Reading with your Spine
During his tenure at Cornell, Vladimir Nabokov famously told his students, "read with your spine." I did not at first understand this. To me it seemed incongruous, absurd, as if someone had said, "Write with your eyebrows." But after a few more moments of humbling bafflement the penny dropped: As the insectile clicking of a Geiger counter indicates the presence of radiation, so the tingling of a reader's spine should indicate that he or she is in the presence of good literature. Here are a few literary moments which I think pass Nabokov's test.
The first that comes to mind is a speciously incidental parenthesis in The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Describing the polysemous nature of the texts in the infinite library, the narrator notes that,
The effect of the last question was profound. I at once intuited, dizzyingly, a language analogous to a lenticular image or a Gestalt illusion capable of conveying two or three or perhaps innumerable meanings at once to different readers. I could not be certain that the text before me, or any text, for that matter, did not signify and radiate such a multiplicity of meanings. I could no longer be certain that the meaning I had access to was the correct or even the intended one. The book that I held in my hands was made suddenly alien. In terms of the queasy feeling of unreality that overcame me, it was much as if a hypnotist had clicked his fingers and revealed to me that the beautiful woman I was embracing was in fact a wooden hat rack.
The next tingle that comes to mind occurred while I was reading A Pale View of Hills. Readers should not be deceived by the pedestrian simplicity of Ishiguro's prose style. His entire novel is transformed by a single word in the last chapter, a slip of the tongue that collapses three characters into a one. The effect is startling, even more so than those paintings by Acimboldo and Dali where the details (fruit bowl, couch, doorway) pull together into a single face. Ishiguro achieves the effect, retroactively, with the addition of a single, tiny detail. Borges describes a "teleology of words and episodes" that is the hallmark of good literature. A third scene on my list is at the end of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where the subtle foreshadowing of Anna's tragic fate in the dreams and symbols that recur throughout the narrative (the shuddering train and the peasant's mumbled words) prepares the way for a climax that is, to borrow a journalistic cliche, shattering; an unforgettable scene that closes spine-tinglingly in an aura of coal smoke, shrieking brakes and inexorable kismet. From Nabokov's own novels there are many moments to choose from. One that stands out as being particularly spine-tingly is near the end of Look at the Harlequins! Anyone who has read it will remember Vadim's strange mental deficiency: He is unable, as he imagines himself walking down the street, to change directions; instead, he is required to rotate the world around the axis of his own point-of-view until where he wants to go is before him. Throughout the novel, I kept raising my eyebrows at his (Vadim's) complicated descriptions of this mental foible and seriously wondering where he (Nabokov) was taking me. By the end of the book, I regretted my mistrust. The masterful way Nabokov sets up and then deploys this device to bring the theme of dementia to its climax (when Vadim, aphasic, probably suffering a stroke, grips with helplessly enfeebled hands a stile he is unable to climb, at the end of a country path he is unable to retrace, since, as the reader knows, doing so would require him to pick up and rotate the entire world 180 degrees) is one of the high points of the novel and of my reading. This is a representative sample of what I believe Nabokov was instructing his students to seek in their reading. There are, of course, countless other books and scenes that might be mentioned. Ulysses alone could supply us with eight or nine galvanic screenfuls of examples, from the silver-helmeted apparition of Rudy that appears to Bloom at the end of the Nighttown episode, to the tragic cheese sandwich that that lovable homo domesticus munches alone, with one dark eye on the clock, knowing Boylan wends his unstoppable way toward 7 Eccles Street. |