Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,139
Pnin’s escape from the jaws of death finds its own echo in the glass bowl that improbably survives the washing up). We can faintly imagine what the last chapter was to have been: the narrator and Jack Cockerell doing their sordid, lame little impressions of Pnin, while Pnin lies dying, or perhaps has already died. (Which leads to the question: what is it about having people speak of you as you lie dying that is particularly Russian?)
32 Of course an actual Van Eyck turns up at Pnin’s successful little party, when Laurence Clements, lost in thought while holding a dictionary, is compared to the master’s portrait of Canon van der Paele. At the same party, a little later on, bored Laurence is to be found “flipping through an album of Flemish Masterpieces.”
33 All appear in Pnin. Bole is used for “the trunk of a tree” but is also the small eye on a butterfly wing; crepitation is a Nabokov favorite, but aside from crackling generally, it’s the word for what a (bombardier) beetle does when he “ejects a pungent fluid with a sudden sharp report.” Punchinello, in Pnin, is of course the ugly Italian commedia character, who is short and stout, and so, in the simile under consideration, reminiscent of a tongue. But it is also a very pretty butterfly.
34 From Pnin: “He placed various objects in turn—an apple, a pencil, a chess pawn, a comb—behind a glass of water and peered through it at each studiously: the red apple became a clear-cut red band bounded by a straight horizon, half a glass of Red Sea, Arabia Felix. The short pencil, if held obliquely, curved like a stylized snake, but if held vertically became monstrously fat—almost pyramidal. The black pawn, if moved to and fro, divided into a couple of black ants. The comb, stood on end, resulted in the glass’s seeming to fill with beautifully striped liquid, a zebra cocktail.”
35 “My method of teaching precluded genuine contact with my students. At best, they regurgitated a few bits of my brain during examinations.”
36 Foucault, “What Is an Author?,” 1969. The English translation quoted is by Joseph V. Harari, first published in 1979.
37 “Ferrety, human-interest fiends, those jolly vulgarians,” as he called them. And that cagey afterword to Lolita performs a similar function.
38 Foucault, “What Is an Author?”
39 In Nabokov’s case, it’s more like S&M—an experience you’d hope Foucault could get behind.
40 A largely romantic concept. And wasn’t it always the same examples? Either it was Homer; some unspecified “ethnographic societies” within which “narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’—the mastery of the narrative code—may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’ ” (Barthes); or else the rather weak model of Beaumont and Fletcher.
41 Respectively, Walter Benjamin, Milena Jesenská, Erich Heller and Felice Bauer.
42 This has not been seriously assailed since Edmund Wilson’s “A Dissenting Opinion on Kafka.”
43 Begley tells us that Brod did not directly publish Kafka’s letters to Milena and Felice, but neither did he press them to “surrender his letters for destruction, or to destroy the letters themselves.” As a result, Brod lost control of them. As the German army entered Prague, Milena entrusted them to Willy Haas, who published them in 1952; Felice, who emigrated to America, sold her letters herself, in 1955, to Schocken Books.
44 Brod championed many artists, including Leoš Janáček, Franz Werfel and Karl Kraus.
45 The truly hagiographic text is Gustav Janouch’s Conversations with Kafka. The young Gustav befriended Kafka in Berlin in the final year of the writer’s life. In this essay, where I quote from the book, it is with the understanding that this is “reported speech” and most probably prettified for publication.
46 Conversations with Kafka, Gustav Janouch.
47 Ibid.
48 Although, naturally, Larkin felt his own case to be by far the more extreme, as he makes clear in his poem “The Literary World”: My dear Kafka / When you’ve had five years of it, not five months, / Five years of an irresistible force meeting an / Immoveable object right in your belly, / Then you’ll know about depression.
49 “Self’s the Man” by Philip Larkin.
50 From Kafka’s diary. “She” is Felice.
51 Traditionally, critics credit Felice Bauer with being at least partial inspiration for “The Judgement”—the first story of his that satisfied Kafka. The evidence is circumstantial but convincing: it was dedicated to Felice, its composition dates to the beginning of their correspondence, and its heroine, to whom the hero is engaged, shares her