Liberal Ironists and the 'Gaudily Painted Savage': On Richard Rorty's Reading of Vladimir Nabokov
by Leona Toker
page three of three

But what if it is the belief in the moral effect of moments of "aesthetic bliss" that lies behind Nabokov's placing "the highest value" upon them?19 According to Henri Bergson, whom Rorty also mentions in conjunction with Nabokov's philosophy (CIS 152 n14), perception is delayed or virtual action: we tend to see and hear that which is relevant to our choosing a course of action. The education of the senses consists in our learning to perceive precisely what is not relevant for any practical endeavor, to perceive details for their own sake: "Conscious perception signifies choice, and consciousness mainly consists in this practical discernment. The diverse perceptions of the same object, given by my different senses, will not, then, when put together, reconstruct the complete image of the object; they will remain separated from each other by intervals which measure, so to speak, the gaps in my needs. It is to fill these intervals that an education of the senses is necessary."20 By educating our senses we thus learn to fulfill Kant's criterion for aesthetic experience, namely, disinterestedness. Given a spot of joy, our disinterested perception of what is useless reenacts some of the author's own "rapture," which, Nabokov says, "has no conscious purpose in view but which is all-important in linking the breaking up of the old world with the building up of a new one."21

Yet the education of the senses means learning to perceive not only what gives us joy; it may also increase our responsiveness to the irrelevant pain of another human being, to that which makes an appeal to pity rather than to the sense of the beautiful.22 The education of the senses may thus help us shed that kind of unintentional callousness which George Eliot may also have had in mind when she remarked that "we are all of us born in moral stupidity"23; though it is obviously far less effective in the case of the deliberate, entrenched, self-protective callousness of the kind that Arthur Koestler clamored against in "On Disbelieving Atrocities."24

In the art of living, "beauty plus pity" has to be achieved through the hard work of attention to others and critical self-inspection. Literary immortality is not just the preservation of one's name in the annals but the possibility to prolong, beyond the life-span of one's generation, the effect that the treasures of one's own consciousness may have on sharpening the sensibilities and promoting the self-inspection of others.

Nabokov did want to believe in some form of the survival of consciousness but did not envision this survival as a reward for artistic achievement. The connection between the two might rather work the other way round: contact with the transcendent realm, in the shape of inspiration, or intuition, or insight, or mystical experience, might help to produce literary work of lasting value.

In an attempt to diagnose what it might feel like to have to say sentences like Nabokov's (a risky business), Rorty claims that Nabokov disbelieves in social change, perhaps in response to the early tragic loss of his beloved father whose whole life was dedicated to liberal reform (CIS 156). Nabokov was, indeed, not sanguine about the possibility of massive social improvement, though he was quite outspoken about his absolute preference for a pluralistic democratic society. Mainly, however, he believed in the distribution of roles between a journalist and a writer. Orwell and Solzhenitsyn were, in his economy, journalists.25 A writer should deal with that which is "real" to him, "real" meaning broadly, that to which one devotes concentrated attention. Thus in the account of his life in Europe before World War II, he refers to the "flat and transparent figures cut out of cellophane," the "perfectly unimportant strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory cities we, emigres, happened to dwell," and then mentions an occasional brutal shift in the sense of reality: "occasionally . . . the spectral world through which we serenely paraded our sores and our arts would produce a kind of awful convulsion and show us who was the discarnated captive and who the true lord."26 Nabokov's total freedom from paranoia stemmed from not allowing the socio-political oppression to become "real" in his inner world. Extrapolating this attitude, he imagines "fellow dreamers" trapped in totalitarian states yet still roaming the earth and keeping "to these same irrational and divine standards during the darkest and most dazzling hours of physical danger, pain, dust, death."27 It is only indirectly that this passage does deal, as Rorty has put it, with "the nature of moral motivation" (CIS 154).

Rorty believes that Nabokov has created "a private mythology of a special elite--artists who were good at imagery, . . . whose lives were a synthesis of tenderness and ecstasy, who were candidates for literal as well as literary immortality, and who, unlike his father, placed no faith in general ideas about general measures for general welfare" (CIS 168). Nabokov would probably define this elite differently, but, in any case, he did not grant it any privileges apart from the privilege of being his favorite reading. He did not tolerate cruelty, callousness, vulgarity-- barring these, he was prepared to recognize the intrinsic value of different human goals, intuitions, and institutions. Rorty, however, tends to dismiss whatever does not stand the test of intellectual probing. He dreams of a utopia in which everyone is a liberal ironist (CIS xv-xvi ff). Utopias are, of course, implicitly exclusive and based on a denial of the multiplicity of incommensurable human goals. This is why, as Isaiah Berlin notes, there has been a marked decline of the Utopian thinking in the West.28 At the risk of raising the ghost of the Cretan liar's paradox, one could note that even in Rorty's entirely pluralist utopia of liberal ironists, the very commitment to pluralism would have to be regarded as contingent. I would be grateful to be convinced that Rorty's ideal community of liberal ironists is not a fantasy of turning each benighted one of us, each "gaudily painted savage" (the make-up may be by the best advertised designers) into a member of the Mannheimean intellectual elite--whereupon this elite would shed its exclusiveness.

However that might be, one of the roads towards this utopia is through expanding human solidarity--not, Rorty explains, on the basis of an admission of some common human core, but through emphasizing what one shares with others,29 in particular, with the formerly marginalized groups (CIS 196). For Nabokov the need for solidarity with marginalized groups is not an issue because it is self-evident (for this reason he would find it an uninteresting subject, just as for a set of different reasons Rorty finds it philosophically uninteresting to talk about "the Truth"30): far more important is it to learn to get rid of one's solidarity with, say, a Humbert-type intellectual who may seem to be "one of us"; get rid of it not because of his belonging to a some group (emigrants, Semitic types, people with weird sexual preferences) but because of his individual moral qualities or acts, the damage that he allows himself to do. This is in tune with the Bergsonian view that not everybody deserves our solidarity. The suppression of solidarity would not, of course, mean, for instance, denial of succor in a medical emergency31--we do certain things out of moral commitments that can be defined without the notions of "solidarity" or "identification"; rather, it would mean that tout comprendre does not have to mean tout pardonner. Bergson, moreover, believes that there is a limit to one's mechanical expansion of sympathies: love for humanity as a whole cannot be systematically worked towards--it can only be a product of religious experience.32 Rorty, indeed, refuses to view human solidarity as identification with "humanity as such"--this he believes is "a philosopher's invention, an awkward attempt to secularize the idea of becoming one with God" (CIS 198). What I believe to be misleading in his redescription of Nabokov is probably based on unwillingness to credit the experience that Nabokov describes as the sense of "oneness with sun and stone."33 Nabokov, however, is prepared to admit solidarity with "the most gaudily painted savage" not merely on the basis of, say, shared parental feelings or love of nature, but also on the basis of shared intuitions that defy the strictures of intellect.

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19. In the past I tended to see this value in Schopenhauerian terms: during moments of aesthetic transport the Will of which an individual is a finite objectification is silenced and hence subdued. Such moments are therefore akin to those of immortal discoveries--say of a new kind of butterfly: the Will here comes to know itself and moves closer to self-cancellation. In any case, by-passing rationality and intelligence, individual aesthetic transport may have an ennobling effect on individual personalities. The limitations of this view become, however, apparent when one recollects the great numbers of genuine lovers of art, music, poetry among the mass murderers of the present century.

20. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory. Authorized translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: Allen and Unwin, 1929), pp. 46-47. 21. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 378.

22. Cf. Iris Murdoch: "The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe. Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and reveals it together with a sense of unity and form. This form often seems to us mysterious because it resists the easy patterns of fantasy . . . Art transcends selfish and obsessive limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer. It is a kind of goodness by proxy. Most of all it exhibits to us the connection, in human beings, of clear realistic vision with compassion. The realism of a great artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and justice." The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), pp. 86-87.

23. George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 243.

24. See Koestler, The Yogi and the Comissar and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), pp. 94-99.

25. As journalists they were entitled to his admiration. Nabokov admired Solzhenitsyn's courage and sent him a welcoming private letter on his arrival to the West; see Vladimir Nabokov, Selected Letters 1940-1977, ed. Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1989), pp. 496, 527-27. 26. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, p. 276.

27. Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, p. 373. This may have been the reason for Nabokov's appreciation of Sasha Sokolov's The School for Fools; see Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), p. 656; and D. Barton Johnson, "Vladimir Nabokov and Sasha Sokolov," The Nabokovian 15 (1985): 29-39.

28. See Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (London: John Murray, 1990), pp. 1-48.

29. Rorty's concept of solidarity is associated with his concept of "personhood" as "a matter of decision rather than knowledge, an acceptance of another being into fellowship rather than a recognition of a common essence" Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, p. 38). Cf. Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), pp. 319-334.

30. One of these reasons is Rorty's denial of the intrinsic moral value of truth; for a response to Rorty's comments, in CIS, on the issue of truth in Orwell's 1984 see Cora Diamond, "Truth: Defenders, Debunkers, Despisers." In Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy, ed. L. Toker (New York: Garland, 1993), pp. 195-221.

31. I am grateful to Cora Diamond whose stimulating comments have made me rethink this and a number of other issues while working on the penultimate version of the paper.

32. "We cannot repeat too often that it is not by preaching the love of our neighbour that we can obtain it. It is not by expanding out narrower feelings that we can embrace humanity. However much our intelligence can convince itself that this is the line of advance, things behave differently. What is simple for our understanding is not necessarily so for our will. In cases where logic affirms that a certain road should be the shortest, experience intervenes, and finds that in that direction there is no road. The truth is that heroism may be the only way to love. Now, heroism cannot be preached, it has only to show itself, and its mere presence may stir others to action. . . . Religion expresses this truth in its own way by saying that it is in God that we love all other men." Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra and Cloudesley Brereton (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1954) p. 53.