While checking
dates for cosmicomic wordplay (Calvino's and Nabokov's)* I found
Conrad Brenner ( 1958, The New Republic). Here is a paragraph on Nabokov
humor:
"
Nabokov's humor, though, is indescribably original:
Uncle
alone in the house with the children said he'd dress up to amuse them. After a
long wait, as he did not appear, they went down and saw a masked man putting the
table silver into a bag. "Oh uncle," they cried in delight. "Yes, isn't my
make-up good?" said Uncle, taking his mask off. Thus goes the Hegelian syllogism
of humor. Thesis: Uncle made himself up as a burglar (a laugh for the children);
antithesis: it was a burglar (a laugh for the reader); synthesis: it still was
Uncle (fooling the reader ) . . . .
None
of the dazzling trickery is practiced for its own sake, but always as the key to
individual scenes or the seminal conflict. Humor becomes a swathe blighting all
those falsely heavy approaches to life and literature, disclosing by the way its
own irresistible angles. The strength of Nabokov lies in the check (and balance)
of the sinister obbligato, Nabokov's figures teeter on the edge of the void,
take one grotesque step, and blunder their way to the bottom. They are
neither Stavrogins, men without qualities, men of action fighting death
with destiny, nor simple victims of assorted "forces." In their own
place, they aspire and fall on the strings of a vision profoundly matured
rather than obsessed. Still, there is no lack of demons; they are there,
convulsed, jerking those strings. Nabokov's pattern of limbo, search,
disguise and discord is played in a variety of keys.
.."
Books and Arts: Nabokov: The Art of the
Perverse
June 23, 1958 By Conrad Brenner
www.tnr.com/...and.../nabokov-the-art-the-perverse
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Nabokov's sentence
antecedes Calvino's. It is found in his biography of Gogol (1959)
Brenner quotes from chapter
5: "The
truth is that the play [The Government Inspector] it not a "comedy" at all, just
as Shakespeare's dreamplays Hamlet or Lear cannot be called "tragedies." A bad
play is more apt to be good comedy or good tragedy than the incredibly
complicated creations of such men as Shakespeare or Gogol. . . . Gogol's play is
poetry in action, and by poetry I mean the mysteries of the irrational as
perceived through rational words. True poetry of that kind provokes--not
laughter and not tears--but a radiant smile of perfect satisfaction, a purr of
beatitude…."
and includes the needed
reference: "It [Gogol's style] gives one the sensation of
something ludicrous and at the same time stellar, lurking constantly around the
corner--and one likes to recall that the difference between the comic side of
things, and their cosmic side, depends upon one sibilant...."