Category: Lit Crit

Review: The Feud

Post author By jon
Post date January 7, 2020

Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson and the end of a beautiful friendship by Alex Beam

An amusing, light-footed but increasingly partial and even sloppy account of the infamous disintegration of a long-standing literary friendship.

What’s important in a friendship? Does loyalty and tolerance in disagreement come first – or does principal, character and rapport count for more? For a quarter of a century, Vladimir Nabokov – already a well-respected Russian author in the European emigration, but virtually unknown in his adopted American home; and Edmund Wilson, the pre-eminent critic of his day, were vital friends.

Books Epistemology Fiction Lit Crit Nabokov Philosophy Philosophy of Language

On Authorial Intent

Post author By jon
Post date May 14, 2018

This was originally written a comment on an episode of the wonderful Partially Examined Life (“A podcast by those who were once considering doing philosophy for a living, and then thought better of it”) – specifically Ep. 189 on Authorial Intent (Barthes, Foucault, Beardsley, et al).

Thanks guys for the great conversation: you do your usual wonderful job of presenting compelling readings for positions I am not particularly sympathetic to. In the same way as Robert Williams’ comment on part one – and as alluded to by Wes during towards the end – my general impulse is to bemoan the baleful influence some of these have had on the practice of criticism. I think you made good points on the potential breadth of “intention” and how it could be broader than the conscious. What I found curious though is that the survey (while seeming to be sufficiently broad to take in all of “art”) seems to leave out some very specifically intentional works.

This particularly chimed with me as I read Brian Boyd’s wonderful criticism on Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (a previous Phi Fic read!) – “The Magic of Artistic Discovery”. Now Wes and Mark described several scenarios where the artist either (i) deliberately uncouples intention from the creative process, (ii) uses free association as a source of raw material which they actively shape into the product or (iii) act as readers of their own work, and create meaning therein. I don’t doubt that this is a major origin in many types of works. But I would argue that in writing prose and poetry, it is not a necessary component.

Books Humour Lit Crit Pastiche Rand & Nabokov

The Roark Attack

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

Howard Roark was a chess genius. He had known this, utterly securely, since his sixth birthday, when he had discovered the chess set in his attic and immediately known how to play. Sitting on pile of magazines which contained the dreary, identical thoughts of the chess ancients, he had there and then created his own unique and devastating attack. He knew that any any honest chess player could not beat it.

Books Lit Crit Nabokov Rand & Nabokov The Defence

Execution

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

Let’s take some time to look in detail with how Rand executes the features we’ve identified. We can make the trouble with Rand’s writing stand out in bold relief when we compare Roark’s portrayal in The Fountainhead with Nabokov’s of Luzhin in The Defence in these terms.

Books Lit Crit Nabokov Rand Rand & Nabokov The Defence The Fountainhead

Luzhin, exceptional and familiar

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

Affirming our opposition to bad art and banal thought is satisfying and often necessary. In the few days after I’d immersed myself back into the sludgy consistency of Rand’s novel, with all its bald and unchallenged commonplaces, I felt a real need to vent distaste, even just as cathartic resistance. Schadenfreude is fun, but it can get close to bad conscience if that’s all we’re doing – often something of an online speciality. Spending our whole time decrying the bad doesn’t cut it – something that Rand herself would have done well to mark: for all her pleas of positive virtue created by individuals, the majority of The Fountainhead is spent sneering at the trivially dismissable.

Books Lit Crit Rand Rand & Nabokov The Fountainhead

Reasoning why

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

Read the first half of this post here

In some lighter posts, I’ll come onto the severe weaknesses in Rand’s writing which I believe she cannot control, and which generated some of the fun that kept me sane during the harder going parts. But I think it’s clear that partially Roark’s bizarre construction is an intentional effect. Rand wants to create an embodiment of her virtues: if we were to describe Roark even in negative terms as unreflective, callous, monomaniacal or bone-headed, I can see the committed Randian openly embracing these qualities (though I suspect they would rather cast them as unswerving, selfish, focused).

So why does it backfire so badly? I would challenge even the most starry-eyed devotee to find the Roark we’re given compelling. The narrative voice – and by extension Rand herself – chooses to spend more of the novel away from him than otherwise. Even if we allow ourselves to discount the rape scene – where the distancing is total, and he may as well be an incidental criminal – he comes out as a pretty second-rate kind of superman.

Books Lit Crit Rand Rand & Nabokov The Fountainhead

Goodies and Badies

Post author By jon
Post date July 23, 2014

My favourite source (wikipedia) describes the process of the The Fountainhead as a series of interactions between Roark, the “author’s ideal man of independence and integrity” and a continuum of lesser personalities. While it’s certain that Roark is an flawless paragon for Rand, as I plowed through the first section it became very clear that Rand has no interest in providing us any nuanced characters. The Fountainhead is a Manichean novel where the characters are neatly split into badies and a vanishingly small number of goodies – it is never in any doubt which are the favoured creatures – and there is no prospect of complexity, heterogeneity of character, or redemption.

Books Lit Crit Rand Rand & Nabokov

Ayn Rand: managing expectations

Post author By jon
Post date July 22, 2014

It is no secret that I come to The Fountainhead with rather low expectations. Everything I’ve heard, even sometimes from otherwise admirers, suggests that Rand’s prose will:

Exist purely for the service of an extremely rigid political idea. There will be no variety, no fun to be had, except to hammer home the message of objectivism, individualism and capitalism at every point.
Be mostly dialogue, and contain extremely long and didactic soliloquies. There will be a lot of telling and not showing.
Be extremely literal and earnest; irony, ambiguity, and humour will be absent
Be indifferent to realistic descriptions of psychology; the surrounding world; the practice of professions; and personal relationships.
Contain some very dubious sexual politics

I list these to make my initial biases explicit. My aim in reading The Fountainhead is to give credit where it’s due – I want to acknowledge where Rand’s text is good (or even just ok), and particularly where it bucks these trends.

Hey, sometimes low expectations can be a good thing.

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