Interest in Bugs, Not Humbugs

By Christopher Porterfield

VLADIMIR NABOKOV: LECTURES ON LITERATURE Edited by Fredson Bowers; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 385 pages; $19.95

"All satisfied with their seats? O.K. No talking, no smoking, no knitting, no newspaper reading, no sleeping, and for God's sake take notes." So began Literature 311-312 at Cornell in the '50s, Professor Nabokov presiding. Teaching was of necessity Nabokov's livelihood in those pre-Lolita days, and he took to it as he took to all the shifting fortunes of his long emigre life: with energy, flair and an unfailing relish for the ironies of the situation. Somewhere in one of those classes, as Nabokov might have guessed, was at least one future novelist, Thomas Pynchon. Somewhere in his own imagination glimmered at least two future academic portraits, the title character of Pnin and the poet John Shade of Pale Fire.

Meantime from the podium he projected another character of his own creation, the cosmopolitan, eccentric lecturer: authoritarian but also authoritative, alternately mock-stern and mischievous (he sometimes started over in mid-lecture, to see how long it would take the class to notice), arrogant yet never harsh, in fact downright kindly at times. After explaining that the transformed Gregor Samsa in Kafka's The Metamorphosis was not a cockroach but a beetle, and that beneath his carapace he possessed unsuspected wings, Nabokov told his students: "This is a very nice observation on my part to be treasured all your lives. Some Gregors, some Joes and Janes, do not know that they have wings."

No collection of Nabokov's lectures and notes could fully recapture the flavor of his professorial persona, but Lectures on Literature comes as close as one could hope for. Elegantly edited by Fredson Bowers, handsomely printed in an oversized format, it includes discussions of seven classic European and English novels and is extensively illustrated with Nabokov's drawings, diagrams, maps, floor plans and marginal annotations ("Idiot!" he scrawled typically next to one of the many mistranslations that outraged him).

At Cornell, wrote Biographer Andrew Field, "Nabokov belonged to the department of Nabokov." Just as well, considering the cheerful contempt for critical orthodoxies that resounds through these lectures. The whole historical and sociological dimension of Dickens' Bleak House, he announces, "is neither interesting nor important." He dismisses Freudian interpretations of The Metamorphosis by saying, "I am interested here in bugs, not in humbugs." As for character study in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, "the worst way to read a book is childishly to mix with the characters in it as if they were living people." Great works of art, for Nabokov, are not so much versions of the real world as new worlds unto themselves, "supreme fairy tales" whose essential harmony and radiance are self-contained and self-sufficient.

The essence of these worlds, their "inner weave," lies in their details. "One should notice and fondle details," he says. "There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected." The bulk of these lectures consists of rapt, minute scrutiny of such trifles. Nabokov does a virtual time-and-motion study of the daylong "dance of fate" between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. He reads volumes into Flaubert's use of the word and in Madame Bovary. Under his microscope, the "flushed prism" of Proust's style reveals a particular rose-purple mauve as the precise color of time.

On the page, unenlivened by Nabokov's rich accent or his antic platform mannerisms, this methodical tracing of specifics could be slow going. Yet it never lapses into dry exegesis. Nabokov keeps stepping back for a longer view of his subject from some surprising angle. Dickens, he insists, is anything but sentimental in his treatment of children in Bleak House. Madame Bovary, that supposed landmark of realism, he finds to be a tissue of implausibilities (although he adds that they do not matter). Above all, he continually exhorts the reader to look for his own angles, to read "not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle." Of the three guises that he says any great writer assumes--storyteller, teacher, enchanter--he leaves no doubt about which he venerates.

Nabokov's faith in the transforming magic of an artist's style leads him to overrate the beautifully written blarney of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By the same token, he somewhat underrates Jane Austen, who, despite her "pert, precise and polished" prose, is so deeply rooted in the quotidian that he misses her enchantment. Yet he celebrates his own aesthetic, the "capacity to wonder at trifles," with an ardor that is irresistible. "These asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness," he maintains, "and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good."

This is nothing less than an artistic credo, a point that readers today can appreciate more readily than the students of Literature 311-312. The enormous success of Lolita in 1958, which freed Nabokov from teaching, made most people aware for the first time that he had practically a lifetime of such writing behind him. Had the students only known it, their professor was not only explaining Dickens or Flaubert or Kafka. With his quirky insights, his cunning traceries and meticulous diagrams, he was also charting the mind of another great novelist: himself. --By Christopher Porterfield

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