WD: one recalls the trad. Christian injunction “Hate the SIN, but love the SINNER.”
Art-gossip oft suggests variants such as “A curse on ye BOTH -- maker and product.”
An extreme counterexample which I (together with the Bernards Shaw and Levin!) have learned to live with is the antisemitic prose of my (our) favourite composer, Wagner. Yet I share VN’s revulsion at the Very Rev Eliot’s unpardonable “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” [‘Rachel nee Rabinovitch/Tears at the grapes with murderous paws’ tears at my heart with CUSC memories of the soft touch of an Ethel nee Rabinovitch — mind your own business ...]
I suppose our relative “Titan-ranking” of Wagner, VN, Eliot et al (DN’s ‘pantheon’ is presumably multi-tiered like Dante’s ten-heaven’d Paradiso?) conditions us into forgiving or not forgiving particular “lapses” or “character defects.” Crudely: the opening chords of Tristan trump Richard’s maddening egomania? Or taking, almost at random, from KQK:
“What guarantee do you offer me?” asked Dreyer, relishing the entertainment.
“The guarantee of the human spirit,” the inventor said trenchantly.
One could ‘play this card’ to defend any number of VN’s curt dismissals?
The equivalent in Scouse folklore: “What would you do if you found Nabokov in bed with your wife?” “I’’ld slip out quietly and bring them a nice cuppa tea.”
In supporting VN’s anti-authoritarianism, we must naturally ponder, individually, his own _ex cathedra_ verdicts.
We skipped the Japan/Croatia WorldCup match to attend the Globe Theatre’s production of Coriolanus. Shakespeare: What an over-rated upstart shakescene sod of a crow! Greene and Voltaire were right!
Stan Kelly-Bootle
On 27/6/06 21:33, "William Dane" <wdane30@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
>
> In Lectures on Russian Lit, VN apparently says:
>
> Let me refer to one more method of dealing with literature---and this is the
> simplest and perhaps the most important one. If you hate a book, you still may
> derive artistic delight from imagining other and better ways of looking at
> things, or, what is the same, expressing things, than the author you hate
> does.
>
> I came across the quote in Omry Ronen's "Emulation, Anti-Parody,
> Intertextuality, and Annotation," Nabokov Studies 98/99.
>
> It would explain in part why VN bothered to read works that he hated.
>
> wd
>
>