Nabokov's "Natasha"; "Bakhtin on the Novel"

Nabokov plays with ideas of the ordinary. There is a prominent magical quality to Natasha's, Baron Wolfe's, and old Khrenov's ways of seeing and living. The younger two characters are especially adamant about removing themselves from the everyday through their imaginations and there's a languid sense of reality detachment. On their outing, Nabokov moves the young couple in and out of the real world first with their stories, then with the empty cafe, the mention of Levitan, and then with Khrenov's ghost. Like Kafka or Burroughs the reader is unsure of what is actually real and what might be a bizarre imaginative tangent, a device created for emphasis or exaggeration.

In class on Wednesday Robin mentioned how difficult it would be to make a movie that actually captured a Nabokov novel/story because so much of his brilliance is in his manipulation of language. This is absolutely true but there is a cinematic quality to his settings. The comparison of the spring day outing to a Levitan landscape is pretty picturesque. Nabokov's attention to detail (clothing, furniture, light, color) brings the reader into the scene, magnifying his facility with magical realism. Also, the "dead little old man with the waxen nose" is quite an image.

Nabokov has an amazing ability to make everything erotically charged: hair parts, hand-washing, lumpy couches, colors even. Actually, he makes everything that would otherwise not be considered in any way sexual, erotic. There's a synesthetic quality to his style that pushes the words to blend ideas as well as color feelings.

Bakhtin's theories of polyphony are applicable to "Natasha" in that nothing of the story would be understood with only one character voice. The three dialogues of Natasha, Baron Wolfe, and old Khrenov exist to elevate one another and create a spherical understanding for the reader. An interesting aspect of this essay is the idea of dialogic hierarchies. Where in Nabokov's short story do we understand who sits higher within the social ladder of the character list?

Levitan Landscapes

Isaac Levitan landscapes from Wikipedia. 

Cut-Up Compostition

As his parachute filled and caught his fall he stopped stressing out about the ingate silt. Everything in his head slid away with the waning floor and his eyelids sank to half mast. His senses dulled so he could barely hear his dad yell-talking into the phone about "raring circulation bioengineering." His limbs were limp, a feeling he craved almost more than the flight of his brain and he bent his fingers, barely able to make a fist. Luke was staring at him from the bean bag chair. "Replacement major, man," he said. "Don't even worry about your dad and the workshop shit. The silt probably won't even clog. He won't even notice." He could tell Luke was speaking at a normal speed because of the way his lips moved but his head was so side-vetted that it sounded like Luke was speaking soooo slowwlyy.
He couldn't even respond to Luke's attempts at comfort. He was fucked anyway. His dad will notice and he will lose his glossy syntax saved for customers, detonating into anger mode, screaming bloody murder.   He looked down at his arm. The rhymed hirudin stubbed upwards into his vein was still leeching liquid into his blood stream. The hirudin was a nice touch. He didn't have to do anything except let go.

Recent Forerunners, William S. Burroughs

Evident in Bradley the Buyer of Naked Lunch, a nervous energy pervades Burroughs's writing style and makes the reader pretty uncomfortable. Throwing himself on the ground, begging for his job, "thrusting" fingers into his mouth, smiling horribly. Very distasteful but intriguing. The number of characters Bradley affects (in/directly) is impressive for a short excerpt: Lupita, the boys, colleagues, the District Supervisor, the Judge. People talk about it, fight it, and perpetuate it.

Burroughs was 60 during this interview, an age in which he seems dulled to earlier ideas of political disdain. Of (or preceding) the Beat generation, he is someone I consider a persuasive opponent of capitalist ideals but during the interview (and perhaps because of the direction of the interview itself) he comes off as a much more secure and resigned in his ideas of literature, spirituality, and drug rehabilitation. Much less paranoid anyway. I liked his sticking up for Eliot: how does anyone think he wasn't a verbal innovator? And his confidence that all is illusion.

All of these writing excerpts are examples of transgressive literature. The junkie that eats the DS, the doctor that dances with scalpels and his patients lives, the "cut up" poetry: they all exemplify a different understanding of mental processes and desire to portray something very unlike the usual. Burroughs leads with something familiar and ends with something horrifying but not necessarily false, just "wrong."