Hafid Bouazza:
"Jansy, you've said it yourself: your passion is old fashioned. Brian Boyd's
masterful and loving essay stresses a new fashioned Nabokov, albeit a
fragmentary one...Let Nabokov's change clear your eyes 'with euphrasy and rue',
like Milton's Adam's eyes by the angel Michael. It is not to the reader to
shape the writer, it is up to the writer to form and surprise the reader...If
there is a sense of dissapointment, it is not Nabokov who has let us down, for
when and what did he promise us? If anything, delight, and the whole change in
Boyd's attitude towards TOoL is a very strong and moving illustration of this:
re-discovered delight!"
JM: Brian Boyd
does, in fact, explain how his "estimation of The Original of Laura has
changed dramatically" and the manner in which his initial
disappointment... was substituted by present enthusiasm for the
novel's "strong beginning, a vivid middle, a wry end, and an already
intricate design."
Boyd adds that, if the
characters are unsympathetic, we can later discover that "the heroine
Flora is deliciously unlikable, and her husband, the neurologist Philip Wild, is
an unforgettable presence ...his brilliant brain trying to erase his
feet."
In his understanding, "Nabokov's
descriptions of sex here hilariously unappetizing, prodigiously unsatisfying
emotionally and often physically comic in their painful shortcomings." For
BB, "if there's little plot tension there's also headlong action from
reckless Flora and comic inertia from Wild's repeated self-erasures." Boyd
believes that although "Nabokov
has focused on sex before, but never has he shown it so divorced from
feeling" and that he "surely amuses and appalls us in a new way
with the sexual activity he depicts."
Boyd also
finds substitute pleasures, to its lack of suspense, in "the contrasts of
helter-skelter narration and meditative stasis, and the puzzles of who has
created, and who has obliterated, whom." Another point (the sixth) relates to "Philip
Wild's obsession with willing his own death. Wild's quest is certainly singular.
But many of us have wished to shed intense pain or discard excess weight. Wild
wishes both. Many have sought to train the mind to control and transcend the
self, through meditation, and Wild has not only the shape of the fattest Buddha
but the same urge to reach nirvana (the text makes references to both) and
to eliminate the self.."
B. Boyd believes that "Nabokov has
some sympathy with Wild in his humiliation, and so should we... All of us might
wish at times we could control our own death or restoration but Nabokov surely
presents Wild's as exactly the wrong way to transcend death. Eliminating the
self promises no worthwhile passage beyond life..."
JM: Hafid, do you mean to
indicate that what Nabokov has inverted let no one break
asunder? Are you suggesting that we must find pleasure and delight in
a "deliciously unlikable" caricatural woman with her psychotic
fatso of a husband, who can only screw her as pictured in
an Italian comedy of the past?
Besides, why should "we, readers," follow
the latest trend, find it shameful to be "old-fashioned" or submit
to all sorts of adaptative psychologies that
sympathetically indicate, for example, how "many of us have wished to shed
intense pain" and "sought to train the mind to control and transcend the self,"
before concluding that "if Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild...so
should we"?
Another famously pompous and ridiculous
figure once said "to thine own self be true" (Polonius,Act I, scene iii of
Hamlet) and I confess
that I'm not afraid of accepting this kind of "ridiculousness" when
I refuse to follow Nabokov's very post-post modern lead into
sadism and nihilism.
I don't read
Nabokov "chronologically" so I cannot evolve in line with this
(purported) evolutionary theory.
(btw: I was not
disappointed in Nabokov, as a writer.)