Subject: Philip Fisher on VN
From: "Jay Livingston" <[email-masked]>
To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 May 2001 11:24:35 -0400

Philip Fisher, Harvard professor and winner of the 2000 Truman Capote
Award for Literary Criticism for “Hard Facts,” interviewed in
“Colloquy,” the alumni magazine of the Harvard grad school.  The entire
interview is, allegedly, available at

http://www.gsas.harvard.edu/colloquy.

Fisher:  People were looking to Tolstoy or George Eliot to talk about
everything of substantial moral weight because they were themselves some

distance from religious sources.  There was going to be a cooperative
spiritual relationship between philosophers and novelists and so on
about existential issues.  People hadn’t liberated themselves from
looking to one master source of wisdom.  Now, we’re a more complexly
secularized culture.  One of the things that separates today’s novel
from that of the 19th century is the roles its trying to fill.

Q: Which accounts for the slimmer books of today.

Fisher: Or the element of play.  It’s one of the things most
incompatible with that [Victorian] high seriousness.  For me, one of the

absolutely great careers stretching into the second half of the 20th
century is Nabokov’s, which is based on toying with language and a
remarkably intellectual relation to moral life. Nabokov’s central
emphasis on cruelty as a moral vice demonstrates that you don’t have to
sacrifice the moral domain when you engage in lightness and gamelike
behavior. . . . .

Q: You have written that no work can become a classic in its own time.
That said, would you hazard any recent contenders?

Fisher: I think I wouldn’t.  The last thing you can feel confident about

is “Lolita,” an American classic and a classic of language and
observation. . . . . The embarrassment of premature classic status is
clear when you consider “Dr. Zhivago.”  When it was published it was
immediately taught, and every course went from Homer to Tolstoy to “Dr.
Zhivago.”  The same was true in recent years of “One Hundred Years of
Solitude.” . . . . .At this point there’s a temptation to think it’s
going to be a big book because at the beginning of the 20th century we
had “Ulysses.”  The instance of “Lolita,” a sly and tiny classic, is a
sign that it doesn’t happen where you think it will.