Nabokov's Details: Making Sense of Irrational Standards

Nabokov's Details: Making Sense of Irrational Standards The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Horgan, Pelagia. 2012. Nabokov's Details: Making Sense of Irrational Standards. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:10114455 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA © 2012 - Pelagia Jozefowski Horgan All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Philip Fisher Pelagia Jozefowski Horgan Nabokov's Details: Making Sense of Irrational Standards Abstract Vladimir Nabokov’s passion for detail is well-known, central to our very idea of the “Nabokovian.” Yet Nabokov’s most important claims for detail pose a challenge for the reader who would take them seriously. Startlingly extreme and deliberately counterintuitive -- Nabokov called them his “irrational standards” -- these claims push the very limits of reason and belief. Nabokov’s critics have tended to treat his more extravagant claims for detail -- including his assertion that the “capacity to wonder at trifles” is the highest form of consciousness there is -- as just a manner of speaking, a form of italics, a bit of wishful thinking, a mandarin’s glib performance, or an aesthete’s flight of fancy. !is dissertation, by contrast, asserts that Nabokov meant what he said, and sets out to understand what he meant. Nabokov’s passion for detail, I argue, represents more than a stylistic preference or prescription for good noticing. Rather, it reflects and advocates for a special way of being in the world, of disposing or orienting oneself to things, and for this reason is best understood as part of a broad program of detailphilic habits, attitudes, practices and attunements Nabokov adhered to throughout his life. In making this argument, I draw on the work of a wide array of thinkers, including Descartes, Heidegger, Richard Rorty, Clifford Geertz, and Philip Fisher, and focus on three of Nabokov’s texts in particular: Speak, Memory, Lolita, and “!e Art of Literature and iii Commonsense.” Making sense of Nabokov’s irrational standards, I argue, helps us to make sense of a number of other critical puzzles as well, from what, exactly, Nabokov means by the word “reality” to what a cruel noticer like Humbert Humbert implies about the moral meaning of passionate attention. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments...................................................................................................vi Introduction............................................................................................................1 Chapter One: On the Capacity to Wonder at Trifles..................................................4 Chapter Two: Commonsense and Its Logic..............................................................34 Chapter !ree: Speak, Memory and the Highest Form of Consciousness....................55 Chapter Four: Knowing the World to Be Good: !e Riddle of Lolita.........................84 Conclusion: Understanding Nabokov's Details...................................................145 Bibliography.........................................................................................................159 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS !ere are many people without whom this project could not have been written. My first and last thanks goes to Joshua Rothman, without whose attention, encouragement, patience, enthusiasm, and advice this dissertation would hardly have been begun, much less completed. I would also like to extend my warmest thanks to: Philip Fisher, who taught me how to read novels, who encouraged the inclusion of Nabokov in a dissertation prospectus that did not include Nabokov at all, and whose respect for his students is apparent in every aspect of his teaching; Daniel Albright, for his kindness and encouragement, and for the energy and inventiveness of his responses to my work; James Wood, whose love for and sensitivity to literary detail helped to encourage my own. Together my advisors set, through their own example, the concrete standards for originality, persuasiveness, and precision toward which this project aspires; My many other teachers in the Department of English at Harvard University. Every page of this study owes something to the richness and rigor of their teaching; Gwen Urdang-Brown, for nearly a decade’s worth of helpfulness, knowledge, warmth, and advice; Gordon Harvey and the members of the Dissertation Writers’ Group, for their intellectual companionship and attention; Harvard University, for, among many other things, its extremely generous fellowship support, vi including one and a half years of fully funded research time; My graduate school friends, especially Garth Greenwell, Catherine Keyser, and Greta Pane, for their love, their stories, and their conversation; My parents, who instilled in me a love of books and stories, who supported me at every stage of my graduate school career, and whose faith in me always exceeded my own. !is dissertation is for them, with much love; And, finally, my husband, my immeasurable debt to whom I am fortunate enough to have a lifetime to repay. Josh: thank you. Repeat till the page is full, printer! vii INTRODUCTION Nabokov’s love of detail shows itself everywhere -- in his style, of course, so radiant with bright particulars; but also in the many letters, lectures, interviews, and essays in which he asserts that love with an intensity peculiar to him. No other novelist invests “the divine detail” with so much glamour and prestige (Look at the Harlequins! (LATH) 24); no other writer’s praise is as impassioned, or as final. And yet, on the long shelf of books about his work, among studies of his thoughts on the afterlife, his quarrels with psychoanalysis, his interest in butterflies, games, memory, childhood, and painting, his uses of metafiction, parody, pattern, and deception, one finds no full-length work devoted to his love of detail. It seems that Nabokov's detailphilia is so basic to our sense of who he is, and so well-known, that we tend not to ask too many questions about it. It's something we simply know about him, and something he makes it easy for us to know. Yet if we step back from it for a moment, that love of detail begins to look a little strange. Why, for example, is it so extreme? Consider his claim about the "capacity to wonder at trifles": these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, 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 (Lectures on Literature (LL) 373-374). What does Nabokov mean, really, when he says that the "capacity to wonder at trifles" is the "highest form[] of consciousness"? Or that it is in this "state of mind" that we "know the world to be good"? Already it seems a little less legible than before. Heidegger has a good phrase for what happens when we step back from familiar things in this way: we make them “worthy of questioning” (!e Essence of 1 Truth 5). !e following chapters are organized around the parts of this central claim, and are designed to be read in order. Chapter One, "On the Capacity to Wonder at Trifles," begins by rendering Nabokov's claim "worthy of questioning." It works toward a definition of what the "capacity to wonder at trifles" is, using philosophical accounts of wonder from Descartes and Philip Fisher as important points of reference and comparison. Chapter Two, "Commonsense and Its Logic," adds depth to this definition by contrasting it with Nabokov's idea of "commonsense." Here Clifford Geertz's concept of "common sense as a cultural system" and Heidegger's notion of "enframing" help to bring Nabokov's own idea into sharper focus. Chapter !ree, "Speak, Memory and the Highest Form of Consciousness" explains how this fuller notion of the "capacity to wonder at trifles" might be plausibly deemed the "highest form[] of consciousness," and argues that Speak, Memory offers a vision of a world revealed by its light. Chapter Four, "Knowing the World to Be Good: the Riddle of Lolita," argues that Lolita is best read as the antithesis of Speak, Memory, and that through the figure of Humbert Humbert Nabokov explores what it means to be cut off from "the highest form[] of consciousness." !is long chapter disputes the claim that Humbert's "artistic gifts" -- his capacity for noticing details among them -- exist on a continuum with Nabokov's own, and in the process examines Nabokov's peculiar notion of "what reality is." !e study concludes with a short reflection on the implications of Nabokov's claim for how we think about his style. !is study might also be thought of as an elaboration of Michael Wood's definition of style as a "complex but still legible trace" of a "person's interaction with the world" (23). Over the course of its four main chapters, I argue that "the capacity to wonder at trifles" is Nabokov's phrase for a special, privileged attunement to the world, and that his details are best understood in relation to 2 that attunement. In my view, the "capacity to wonder at trifles" signifies a certain way of being in the world, and consequently I've found Heidegger's language of attunements, revealing, allowing things to show up, and disposing oneself to things useful here. I'm not suggesting that Nabokov was influenced by Heidegger, and I'm not attempting a Heideggerean "reading" of Nabokov. Rather, I've borrowed from the vocabularly of Being and Time, because I've found it to be a particularly congenial vocabularly for understanding, and explaining, what Nabokov means. Most readings of Nabokov put one of his books at their center. For many critics, Lolita is really the central Nabokovian work. For some it is Pale Fire, for others it is Ada, and for still others it is !e Gift.

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