#aesthetic autonomy

[literary-structures]

Nabokov never abandoned intertextuality, but its role in his poetics diminished, becoming offset by irony reflective of the fact that too much was lost in cultural translation and too many ‘good’ readers had been left behind in another language or murdered on another continent. Nabokov’s American novels most reputed for intertextual allusiveness also poke the most fun at it. “The Gift”’s serious exercise in literary erudition devolves into the ravings of a lunatic annotator in “Pale Fire” (1962) and a contest of motel-hopping paedophiles in “Lolita” (1955). Absence – from linguistic, cultural and personal losses – becomes a leitmotif in Nabokov’s post-war art, displacing understatement at the centre of his method. “Lolita”’s title character exists as a significant absence. She is a discursive projection by her tormentor and jocose raconteur, Humbert Humbert; unlike Zina, who is physically present in “The Gift,” alongside her own tormentor and jocose raconteur nursing Humbert-like paedophile fantasies. This evolution in Nabokov’s poetics is mediated by the problem of Jewish representation, on display in his story “Signs and Symbols” (1948), which mocks the author’s former reliance on the reader in the decryption of hermeneutic indices. Contracting the ‘referential mania’ of the story’s absent hero, who is confined to a mental hospital, readers go to great interpretive lengths to find a Holocaust parable in a narrative that keeps mum about the Jewishness of its protagonists, surmised from onomastic hints and a mention of murdered European relatives – a silence made meaningful by absence. Nabokov does not avoid the subject of Jewishness. Instead, he eschews Jewish representation, whose absence, rooted in the lack of adequate imaginative language, finds new meaning in the destruction of European Jews and in its ethical implications for art. Yet one is hard pressed to assimilate this interplay of ethics and aesthetics to Theodor Adorno’s statement that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ The Marxist critic is selective in his attention to suffering, keeping silent about Soviet terror. Nabokov, in contrast, treats the Holocaust as a touchstone for all suffering – in Germany and in ‘another torture house, [Russia].’ But the topic is best handled through evocative silence. Hence Nabokov’s classification of “Signs and Symbols” among the texts ‘wherein a second (main) story is woven into, or placed behind, the superficial semitransparent one.’ We cannot recreate the hidden (Jewish) story in “Signs and Symbols” the way we intertextually reconstruct it in “The Gift.” The author makes us speculate in a hermeneutic vacuum, deriding overzealous interpretation. Nor is this a one-time event in his American fiction: witness the endless debates around “Pnin,” “Lolita” or “Pale Fire.”

Leonid Livak, ‘Jewishness as Literary Device in Nabokov’s Fiction,’ in Nabokov in Context (233–4)

[literary-structures]

Although [Christopher] Okigbo, in his personal life, was willing to die for a political cause, he routinely rejected the notion that he be bound by political obligations in his professional life. For instance, when he was awarded a prize at the 1er Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres in Dakar in 1966, he declined it on the grounds that black literature was an absurd concept. In this declaration Okigbo expresses a longing to be recognized as a writer, not as a black writer. For him, the aesthetic realm transcends, or ought to transcend, racial and political boundaries. In life he might be a firm believer in the need for black people to assert their rights. As a poet, however, he felt that his work should not observe systems of racial exclusion or separatism in any form. Also, his rejection of the prize might be construed as a classic modernist gesture of distancing oneself from careerist or financial ambitions in the name of artistic purity. Sometimes, as in “Black Orpheus,” the idea of an apolitical literary sphere represented a pragmatic compromise, a willingness to suspend or forestall political differences that might hinder the establishment of independent African cultural institutions. In other cases, the discourse of aesthetic autonomy could function as a self-conscious professional strategy, a belief that literature and its producers ought not to be influenced by wealth or by vested political interests. […] The modernist ideal of autonomy, refashioned to speak to the circumstances of the Cold War, could permit African intellectuals to reject ideological binaries. Commitments to artistic and political sovereignty were frequently blended in the fabrication of anglophone African cultural institutions of the decolonization era. The doctrine of nonalignment, expressed both politically and artistically, bolstered anticolonial sentiments by insisting on African self-determination in all its forms. Even apolitical art, in a paradoxical formulation, could have some political resonance in that it insisted on the right of Africans to determine their aesthetic future without interference from the Cold War superpowers, which were prone to evaluate every aesthetic object by its ideological utility.

Peter Kalliney, ‘Modernism, African Literature and the Cold War,’ in Modern Language Quarterly (2015) 

[literary-structures]

The charges of elitism and an of unhealthy preoccupation with style were applied consistently to Nabokov throughout his career, including when he wrote in Russian before World War II. However, “Bend Sinister” is exceptional in its adoption of various alienating modernist strategies, to the extent that John Coleman, reviewing for “The Spectator,” felt compelled to ask whether Nabokov’s style constituted ‘a sort of running threat to our imaginative engagement’ in the lives of the characters. Importantly, Coleman found that ‘the assorted mannerisms […] just fail to stifle the theme […] for all the finicking devious overlay, the harsh anatomy of despotism shines through; seen, felt, done.’ Nabokov’s novel, in this reviewer’s judgment, succeeds despite its style rather than because of it, and this paradox returns us to the critical issues raised by those readers who have perceived the radical disjunction between a politically simplistic dystopian novel and an alienating modernist style. The disjunction was absolutely intended, and it reflects Nabokov’s cultural politics of the 1940s. The intellectual rigor, challenging style, and most importantly, temporal mastery associated by both Nabokov and his reviewers with European modernism, were defenses instigated directly against totalitarian ideology.

Will Norman, Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time (p. 85)

[literary-structures]

Words are free, there for the taking, and William Gass makes sure we are aware of their infinite potential. Words can be used to command, to describe, to denigrate. They can be strung into sentences and bellowed in a song ‘in such a way that from a distance it will seem a harmony, a Strindberg play, a friendship ring.’ We understand nuance and learn how to prepare for consequence with the help of words. We can make beautiful things with words. Those inclined can dare to treat the medium of language as an inexhaustible source of art. Art is the business of serious writers, Gass insists. A brilliant essayist as well as one of this nation’s most important novelists, Gass argues in his essay “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction” that the task for a serious writer is twofold: ‘He must show or exhibit his world, and to do this he must actually make something, not merely describe something that might be made.’ In his emphasis on making, Gass is proposing that the meaning generated by a work of fiction goes beyond its mimetic familiarity. The purpose of an imaginative narrative isn’t to confirm what we think we already know about reality; rather, it offers ‘a record of the choices, inadvertent or deliberate, the author has made from all the possibilities of language.’ A fictional cat may reflect qualities of a real cat, but it is better appreciated as a product of the author’s agile mind.

Joanna Scott, introduction, in William Gass’ In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (2015)

[literary-structures]

Winterson is certain that art must not speak ‘the language of shop assistants and tabloids,’ wishes to resist the ‘notional life’ promoted by ‘governments, mass education and the mass media,’ and says, ‘Art always dresses for dinner. Does this seem stuffy in the jeans and T-shirt days of popular culture? Perhaps, but without formal space art cannot do its work.’ Art certainly needs form, but the persistent snobbery in these analogies unravels a lot of Winterson’s meaning. Art always dresses, perhaps; but it doesn’t always dress conventionally or dress for dinner. ‘I know of no pain that art cannot assuage,’ Winterson writes. This is intended as a tribute to art, but it sounds like an ignorance of pain.

Michael Wood, ‘The Nightmare of Narrative (Jeanette Winterson)’, in Children of Silence: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (p. 185)

[literary-structures]

As much as Nabokov would have recoiled at his Marxist-influenced account of literary history, one suspects he would not have been entirely displeased by Jameson’s description of his spinning his forms in ‘a time capsule of isolation or exile.’ Indeed, the idea that Nabokov’s work was somehow out of season is ironically congruent with the way he has been read by many of what Rampton called his ‘professional readers’ and what we might call Nabokovians; both approaches isolate Nabokov from his socio-historical context, even if they come at his work from different directions. In an important way, however, these ‘professional readers’ represent Nabokov’s ideal readers. With the collapse of the emigration Nabokov lost a close community of readers who understood his work’s contexts and cultural nuances. In Pierre Bourdieu’s terms this was a ‘field of restricted production’ in which Nabokov was writing for other artists and a relatively small public. In the United States his work, after the publication of “Lolita,” was participating in the ‘field of large-scale production’ in which culture is made for the ‘general public.’ One way of understanding the Nabokovian project is by reading his overdetermined texts of the American and Swiss periods, with their games, riddles, and submerged plots, as seeking to re-create that lost readership through inviting an ahistorical exegetical criticism. By drawing readers into a restricted group that reads communally, Nabokov’s work invites the re-creation of a readership analogous to the one it had lost. On this analysis, the project has enjoyed great success, with an established community of Nabokovian scholars who have produced remarkable ‘deep’ readings of his fiction. This scholarship has sustained Nabokov’s idea of artistic durability outside the context of literary movements or sociological phenomena, such as the very acts of periodization just described.

Duncan White, Nabokov and his Books: Between Late Modernism and the Literary Marketplace (p. 27–8)