Bruce Stone: "Nabokov's own pronouncements about reality--for example, that it begins "to rot and stink" unless its surface is animated by subjective perception--seem to cover both his fictional and our "real" worlds..."

JM (continuation): Joyce Carol Oates in ".The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath" THE DEATH THROES OF ROMANTICISM: The Poetry of Sylvia ... work.restory.net/.../Oates%20- ... departs from Nabokov's sentence: "Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture." to compare Sylvia Plath, whose "ego suffers dissolution in the face of even the most banal of enemies," and "such writers as Nabokov and Stevens" with their "confident and victorious ego." According to her, Plath shares with Nabokov and Stevens "the same metaphysics - the same automatic assumption that there is an "average" reality somehow distinct from us, either superior (andtherefore terrifying) or inferior (and therefore saved from "rot" and "stink" only by our godly subjective blessing)....the old romantic bias, the opposition between self and object, "I"and non-"I," man and nature." Oates ratiotinates that "Nabokov and Stevens have mastered art forms in which language is arranged and rearranged in such a manner as to give pleasure to the artist and his readers, excluding any referent to an available exterior world....it is quite natural to assume that Nabokov's writing is about the art of writing and Stevens' poems about the art of writing [ ] Nabokov and Stevens receive only the most incidental stimuli from their 'average reality' and 'obscure world,' but Plath is an identity reduced to desperate statements about her dilemma as a passive witness to a turbulent natural world."

Bruce Stone's sentence, so it seems, hasn't emphasized "average reality" per se, but what Nabokov contrasts to it in order to express how his curiosity and marvel at the world "outside" animates his fiction. .Oates asserts that Nabokov (and his twin literary companion) "excluded any referent to an available exterior world," but I didn't read JCO's sweeping article in full, for it was only an incidental find to Nabokov's quote.

btw, Nabokov's vision ( I'm thinking of J.C.Oates's conclusions here) was prophetic: "When my fancies will have been sufficiently imitated, they, too, will enter the common domain of average reality, which will be false, too, but within a new context which we cannot yet guess."

Shouldn't we rather imagine that, instead of isolating an "external world,"Nabokov was constantly erasing artificial distinctions so that he could instil life into fiction and help his words to breathe, interact, to take in and expel "reality" somehow? I'm truly intrigued by Joyce C. Oates's words that it's the "mirror and never the window...the stimulus for this art that, far from being overwhelmed by nature, turns from it impatiently, in order to construct the claustrophobic Ada or the difficult later poems of Stevens, in which metaphors inhabit metaphors ..."