughtful post about a challenging subject. Especially appreciate this: "What I am saying is that stories about political systems or social struggle are most poignant and effective when they acknowledge we are all up against such harsh mystery whether we are a powerful statesman or a poor child."
Irrational goodness! I always struggled to pin down what he meant by that. I love your answer, although it’s nowhere near any of the ones I found myself groping towards. But then, isn’t Nabokov, in that essay, giving us -- each of us -- a maze in which to trace our own, personal version of the irrational Good? I always thought that was what he was up to, in the end, there (and elsewhere); and the point of the ambiguity was exactly that, to release a living, protean, metamorphic butterfly into the world, rather than a dead definition, spread out for inspection. Incidentally I loved the way you had Paul, in The Mare, be so often the one with the impulse to pin things down, define them once and for all... only for him to release that lovely Vanessa at the end... “there’s hope for us all”...
Thank you for this. I read that section for many years without needing to know exactly what it meant; it made so much intuitive sense to me. But eventually I used the piece in class and felt I had to get more analytical. You saw what I came up with--I'd like to hear your ideas.
Re-reading the Nabokov (which I have as “The Creative Writer” (1941), anthologised in “Think, Write, Speak”, with apparently two extra pages that were left out of the later version) I see that he starts off by writing of belief in the “goodness of man”. And it’s that variety of goodness that you end up taking as primary, here, I think. I always found myself more drawn to and intrigued by the idea of goodness in the world, or the goodness that the world discloses when we attend to it in the right way - with the “round eyes” of “a child at its first circus show.” You mention this at some length - why I say you’ve already covered most of my thoughts - when you talk about “wondering at trifles,” “taking us out of our pragmatic concerns.” Yes: exactly, and this reminded me of another wonderful Nabokov line about “the mysterious gift of seeing beyond the horizon of things and through the texture of things just a little further than do the users of things”. This gift, this manner of attention is what the poor insane son in “Signs and Symbols” is grasping for and failing to attain, I think. Which implies that when the political system of mass murder meets the son’s delusional system of signs, it’s not so much a case of sanity meeting insanity, as everyday insanity meeting sanity manqué.
Going back to the limitations of pragmatism and the “users of things” - this chimes very strongly for me with what I’ve recently been learning about brain hemisphere differences - the left hemisphere being the one that prioritises model over data, map over territory, snapshot over flow, stripping the world of its full time texture and richness in order to attain a (very real) pragmatic advantage. “The left hemisphere ‘re-presents’ a digest of the specific views presented by the right, with all their complex features and holistic roundness neatly excised... it is the right hemisphere that primarily produces ‘vivid, in-context, external’ images, while the left hemisphere primarily deals in ‘non-vivid, out-of-context, internal’ images. One revealing detail: while there is no left hemisphere advantage for recognising objects in general -- rather the opposite -- there is such an advantage for recognising *tools*.” (“The Matter With Things”, Ian McGilchrist, 2021)
Forgive the lengthy quote, but I found it suggestive in the context of this question we are discussing. Because when the left hemisphere, which let’s allow for a moment to stand in for Nabokov’s “common sense”, is allowed to run riot at the expense of the right (so McGilchrist argues) bad things happen. Individuals lose contact with reality; societies prioritise the wrong things; culture loses its capacity for enchantment, tenderness, delight. There’s something at once creepily pragmatic and totally out of touch with reality about the arguments of both Nazism and Soviet Communism, and it is perhaps in this sense that Nabokov, writing when he did, could refer to common sense as positively immoral.
As for the goodness of the world as disclosed by the round-eyed view, as for what that *is*, I’m afraid I’m no closer than when I started. Maybe it’s in some way similar to the hidden harmonics, the signs and symbols and “secret points” that Nabokov saw as key to great literature. And I find something very attractive and intuitively convincing in the idea that this good, esoteric world is more real than the mundane.
But I find myself rebelling, time and again, when Nabokov insists that Messerschmidts are “unreal”. I get what he’s saying, I think, but I always find myself objecting that they must seem real enough to the column of French refugees being strafed, or whoever. Yes, he anticipates the objection, and I absolutely love the phrase, “quietly persists”. Okay -- if the angel is there in the detail, it must be there in every grain of dust as you press your face to the road while the bullets rain down -- but how many can truly say that it is more real than the bullets? Can the mother in “Signs and Symbols” see the good world that quietly persists (a different question from whether she is herself an instance of goodness)? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong. But Nabokov only says there are “thousands” of “fellow dreamers” out of the billions on the face of the Earth who are capable of it. Then again, he’s just given a vastly understated figure, five million square miles, for the area concerned. So perhaps he’s being less elitist that I give him credit(?) for.
I guess he had standing -- lost everything in the Revolution, father murdered, brother holocausted, lord knows how many others he loved devoured. And he makes sure to make his “good” characters able to be/do/see good in the world *despite* the most terrible suffering in their pasts. Pnin avoids thinking about his murdered sweetheart because it would not be possible to exist in a world where that could happen: but he does exist, and persist, and disport himself like a joyful porpoise among the footnotes of obscure defunct inutile journals. I can imagine nothing worse than what has happened to John Shade, and yet there he is, unbowed, musing over and adding to the world’s goodness with a face like a “tipsy witch.” Which is my favourite description of a face ever. And as good a place as any to end this very long reply. Funny that I ended up on another bereaved parent.
Thank you for this wonderful reply. I especially appreciate the information about brain hemisphere differences as that is something I know next to nothing about; love that you made the connection there. I'm also interested to find out about the two "missing pages;" that is the notation made in the version I have (the Lectures on Literature) and I always thought it was uncharacteristic and peculiar to abruptly announce in mid-sentence that two pages were...missing. I almost wondered if it were a joke!
Yes, there is something stubborn and fanatical about the idea that "war gods are unreal," and that strain runs through the whole essay. I share his idea of goodness as expressed in the piece but I find his light treatment of evil a little strange given that he treats it as a very real thing in his fiction. Perhaps he means that in the biggest possible picture, what is evil in the human realm is actually a part of some greater reality that makes it immaterial? I don't know, but I'm thinking of a line in Spring In Fialta, if you know that story, in which a circus poster depicts a tiger: "...in his effort to make the beast as ferocious as possible, the artist had gone so far that he had come back from the other side, for the tiger's face looked positively human." That joining of opposites through 'going so far' that you 'come back' suggests unity even when there appears to be only opposition. If that makes any sense?
But, and I hate to suggest this about someone with such a powerful intellect, it also seems possible that he was trying to assert a comforting reality by sheer force of will. I don't know if anyone is above that.
I don't agree though that the mother in Signs and Symbols can't see the good world, and here is why: on the way back from the hospital, after receiving crushing news, in the subway, while on the verge of tears, she looks around "trying to hook her mind onto something" and feels "a kind of soft shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers, a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails, was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman." The key words to me are "soft shock," "compassion and wonder;" in the midst of real pain she has it in her to register the pain of others, and not dully, but with softness, not just with compassion but with wonder. This is a person alive to the world in the sense that her creator meant alive to goodness. And I do think there are many many people like that, all walks of life.
Anyway thanks again for the reply, it was great to read. Especially the image of Pnin disporting himself like a joyful porpoise among the footnotes of obscure journals and the reminder of the "tipsy witch!"
Okay, so you’re definitely, or even definitively, right about the mother: I should have re-read the story! And I share your conviction that there are many people like that.
On the reality or otherwise of evil, I think both versions of what you say VN might be doing/getting at are right; maybe he did both things at different times in his life, I don’t know, but I’ve certainly felt pretty much exactly what you say about a greater reality, *and* about denial. On the first point, I’m sure I read somewhere about him saying evil is not a real thing in itself, but rather a lack, something missing. Doesn’t he make his most memorable villains blundering, mockable failures? Or somewhere else, he writes that tyrants fear and hate poets more than they do political opponents, because the former can see how ludicrous they are. Humbert Humbert -- the very name! -- is kind of hapless, and “Lolita” can be read as an extended piss-take of the man. Kinbote: another pitiful bungling fantasist who doesn’t get it. And this sense of evil as failure meshes, for me, with something VN said in an interview (I think) after the publication of Lolita, about the sexual instinct being a subset of the impulse towards beauty. So, Humbert fails because he allows the lesser reality (sexual passion) to take over everything, and all the while he’s passing through this world that brims over with beauty, which Nabokov takes care to show us, through Humbert’s prose, without Humbert noticing (and to be sure, the fact that Humbert’s ‘fancy prose style’ and Kinbote’s luminous fantasies are themselves so beautiful does, typically, complicate matters!)
There’s a bit in Pale Fire (the poem) when John Shade describes a spiral fountain of light he sees in a vision, which always gave me a transcendent-reality shiver. (The first time I read it, it reminded me of the invisible, momentous, teetering needle-structure that Prince André is building/allowing to build itself on top of his face (with those weird but somehow perfectly convincing whispers of ‘piti-piti-piti... ti-ti’) as he lies dying for all we know in the field hospital after Borodino; although maybe that’s just me.)
And Nabokov’s insistence on secret patterns of detail revealing the true essence in literature -- could there be an equivalent secret truth to “real” life (remember that line in Ada about ‘“reality”’ and the ‘quotes it wears like claws’?)
And yes, a stubborn denial too, which in some instances I find kind of magnificent: like the image (that crops up at least once in the short stories I think) of the captive poet being led to the firing squad, confronting his executioners with scorn, denying their power over him. I can’t believe that that poet doesn’t fear the bullets, but I admire the gesture, and I feel that making it is the most important thing he can do at that point.
Of course, there’s always the “greater reality” of memory, subjective experience, the universe we each carry inside our heads, that can’t be reached by any tyrant (I prefer to go with Nabokov on this than Orwell, say). One of my favourite and most shivery bits in all VN’s poetry, referring to the homeland that he has fled and cannot conceive ever returning to:
I forget who said that cinema was essentially fascist as a medium, because it “forces” a specific, objective and non-negotiable image before the viewer, but playing off that, it’s possible that literature (or more narrowly the novel and the short story, as opposed to epic poetry and verse) are inherently ironizing as a medium, or inherently subjective in its attempt to depict “reality” (which is itself ironic, that the closer fiction writers tried to get to “the real,” the more they collapsed into the subjectivity of free-indirect style and stream-of-consciousness individuation). It’s probably a class thing as well, with the novel being basically a middle-class invention, and where a rising mercantile class is supposed to carry certain virtues of the working class upward while also aspiring to the more socially desirable traits of the aristocracy. Such a mixed (and above all practical) worldview would seem likely to reject political absolutism of both the revolutionary and reactionary type.
Great essay! I especially loved this: "I do it to say that we live in a world of surpassing strangeness and power, a world that for all we understand about it, we still don’t understand."
I've been making an effort to include more mystery in my fiction, trying to tap into human unconsciousness. When I was younger, I thought I could change people's minds politically with my writing, but now what I think people need the most is to realize there's life beyond politics. But polemics disguised as fiction sure are trendy now.
Do you think dreamlike writing can move people politically? The Gospels or uncle toms cabin, or on team evil the turner diaries? Maybe even “the apprentice” was a sort of fever dream of a cruel savior rich man? Dunno!
I think it can in the way I talked about in my post Emergency Broadcast. In Shelly's time poets were unacknowledged legislators; in that post I half-jokingly said that they are now unacknowledged taxi drivers. I have remembered things certain taxi drivers have said to me for decades. In that way books can affect people's thinking, including their political thinking, but in dream-like, sideways fashion, a small conversation sitting deep in their brain somewhere.
All art is political, though it will manifest a politics you'd never claim to profess. Focusing on form gives you plausible deniability. Nabokov played that game with us and with himself. He's not alone; it's the hide and seek of moralism and its opposite (which is another form of moralism) from Eliot to the Nouveau Roman. Huysmans returned to the Church. Robbe-Grillet and de Man, Nazi collaborators, moved into the theatrical fakery of full-on formalism/Mannerism.
But all of it is literature, as much as Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And if you're sensitive to the desires behind the elisions, which are all there on the page, you can learn from them without being seduced. And that's what art is. It's the con that reveals itself as a con, as it tries to con you.
Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake
"ARTISTS. All charlatans." Flaubert.
Just look behind/ think beyond any discussions of "aesthetics", which are as bogus as any discussion of "truth".
Better in the end to have a political life—to face politics as vulgar necessity—than indulge the fantasy of a political (utilitarian) art. Fascism after all is the dream of art as life.
My favorite discussion of the relation of art and politics is from a piece by AJ Liebling, traveling with the irregulars, fighting in North Africa,
---…in a hospital tent at the clearing station I came across a man with a French flag wrapped around his waist; the medics discovered it when they cut his shirt away. He was a hard-looking, blondish chap with a mouthful of gold teeth and a face adorned by a cross-shaped knife scar—the croix de vache with which procurers sometimes mark business rivals. An interesting collection of obscene tattooing showed on the parts of him that the flag did not cover. Outwardly he was not a sentimental type.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Belleville," he said. Belleville is a part of Paris not distinguished for its elegance.
"What did you do in civilian life?" I inquired.
That made him grin. "I lived on my income," he said.
"Why did you choose the Corps Franc?"
"Because I understood," he said. ---
You have to know when the draw the line. Or better: you have to know that there's a point at which you'll draw it.
I like this response a lot. I don't know about drawing lines in relation to pieces of fiction, but I really like your tone and thought. I can't understand the AJ Liebling bit as a discussion of art and politics but I feel the connection in a way I can't articulate, particularly in the description of the cut face, the mouth of gold teeth and the flag draped around the waist. But this:
Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake
It's an argument against moralism, and that's all "political art" is. It can't describe the world of experience, and the political imposition of moralism is authoritarian. The man answered Liebling's question: "I'm a criminal but I'm not a fascist." Liebling recognized civic virtue. The story breaks there, to mark the irony. No philosopher would accept that, and that's the problem with philosophers.
Decadence is moralism: the need for the binary. It's weakness and laziness: the need to be a servant or a master, high or low, to be free one way or the other from the burden of moral responsibility. And after one extreme you go to the other: Huysman's return to the church was as much a symptom as his life before it. Fascism is weakness, moralism and self-hatred. None of those fit Leibling's pimp. He's a more honest liberal than the liberals are, but again he knows what fascism is, unlike the spoiled suburbanites now cosplaying politics: woke vs dimes square, or earnestly debating John Rawls and Badiou.
"Defense of personal freedom isn't enough. What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords."
I wrote that a few years ago. I still like it. It works as a defense of art.
I like it too or find it interesting anyway. I like the conclusion "so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness." Even if it often doesn't work that way in my experience, at least "all kinds of wrong" allows for the possibility.
I thought more about the Liebling story last night after I wrote to you. I was wondering why I was connecting the description of the pimp's face with his presence in the irregulars or with anything political in the conversation that ended on the ambiguous line "Because I understood." It occured to me that the man had experienced "politics" in terms of local power struggle literally carved onto his face, that he knew a serious turf war when he saw one and had the sense to choose a side that he could get behind. The complicated symbol of a flag combined with the much more crude symbol of the cross plus the animal teeth made ornamental by gold--killer.
I think it's a mistake to intellectualize it. The simplest interpretation is the best, and I think that's Liebling's too: he's a criminal who doesn't want a world ruled by criminals. That's where he draws the line. Most career criminals don't want their siblings to do what they do, but once you've started down the road, by whatever cause, it's hard to go back. And the state's punishment is just more of the same. And you begin to Identify with the punishment, which is where things get complex. And, no, I've never grown up; or perhaps enough to stay alive. But there's luck in that too.
This is such a wonderful post. I had to come back days after my first reading and read it again. I wasn’t familiar with the Nabokov essay. “Small, soft humans” and the “mysterious, asocial” operations of fiction … yes, yes. The question of whether fiction is or can be a moral force (or might even be moral in its amorality, if that makes any sense at all) has always interested me, and I love this contribution to the discussion. And especially the exploration of the beautiful “Signs and Symbols.”
I am going to have nightmares about the terrifying sand striker! What place does it occupy in the evolutionary plan except to feed on the less fortunate? (capitalist analogy?) Love the illustrations you choose for these essays, Mary.
Honestly, evolutionary plans are like that. Plants 'eat' sunlight, herbivores eat plants, small carnivores eat herbivores, and large carnivores eat smaller carnivores (or herbivores) until you don't have enough biological mass to support another layer of carnivores. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Social Darwinism really is the evolutionary principle as a form of social organization...and it's awful for everyone in it!
This is interesting to me but I don't know how to reply because its a subject I know very little about. I have certainly observed that nature is brutal and so are human structures. But I don't think awful for everyone in it, or at least not all the time. Nature is very very gentle at times, and so are we, like soft rain and strawberries. Nature is highly responsive to our touch; if nature was teeth and claws all the time, we would not have survived. Mother animals very tender with their young--but if the young are too weak to keep up, its true they will often abandon them or refuse to nurse them. If I have an opinion it's that nature is very mixed, more amoral than brutal, and has a lot of different faces/aspects put together in what seems like a chaotic way to us. But my intuition is that we don't fully understand what it is.
The subtle art between truth and reality...but what is true? What is real? Our lives, subjective at best.
The embedded voice readings you use to draw us further into your writing continue to help me become a better listener and understand the nuances of wordplay.
No reason other than she is a political writer. And it was a nice photo. Unusual for her, kind of receptive and sweet. Who do you think would be better? There are a lot of people, but I wanted one of someone typing. I considered George Orwell.
Wow - you responded personally!! Fantastic. Thank you. Fabulous essay. I love good writing and this was just excellent. It set me off on a deep dive into Russell Banks tonight. As for the photo of Rand - her politics seems so opposite to yours, I found it jarring there. Small quibble. Please keep the genius flowing. Good night from Edinburgh. :)
Well yeah, I respond personally a lot. And I thought your question was valid, putting Rand's face upfront makes it look like the post is about her. I've thought about switching it out but whoever I put there it will be the same issue. I guess I could rotate!
There has been criticism against literature of this nature, where the mix of good and evil is depicted without moral instruction, and I believe Twitter and other reductive forms of media are to blame. I deactivated my account a few weeks ago, but I had been hacking down my ideas to fit into tweets for so long that it will take some time to recover.
The fundamental difference between politics and fiction is very nicely (beautifully, I dare say) described in this post.
It's a salutary reminder that life and the world cannot be reduced to black and white (it has a 'mixed quality' as this post suggests), and that even in the most depressing situations, as individuals who are part of a collective, there are other recourses to us than seek the 'comfort' of common cause.
'[Even] The personal is political' has become something of a credo in our times and it is genuinely liberating to seriously consider others' problems ours too. Where fiction / literature perhaps differs is in imagining that the way to connect with, empathise with and seek solutions to others' problems needn't always be collective, let alone prescribed.
yes! keeping heroic actions the actions of fallable imperfect humans is crucial. i believe as Brecht did that we are only as heroic as our last act of courage.
Thank you for this - I really enjoyed it. I have loved the Nabokov story for years, without fully 'understanding' it. I just know it says something universal that moves me every time I read it.
Frank O Connor's short story 'Guests of the Nation' is also a story that you might like in terms of a rich and complex human portrayal of what it is to be caught in political forces that bring people into places that are very dark - and yet, at the end of the story, places the events in a broader, kind of 'cosmic' setting. I read it at school (I'm from Ireland) when I was 15 - it still remains one of my favourite stories. For a lot of people of my generation in Ireland it has huge resonance.
Excellent, thoughtful post about a challenging subject. Especially appreciate this: "What I am saying is that stories about political systems or social struggle are most poignant and effective when they acknowledge we are all up against such harsh mystery whether we are a powerful statesman or a poor child."
Irrational goodness! I always struggled to pin down what he meant by that. I love your answer, although it’s nowhere near any of the ones I found myself groping towards. But then, isn’t Nabokov, in that essay, giving us -- each of us -- a maze in which to trace our own, personal version of the irrational Good? I always thought that was what he was up to, in the end, there (and elsewhere); and the point of the ambiguity was exactly that, to release a living, protean, metamorphic butterfly into the world, rather than a dead definition, spread out for inspection. Incidentally I loved the way you had Paul, in The Mare, be so often the one with the impulse to pin things down, define them once and for all... only for him to release that lovely Vanessa at the end... “there’s hope for us all”...
Thank you for this. I read that section for many years without needing to know exactly what it meant; it made so much intuitive sense to me. But eventually I used the piece in class and felt I had to get more analytical. You saw what I came up with--I'd like to hear your ideas.
Re-reading the Nabokov (which I have as “The Creative Writer” (1941), anthologised in “Think, Write, Speak”, with apparently two extra pages that were left out of the later version) I see that he starts off by writing of belief in the “goodness of man”. And it’s that variety of goodness that you end up taking as primary, here, I think. I always found myself more drawn to and intrigued by the idea of goodness in the world, or the goodness that the world discloses when we attend to it in the right way - with the “round eyes” of “a child at its first circus show.” You mention this at some length - why I say you’ve already covered most of my thoughts - when you talk about “wondering at trifles,” “taking us out of our pragmatic concerns.” Yes: exactly, and this reminded me of another wonderful Nabokov line about “the mysterious gift of seeing beyond the horizon of things and through the texture of things just a little further than do the users of things”. This gift, this manner of attention is what the poor insane son in “Signs and Symbols” is grasping for and failing to attain, I think. Which implies that when the political system of mass murder meets the son’s delusional system of signs, it’s not so much a case of sanity meeting insanity, as everyday insanity meeting sanity manqué.
Going back to the limitations of pragmatism and the “users of things” - this chimes very strongly for me with what I’ve recently been learning about brain hemisphere differences - the left hemisphere being the one that prioritises model over data, map over territory, snapshot over flow, stripping the world of its full time texture and richness in order to attain a (very real) pragmatic advantage. “The left hemisphere ‘re-presents’ a digest of the specific views presented by the right, with all their complex features and holistic roundness neatly excised... it is the right hemisphere that primarily produces ‘vivid, in-context, external’ images, while the left hemisphere primarily deals in ‘non-vivid, out-of-context, internal’ images. One revealing detail: while there is no left hemisphere advantage for recognising objects in general -- rather the opposite -- there is such an advantage for recognising *tools*.” (“The Matter With Things”, Ian McGilchrist, 2021)
Forgive the lengthy quote, but I found it suggestive in the context of this question we are discussing. Because when the left hemisphere, which let’s allow for a moment to stand in for Nabokov’s “common sense”, is allowed to run riot at the expense of the right (so McGilchrist argues) bad things happen. Individuals lose contact with reality; societies prioritise the wrong things; culture loses its capacity for enchantment, tenderness, delight. There’s something at once creepily pragmatic and totally out of touch with reality about the arguments of both Nazism and Soviet Communism, and it is perhaps in this sense that Nabokov, writing when he did, could refer to common sense as positively immoral.
As for the goodness of the world as disclosed by the round-eyed view, as for what that *is*, I’m afraid I’m no closer than when I started. Maybe it’s in some way similar to the hidden harmonics, the signs and symbols and “secret points” that Nabokov saw as key to great literature. And I find something very attractive and intuitively convincing in the idea that this good, esoteric world is more real than the mundane.
But I find myself rebelling, time and again, when Nabokov insists that Messerschmidts are “unreal”. I get what he’s saying, I think, but I always find myself objecting that they must seem real enough to the column of French refugees being strafed, or whoever. Yes, he anticipates the objection, and I absolutely love the phrase, “quietly persists”. Okay -- if the angel is there in the detail, it must be there in every grain of dust as you press your face to the road while the bullets rain down -- but how many can truly say that it is more real than the bullets? Can the mother in “Signs and Symbols” see the good world that quietly persists (a different question from whether she is herself an instance of goodness)? I don’t think so. Maybe I’m wrong. But Nabokov only says there are “thousands” of “fellow dreamers” out of the billions on the face of the Earth who are capable of it. Then again, he’s just given a vastly understated figure, five million square miles, for the area concerned. So perhaps he’s being less elitist that I give him credit(?) for.
I guess he had standing -- lost everything in the Revolution, father murdered, brother holocausted, lord knows how many others he loved devoured. And he makes sure to make his “good” characters able to be/do/see good in the world *despite* the most terrible suffering in their pasts. Pnin avoids thinking about his murdered sweetheart because it would not be possible to exist in a world where that could happen: but he does exist, and persist, and disport himself like a joyful porpoise among the footnotes of obscure defunct inutile journals. I can imagine nothing worse than what has happened to John Shade, and yet there he is, unbowed, musing over and adding to the world’s goodness with a face like a “tipsy witch.” Which is my favourite description of a face ever. And as good a place as any to end this very long reply. Funny that I ended up on another bereaved parent.
Thank you for this wonderful reply. I especially appreciate the information about brain hemisphere differences as that is something I know next to nothing about; love that you made the connection there. I'm also interested to find out about the two "missing pages;" that is the notation made in the version I have (the Lectures on Literature) and I always thought it was uncharacteristic and peculiar to abruptly announce in mid-sentence that two pages were...missing. I almost wondered if it were a joke!
Yes, there is something stubborn and fanatical about the idea that "war gods are unreal," and that strain runs through the whole essay. I share his idea of goodness as expressed in the piece but I find his light treatment of evil a little strange given that he treats it as a very real thing in his fiction. Perhaps he means that in the biggest possible picture, what is evil in the human realm is actually a part of some greater reality that makes it immaterial? I don't know, but I'm thinking of a line in Spring In Fialta, if you know that story, in which a circus poster depicts a tiger: "...in his effort to make the beast as ferocious as possible, the artist had gone so far that he had come back from the other side, for the tiger's face looked positively human." That joining of opposites through 'going so far' that you 'come back' suggests unity even when there appears to be only opposition. If that makes any sense?
But, and I hate to suggest this about someone with such a powerful intellect, it also seems possible that he was trying to assert a comforting reality by sheer force of will. I don't know if anyone is above that.
I don't agree though that the mother in Signs and Symbols can't see the good world, and here is why: on the way back from the hospital, after receiving crushing news, in the subway, while on the verge of tears, she looks around "trying to hook her mind onto something" and feels "a kind of soft shock, a mixture of compassion and wonder, to notice that one of the passengers, a girl with dark hair and grubby red toenails, was weeping on the shoulder of an older woman." The key words to me are "soft shock," "compassion and wonder;" in the midst of real pain she has it in her to register the pain of others, and not dully, but with softness, not just with compassion but with wonder. This is a person alive to the world in the sense that her creator meant alive to goodness. And I do think there are many many people like that, all walks of life.
Anyway thanks again for the reply, it was great to read. Especially the image of Pnin disporting himself like a joyful porpoise among the footnotes of obscure journals and the reminder of the "tipsy witch!"
Okay, so you’re definitely, or even definitively, right about the mother: I should have re-read the story! And I share your conviction that there are many people like that.
On the reality or otherwise of evil, I think both versions of what you say VN might be doing/getting at are right; maybe he did both things at different times in his life, I don’t know, but I’ve certainly felt pretty much exactly what you say about a greater reality, *and* about denial. On the first point, I’m sure I read somewhere about him saying evil is not a real thing in itself, but rather a lack, something missing. Doesn’t he make his most memorable villains blundering, mockable failures? Or somewhere else, he writes that tyrants fear and hate poets more than they do political opponents, because the former can see how ludicrous they are. Humbert Humbert -- the very name! -- is kind of hapless, and “Lolita” can be read as an extended piss-take of the man. Kinbote: another pitiful bungling fantasist who doesn’t get it. And this sense of evil as failure meshes, for me, with something VN said in an interview (I think) after the publication of Lolita, about the sexual instinct being a subset of the impulse towards beauty. So, Humbert fails because he allows the lesser reality (sexual passion) to take over everything, and all the while he’s passing through this world that brims over with beauty, which Nabokov takes care to show us, through Humbert’s prose, without Humbert noticing (and to be sure, the fact that Humbert’s ‘fancy prose style’ and Kinbote’s luminous fantasies are themselves so beautiful does, typically, complicate matters!)
There’s a bit in Pale Fire (the poem) when John Shade describes a spiral fountain of light he sees in a vision, which always gave me a transcendent-reality shiver. (The first time I read it, it reminded me of the invisible, momentous, teetering needle-structure that Prince André is building/allowing to build itself on top of his face (with those weird but somehow perfectly convincing whispers of ‘piti-piti-piti... ti-ti’) as he lies dying for all we know in the field hospital after Borodino; although maybe that’s just me.)
And Nabokov’s insistence on secret patterns of detail revealing the true essence in literature -- could there be an equivalent secret truth to “real” life (remember that line in Ada about ‘“reality”’ and the ‘quotes it wears like claws’?)
And yes, a stubborn denial too, which in some instances I find kind of magnificent: like the image (that crops up at least once in the short stories I think) of the captive poet being led to the firing squad, confronting his executioners with scorn, denying their power over him. I can’t believe that that poet doesn’t fear the bullets, but I admire the gesture, and I feel that making it is the most important thing he can do at that point.
Of course, there’s always the “greater reality” of memory, subjective experience, the universe we each carry inside our heads, that can’t be reached by any tyrant (I prefer to go with Nabokov on this than Orwell, say). One of my favourite and most shivery bits in all VN’s poetry, referring to the homeland that he has fled and cannot conceive ever returning to:
Almost from anywhere
Homeward, even today
I can still find my way.
I forget who said that cinema was essentially fascist as a medium, because it “forces” a specific, objective and non-negotiable image before the viewer, but playing off that, it’s possible that literature (or more narrowly the novel and the short story, as opposed to epic poetry and verse) are inherently ironizing as a medium, or inherently subjective in its attempt to depict “reality” (which is itself ironic, that the closer fiction writers tried to get to “the real,” the more they collapsed into the subjectivity of free-indirect style and stream-of-consciousness individuation). It’s probably a class thing as well, with the novel being basically a middle-class invention, and where a rising mercantile class is supposed to carry certain virtues of the working class upward while also aspiring to the more socially desirable traits of the aristocracy. Such a mixed (and above all practical) worldview would seem likely to reject political absolutism of both the revolutionary and reactionary type.
Great essay! I especially loved this: "I do it to say that we live in a world of surpassing strangeness and power, a world that for all we understand about it, we still don’t understand."
I've been making an effort to include more mystery in my fiction, trying to tap into human unconsciousness. When I was younger, I thought I could change people's minds politically with my writing, but now what I think people need the most is to realize there's life beyond politics. But polemics disguised as fiction sure are trendy now.
Do you think dreamlike writing can move people politically? The Gospels or uncle toms cabin, or on team evil the turner diaries? Maybe even “the apprentice” was a sort of fever dream of a cruel savior rich man? Dunno!
I think it can in the way I talked about in my post Emergency Broadcast. In Shelly's time poets were unacknowledged legislators; in that post I half-jokingly said that they are now unacknowledged taxi drivers. I have remembered things certain taxi drivers have said to me for decades. In that way books can affect people's thinking, including their political thinking, but in dream-like, sideways fashion, a small conversation sitting deep in their brain somewhere.
All art is political, though it will manifest a politics you'd never claim to profess. Focusing on form gives you plausible deniability. Nabokov played that game with us and with himself. He's not alone; it's the hide and seek of moralism and its opposite (which is another form of moralism) from Eliot to the Nouveau Roman. Huysmans returned to the Church. Robbe-Grillet and de Man, Nazi collaborators, moved into the theatrical fakery of full-on formalism/Mannerism.
But all of it is literature, as much as Wittgenstein's Tractatus. And if you're sensitive to the desires behind the elisions, which are all there on the page, you can learn from them without being seduced. And that's what art is. It's the con that reveals itself as a con, as it tries to con you.
Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake
"ARTISTS. All charlatans." Flaubert.
Just look behind/ think beyond any discussions of "aesthetics", which are as bogus as any discussion of "truth".
Better in the end to have a political life—to face politics as vulgar necessity—than indulge the fantasy of a political (utilitarian) art. Fascism after all is the dream of art as life.
My favorite discussion of the relation of art and politics is from a piece by AJ Liebling, traveling with the irregulars, fighting in North Africa,
---…in a hospital tent at the clearing station I came across a man with a French flag wrapped around his waist; the medics discovered it when they cut his shirt away. He was a hard-looking, blondish chap with a mouthful of gold teeth and a face adorned by a cross-shaped knife scar—the croix de vache with which procurers sometimes mark business rivals. An interesting collection of obscene tattooing showed on the parts of him that the flag did not cover. Outwardly he was not a sentimental type.
"Where are you from?" I asked him.
"Belleville," he said. Belleville is a part of Paris not distinguished for its elegance.
"What did you do in civilian life?" I inquired.
That made him grin. "I lived on my income," he said.
"Why did you choose the Corps Franc?"
"Because I understood," he said. ---
You have to know when the draw the line. Or better: you have to know that there's a point at which you'll draw it.
I like this response a lot. I don't know about drawing lines in relation to pieces of fiction, but I really like your tone and thought. I can't understand the AJ Liebling bit as a discussion of art and politics but I feel the connection in a way I can't articulate, particularly in the description of the cut face, the mouth of gold teeth and the flag draped around the waist. But this:
Milton "was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Blake
Yes. Absolutely.
It's an argument against moralism, and that's all "political art" is. It can't describe the world of experience, and the political imposition of moralism is authoritarian. The man answered Liebling's question: "I'm a criminal but I'm not a fascist." Liebling recognized civic virtue. The story breaks there, to mark the irony. No philosopher would accept that, and that's the problem with philosophers.
Decadence is moralism: the need for the binary. It's weakness and laziness: the need to be a servant or a master, high or low, to be free one way or the other from the burden of moral responsibility. And after one extreme you go to the other: Huysman's return to the church was as much a symptom as his life before it. Fascism is weakness, moralism and self-hatred. None of those fit Leibling's pimp. He's a more honest liberal than the liberals are, but again he knows what fascism is, unlike the spoiled suburbanites now cosplaying politics: woke vs dimes square, or earnestly debating John Rawls and Badiou.
"Defense of personal freedom isn't enough. What's needed is an argument in defense of the need for citizens in a democratic state to be able to be all kinds of wrong, all kinds of confused, creepy, conflicted, desirous, weepy or hate-filled, so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness. The choice is between a community of adults with a minority of the inveterately childish and criminal or a community of children ruled by moralists and crime lords."
I wrote that a few years ago. I still like it. It works as a defense of art.
I like it too or find it interesting anyway. I like the conclusion "so that they may be able to learn to understand and outgrow their childishness." Even if it often doesn't work that way in my experience, at least "all kinds of wrong" allows for the possibility.
I thought more about the Liebling story last night after I wrote to you. I was wondering why I was connecting the description of the pimp's face with his presence in the irregulars or with anything political in the conversation that ended on the ambiguous line "Because I understood." It occured to me that the man had experienced "politics" in terms of local power struggle literally carved onto his face, that he knew a serious turf war when he saw one and had the sense to choose a side that he could get behind. The complicated symbol of a flag combined with the much more crude symbol of the cross plus the animal teeth made ornamental by gold--killer.
I think it's a mistake to intellectualize it. The simplest interpretation is the best, and I think that's Liebling's too: he's a criminal who doesn't want a world ruled by criminals. That's where he draws the line. Most career criminals don't want their siblings to do what they do, but once you've started down the road, by whatever cause, it's hard to go back. And the state's punishment is just more of the same. And you begin to Identify with the punishment, which is where things get complex. And, no, I've never grown up; or perhaps enough to stay alive. But there's luck in that too.
This is such a wonderful post. I had to come back days after my first reading and read it again. I wasn’t familiar with the Nabokov essay. “Small, soft humans” and the “mysterious, asocial” operations of fiction … yes, yes. The question of whether fiction is or can be a moral force (or might even be moral in its amorality, if that makes any sense at all) has always interested me, and I love this contribution to the discussion. And especially the exploration of the beautiful “Signs and Symbols.”
I am going to have nightmares about the terrifying sand striker! What place does it occupy in the evolutionary plan except to feed on the less fortunate? (capitalist analogy?) Love the illustrations you choose for these essays, Mary.
Thank you!
Honestly, evolutionary plans are like that. Plants 'eat' sunlight, herbivores eat plants, small carnivores eat herbivores, and large carnivores eat smaller carnivores (or herbivores) until you don't have enough biological mass to support another layer of carnivores. Nature is red in tooth and claw. Social Darwinism really is the evolutionary principle as a form of social organization...and it's awful for everyone in it!
This is interesting to me but I don't know how to reply because its a subject I know very little about. I have certainly observed that nature is brutal and so are human structures. But I don't think awful for everyone in it, or at least not all the time. Nature is very very gentle at times, and so are we, like soft rain and strawberries. Nature is highly responsive to our touch; if nature was teeth and claws all the time, we would not have survived. Mother animals very tender with their young--but if the young are too weak to keep up, its true they will often abandon them or refuse to nurse them. If I have an opinion it's that nature is very mixed, more amoral than brutal, and has a lot of different faces/aspects put together in what seems like a chaotic way to us. But my intuition is that we don't fully understand what it is.
The subtle art between truth and reality...but what is true? What is real? Our lives, subjective at best.
The embedded voice readings you use to draw us further into your writing continue to help me become a better listener and understand the nuances of wordplay.
Why a photo of Rand at the start of this excellent essay?
No reason other than she is a political writer. And it was a nice photo. Unusual for her, kind of receptive and sweet. Who do you think would be better? There are a lot of people, but I wanted one of someone typing. I considered George Orwell.
Wow - you responded personally!! Fantastic. Thank you. Fabulous essay. I love good writing and this was just excellent. It set me off on a deep dive into Russell Banks tonight. As for the photo of Rand - her politics seems so opposite to yours, I found it jarring there. Small quibble. Please keep the genius flowing. Good night from Edinburgh. :)
Well yeah, I respond personally a lot. And I thought your question was valid, putting Rand's face upfront makes it look like the post is about her. I've thought about switching it out but whoever I put there it will be the same issue. I guess I could rotate!