Subject
Nabokov and the History of the Muse (fwd)
Date
Body
EDITOR'S NOTE. I was so enthralled by Daphne Merkin's "spanking" essay,
that I missed far more significant item below.
---------------------------------
This is probably already old news to many Nabokovians, but Arlene Croce's
essay, "Is the Muse Dead?", which appears in the special Feb. 26-March 4
Women's Issue of THE NEW YORKER, discusses at some length what Croce sees
as LOLITA's crucial contribution to a literary tradition that has (in her
characterization) seemingly come to an end. One of the essay's middle
sections focuses especially on Nabokov, Balanchine, and Stravinsky as
'emissaries of Petersburg modernism' who all made important use of the
muse. The latter two members of this triad occupy Croce's attention at
somewhat greater length than does the former, but there are several
interesting comments on Nabokov nevertheless. A sample:
'As the creations of men, Lolita and Balanchine's ballerinas seem to me
so utterly miraculous that I would like to think of them as anomalies, in
a category of their own. But in fact their subtlety and irony depend on
that "essentialism" which modern feminists decry in the idea of the
Muse. Nabokov's Lolita needs the old Symbolist visions of damnation to
be fully appreciated: she is the temptress in a new guise, the teen-ager
with the dirty smile on the cover of LIFE. (I mean LIFE then, not now.)
No woman could have created Lolita. . . ' (166).
Worth a look.
Brian Walter
bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu
that I missed far more significant item below.
---------------------------------
This is probably already old news to many Nabokovians, but Arlene Croce's
essay, "Is the Muse Dead?", which appears in the special Feb. 26-March 4
Women's Issue of THE NEW YORKER, discusses at some length what Croce sees
as LOLITA's crucial contribution to a literary tradition that has (in her
characterization) seemingly come to an end. One of the essay's middle
sections focuses especially on Nabokov, Balanchine, and Stravinsky as
'emissaries of Petersburg modernism' who all made important use of the
muse. The latter two members of this triad occupy Croce's attention at
somewhat greater length than does the former, but there are several
interesting comments on Nabokov nevertheless. A sample:
'As the creations of men, Lolita and Balanchine's ballerinas seem to me
so utterly miraculous that I would like to think of them as anomalies, in
a category of their own. But in fact their subtlety and irony depend on
that "essentialism" which modern feminists decry in the idea of the
Muse. Nabokov's Lolita needs the old Symbolist visions of damnation to
be fully appreciated: she is the temptress in a new guise, the teen-ager
with the dirty smile on the cover of LIFE. (I mean LIFE then, not now.)
No woman could have created Lolita. . . ' (166).
Worth a look.
Brian Walter
bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu