EJ Epstein writes: ".What I had not taken into account was Nabokov’s theory
that great novelists create pictures in the minds of their readers that go far
beyond what they describe in the words in their books."
For me, Epstein's assertion is simultaneously true and false. On the
side of "true" I have my personal reaction to Nabokov's words, when they depart
from signs and sounds to carry me beyond cosmos and chaos ( I'll risk to compare
this effect to a sensation of "patternings" or John Shade's "web of sense" ).
On the side of "false" I must place Epstein's account about the
details he extracted from a movie to respond to Nabokov's very literal
request.
When I searched the internet for a ready quote to demonstrate VN's
'literalness", either from "Good Readers, good writers..,." or
from his Lectures on Literature, I was unable to find what I was looking
for. However, I got in touch with one interesting article, the Zemblan
"Nabokov's Poetics of Vision, or, What Anna Karenina is Doing in Kamera Obskura"
by Thomas Seifrid.
: " The compartment in which Anna sits pondering recent events
(which also, incidentally, comes equipped with a very screen-like window) and
the book
she holds before her eyes turn out to be but large- and small-scale
versions of the same theater of vision: a literal darkroom whose architectonics
of sight is as important for Tolstoy as is its indisputable evocation of Plato's
cave (see also Mandelker 132-3). The scene thus turns out to be a richly
redundant mis-en-abime of a sort that Nabokov might very well have noticed.[In
his lecture on the novel Nabokov quotes this passage at significant length;
Lectures on Russian Literature 155-9]
The link sent by Steve Blackwell came in a propitious moment when we
consider present VN-L exchanges about Nabokov's "ambiguity".
Perhaps the correct term is not "ambiguity," but another quality that
doesn't rely exclusively on grammar, logic or good-sense.
.........................................
* Since I didn't know who he was (he isn't Jason Epstein...), I
checked in Wiki:
"Edward Jay Epstein (born 1935) is an American investigative journalist
and a former political science professor at Harvard, UCLA, and MIT.While a
graduate student at Cornell University in 1966, he published the book Inquest,
an influential critique of the Warren Commission probe into the John F. Kennedy
assassination..." He wrote in " The New York Review
of Books" in "An A from Nabokov" (April 4, 2013) :(I'll allow for context
and underline the paragraph in question)
"I wandered into Lit 311 at the beginning of my sophomore year at Cornell
in September 1954...I was just shopping for a class that met on Monday,
Wednesday, and Friday mornings ...It was officially called “European Literature
of the Nineteenth Century,” but unofficially called “Dirty Lit” by the Cornell
Daily Sun, since it dealt with adultery in Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. The
professor was Vladimir Nabokov...Facing him on the stage was his white-haired
wife Vera, whom he identified only as “my course assistant.” He made it clear
from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with
students...He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He
said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that
we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them,
since novels are works of pure invention. .. Unfortunately, distracted by
the gorges, lakes, movie houses, corridor dates, and other more local
enchantments of Ithaca, I did not get around to reading any of Anna Karenina
before Nabokov sprang a pop quiz. It consisted of an essay question: “Describe
the train station in which Anna first met Vronsky.”... I did recall the station
shown in the 1948 movie starring Vivien Leigh. Having something of an eidetic
memory, I was able to visualize ...and, to fill the exam book, I described in
great detail everything shown in the movie ...Only after the exam did I learn
that many of the details I described from the movie were not in the
book... when Nabokov asked “seat 121” to report to his office
after class, I fully expected to be failed...What I had not taken into
account was Nabokov’s theory that great novelists create pictures in the minds
of their readers that go far beyond what they describe in the words in their
books. In any case, since I was presumably the only one taking the exam to
confirm his theory by describing what was not in the book, and since he
apparently had no idea of Duvivier’s film, he not only gave me the numerical
equivalent of an A, but offered me a one-day-a-week job as an “auxiliary course
assistant.”