Lectures on Literature Read online

  VLADIMIR

  NABOKOV

  LECTURES ON

  LITERATURE

  EDITED BY FREDSON BOWERS

  INTRODUCTION BY JOHN UPDIKE

  Contents

  Editor’s Foreword by Fredson Bowers

  Introduction by John Updike

  Good Readers and Good Writers

  JANE AUSTEN

  Mansfield Park

  CHARLES DICKENS

  Bleak House

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Madame Bovary

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”

  MARCEL PROUST

  The Walk by Swann’s Place

  FRANZ KAFKA

  "The Metamorphosis”

  JAMES JOYCE

  Ulysses

  The Art of Literature and Commonsense

  L’Envoi

  Appendix

  Editor's Foreword

  by Fredson Bowers

  In 1940, before launching on my academic career in America, I fortunately took the trouble of writing one hundred lectures—about 2,000 pages—on Russian literature, and later another hundred lectures on great novelists from Jane Austen to James Joyce. This kept me happy at Wellesley and Cornell for twenty academic years.[*]

  Vladimir Nabokov arrived in America in May 1940. After lecturing on the road for the Institute of International Education and teaching a summer course in Russian literature at Stanford University, he was at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948. Initially he was the Wellesley Russian Department and taught courses in language and grammar; but he also developed Russian 201, a survey of Russian literature in translation. In 1948 Nabokov was appointed Associate Professor of Slavic Literature at Cornell University where he taught Literature 311-312, Masters of European Fiction, and Literature 325-326, Russian Literature in Translation. The catalogue description for Literature 311-312 was almost certainly written by Nabokov: "Selected English, Russian, French, and German novels and short stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will be read. Special attention will be paid to individual genius and questions of structure. All foreign works will be read in English translation." This course included Anna Karenin, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," Dead Souls, "The Greatcoat," Fathers and Sons, Madame Bovary, Mansfield Park, Bleak House, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Swann's Way, "The Metamorphosis," and Ulysses. [*] Nabokov was prohibited from teaching American works at Cornell because he was not a member of the English Department. He was a visiting lecturer at Harvard University in the spring of 1952.

  After he left teaching in 1958, Nabokov planned to publish a book based on his lectures, but he never began the project. (The lectures on Dead Souls and "The Greatcoat" were incorporated in Nikolai Gogol [1944].) These volumes preserve his lectures in their classroom form. Apart from the happy circumstance that here we have a major writer responding to the masterpieces of four literatures, his lectures merit wide availability because they are enduring guides to the art of fiction. Contemptuous of school-and-movement approaches to literature and scornful of critics who treated literature as a medium for socio-political messages, Nabokov tried to reveal how masterpieces work: "In my academic days I endeavored to provide students of literature with exact information about details, about such combinations of details as yield the sensual spark without which a book is dead. In that respect, general ideas are of no importance. Any ass can assimilate the main points of Tolstoy's attitude toward adultery but in order to enjoy Tolstoy's art the good reader must wish to visualize, for instance, the arrangement of a railway carriage on the Moscow-Petersburg night train as it was a hundred years ago. Here diagrams are most helpful. Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom's and Stephen's intertwining itineraries clearly traced. Without a visual perception of the larch labyrinth in Mansfield Park that novel loses some of its stereographic charm, and unless the facade of Dr. Jekyll's house is distinctly reconstructed in the student's mind, the enjoyment of Stevenson's story cannot be perfect."[*]

  The lectures collected in these two volumes represent Vladimir Nabokov's teaching at Wellesley and Cornell—with four lectures prepared for special occasions. For the convenience of readers, the lectures have been separated into two volumes: 1. British, French, and German Writers; 2. Russian Writers.

  At the first meeting of Literature 311 in September 1953 Vladimir Nabokov asked the students to explain in writing why they had enrolled in the course. At the next class he approvingly reported that one student had answered, "Because I like stories."

  EDITORIAL METHOD

  The fact cannot and need not be disguised that the texts for these essays represent Vladimir Nabokov's written-out notes for delivery as classroom lectures and that they cannot be regarded as a finished literary work such as he produced when he revised his classroom lectures on Gogol for publication as a book. The lectures exist in very different states of preparation and polish, and even of completed structure. Most are in his own handwriting, with only occasional sections typed by his wife Vera as an aid to delivery; but some lectures are completely in autograph form, as is true for the Stevenson, Kafka, and substantially for the series on Joyce. The Bleak House series is very much of a mixture, but with autograph predominating. Ordinarily the handwritten pages give every indication of rough initial composition, and as a result Nabokov might work them over extensively, not only during the first writing-out but also on review, when on some occasions he further revised both style and content. However, the alterations, whether substitutions or simple additions, were not always fully fitted syntactically into the context, or else further necessary adjustment in unaltered readings was not made. As a result, when the revision was heavy, the holograph portions of the texts require frequent editorial intervention, in order to prepare for reading what was no doubt easily adjustable or would pass unnoticed in oral delivery.

  On the other hand, typed pages can represent a considerable part of a lecture, as for Mansfield Park but more substantially in the Madame Bovary series. The frequent contrast between the comparative roughness of much of the holograph, even when revised, and the relative smoothness of the typed pages suggests that in the process of typing parts of her husband's lectures, Mrs. Nabokov exercised normal editorial discretion in preparing the pages for delivery. Even so, Nabokov might work over some pages of the typing in order to add fresh comments or to revise phrases for felicity.

  As a whole, it would be impractical to offer these manuscripts to the reading public in verbatim form, either structurally or stylistically. The Stevenson essay exists in what can described only as rough notes; hence the present ordering of its material is almost entirely the responsibility of the editor. In the other lectures, however, the general order of delivery is not usually in question since it is ordinarily a chronological working through of the book. Problems may arise, however, which make the editorial process one of synthesis and redaction. Various separate groups of pages in the folders represent simple background notes made in the initial stages of preparation and either not utilized or else revised and incorporated subsequently into the lectures themselves. Other of these independent sections are more ambiguous, and it is not always demonstrable whether they reflect stages of amplification during the course of repeated delivery in different years or else jottings for possible use in a future version. Certain problems of organization seem to result from added or alternate parts of some of the lectures, possibly intended for different audiences. Whenever possible the editor has salvaged all such material not manifestly background and preparatory memoranda and has worked it into the texture of the lecture discourse at ap
propriate places. Omitted, particularly, however, are pages of quotations from critics, which Mrs. Nabokov typed for her husband's use in the Proust, Jane Austen, Dickens, and Joyce lectures, as well as chronologies of the action of novels that Nabokov constructed for his own information.

  However, the problem of structure goes deeper than this incorporation of pertinent material from what might be called Nabokov's files. In various of the lectures Nabokov interspersed his chronological narrative with discrete sections of remarks on theme or style or influence. Where these interpolations were intended to be placed is usually far from clear; moreover, they are often incomplete and can even represent little more than jottings, though some may actually form charming little separate essays. It has devolved upon the editor to insert these sections when simple bridge passages are possible or, when the materials are in somewhat fragmentary form, to break up their separate elements for insertion in the discourse elsewhere as appropriate. For instance, the connected account of Stephen's interview with Mr. Deasy in part one, chapter 2 of the Ulysses lectures has been assembled from three different parts of the manuscript. The main quotation (here editorially supplied) seems not to have been read in class, but the students, with their books open, were referred to its pertinent points, provided in the next paragraph about the shell of Saint James. The rest of the text, however, comes from two parts of a separate section that begins with notes on structure, passes to miscellaneous comments on beauties and defects in the novel, to parallels in themes, and then to notes such as the reference to the conversation with Deasy as illustrating Flaubertian counterpoint and another note about Joyce's parodic style, citing the Deasy letter as an example. By such means, whenever the material permitted, the editor has been able to flesh out narrative and to preserve in a connected context a maximum of Nabokov's discussion of authors, their works, and the art of literature in general.

  Quotation bulked large in Nabokov's teaching methods as an aid in his effort to transmit his ideas of literary artistry. In the construction of the present reading edition from the lectures, Nabokov's method has been followed with very little cutting except of the most extended quoted illustrations, for the quotations are most helpful in recalling a book to the reader's memory or else in introducing it to a fresh reader under Nabokov's expert guidance. Quotations, therefore, ordinarily follow Nabokov's specific instructions to read certain passages (usually marked also in his own teaching copy) with the effect that the reader may participate in the discourse as if he were present as a listener. On occasion Nabokov's copies of his teaching books have passages marked for quotation although not mentioned in his lecture text. When these could be worked into the text as an aid to the reader, the quotations have been provided. Moreover, some few quotations have been selected by the editor although not called for either in the lectures or in the teaching copies when the occasion seemed to require illustration of a point that Nabokov was making. Nabokov's students were expected to follow his lectures with their books open before them. Hence they could be referred to points in the text by allusions in a manner impossible for a reader to follow, who must be supplied with extra quotation as a substitute. Molly's final soliloquy in Ulysses is an example. A unique instance, however, occurs at the end of the lectures on Proust. Nabokov had chosen for his text Swann's Way, the first volume of Remembrance of Things Past. The last lecture on Proust ends with an extended quotation from Marcel's meditations in the Bois de Boulogne on his memory of the past that concludes the novel. It is an effective ending to the novel but it leaves Marcel (and the reader) only a short way along the road to the full understanding of the functions and operations of memory as the key to reality, the meaning of the whole work. The musings in the Bois, indeed, are only one of the different aspects of viewing the past that in the gradual building up of Marcel's understanding prepare him for the final experience that reveals the reality for which he had been searching through the preceding volumes. This event takes place in the great third chapter, "The Princesse de Guermantes Receives," of the final volume, The Past Recovered. Since the revelation found in this chapter is the key to the cumulative meaning of the whole series of novels, any consideration of Proust that did not analyze it in explicit terms and make clear the difference between its full flowering and the early seed dropped in Swann's Way would fail in its essential purpose. Although Nabokov's lectures on Proust ended with the quotation of the episode in the Bois, a random sentence or two unconnected directly with his lectures suggests that he may have taken up the matter with his students, the more especially since the extensive typed quotations from Derrick Leon's book on Proust tend to concentrate on this final episode and its explanation. Nabokov's disjunct remark that "a nosegay of the senses in the present and the vision of an event or sensation in the past, this is when sense and memory come together and lost time is found again" is essentially true and an excellent encapsulation of Proust's theme; but it would not be very illuminating to anyone who had not read this final volume without the full explanation Proust himself provides in The Past Recaptured. The editor in this extraordinary case has felt justified, therefore, in extending the Nabokov ending by fortifying with quotation from the final volume of Remembrance of Things Past the incomplete Nabokov notes in an attempt to focus more sharply the essence of the revelation that came to Marcel by providing excerpts from Proust's own account of the transformation of memory into reality and into material for literature. The editorial augmentation fulfills the spirit of Nabokov's jottings and should be of some help in rounding out the understanding, in turn, of Swann's Way, which was, after all, designed as the opening of a series.

  The reader of these lectures should take special note that quotations from Flaubert reproduce Nabokov's frequent alterations of the translation that he made throughout his teaching copy of the novel, whereas those from Kafka and Proust take account of the less systematic changes marked in his books.

  The teaching copies for all the novels in this volume have been preserved. As remarked, the translated books may be interlined or marginally annotated with his own translations of words and phrases. All of the books are marked for quotation and contain notes about the context, most of these notes also being present in the written-out lectures but others clueing Nabokov in on some oral comment to make about the style or the content of certain passages. Whenever possible, comments in the annotated copies have been worked into the texture of the lectures as appropriate occasion arose.

  Nabokov was acutely conscious of the need to shape the separate lectures to the allotted classroom hour, and it is not unusual to find noted in the margin the time at which that particular point should have been reached. Within the lecture text a number of passages and even separate sentences or phrases are enclosed in square brackets. Some of these brackets seem to indicate matter that could be omitted if time were pressing. Others may represent matter that he queried for omission more for reasons of content or expression than for time restrictions; and indeed it is not unusual to find some of these bracketed queries subsequently deleted, just as some, alternatively, are removed from the status of queries by the substitution for them of parentheses. All such undeleted bracketed material has been faithfully reproduced but without sign of the bracketing, which would have been intrusive for the reader. Deletions are observed, of course, except for a handful of cases when it has seemed to the editor possible that the matter was excised for considerations of time or, sometimes, of position, in which latter case the deleted matter has been transferred to a more appropriate context. On the other hand, some of Nabokov's comments directed exclusively to his students and often on pedagogical subjects have been omitted as inconsistent with the aims of a reading edition, although one that otherwise retains much of the flavor of Nabokov's lecture delivery. Among such omissions one may mention over-obvious explanations for an undergraduate audience such as "Trieste (Italy), Zurich (Switzerland) and Paris (France)" from the Joyce lectures, or admonitions to use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words, and similar c
omments suitable only for students' ears and not for the printed page. Various of the addresses to the class as you have been retained as not inappropriate on some occasions for a reader, but these have been changed in some instances to a more neutral form of address.

  Stylistically the most part of these texts by no means represents what would have been Nabokov's language and syntax if he had himself worked them up in book form, for a marked difference exists between the general style of these classroom lectures and the polished workmanship of several of his published lectures. Since publication without reworking had not been contemplated when Nabokov wrote out these lectures and their notes for delivery, it would be pedantic in the extreme to try to transcribe the texts literatum in every detail from the sometimes rough form found in the manuscripts. The editor of a reading edition may be permitted to deal more freely with inconsistencies, inadvertent mistakes, and incomplete inscription, including the need sometimes to add bridge passages in connection with quotation. On the other hand, no reader would want a manipulated text that endeavored to "improve" Nabokov's writing in any intrusive way even in some of its unpolished sections. Thus a synthetic approach has been firmly rejected, and Nabokov's language has been reproduced with fidelity save for words missing by accident and inadvertent repetitions often the result of incomplete revision.

  Occasionally some tangles either in language or in syntax have needed straightening out, chiefly when Nabokov had interlined additions or substitutions and neglected to delete parts of the original to make it conform to the revised readings. In a few cases syntactical constructions that would pass unnoticed in oral delivery have been adjusted for a reading audience. Minor slips such as inadvertent singulars for plurals, misspellings, omitted opening or closing quotation marks, missing necessary punctuation, erratic capitalization, unintentional verbal repetition, and the like have all been set right unobtrusively. For the purposes of this edition Nabokov's few British spellings and punctuational usages have been modified for American publication: these were not always consistent, anyway. A very few times English idioms have been rectified, but borderline cases are retained such as Nabokov's idiosyncratic use of the verb grade. Mostly, however, usage that a reader might be inclined to query will be found to have dictionary authority, for Nabokov was a careful writer. Titles of books have been italicized and shorter pieces placed within quotation marks. It would be tedious for a reader to be presented with all of Nabokov's underlined words in italics, most of which were directions to himself for verbal emphasis, not necessarily of the kind to be transferred to the printed page. Correspondingly, his dependence upon the dash for punctuating oral delivery has been somewhat reduced by the substitution of more conventional punctuation.