Lectures on Don Quixote

...As a creator, he enjoys the freedom of genius...

...As a thinker, Cervantes's mind is both directed and shackled by the classical and academic ideas of his age...

...and to the effects, often grotesque, of rapidly shifting frames of reference which hopelessly blur the ordinary distinctions between fiction and reality...

...One cannot help noticing the strong ethical sense of this last passage...

...If this is so, and I think it is, the question arises: why doesn't Nabokov recognize in Cervantes one of his great precursors...

...The picture Cervantes paints of the country," he says, "is about as true and typical of seventeenth-century Spain as Santa Claus is true and typical of the twentieth-century North Pole...

...To the follow-up question, "Which is the best...

...His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty...

...The moral aspect of Cervantes's artistic triumph becomes evident when we realize that Don Quixote as a hero, endowed with powerful fictional reality, ends up standing for "everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant"-that is, for values that are in sharp contrast with the overall "cruel" ethics of the book...

...If Nabokov consistently rejected "great ideas" and sentimentality in literature, as well as all the modern calls for artistic "commitment" (Sartrean or otherwise), he did so because he saw them as mere forms of "cheating"-and to cheat, we know, is one of the worst things men, and all the more so artists, can do...

...So the book is a masterpiece, after all, or, in Nabokov's striking formulation, "the most scarecrow masterpiece among masterpieces...

...Bell and Joseph Wood Krutch is that they "oversentimentalize" the book and see the "cruelty" as a display of generous humor and humane feelings...

...LECTURES ON DON QUIXOTE Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Fredson Bowers, preface by Guy Davenport/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/ $17.95 Matei Calinescu discussion of "poshlost," the Russian term for "kitsch" or bad taste, defined, very interestingly, not aesthetically but ethically (by means of the metaphor of the "devil...

...As a thinker, Cervantes shared lightheartedly most of the errors and prejudices of his time-he put up with the Inquisition, solemnly approved of his country's brutal attitude toward Moors and other heretics, believed that all noblemen were God-made and all monks God-inspired...

...Also, one would expect the author of Despair and Pale Fire to be more sensitive to the intricate distinctions between illusion and self-conscious illusion...

...First, taken by itself, it is a fine example of a great modern novelist's critical vocation, a vocation that usually manifests itself invisibly or esoterically within the body of his fiction...

...leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator's desk and roaming space after roaming Spain...

...Nabokov's analysis of Don Quixote has brought out the following paradox: that the hero of a book aesthetically "crude" and ethically "cruel" ("brutal" and "barbarous" are frequent synonyms) is someone just the opposite-gentle, unselfish, gallant...

...In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb...

...Cervantes was apparently one of those accepted authors who simply did not exist for Nabokov, and Don Quixote one of those books he considered "dummies...

...Clearly, as long as he deals with the novel's compositional "crudeness" (not a new theme in Cervantes criticism) he stays within an appropriate aesthetic frame of reference...

...In any case, whenever a critic considers the picaresque novel, or literary treatments of illusion and identity, he will find himself thinking of Cervantes and Nabokov together...

...In this sense Lectures on Don Quixote, while reasserting well-known Nabo-kovian positions, introduces a number of important nuances, qualifications, and distinctions...

...The manuscripts that have survived are mostly in Nabokov's own handwriting, with extensive emendations made during his teaching years at Wellesley, Cornell, and Harvard...

...This qualifier also entitles the reader to speak-as Nabokov does- of the ethics of a novel...

...Nabokov's criticism calls into question the widespread view of his "pure aestheticism" and "playful formalism," and with the recent publication of his Lectures on Don Quixote, this aestheticism now reveals an ethical dimension, leaving it less "pure" and full of unexpected, enriching tensions...

...The major disappointment in Lectures on Don Quixote is Nabokov's failure to see the book's most "Nabokovian" concerns and themes...

...According to Nabokov, the error of critics such as Aubrey F.G...

...Even his first drafts seem subtly rewritten, always fresh and spontaneous, exhilaratingly free of repetition, overwriting, noble or ignoble banalities, not to mention the temptation of "great ideas" ("hog-wash" he called them...

...Some ten years before his death in 1977, he declared his intention to publish a series of essays based on his classroom lectures-on Joyce's Ulysses, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformations, Cer-vantes's Don Quixote-but the project was never carried out...

...The book Don Quixote, then, is "crude," a farrago of episodes sloppily put together, full of inconsistencies and incongruities...

...Fortunately, in the case of Cervantes, his art transcended his prejudices when he created his pathetic hero...

...Cervantes's playful treatment of the uses and abuses of authorship (including not only the attribution of the work to the fictional Arab, Cid Hamete Benengeli, but also the polemical sorties in the second part against the fake Don Quixote of Avellaneda, and the joyous display of narrative inventiveness in response to that piece of literary forgery and exploitation) is certainly more than a "primitive" device, as Nabokov unfairly describes it...

...Throughout the Quixote lectures, Nabokov argues that Don Quixote reveals a partial failure of its author's ethical imagination...

...When asked in 1969, "Which is the worst thing men do...

...he answered: "To stink, to cheat, to torture...

...He also repeats his favorite idea that great novels (such as Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenin, which academics offer as examples of "realism") are nothing but "supreme fairy tales...

...what eventually saves the book is Cervantes's "intuition of genius" which gave birth, in such an unlikely context, to the attaching figure of Don Quixote...

...he replied: "To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless" (a condensed version of what Don Quixote stands for...

...The parody has become a paragon...

...For answers we must take a closer look at how Nabokov conceives the relationship between "art" and "life...

...The higher kind of fiction is marked by the richness, vividness, and imaginative precision of the details woven into it...

...Nabokov goes on to recall that "throughout my academic ascent in America, from lean Lecturer to Full Professor, I have never delivered to my audience a scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand...

...This important qualifier of the larger paradox about novels as fairy tales gives the fiction reader a right to make judgments, not only about the internal compositional felicities or infelicities of a work, but also about the degree to which it is faithful to certain external "facts" it purports to reflect...

...Early on, he revised his Gogol notes and published them as Nikolai Gogol (1948), a delightful critical (anti)biography and a most penetrating study of Gogol's art...

...Even beauty acquires a clear-cut ethical dimension...

...A typical aesthete, I might add, far from being bothered by cruelty, relishes it, although not necessarily in its more naive forms, such as those used by Cervantes for comical effect...

...1 he first lecture opens with a restatement of a recurrent "aesthet-icist" theme of Nabokov's criticism: one must not confuse "the facts of fiction" with "the fiction of facts," i.e., "reality...

...What is surprising is the degree to which they are internally if not externally "finished," bearing the distinctive marks of Nabokov's verbal art, his passion for precision, his calculated insouciance, graceful idiosyncrasies, and bluntly unconventional intelligence...

...Nothing could be more foreign to Nabokov's stubbornly civilized views of literature and art...

...This table of values should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Nabokov's moral convictions...

...Whatever the book's numerous defects, its hero remains mysteriously seductive: "We do not laugh at him any more...

...It brings to mind a version of what Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence," which would explain Nabokov's reluctance to lecture on Don Quixote and the fact that, unlike his other university lectures, these were given only once, at Harvard, in the spring semester of 1952...

...The conclusion of Nabokov's reluctant but extremely minute (rereading of Don Quixote is equally striking: Cervantes's novel "is one of those books that are perhaps more important in eccentric diffusion than in their own intrinsic value...

...It contains Nabokov's famous Matei Calinescu is Professor of Comparative Literature and West European Studies at Indiana University and author of Faces of Modernity (Indiana University Press...

...Curiously enough," Nabokov once jested with his students, "one cannot read a book: one can only reread it...

...My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French...

...How can we account for this blind spot in a writer as lucid and clear-sighted as Nabokov...

...He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant...

...BOOK REVIEWS At the outset of Strong Opinions, mainly a collection of written interviews granted by the Lolita-famous Nabokov between 1962 and 1972, we find the following memorable statement, insolently modest, haughtily self-ironic: "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child...

...The importance of Nabokov's criticism is twofold...

...Yet without such fairy tales, Nabokov stresses, "the world would not be real...

...Second, in relation to Nabokov's own novels, his criticism has the effect of clarifying certain apparent ambiguities while rendering ambiguous and even mysterious certain apparent clarities that his critics tend to take for granted...

...Moreover, leaving aside the fact that Nabokov writes so much better than those he attacks, is he on safer ground when he decides to separate a major character from the text that creates his fictional reality...

...In other words, the art of a book is normally affected by its ethics...

...it is also a "veritable encyclopedia of cruelty" (replete with scenes of mental and physical torture that do not go beyond the primitive level of medieval farce and presuppose the existence of a natural link between pain and humor...

...A Pninishly awkward speaker who, at parties, could not tell a story without having "to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts," Nabokov (unlike some of his colleagues) clearly could not afford to come to class with just a few notes jotted down on the back of a used envelope...

...As for the "real life" that we are wont to look for in literature, the "real life" (the quotation marks are Nabokov's) that is defined by the perspective of the so-called average man, what else can it be but a "piece of fiction," given that "the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics...

...But by rejecting much of the book on account of its "cruelty," isn't he stepping outside that frame...

...The modern reader of Don Quixote cannot help but "find the implications of its humor brutal and grim," and it is not enough to say that Cervantes was a "man of his time": It is sad when an author assumes that certain things are funny in themselves- donkeys, gluttons, tormented animals, bloody noses...

...Note that the substance of such harsh accusations is not only ethical but, in a larger sense, ideological...

...Had he been a better extemporaneous speaker, we would probably have been deprived of an incidental but fascinating component of his literary legacy...

...Their publication since 1980-thanks to the admirable editorial work of Fredson Bowers-has been a major literary event...

...Representatives of the various aestheticist movements, whether late nineteenth-century decadents or twentieth-century avant-gardists, often developed an "aesthetics of cruelty" of their own (the success of Antonin Artaud's concept of "the theatre of cruelty" is just one example...

...Nabokov praises Joyce for the complete accuracy of the image of Dublin that can be reconstituted from Ulysses, and blames Cervantes for the jarring inaccuracies of his geography...

...The art of a book is not necessarily affected by its ethics...

...Nabokov's aesthetics, then, is always a form of ethics: even if art is ultimately a game, ethical standards are important for the game to be played well...

...The intriguing similarities between Don Quixote and Lolita (which was published just a few years after the delivery of the Quixote lectures) have not escaped the attention of Guy Davenport, who writes in the foreword: Both Cervantes and Nabokov recognize that playing can extend beyond childhood...

...Lolita's side of her affair with Humbert Humbert is play . . . and the psychology of Humbert (meant to elude the theories of Freud) may be that he is simply stuck in the playtime of childhood...

...It is clear that the texts included in Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and now Lectures on Don Quixote are unfinished...

...While this sums up one of the main arguments of the Quixote lectures it tells us nothing about Nabokov's growing fascination with the character of Quixote himself, whom, the lecturer suggests, we can somehow separate from the very book that brought him into being...

...In art, the dangers of cheating-or the demonic temptations of Pseudo-are in fact much stronger than in ordinary life, the price we perhaps have to pay for the exquisite joys of genuine and rigorous imagination...

...to the many paradoxes of identity, enchantment, and disenchantment...

...On the other hand, Nabokov notes, "between certain generalities of fiction and certain generalities of life there is some correspondence...

...If followed attentively, Nabokov's argument leads to a distinction not between fiction and reality but between a higher kind of fiction (the "fairy tale") and a lower kind ("real life...

...We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero gradually losing contact with the book that bore him...

...At least this was the case before he was asked to lecture on Quixote at Harvard, where he had accepted a visiting appointment for the spring of 1952...

...But is this error really so great, or are these critics merely projecting onto the book as a whole the qualities Nabokov himself grants only to its main hero...

...And isn't Nabokov here violating his oft-stated principle that one must not mix ethics and aesthetics, the concerns of life with the concerns of art...

...Nabokov was certainly aware of the interest of his lectures...

...Years later, he recalled "with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues...

...More important, as in the case of Don Quixote, when an author's art tran-scends his ethics, his achievement is at once aesthetic and moral...

...For all that, Nabokov's Quixote lectures remain a great pleasure to read and, if not particularly enlightening in regard to Cervantes, very much so in regard to Nabokov himself...

...We recall that everything in Nabokov's conception of writing hinges on the importance of detail: for him details are "divine" and he would have certainly subscribed to the famous maxim of the art critic Aby Warburg, "God is in detail...

...Nabokov himself, we might say, could not write: he could only rewrite...

...to the problematics of play, simulation, and dissimulation...

...That's what Don Quixote is doing: playing knight-errant...