Chapter and line numbers from the Gabler edition.

The literary idea of Ulysses is represented in microcosm by its fourteenth chapter, unofficially titled “Oxen of the Sun.” Whatever you think of this chapter — whether you find it impressive, pretentious, exhilarating, intimidating, boring, liberating, or unreadable — is likely to be your opinion of the novel as a whole. For that reason, we may also start there. Continue reading →

Undoubtedly, Nineteen Eighty-Four was a significant milestone in the trajectory of twentieth-century Western culture. Orwell’s novel is also the true national epic of Great Britain. Surely you did not expect that it would be Shakespeare, who merely retold popular European stories in good verse.

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from On the Road (Kerouac, I/227-228)

Kerouac wrote, “With one illegitimate child in the West somewhere, Dean then had four little ones and not a cent,” (I/223) but not once, in any of his books, did he mention his own daughter. But he had one. Her name was Jan, and she wrote two novels. Continue reading →

Hard at work portraying the role of youth spokesman.

Kerouac’s appearance marked the moment when the formation of American culture was completed. Starting with On the Road, American culture became what the world recognized by that term throughout the next fifty years. Continue reading →

At the dawn of misty youth.

Earlier this year, Beverly Cleary died, at the age of 104. This inconceivable lifespan roughly corresponds with that of American culture itself, a small but important part of which Cleary embodies. Continue reading →

(Conclusion. Continued from part 1.)

Dick felt insecure about being a writer of genre fiction, however successful. In an introduction to a collection of his short stories (published in 1980), he advised readers to “bear in mind that most were written when SF was so looked down upon that it virtually was not there, in the eyes of all America. This was not funny, the derision felt toward SF writers. It made our lives wretched…really cruel abuse was inflicted on us.” The abuse was largely self-inflicted. When meeting new people in the late 1950s, especially if they had real or imagined literary connections, Dick would deliberately downplay his science fiction writing, instead emphasizing his attempts at “mainstream” novels with more conventional realistic plots, which very few people ever read. Even in 1981, he felt that his failure in this area was “the tragedy…of my creative life.”

But he needn’t have worried. A Scanner Darkly was his literary masterwork, in which the line between realism and science fiction thinned out into nonexistence. In fact, the stylistic conventions of science fiction writing are deliberately used to erode that line, from the very first page. Continue reading →

“Let me tell you about my mother.”

I wrote earlier that every culture revolves around a certain central idea, which is best expressed in a single word, thus allowing one to see that culture in sharp focus. I gave several examples, with the notable omission of American culture. Maybe now we can fill in this missing piece. The theme of American culture is destruction. Continue reading →

(Conclusion. Continued from part 3.)

Nabokov gave dozens of interviews and expressed hundreds of opinions, even when they were not asked for (in his translations, for example). For the most part, this material is just as fictional as his novels. Continue reading →

1884 grammar textbook quoted in the epigraph (11)

Nabokov’s foreword to the English edition (9)

(Continued from part 2.)

Nabokov despised clichés, but his life easily fits them. The Gift, his penultimate novel in Russian (the last being Other Shores), is proof that money does not buy happiness. It was written in obscurity, in Berlin, when Nabokov roomed in boarding-houses and made a living as an English tutor. The same drab life is shared by the protagonist of The Gift, and yet he is remarkably free from it. His inner world offers him an escape. In Pale Fire, a quarter-century later, it will lead only to a more restrictive prison. Continue reading →