Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

Nabokov, having fled the Communist revolution, was not sympathetic to ideologies that made light of Western freedoms and individual privilege, up to and including the individuality of the author. But in a deeper sense, the disjunction between Nabokov and la nouvelle critique is philosophical. It has to do with how Nabokov thought about reality:

Reality is a very subjective affair. I can only define it as a kind of gradual accumulation of information, and as specialization. If we take a lily, for instance, or any other kind of natural object, a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person. But it is still more real to a botanist. And yet another stage of reality is reached with that botanist who is a specialist in lilies. You can get nearer and nearer, so to speak, to reality; but you never get near enough because reality is an infinite succession of steps, levels of perception, false bottoms, and hence unquenchable, unattainable. You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing: it’s hopeless.

But this is a different kind of interpretive hopelessness. For Barthes, hermeneutics and epistemology have been subjected to a twin crisis: there is no there there. With the Author dead, no longer the past of his own text, nor its source of nourishment or final meaning, the scriptor merely “traces a field without origin-or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins.” And this crisis in authorship, for Barthes, has consequences far beyond the little world of novels and their readers:

In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing ), by refusing to assign a “secret,” an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases-reason, science, law.

Just as we must give up the urge to know the reality of the text, we must also give up the hope of knowing the world in its ultimate reality. There can be no more “deciphering,” we must settle for “disentangling.” Power is relinquished. Not so in Nabokov’s world. In Nabokov’s portrait of subjectivity you can still decipher by degrees. The lily can be more or less real, and there exists an ultimate reality even if we can never know it. Still, we can come close. To approach the reality of a novel, as readers, Nabokov asked that we bring biographical, [24]historical, cultural, entomological, and linguistic knowledge to the task, not to mention attentive care, empathy, synesthetic acuity, and a keen visual sense. There can be ever more accurate readings of the lily. And there can be, consequently, philistine misreadings, a fact Barthes’s portrait of the prepotent reader (blissed out, picking her way through a riot of potential meanings, constructing a text playfully, without limits) refuses to acknowledge.

But Nabokov was no cold-blooded empiricist and he was not blind to the indeterminacy of writing. For him, too, there existed a blissful, unfettered, nonhierarchical experience of meaning-but it came earlier in the process. Not while the reader reads, but before the writer writes, in a moment that precedes composition: “Inspiration.” Nabokov split this old-fashioned word into two Russian parts. The first half of inspiration, for him, is vorstog (initial rapture). Vorstog describes that moment in which the book as a whole is conceived:

A combined sensation of having the whole universe entering you and of yourself wholly dissolving in the universe surrounding you. It is the prison wall of the ego suddenly crumbling away and the non-ego rushing in from the outside to save the prisoner-who is already dancing in the open.

Here the author dies, momentarily; here meaning is indeterminate and free flowing. Vorstorg “has no conscious purpose in view”; in vorstog “the entire circle of time is conceived, which is another way of saying time ceases to exist.” But after this comes the second stage: vdokhnovenie (recapture). And it’s here that the actual writing gets done. In Nabokov’s experience, the two had quite different natures. Vorstog was “hot and brief.” Vdokhnovenie “cool and sustained.” In the first you lose yourself. In the second, you are doing the conscious work of construction. And while making the choices good writing requires, the Author exists, he circumscribes, he controls, he puts walls on either side of the playground. The reader, to read him properly, would do well to recognize the existence of these walls. The Author limits the possibility of the reader’s play.

In The Pleasure of the Text and “S/Z,” meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful Barthesian distinction is made between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smooth and fixed in meaning and can be read passively (most magazine copy and bad genre writing is of this kind). By contrast, the writerly text openly displays its written-ness, demanding a great effort from its reader, a creative engagement. In a writerly text the reader, through reading, is actually reconstructing the act of writing, a thrilling idea with which Nabokov would sympathize, for that was the kind of active reader his own work required. [25]But then Barthes imagines a further step: that by reading across the various “codes” he believed were inscribed in the writerly text (the linguistic, symbolic, social, historical, et cetera), a reader, in an active sense, constructs the text entirely anew with each reading. In this way Barthes reverses the hierarchy of the writer-reader dynamic. The reader becomes “no longer the consumer but the producer of text.”

Hard to know for sure what Nabokov would have made of that . My guess is he would have found it unhinged. He disliked literary theory in general. (“Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyse the pleasures that both sides know?”) It’s probably for the best that he didn’t live to see the kind of post-Barthes (and post-Foucault) campus criticism that flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses; a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort of thing:

The Trans-gendered Suitor : Refractions of Darcy as Elizabeth’s True Sister in Pride and Prejudice:

Daisy, the Dollar, and Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis: Portraits of Sexualised Capital in The Great Gatsby.

Please Sir Can I Have Some More: Bulimic Rejections of Self in Oliver Twist.

I’ve written a lot of essays like this. And found it a wonderful thing, to feel so free. The novel was mine to do with as I wished with, to read upside down, back to front or in entirely anachronistic terms. That kind of freedom makes writers of readers, liberating us from the passive and authoritarian reading styles we are taught in school ( Hard Times = British education system in Victorian England). When we read instead in an active way we get to reinscribe dusty old novels into our own interests and concerns. There is a joy in getting someone to hand us their butterfly so we can spend twenty pages making the case for its being our giraffe.

But Nabokov believed in the butterfly qua butterfly. For this reason, when I first read his Lectures on Literature I was disappointed. [26]Was this really Nabokov? The apparent analytic simplicity, the lengthy quoting without commentary. The obsession with (what seemed to me) utterly banal details: the shape of Gregor Samsa’s shell, a map of Dublin, the exact geographical location of Mansfield Park. And the questions he set his students! What color are Emma Bovary’s eyes? What kind of house was Bleak House? How many rooms are in there? You have to reset your brain, away from the overheated hustle of English departments, before you can see how beautiful those lectures are. How attentive. How particular. When it comes to rereading, Nabokov felt, “one should notice and fondle details.” These lectures are a marvelous, concrete example of that principle.