Wan Flame

I first read Lolita when impossibly young (much like the lass herself):  yet with a sense of complete understanding and delight.  Thus encouraged, I read various other Nabokov novels in high school, including, at some point, Pale Fire.   By that I was baffled.

It was my first exposure to what scholars term a sotie: an extended learnèd jest.   You had to wrap your young head around the notion of an Unreliable Narrator (nothing in the Hardy Boys had prepared me for that!), and the ironies and rivalries of literary criticism.    The central/initial segment, the poem, was alright, though not great, but I relished it as one of the longest poems I had then read, and quite comprehensible.   I accordingly took the criticism section in good faith, gradually growing perplexed at the increasing obtuseness of the critic.  What was going on?

A second read in mature years  had naturally a quite different effect.   Now it is easy to get all the jokes, the humor runs throughout, though in a donnish way inaccessible to the inmates of Ridgewood High.    All very jolly;  though as academic-psychosexual-picaresque exercise,  David Lodge does it better.  (Changing Places; Small World.)

~

Over the years,  I read most of what he wrote, the high point being Speak, Memory (the low point:  Ada).    Only a scattering of minor novels were left on my maybe-read-someday list;  when suddenly, the lot of them turned up  all at once, on the local remainder-tables, in a handsome uniform Penguin edition -- hardcover and clean print for these aging eyes.    It was thus that, for a couple of bucks, I took home The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.

Appearing in 1941, it was the first novel that the initially russophone and later germanicolous polyglot wrote in English.   Linguistically, it is no apprentice work.   The style is smooth, as though to the manner born.  Nowhere is there the slightest off-idiom or false note -- scarcely one American author in twenty can write so well, simply from a grammatical and semantic standpoint.  He handles with unobtrusive ease such choice vocables  as elenctic, paraph, and kerf.  (And if anyone presume to make light of such feats:  how’s your Russian, by comparison?) For language-learners and language-teachers like ourselves, on that basis alone  it deserves notice. (Or is it possible that, unannounced by the publishers, Nabokov was allowed successive retouchings over subsequent editions?)

[Emendation:   Though the first so written, it was not the first that he published in English.  His own supremely fluent transation of the originally-Russian Laughter in the Dark  appeared in 1938.   Which only moves the mystery back a few years.]

As in Pale Fire, the basic premise of Real Life is the (real or chimerical) obsessive quest of a lone researcher  for the true story behind the author of a supposed literary masterpiece.   In Pale Fire, the author plays fair with you to that extent:  the entire opus, unabridged, is presented to the reader  before exegesis begins.   And though the ultimate result is dark farce, it is not for any failing of the poem.  Pale Fire’s poem has its high points, and goes on long enough to present a challenge to any lesser poet.   It boasts a couple of memorable lines;  many’s the undergraduate alehouse where, as the assembled English-majors work their way to the bottoms of successive schooners, some one of their number will suddenly arise and bellow

I-I-I was the shadow of the waxwing   slain

By the false azure in the windowpane!

before collapsing face-first into the french-fries.

Yet in Real Life, we are granted only late, brief glimpses of the supposed prodigy’s oeuvre,  which turn out to be remarkable in no respect.   As for the late Sebastian Knight himself, the reader never warms to him, he is never really brought to life, and indeed is finally depicted as having been rather unpleasant and not especially memorable  even to his familiars.   By the end of the novel, in the celebrated phrase of the Bard of Hibbing,  “Nothing   is re-  vealed.”

Nabokov is perfectly equal to telling a rousing good yarn when he wants to, without sacrificing any of his connate literary elegance.  Lolita is such, accessible at several levels, variously to adolescents through pensioners.   Laughter in the Dark likewise -- it thus effortlessly made its way to the silver screen.  

Other novels tell a tale,  but allegorically or surreally, straddling a couple of parallel universes:  Invitation to a Beheading, Despair,  The Luzhin Defense.   (That last sort of told a story, but kept drifting inside and outside the protagonist’s head.   When it eventually was made into a film, the novel’s plot was not followed, that being impossible, and the result was  in any case  unsatisfactory, despite having a perfectly cast lead in John Turturro.)

Sebastian Knight, when all is done, hasn’t really told a story either, but only the narrative of someone in search of a story, which he never does find.

Postmodernist avant la lettre?  But the telling is reasonably naturalistic, and devoid of self-consciously self-referential tics.  Thus, a paradox:  a straightforward story that goes nowhere.

Unless it’s actually not straightforward.  We even begin to wonder whether, in exact anticipation of the much more successful execution later in Pale Fire, we might be again in the hands of an Unreliable Narrator who is not what he seems -- no genuine brother of Sebastian (and indeed, their fraternal relations are shown as having ever been sporadic lukewarm, on both sides, belying the later obsessiveness of his supposed admirer), and possibly even identical with Sebastian himself, the way the ‘critic’ of Pale Fire turns out to be none other than the fugitive king of Zembla (a cross between zemlya and semblance).  Fodder for such an extravagant ‘collapse of the wave-function’ is tossed forth towards the very end:   “All [his] books I knew as well as if I had written them myself.”   But unlike the case of Pale Fire, where the many deceptions  deftly interlock,  that interpretation makes nonsense of the entire affair, and would leave nothing but a mound of damp ashes.

~

So.  Not much to salvage.  Like certain other of Nabokov’s always magisteriously prosed novels (e.g. King, Queen, Knave, or the witty but cruel exercise, Laughter in the Dark),  the thing is spottily impressive but fundamentally leaves one cold.   All I can offer the disappointed reader, is the following thimbleful of tableaux, which were the best I could quarry out of this book:

one sheet of foolscap

lying alone  on the blue carpet, half in shade

cut diagonally  by the limit of the light.

~

The sky is alive    with stars

~

“We shall take our coffee in the green room”,

said Madame Lecerf   to the maid.

~

[Afterthought]

According to Wikipedia,  Sebastian Knight was the favorite Nabokov novel of the very well-read critic Edmund Wilson.   Now, Wilson had previously tackled a notoriously difficult and intricate work, Finnegan’s Wake, and managed to winkle out quite a bit of meaning.   Might it be that Wilson was simply more percipient in the other case as well, and that I missed the underlying premise, the way I did when first reading Pale Fire?  In light of the disappointments above, one would be curious to read his take on it.

The possibility is uncomfortable  -- as one who already suffers from Stultitia mathematica, it would be dreadful to suffer likewise from Stultitia literaria.

In defense nonetheless of the above jaundiced summary of the book,  it isn’t in any case  much fun to wade through -- not the sort of thing I’d reread in hopes of catching something I’d missed.   To that, someone might retort:  But if you missed the underlying point, that rules all your other observations out of court.

For some works  that’s true.   But an all-round work of narrative art, whether literary or cinematic, can be enjoyed on several levels.   Thus, “Memento” was an engrossing watch, and I expended much (futile) ingenuity later, trying to fit all the jigsaw fragments together;  and though ultimately failing (and reaching a suspicion that, in the final analysis, some of them don’t fit), it didn’t matter, Getting There is Half the Fun.   So too, classics like Robinson Crusoe or Alice in Wonderland or Wind in the Willows  can be fully appreciated only by historians or logicians or theologians  respectively, but laymen and even children are none the worse for the pleasures of the tale.
(/) At the extreme, there is the case of the Three Little Pigs, which has managed to delight generations of nursery dwellers, though they had no inkling of the deeper purpose of the tale:  at one level (as any professor can tell you), it is a thinly-disguised disquisition upon the filioque controversy concerning the Trinity;  yet at a deeper level (clear only to specialists), it is a subtle contraposition of the “Copenhagen interpretation” of the quantum theory, to the theory of Many Worlds or the “Three-Fold Way” philosophy of later researchers.   (/ Nabokovian sotie.)

[Another Pale-Fire-style sotie  can be viewed here.]

~

[Postscript] 

Shortly after posting all the above, and by sheerest happenstance, meaning to while away the remaining hours of a Sunday afternoon, 

I plucked from a pile of literary miscellanea,

an omnibus volume of criticism by the late Mary McCarthy,  novelist and critic and controversialist:

A Bolt from the Blue, and other essays,

edited by the estimable A.O.Scott  for the New York Review of Books in one of its exemplary editions of Books Worth Reviving -- a worthy counterpart to the Penguin Classics:  creamy paper, crisp type, and a dust-jacket  silky as a geisha’s intimate skin.

Indeed, no other publisher quite approaches these exemplars, unless it be Lingua Sacra, editore to the cognoscenti.

The title essay turns out to be a review, from 1962, of Pale Fire (interesting that Scott promotes this assessment  to primus inter pares of McCarthy’s critical oeuvre).

Nothing escapes her.  It is a masterly reading of a tricky work, brilliantly expressed.  Her ingenuity of interpretation, her weeviling through baklava-like strata of authorial metaphor and detail, exceeds what all but a very few readers could aspire to -- or desire.  By the time she is done with her analysis (and with us), Pale Fire has come to seem as steroidally mythological, and as perversely interarticulated, as Finnegan’s Wake (which I have never managed to read, despite assaults  first on the north face, then on the east, and finally an attempted gondola-ride to the summit  using the cheat-sheets of the Skeleton Key).   In particular, I blush to acknowledge that, no, after all, even after second reading, I did not get all the jokes.

Just possibly, such virtuosity might (after much labor) triumphantly decode Sebastian Knight as instructions for a play-by-play laying-out of an actual chess-game, from pawn-to-king’s-four to nuts.   Or better yet, a variant upon the tragic but celebrated grudge-match of Capablanca vs Nimzowitsch (Havana, 1894), in which Nabokov (or Sebastian himself?)  discovers an unexpected alternate line of attack at the crucial move 45, resulting in a late save for Black.

Only, such a feat still doesn’t work as simply literature, for a readership; any more than some blate embodiment of arcane fourteen-tone musical theory, dazzling on the Partitur  to handful of  virtuosi (sadly deaf), can cross the footlights  to actual ears.

Der Roman mit zu vielen Eigenschaften

When bent with cares, and weight of years,

periodically  we must refresh ourselves,

not merely from the stream,

but in the deep.

-- Paracelsus

This first I did  when still in my early twenties.  Residing in a tiny chamber on the second floor of a down-at-heels rooming house in one of the less-better parts of Berkeley,  unemployed and quite penniless, having just dropped out of the mathematics Ph.D. program,  for lack  equally of the wherewithal for tuition, and of Vocation,

I turned to things that, being both dense and plain long, many of us  go through life  never having the time to tackle.   Seated at a bare deal table, clad in an old much-stained and -perforated labcoat  which I had retained (for all outer-wear) from palmier days in freshman chemistry lab,

I patiently pored over, reading and digesting from cover to cover,  and unaccompanied by any appetizer (being at all events  at that time  a vegetarian, more from constraints of purse than of conviction),  such meaty main-courses as:

=>  the Bible;  all seven volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu; both stout volumes of the Wilhelm Meister Bildungsromane (along with occasional, shorter, not hors d’oeuvres but rince-gueles, from Goethe’s pen),

=> all of Kafka,  all of Orwell (essays and novels both),

=> along with several quite entertaining but l-o-n-g, multivolume studies (Mencken American Language, cum supplements; Havelock Ellis’ Psychology of Sex) and biographies (of Trotsky, of Proust, of Freud).

Many a doctoral candidate in the humanities, at one of the more exacting (non-Internet) universities, plows on through similar expanses, but  by professional exigency  they are channeled along a particular path, and even more hermetically chambered than sat I,

building  brick by (brick by) brick

that Babelian structure that will someday become their dissertation,

crown of their youthful labors, mausoleum of all their hopes,

which will (in most cases) be read by three people (those on their dissertation committee),

and by never a man else, till the Sun wink out like a candle. 

For them, something as wide-ranging and unfocused as my own reading-list of that time, would have struck any of their thesis-advisors as mere gaspillage.

~

And now, with the leisure of an empty-nester, all earthly debts settled, and the prospect of retirement  so soon as I shall have received the nunc dimittis,

I turn again to certain lengthy works  which, decades earlier, I might have pecked at, but let drop.

Dropped not, unfortunately, because they contain a deep hard wisdom  for which I was as yet unripe, but because, to this fitful cognition at any rate, they were, frankly, wearisome, not worth the candle.   Hence I do not anticipate that, in the course of this current return to masticating tough and leathery belts of prose, I shall be experiencing any epiphanies.    It is unlikely that mine eyes shall, suddenly scaleless, peep forth astonished at a bright new world, the way Phantastes quickened CSL.

Nor that, changing careers yet again, I shall take up the mantle as the Official Astronaut-Clown of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, realizing at last that this is the very role for which Life, all along, had been mysteriously preparing me.

~

It was thus that I turned, a few months ago, to the massive heft of that doorstopper of a novel, much-praised but less-perused, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, by Robert Musil;  the tale of that encounter (as yet incomplete), has been told here:

            Eigenschaften  ohne Männer

That project has alas  been shelved for the nonce, since, the stray epigram and choice asides aside, that book is filled with what the French, with unsurpassable mot-justitude, denominate  “longueurs”.

Such likewise has proved the case  with much of Gibbon (half-way through that now), and -- though I sigh to say it -- with Don Quixote.

~

Now --  Not in that studious spirit, but purely for relaxation, in spare moments, I recently reread  a slender and easy-to-read novel,  which I had already breezed-through back in high school:  J.P. Donleavy’s  The Ginger Man.    It’s a rousing good read, partaking of the spirit of much of Kingsley Amis (One Fat Englishman) or William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man.  It leaves not much deposit in the mind, and none in the soul;  but as I set the volume down with a smile, I realized that it had whetted my appetite for more Celtic matter -- an appetizer indeed, and no main course.

And thus it was that I turned, speculatively and with strange surmise, to that unread-masterpiece to end all unread-masterpieces -- to plant a stake through the heart of all literature whatever --  Finnegan’s Wake, by Mr. James “Jim” Joyce,  late of Ireland.

In high school (or rather in that well-remembered summer session at Mount Hermon;  thank you again, Mr. Zilliak!)   I had read (and loved) Portrait of the Artist, and various stories:  short, and very accessible.   Much later, after repeated attempts, I finally forced myself all the way through the much longer and more contorted Ulysses.   Its reputation among the exquisite literati stands much higher than that of its youthful slender cousin,  but I am here to tell you that anyone who tells you it is a breeze to read, is talking through his hat.   Beyond that lies only the cold northern slope of that nec plus ultra of ultima Thule -- Finnegan.   Discouraged by the Ulysses experience, I never made more than a half-hearted attempt to scale its cliffs, or even the scree about its skirts, never reaching, in the course of a half-dozen sallies over the space of many years, beyond (candor compels) the first page.  No doubt, by the second page, things pick up considerably;  but I never had the stamina to find out.

Now, however, much juiced with pep and zeste de vivre   after downing, in a couple of mouthfuls, The Ginger Man (with a Guiness chaser),  I pulled from its shelf  that dusty old Viking paperback, its cover much-thumbed (and all the rest new as though fresh from the bookseller’s), and (aided  this time  by stronger spirits, again from the Emerald Isle)  sat down to read with a will.

Yet --  vae mihi ! -- the Momentum that had been accumulated (integrating the Impulse over the Interval)  was quickly spent, not sufficing to propel me even so far as the second paragraph, before, with a groan, and tired of life, I let the volume drop with nerveless fingers.

Hours later, coming to my senses, I found the item on the floor, among detritus, and -- unaccountably -- the usquebaugh-bottle empty, as though having been meanwhile  consumed by some leprechaun.   Retrieving the former  from amidst the flotsam,  I idly turned to the inside-back-cover, and discovered a quotation that, many years ago, I had written-in in pen, from William Empson, who, in his celebrated work of literary-linguistic criticism, The Structure of Complex Words, calls Finnegan’s Wake “a titanic corpse”, and puts his finger on what Jeeves would call the “res”:

The trouble about the double meanings in Finnegan’s Wake is that, since they are wholly artificial, one cannot tell which way round  they are meant to go.

~

Here matters might well have remained, save that, beside it on the shelves, was a companion volume from Viking, A Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake,  by Joseph Campbell and H. M. Robinson.  Book-length itself, it is a sort of Thinking Man’s Cliff Notes.  I had (decades ago) once read through about a chapter of it, then let it lie;  and now I took up the volume again, to see what excuse these gentlemen might be able to make, for the hundreds of pages of trickylinguistic gibberish, of which I had shortly before  waded through but a pageful, before drowning.

And am forced to report, that this Skeleton Key is so engaging, that it renews my interest into the lock (the seven seals) which it claims to fit.

That is quite an achievement.  Had the authors, Messers Campbell & Robinson, instead bent their considerable talents to touting a washday product, rather than an unreadable masterpiece, they might have retired as millionaires.

So there things stand.  I have resolved, not to tackle that meganovel again, until such time as I shall have read through and digested this excellent adjutant.   We have, in short, at this point -- nothing at all;  a hint at a possible promise  of something to come.    What I am hoping is that, thus instructed, I shall eventually return to that hitherto-unchewable wad, and extract some juice from it.  In which case, we shall have a tribute to Criticism, as much as to Literature;  for, unaided, I must confess myself  unequal to the task.

More (deo volente) anon.

~

 

Another stout volume  from the same shelf, purchased in college  decades ago, and now sitting on my night-stand, is Richard Ellmann’s massive and standard biography, James Joyce.    I have done no more than peck at a few pages (apart from restricted sections read, not for Joyce’s sake, but for another perspective on something else I was pursuing, such as the whole American-exiles, Robert McAlmon  Being-Geniuses coterie).    That book was first published anno domini 1959;  and such has been my dilatoriness, that it has since been overtaken by a substantially revised and (oh no!) enlarged edition, published in the 1980s.

You’ve got to sprint as fast as you can, just to stay in one place …

~

All this might fall under the rubric, Making Too Big a Deal over a Book.  Clearly, some-body has too much time on his hands.  (Though for that matter, since  after all   you are reading this, so do you -- indeed, one level lower, an idler paravail.)   Not often just yet, in fact  -- this breather, from the accident of a weekend being bookended by the President’s Day holiday plus a couple of snow-days -- but retirement is in imaginable prospect, and several good friends have already retired (and report they are enjoying it).    And since, at our stately age, we spend few of our days sky-diving or cliff-climbing (though one stubborn old colleague still doggedly runs several miles a day, winter and summer), the question of reading-matter does naturally arise.  It is certainly a lot more central to our time of life, than the impression you’d get from the Sunday supplements -- “Sex at Seventy” or whatever.  (Sex at Twenty was just great, thankyouverymuch; but now it’s time to move on.)

 

~

There has sprung up  a sort of micro-mini-genre, which we may expect to expand as the boomers retire (and possibly, in retirement, become even more narcissistic than we already were) of book-length memoirs, purely parasitic upon some book the writer has read.  As, Reading Lolita in Tehran, or the recent My Life with Middlemarch.   There is something to be said for a bit of this -- and certainly it is preferable to that other fad of self-strokers, O My Childhood How Cruelly Was I Abused -- but one shudders to think of this sort of thing extending very far:  Reading Lolita in Poughkeepsie;  Poring through War and Peace on the Toilet;  My Secret Romance with “Joy of Cooking”.

[Update, President’s Day -- continuing with this mini-essay-fleuve]

My friend the Blindman writes:

My limited exposure to Finnegan suggests it needs to be read aloud because a lot of the content is sound.

I replied:

You may have something there.   I never appreciated “Paradise Lost” until I heard it as an audiobook;  and Joyce’s effervescent work  cries out to be read aloud by an Irishman.    Visually, the layers and lathers of puns  are wearying;  much of that would melt into the cadence of the dialect speech.  As, why Joyce wrote “sprids the boord” rather than “spreads the board”  I don’t know, and haven’t the interest to inquire;  but read aloud, you would simply understand it right off, rather than being sent off on a fruitless detour by the written form.   Just as with The Ginger Man, it is the sheer Celtic energy that sweeps you away, and not this detail or that. 

In a somewhat similar way,  I found Milton’s syntax, read written, annoying, but all that faded into the background in the recitation of the poem.

I have got much more from audiobook Dickens -- which after all  only approximates its original frequent consumption,  read aloud around the family fire -- than from the printed page.   Dickens has a brilliant interpreter in Frederick Davidson.   Whoever would successfully tackle Finnegan  would need similarly excellent qualifications.

For a single performer to actually read-aloud the entire book, would be a labor both of heroism and of folly, reminiscent of those round-the-clock marathon public readings of Gravity’s Rainbow in its entirety:

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/10/12/us/education-new-trend-on-campus-nonstop-public-reading.html

However, the Internet comes to our aid  with convenient excerpts.  Here, the opening page, rousingly read by a wild Irishman:

Finnegan Unbound

[Update 23 February 2014]  I have now managed to wade through a fair number of pages of the Skeleton Key, without  however  yet getting caught up in the sweep of its mythology.  Quite clearly, Joyce’s final offering is not a work to be unriddled and deciphered, line by line, the way your would a Sumerian inscription:  for one thing, it’s far too long.   You either you get swept up, or not.  So far, not.  We’ll see.  If I ever do wind up doing a deep-dive into that novel, it will be  not merely to puzzle it out, but to absorb and inform it, as I did with the Rootabaga Stories.

Nay more -- I am beginning to fear, that this late work of the Irishman, is like that folly of the Frenchman’s dotage:

Il serait injuste  de juger  comme une œuvre achevée  le roman posthume de Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881).  Ces expériences  incessamment renouvelées  de la bêtise bourgeoise  deviennent vite  fastidieuse[s] et fatigantes …

-- G. Lanson, Histoire de la littérature française (1895; rev. ed. P. Tuffrau, 1951), p. 1083

[Update 3 March 2014]   In Northrop Frye’s essay-collection Myth and Metaphor, I just stumbled upon his treatment of Finnegan’s Wake.

He too begins with a spot of bibliographic autobiography, saying that when he first met the book as a young man, he was “in no position to go into orbit around it” (the image is well-chosen).    He proceeds to a brief and appreciative précis, which reads like a sort of skeleton key to the Skeleton Key.

It is quite valuable to approach an inaccessible work by the guidance of someone whose mind you understand and admire.   But alas, in this instance, the exercise left me even less interested in Joyce than before.   Because the otherwise unfailingly companionable essayist  here fails to bring really anything to the table.  If Finnegan’s Wake can bring out the least-good in a fine author, then it is something better avoided.

[Update 26 April 2014]  A remarkably compact and trenchant summary of Finnegan’s Wake  appears in the “Dream of H.C. Earwicker” chapter of  The Wound and the Bow (1941), by Edmund Wilson.  He, mm, notices things  that other readers might not.   If ever I do return to the attempt to scale the north face of this intimidating mega-novel,  it will be on the coat-tails, or rather the climbing-rope, of such as he.