There is also a surprising (for me) material available from "The
Slate" on-line , in April 1999 [ James Wood & Richard Lamb
http://www.slate.com/id/2000072/entry/1002648/ ],
constituted by eight exchanges which I superficially abridged here, risking a
severe distortion that may be corrected by going directly to the URL which,
o
nce again, was sent by James Twiggs.
(Abridged excerpts):
James Woods: Perhaps most readers have this rather
mottled experience in reading Nabokov; we tend to select from that gorgeous
prose what we like, as if playing only the white notes on the piano, and
benignly pass over what seems precious, fussy, cold, and sometimes
didactic...Nabokov's aestheticism of detail--a kind of religion of retrieval, in
which the writer must hoard and worship the tiniest noticings, for fear that
they will disappear--is related to his own lost childhood... it was natural that
Nabokov should so fiercely clutch at this invented Eden, given the historical
eruptions that shattered his life, and then we proceed to notice that the entire
edifice of his work is tremblingly built on this beautiful Freudian denial--on
Nabokov's very Freudian refusal to admit to his own Freudianism.
[Nabokov's] nery precision of language is deliciously pedantic....art does
truly triumph over history, and style over content. Yes, at moments likes this,
Nabokov is a master of the most beautiful pedantry, the only one that,
artistically speaking, counts. [...] Nabokov is a kind of detective of his own
childhood, and turns us, his readers, into private eyes, hermeneuts of the
invisible. (This code-cracking quality is sometimes enthralling and sometimes
irritating...)Somebody's future recollection might stand as a motto for all of
Nabokov's work, particularly its sense of fragility: for what you now visually
possess may tomorrow be only an invisible recollection. Unsurprisingly, it is in
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, his first novel in English, that we feel the
greatest pathos of loss...The character, Sebastan Knight, is the author of a
book called, of all things, Lost Property, in which he writes: It has always
distressed me that people in restaurants never notice the animated mysteries...
Now, this Nabokov, who told his students to "caress the divine details," can be
too pious for me, and indeed a bit empty: We don't always save the world simply
by noticing things. Clearly, then, there is noticing and noticing, and Nabokov's
kind of noticing too easily slides into a fetishism of the visual.[...] I
evade this frustration [ with Nabokov as an autobiographer] by
converting Speak, Memory out of the category of confession and into the realm of
artistic lie...My difficulties with Nabokov are aesthetic--though of course, the
aesthetic is the human... Criticism celebrates Nabokov's aestheticism as
the most refined moral warning against the dangers of that very same
aestheticism. Nevertheless, people like Brian Boyd and Richard Rorty ...
are so concerned to find the humane in Nabokov that Nabokov's aestheticism can
do no wrong, and is never found to be inhumane....I'm inclined to find fault
with Nabokov, while cherishing him for all his lusters... I feel, paradoxically,
that Nabokov is neither wholly humane nor wholly sterile. Speaking artistically,
I used to love Nabokov's variant of Shklovsky's technique, "making it strange."
But Nabokov's brilliance in this regard has had an overpowering, and not always
very fruitful, influence on two or three generations after him. First, it has
incarnated the idea--for which Flaubert is ultimately, if complicatedly,
responsible--that detail is above all visual, that the writer scans the world
with his brilliant eye, and then uses that eye to turn the world into riddling
metaphor... Second, both in practice and in teaching ("caress the divine
details"), Nabokov imparts the idea that fictional narrative is, at its highest
moments, a string of such details, a convoy of little visual perfections (again,
Flaubert is to blame here, too).Third, and consequently, the Nabokovian idea of
cherished detail and stuffed perfection is too artistic an idea for a form that
must surrender itself to the freedom of its characters. For characters are
generally not artistic at all, are they? In this respect, novels are not like
poems, and it is wrongheaded to try to turn them into poems. We do not read
novels to feel the constant artistic control of the author, but to share in the
wayward, inartistic freedom of created human beings. Nabokov was dismissive of
Chekhov's "prosaicisms," but the wonder of Chekhov's similes and metaphors is
that they are not, in this sense, "artistic" at all, but are the kinds of
connections that ordinary people--i.e. Chekhov's characters--might make.
Chekhov's involves the surrendering of the "artistic" while, of course,
retaining final artistic control; Nabokov's involves the mere assertion of
artistic control. After several hours of effort we might well come up with, in
our study, "asphalt's parakeet." But you have to know a community to let a
character hear "an expensive-sounding accordion." That takes a lifetime. If
Nabokov feels such pity, why is it such a delicious little "quiver"? --one needs
more human evocation, more ordinary sympathy, more evidence, than Nabokov
provides, before one simply believes him just because he tells us he feels it.
If Lenski really existed, as a created character, then we might believe in
Nabokov's feelings. But Lenski is just a counter, to be moved about on the
artistic board. He is a pattern. As you suggested yesterday, Nabokov is at his
best when "crystalline and cartoonish." That's not enough for me, nor for you, I
suspect.[...] After the age of 23 or so, perhaps we are all recovering from an
earlier infatuation with Nabokov's work... The old fire of infatuation may now
only be a torch of admiration, but what an awful lot there is to admire! Such
beauty ("the mobile shade of the trees"), and many, many moments of real
sympathy. At his best, despite all my strictures, Nabokov is able to wring great
pathos from the delicate games he plays.... Nabokov describes Sirin's career,
beginning in 1925 (the date of Nabokov's first novel), "until he vanished as
strangely as he had come," and then writes that: "Across the dark sky of exile,
Sirin passed, to use a simile of a more conservative nature, like a meteor, and
disappeared, leaving nothing much else behind him than a vague sense of
uneasiness." It is impossible not to be moved by this. It is not merely a game;
or rather, it is a game of high beauty. Remember that Nabokov wrote this passage
in English, in America, in 1950, having left Europe ten years before. So, it is
an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was once called Sirin and who once wrote
in Russian, and who did truly vanish "as strangely as he had come." But there is
a further delicacy. When Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American
writer, still making his way in American letters. ...So, when Nabokov wrote
those words, he was not playing quite the game of recognition he seems to be
playing now. Most of his readers will not have got the joke, and Nabokov knew
this.
Richard
Lamb: None of the books, except perhaps parts of The Gift, which
is ravishing as you say, and possibly Lolita, uses the lineaments of personal
connection to unfold. Instead, each is full of human information gleaned from
objects, documents, phenomena. These are closely examined until they yield up a
sort of quiddity or presiding spirit that our hero may draw conclusions from and
proceed, still perplexed. Meanwhile, Nabokov--as has been observed--has a way of
seeming to conspire with you over the predicament of these unfortunates. Thus
you have the bright pleasure of a sort of reverse Schadenfreude . Yet there is
an overarching pathos, for these assorted predicaments are all much too close to
the bone, they are closer to your predicament than you would care to admit, and
I imagine they were closer to Nabokov's (that impulse to puzzle out the
anguish).[...] it is here, in the tension between familiarity and
strangeness that the book....becomes merely wonderful, rather than great?
Strangeness was Nabokov's stock in trade. He was a master--the master--of a
technique in Russian fiction called ostranenie: making strange. He cultivated
the habit of seeing the world anew, from cars, to puddles, to people, to
countries. Nabokov's best images...cartoonish and crystalline, dynamic and
static at the same time: Freud would have said "uncanny."The most maddening
thing about Speak, Memory, though, if I may usher in the baleful Viennese ...,
is the author's failing to see the object of object relations. He seems
oblivious to emotional give and take. Usually Nabokov manages through various
sleights of voice to elude this problem to some extent...I could not help but
think as I read Speak, Memory, that it exhibits, as do all of the works, a sort
of virtuoso autism. [...] The case of Anna Karenina bears on our discussion. If
appreciating the book had anything, actually, to do with the interior decoration
of the Imperial Railroad System, Tolstoy would be an unfamiliar name. More
important is a moment such as that which takes place when Anna debouches from
her sleeping car, having gathered up her red handbag and perhaps taken leave of
the stout lady. At the station she meets Karenin and realizes--I can't remember
whether it's an offending hat or a new haircut that prompts this--that she no
longer loves her husband. As for Rorty's attempt to find the humane in Nabokov,
it seems pointless, but I suppose there is no other way to appreciate him from a
Pragmatist standpoint.[...] You were right, early on, to call Nabokov "the
last living embodiment of Valéry-fed, fin de siècle aestheticism." Mary
McCarthy, in her review of Pale Fire, called him the last dandy novelist (that
was before the new crop)...An equally stringent, equally 19th-century scientific
empiricism might be added to the mix. Nabokov himself practiced a sort of
serial ekphrasis, and the fact that we affect what we observe does not produce
enough cause and effect to power a novel in most hands. He is irresistable,
though. He has the mysterious charisma he called "shamanstvo." The result is the
contagion you have alluded to, and perhaps that's what I was really writing
yesterday, a hasty fable on the--avoided--subject of contagion... A story, like
Gogol's, about a man whose nose leaves him is not necessarily funny in broad
concept. What is funny is the horrifying, mundane, human bewilderment of the
noseless man recognizing that lost organ at a party and not being able to claim
it because the nose has become a privy councilor and outranks him. Nabokov
repeatedly manages this wry and wonderful trick, maybe because he had himself
lost his beloved Russian nose and, as history trumps the individual, he could
not have it back. His nose outranked him. Exasperation aside, Nabokov is, I
think, the best writer of the century who can be read for sheer pleasure:
Lolita, Pale Fire, but also The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, and maybe
Bend Sinister...
** (excerpts)
Almost since the moment Nabokov's Pale Fire was published, readers have
been engaged in a complex argument about who the "real"
narrator of the story is.
(1) The real narrator is the
person corresponding to John Shade, who does not really die but composes a work
in which he makes his own death an incident so that he can go on and compose a
commentary to his own completed poem: "Man's life as commentary to abstruse /
Unfinished poem."
(2) The real narrator is the person corresponding to Kinbote (Botkin), who
writes a poem and imagines the death of the poet so as to have an excuse to tell
the story he is really interested in -- the magical tale of his lost
kingdom of Zembla and his escape and exile.
(3) there really are two narrators in Pale Fire, one corresponding to
Shade, one to Kinbote.In "Nabokov's Pale Fire:
The Magic of Artistic Discovery," Brian Boyd presents his "two
narrator" solution. in a poem and commentary much concerned with the life
of consciousness in "another realm" after physical death...the ghosts of both
Hazel Shade and John Shade exert pressure on the narrative at various points,
sending "coded" messages that account for the resonances and reverberations
between the poem and commentary.
(4) I think that John Shade and Kinbote are creations of
a narrator resembling Vladimir Nabokov, and that this narrator "shows himself"
at a certain crucial point ...I don't mean that the narrator corresponds in any
sense to the "real" Vladimir Nabokov...Nabokov when he was alive believed in art
as something like the ultimate reality. If he explicitly survived in his art as
"Nabokov" -- as he does, for instance, as the narrator of the novel Pnin, where
he appears as rather an unpleasant character -- it would have to be as a
presence IN the story: ...
...the Nabokov-like narrator is telling the story as a voice
that, if it survives, will have exactly the same status as John Shade and
Kinbote...the Nabokov-like narrator is saying something like this: "A work of
art originates in the consciousness of a creator, but it does so in a manner of
speaking 'from the outside' ." This is what the ancient invocation of the Muses
was about... When the creator has finished a work of art, he's still present in
the world, but there is this 'other him' that is caught forever in the words of
the work that has come to birth through him." ... There is are
consciousnesses in the world that belong to literary geniuses like Shakespeare,
Puskin, and Nabokov. But when the "real" Nabokov who escaped from Russia and
came to the United States begins work on Pale Fire, his consciousness "passes
into" John Shade and becomes, for the nonce, the American poet who writes Pale
Fire. Then this same consciousness "passes into" Kinbote and becomes, for the
nonce, the mad commentator of Pale Fire. Then, as this consciousness leaves
Kinbote, it briefly shows itself as a "third consciousness" identical neither
with Shade nor Kinbote. The end of the "passing through" period -- what involves
consciousness passing on and leaving the completed work behind -- is in each
case represented as a death. For John Shade, it is getting killed by the bullet
of an assassin....the "third narrator," it is the spectre that briefly appears
at the very end of the book -- "a bigger, more respectable,
more competent Gradus"
The moment at which I see Shade "dying" and Kinbote coming
into existence as a narrator is, therefore, the moment of Gradus's
assassination attempt...watch carefully and you'll see the "transmigration of
consciousness" from one narrator to the next as the manuscript of the poem Pale
Fire passes from poet to commentator: I instinctively
backed, bellowing and spreading my great strong arms (with my left hand still
holding the poem) in an effort to halt the advancing madman and shield John,
whom I feared he might, quite accidentally, hit. . . . I felt -- I still feel --
John's hand fumbling at mine, seeking my fingertips, finding them, only to
abandon them at once as if passing to me, in a sublime relay race, the baton of
life. For the evidence for Dowling's reading, please consult his
article directly (Copyright (c) 2003 by William C.
Dowling)