'The Sudden Erection of Your Small Dorsal Hairs'

The medical technician performing the echocardiogram asked me to lie on my side, not “dorsally.” I thought first of the triangular fin on the back of a porpoise. Then I thought of Nabokov’s 1966 interview with Alfred J. Appel, who asks, “Do you think literary criticism is at all purposeful, and if so, what kind of criticism would you point to?” He replies: 

“My advice to a budding literary critic would be as follows. Learn to distinguish banality. Remember that mediocrity thrives on ‘ideas.’ Beware of the modish message. Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint. Ignore allegories. By all means place the ‘how’ above the ‘what’ but do not let it be confused with the ‘so what.’ Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.”

 

The reference to “small dorsal hairs” is characteristic of Nabokov’s imagination – physical, playful, precise. He was a lepidopterist. His remark  reminds me of the test for poetry A.E. Housman proposed in the Leslie Stephen Lecture at Cambridge (Nabokov’s alma mater) in 1933, published as “The Name and Nature of Poetry”: “Experience has taught me, when I am shaving of a morning, to keep watch over my thoughts, because, if a line of poetry strays into my memory, my skin bristles so that the razor ceases to act.”

 

Such sensitivity and openness to a text is part of the “personal talent” Nabokov commends. He endorses in critics and other readers sensitivity mingled with attention to detail and independence of thought. So much criticism is written in lockstep with prevailing fashion. Janet Lewis, in a poem from 1930, “Lines to a Kitten” (Poems Old and New 1918-1978), describes her cat as a “morsel of suavity.” It sits on her knee and intently watches a fly six feet across the room:

 

“Only the great

And you, can dedicate

The attention so to one small thing.”