February 3rd, 2012
When that slow-motion, silent explosion of love takes place in me, unfolding its melting fringes and overwhelming me with the sense of something much vaster, much more enduring and powerful than the accumulation of matter or energy in any imaginable cosmos, then my mind cannot but pinch itself to see if it is really awake. I have to make a rapid inventory of the universe, just as a man in a dream tries to condone the absurdity of his position by making sure he is dreaming. I have to have all space and all time participate in my emotion, in my mortal love, so that the edge of its mortality is taken off, thus helping me to fight the utter degradation, ridicule, and horror of having developed an infinity of sensation and thought within a finite existence.

Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory, quoted by my heroine Abby, who rebuts a classroom critic of the author:

in class some twit complained that nabokov was uselessly pretentious and pedantic, that he used latin terms and untranslated french and russian to intentionally muddle the reader. i can agree that his writing is extravagant at times, that he creates puzzles he knows we will never master, and that occasionally he hints that our intelligence is inferior to his (which, in most cases, is undeniably true). but i argued that in his memoir the inclusion of multiple languages, the movement between the sensory and the scientific, the distortions and expansions of time are all methods of grasping onto his own mortality, a desperate attempt to hold onto ephemeral memory, and to express the self —ever bifurcated between the past and the present, that which we feel and that which we can articulate.

I consider criticism of Nabokov’s “pretentiousness” to be specious until it can be demonstrated that his artistic aims might have been achieved with plainer prose. I doubt many of his detractors even bother to consider his aims, however; they’re too busy reacting, as most readers do, to the phantom author whose personality they imagine and judge on the basis of individual, largely aesthetic and demographic preferences. Pretentiousness is a matter of purpose and intent, not merely of diction or style (although they can be clues to intent, of course); there are pretentious epigones of Hemingway and Carver, for example, whose simple sentences constitute a self-regarding affectation, a false, contrived humbleness; there are surely even pretentious illiterates.

Pretension rarely resides in the work but more often in the imagination of the critic: he imagines Nabokov, imagines how Nabokov feels about Nabokov, imagines how the critic would feel interacting with a man like the imagined Nabokov who feels about himself and writing and erudition as the critic imagines Nabokov does, etc. This is why to call something pretentious is typically a shallow criticism, a bit ad hominem and a bit extraneous to the real, duller and more difficult issue of a work’s success. Very pretentious authors can write beautifully true and accessible stories; unpretentious authors —that is, authors who are who they are and do not pretend to anything greater— can write prolixly and extravagantly for any number of perfectly justifiable reasons. In sum: inducing an author’s personality from his style is largely without reward; judging a work based on this inductively-derived personality is worse.

All that should matter is the work itself, of course, and if one’s reaction to the work strays far from its form and content, strays into questions of whether the author “thinks he’s so clever” or the like, one’s reaction is neither about the author nor the work but about oneself. And since we are all pretentious, all occasionally obliged by insecurity or confusion or even defensible artistic ambition to pretend to possess what we do not, I suspect that our reaction is really one of sublimated self-loathing.
134 notes·
vladimir nabokov literature
  1. hannahkessel reblogged this from littlepotato
  2. totanava reblogged this from mills
  3. dearantidiary reblogged this from naranzarian
  4. naranzarian reblogged this from mills
  5. bunniesincups reblogged this from mills
  6. awkward-sauce reblogged this from littlepotato
  7. n-i-m-b-l-e reblogged this from 2bpencil
  8. exquisitelypathetic reblogged this from mills
  9. 2bpencil reblogged this from mills
  10. iluxia reblogged this from mills
  11. l-live reblogged this from mills
Loading tweets...

Twitter

Aporia

Aporia is written by Mills Baker and concerns art, culture, love, philosophy, memory, history, and more. A selection of better posts has been assembled. It's been featured on Tumblr Tuesday and is listed in the Spotlight, but it pines for its youth as a coloring book.