Jay Livingston: That brunette on his
arm...was Lolly Hayes, an up-and-coming starlet. Hope you had fun,
Clark.
And didn't Rita Hayworth look stunning last
night...
JM: Besides Lolita Haze, we find
Rita...[Cf. I would be a knave to say, and the reader a fool to believe, that
the shock of losing Lolita cured me of pederosis[...] Solitude was corrupting me
[...] This is how Rita enters the picture.[...]She was twice Lolita's age
and three quarters of mine: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult[...]
— I think she had some Spanish or Babylonian blood[...]Dear
Rita! We cruised together for two dim years, from summer 1950 to summer
1952[...] I told her I was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's bully.
Rita solemnly approved of the plan[...]
Stan
K-B (on consistency, to GS): [...]Wonderful
citations that remind us of VN's blistering genius _as a novelist_. One of the
hallmarks is the ability to create "convincing" characters who may or may not
"agree" with the writer's current opinions[...]It's not "inconsistent" to
replace or refurbish your opinions in the light of new evidence or fresh
pondering. Au contraire, that's central to the rational intellect embodied in
the "scientific method." Novelists/dramatists, more so than poets, perhaps, have
the luxury (duty?) of inventing "mouths" through which opinions can be mooted
and bandied pro'n'con.
JM: While searching for Rita, in "Lolita", I came
across a spec ial instance of "consistency", directly from HH's mouth (more
than the recognition that his "accursed nature could not change", the
symptomatic consistency like the scorpion's in the old parable).
Here it is: I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends
with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the
reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never
shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes
forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never
will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely
tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between
the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our
friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed
for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the
second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder.
Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our
minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is
to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of
him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not
only anomalous but unethical. We would prefer not to have known at all
our neighbor, the retired hot-dog stand operator, if it turns out he has just
produced the greatest book of poetry his age has
seen.
Umberto Eco
describes the immutable qualities in epics, fairy-tales, even novels in which
“characters get installed as natives in our memory, as if they’d existed
ever since in our parents’ memory: young as Methusalem and millennial, like
Peter Pan.” For him, when we learn that things shall always happen in
the way they are told in a story, despite our fears and desires, we may then
experience a thrill that results from one’s realization that we are submitted to
an inexorable destiny. Unaltered relationships and characters in works of
fiction express one of the functions of literature, namely, to instruct the
reader about the unfathomable design of fate: “Unchangeable stories teach us
how to die and literature humbles us into accepting death and destiny”
(Eco,2001).
If historical facts can be variously interpreted
and testimonies modified, we are often invited to review our
convictions, should they prove to have been mistaken. The need of constant
reformulations doesn’t arise in literature: sentences such as Sherlock Holmes
was unmarried, or Anna Karenin killed herself are always valid as original
“textual facts” that cannot be refuted.
In this respect
we find Nabokov’s (1944) own assessment*. In a letter to Edmund Wilson he
mentioned, informally, that whereas science is always open to revision (changing
the perspective from where we look at nature), a work of art is not: his
concepts about classification of butterflies or on evolution might “remain a wonderful and indispensable thing for some 25 years,
after which another fellow will show how wrong I was in this or that. Herein
lies the difference between science and
art".
....
* already
brought up in the list in postings related to "science and art".