Aesthetic Bliss Research Articles

The Poetry of Ordinary Language

Abstract The general argument of this essay is that poetry is an everyday ambition and an everyday accomplishment. The evidence for this – a good bit of which I will amass enthusiastically in what follows – is everywhere in our language. I explore this according to three guiding intuitions: (i) people, at least some of the time, want to give their words a similar intensity or fullness and show the same skill in unleashing verbal power, as poets do – seeking words that will carry their voices; (ii) people say things give me the same aesthetic bliss and ache of gratitude that poetry gives me; and (iii) there seems to be a poetic or aesthetic dimension to all of language, without which words would not have the significance for us that they do. I end the essay by saying why the poetry in our everyday speech complicates the relation between the ordinary and (different versions of) the extraordinary as other philosophers have imagined it.

Aesthetic Bliss: How Vladimir Nabokov Uses Unreliable Narration in Lolita to Create Better Readers

In his most famous novel<em>, Lolita, </em>Vladimir Nabokov created one of the most intricate, memorable, and maddening narrators in literature. By firmly positioning Humbert Humbert as a mis-handler of fact and purveyor of his own skewed perspective, Nabokov encourages the perceptive reader to reject the narrator and actively seek out the truth of the story for themselves. Subtle yet undeniable clues (such as holes in the narrative arguments, clear exaggerations, and logical fallacies) saturate this story, undermining the credibility of the first-person perspective and pointing toward its deception. Once we as the audience recognize that Nabokov is guiding us away from his grasp, we are free to wander through the world the author has created and interpret its meaning for ourselves, and as such, evolve into more attentive and thoughtful readers of fiction.

How to Read Harold Bloom and Why

How to Read Harold Bloom and Why Benjamin D. Carson (bio) Urge and urge and urge,Always the procreant urge of the world. Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" No other well-known literary critic elicits the kind of praise or vitriol, and not in equal measure, as does Harold Bloom. He is either championed as a professional provocateur—a "colossal" among critics—or, as is more often the case, he is condemned as a pretentious windbag. If he is not a genius, he is, in the words of Joseph Epstein in a particularly nasty hit piece for The Hudson Review, "that most comic of unconscious comic figures . . ., the intellectual equivalent of that character in P. G. Wodehouse of whom Wodehouse writes that he looked like someone who was poured into his clothes but forgot to say when" (215). "So far as one can determine," Epstein continues, "The Anxiety of Influence has had very little influence and appears to have caused anxiety chiefly in Harold Bloom, who claims that few people really understand it" (215). And, Terry Eagleton, in his Figures of Dissent, writes that Bloom's theory, "as Henry Fielding observed of the belief that the good will get their reward in this world, had only one drawback, namely that it was not true" (Figures 168). About How to Read and Why, specifically, Eagleton goes on to write, Bloom's "portentously self-important book would collapse at the faintest whiff of" irony (169). Eagleton and Epstein are hardly alone in their critique of Bloom's project. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their The Madwoman in the Attic, suggest Bloom's theory, rooted, however nominally, as it is in Freud's Oedipus Complex, is "offensively sexist to some feminist critics" (47) while other critics follow in the same way: Geoffrey Hartman, in his Criticism in the Wilderness; Elizabeth Bruss, in her Beautiful Theories; Jonathan Arac, in his Afterword to The Yale Critics; and Edward Said, in his The World, the Text, and the Critic, all conclude that Bloom is less than what Arac labels an "iconoclast" (179) than a conservative defender of the Western, maledominated literary canon.1 In this essay, I argue for a way of reading Bloom that allows us to give Bloom his due without taking recourse to ad hominem attacks (Epstein) or outright dismissal because his theory is not "true" (Eagleton). Rather than asking questions like "Is Bloom right?" or, more specifically, "Are poets really embroiled in a heroic struggle with their poetic fathers?"—we might instead read Bloom the same way Richard Rorty reads Plato, Heidegger, [End Page 3] Proust, and Nabokov: as the author of a new vocabulary, a new way of talking, describing and re-describing the world. In other words, we should read Bloom ironically—that is, through a pragmatist's eyes. In this sense, Bloom, like William Blake, is not just an ironist in an agonizing struggle for self-creation. Rather, the tetralogy of books in which Bloom outlines his theory of poetic influence—The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Kabbalah and Criticism (1975), A Map of Misreading (1975), and Poetry and Repression (1976)—can be understood not as offering a new epistemology that must bear the burden of truth claims but, in Cynthia Ozick's words, "as a long theophanous prose poem, a rationalized version of Blake's heroic Prophetic Books" (46).2 If Ozick is correct about the how we should read Bloom, what about the why? Bloom's theory, finally, is about the relationship between what Nabokov calls "aesthetic bliss" and being (314). The former breathes life into the latter. Difficult reading, David Denby writes, "develops . . . stamina in the way that track practice builds lung power and muscle" (236). In a passage that sounds like it could have been written by Harold Bloom, Denby argues in his recent book, Lit Up, You make a self by matching yourself against the text. When you respond to the text fully, understanding how it is constructed, and what the parts mean, you come into being. This was hardly a narcissistic exercise; the students [at the Beacon School, Mamaroneck, and Hillhouse] couldn't do what they did without the...

Lolita Speaks

Since Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 publication of Lolita, numerous feminist scholars have argued for rereading the novel from the girl’s point of view to understand Lolita not as a sexual agent, but as an incest victim. In this article, I examine how revisionary texts like , , and give voice to the girl in the text, disrupting Nabokov’s “aesthetic bliss” and emphasizing aspects of Lolita’s victimization. Ultimately, I discuss how a contemporary analytical shift from valuing the aesthetics to a consideration of the ethics of the novel has led to restricted critical readings of the narrative, which, nevertheless, remain open through the acknowledgement of the girl’s sexual desire and agency within these female authors’ revisionary texts.

Lolita reading Lolita: Rhetoric of Reader Participation

Following Roland Barthes’ definition, this paper argues that Lolita is a “text of bliss”, namely a text that discomforts the reader, bringing to a crisis his/her relation with language. At the same time it is based on Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the text as an event, designating the reader’s continual oscillation between involvement and observation. The research objective is to find out how Lolita is supposed to be read by Nabokov’s “good reader”: what the given instructions are and how the reader should interact with them. The development of the Humbert-Lolita relationship in the novel in contrast to its transformation in the screenplay is of particular interest because it seems to figure the interaction between author/text and reader. The findings uncover how aesthetic and sensual come together to entangle the reader in the text, and thus art is demonstrated as a clash and aesthetic bliss at the same time.

Féerie pour un scandale : l’art et la morale dans Lolita (1958) de Vladimir Nabokov

The moral apotheosis of the narrator-character Humbert Humbert consists in the narrative of transgressive acts like pedophilia and incest. How is it possible for the writer first, and then the reader, to reconcile art and morality ? In the preface to Lolita, V. Nabokov impersonates the fictive John Ray and looks at transgression with both a moral and clinical intent. In the postface to the novel written by V. Nabokov himself, the writer affirms his aesthetics and claims that his novel has no moral in tow. A close reading of this preface shows a writer on the defensive in the face of a persisting scandal. Poetical options are carefully explained to the reader. Thus aesthetic bliss comes foremost transcending moralism. Nabokov shows himself a rigorous formalist insisting on the purity of art and its disconnection from ethics. A dialectic defending perversion causes the reader to shake in his/her moral foundation. The specious reasoning of the narrator makes Lolita a masterpiece of casuistry. Lolita creates a utopia beyond good and evil where the freedom of the reader can find in the sanctuary of art the proper place to exercise itself.

Can We Avoid Cruelty?

Even if Rorty says that m Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity he wanted to show how things look if we treat the demands of self-creation and human solidarity as equally valid, but forever incommensurable, I do not think he meant that the main engagement of the has to be only with solidarity, and the mam engagement of the ironist only with self-creation. That is why he combined these two ideas in Ins creation of the 'liberal ironist' figure. As we know, Rorty borrows lus use of the word 'liberal' from Judith Shklar, according to whom liberals aie people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we do, but gives Ins own definition of the ironist as someone who faces the contingency of Ins or her own most central beliefs. He does not give us many clues at the beginning of lus book of why cruelty is the worst thing for a liberal. Only at the end of it, when talking about Nabokov's novels, does he give us a hint. A modem is someone who works for a future in winch cruelty will no longer be institutionalized.' The tiling the fears most is not cruelty per se but especially institutionalized cruelty; the cruelty against a group or a person made m name of a credo, an ideology, or a state politics. Tins sort of cruelty involves a majority, a collectivity, society at large.Tins is the cruelty Judith Shklar writes about in Ordinary Vices. There, she explains why seeing morality from the point of view of vices, and not of virtues, was an important step secular humain tail ans like Montaigne and Montesquieu made to get us outside of that divinely-ruled moral universe so that from then on we could put our minds to the common ills we inflict upon one another eveiy day. The intolerance for cruelty, the reason why it is the vice tlie liberals most hate, is that the willful infliction of physical or moral pain on a weaker being means the destraction of one's freedom. The victim's feelings of fear and anguish are responsible for her loss of autonomy and decisionmaking capacity. The evils caused by political and religious conventions such as the ones faced by the victims of the Spaniards in America are some of the past events of cruelty Shklar mentions in her book.For lus part, Rorty descubes a as someone engaged with solidarity and the social demands of justice, and broadens its meaning while associating it with what he calls liberal hope. The hope Rorty is urging us to pay attention to is not only the hope that in the future there will be less social and institutionalized cruelty, but also the hope that there will be less cruelty perpetrated among individuals, especially by those who are obsessively following their selfcreative impulses and who for the sake of art or for the sake of achieving an aesthetic bliss are not at all interested or even touched by the suffering they may cause to others around them. It is interesting to notice that although Roily emphasizes several times that the public and the private sphere are not reduced to one another - in fact, they constitute qmte different aspects of human life - he is nonetheless warning us about the risks of unethical behavior in the obsessive pursuit of autonomy. The private sphere is not a domain free from ethical worries. Certainly, ironists like Nietzsche would defend just the opposite: that society should support the autonomy and creativity of some superior spirits - in Rortyan vocabulary, of some strong poets - even at the cost of the lives and freedom of non-educated poor spirits. Strong poets are not necessarily liberals. The non-liberal strong poets have no interest in watching the world from the point of view of a person in a weak position.However, in order to avoid an oversimplification of the strong poet as an egoistic character isolated from society's search for social progress, we have to clarify Nietzsche's position a bit more. Although definitely not a - in fact for him equality had no relevance at all and freedom was a conquest of few - Nietzsche was a vehement critic of religious morality, of its so-called universality, of the imposition of its dogmas and prohibitions at the cost of our autonomy. …

Editorial: Aesthetic Bliss: All Fiction Issue

Editorial: Aesthetic Bliss: All Fiction Issue

Aggressive Tendencies: Lolita and the Conscripted Reader

This essay reads Lolita within the broader context of midcentury advice literature intended to manage marriage, parenting, and sexuality. Moving away from critiques that read the novel as a parody of the prescriptive genre, Wilhite argues that Humbert’s narrative and what Nabokov calls the “aesthetic bliss” of his novel are consistent with a cultural incitement to classify sexual practices and identities for an uneasy readership. Devotees of parenting guides and marriage manuals turn to such works in search of answers, and Humbert knows that readers of his confessional narrative are also on a quest for information—to learn the salacious details of his affair with Lolita. In similar ways, Lolita and prescriptive literature depend on the presence of a curious and conscripted reader, and from John Ray Jr.’s Foreword to Nabokov’s “On a Book Entitled Lolita ,” the novel sustains a hyper-vigilant awareness of, and apprehension about, its audience. This balancing act between curiosity and control suggests a new framework for understanding how Lolita exercises power over, and exhibits aggressive tendencies toward, its sexually inquisitive and anxious readers.

No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy

Cooper, Lydia R. No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in Cormac McCarthy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2011. 185 pp. Hardcover, $38.00, 978-0-8071-3721-5.In No More Heroes, Lydia Cooper finds in Cormac McCarthy's fiction narrative gaze that is shot through with glimpses of human compassion, pity, nobility, and hope (161-2). Her project places work within the current trend that seeks to ground literature's work and worth within imagination and affective experience-the notion that by coaxing us into imagining counterfactual social arrangements or inhabiting the lives of others, novels can make us more empathetic, thoughtful people. At first glance, Cormac McCarthy's oeuvre would seem rocky ground indeed on which to stake claims of empathetic engagement or find seeds of hope. Readers of work often feel obliged to disavow the affective properties of McCarthy's fiction: we balk at the aesthetic bliss of Blood Meridian and treat with suspicion the generic pleasures of the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men. Cooper admits that McCarthy's work is regularly characterized as brutally anti-humanistic, and particularly unkind to women and ethnic others. Delving into the syntax and perspective of McCarthy's narratives, however, Cooper finds ethical riches within: affirmations of empathy, the necessity of community, and heroic struggle in the face of despair. She insists that novels consistently the valiant inner struggles of men trying against all odds to be good (1). We gain access to this interiority by attending to shifts in perspective, fleeting moments when the distant third-person omniscient voice gives way to limited third- or first-person point of view. These perspectival shifts are marked by instances of particularly fragmented or compounded syntax, and call our attention to characters' struggle toward goodness, empathy and human connection (12). By formally underscoring these moments, McCarthy asserts the ethical importance of imagination and reading, and encourages readers to practice empathy themselves. Thus narrative becomes a vehicle for bearing witness to courage in extremis, and even moral act in itself (22, 162).Cooper works chronologically and carefully through all of McCarthy's fiction. Her first chapter establishes the link between empathy, narrative, and morality in McCarthy's first three Appalachian novels. She reads The Orchard Keeper as demonstration of how shifts in narrative perspective work according to character morality: the generally omniscient narrative shifts dramatically into the perceptions of the deeply Arthur Ownby, and maintains greater perspectival proximity to the problematic Marion Sylder than to the evil Kenneth Rattner (32, 33). In Outer Dark, flashes of perspectival shifts illuminate few instances of in bleak world (38). Child of God presents compassion as necessity, suggest[ing] that readers' refusal to acknowledge Ballard as child of God much like themselves is failure that sustains savage retaliation like his (45). These links between interiority and goodness hold throughout. Cooper shows that within the Border Trilogy, All moments of interiority underscore the significance of human connection and interaction (100, italics original). And in No Country for Old Men, the thoughts of Sheriff Bell comprise much of the text; the morally ambiguous Llewellyn Moss's mental life blossoms whenever he is conscious of dilemma (115); the inner life of the malevolent Chigurh remains utterly unintelligible.By framing narrative perspective in McCarthy along these lines, Cooper implicitly adopts the tenet of Christian theology that evil has no positive substance but is merely negation or absence of the good. Hence, in No More Heroes evil is always opaque. The interpretive limits this imposes are visible in her second chapter, where Blood Meridian serves only as Suttree's foil. …

Realizing and Imagining "Aesthetic Bliss" in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire are exemplary works of art that continue to push the boundaries of aesthetic and ethical literary theory. Critics and theorists alike once strove to categorize these tenets so central to Nabokov’s work, but in current reviews many have chosen to defer a deterministic analysis of the novel’s themes and instead relegate the philosophical and artistic value of his texts to the realm of “potustoronnost” (“otherworld”). This paper argues that the artistic puzzle that motivates such a critical assessment is in fact more complexly related to Nabokov’s strong opinions about art, aesthetics, and ethics, and ignoring a finer analysis of these themes renders a general term such as “otherworld” unsatisfactory. My research explores two principle motifs—reality and imagination—in an attempt to join Nabokov’s artistic mechanisms with his well-established aesthetic and ethical axioms. Additionally, I invoke the preceding work of Gustauve Flaubert, Madame Bovary, in order to demonstrate how Nabokov has, almost a century later, complemented Flaubert’s negative representation of art’s integration into his characters’ average realities (via a literary critique of interested aesthetics) with a positive, humanistic perspective that invokes moral sentiment. This essay strives to show how beauty and morality connect reality and imagination to aesthetics and ethics; and ultimately, how these interrelationships provide a dimensionality to art that invites the thoughtful reader to an elevated state of “aesthetic bliss.” I offer a refreshing perspective on Nabokov’s artistic priority of attaining “aesthetic bliss” that synthesizes and expands upon the current dialogue.

Partial Badness

Partial Badness James Phelan It's good that ABR wants to promote the discussion of the bad—another sign that it's once again safe to talk about better and worse when we talk about literature. There will, I'm sure, be no consensus about what constitutes badness or whether it belongs to the book, the reader, the situation of reading, all of the above, or none of the above. But that's okay. Even bad ideas about badness can at this stage help advance the discussion. (Even if what I say here is bad, it's good.) Books are not just objects but also rhetorical actions in which authors try to do things to their readers. Consequently, books can own their own badness. And they can be bad in three ways: 1) the things they try to do—their goals—can be bad; 2) their goals can be good but their efforts to achieve those goals can be bad; 3) both their goals and their efforts to achieve them can be bad. Good things authors try to do include giving us new ideas and new ways of thinking, engaging and sharpening our ethical values, offering us enriching aesthetic experiences. But sometimes the new way of thinking turns out to be incoherent, the ethical values we engage with are abhorrent, and/or the vision of aesthetic bliss is riddled with clichés. Sometimes the goals can be good, but the gap between those goals and the ability to achieve them—at the level of style, characterization, plotting, etc.—is as wide as the Pacific Ocean. Other times the goals can be deficient and the efforts to achieve them embarrassingly weak. In these cases, the only interesting question about this third phenomenon is whether the double deficiency multiplies or mitigates the badness. I submit that the most interesting badness in books is partial badness. It's easy to dismiss the thoroughly bad, but the mixture of the bad and the good is compelling. If Mark Twain had nailed the ending to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), would the novel be so widely discussed? If Twain had written a less brilliant first two-thirds of his novel, would his ending have as many defenders as it does? If that first two-thirds were not so brilliant, would the ending be as bad as it is? No, no, and no. Of course it's bad to ask such tendentious questions and answer them with unsupported blanket assertions. But providing the support would be worse, since it would entail an ethical—and aesthetic—breach of the conventions of this forum. So, I end my rhetorical action with a reminder that even if it's bad, it's good. James Phelan The Ohio State University Copyright © 2009 American Book Review

Aesthetic Bliss:The Way for Nabokov to Freedom

The American writer, Vladimir Nabokov, immersed himself in Art for all his life. He insisted that Art was the way to a better realm of life. He also insisted that Art could bring him a thrill from the vertebra. This kind of thrill was the Aesthetic Bliss he named. Aesthetic Bliss was the way for Nabokov to freedom. Because of this way to freedom, Nabokov had really effaced the ambit between imagination and reality, and depicted lots of characters as free as Pnin. Key Wards: Nabokov; Aesthetic Bliss; Freedom

Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabohv by Leland de la Durantaye (review)

reviews 535 ofimagining thatideas and solutions can be imposedfromabove,and who allegedly finditdifficult eventodaytograspthat'somedilemmas thatappear philosophical cannotbe answered philosophically' (p. 201). Intellectuals are not the onlygroupto be subjectedto thisbroad-brush approach;thestudy is regularly punctuated bygeneralized references to the perceptions and reactions of'readers'and 'critics' as well.We are toldthat critics imaginedthattherewas 'no artistry, no meaningin Tolstoybeyond thatofdirectexperience oflife,and so he had nothing to teachus' (p 11); thattheyseem 'to have sharedAnna's perspective and romantic viewsso thoroughly thattheycannotimaginethe authorwould differ' (p. 87); that readers, too,'misreadthenovelas a bookcelebrating highdramaand grand romance'(p. 37);that,in Emma, readers'come to realizethedeficiencies of theheroine's waysofperception', whereas, inAnna Karenina, 'toomanydo not' (p. 87). There is hardlya sentencein thisbook thatdoes not have something arresting orchallenging tosay.Morsondismisses a number ofreceived 'myths', including theviewthatthereis an allegorical connection betweenthedeath ofVronskii's horseFrou-Frou and Anna'ssuicide,and thestandard explanationsof the novel'sepigraph, forwhichhe advanceshis own 'unexpected' interpretation. Karenin'shumanqualitiesare emphasized, although Morson showshimas turning intoa 'moralmonster' after hisconversion. The close readingofKareninand hisrelationship withAnnais one ofthebook'smany highlights, together withtheanalysis ofLevinand thequestionofagricultural reform in chapterfour. Thisstudy isTolstoyan, intoneas wellas content, and thefactthatitends withover ten pages of 'one hundredsixtythreeTolstoyanconclusions'is appropriate. Littleweightis givento thepossibility thattheremightbe a middlewaybetweenextreme positions. I emerged from thisbookmuchas I often do after readingTolstoihimself, havingexperienced thewholegamut ofreactions from 'Yes, thatis absolutely right! How can I havenotseenthat before?'to 'No, that'sreallyunfair! I mustgo and checkthisformyself. Morson'sintention in writing thisstudy was 'to open debate,notto closeit' (p. 5); he has succeededbrilliantly. Exeter Roger Cogkrell de la Durantaye,Leland. Style Is Matter: TheMoralArtof Vladimir Nabokov. CornellUniversity Press,Ithaca,NY and London,2007.viii+ 211pp. Illustrations. Notes.Bibliography. Index.$39.95:£20.50. Leland de la Durantaye's bookfocuses on theproblemofhowone should read Lolita, in particular, whatattitude one shouldtaketo itsprotagonistnarrator . Using Eichmann'srejectionof this'immoral'book as his springboard , the authornegotiates betweenthe unsatisfactory 'art-for-art's-sake' perspective and the equallyunacceptableview of VladimirNabokov as a warmcosymoralist. The answerthathe offers pertains toNabokov'spoetics, 536 seer, 87, 3, July 2009 especiallyhis view of styleas a 'moral stancereflected in formalchoice' (p. 191).The stanceis 'moral'notbecauseitconveys a messagebutbecause, according to thiscritical study, thenovelengagesin moralissues.Whatthe study likewise suggests is thatartistic excellence, complete withthebalanced and modulatedtreatment ofone's material, createsconditions foran ethical response. The ethicsoftheworkis itsinherent quality, notreducible towhat Nabokovcalledhaving'a moralin tow'. The book does not engagein actual textanalysisthatwould show,on concrete instances, whatis so really good aboutNabokov'sstyle, yetitgoesa longwaytowards preparing a conceptual basisforsuchan analysis. The line ofthought windsthrough a seriesofshort sections, each devotedtoa specific issueinNabokov'sownpoeticsorincritical literature abouthim.The reader is in suspense,waitingforthe engagements withtheseissuesto converge. The expectation is, indeed,ultimately fulfilled; in themeantimea bonusis offered tous at manyturns ofthepath,either intheshapeofinformation on Nabokov'sEuropeancontexts or hisunpublished correspondence, or in the shape ofseparateinsights. One ofsuchexcellent observations, whichcould map avenuesoffurther research, isthatportions oí Lolita shift 'thetraditional poles of ethicalresponse:the categorical and the conditional? (p. 14).In other words,in LolitaNabokov stagesa tensionbetweenthe prima-facie ethics, according towhichcertain things areplainly nottobe done,and theall-thingsconsidered morality, whose evaluativeagenda takesintoaccountthe sundry extenuating circumstances and individualconditions. HumbertHumbert's claimon thereader'sunderstanding is rootedin thelatter approach,though deep downevenhe is notunresponsive to theclaimsoftheformer. A numberofpointsin de la Durantaye'sbook can elicitprotest - for instanceagainstwhatlookslikethe author'sall too readyconcurrence in Nabokov'srejectionofJoyce'sFinnegans Wake(he willprobablychangehis mindone day).Moreimportantly, itisunfortunate thatde la Durantaye joins thecommentators who ascribe'cruelty' to Nabokov- not to some of his characters butto thenovelist himself, sincean arrayofhistechniques keeps pointingto the inadequaciesof our reading,attentiveness and erudition. Thoughde la Durantaye ultimately suggests thatthenovelist may'havebeen cruelto be kind'(p. 179),theissueof cruelty is hererathermisguided. In Contingency, Irony, andSolidarity RichardRortydiscusses Nabokovas a liberal, one who (borrowing JudithShklar'sterms)thinks thatcruelty is theworst thingwe do. Admittedly, Rortywas not rightin everything he said about Nabokov,but his comments on thetreatment ofcruelty and callousness in Lolita areofmajorimportance. Itmust, indeed,be notedthatNabokovdenies his readersthe complacency of aesthetic bliss,but such pricking of our selfsatisfaction , our senseofunavoidableunder-reading alternates withthejoy ofdiscoveries that,as mostofNabokovcritics can testify, giveeach ofus an illusion ofbeingsingled out,granted a glimpse ofwhatmaybe hiddenfrom others. I also disagree withde la Durantaye's accounting forNabokov'sobjections to Marx,Freudand Darwinbythegenerality oftheir theories. Adherents of thesetheories tendto formclosed systems withinwhicheverything...

Understand All, Forgive Nothing: The Self-Indictment of Humbert Humbert

Understand All, Forgive Nothing:The Self-Indictment of Humbert Humbert Yuval Eylon For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. —Vladimir Nabokov, "On a Book Entitled Lolita" Pride is the tendency to overestimate oneself, or underestimate others. In either case, a proud person overestimates his own qualities. Since such a person is inclined to view others as inferior and his own actions as admirable, a proud person is disposed to underestimate the suffering he inflicts on others, or worse—to try and justify it. Curiosity about others, tenderness, and kindness, rarely accompanies pride. Thus, it often conflicts with a charitable view of others, and begets cruelty and callousness. Pride is often accompanied by the desire to be admired by others. This desire gives rise to vanity, or vainglory: a vice that seems destined to give rise to further vices. Aquinas clearly expresses this view in the Summa Theologia:1 . . . the vices which by their very nature are such as to be directed to the end of a certain capital vice, are called its daughters. Now the end of vainglory is the manifestation of one's own excellence, as stated above (A1, 4). To this end a man may tend in two ways. On one way directly, [End Page 158] either by words, and this is boasting, or by deeds, and then if they be true and call for astonishment, it is love of novelties which men are wont to wonder at most; but if they be false, it is hypocrisy. On another way a man strives to make known his excellence by showing that he is not inferior to another, and this in four ways. First, as regards the intellect, and thus we have "obstinacy," by which a man is too much attached to his own opinion, being unwilling to believe one that is better. Secondly, as regards the will, and then we have "discord," whereby a man is unwilling to give up his own will, and agree with others. Thirdly, as regards "speech," and then we have "contention," whereby a man quarrels noisily with another. Fourthly as regards deeds, and this is "disobedience," whereby a man refuses to carry out the command of his superiors. However, whereas pride is an attitude that a person has towards himself, vanity involves a relation with others which pride does not: it emanates from the need to manifest one's excellence to others and gain their approval. Thus, since the proud person does not engage with the opinions of others, his view of himself remains secure. Vanity, on the hand, can prove to be a blessing in disguise: the attempt to gain approval could lead to self-awareness. The pride of Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator in Nabokov's Lolita, is the pride of an aesthete: intellectually superior, and determined to pursue his appetites. But Humbert is not only proud.2 He is also vain. Vanity leads him to seek the approval of others, and underlines his artistic aspirations. He undertakes the writing of a manuscript, designed to be a masterpiece that vindicates his actions. In his manuscript, Humbert tries to elicit the reader's sympathy, in the conviction that sympathetic identification would lead to acceptance. However, while he successfully challenges and threatens the reader's moral outlook, writing the manuscript has an unintended effect: it shatters Humbert's own convictions and leads to moral transformation. The reason for this transformation is that he recognizes the aesthetic faults of his work, and traces these faults to his own moral faults. The claim that aesthetic considerations can play an important role in moral thinking cannot be taken for granted. First, the threat of an empty aestheticism must be addressed, because it seems that aesthetic considerations and the pursuit of aesthetic ideals compete with moral considerations, rather than complete them. As Humbert illustrates, aesthetic pursuit motivates acts of cruelty and callousness, and aesthetic ideals are often devoid of any moral significance. Second, if aesthetic [End Page 159] considerations...

A Conversation with Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston

Charles Johnson and Maxine Hong Kingston each gave a riveting address to a large hall of scholars at the 2004 American Literature Association conference in San Francisco (May 26-30, 2004). They were equally generous with their time: they provided access to younger scholars, demonstrated noble patience while signing books for long lines of admirers, and made themselves available during several delightful dinners and even long walks through town. Scholars of American literature were treated to two equally impressive yet stylistically distinctive presentations: Johnson speaking urgently about the relationship between craft and representation, and Kingston braiding her notions about peace and beauty together through an improvisational ceremony. On the morning of May 29, 2004, Linda Selzer, Will Nash, Gary Storhoff Marc Conner, and myself--all members of the Charles Johnson Society--met with Johnson and Kingston over numerous cups of coffee to discuss a wide range of matters. While these two authors (who had never met previously) have rarely if ever been discussed together in scholarly contexts, they apparently share a surprising number of interests. Both authors spoke fluently about Buddhist philosophy and its relationship to artistic expression. Johnson has discussed his interest in Buddhism, which extends from a personal commitment to an evolving artistic aesthetic, in numerous essays and interviews, whereas Kingston has, to date, said very little about this subject. Each writer expressed vexation at the way reviewers and critics so often fail to get beyond race when apprehending the various phenomena which constitute a work of art. Finally, Johnson and Kingston each demonstrated a concern for the state of American culture that was at once light-of-touch and to-the-bone earnest. We also discussed in some detail the responsibilities of art, both to political and ethical problems in the worm and to the matter of aesthetic bliss. Linda Selzer: I'd like to start with a question for Charles Johnson. What is your attitude about cross-representation, about a writer of one race and gender representing another race or gender. How do you approach, say, the intimate construction of a female character such as Faith in Faith and the Good Thing, especially such intimate, gender-specific experiences as sex? Charles Johnson: I tend to be very cautious with sexual descriptions because, as we know, sex is a powerful subject. It's like playing with fire, a bomb that can blow up on you if you're not careful. But I want to know what Maxine says. Maxine Hong Kingston: When I wrote Wittman Ah Sing, I was seeing that as a big artistic challenge for myself. I saw my career like forty years before as being selfish--not ethnocentric but egocentric, just writing from a woman's point of view. And if I could--if I could write a male character, then it would be a great artistic breakthrough. And I believe I was seeing myself as such a limited person and as a limited writer if I could only stay within the bounds of the feminine and because there's the other half of existence and I'm not even trying to create male fiction characters. Actually, this struggle started when I was writing China Men and one of the ways that I approached this was to give myself permission; I had to have the faith that any one of us is free to be looked at from the point of view of any other human being on this earth. And I struggled against the critical discourse in which, you know, that you have no right to presume that you can inhabit another person's body and mind. So I thought, well, I'm not going to listen to that. It's restricting my freedom. It's almost like an out-of-body experience--what we can do is fly out of our own body and inhabit the body of somebody of our own race and class and gender. That's already very magical. We can choose any person that we can write from their insight. And so if I could do that with a Chinese American woman, why can't I do that with anybody? …

Rare and Unfamiliar Things: Vladimir Nabokovis "Monsters"

Since its initial publication, readers have been troubled by the insidious collusion with monstrosity they experience when reading Lolita. Examination of Vladimir Nabokov's progression as he amplifies themes he begins in "The Potato Elf" and develops in The Enchanter and "Scenes From the Life of a Double Monster" makes clear that the uncomfortable sympathy he achieves for Humbert Humbert in Lolita is not a mere side-effect, but the very essence of the novel. With this grand portrait of monstrosity, Nabokov challenges his readers to pay attention to what is outside of themselves (no matter how alien or horrible it may seem) in order to achieve what he calls "aesthetic bliss."

Aesthetics of navigational performance in hypertext

A hypertext learner navigates with a instinctive feeling for a knowledge. The learner does not know her queries, although she has a feeling for them. A learner’s navigation appears as complete upon the emergence of an aesthetic pleasure, called rasa. The order of arrival or the associational logic and even the temporal order are not relevant to this emergence. The completeness of aesthetics is important. The learner does not look for the intention of the writer, neither does she look for significance. Lexia has a suggestive power and she is suggested in the arrival of aesthetics. Hypertext learning does not depend on communication. The learner in her pleasure transgresses the bounds of space-time to be in communion with several writers/learners. Hypertext learning does not appear to be fundamentally different from the analog learning; however, in performance, as in navigation, the learner assumes a mental state that helps her in her emergence into aesthetic bliss, of an arrival to the completed lexial navigation. This completeness is owing to aesthetics and is not owing to either the semantics or the query-fulfilling qualities.

Lolita’s Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel

Research Article| June 01 2000 Lolita’s Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel James Tweedie James Tweedie Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2000) 46 (2): 150–170. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-3003 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation James Tweedie; Lolita’s Loose Ends: Nabokov and the Boundless Novel. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 June 2000; 46 (2): 150–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2000-3003 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2000 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Metafiction, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita

Nabokov Studies 5 (1998/1999) PHILIPP SCHWEIGHAUSER (Basel) Metafiction, Transcendence, and Death in Nabokov's Lolita Alfred Appel's "Lolita: The Springboard of Parody" (1967) and his introduction to The Annotated Lolita (first published in 1970) have set the tone for many aspiring critics of the novel. Appel highlights Lolita's metafictional elements and labels it an "involuted work":1 An involuted work turns in upon itself, is self-referential, conscious of its status as a fiction, and "allégorique de lui-même"— allegorical of itself, to use Mallarmé's description of one of his poems. An ideally involuted sentence would simply read, "I am a sentence" [...] (The Annotated Lolita, xxiiif.) Both John Ray Jr.'s fictional foreword and Nabokov's afterword "On a book entitled Lolita" strongly discourage a referential reading and lend support to Appel's proposals. While John Ray mocks the "old-fashioned readers who wish to follow the destinies of the "real" people beyond the "true" story" (4), Nabokov declares that "Lolita has no moral in tow. For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss" (134). Later critics who wished to stress the novel's referential aspects (e.g. Lolita's suffering as a human being) often had to define themselves explicitly against Appel's readings.2 Feminist critic Linda Kauffman (1989) attempts to steer a middle course: I should like to propose a dialogic reading, one that is both feminist and intertextual; one that releases the female body both from its anesthesia and from Humbert's solipsism while simultaneously highlighting textual artifice. (137f.) Kauffman then makes an interesting assertion concerning the relationship between the novel's intertextual references and the violence done to Lolita: "That the novel is an exercise in intertextuality [...] does not mitigate the 1. "Involution" is also the term used by John Fletcher in his chapter on metafiction in Novel and Reader (1980: 33-50). 2. Cf. Merrill 1979, Alexandrov 1991. 100 Nabokov Studies honor of Lolita's treatment. Instead, it reinforces it" (138). Unfortunately, though, Kauffman abandons this line of inquiry after a few references to Poe, Dickens and James in favour of a straightforwardly referential reading: "In Lolita, the incestuous father's jealousy, tyranny, voracity, and possessiveness are both verisimilar and clinically verifiable" (149). I would indeed argue that there is an intimate relationship between Lolita's suffering, and the novel's status as metafiction. Now this is a paradoxical statement. If Lolita is a metafictional novel that severs all links with reality and comments on the process of fiction-making instead,3 then it seems highly irrelevant and maybe even somewhat naive to inquire into the suffering one of its characters inflicts on another. In metafiction, "death" may be "but a question of style" (Bend Sinister, 220), as the nanator of Nabokov's Bend Sinister suggests in the face of the main protagonist's demise.4 In the case oÃ- Lolita, however, I would argue with Alfred Appel that the novel is "a parody of death with real suffering in it" (The Annotated Lolita, 378 n. 119/1). In one sense, Lolita's parodie, intertextual, self-reflexive, anti-realist and anti-representational stance diverts from and to a certain extent even negates the ethical dimension a reading of the novel as realist fiction might focus on. On the other hand, my discussion will suggest, it is precisely these metafictional elements which contribute to and reinforce the sinister implications of Humbert's discourse. Take Humbert's solipsism for instance. The self-reflexiveness and selfconsciousness of the text reproduces the fictional character Humbert's almost exclusive concern with himself on the extradiegetic level of nanation.5 At first 3. For Raymond Federman (1975), the primary purpose of metafiction (his term is surfiction) is "to unmask its own fictionality, to expose the metaphor of its own fraudulence, and not to pretend any longer to pass for reality, for truth, or for beauty" (8). Rüdiger Imhof (1986) argues in a similar vein that "[a] metafiction is a kind of self-reflexive nanative that nanates about nanating" (9) and that "metafiction thematises only its own mechanisms and does not aspire...