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Re: Cruelty
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Like Matt, I too was puzzled by parts of the exchange on cruelty between Jansy Mello and Gavriel Shapiro. Consider this passage from Clarence Brown’s essay “Krazy, Ignatz, and Vladimir: Nabokov and the Comic Strip,” which appears in the volume Nabokov at Cornell(2003), edited by Shapiro himself:
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Asked by an interviewer to characterize his memory, Nabokov replied:
I am an ardent memoirist with a rotten memory; a drozy king’s absentminded remembrancer. With absolute lucidity I recall landscapes, gestures, intonations, a million sensuous details, but names and numbers topple into oblivion with absurd abandon like little blind men in file from a pier. [Italics supplied by Brown.]
Pause for a moment to consider this figure. It has the streak of cruelty that is inherent in all caricature (and, to the exasperation of many critics, in Nabokov’s imagination): “Absurd abandon” seems a heartless characterization of the stumbling of the blind. But this sequential bit of slapstick must be understood as the benign violence of the early comic strip, hopelessly incorrect politically, in which “visual impairment” meant getting poked in the eye with an umbrella.
(Brown, pp. 260, 262)
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There are a couple of interesting things here. First, I’m not sure that “benign” is an adequate description of the violence of the early comic strips (and also of movie comedies and animated cartoons)--a kind of violence that continues today in shows like The Simpsons, South Park, and Family Guy. To the extent that the fun is directed against a stuffy, arbitrary, upper-class or adult authority, “benign” does not do justice to the depths of insight and the healthy outlets for anger the comedy provides. Nor is “benign” quite the right word for the collateral damage done along the way, in the history of such comedy, not only to the sensibilities but to the physical well-being of minorities, women, gays, and, as in the example from VN, the genuinely impaired. Worst of all, perhaps, the simple thoughtlessness behind so much of the action and so many of the portrayals can spread among us like an epidemic.
Second, and more to the point, is the question, addressed only parenthetically by Brown, of the possible cruelty in VN’s imagination. Although I have little if any quarrel with what Gavriel says about Pnin, I have strong doubts concerning his general premise about art and cruelty and also his apparent faith that a good upbringing is a guarantee against either bad behavior or the development of a cruel sensibility. VN himself called Don Quixotea cruel book. Did he also deny that it was a work of art? Among my own favorite writers are Evelyn Waugh and Flannery O’Connor, but I have no hesitation in saying of both that their work is cruel. As for examples of well-brought-up people being bad, we don’t even need to mention such grotesques as the cultured Nazi. The halls of our own universities, overflowing with the well-bred and highly educated, are also, as we all know or ought to know, regular beehives of the pettiest and most vicious kinds of cruelty.
--Which, come to think of it, is surely part of the point of Pnin.
We know that VN himself often put cruelty on his list of greatest sins. Is Brown wrong, then, in speaking of the streak of cruelty in VN’s imagination? The question is inescapable, it seems to me, in considering VN’s two greatest novels, Lolitaand Pale Fire.
I would like to think this discussion might continue, so I’ll stop for now--though not without referring you to the three discussions of VN and cruelty that I’m familiar with. They are all defenses of VN, and two are by Richard Rorty:
(1) The Introduction to the Modern Library edition of Pale Fire.
(2) “The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity(1989)
The third is by Mary Gaitskill and is available online (in reading it, be sure to access the links within the essay):
(3) “My Inspiration: Vladimir Nabokov”
http://www.salon.com/12nov1995/feature/nabokov.html
Thanks to Jansy and Gavriel for bringing up such an interesting topic.
Jim Twiggs
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From: NABOKV-L <NABOKV-L@HOLYCROSS.EDU>
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Fri, April 9, 2010 8:31:33 AM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] Cruelty
Jansy,
You said, affirming Gavriel Shapiro's point, that genuine art doesn't resort to cruelty. I have to admit that I'm not sure what this means in practical terms. Your statement seems to imply that genuine art could resort to cruelty, but doesn't. But what is cruelty in art? Cruelty at what level? Certainly all satire has an element of cruelty in it, insomuch as corrective laughter, even when well-placed, corrects by shaming and/or embarrassing the butt of the joke. So the point may be both true and cruel. If, on the other hand, we're talking about an author's relationship to his characters, I don't see how an author can be either cruel or kind. Was it cruel to give Humbert Humbert that nasty habit? Was it kind of VN to show us Pnin's tender side? Perhaps I'm missing something. Can you give an example of another author you would consider cruel?
Thanks,
Matt
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