Passages from a famous American poem

The tricks memory plays.

Vladimir Nabokov taught me to listen for the poetry embedded in prose.  In the magnificent Chapter 4 of The Gift (1938, sort of), we find:

Chernyshevski’s “philosophy” goes back through Feuerbach, to the Encyclopedists. On the other hand, applied Hegelianism, working gradually left, went through that same Feuerbach to join Marx, who in his Holy Family expresses himself thus:

    . . . . no great intelligence
    Is needed to distinguish a connection
    Between the teaching of materialism
    Regarding inborn tendency to good;
    [snip]
    Of industry; the moral right to pleasure,
    And communism.

I have put it into blank verse so it would be less boring. (244-5, Vintage edition, 1991)

The “I” in that last line, the switch back to prose, is not Nabokov but Fyodor, the novel’s protagonist.  The long chapter is “actually” Fyodor’s book about Nikolai Chernoshevsky, fascinating author of the terrible (but fascinating) novel What Is To Be Done? (1862).  So the cheekiness (“less boring”) exists on two levels.  This chapter is among the greatest pieces of writing of, let’s say, 20th century fiction.  Five Branch Tree is writing about The Gift’s fraternal twin, Invitation to a Beheading (1938).  Where was I?

Note, please, that Nabokov is not actually discovering the inadvertent poetry of Karl Marx, but putting Marx into verse.  Not the same thing at all.  My memory fooled me.

What, then, is this, from Chapter 12 of Bend Sinister (1947), VN’s second novel in English:

On the next slip of paper he had transcribed passages from a famous American poem

      A curious sight – these bashful bears,
      These timid warrior whalemen

      And now the time of tide has come;
      The ship casts off her cables

      It is not shown on any map;
      True places never are

      This lovely light, it lights not me;
      All loveliness is anguish –

and, of course, that bit about the delicious death of an Ohio honey hunter (for my humour’s sake I shall preserve the style in which I once narrated it at Thula to a lounging circle of my Russian friends). (155, Vintage edition, 1990).

Krug, the protagonist, spends several pages leafing through similar “dead and unusable” notes for an essay.  I have no idea what that business about the honey hunter is.  But the poem, the famous American poem.  Searchable texts almost spoil the fun.

The first couplet is from Moby-Dick, Chapter 5, “The Breakfast.”  The second is from Chapter 9, “The Sermon.”  The profoundly Melvillean third describes Queequeg’s home, Chapter 12, “Biographical”; the painful last lines are Ahab’s, Chapter 37, “Sunset.”

Nabokov had discovered, or created, a lost Melville poem, shattered and scattered throughout Moby-Dick.  So this is where I learned to look for poetry in prose.  It was Melville all along.

How, by the way, did I know that the poem was Melville’s?  The whalemen are a pretty blatant clue, aren't they, but that’s not it.  Nabokov explains the gag in the introduction he added to the novel in 1963.

The enjoyable Karl Marx - a classroom success

I do not believe I have ever written a post about my teaching.  In the classroom, the Amateur Reader becomes a Professional Reader.  Not a reader of anything that might show up on Wuthering Expectations - there's the difference.

This semester, though, I have been able to briefly force a merger, during a two week unit on Karl Marx.*  My real coup was forcing John Ruskin on the unsuspecting young'uns.  As with many coups, a counter-revolution drove the rebels from the palace.  They were lucky to escape with their lives.  What a disaster.

Marx, though, I cannot believe how well the students responded to Marx.  We used The Portable Karl Marx, edited by Eugene Kamenka, reading The Communist Manifesto and selections from The German Ideology, Grundrisse, and Capital.  Light stuff, as Marx goes.

I had a copy of the book from college, and read or reread the whole thing.  I read an unhealthy chunk in Morocco, or on the plane home.  When I was an undergraduate, twenty years ago, I read Karl Marx, substantial chunks of Karl Marx, in courses in:  History, Economcs, Political Science, and Sociology.  Plus, everyone graduating with a BA was assigned The Communist Manifesto in Western Civ.  So that's five subjects.  That's a lotta Marx.

Of my sixteen students, four had read the Manifesto.  One of these had read Capital as well.  What, the first volume, I asked?  No, all of it, all of it.  Two thousand pages, more.  I thought it would be discouraging to ask why, so, to answer your question, I don't know.  No, I know.  Why do I read (some) of what I read?  To do it, to see what's there.  Good for him.

I do not believe I had any actual Marxists in my class, although a student did wear a Marxite novelty t-shirt on the final day (Lenin in a pointy hat, Mao with a noise-maker, all at the Communist Party, ho ho), and another said he had meant to.  The positive response, then, was not to the ideas of Marx, as such - hostility was more openly expressed, at least - but to Marx as a sort of intellectual puzzle.  We take a definition of surplus value from this reading, combine it with offhand comments about what capitalists produce from that one (short answer: nothing but trouble),  mix in some colonialism here and some peppery rhetoric there.  Combine enough pieces and a picture begins to emerge.  The students seemed to enjoy it, and seemed to understand that agreeing with any or all of it was entirely beside the point, an activity for elsewhere.

If they actually remember a single Marxian idea, I hope it is the concept of the worker's alienation from his labor.  I'm training students to be well-paid bureaucrats.  I accept that.  Best to be aware of the truth.

*  I will allow readers to guess at the class.  Standard class in my field.

Monday literay links - true taste is laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished

It's time for a roundup of literary links. Most people seem to use posts like this to link to other websites. Consider them all linked, in spirit.

***

What a shock it was to come across this passage in Dombey and Son:

"[T]he Doctor, leaning back in his chair, with his hand in his breast as usual, held a book from him at arm's length, and read. There was something very awful in this manner of reading. It was such a determined, unimpassioned, inflexible, cold-blooded way of going to work. It left the Doctor's countenance exposed to view; and when the Doctor smiled suspiciously at his author, or knit his brows, or shook his head and made wry faces at him, as much as to say, 'Don't tell me, Sir; I know better,' it was terrific." (Ch. XI)

Honestly, it was like looking in a mirror, the kind of mirror that turns reflections into descriptive passages in the style of Dickens. That is exactly how I read. If I am reading your blog, that is exactly how I am reading it.

Note how the meaning of a word changes. When Dickens calls the Doctor's way of reading "terrific," he means it inspires terror. But when I read that way, it's also "terrific," meaning "really good." Don't tell me, Sir; I know better.

***

I was recently, for one reason or another, looking at this famous passage from The German Ideology, about the division of labor as is and under communism:

"He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic."

Meine Frau pointed out to me that, assuming the hunter uses gunpowder, Marx and Engels have covered fire, water, earth, and air. The "critical critic" produces, mostly, air.

I've enjoyed this imaginative passage since I first read it, but only now does it strike me that "The After-Dinner Critic" would be a good name for a litblog. The phrase only gets two hits (until this post gets added in), both from Google books! A golden opportunity. "The Critical Critic," also not a bad name, gets 686.

***

If I were collecting quotations for an Appreciationist Manifesto, I would include this one by John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Part III, Section I, Chapter 3, "Of Accuracy and Inaccuracy in Impressions of Sense":

“The second, that, in order to the discovery of that which is best of two things, it is necessary that both should be equally submitted to the attention; and therefore that we should have so much faith in authority as shall make us repeatedly observe and attend to that which is said to be right, even though at present we may not feel it so. And in the right mingling of this faith with the openness of heart, which proves all things, lies the great difficulty of the cultivation of the taste, as far as the spirit of the scholar is concerned, though even when he has this spirit, he may be long retarded by having evil examples submitted to him by ignorant masters.” (pp. 246-7 of the 1851 edition).

Those ignorant masters! This does get at the heart of what I call appreciationism - that the people that came before me are not all fools or frauds, and should be given some attention. My worry is that I am too respectful, with too much faith and insufficient "openness of heart." Well, I'm not done yet:

“But true taste is forever growing, learning, reading, worshipping, laying its hand upon its mouth because it is astonished, casting its shoes from off its feet because it finds all ground holy, lamenting over itself and testing itself by the way that it finds things.” (248)

“I have seen a man of true taste pause for a quarter of an hour to look at the channellings that recent rain had traced in a heap of cinders.” (249)

I wonder if that man of true taste is J. M. W. Turner.

The phrase "Appreciationist Manifesto" gets one Google hit, to me, here, in another post about Modern Painters. Seem to be repeating myself.