James Twiggs: In
case they haven't already been reported (I've lost track), here are links to two
substantial essays by well-known writers. The first is generally favorable, the
second highly critical: THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, Flashes of Flora by John
Lanchester http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23491; EXCERPT FROM
SPEAK, NABOKOV by Michael Maar http://www.nplusonemag.com/speak-nabokov
JM: Great additions*,
Jim.
Chesterton's Father Brown
concluded that the best place to hide a leaf is in the forest and there are
plenty of mysterious leaves that demand to be discovered in loving detail
- together with trees and the entire forest- in Nabokov. As
I see it these items, as art, are themselves more fascinating than the
exploration of a "true Nabokov," such as Maar purported to do by lifting
VN's mask(s).
But I agree with him that "dying is
not fun" but, rather, it is very "funest" ( a word VN employed for
dark beauties in KQK)
The guesome escatological descriptions and
the masochistic trend or, as Lanchester notes, "the emphasis on physical
disintegration" are nothing new in VN, though.
Nevertheless, in TOoL,
the "process of dying by
auto-dissolution offered the greatest
ecstasy known to man....Dissolution, in fact, is a marvelously apt term here,
for as you sit relaxed in this comfortable chair (narrator striking its
armrests) and start destroying yourself, the first thing you feel is a mounting
melting from the feet upward" . Such a description may be fruitfully
compared to Lanchester's, on how Wild holds
Flora because the " only way he could possess
her was in the most [] position of copulation: he reclining on cushions: she
sitting in the fauteuil of flesh with her back to him."). The next step
leads one to recollect how, on a different key, Humbert
Humbert sometimes sat Lolita in a sofa-like lap (not because he was fat
like Wild), in order to achieve a particular kind of "dissolution"
through orgastic "little deaths."
In that case, Wild's obliterative
prospect may become something akin to a sexual ecstasy?
.................................................................................................................................
* excerpts: In Michael Maar's "Speak, Nabokov"
Nabokov's work is presented as "a forest in which it is easy to lose
oneself and see nothing but the trees."[...] and the author tries to
reveal "the true Nabokov" hidden "behind the mask of Nabokov's
magisterial public persona".For Maar ( in the English version)
"from an artistic perspective The Original of Laura is disappointing-all the
more so as the hints Dmitri dropped about the new aesthetic summit his father
had supposedly reached were so rhapsodic as to make the mouths of Nabokovians
water," while in actuality descriptions (such as Wild's dissolution) are
"uncharacteristically dreary and colorless... Laura is a
far cry from the dark metaphysical cosmos into which Nabokov's great novels draw
us. The sad truth is: dying is not fun... All the expansive elaborations on old
age in Laura-involving flatulence, constipation, diarrhea, foot odor and
prostate tumors-strike a downright grim, masochistic
note...Sick and dying, Nabokov ruminates in his literary
testament on the book that made him famous. Word has gotten around that a
child-woman accompanied him as a theme all his life"...For Nabokov's admirers,
the tomb needn't have been opened..." http://www.nplusonemag.com/speak-nabokov
In "Flashes of
Flora," John Lanchester: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23491 emphasizes
the "thread of loss" that
traverses VN's writings. For him the dry tone of
academics "make Nabokov's oeuvre seem narrower, more purely
intellectual..." and he cites "The Sublime Artist's Studio" (Gavriel
Shapiro) and "The Quill and the Scalpel" (Stephen H. Blackwell), to
conclude that "these serious, sober, worthwhile books also feel as if
they are interring him ever more deeply..." Lanchester
follows Wood's distinction between "signature"
and "style" and, for him, TOoL "in its finished form would have been
full of those flashes of Nabokovian signature" which are so pleasurable to
read. Also for him "the emphasis on physical disintegration is something of
a new note in Nabokov's work."