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what we search for in fiction is not so much reality but the epiphany of truth.
The theme of the class was the relation between fiction and reality.
Why did I stop teaching so suddenly? I had asked myself this question many times. Was it the declining quality of the university? The ever-increasing indifference among the remaining faculty and students? The daily struggle against arbitrary rules and restrictions?
Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
Nabokov tells us, Cincinnatus appreciated the freshness and beauty of language, while other children “understood each other at the first word, since they had no words that would end in an unexpected way, perhaps in some archaic letter, an upsilamba, becoming a bird or catapult with wondrous consequences.”
“Explain the significance of the word upsilamba in the context of Invitation to a Beheading. What does the word mean, and how does it relate to the main theme of the novel?”
“Upsilamba!”
To me the word contains the sound of lamb and that I associate with the sacrifica lamb of the Old Testament where those who are close to god are required to kill - spill the blood on an innocent to demonstrate their pure faith. To put it DOWN. With sound of UP combined with lamb - it is the opposite - no sacrifice required - no demonstration - unconditional faith
Poshlust, Nabokov explains, “is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive.”
in most of Nabokov’s novels—Invitation to a Beheading, Bend Sinister, Ada, Pnin—there was always the shadow of another world, one that was only attainable through fiction. It is this world that prevents his heroes and heroines from utter despair, that becomes their refuge in a life that is consistently brutal. Take
The desperate truth of Lolita’s story is not the rape of a twelve-year-old by a dirty old man but the confiscation of one individual’s life by another. We don’t know what Lolita would have become if Humbert had not engulfed her.
I read a sentence by Nabokov—“curiosity is insubordination in its purest form”
Nabokov calls every great novel a fairy tale,
The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique quality which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.
The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable.
Fitzgerald’s own explanation of the novel: “That’s the whole burden of this novel,” he had said, “the loss of those illusions that give such color to the world so that you don’t care whether things are true or false as long as they partake of the magical glory.”
About Great Gatsby
As Fitzgerald puts it, “No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.”
It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.
Re gatsby
Dreams, Mr. Nyazi, are perfect ideals, complete in themselves. How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.
In retrospect, when historical events are gathered up, analyzed and categorized into articles and books, their messiness disappears and they gain a certain logic and clarity that one never feels at the time.
I had not realized how far the routines of one’s life create the illusion of stability. Now that I could not call myself a teacher, a writer, now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional, as if I were walking on air, as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.
Loss of identity
I wrote, rather dramatically, to an American friend: “You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar, but the door is now metal instead of wood, the walls have been painted a garish pink, the easy chair you loved so much is gone. Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set. This is your house, and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house, to its walls and doors and floors; you
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Irrelevancy
he cited a line from Nietzsche that struck me as pertinent to our situation. “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche had said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”
the reason I am so popular is that I give others back what they need to find in themselves. You need me not because I tell you what I want you to do but because I articulate and justify what you want to do. That is why you like me—a man without qualities. That’s what yours truly is all about.
I had by now become something of an expert in the manners of pious men. They showed their opinion of you by the manner in which they avoided looking at you.
When I complained about the workload, I was reminded of the fact that some of the faculty taught over twenty hours a week. For the administrators, the quality of the work was of little consequence. They called my expectations unrealistic and idealistic. I called their indifference criminal.
Teaching
the world is full of angry, pathological individuals pushing pieces of paper with obscene messages under doors.
Mina told me that when she wanted to explain the concept of ambiguity in the novel, she always used her chair trick. In the next session I started the class by picking up a chair and placing it in front of me. What do you see? I asked the class. A chair. Then I placed the chair upside down. Now what do you see? Still a chair. Then I straightened the chair and asked a few students to stand in different places around the room, and asked both those standing and those sitting to describe the same chair. You see this is a chair, but when you come to describe it, you do so from where you are
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These are people who consciously choose failure in order to preserve their own sense of integrity. They are more elitist than mere snobs, because of their high standards. James, I believe, felt that in many ways he was one, with his misunderstood novels and his tenacity in keeping to the kind of fiction he felt was right,
perfectly equipped failure
She was one of those people who are irrevocably, incurably honest and therefore both inflexible and vulnerable at the same time.
Mina
On August 4, 1914, Henry James added an entry to his journal: “Everything blackened over for the time blighted by the hideous Public situation. This is (Monday) the August Bank Holiday but with horrible suspense and the worst possibilities in the air.”
“Black and hideous to me is the tragedy that gathers,” he wrote to his old friend Rhoda Broughton, “and I am sick beyond cure to have lived to see it. You and I, the ornaments of our generation, should have been spared this wreck of our belief that these long years we had seen civilization grow and the worst became possible.”
James about WWII
the villain in modern fiction is born: a creature without compassion, without empathy. The personalized version of good and evil usurps and individualizes the more archetypal concepts, such as courage or heroism, that shaped the epic or romance. A hero becomes one who safeguards his or her individual integrity at almost any cost.
Footfalls echo in the memory Down the passage which we did not take Towards the door we never opened Into the rose-garden. My words echo Thus, in your mind. But to what purpose Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves I do not know.
Eliot ---Four Quartets
Resentment had erased all ambiguity in our encounters with people like him; we had been polarized into “us” and “them.”
Could be said about the trump era
At the start of the twentieth century, the age of marriage in Iran—nine, according to sharia laws—was changed to thirteen and then later to eighteen. My mother had chosen whom she wanted to marry and she had been one of the first six women elected to Parliament in 1963. When I was growing up, in the 1960s, there was little difference between my rights and the rights of women in Western democracies. But it was not the fashion then to think that our culture was not compatible with modern democracy, that there were Western and Islamic versions of democracy and human rights. We all wanted
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Austen’s protagonists are private individuals set in public places. Their desire for privacy and reflection is continually being adjusted to their situation within a very small community, which keeps them under its constant scrutiny. The balance between the public and the private is essential to this world.
“You used to preach to us all that she ignored politics, not because she didn’t know any better but because she didn’t allow her work, her imagination, to be swallowed up by the society around her. At a time when the world was engulfed in the Napoleonic Wars, she created her own independent world, a world that you, two centuries later, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, teach as the fictional ideal of democracy.
Jane Austen
I said I wanted to teach a class, a literature workshop at home, with only a few select students who really love literature.
