Matt Roth [to
J.Friedman] "You asked whether or not VN's parodies
ever employ "bad writing" in something the length of "PF." I say yes...and no.
You could argue that Despair is a whole novel of "bad writing." ...we could say
that the book as a whole is a parody of the solipsistic artist, or the artist
who can't tell art from life, as some have put it..."
JM: The ellaboration about the
artist "who can't tell art from life" was magisterially developped by
Page Stegner, in his introduction to "The Portable Nabokov."
The way M.R. referred to the "solipsistic
artist" in Hermann and Kinbote, made me think of Nabokov's own penchant for
self-parody.
I wonder if HH, Hermann or CK would
represent a kind of "meta-solipsism," and if this procedure, in turn,
was not employed by VN, among others, to parody the "stream of
consciousness," in the spirit of William James' own considerations ( "stream of
consciousness" as distinct from introspection).
..........................
The reference to Dryden, in EO, is on 3/page
149: "The play of inner assonances that is so striking in EO
and another poems by Pushkin occurs, not infrequently, in English verse. One
remembers Dryden's beautifully counterpointed lines (in his imitation, 1692, of
Juvenal, Satires, VI) in which the confusion of intoxication is rendered by
words echoing and mimicking each other (ll.422-23;my
italics):
When vapours to their
swimming brains advance,
And double tapers on the
table dance.
"Table" combines the first
syllable of "tapers" and the second of "double"; "vapours" rhymes with "tapers";
and the initial consonants of these two words are repeteated in the terminal
rhyme, "advance-dance."
These comments amply illustrate
Nabokov's finely-tuned ear for "plexed artistry." Equally
it shows that Nabokov did not only maintain "strong opinions" against
bad poets, as if trying to oust them from the mainstream "artistic
survival" in a most darwinistic negative way. He could
equally high-light qualities in poets he often didn't
fully appreciate.