Dear Walter Miale
Authors, unlike generals, cannot command the
riotous ranks of those ragtag bands who constitute their readership. Nabokov
did, frequently in his prefaces, like to play the hermeneutic generalissimo,
intimating that the field over which the interpretative battles of his
posthumous future might rage was already mined againsts guerilla assaults intent
on challenging, with their semantic insurgency along unsuspected defiles, the
lie of the land as he had crafted it. You cannot however checkmate the moves in
a game of infinite combinations whose future permutations you will never
have occasion to witness.
As to luck favouring the best
authors, Sappho, the greatest lyric poet of antiquity, lack Irish blood,
and her works did not survive the fires of 1204 C.E. The splendid abundance of
Aristotle's dialogues, perhaps on par with the otherwise incomparable works of
his mentor Plato, did not survive the damp of Skepsis' cellars, as his lecture
notes, scarcely commendable for their literary genius, did. We have dull
Manilius with his fluently banal volumes on astronomy, whom luck favoured over
the dazzling genius of Heraclitus. We have but a 16th part of the Satyricon of
Petronius, the greatest novel of antiquity, but numerous specimens of late
hellenistic romances. To turn to the modern period, whole stacks of libraries
fatten on the omnia opera of forgotten hacksmiths, while masterpieces
have consistently struggled to find a publisher ( John
Kennedy Toole and his 'A Confederacy of Dunces', being a late
case).
Of
course, you mean the best authors are lucky in the readers they attract. But
luck has nothing to do with that. Genius may be ignored, but not for long, once
it is noticed. Some notably tiresome books have attracted readers of
praeternatural genius willing to spend a large part of their lifetimes
elucidating the finer points of drabness. Manilius again, who seduced the
palmary acuity of three of the greatest readers of the last five hundred years,
Scaliger, Bentley and Housman.
Regards
Peter Dale
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, August 12, 2006 5:00
AM
Subject: [NABOKV-L] [Fwd: Re: [NABOKV-L]
monte-fonte]
-------- Original Message --------
>...many a salutary caution against over-reading what authors,
>especially brilliant ones, write, as if every divined association a
>sequence of words may conjure up were necessarily part and parcel of
>authorial intentions, and not, in good part, simply the ingenious
>outcome of ingenuous obsessions on the part of the reader.
So true. But aren't the best authors (as the best generals are
purported to be) the lucky ones?
Walter Miale
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