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Nero sonetto solubile

Dieci autori riscrivono una poesia di Baudelaire

By Valerio Magrelli

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| Mass Market Paperback | 9788842081241

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Perché, prima d'essere uccisa dal compagno (il cantante del gruppo rock francese Noir Désir), l'attrice Marie Trintignant invia alla propria madre un sms con l'inizio di Recueillement? Perché, prima di cadere in un'imboscata nazista, Jean Prévost riscrive lo stesso sonetto di Baudelaire in un nuovo Continue

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Perché, prima d’essere uccisa dal compagno (il cantante del gruppo rock Noir Désir), l’attrice Marie Trintignant invia alla madre un sms con l’inizio di Recueillement? Perché, prima di cadere in un’imboscata nazista, Prévost riscrive lo stesso sonetto di Baudelaire in un nuovo metro? Perché Perec lo ... (continue)

Perché, prima d’essere uccisa dal compagno (il cantante del gruppo rock Noir Désir), l’attrice Marie Trintignant invia alla madre un sms con l’inizio di Recueillement? Perché, prima di cadere in un’imboscata nazista, Prévost riscrive lo stesso sonetto di Baudelaire in un nuovo metro? Perché Perec lo traduce in una lingua priva della lettera ‘e’, come simbolo di un’amputazione causata dalla Shoah? Perché Céline e Beckett lo citano in due loro capolavori? Perché, malgrado disprezzi alcuni suoi versi, Valéry ne addita altri quali supremo esempio di poesia? Perché la medesima lirica compare in Michaux, Colette, Queneau, fino a balenare in Lolita di Nabokov? Perché, nel primo romanzo di Houellebecq, uno studente della banlieue parigina scorge nelle sue strofe «il principio di morte»?
Indice
Premessa
Dieci reincarnazioni -
1. Il sonetto di Baudelaire: tra personificazione e ossimoro -
2. Valéry recensore (1924-1939): una stroncatura entusiastica -
3. Ipotesi su Michaux (1930): dalla Douleur al Malheur -
4. L’omaggio di Céline (1932): Parigi -
5. Prévost ortopedico (1943): correggere poesia -
6. Colette si sposa (1944): pastiches, rebus e calembours -
7. Qualche barbaglio in Nabokov (1955): un eroe francesista -
8. Beckett a memoria (1957): nel finale del Finale -
9. La quartina di Queneau (1969): raccogliendo versi -
10. Lipogrammi perecchiani (1969): il pronome amputato -
11. Houellebecq al liceo (1998): sui rischi di una pausa -
12. Logiche di inclusione letteraria -
Nota al testo -
Indice dei nomi
-----------------------------------------
Il sonetto di Baudelaire: tra personificazione e ossimoro
Invece di perseguire non si sa bene dove l’ineffabile, non è meglio interrogarsi sulla persistenza del sonetto?
Georges Perec
I
Iniziamo col presentare la poesia da cui nasce questo viaggio nel Novecento, la pasticca d’uranio che alimenta il motore dell’intera ricerca, il nucleo radioattivo le cui tracce si ritroveranno all’interno di tanti diversi organismi testuali. Incluso in molte antologie della lirica francese, Recueillement ha goduto di una fortuna rilevante, al punto che il suo primo emistichio («Sois sage, ô ma Douleur») è stato accolto nella ristretta cerchia delle frasi canoniche della lingua. Si tratta di un sonetto, ossia della forma di cui Baudelaire vantò la «bellezza pitagorica», paragonandola a quella «del metallo e del minerale ben lavorati». Tutti i suoi versi sono alessandrini, ma su un impianto irregolare, con rime che seguono lo schema abab abab ccd ede. Redatto nel 1861, Recueillement apparve sulla «Revue euro péenne» il 1° novembre dello stesso anno, a qualche mese di distanza dalla seconda edizione delle Fleurs du mal. Avrebbe quindi dovuto fare parte della terza edizione, che tuttavia l’autore non riuscì a completare. La sua importanza è confermata dal fatto d’essere stato ospitato in diversi periodici (per Pierre Louÿs, esso rappresenterebbe addirittura il miglior sonetto di Baudelaire). Rispetto alla prima versione fu introdotta una sola variante: già a cominciare dal testo pubblicato il 12 gennaio 1862 su «Le Boulevard», il verbo «se coucher», collocato al dodicesimo verso, venne sostituito con «s’endormir».
Quanto alla collocazione della lirica all’interno della raccolta, mentre le attuali edizioni si limitano a situarla fra i materiali destinati all’edizione del 1868, i curatori dell’edizione postuma l’avevano inserita, con il numero 104, fra i testi di Spleen et Idéal. Diversa l’opinione di Robert-Benoït Chérix, che propose di farla figurare nei Tableaux parisiens, tra Le crépuscule du soir e Le jeu. In effetti, con le sue antitesi Douleur/Plaisir e Solitude/Multitude, Recueillement ricorda il tema dominante di quella sezione, e si riallaccia per diversi aspetti alle due composizioni fra cui lo si pensava di inquadrare. La tesi, tuttavia, è stata rigettata da più parti.
Per il momento è tutto: soltanto un’avvertenza. Quella che si propone, è una semplice traduzione di servizio, tale da risultare, almeno sotto l’aspetto lessicale e sintattico, il più aderente possibile al francese. L’unica, rilevante eccezione risulta costituita dal sostantivo Douleur, reso con l’italiano «Pena», invece che con il più immediato «Dolore»: come si è già visto, la scelta è dovuta alla necessità di conservare il genere femminile, e dunque la personificazione che sta alla base dell’intera poesia.
Ecco dunque l’originale e la nostra versione italiana:
RECUEILLEMENT
Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu réclamais le Soir; il descend; le voici:
Une atmosphère obscure enveloppe la ville,
Aux uns portant la paix, aux autres le souci.
Pendant que des mortels la multitude vile,
Sous le fouet du Plaisir, ce bourreau sans merci,
Va cueillir des remords dans la fête servile,
Ma Douleur, donne-moi la main; viens par ici,
Loin d’eux. Vois se pencher les défuntes Années,
Sur les balcons du ciel, en robes surannées;
Surgir du fond des eaux le Regret souriant;
Le Soleil moribond s’endormir sous une arche,
Et, comme un long linceul traînant à l’Orient,
Entends, ma chère, entends la douce Nuit qui marche.
RACCOGLIMENTO
Fa’ la brava, o mia Pena, e sta’ più tranquilla.
Tu invocavi la Sera; essa scende; eccola:
Un’atmosfera oscura avvolge la città,
Agli uni portando pace, agli altri affanno.
Mentre dei mortali la moltitudine vile,
Sotto la sferza del Piacere, questo boia senza pietà,
Va a cogliere rimorsi nella festa servile,
Mia Pena, dammi la mano; vieni qui,
Lontano da loro. Guarda affacciarsi i defunti Anni,
Dai balconi del cielo, in vesti antiquate;
Sorgere dal fondo delle acque il Rimpianto sorridente;
Il Sole moribondo addormentarsi sotto un’arcata,
E, come un lungo sudario trascinato verso Oriente,
Ascolta, mia cara, ascolta la dolce Notte che cammina.
II
Prima di esaminare il testo, si impongono alcuni chiarimenti. Come si è detto, la nostra ricerca tenterà di ricostruire la presenza di Recueillement nell’opera di dieci scrittori. Essendo concentrate in area francese (tranne che per il «francofilo» Nabokov), le indagini non hanno riguardato quegli autori di altre lingue che pure hanno attinto al sonetto sotto forma di prestiti o imitazioni. Su tale argomento si è ampiamente soffermato Jean Robaey, allestendo una rassegna di quasi trenta poeti debitori ai suoi versi, tra i quali gli italiani Carducci, D’Annunzio, Marinetti, Ungaretti, Luzi e Sereni.
Del pari, si è deciso di tralasciare completamente un ulteriore filone di studi, che si potrebbe definire in termini di trasposizione intersemiotica. Mi riferisco a quegli interventi nei quali il testo di partenza viene dislocato in un’altra sfera espressiva, come ad esempio nel passaggio dalla letteratura alla musica. Anche in questo caso, si è preferito sospendere ogni approfondimento, benché sia possibile contare almeno undici adattamenti di Recueillement. Da uno spoglio di Lila Maurice-Amour emerge addirittura che, fra tutti i testi delle Fleurs du mal, questo sarebbe il più frequentato dai compositori, insieme a La cloche fêlée, Harmonie du soir e La mort des amants – un risultato tanto più sorprendente considerando come la lista (in cui compare il nome di Debussy) non annoveri le composizioni di Villiers de l’Isle-Adam o di Léo Ferré, che pure lo musicarono.
Un ulteriore genere di indagini che si dovrà purtroppo trascurare è quello relativo alle fonti. Se i nomi più ricorrenti sono quelli di Théophile Gautier, Edgar Allan Poe, Théodore de Banville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow e Sarah Helen Power Whitman (ma senza dimenticare Thomas Gray, George Byron, Jules Lefèvre-Deumier, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore o George Sand), non si può escludere che la composizione tradisca il riflesso, cosciente o meno, di certi accorati appelli al dolore presenti nelle Contemplations di Victor Hugo, oppure di quei Recueillements con cui Alphonse de Lamartine terminò, verso il 1839, la sua carriera poetica. Anche su questo campo, ampiamente setacciato dalla critica, si è preferito sorvolare, condividendo le osservazioni di Antoine Fongaro circa l’enorme «massa di cultura e di lettura presente [...] dietro ogni verso del sonetto». Dunque, senza affrontare l’esame di simili materiali, la nostra ricerca si dedicherà piuttosto ad alcune specifiche «riapparizioni» del testo baudelairiano, ravvisabili in altrettante opere di autori novecenteschi.
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La Repubblica - giovedì 14 gennaio 2010
Riscrivere Baudelaire da Colette a Nabokov
Sappiamo da tempo, almeno da quando alla fine degli anni Sessanta ne parlò diffusamente Julia Kristeva, che lo spazio della poesia può essere considerato come un coacervo di riscritture del già scritto, che incrociandosi e variamente mescolandosi danno ogni volta vita a un "nuovo" testo. Era un'idea dirompente, visto che minava uno dei pilastri del giudizio di valore sul testo poetico, vale a dire la sua originalità; e infatti fu accolta con cautela, o utilizzandola in limitate indagini intertestuali, o avocandola ai terreni delle sorgenti inconsce della creazione letteraria.
Ora il problema torna in primo piano grazie a uno straordinario saggio di Valerio Magrelli (Nero sonetto solubile, Laterza), che non offre solo una variegata fenomenologia della riscrittura, ma scava anche in profondità nei meccanismi che ad essa danno luogo. Magrelli parte da Recueillement ("Raccoglimento"), un sonetto di Charles Baudelaire accolto nei Fiori del male, e ne segue le "reincarnazioni" (ora evidenti e dirette, ora implicite e dissimulate) in dieci grandi autori successivi, da Valéry a Michaux, da Céline a Prévost, e poi via via Colette, Nabokov, Beckett, Queneau, Perec, Houellebecq.
Prévost, ad esempio, lo riscrive integralmente usando un verso più breve e rendendolo quindi più sintetico ed essenziale, ma lo fa, in questo caso, allo scopo didattico di dimostrare, vista la presunta pochezza del risultato, l'assoluta intangibilità dell'originale. Integrale è anche la riscrittura che ne fa Perec nel romanzo La disparition, senza però mai usare, come del resto in tutto il romanzo, la lettera e. Colette invece ne modifica impercettibilmente un verso per fare una battuta di spirito, mentre Queneau ne usa solo il titolo come omaggio segreto che sigilla una sua raccolta di versi. E se Céline lo dissemina negli echi di una passeggiata per Parigi del protagonista di Viaggio al termine della notte, Beckett ne fa faticosamente ricostruire a memoria un verso allo Hamm di Finale di partita. Nabokov ne sparge esili tracce (ma forse addirittura anche nel nome della protagonista) in Lolita, e infine Houellebecq ne fa l'oggetto di una lezione che segna uno snodo cruciale in Le particelle elementari.
Un catalogo affollato e molto variegato insomma, che però avrebbe in sé un rilievo quasi solo statistico, se Magrelli non ricostruisse per ognuno degli autori citati il quadro espressivo, o psichico, o esistenziale, o culturale nel quale il sonetto di Baudelaire irrompe, spesso destabilizzando il loro universo di riferimento. Valga per tutti l'esempio di Perec, per il quale la scomparsa della e allude potentemente, essendo la vocale dominante in père e mère, ma anche in je e in eux, alla tragica mancanza di una famiglia distrutta dalla Shoah e alla flagellazione di un'identità periclitante e quasi misconosciuta.
L'ipotesi teorica di Julia Kristeva subisce quasi sempre in Nero sonetto solubile una radicale "drammatizzazione", un'inserzione spesso dolorosa nella carne e nel sangue della creazione poetica. È come se in Magrelli lo studioso arrivasse fino al fondo di una lussureggiante e coltissima analisi, lasciando però poi le conclusioni al poeta, che vive in prima persona i processi intertestuali così sottilmente rilevati in altri, e che in prima persona ne scopre il veleno. Un poeta che, come è noto, è tra i maggiori oggi in attività, e che forse proprio in quanto tale può chiedersi: «Gli autori che costituiscono un autore, ossia la comunità di opere da cui nasce un'opera, non agiscono su di lui come una sorta di lingua nella lingua? [...] Non rappresentano cripte per conservare in vita qualcosa di morto, corpi estranei che lavorano il suo spazio, pulsioni che premono per penetrare nel corpo del testo? La mia proposta è insomma quella di considerare la tradizione alla stregua di un disturbo soggiacente, un focolaio d'infezione e di trasmissione». E poco oltre: «Di fatto, ogni testo letterario è sempre, più o meno, parassita di altri testi di cui si nutre, citandoli in modo esplicito o allusivo. Reciprocamente, queste citazioni sembrano essere altrettanti parassiti che abbiano eletto domicilio nel testo che li cita».
Sono considerazioni che ci conducono nel corpo vivo del far poesia, nel controverso rapporto mai eludibile con la tradizione, nella difficoltà di rendere di nuovo vergine una parola che ha secoli di storia e che racchiude in sé un enorme fardello di sedimentazioni di significato. Se il già scritto è un'«infezione», resta il fatto che il poeta non può usare antibiotici. Deve tenersela, e combatterci ogni volta che si siede a tavolino, riscoprendola nei minimi recessi dei versi che compone, e rassegnandosi alla certezza che proprio quel combattimento è la sua cifra da consegnare al mondo.
Stefano Giovanardi
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Il saggio citato in nota a pag. 110 su Nabokov:
Parody, Pastiche, and Periodization: Nabokov/Jameson
John Burt Foster Jr.
George Mason University
1.
Parody, pastiche, and the shift from modernism to postmodernism are all terminological
minefields. But the idea of confronting Nabokov with Fredric Jameson will probably arouse
the most resistance from Nabokov’s readers. Jameson is the best-known Marxist critic in the
United States today: but this reputation would not have impressed Nabokov, who would have
relished the parallel between Jameson’s first name and that of Fradrik Skotoma, the invented
ideologue in Bend Sinister. 1 However, Jameson’s Marxism has post-structuralist flourishes
that are hard to square with the Soviet orthodoxies that Nabokov detested. Over two decades
ago, in fact, Jameson responded favorably to Russian formalism, a marginalized Soviet
movement with affinities to Nabokov.2
More generally, Jameson’s criticism displays an intellectual restlessness that can dazzle and
confuse, yet its very breadth opens up stimulating issues at the edge of his main project. This
is especially true with problems of historical context and periodization, most notably the very
crossroads which this issue of Cycnos proposes to study with regard to Nabokov. Thus
Jameson’s recent major book on postmodernism3 advances an ambitious but debatable thesis
about the shift from modernism to postmodernism that needs to be tested against Nabokov’s
career.
According to Jameson, a major change in intertextual practices occurred in the 1950s. Instead
of parody, with its nuanced evaluations of past styles which still function as benchmarks even
when the styles are rejected or transformed, we get pastiche. In this practice, the ingrained
awareness of cultural history which marks parody has vanished. Instead, Jameson contends,
we get “a neutral practice of such mimicry” (17), which undertakes “the random
cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (18). These contrasting categories then allow him
to identify a larger change in literary period, in the manner of Wölfflin’s Principles of Art
History (1915). Thus the dramatic erosion of cultural self-consciousness in pastiche can be
correlated with the advent of postmodernism. Our age, unlike early twentieth-century
modernism, willfully ignores both history and memory, producing a massive
detemporalization of experience.
History in this diagnosis means Marxist shifts in economic paradigms, from market capitalism
to imperialism, then on to contemporary multinational capitalism (35). The decline of
memory, however, may be witnessed in post-structuralist critiques of individualism; or, as
Jameson colorfully puts it, “we are sick and tired of the subjective as such in its older classical
forms (which include deep time and memory)” (151). As a result, unlike Joseph Frank in
“Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” Jameson sees modernism as still temporal in
orientation. Only with postmodernism does spatialization triumph, thus explaining why his
own criticism downplays fiction in favor of visual artifacts like architecture, film, and
experimental video.
Thus for Jameson the big issue is not separating modernist parody from postmodern pastiche;
it is linking cultural and economic history. But as already noted, the main trend of his
1
Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister (1947; rpt. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 74-79.
2
Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 43-98.
3
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1991),
which won the prestigious Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association. Further references are given in
parentheses. The book reprints a much-cited essay with same title from the New Left Review, n° 146 (July-
August 1984), 59-92.
criticism can be less thought-provoking than what occurs at the margins. In this spirit, though
the postmodernism book never mentions Nabokov, it does include three scattered passages
with intense relevance to his career. One turns on Viktor Shklovsky’s “knight’s move”
metaphor for artistic innovation; another emerges from Jameson’s discomfort with
intertextuality as a wayward form of historical awareness; and a third involves his little-
noticed reliance on Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus to define pastiche. Let us consider these
items one by one.
2.
Jameson invokes Shklovsky in a discussion of “modernist history,” a phrase Jameson
cautiously puts in quotes but then describes with gusto. Modernist history “in its most
authentic, least stupid and caricatural, form” proposes a temporal series “in which each
genuinely new work unexpectedly but logically outtrumped its predecessor (not ‘linear
history’ this, but rather Shklovsky’s ‘knight’s gambit,’ the action at a distance, the quantum
leap to the undeveloped or underdeveloped square)” (xi). This passage stands out for two
reasons. By praising Russian formalist approaches to history, it places an element of
Nabokov’s youthful literary world at the heart of modernism’s theoretical self-consciousness.
As a result, far from seeming an outsider or latecomer in English-language fiction, Nabokov
proves closer than his Anglo-American contemporaries to what Jameson calls the “most
authentic” impetus of modernism. Such a view usefully questions recent efforts to class
Nabokov as neither postmodernist nor modernist, but as late modernist.4 How can a writer in
direct contact with the basic thrust of modernism be “late”?
In addition, Shklovsky’s metaphor resonates with great power in Nabokov’s fiction. Thus the
writer-hero of The Gift at once echoes Shklovsky and parallels Jameson when he remarks that
“any genuinely new trend is a knight’s move.”5 The same metaphor of non-linear progress
marks the very name of another fictitious writer, Sebastian Knight in Nabokov’s first novel in
English, whose genius is said to embody “that special ‘Knightian twist.’”6 Within the author’s
imagined career, this trait can imply a penchant for contrived plots, a love of playing with
characters’ names, or an uncanny permeability between levels of reality. But one key meaning
is parody, which for Knight, in a famous phrase, becomes a “springboard for leaping into the
highest region of serious emotion.”7
On reflection, this formula points up a double twist in Knight’s writing. For beyond his skill
in parodically distorting an original text — which is the term’s traditional meaning8 — Knight
also turns the ridicule usually associated with parody into serious emotion. This sense of the
possible seriousness of parody was of course a hallmark of Russian formalism, whether in
Shklovsky’s celebration of Tristram Shandy as a parodic novel, in Tynianov’s emphasis on
Dostoevsky’s parodic link to Gogol, or — moving beyond Formalism — in Bakhtin’s idea of
parody as one variant of the dialogic principle.
The fact that all these critics were active in the twenties at the height of modernism may
explain why Jameson considers parody an explicitly modernist practice. For if he accepts the
“knight’s move” as a primary metaphor for literary modernism, then the Russian view of
parody as creative manipulation of the past could be seen as giving that metaphor a specific
stylistic content. Granted, parody was around long before modernism, as formalist criticism of
4
This issue arose at a 1994 meeting of the International Nabokov Society. See The Nabokovian 34 (Spring
1995), 4.
5
Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift, trans. Michael Scammell with the collaboration of the author (New York:
Putnam’s, 1963), p. 239.
6
Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: New Directions, 1941), p. 158.
7
Real Life, p. 91.
8
See Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1982), p. 17.
Genette’s term for Knight’s serious parody is “transposition” (35).
Sterne and Dostoevsky shows. But its capacity to undermine and rework previous literature,
thereby preparing for Jamesonian “quantum leaps” and the “outtrumping of predecessors,”
does suggest how parody can support projects of modernist innovation. The Russian
formalists — and Nabokov after them — demonstrate the force of this conjunction, which
Jameson warmly endorses even though none of the Russians actually argues that parody is
exclusively modernist.
The knight’s-move metaphor thus points up a startling convergence between two figures on
very different wavelengths. But no sooner does Jameson acknowledge parody’s role as a
demolition agent than he pulls up short. Such a role is only cultural, not social; and hence,
though parody can open up historical vistas, it does so only in the limited way signalled by the
quotes around “modernist history.” To be more specific, the parodic strategy of advancing
through negation appeals to Jameson because to Marxist eyes it follows the same dialectical
logic as real history — except parody stays within an aesthetic realm of illusion. Thus, in
commenting further on the knight’s move, Jameson states that “dialectical history, to be sure,
affirmed that all history worked this way, on its left foot, as it were [...] but fewer ears heard
that than believed the modernist aesthetic paradigm” (xi). This gap between modernism and
true history marks the spot where intertextuality will enter the discussion. When it does, it will
waken such anxieties that the distinction between parody and pastiche dissolves, thus
threatening the stylistic test for the shift to postmodernism.
3.
The vehicle for this terminological confusion, which bears out my opening remark about
minefields, is the American film Body Heat, supposedly a classic example of postmodern
pastiche. Quite like Despair and the early twentieth-century Dostoievskyians analyzed by
Alexander Dolinin, but without the novel’s critical bite, Body Heat is an echo-chamber of
film-noir classics. Jameson acknowledges such interplay by calling the film “a distant
‘affluent society’ remake of James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity” (20). But then he stresses the
skill with which Body Heat edits out “the object world of the present day — artifacts and
appliances, whose styling would at once serve to date the image”; hence the viewer receives
“the narrative as though it were set in some eternal thirties, beyond real historical time” (21).
In this spirit Jameson notes the lack of ocean-front high rises in a Florida movie, to which I
would add the oddity of characters who repeatedly mention the oppressive heat, as if most
Floridians were not shielded by air conditioning. The film presents a 1980s Florida with the
climate technology of 1930s California, the setting of so many films-noirs.
Jameson has helpfully uncovered a willful lack of historical precision in Body Heat that
indeed suggests detemporalization, making the film seem ideal for studying pastiche as a
postmodern practice. Yet when Jameson makes this point, something odd happens: his
language jumps to a level of generality where pastiche merges with parody. In Body Heat, he
states, “the preexistence of other versions [...] is now a constitutive and essential part of the
film’s structure: we are now, in other words, in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature
of the aesthetic effect and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-
historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic style displaces ‘real’ history” (20). Notice
that as this key passage sums up the postmodern aesthetic, it evokes a parodic revaluation of
previous styles more than the random cannibalization of pastiche. Indeed, since pastiche
conveys both a “connotation of ‘pastness’” and a “history of aesthetic style,” it now has the
same modicum of historical awareness as parody. The reason for this confusion is clear.
Whatever the difference between parody and pastiche, they are both intertextual practices; and
Jameson has turned from determining which one is marginally more historical to defending
“real,” Marxist history from an all-consuming intertextuality, which pretends to be adequate
to history in its own right.
Nabokov, of course, rejects this emphasis on one particular brand of historical consciousness.
Nor does he try to split parody off from pastiche, for if Humbert Humbert claims to write
pastiches of T. S. Eliot, their overall impact is strongly satirical and hence parodic.9 What is
more, as a virtuoso of intertextuality, Nabokov seems to take the very stance that bothers
Jameson. But in fact Nabokov allows for nuances, as shown by his preface to Bend Sinister, a
notably searching discussion of intertextuality and its relation to history.
This preface opens with a characteristic denial of history, attacking “literature of social
comment” as a misguided detour into “general ideas.”10 Nabokov then explicates some of his
devices, many of which are intertextual and often parodic in either the satiric or serious sense.
Though conceding that most readers are deaf to this aspect of literature, he still insists on its
primacy for his creative process: “what pleases me most is the wayside murmur of this or that
hidden theme” (xii) The word “hidden” in this capsule statement is especially rich. It evokes
not just the understated surface of Nabokov’s intertextual art but also the desire to challenge
the reader’s interpretive powers and the analogies with a metaphysics of mysteriously elusive
meaning. Above all, it registers the insight that once parody becomes a springboard for
innovation, one’s writing will no longer necessarily carry any clear trace of the source text.
Reflecting this inescapable process of distortion, the preface later refers to intertextual
passages as “delicate markers whose very nature requires that they not be too
conspicuous” (xi).
By calling these passages “themes,” Nabokov uses a word that is almost as rich as “hidden.”
On one level it means interwoven motifs, as with musical “themes.” At the same time, despite
Nabokov’s strictures against ideas in literature, it also means significant content; thus he
remarks that his novel’s “main theme” is not the exposure of dictatorship but a particular
serious emotion — “the beating of Krug’s loving heart” (viii). This dual potential in any
intertextual theme can be illustrated by the dictator’s name in Bend Sinister. On the pattern-
making level “Paduk the Toad” chimes with “paddock,” a Shakespearean word for toad. But
more is involved than clever word-play, since the witches in Macbeth put a poisoned toad into
their cauldron just before the hero appears in Act IV, asks their advice, and orders the murder
of Macduff’s family.11 Since Krug’s son meets a similar fate, this intertexual reference has
acted parodically; it springs the reader into the region of Krug’s “loving heart,” thus becoming
thematic in the sense of serious content.
Moreover, this play of references cannot be kept apart from historical issues, as Nabokov
himself admits. Thus he claims that the story of Krug’s son has exposed a new trend among
dictators, their use of the “lever of love” to control rebellious subjects (vii). Just as important,
the resonances with Macbeth confront Renaissance England with the recent Germano-Slavic
world of Bend Sinister. Though the confrontation resists easy summary, it does encourage
historical reflection, especially on the analogy between David’s death (in a ghastly experiment
that recalls both the Holocaust and the Gulags) and Macduff’s image of “hell-kite” tyrants
who destroy families in “one fell swoop.”12 Nabokov’s intertextual “themes” are not always
this historical, but in their often hidden pursuit of significance neither are they resolutely
unhistorical, as Jameson contends and Nabokov likes to think. Or to rephrase the point with
an eye to American debates on cultural theory, the webs of connection set up in Nabokov’s
writing are less resistant to Bakhtinian approaches, which highlight the complex historical
residues in language and how authors manipulate them, than they are to Marxist ones, with
their emphasis on grand socio-economic narratives.
9
See especially the devastating take-off on “Ash Wednesday” when Humbert confronts Quilty. Vladimir
Nabokov, Lolita (1958; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1989), pp. 16, 299-300.
10
Bend Sinister, p. vi. Further references to the preface, which Nabokov wrote in 1963, are given in parentheses.
11
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, scene i.
12
Ibid., Act IV, scene iii.
4.
No one to my knowledge has considered Thomas Mann’s role in shaping the opposition
between modernist parody and postmodern pastiche. But the Australian scholar Margaret
Rose has raised the key issue in another context. Arguing that Jameson’s definition of
pastiche contains a hidden debt to Baudrillard, she points out “a set of category errors”
whereby Jameson labels as postmodern a group of traits that were called modern in his
source.13 Rose overlooks the fact that in the United States Baudrillard has become a guru of
the postmodern, but a similar slippage is even more striking with Mann. Thus, though critics
of postmodernism hardly ever mention Mann, it is his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus that
Jameson openly credits with influencing his concept of pastiche (16).
Here the student of Nabokov’s career gets interested. For like The Real Life of Sebastian
Knight, Mann’s novel tells the fictitious life-story of an artist, in this case a composer who
flourished from about 1905 to 1930. Even more than with Knight, whose works appeared
from 1925 to 1936, this time-frame suggests modernism. Also, it is hard to see how Doctor
Faustus might have aided Jameson’s thinking about pastiche, since the term “parody” gets all
the attention. Thus the hero sees it as crucial for his gift, asserting that “all the methods and
conventions of art today are good for parody only.”14 Such strong emphasis suggests that
Mann surpasses even Nabokov in making parody central to modern art. But there is a key
difference: for Mann, in contrast to the rousing leap of Sebastian Knight’s springboard,
parody is a melancholy necessity in a world without artistic originality.
Given Nabokov’s view of Mann’s Death in Venice as a supreme example of poshlust,15
comparisons between the writers have not flourished. Elsewhere I have suggested that one
reason for Nabokov’s dislike was probably the story’s status as a modernist icon.16 Written at
a major turning point for Mann, it initiated his breakthrough into myth, which in turn
anticipated Eliot’s equation of modernism with the “mythical method” in his review of
Ulysses.17 As Astradur Eysteinsson has just reaffirmed, this doctrine soon became
paradigmatic for Anglo-American modernism.18 But for Nabokov on entering the Anglo-
American scene in the 1940s, this conjuncture was far from propitious; he detested myth
wherever he found it, not just in Mann and Eliot, but even in James Joyce. Thus he could
condemn the Homeric material in Ulysses: “there is nothing more tedious than a protracted
and sustained allegory based on a well-worn myth.”19
As the epithet “well-worn” indicates, myths are close to stereotypes in Nabokov’s mind. They
therefore lack parody’s power to intervene in some cultural corpus and creatively rework it.
Still, despite the sharp contrast Nabokov draws, parody and myth both operate by referring
systematically to bodies of extratextual material. Nabokov touches on this parallel at one
point in his Ulysses lecture, where instead of using Eliot’s language of myth he calls the
Homeric analogies “a close parody.”20 The distinction between the two methods perhaps lies
13
Margaret A. Rose, “Post-Modern Pastiche.” British Journal of Aesthetics 31, 1 (Jan. 1991), 29. Similarly,
Jameson does not explain why Proust, who was surely a paragon of modernist “deep time and memory,” should
have written the famous pastiches collected in Pastiches et mélanges.
14
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1948), p. 134. The italics are
Mann’s.
15
Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), p. 101.
16
John Burt Foster, Jr., “Nabokov and Kafka,” The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, ed. Vladimir
Alexandrov (New York: Garland, 1995), pp. 446-447.
17
T. S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order, and Myth.” The Dial 75 (Nov. 1923), 480-83. Kenneth Burke’s influential
translation of Death in Venice appeared in the same journal in March, April, and May 1924.
18
Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 9-12.
19
Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, introd. John Updike (New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 288.
20
Ibid., p. 288.
in the cultural authority of the material to which they refer; even a literary classic does not
solicit the religious veneration once given to myths, and many targets of parody are not
classics at all. If this observation is correct, then Nabokov’s insight here may have been
keener than Eliot’s, who arguably misread the Homeric intertext in Ulysses due to his own
work with explicitly religious materials in The Waste Land.
In any case, if Nabokov could have seen Mann as a Joycean parodist, instead of rejecting him
as an Eliotic mythmaker, he might have better appreciated his work. Perhaps Felix Krull,
begun just before Death in Venice but finished after Doctor Faustus and published in the
fifties like Lolita, would have provided common ground. For if Lolita, the “Confession of a
White Widowed Male,” parodies Nabokov’s just completed Speak, Memory as well as other
forms of life-writing like the Freudian case-history, then he might have admired Mann’s self-
styled “Confessions of a Confidence Man,” with its own parodies of Goethe’s autobiography.
In the context of Nabokov’s career, then, Mann does not authorize a Jamesonian division
between modernist parody and postmodern pastiche. Instead, he suggests a different
distinction between intertextual practices — a fissure within modernism itself between parody
and myth.
5.
Thus, despite Jameson’s claim to have a stylistic test for separating modernism and
postmodernism, he does little to clarify Nabokov’s position at the crossroads of these
movements. The definitions of parody and pastiche prove on examination to be too
problematic. Still, confronting this novelist with this critic does support inquiry into
Nabokov’s place in twentieth-century literature; and ironically, given the title of Jameson’s
book, it yields insights into modernism.
Students of Nabokov’s cultural situation should not be misled by his quarrels with historical
doctrines like Marxism. There is an historical dimension to his work, even though the
ingenuity of his intertextual games can make it difficult to analyze. In fact, given the cross-
cultural range of Nabokov’s contacts, a full elucidation of his historical place may well prove
unusually instructive. Thus, despite the difficulties both with the modernism-postmodernism
distinction and with locating Nabokov within it, the topic is worth pursuing.
As for modernism, the vicissitudes of the knight’s-move metaphor show that definitions of the
term must allow for Nabokov’s Russian background. Assertions about his postmodernism (or
even his late modernism) which gloss over the three decades of fiction before Lolita
drastically oversimplify his position within twentieth-century literature. In addition,
Nabokov’s critiques of Mann and Eliot should make us wary of formerly dominant definitions
of modernism. If modernism means myth, and postmodernism opposes modernism, then
Nabokov’s dislike of Death in Venice and The Waste Land makes it easy to prove him a
postmodernist. But what if all that is at stake is Eliot’s version of modernism, or even the New
Critics’ version of Eliot? Not only Nabokov but also Mann, we have seen, wrote imagined
narratives of modernism which stressed parody rather than myth.
Most important of all, however, is the basic assumption of this paper. To set Nabokov beside
a critic like Jameson reveals that Nabokov’s practice as a fiction-writer has major theoretical
implications in its own right. These implications are well worth teasing out despite his
hostility to theory. For though the theory boom has slackened, to leave theory to the theorists
would be a mistake, especially with a writer like Nabokov. After all, as Frank Kermode once
remarked, here is a modern novelist with a “really overpowering intelligence.”21
21
Frank Kermode, “Bend Sinister,” Nabokov: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 76.

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Flaviano Estradiotto said on Feb 24, 2010 | 1 feedback