Nabokov on Joyce, Kafka

[Charles Albert]

For fun, you might want to take a bite out of "St. Petersburg".........


love,
cfa

On 10/27/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> and on "mediocrities". I haven't read this interview before, and I should
> say professor Nabokov can be harsh. I disagree on Mann and Faulkner
> (haven't
> read Pasternak).
>
> "What  is  your  approach to the teaching of literature?
>
>
>      I can give you some examples. When studying Kafka's famous
> story, my students had to know  exactly  what  kind  of  insect
> Gregor  turned  into  (it  was  a  domed  beetle,  not the flat
> cockroach of sloppy translators) and they had  to  be  able  to
> describe  exactly  the  arrangement  of  the  rooms,  with  the
> position of doors and furniture, in the Sarnsa  family's  flat.
> They  had  to  know  the  map  of  Dublin for Ulysses. I
> believe in stressing the specific detail; the general ideas can
> take care of themselves. Ulysses, of course, is a divine
> work of art and will live on despite the  academic  nonentities
> who turn it into a collection of symbols or Greek myths. I once
> gave  a  student  a  C-minus,  or  perhaps  a  D-plus, just for
> applying to its chapters the titles borrowed from  Homer  while
> not  even  noticing  the  comings  and goings of the man in the
> brown mackintosh. He didn't even know who the man in the  brown
> mackintosh  was. Oh, yes, let people compare me to Joyce by all
> means, but my English is patball to Joyce's champion game." ...
>
> "Ever   since   the   days   when  such  formidable
> mediocrities as Galsworthy, Dreiser, a  person  called  Tagore,
> another called Maxim Gorky, a third called Romain Rolland, used
> to be accepted as geniuses, I have been perplexed and amused by
> fabricated  notions  about  so-called  "great books". That, for
> instance, Mann's asinine Death in Venice or  Pasternak's
> melodramatic  and  vilely  written Zhivago or Faulkner's
> corncobby chronicles can be considered  "masterpieces,"  or  at
> least  what  journalists call "great books," is to me an absurd
> delusion, as when a hypnotized person makes love to  a  chair.
> My greatest masterpieces of twentieth century prose are,
> in     this     order:    Joyce's    Ulysses,    Kafka's
> Transformation, Biely's Petersburg, and the first
> half of Proust's fairy tale In Search of Lost Time."
>
> http://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter05.txt
>
> _________________________________________________________________
> Don't just search. Find. Check out the new MSN Search!
> http://search.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200636ave/direct/01/
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20061027/0a86f4e4/attachment.html>