Respecting the Audience and Vladimir Nabokov

Dan Green and Amardeep Singh have some good posts about the role of complexity in literature. They're discussing a piece in which Lionel Trilling wrote:

The writer who defines his audience by its limitations is indulging in the unforgivable arrogance. The writer must define his audience by its abilities, by its perfections, so far as he is gifted to conceive them.

which Amardeep glosses as:

In short, there should be a place where people write, freely assuming their audience knows way more than the average reader of USA Today. Serious writers and thinkers should feel free to take advantage of such an intellectually enlivened -- if rarefied -- space to work out complex ideas.

All this reminds me of Nabokov's correspondence with The New Yorker.

Before Nabokov became a recognized genius and literary sensation, The New Yorker published several of his short stories. Some of the correspondence between him and the editors is reproduced in Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years.

What is made clear in the give and take between Nabokov and the editors of The New Yorker is that Nabokov had a great respect for his audience. He vigorously fought the editors' attempts to "lower the drawbridges" he had carefully put up. He purposely made his stories difficult and complex and he didn't want The New Yorker simplifying them--he didn't want to deny his audience the pleasure of participating in the creation of the story, and he knew that integrating his audience into his stories would make both far more complex.

Nabokov was a writer who expected a lot from himself, from other writers, and from readers. He was intolerant of linguistic laziness and poor writing, and he could be harsh (just ask his former students), but this harshness is partly redeemed because it was engendered by a respect for literature. Nabokov took literature very seriously, so much so that he broke a longstanding relationship with Edmund Wilson, and his placement of literature above sales and certain readers is part of what made him such a substantial talent.

Another part was that Nabokov has a keen sense of how much to expect from an audience. In Trilling's words, Nabokov was gifted at defining "his audience by its abilities, by its perfections." He wrote without fear of confusing his readers, and so he did not indulge in Trilling's "unforgivable arrogance" of defining "his audience by its limitations." Nabokov's high standards and complex fictions were a sign of his respect.

Comments

[Debbie]

Yes! This is exactly why I don't think people should call big, ambitious books (of course I'm thinking of Infinite Jest) "pretentious." Wallace obviously believes that there are readers out there who will take the time to read and understand the book. In doing so, he's being more respectful than writers that try to be accessible and end up spoon-feeding the reader their story.

[Scott]

You know that's funny because DFW's style doesn't strike me as pretentious at all. (I guess you could make a case for the footnotes, but I like them.)

But, you know, go to Amazon and read the reader reviews and you can find plenty of people who hate even the most mainstream novels for "being too difficult." I suppose there will always be those out there who do not care or want to get it. Nabokov wasn't and Wallace isn't writing for them anyway, and we're the better for it.

[Amardeep]

It's funny, but I tend not to put Nabokov and Trilling in the same category on my mental shelf.

In part, it's because Trilling is kind of a critic's critic, whereas Nabokov is always happiest being a writer's writer. Even when Nabokov is writing expository prose, there's something a little too linguistically excessive, too out there, too idiosyncratic, to quite work as criticism.

Whereas Trilling, even when he's praising complexity, is fairly straightforward...

Somewhat unrelatedly, have you checked out the recently published Nabokov "lecture notes"? I believe the title of the volume is "Lectures on Literature." They were notes for lectures he used to give his undergrads on writers like Joyce, Austen, Dickens, and Proust. There's some amazing insight, occasionally sheer delight at the writing. Also the "intro" and "outro" to the class are pretty brilliant...

[Scott]

Amardeep--I own copies of Lectures on Literature (Austen, Dickens, Kafka, proust, & others) and Lectures on Russian Literature. Both make for very good reading (Nabokov's undergrads were a lucky bunch!).

I actually posted a bit on this about a month back:

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[Steven]

DFW is not deep or demanding, he is merely clever. Clever is not genius.

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