Lectures on Literature

by Nabokov, Vladimir

  18. The social side ("upper class" versus "lower class" etc.) is the weakest one in Bleak House. Who was Mr. George's brother? What part did he play? Should a major reader skip those pages, even if they are weak?

  19. John Jarndyce's Bleak House: list a few specific details.

  20. Discuss the style of Dickens and that of Mrs. Allan Woodcourt.

  21. Follow Mr. Guppy through Bleak House.

  MADAME BOVARY

  1. What was Homais' version of Emma's taking the poison—describe that event.

  2. Describe briefly Flaubert's use of the counterpoint technique in the County Fair scene.

  3. Analyze Flaubert's devices in the Agricultural Show chapter (grouping of characters, interplay of themes).

  4. Answer the following five questions:

  i. Who wrote the Genie du Christianisme?

  ii. What was Léon's first view of Emma?

  iii. What was Rodolphe's first view of her?

  iv. How did Boulanger transmit his last letter to her?

  v. Who was Felicie Lempereur?

  5. There are numerous thematic lines in Madame Bovary, such as "Horse," "Plaster Priest," "Voice," "The Three Doctors." Describe these four themes briefly, *

  6. Give some details of the "counterpoint" theme in the following settings: a. The Golden Lion, b. The Agricultural Show, c. The Opera, d. The Cathedral.

  7. Discuss Flaubert's use of the word "and."

  8. What character in Madame Bovary behaves in very much the same way as a character in Bleak House does under somewhat similar circumstances? The thematic clue is: "devotion."

  9. Is there a Dickensian atmosphere about Flaubert's description of Berthe's infancy and childhood? (Be specific.)

  10. The features of Fanny Price and Esther are pleasantly blurred. Not so with Emma. Describe her eyes, hair, hands, skin.

  11. a) Would you say that Emma's nature was hard and shallow?

  b) "Romantic" but not "artistic"?

  c) Would she prefer a landscape peopled with ruins and cows to one that contained no allusions to people?

  d) Did she like her mountain lakes with or without a lone skiff?

  12. What had Emma read? Name at least four works and their authors.

  13. All translations of Madame Bovary are full of blunders; you have corrected some of them. Describe Emma's eyes, hands, sunshade, hairdo, dress, shoes.

  14. Follow the purblind vagabond through Madame Bovary.

  15. What makes Homais ridiculous and repulsive?

  16. Describe the structure of the Agricultural Show chapter.

  17. What ideal is Emma striving for? What ideal is Homais striving for? What ideal is Léon striving for?

  18. Although the construction of Bleak House is a great improvement on Dickens's previous work, still he had to conform to the exigencies of serialization. Flaubert ignored all matters extraneous to his art when writing Madame Bovary. Mention some of the structural points in Madame Bovary.

  [*] Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw Hill, 1973), p. 5.

  [*] Mrs. Nabokov is certain that Chekhov was taught in Literature 311-312, but the student class notes we have consulted do not include Chekhov. It may be that he was not caught every year.

  [*] Strong Opinions, pp. 156-157.

  [*] "No doubt can exist that there is in Jane Austen a slight streak of the philistine. This philistinism is obvious in her preoccupation with incomes and in her rational approach to romance and nature. Only when the philistinism is grotesque, as in Mrs. Norris and her penny-pinching, does Miss Austen really feel it and apply it in her artistic sarcasm." VN note elsewhere in the Austen folder. Ed.

  [*] In a note elsewhere in the Austen folder VN defines plot as "the supposed story." Theme's, thematic lines are "images or an idea which is repeated here and there in the novel, as a tune reoccurs in a fugue." Structure is "the composition of a book, a development of events, one event causing another, a transition from one theme to another, the cunning way characters are brought in, or a new complex of action is started, or the various themes are linked up or used to move the novel forward." Style is "the manner of the author, his special intonations, his vocabulary, and that something which when confronted with a passage makes a reader cry out that's by Austen, not by Dickens." Ed.

  [*] "Nobody in Mansfield Park dies in the arms of the author and reader, as people do in Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy. The deaths in Mansfield Park happen somewhere behind the scenes and excite little emotion. These dull deaths have, however, a curiously strong influence on the development of plot. They have great structural importance. Thus the death of a pony leads to the horse theme which involves an emotional tangle between Edmund, Miss Crawford, and Fanny. The death of the clergyman Mr. Norris leads to the arrival of the Grants, and through the Grants to the Crawfords, the amusing villains of the novel; and the death of the second clergyman at the end of the novel allows the third clergyman, Edmund, to settle in the snug parsonage at Mansfield Park, allows Edmund the 'acquisition' of the Mansfield living, as Austen puts it, by the death of Dr. Grant which, as she goes on, 'occurred just after [Edmund and Fanny] had been married long enough to begin to want an increase of income,' which is a delicate manner of saying that Fanny was in a family way. There is also a dowager who dies—the grandmother of the friends of Yates—and this leads directly to Tom bringing Yates to Mansfield and the play theme, which is such a crucial one in the novel. Finally, the death of little Mary Price makes it possible, in the Portsmouth interlude, to have the vivid incident of the little knife take place among the Price children." VN note elsewhere in the Austen folder. Ed.

  [*] To this paragraph VN adds a note in his annotated copy: "And she is quite right. There is something obscene in Amelia's part." Ed.

  [*] "Yates, the last prop of the play, is removed." VN's note in his annotated copy. Ed.

  [*] "Critics like Linklater Thomson are astonished to find that Jane Austen, who in her youth had mocked at the propensities of sensibility that fostered admiration for excessive feeling and sentimentality—for weeping, swooning, quivering, indiscriminate sympathy with anything pathetic or to be assumed morally or practically good—should choose such sensibility to distinguish a heroine whom she preferred above all other of her characters and to whom she had given the name of her favorite niece.... But Fanny exhibits those symptoms of fahionable sensibility with such charm, and her emotions are so consistent with the dove-gray sky of the novel, that Thomson's astonishment may be ignored." VN's note elsewhere in the Austen folder. Ed.

  [*] Shortly before, under the propulsion of Mr. Bucket, old Smallweed had disgorged a copy of a Jarndyce will, which he had found among the accumulation of Krooks old wastepapers. This will was later than those in contest and gave the major share of the estate to Ada and Richard. It had seemed at the time that this new will would end the suit with some promptness. Ed.

  [*] Elsewhere among the papers, VN has a note that "Charley coming to Esther as a maid is the 'sweet little shadow' instead of the dark shadow of Hortense" who had offered her services to Esther after she had been discharged by Lady Dediock but had not been accepted. Ed.

  [*] On an inserted leaf VN compares, unfavorably to her, Jane Austen's description of the sea at Portsmouth Harbor when Fanny Price is visiting her family: " 'Theday was uncommonly lovely. It was really March; but it was April in its mild air, brisk soft wind, and bright sun, occasionally clouded for a minute; and every thing looked so beautiful |and a little repetitious) under the influence of such a sky, the effects of the shadows pursuing each other on the ships at Spithead and the island beyond, with the ever-varying hues of the sea now at high water, dancing in its glee and dashing against the ramparts/ etc. The hues are not rendered; glee is borrowed from minor poetry; the whole thing is conventional and limp." Ed.

  [*] For some features of Flaubert's style, see VN's Notes at the end of the essay. Ed.

  [*] Quotations in this essay are taken from the Rinehart edition of 1948 but greatly revised by VN in hi
s preserved heavily annotated copy. Ed.

  [*] For data on the horse theme, see Notes at the end of the essay. Ed.

  [*] VN notes that Emma found the cigar case, which becomes to her the symbol of fashionable romantic Parisian life, when Charles had stopped to mend the horse's harness. Later, Rodolphe will also fix a broken bridle after the seduction that begins her romantic association with him. Ed.

  [*] In listing the details of the horse theme (for which see the Notes at the end of this essay), VN writes, that "the scene can be said to be seen through the long blue veil of her amazon dress." Ed.

  [*] "This is a simile that must be supposed to have occurred to Emma. Hummingbirds do not occur in Europe. May have found it in Chateaubriand." VN in his annotated copy. Ed.

  [*] The entire passage of the cab, from the words of the coachman "Where to?" to the end of the chapter was suppressed by the editors of the magazine Revue de Paris where Madame Bovary was appearing serially. In the issue of 1 December 1856, where this passage was to appear, there is a footnote informing the reader of the omission. VN.

  [*] VN states that critical quotations in this essay are drawn from Stephen Gwynn, Robert Louis Stevenson (London: Macmillan, 1939). Ed.

  [*] In VN's Stevenson folder there are four pages of typed quotations from Stevenson's Essays in the Art of Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 1920), which he read to his students. Among these pages is the following quotation, which seems apt here: "In the change from the successive shallow statements of the old chronicler to the dense and luminous flow of highly synthetic narrative, there is implied a vast amount of both philosophy and wit. The philosophy we clearly see, recognising in the synthetic writer a far more deep and stimulating view of life, and a far keener sense of the generation and affinity of events. The wit we might imagine to be lost; but it is not so, for it is just that wit, these perpetual nice contrivances, these difficulties overcome, this double purpose attained, these two oranges kept simultaneously dancing in the air that, consciously or not, afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect, not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler, but which attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the greatest gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous for the mind; and it is by the means of such designed reversal that the elements of a judgment may be most pertinently marshalled, or the stages of a complicated action most perspicuously bound into one.

  "The web, then, or the pattern: a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature." Ed.

  [*] "The dualism, thus, is not 'body and soul' but 'good and evil.' " VN note in his annotated copy. Ed.

  [*] Among the typed quotations from Stevenson's Essays in the Art of Writing in VN's folder is the following: "It used to be a piece of good advice to all young writers to avoid alliteration, and the advice was sound, in so far as it prevented daubing. None the less for that, was it abominable nonsense, and the mere raving of those blindest of the blind who will not see. The beauty of the contents of a phrase, or of a sentence, depends implicitly upon alliteration and upon assonance. The vowel demands to be repeated; the consonant demands to be repeated; and both cry aloud to be perpetually varied. You may follow the adventures of a letter through any passage that has particularly pleased you, find it, perhaps, denied a while, to tantalise the ear; find it fired again at you in a whole broadside; or find it pass into congenerous sounds, one liquid or labial melting away into another. And you will find another and much stranger circumstance. Literature is written by and for two senses: a sort of internal ear, quick to perceive 'unheard melodies'; and the eye, which directs the pen and deciphers the printed phrase." To this, VN adds the note, "and let me add as a reader, the internal eye visualizes its color and its meaning." Ed.

  [*] Middleton Murry wrote that if you try to be precise you are bound to be metaphorical. VN

  [*] Here and elsewhere VN has occasionally included his own phrasing or interpolated remarks in quotations. Ed.

  [*] VN illustrates a simple simile as "the mist was like a veil";a simple metaphor as 'there was a veil of mist"; and a hybrid simile as "the veil of the mist was like the sleep of silence, "combining both simile and metaphor. Ed.

  [*] VN's note in his annotated copy: "A regular beetle has no eyelids and cannot close its eyes—a beetle with human eyes." About the passage in general he has the note: "In the original German there is a wonderful flowing rhythm here in this dreamy sequence of sentences. He is half-awake—he realizes his plight without surprise, with a childish acceptance of it, and at the same time he still clings to human memories, human experience. The metamorphosis is not quite complete as yet." Ed.

  [*] In a note in his annotated copy VN observes that after Gregor's death it is never "father" and "mother" but only Mr. and Mrs. Samsa Ed.

  [*] "The soul has died with Gregor; the healthy young animal takes over. The parasites have fattened themselves on Gregor." VN note in his annotated copy. Ed.

  [*] "I have looked this up in the same special dictionary where Stephen and Joyce found the words: mort means 'woman'; bing awast, to Romeville—'going to London'; wap—'love'; dimber wapping dell—‘a pretty loving woman'; fambles—‘hands'; gan—'mouth'; quarrons—'body'; couch a hogshead—'lie down'; darkmans—'night.' " VN

  [*] Molly's new garters are violet colored, as we have learned during the Oriental fantasy Bloom enjoyed while on his way earlier that morning to purchase his breakfast kidney. Ed.

  [*] In a deleted passage, following, VN wrote: "Those who will read out of artistic curiosity the house-of-ill-fame chapter 12 will find, at one point, Bloom seeing himself in the mirror under the reflection of a deer-horned hat hanger—and the cuckold's face is fleetingly identified with Shakespeare's face—the two themes Bloom's betrayal and Shakespeare's betrayal come together in a whore's looking glass." Ed.

  [*] In his annotated copy VN wrote in the margin of this paragraph: "NB Stephen recalls his dream at the moment he notices Bloom bowing, greeting." Ed.

  [*] In VN's annotated copy he remarks, "Moreover, 'the let my epitaph be' is linked up with the famous limerick about wind going free, and the 'done' ends the chapter in more ways than one." Ed.

  [*] VN has interlined a later comment, in pencil: "This is fifty years ago. They would correspond in our time and place to stories about blonde office girls and boyish-looking executives in the Saturday Evening Post trash." Ed.

  [*] VN adds, "and is not a success." Ed.

  [*] Elsewhere in VN's notes is this passage: "Bernard Shaw writing of Ulysses in a letter to its publisher Sylvia Beach defined it as a revery—but truthful record of a disgusting phase of civilization." Ed.

  [*] In his annotated copy VN marked in the following chapter the end of Bloom's examination of the contents of the second drawer containing an addressed envelope "To my Dear Son Leopold" and evoking memories of his father's dying words. Joyce questions, "Why did Bloom experience a sentiment of remorse?" and answers "Because in immature impatience he had treated with disrespect certain beliefs and practices." In the margin, VN noted, "Cp. Stephen." The passage continues:

  "As?

  The prohibition of the use of fleshmeat and milk at one meal, the hebdomadary, symposium of incoordinately abstract, perfervidly concrete mercantile coexreligionist excompatriots: the circumcision of male infants: the supernatural character of Judaic scripture: the ineffability of the tetragrammaron: the sanctity of the sabbath.

  How did these beliefs and practices now appear to him?

  Not more rational than they had then appeared, not less rational than other beliefs and practices now appeared." Ed.

  r, Lectures on Literature