Poshlust
Mates, I have been greedily reading this book and I can't set it down.
Frankly, I have never read a book like this. It brings me to structures of so many ideas and philosophies that I have never thought about. After all, I have read only a handful of fictions.
On to Poshlust.
Does anyone really get the idea of Poshlust as described in the book? I seem to get pieces of it - about the disparity between reality and banality - but not all the links. Please explain what you understand it to be. (Reference: page 23. "...The two pictures remind us of the close relationship between banality and brutality. Nabokov had a special Russian term for it: poshlust."
The role of fiction, as she explains, in their lives seems quite strange to me (I mean, I read fiction flippantly - reading it in the morning and not remembering much the next day): "...how these great works of imagnation could help us in our present trapped situation as women. We were not looking for blue-prints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novels provided and the closed spaces we were confined to." (page 19)
In the same vein it is interesting to note Nabokov's claim, also in page 19: "readers were born free and ought to remain free".
What do you think?
I am excited to be learning these things.
Upsilamba to you too!
Frankly, I have never read a book like this. It brings me to structures of so many ideas and philosophies that I have never thought about. After all, I have read only a handful of fictions.
On to Poshlust.
Does anyone really get the idea of Poshlust as described in the book? I seem to get pieces of it - about the disparity between reality and banality - but not all the links. Please explain what you understand it to be. (Reference: page 23. "...The two pictures remind us of the close relationship between banality and brutality. Nabokov had a special Russian term for it: poshlust."
The role of fiction, as she explains, in their lives seems quite strange to me (I mean, I read fiction flippantly - reading it in the morning and not remembering much the next day): "...how these great works of imagnation could help us in our present trapped situation as women. We were not looking for blue-prints, for an easy solution, but we did hope to find a link between the open spaces the novels provided and the closed spaces we were confined to." (page 19)
In the same vein it is interesting to note Nabokov's claim, also in page 19: "readers were born free and ought to remain free".
What do you think?
I am excited to be learning these things.
Upsilamba to you too!
posted by George | 10:41 PM
7 Comments:
George, welcome to the world of literature appreciation! If Nafisi accomplishes nothing else with her book, it won't have been wasted if it shows you the magnifying glass that good fiction holds to real life. Science and business teach people how to live long healthy lives with lots of money. The humanities should, and can, teach people why they are living at all.
Nabokov describes poshlust in this way:
Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature -- these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlust in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over-concern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.
I find it intriguing that his pinned-down poshlust skirts very neatly around the edges of what Nafisi has written. Also, Nafisi's reading of The Great Gatsby seems to base the validity of the novel entirely on Gatsby's unflinching grip, firm right to his death, on the poshlust of his own imagination. I found it an insightful comment that Fitzgerald is worth reading by revolutionaries as a cautionary tale of the potential cost of believing absolutely in your dreams.
I agree with you, Kevin, about the difference between Science and Arts. I am just starting to learn about some of these essentials.
On a very slightly different note, I just finished reading this article from New Yorker about Edi Rama, the mayor of Tirana, Albania. The point is that Rama is an artist and this article points out how this fellow using his artistic-leanings changed the Albanian town from rubbles to glory. Its an inspiring story!
OK, kid, now I get what poshlust is. After I read your explanation, I went back and re-read Nafisi's parts about Invitation to a Beheading - and then I understood the significance of poshlust.
By the by, has any of you read Thousand and One Nights or Invitation to a Beheading?
George, that article you posted is very interesting. I have to confess I wouldn't normally have picked up a copy of The New Yorker because the rampant liberalism galls me, but it was refreshing to read a story of how hard work, some common sense, and an appreciation for aesthetics is making a difference in such rocky soil regardless of the protagonist's political angle.
Mate, The New Yorker is very good! If you remember the magazine only for its leftist views, you are missing a lot.
It covers a wide range of topics - art, education, economics, religion, international affairs, fiction, and politics.
(Recently, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a three-part series on climate change titled The Climate of Man. It was super informative and thought provoking.)
Anyway, do yourself a favour and get a year's subscription of The New Yorker.
lol... thanks, George. I'll stick with my native environment, the far, wiggly, right wing Wall Street Journal and cull the more balanced New Yorker articles from you...
I have been doing some additional research on the term poshlust and am getting an interesting education in the Russian language in the process.
There are numerous sites discussing poshlust and they invariably tie back to Nabokov and his work. The sources all agree that the word is a Nabokov invention based closely on the Russian word: пошлость or poshlost. The Russian letter shah "ш" is transliterated "sh". The other letters have a one-to-one correspondence to the English ones in poshlost. The little "ь" at the end indicates the soft vowel sound. So, really, there are a couple reasons that Nabokov went with the alternative transliteration of poshlust. It is closer to the way the word is pronounced in Russian and it has obvious ties in meaning to the English words posh and lust.
A trip to my handy Russian dictionary revealed that the most commonly used English translations of "пошлость" are trite and platitude. So it would seem that Nabokov has taken some liberties with an existing word and tried to deepen and expand its applicability in English. I highly approve of this very functional word and plan on using it frequently until OED or MW decides to include it in their work.
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