Zadie Smith - Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays

[34]From Pnin: “He placed various objects in turn-an apple, a pencil, a chess pawn, a comb-behind a glass of water and peered through it at each studiously: the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight horizon, half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil, if held obliquely, curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became monstrously fat-almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided into a couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass’s seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.”

[35]“My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations.”

[36]Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 1969. The English translation quoted is by Joseph V. Harari, first published in 1979.

[37]“Ferrety, human-interest fiends, those jolly vulgarians,” as he called them. And that cagey afterword to Lolita performs a similar function.

[38]Foucault, “What Is an Author?”

[39]In Nabokov’s case, it’s more like S&M-an experience you’d hope Foucault could get behind.

[40]A largely romantic concept. And wasn’t it always the same examples? Either it was Homer; some unspecified “ethnographic societies” within which “narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’-the mastery of the narrative code-may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’ ” (Barthes); or else the rather weak model of Beaumont and Fletcher.

[41]Respectively, Walter Benjamin, Milena Jesenská, Erich Heller and Felice Bauer.

[42]This has not been seriously assailed since Edmund Wilson’s “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka.”

[43]Begley tells us that Brod did not directly publish Kafka’s letters to Milena and Felice, but neither did he press them to “surrender his letters for destruction, or to destroy the letters themselves.” As a result, Brod lost control of them. As the German army entered Prague, Milena entrusted them to Willy Haas, who published them in 1952; Felice, who emigrated to America, sold her letters herself, in 1955, to Schocken Books.

[44]Brod championed many artists, including Leoš Janáček, Franz Werfel and Karl Kraus.

[45]The truly hagiographic text is Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka. The young Gustav befriended Kafka in Berlin in the final year of the writer’s life. In this essay, where I quote from the book, it is with the understanding that this is “reported speech” and most probably prettified for publication.

[46] Conversations with Kafka , Gustav Janouch.

[47]Ibid.

[48]Although, naturally, Larkin felt his own case to be by far the more extreme, as he makes clear in his poem “The Literary World”: My dear Kafka / When you’ve had five years of it, not five months, / Five years of an irresistible force meeting an / Immoveable object right in your belly, / Then you’ll know about depression.

[49]“Self’s the Man” by Philip Larkin.

[50]From Kafka’s diary. “She” is Felice.

[51]Traditionally, critics credit Felice Bauer with being at least partial inspiration for “The Judgement”-the first story of his that satisfied Kafka. The evidence is circumstantial but convincing: it was dedicated to Felice, its composition dates to the beginning of their correspondence, and its heroine, to whom the hero is engaged, shares her initials: “Frieda Brandenfeld, a girl from a well-to-do family.”

[52]Now more commonly used for recent immigrants to Western democracies.

[53]Begley: “Three ‘ritual murder trials,’ throwbacks to the Middle Ages, and unimaginable for Jews believing that they lived in an era of moral as well as material progress, took place within his lifetime.”

[54]From her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations: Essays and Reflections . As Begley points out, Benjamin and Kafka were “near enough contemporaries for Arendt’s comments to be considered directly relevant” to Kafka’s case.

[55]Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.”

[56]As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic Ungeziefer. Variously translated as insect, cockroach -much to the horror of Nabokov, who insisted the thing had wings- bug, dung-beetle, the literal translation is vermin. Only the David Wyllie, Joachim Neugroschel and Stanley Corngold translations retain this literal meaning.

[57]McCarthy is also the author of the novel Men in Space .

[58]This can be heard at http://www.listen.to/necronauts.

[59]In another INS report, this line is described as “an active construct in which ‘nothing’ designates an event, perhaps even a momentous one.”

[60]RAI is the Italian state broadcasting corporation.

[61]Alessandro Blasetti (July 3, 1900-February 1, 1987) was the director of more than twenty films including Quattro passi fra le nuvole (1942) and L a fortuna di essere donna (1956).

[62]The bikini-clad showgirls on Italian television.

[63]Literally a recommendation of iron. A good word that will secure an applicant in a position.

[64]Urban Italian mass housing, the equivalent of England’s housing estates and America’s projects.

[65]From Larry McCaffery’s Dalkey Archive Press 1993 interview with Wallace, conducted during the composition of Brief Interviews . The great majority of Wallace quotes in this piece come from that interview.

[66]Each year, the MacArthur Fellows Program gives out awards of several hundred thousand dollars (nicknamed genius grants) to individuals working in any field who “show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work.” Wallace received his in 1997. Brief Interviews was published in 1999.

[67]Wallace’s most attentive mainstream critic, Wyatt Mason, made this point in his 2004 review “You Don’t Like It? You Don’t Have to Play.” There he asks and answers the question-“Why should [the reader] grant Wallace any of his demands… when the reader feels, not unreasonably, that Wallace is making unreasonable demands?”-with the only honest response available, that is, an account of Mason’s own pleasure: “having read the eight stories in Oblivion; having found some hard to read and, because they were hard and the hardness made me miss things, reread them; having reread them and seen how they work, how well they work, how tightly they withhold their working, hiding on high shelves the keys that unlock their treasures; having, in some measure, found those keys; and having, in the solitary place where one reads, found a bright array of sad and moving and funny and fascinating human objects of undeniable, unusual value.” But to those readers who find even Wallace’s habit of abbreviating the phrase with regard to (w/r/t) an unreasonable demand, no counterargument will suffice.

[68]The second person present tense imperative-a fashionable conceit of the ’90s.

[69]Maybe writers have this dream more than most.

[70]I once asked Wallace, in a letter, for a list of favorite writers. Larkin was the only poet mentioned.

[71]From “Dockery and Son.”

[72]The end of “High Windows”: “The sun-comprehending glass,/And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.” The end of “Water”: “And I should raise in the east/A glass of water/Where any-angled light/Would congregate endlessly.”

[73]From “Dockery and Son.”

[74]This, and later James quotes, are from the 1908 preface to The Princess Casamassima. This section of the preface has been used before, in the context of the connection between fiction and philosphy, by Martha Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge .