Subject
Sausage dogs and the Campus novels...
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Date
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Right at the time of the N-L postings on Nabokov's "Box" with a survey of dackelhood, I got my hands onto Alexander McCall Smith's "The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs" (2003) because I was curious about Professor Dr. von Igelfeld's philological expertise in Portuguese matters. Right at start I was reminded of Prof. Pnin's mishaps, worrying over the whereabouts of the envelope with his lectures, without realizing that he'd lost his bearings after catching the wrong train.Prof. Dr. von Igelfeld's quandaries were of a different order: his name was mixed up with Dr. Igelfold's. He travelled all the way from Germany to Arkansas and, instead of delivering a lecture on modal verbs in the writings of Fernando Pessoa, he was expected to speak as a world authority on the sausage dog. Some shift.
Now Pnin was a foreigner unlike Prof. V. Botkin, who was an American scholar inspite of behaving like one..For the first time I realized a specificity that must be glaringly obvious to any American reader: both novels deal with the academic universe.
Another novelist whose satirical vein I'd always enjoyed was David Lodge and, remembering that he'd once been invited to the Third International Conference on Nabokov, I looked for his lecture in the internet. It's availabe as "Nabokov and the Campus Novel", Cycnos, Volume 24 n°1. Online since 2008, Nabokov and the Campus Novel - Cycnos revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1081
I was struck by one of D.Lodge's comments, related to what later became the title of one of his novels ("A Small World"), after he describes the use of the term to "designate a work of fiction whose action takes place mainly in a college or university, and which is mainly concerned with the lives of university professors and junior teachers..In the campus novel students are usually objects perceived by the academic staff, rather than subjects from whose point of view the story is told...the campus novel"[...] David Lodge explains that "the novelist must first create or imagine a world which has some kind of logical relation to the real world, within which he can explore the themes that interest him through narrative. The university or college provides such a world ready-made, so to speak, a "small world" which is a kind of microcosm of the larger world, with its own distinctive customs, seasons, rituals, and foibles, where the factors that motivate human behaviou-power, ambition, rivalry, lust, anxiety-can be displayed and anatomised. The fact that universities are institutions dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth and the preservation of high culture, but staffed by human beings with ordinary human weaknesses and often more than ordinary eccentricities, no doubt explains why the campus novel is a predominantly comic or satiric genre."* Not having experienced life in an American or an English campus I find it strange to envisage it as a "small world... a microcosm of the larger world" and, in my opinion, Vladimir Nabokov's two quasi "academic novels" speak against this sort of "universality" and Weltanschauung. His Arcady is provincial and not cosmopolitan nor rural. It's often dominated by a sort of "Parthenocissus Hall" or ivory towers with spiral staircases that do'nt open into infinity. .
................................................................................................................
*- Abstract: Vladmir Nabokov's Pnin, (1955) is, in one of its many aspects, a very early example of the "campus novel", written and published before that subgenre of modern literary fiction was identified and named. In Pale Fire (1962) Nabokov returned to the university campus for the principal location of his story. I will try to identify the specific nature of Nabokov's contribution to the evolution of the campus novel and his possible influence on other practitioners of this kind of fiction.
According to the author, "the first English campus novel of real significance, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, published in 1954, cannot properly be so called since the word was not then current in British English." For him C.P.Snow's The Masters, "is not sufficiently typical" because its "overall tone is tragic, or elegiac, whereas the campus novel is typically comic or satirical." An influencial novel about the academic world is Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe,published in 1952,."quickly followed by Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution in 1954 and by Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin in 1955." D. Lodge explains why novels about universities suddenly started to appear in both countries at about the same time considering that the period after the Second World War saw great expansion in university education both in America and in England and ".university teaching, with its generally agreeable conditions, flexible hours, and long vacations, became a favoured second occupation for writers...These novels, it is worth noting, are invariably concerned with teachers in the Arts or Humanities, because that is where most university-based novelists work. [...] Vladimir Nabokov was a European writer who became a university teacher in America in order to escape Europe, and became in consequence a kind of American writer. His life story up to that point was a dramatic one" He explains that soon "after his arrival in the USA, Nabokov met Edmund Wilson...[who] immediately recognized Nabokov's intellectual brilliance and literary gifts.At this time Wilson was married to Mary McCarthy...The Wilsons and the Nabokovs became friends.[...] . [and] in February 1952. Nabokov read Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe and wrote to E.Wilson: "I have read Mary's book. It is very amusing and quite brilliant in parts.". D.Lodge believe shtat this novel "may have planted in his mind, if only unconsciously, the thought of making similar fictional use of his own academic experience." Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution was published in 1954 and he and Nabokov met in the 1940s D. Lodge notes that even "in its final form, Pictures from an Institution resembles a series of episodes and character sketches rather than a novel...and invites admiration mainly for its witty, mannered, rhetorically complex style. The same was said-with less justification-of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin when it was published a year later. And like Pnin, Pictures from an Institution has an "I" narrator who appears to belong to the same fictional world as the rest of the characters, but paradoxically has omniscient access to their private thoughts and deeds... More striking, and in a way more interesting, are the resemblances between these three novels about academia, all conceived quite independently and written at overlapping periods of time. All three give priority to analysis and description over action, and seek to hold the reader's attention by stylistic virtuosity. All three tease the knowing reader with coded references to real institutions and more or less thinly disguised portraits of real people. All three are packed with literary allusions. All three are predominantly comic and satirical in their stance towards the world they evoke. Between them they provided the template for campus novels in the future.".
"It must be admitted that if we do decide to categorize Pnin as a novel, it is not a campus novel in the straightforward sense exemplified by The Groves of Academe; but it does, as it were, contain a campus novel within it, alongside another kind of novel, the novel of expatriation and exile...Pnin is subject to sudden visions, sometimes triggered by a "seizure" of the heart, in which he poignantly recalls episodes from his Russian past....In a later chapter we learn that this sweetheart was a Jew and perished in a Nazi extermination camp. This is emotionally heavier material than is usually admitted into the campus novel. Yet the prevailing tone is comic. Originally Nabokov had intended that at the end of the book Pnin would die, with the magnum opus he had been writing all his life unfinished, but later decided on a less bleak conclusion. ..Nabokov's deceptively suave prose is a velvet glove stretched over steely sarcasm." David Lodge believes that Nabokov had "some things in common with his fictional character. Nabokov's lecturing style, for instance-reading from a carefully written text and making little or no eye contact with his audience-was similar to Pnin's. Nabokov too was capable of absent-mindedness, and on one famous occasion began lecturing obliviously to the wrong class until rescued by a student who had seen him entering the wrong lecture-room. (He dealt with the mistake more suavely than Pnin would have managed, however, saying to the students as he left the room: "You have just seen the 'Coming Attraction' for Literature 325. If you are interested you may register next fall.") Pnin also shares, in a milder form, several of his creator's intellectual prejudices - against Freud and psychotherapy, for instance. But what links Nabokov to Pnin most strongly is that they are both exiles with painfully nostalgic memories of pre-revolutionary Russia." In Pale Fire we find John Shade, "a scholar as well as a poet and teaches at Wordsmith College, another of those fictional campuses in bucolic settings in a north-eastern American state. Kinbote is an émigré scholar from a country in north-east Europe which he calls Zembla... the novel is a tour de force of unreliable narration. On one level Pale Fire is a hilarious satire on eccentric scholarship and perverse interpretation-academic discourse turned imaginatively upon academia as a narrative device. There is a sense therefore in which Pale Fire can be viewed as a brilliant variation on the burgeoning form of the campus novel. But like Pnin - even more emphatically-its themes are broader and deeper than the genre usually permits. Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe contains no such sexual intrigue, and neither does Jarrell's own novel, nor does Pnin-nor, interestingly enough, does Lucky Jim...The campus novel has indeed proved a very adaptable register of changes in contemporary sexual mores over the last half-century. ..But the roots of the campus novel are, in my opinion, in the genre of pastoral, as indicated by the title of Mary McCarthy's seminal novel, The Groves of Academe, and confirmed by the settings of Nabokov's Pnin and Pale Fire... The campus novel provides the reader with civilized entertainment rather than catharsis
NB: Excerpts often distort the article and I recommend that newcomers, who are interested in pursuing this theme, access the original in its entirety.
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Now Pnin was a foreigner unlike Prof. V. Botkin, who was an American scholar inspite of behaving like one..For the first time I realized a specificity that must be glaringly obvious to any American reader: both novels deal with the academic universe.
Another novelist whose satirical vein I'd always enjoyed was David Lodge and, remembering that he'd once been invited to the Third International Conference on Nabokov, I looked for his lecture in the internet. It's availabe as "Nabokov and the Campus Novel", Cycnos, Volume 24 n°1. Online since 2008, Nabokov and the Campus Novel - Cycnos revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=1081
I was struck by one of D.Lodge's comments, related to what later became the title of one of his novels ("A Small World"), after he describes the use of the term to "designate a work of fiction whose action takes place mainly in a college or university, and which is mainly concerned with the lives of university professors and junior teachers..In the campus novel students are usually objects perceived by the academic staff, rather than subjects from whose point of view the story is told...the campus novel"[...] David Lodge explains that "the novelist must first create or imagine a world which has some kind of logical relation to the real world, within which he can explore the themes that interest him through narrative. The university or college provides such a world ready-made, so to speak, a "small world" which is a kind of microcosm of the larger world, with its own distinctive customs, seasons, rituals, and foibles, where the factors that motivate human behaviou-power, ambition, rivalry, lust, anxiety-can be displayed and anatomised. The fact that universities are institutions dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of truth and the preservation of high culture, but staffed by human beings with ordinary human weaknesses and often more than ordinary eccentricities, no doubt explains why the campus novel is a predominantly comic or satiric genre."* Not having experienced life in an American or an English campus I find it strange to envisage it as a "small world... a microcosm of the larger world" and, in my opinion, Vladimir Nabokov's two quasi "academic novels" speak against this sort of "universality" and Weltanschauung. His Arcady is provincial and not cosmopolitan nor rural. It's often dominated by a sort of "Parthenocissus Hall" or ivory towers with spiral staircases that do'nt open into infinity. .
................................................................................................................
*- Abstract: Vladmir Nabokov's Pnin, (1955) is, in one of its many aspects, a very early example of the "campus novel", written and published before that subgenre of modern literary fiction was identified and named. In Pale Fire (1962) Nabokov returned to the university campus for the principal location of his story. I will try to identify the specific nature of Nabokov's contribution to the evolution of the campus novel and his possible influence on other practitioners of this kind of fiction.
According to the author, "the first English campus novel of real significance, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, published in 1954, cannot properly be so called since the word was not then current in British English." For him C.P.Snow's The Masters, "is not sufficiently typical" because its "overall tone is tragic, or elegiac, whereas the campus novel is typically comic or satirical." An influencial novel about the academic world is Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe,published in 1952,."quickly followed by Randall Jarrell's Pictures from an Institution in 1954 and by Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin in 1955." D. Lodge explains why novels about universities suddenly started to appear in both countries at about the same time considering that the period after the Second World War saw great expansion in university education both in America and in England and ".university teaching, with its generally agreeable conditions, flexible hours, and long vacations, became a favoured second occupation for writers...These novels, it is worth noting, are invariably concerned with teachers in the Arts or Humanities, because that is where most university-based novelists work. [...] Vladimir Nabokov was a European writer who became a university teacher in America in order to escape Europe, and became in consequence a kind of American writer. His life story up to that point was a dramatic one" He explains that soon "after his arrival in the USA, Nabokov met Edmund Wilson...[who] immediately recognized Nabokov's intellectual brilliance and literary gifts.At this time Wilson was married to Mary McCarthy...The Wilsons and the Nabokovs became friends.[...] . [and] in February 1952. Nabokov read Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe and wrote to E.Wilson: "I have read Mary's book. It is very amusing and quite brilliant in parts.". D.Lodge believe shtat this novel "may have planted in his mind, if only unconsciously, the thought of making similar fictional use of his own academic experience." Randall Jarrell book Pictures from an Institution was published in 1954 and he and Nabokov met in the 1940s D. Lodge notes that even "in its final form, Pictures from an Institution resembles a series of episodes and character sketches rather than a novel...and invites admiration mainly for its witty, mannered, rhetorically complex style. The same was said-with less justification-of Vladimir Nabokov's Pnin when it was published a year later. And like Pnin, Pictures from an Institution has an "I" narrator who appears to belong to the same fictional world as the rest of the characters, but paradoxically has omniscient access to their private thoughts and deeds... More striking, and in a way more interesting, are the resemblances between these three novels about academia, all conceived quite independently and written at overlapping periods of time. All three give priority to analysis and description over action, and seek to hold the reader's attention by stylistic virtuosity. All three tease the knowing reader with coded references to real institutions and more or less thinly disguised portraits of real people. All three are packed with literary allusions. All three are predominantly comic and satirical in their stance towards the world they evoke. Between them they provided the template for campus novels in the future.".
"It must be admitted that if we do decide to categorize Pnin as a novel, it is not a campus novel in the straightforward sense exemplified by The Groves of Academe; but it does, as it were, contain a campus novel within it, alongside another kind of novel, the novel of expatriation and exile...Pnin is subject to sudden visions, sometimes triggered by a "seizure" of the heart, in which he poignantly recalls episodes from his Russian past....In a later chapter we learn that this sweetheart was a Jew and perished in a Nazi extermination camp. This is emotionally heavier material than is usually admitted into the campus novel. Yet the prevailing tone is comic. Originally Nabokov had intended that at the end of the book Pnin would die, with the magnum opus he had been writing all his life unfinished, but later decided on a less bleak conclusion. ..Nabokov's deceptively suave prose is a velvet glove stretched over steely sarcasm." David Lodge believes that Nabokov had "some things in common with his fictional character. Nabokov's lecturing style, for instance-reading from a carefully written text and making little or no eye contact with his audience-was similar to Pnin's. Nabokov too was capable of absent-mindedness, and on one famous occasion began lecturing obliviously to the wrong class until rescued by a student who had seen him entering the wrong lecture-room. (He dealt with the mistake more suavely than Pnin would have managed, however, saying to the students as he left the room: "You have just seen the 'Coming Attraction' for Literature 325. If you are interested you may register next fall.") Pnin also shares, in a milder form, several of his creator's intellectual prejudices - against Freud and psychotherapy, for instance. But what links Nabokov to Pnin most strongly is that they are both exiles with painfully nostalgic memories of pre-revolutionary Russia." In Pale Fire we find John Shade, "a scholar as well as a poet and teaches at Wordsmith College, another of those fictional campuses in bucolic settings in a north-eastern American state. Kinbote is an émigré scholar from a country in north-east Europe which he calls Zembla... the novel is a tour de force of unreliable narration. On one level Pale Fire is a hilarious satire on eccentric scholarship and perverse interpretation-academic discourse turned imaginatively upon academia as a narrative device. There is a sense therefore in which Pale Fire can be viewed as a brilliant variation on the burgeoning form of the campus novel. But like Pnin - even more emphatically-its themes are broader and deeper than the genre usually permits. Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe contains no such sexual intrigue, and neither does Jarrell's own novel, nor does Pnin-nor, interestingly enough, does Lucky Jim...The campus novel has indeed proved a very adaptable register of changes in contemporary sexual mores over the last half-century. ..But the roots of the campus novel are, in my opinion, in the genre of pastoral, as indicated by the title of Mary McCarthy's seminal novel, The Groves of Academe, and confirmed by the settings of Nabokov's Pnin and Pale Fire... The campus novel provides the reader with civilized entertainment rather than catharsis
NB: Excerpts often distort the article and I recommend that newcomers, who are interested in pursuing this theme, access the original in its entirety.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/