"Nabakov on Bleak House"

"Nabakov on Bleak House"

In 1948, Vladimir Nabakov was teaching at Cornell and gave a famous series of lectures on literature. These are the introductory words from his lecture on Charles Dickens' Bleak House, as reprinted in the Bantam Classics edition of the book:

"We are now ready to tackle Dickens.
We are now ready to embrace Dickens.
We are now ready to bask in Dickens.
In our dealings with Jane Austen we
had to make a certain effort in order
to join the ladies in the drawing room.
In the case of Dickens we remain at
table with our tawny port."

"With Dickens we expand...We just
surrender ourselves to Dickens's
voice--that is all. If it were possible
I would like to devote the fifty minutes
of every class meeting to mute medi-
tation, concentration, and admiration
of Dickens. However, my job is to
direct and rationalize those medi-
tations, that admiration. All we have
to do when reading Bleak House is to
relax and let our spines take over.
Although we read with our minds,
the seat of artistic delight is between
the shoulder blades. That little shiver
behind is quite certainly the high-
est form of emotion that humanity
has attained when evolving pure art
and pure science. Let us worship the
spine and its tingle. Let us be proud
of our being vertebrates, for we are ver-
tebrates tipped at the head with a divine
flame. The brain only continues the spine:
the wick really goes through the whole
length of the candle. If we are not capable
of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy
literature, then let us give up the whole
thing and concentrate on our comics, our
videos, our books- of-the week. But I
think Dickens will prove stronger."

-Benjamin Harris