Jim Twiggs:Jansy is wrong in
thinking that I share Boyd's views about the importance of VN's personal and
metaphysical beliefs. Quite the contrary. But because Boyd is VN's biographer
and best-known interpreter, his views on the matter have to be considered in any
discussion. Because the problem is so beautifully and concisely stated by D.
Barton Johnson, it's worth quoting again the passage that Boyd was responding
to:"Much of Nabokov’s work is best understood in terms of the possible survival
of the individual consciousness (personality and memory) after death. Death is,
speculatively, merely the dividing line between levels of consciousness. These
levels (or worlds), one exercising a degree of influence over the events in the
other, form the basic conceptual categories underlying most, if not all of
Nabokov’s work[...]Apart from whatever heuristic value they may have, our
reigning paradigms should be regarded with scepticism, lest they deflect
attention from the area of Nabokov’s greatest originality--the brilliance of his
style and wit." --Johnson and Boyd, “Prologue: The Otherworld,” in Nabokov’s
World, Vol. 1: The Shape of Nabokov’s World (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002), p.
23.
JM: Boy, am I glad I was in
the wrong when I missed Jim's irony and was led astray by
the "Johnson and Boyd" reference. I should have known
better! Johnson's words JT quoted again
are, in fact, beautiful and extremely concise.
I'd been re-reading the exchange between James
Woods and Richard Lamb (Slate, April 26,1999), when the first one
observes that Nabokov is a writer hes loves "ambivalently" (
and I intimately substituted "ambivalently" for the
etymologically unsound "polivalently" for my own kind of Nablove).
Now, after encountering Johnson's overview of the "various levels
of consciousness...exercising a degree of influence over the events in the
other... form the basic concecptual categories...," various
suspended incongruities settled down all of a sudden. Johnson's
clarification helped me to
extricate conflitcting ethical, metaphysical, religious and
literary threads and dismiss, after that, a host of musings about N's
actual beliefs in a hereafter, or actual sources, as if they mattered
when one is enjoying Nabokov's literary creations and
strategies. Considered retrospectively this
conclusion implies a sort of "elementary, my dear Watson"
mood, but it was inaccessible to me until now.