High-Brow or Pseudo-High-Brow: the quest for the Nabokovian Brow

Published Tuesday, December 05, 2006 by Kevin Breathnach | E-mail this post

At the risk of sounding like one of those warbling thesps who bang on about the "dangers" of the stage and the "high-wire act" of live theatre, I suggest that going for a fancy style in prose can also be a risky undertaking. One textual faux pas can put the whole enterprise in jeopardy. For example, I have started reading Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children around four times. At each false start I am halted by the same odd description. A character is grandly described as having a "Nabokovian brow."

I mutter to myself: what the hell is "Nabokovian" doing here? Does Messud mean that the character has a forehead like Vladimir Nabokov's? But I'm not sure if the Russian's forehead is sufficiently renowned to deserve it being archly applied as an adjective to a fictional face. But what is more dubious about the phrase is that by dropping the term "Nabokovian" like a stone into the narrative, Messud is trying, you feel, to take a shortcut to high-brow cachet by associating her prose with Vladimir Vladimirovich's.

So said Shane Barry, author of the notable Monkey's Typewriter, almost a month ago. So read I, not without a satisfactory sense fo smugness. Smugness dissolved on the train today where, thumbing through Nabokov's foreword to his fifth novel, Glory, I happened upon this.

My wife and I, who were then still childless, rented a parlor and bedroom on Luitpoldstrasse, Berlin West, in the vast and gloomy apartment of the one-legged General von Bardeleben, an old gentleman solely occupied in working out his family tree; his large brow had a somewhat Nabokovian cast, and, indeed, he was related to the well-known chess player Bardeleben, whose manner of death resembled that of my Luzhin.

So! The Nabokovian brow went not without note prior to Claire Messud. It was not an invention of imagination, nor her pretention. The question now, I guess, is whether there is anything else of note written by Nabokov on his or his family's brow, or whether Messud saw in passing a link between Nabokov and the brow, deciding thusly to store it for future boats of necessary prentention? Until I make it through Nabokov's autobiography, the apparently labyrinthine Spoke, Memory, I'll side with Shane Barry: the term is, if not absolutely useless, then stupidly esoteric.

Labels: books, literature, nabokov

High-Brow or Pseudo-High-Brow: the quest for the Nabokovian Brow

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