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I was very troubled by _The Original of Laura_ ...
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Salon Article Considers the Place Bad Writing Holds In Our Lives
May 12th, 2010
by Katherine
For me it is a big one.
This link will take you there. It’s very interesting to read!
For consideration: how do you know if your writing is good? I’d reckon no - I mean it’s probably dangerous to be too sure about it because it’s so easy to be self-indulgent… but for me, if I didn’t think it was at least sometimes good, I wouldn’t do it.
Also, for your consideration: the point at the end about imaginary bad writing. So… sometimes writers think their writing is bad. That it needs to be destroyed. What if they are right to do so? Then it isn’t imaginary bad writing, I guess? What about The Original of Laura?
I was very troubled by The Original of Laura, which I read in part one day in a bookstore and hadn’t the heart to finish. The writing just… wasn’t that good. On the sentence level. I’d even say it was pretty bad. Nabokov. Bad. Writing. Ugh. For anyone who missed the “literary event of 2009,” Dmitri Nabokov, in an ironical, post-Hamlet, quasi-Nabokovian moment, communed with the ghost of his deceased papa and did not destroy the manuscript (index cards! like the poem in Pale Fire!!!) as per estate instructions, but instead published with Penguin. When it came out last year I:
1) flirted briefly with index cards before returning to post-its. now i have a stack of unused index cards next to my computer.
2) thought: wtf. many great works have been rescued from the flames, but this is not one of them. how? it’s kind of cool, i guess, and in some perverse way it made me feel really good about what i might be able to achieve one day, but you know they say you should never meet your heroes and i wonder if that should be extended to their rough drafts
3) lessons learned: Burn it yourself; some people have neither taste nor home trainin’. Also, family members do not make good executors.
I don’t have a point to make about any of this… Wait, yes I do. I found the entire TOoL (HAH!) business particularly troubling in that Nabokov recognized the badness (and not in the good way) of TOoL and requested its destruction, however some fooles (okay, not some, but rather a very specific few) decided it was “imaginary” (or imaginary-enough to pass) bad writing and published it anyway for posterity or profit or whatever. When really, it was just bad. The sentences were bad. The premise made me cringe. Fat man wants obliteration? I want obliteration of this manuscript. Anyway, interesting issues. Topical Salon article. For your pleasure.
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