Nabokov has, of course, written more on пошлость than what appears here. He wrote a book on Gogol, where he describes Gogol as a master of пошлость, as the man who took the profane and made it art. I think he’s probably right. But more importantly, to add to my collection (list) of lists, here’s Nabokov’s on пошлость:
“Poshlust,” or in a better transliteration poshlost, has many nuances, and evidently I have not described them clearly enough in my little book on Gogol, if you think one can ask anybody if he is tempted by poshlost. Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as “the moment of truth,” “charisma,” “existential” (used seriously), “dialogue” (as applied to political talks between nations), and “vocabulary” (as applied to a dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam is seditious poshlost. Belonging to a very select club (which sports one Jewish name—that of the treasurer) is genteel poshlost. Hack reviews are frequently poshlost, but it also lurks in certain highbrow essays. Poshlost calls Mr. Blank a great poet and Mr. Bluff a great novelist. One of poshlost’s favorite breeding places has always been the Art Exhibition; there it is produced by so-called sculptors working with the tools of wreckers, building crankshaft cretins of stainless steel, Zen stereos, polystyrene stinkbirds, objects trouvés in latrines, cannonballs, canned balls. There we admire the gabinetti wall patterns of so-called abstract artists, Freudian surrealism, roric smudges, and Rorschach blots—all of it as corny in its own right as the academic “September Morns” and “Florentine Flowergirls” of half a century ago. The list is long, and, of course, everybody has his bête noire, his black pet, in the series. Mine is that airline ad: the snack served by an obsequious wench to a young couple—she eyeing ecstatically the cucumber canapé, he admiring wistfully the hostess. And, of course, Death in Venice. You see the range.
There’s a Gogolian element to Aldiss’ storytelling: the use of lists: lists of objects, of actions, of movements, and most interestingly, of layers of glass. Gogol, though, would never do what Aldiss does – Aldiss uses lists like Tolstoy would have used lists had Tolstoy used lists (which I’ll get back to in a later post). For now, three examples of Aldiss’ love of the list:
His legs were doubled under him, so that he sat on the tawny planking with the following parts of his anatomy touching it: some of his right buttock, the outer side of his right thigh, his right knee, the outer side of his right calf, his right ankle, and his right foot, while his left leg copied the attitude of his right one, overlapping it so that from the knee down it also touched the planking and the tip of the left shoe pressed against the heel of the right shoe. The shoes were dusty. His right shoulder and part of the right-hand side of his body pressed against the brickwork beside the round window.
I like this one because its a weird way to use a list. He’s describing the position in which this guy was crouched by listing, in detail, body parts and proximities. It just gives you a funny sense, not of the croucher, but of the observer who is writing all this down.
On and in these shelves was a collection of articles belonging to or acquired by S, including three empty jam jars and a jar containing runner bean seeds; a bowler hat, in the rim of which lay a patent inhaler designed to fit up a nostril; a worm-eaten leg of an upright chair; a tartan plastic fountain pen; a perished hot water bottle; a brass handle off a drawer; a cotton reel containing brown thread; an empty pigskin purse; a china candlestick of an earlier age, on which was printed a representation of a devil breathing fire; a paperbound book entitled ‘Low Point X’, the cover of which was curled upwards, exposing brown pages; a broken coach lantern lying cheek-by-jowl with a group of three walnuts; a straw hat of the kind called ‘boater’, bound round by a red and blue ribbon; an umbrella with a handle representing a fox’s head lying under the boater; two enamel notices bearing the legend Beware of the Dog in black letters; a small collection of groceries and eating utensils, including a cracked blue and white cup and an unopened tin of sardines; a small brass crocodile; a bundle of newspaper; an enamel chamber pot with no handle; some shaving things lying in a small basin with floral decorations on it; a brass hinge and an iron key; an ancient tennis ball with most of its knap missing; a briefcase; the skeleton of a long-eared bat with its left ear missing; a pottery carthorse with its head missing; and a mousetrap still bearing a crumb of cheese on its single rusty tooth. Most of these articles were covered with a fine dust.
This one, to me, is notable not only for its obscene length but also because this isn’t the first occurrence of this list in the book. The one above occurs on 115-116. On 61-63 we see:
Some of this equipment still remained, though in the main the shelving was monopolized by articles belonging to or acquired by S.
Among these articles, the following could be distinguished: a storm lantern of antique design; a bowler hat; two empty jam jars; a patent inhaler made to fit the nostril; a streamlined pottery representation of a carthorse, the head missing; a pair of nail clippers; a collection of nail clippings, gathered in an ash tray; a mousetrap; part of the skeleton of a long-eared bat, discovered during an expedition to the chamber below; a brief-case purchased on the day that S had been given the post of secretary to Mr. Mary; the leg of an upright chair, worm-eaten; a fountain pen constructed of a tartan plastic; a hotwater bottle; a brass handle off a drawer; a cotton reel on which was wound brown thread, with a needle balanced on the top of it; a pigskin purse, lying open and empty; a chipped china candlestick on which had been printed a crude representation of the devil; a paperbound book with a curled-up cover entitled ‘The Penguin Handyman’; three walnuts; a coach lantern with its glass smashed; another empty jam jar; an umbrella, across which lay a straw hat with a red and blue band round it; an oval notice made of metal coated with enamel, on which was printed the legend Beware of the Dog; an oblong notice of the same materials bearing the same legend; a punched bus ticket; a comb with teeth missing; a hair brush with hair missing; an upright shaving mirror with the mirror missing; an elaborate iron key; a cigarette packet; a free luncheon voucher; another jam jar, this one containing purple runner bean seeds; a brass hinge; an oily rag; a small basin with a floral design containing a razor, a shaving brush, and a spoon; a rag; a slice of green soap; an enamel chamber pot without handle; a brass crocodile eight centimetres long; a small collection of groceries and eating utensils, among which a blue and white striped cup and a packet of tea were noticable; a row of books, including a ‘Typist’s Desk Book’; ‘Low Point X’; Victor Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’; ‘Pickwick Papers’ without its cover; ‘Pregnancy–Conception’ To Childbirth’; Band I of Spengler’s ‘Der Untergang des Abendlandes’; ‘Toys Through the Ages’; ‘Living for Jesus’; ‘First Steps in the Bible’; ‘First Steps in Chemistry’; ‘First Steps in Philosophy’; ‘Understanding God’; ‘A Shorter Shorthand Manual’; ‘Sex in Practice’; ‘Black’s Picturesque Tourist of England’; ‘My Alps, by Mrs. Meade; and the ‘Boy’s Own Paper’ for the second week in August, 19–.
The lists of layers of glass and other objects between an observer and someone observed are by far the most interesting use of lists in Report on Probability A. These mostly occur when S is watching Mr. Mary’s wife (presumably Mrs. Mary?) through a telescope:
These lips were viewed through six thicknesses of glass, four consisting of the little lenses in the telescope, one consisting of the square of glass that formed the central panel of the nine glass panels together comprising the round window in the front of the old brick building, and one consisting of the openable but closed portion of the kitchen window. So near was this closed portion of the kitchen window to the moving lips that the breath issuing between them had fogged the pane, obscuring still further both the right cheek already obscured by the towel and a part of the towel itself.
and:
Between her head and the eye of the watcher were interposed the glass of the kitchen window, the glass of the round window in the old brick building that had once housed a gentleman’s private coach, and the four lenses of the telescope.
Ivan Turgenev has a certain awesomeness about him. He starts you off with some realistish narrative, then throws you off with a bizarro description like:
Bazarov frowned. The small and unprepossessing figure of the emancipée was not in the least ugly, but the expression on her face had an unpleasant effect on someone looking at her. One felt like asking her: ‘What’s wrong with you? Are you hungry? Are you bored? Are you shy? What are you all tensed up about?
And then goes back to his usual mode of writing. He’ll also throw in all sorts of Gogolesque trivia like “It is a well known fact that our provincial towns burn down once every five years.” The more I look at him, the less certain I am of how to read him. Is he playing a joke on me? Is he just tangental? Is he hungry? This raises all sorts of suspicions about all sorts of authors. Take Gogol, supposed by Soviet literary critics to have written firmly in the realist tradition (had they not read “The Nose“?):
In this connection the author feels bound to confess that the appetite and the capacity of such men are greatly to be envied. Of those well-to-do folk of St. Petersburg and Moscow who spend their time in considering what they shall eat on the morrow, and in composing a dinner for the day following, and who never sit down to a meal without first of all injecting a pill and then swallowing oysters and crabs and a quantity of other monsters, while eternally departing for Karlsbad or the Caucasus, the author has but a small opinion. Yes, THEY are not the persons to inspire envy. Rather, it is the folk of the middle classes–folk who at one posthouse call for bacon, and at another for a sucking pig, and at a third for a steak of sturgeon or a baked pudding with onions, and who can sit down to table at any hour, as though they had never had a meal in their lives, and can devour fish of all sorts, and guzzle and chew it with a view to provoking further appetite–these, I say, are the folk who enjoy heaven’s most favoured gift. To attain such a celestial condition the great folk of whom I have spoken would sacrifice half their serfs and half their mortgaged and non-mortgaged property, with the foreign and domestic improvements thereon, if thereby they could compass such a stomach as is possessed by the folk of the middle class. But, unfortunately, neither money nor real estate, whether improved or non-improved, can purchase such a stomach.
Gogol definitely has a knack for this sort of thing – the weird, and weirdly compelling, details that drive his stories in ways that plot doesn’t seem capable of. More than just weirdness of details, the lists (and they are often enough just lists) of things he describes are weirdly long: pages of foods, names of serfs, objects in the distance. But, of course, the weird attention to weird details doesn’t stop with Gogol and Turgenev. Take Dostoyevsky:
Sonia’s room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse. There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other flat. Two rush-bottom chairs stood by the table. On the opposite wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers looking, as it were, lost in a desert. That was all there was in the room. The yellow, scratched and shabby wall-paper was black in the corners.
Since when does a room’s being a quadrangle, however irregular, make it grotesque? And yet, Dostoyevsky succeeds in making his quadrangular room seem just that. He focuses on the corners, almost nervously noting the one as very acute before he moves on and lists what must be all of the objects in the room, and somehow creates just that illusion of Petersburg as frighteningly off-kilter.
All of this is really, really weird in a way. It seems to me that authors, when they write – good authors, anyway – should be trying to do something, beyond just taking up space, and all three of the above are good, even great, authors. I can’t, though, get a good feel for what the hell they’re trying to do, and yet, it is in these minute, disproportionately described, and varied details that these authors are most compelling to me.
