![]() But Brian Boyd, in Nabokov: The American Years, his intimate yet panoramic biography, recounts the difficulty of invisible ink turning visible-not only in the protracted struggle for the publication of Lolita, but in the most liberal of literary journals. Only on his arrival in America did the marginalizing term “émigré” begin to vanish, replaced first by the notion of citizen, and ultimately by American writer-since it was in America that the invisible became invincible. And as an émigré writing in Russian in Berlin and Paris, he remained invisible to nearly all but his exiled compatriots. As an émigré fleeing the Bolshevik upheavals, and later as a refugee from the Nazis, he escaped the twentieth century’s two great tyrannies. Vladimir Nabokov was once an invisible writer suffering from three of these unhappy conditions: the public, the private, the linguistic. But what of an intrinsic, delicate, and far more ubiquitous private invisibility? All these are rampant and scandalous and undermining. ![]() Political shunning-of writers who are made invisible, and also inaudible, by repressive design-results in what might be called public invisibility, rooted in external circumstance: the thuggish prejudices of gangsters who run rotted regimes, the vengeful prejudices of corrupt academics who propose intellectual boycotts, the shallow prejudices of the publishing lords of the currently dominant languages, and finally (reductio ad absurdum!) the ideologically narrow prejudices of some magazine editors. The invisibility of recently dead writers is one thing, and can even, in certain cases (I would be pleased to name a few), bring relief but the invisibility of the living is a different matter altogether, crucial to literary continuity. Yet these eruptions of sudden mufflings and posthumous silences must be ranked entirely apart from the forced muteness of living writers who work in minority languages, away from the klieg lights of the lingua franca, and whose oeuvres linger too often untranslated. As for poor befuddled mystical Jack Kerouac and declamatory fiddle-strumming mystical Allen Ginsberg, both are diminished to Documents of an Era: the stale turf of social historians and excitable professors of cultural studies. Nothing is more poisonous to steady recognition than death: how often is a writer-lauded, feted, bemedaled-plummeted into eclipse no more than a year or two after the final departure? Already Norman Mailer is a distant unregretted noise, and William Styron a mote in the middle distance (a phrase the nearly forgotten Max Beerbohm applied to the fading Henry James). That all this came to be munificently reversed is of no moment: the denizens of Parnassus are deaf to after-the-fact earthly notice belatedness does them no good. Recall Henry James’s lamentation over his culminating New York Edition, with its considered revisions and invaluable prefaces: the mammoth work of a lifetime unheralded, unread, unsold. Recognition, hushed and inherent in the silence of the page, is a reader’s category: its stealth is its wealth.Īnd recognition itself can be fragile, a light too easily shuttered. ![]() Fame, by and large, is an accountant’s category, tallied in amazonian sales. What writers prize is simpler, quieter, and more enduring than clamorous Fame: it is recognition. (Fame merits its capital F for its fickleness, Literature its capital L for its lastingness.) Thespians, celebrities, and politicians, whose appetite for bottomless draughts of public acclaim, much of it manufactured, is beyond any normal measure, may feed hotly on Fame-but Fame is always a product of the present culture: topical and variable, hence ephemeral. ![]() Writers’ invisibility has little to do with Fame, just as Fame has little to do with Literature. Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays - Cynthia Ozick 2016 Writers, Visible and Invisible Monsters
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