Literary Blog

Literary Blog Table of Contents Nabokov’s lively objects ...................................................................................................................... 2 Shoshana Zuboff ‘s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism...................................................................... 5 Camus’ Notebooks ............................................................................................................................ 10 Graham Greene’s novels ................................................................................................................... 13 Carson McCullers: ‘Untitled Piece’ .................................................................................................... 16 Piketty’s Capital and Ideology ........................................................................................................... 17 Rezzori’s Abel and Cain ..................................................................................................................... 21 Sloterdijk’s Critique of Cynical Reason.............................................................................................. 24 Lucy Ellmann Ducks, Newburyport ................................................................................................... 26 Zola’s Sin of Abbe Mouret................................................................................................................. 31 Zadie Smith’s essays Feel Free .......................................................................................................... 31 Zola’s Pot-Bouille and Abbe Mouret’s Sin ........................................................................................ 33 Zola’s Eugene Rougon, The Kill, Money and The Conquest of Plassans. I ........................................ 34 Zola’s The Bright Side of Life ............................................................................................................. 34 Wodehouse’s What Ho, Jeeves and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway ............................................................. 35 Keswick Theatre by the Lake production of Alan Bennett’s Single Spies ......................................... 36 Danny Leigh in Saturday’s Guardian bemoans the lack of working class actors, ............................. 37 Gaddis’ The Recognitions .................................................................................................................. 38 Powell in The Military Philosophers.................................................................................................. 39 Re-reading Powell’s Dance................................................................................................................ 39 Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last .......................................................................................................... 40 Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence ......................................................................................................... 41 Abandon Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion ................................................................................... 41 Barnes’ Nightwood. .......................................................................................................................... 41 Mannheim’s translation of Celine’s Death on Credit........................................................................ 41 Susie Dent in the i last week notes the accidental aspects of the English language – malapropisms .......................................................................................................................................................... 41 Chester Himes Lonely Crusade i ........................................................................................................ 42 Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream and start her The Philosopher’s Pupil .............................................. 42 Solzhenitsin’s November 1916 ......................................................................................................... 42 Kelman’s new collection of short stories. ......................................................................................... 42 Linz. I walk to Shifter’s House ........................................................................................................... 43 The enormous American Library edition of Mann’s Joseph. ............................................................ 43 Franny and Zooey .............................................................................................................................. 43 Thirty years after my first reading of Mann’s Dr Faustus ................................................................. 44 Stegner’s All the Pretty Things .......................................................................................................... 44 Beckett’s trilogy ................................................................................................................................ 45 I finish The Man without Qualities .................................................................................................... 45 I get Tessa Hedley’s short story collection Bad Dreams ................................................................... 45 Lethem’s The Blot, ............................................................................................................................ 46 Bellow’s Collected Essays and Journalism ........................................................................................ 46 I Download from Lancashire Libraries ebooks Elizabeth Bowen’s A world of Love. ........................ 48 Eliot: Poet-Phenomenologist ............................................................................................................ 48 Re-read Sartre’s Iron in the Soul. ...................................................................................................... 50 Read a selection of Gramsci made in the Forgac’s edition. .............................................................. 51 Short notes made when reading Proust. How sociological he is!..................................................... 51 Sodom and Gomorrah cod psychology ............................................................................................. 51 Richard Ford’s collection A Multitude of Sins. .................................................................................. 52 Re-read Solzhenitzen’s First Circle .................................................................................................... 52 Nabokov’s lively objects After a time Nabokov’s supercilious tone wearied me and in the later novels, especially Ada the tone is pretty egotistical. The early novels, though, are marked by a quirky stylistic trope of animated objects which Nabokov used intriguingly in order to confront the reader’s experience of literary metaphor. Essentially, Nabokov pursues an original, highly individualistic, phenomenology of objects that makes the reader re-vision the world as a result of this defamiliarization. In Nabokov’s first novel, Mary, this characteristic is not much in evidence, but in the majority of Nabokov’s novels up to The Gift (in which it reaches its apogee, a novel itself much centred on a number of questions of style and language) and The real Life of Sebastian Knight, and in the short stories of this period, destabilizing objects is a regular concern. Nabokov’s essay ‘Man and Things’ (1928) sets out his thinking on this topic. In it he takes a kind of Berkeleyan viewpoint in which it is not the object itself that exists for the viewer but only what our perception makes of it. ‘A thing, a thing made by someone, does not exist in itself’ (69) he states, but is ‘dependent upon who looks on it’. Things thus ‘bring to mind’ images which are the material of thought, of representation (he regularly criticized James Joyce for his over- estimation of the verbal-linguistic in the constitution of human thought or experience). Nabokov sees us as ‘lending things our feelings’ – which he calls ‘anthropomorphic ardour’ (72). He even goes as far to argue that things die when we ‘neglect’ them, and we often mourn them when we have done so (73). In Invitation to a Beheading the central character Cincinnatus is shown to be surrounded by a ‘false logic of things’, chimera, objects that are animated by others, by the agents of the state who are working to subjectify him. In his experience we see him feeling a ‘general instability, …a certain flaw in all visible matter’, even if the ‘objects still observed an outward propriety’ (172). In this Orwellian and Kafkaesque world there is a moral concern to address the political status of objects and to confront the issue of who or what is doing the primary seeing and defining along with the phenomenological status of everyday objects. This concern is also prominent is many of the interviews and essays Nabokov made concerned with questions of his style. In his fragment-essays ‘The creative writer’ and ‘style’ (both circa. 1941) he shows a concern to ‘dislocate the given world’ (189), to make the reader see the ‘whatness of things’ (187), to ‘move objects from their usual series’ (198), and to bring things out of the domain of habitual modes of experience (188) (in this he shows an affinity for Proust). This concern is particularly marked in Look at the Harlequins with its performative ‘look’ in its title and where the aim is ‘to make iniquity absurd’ (197). But Nabokov consciously rejected the type of politically-committed

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