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Re: [NABOKOV-L] TOoL review
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Hafid Bouazza: "Jansy, you've said it yourself: your passion is old fashioned. Brian Boyd's masterful and loving essay stresses a new fashioned Nabokov, albeit a fragmentary one...Let Nabokov's change clear your eyes 'with euphrasy and rue', like Milton's Adam's eyes by the angel Michael. It is not to the reader to shape the writer, it is up to the writer to form and surprise the reader...If there is a sense of dissapointment, it is not Nabokov who has let us down, for when and what did he promise us? If anything, delight, and the whole change in Boyd's attitude towards TOoL is a very strong and moving illustration of this: re-discovered delight!"
JM: Brian Boyd does, in fact, explain how his "estimation of The Original of Laura has changed dramatically" and the manner in which his initial disappointment... was substituted by present enthusiasm for the novel's "strong beginning, a vivid middle, a wry end, and an already intricate design."
Boyd adds that, if the characters are unsympathetic, we can later discover that "the heroine Flora is deliciously unlikable, and her husband, the neurologist Philip Wild, is an unforgettable presence ...his brilliant brain trying to erase his feet."
In his understanding, "Nabokov's descriptions of sex here hilariously unappetizing, prodigiously unsatisfying emotionally and often physically comic in their painful shortcomings." For BB, "if there's little plot tension there's also headlong action from reckless Flora and comic inertia from Wild's repeated self-erasures." Boyd believes that although "Nabokov has focused on sex before, but never has he shown it so divorced from feeling" and that he "surely amuses and appalls us in a new way with the sexual activity he depicts."
Boyd also finds substitute pleasures, to its lack of suspense, in "the contrasts of helter-skelter narration and meditative stasis, and the puzzles of who has created, and who has obliterated, whom." Another point (the sixth) relates to "Philip Wild's obsession with willing his own death. Wild's quest is certainly singular. But many of us have wished to shed intense pain or discard excess weight. Wild wishes both. Many have sought to train the mind to control and transcend the self, through meditation, and Wild has not only the shape of the fattest Buddha but the same urge to reach nirvana (the text makes references to both) and to eliminate the self.."
B. Boyd believes that "Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild in his humiliation, and so should we... All of us might wish at times we could control our own death or restoration but Nabokov surely presents Wild's as exactly the wrong way to transcend death. Eliminating the self promises no worthwhile passage beyond life..."
JM: Hafid, do you mean to indicate that what Nabokov has inverted let no one break asunder? Are you suggesting that we must find pleasure and delight in a "deliciously unlikable" caricatural woman with her psychotic fatso of a husband, who can only screw her as pictured in an Italian comedy of the past?
Besides, why should "we, readers," follow the latest trend, find it shameful to be "old-fashioned" or submit to all sorts of adaptative psychologies that sympathetically indicate, for example, how "many of us have wished to shed intense pain" and "sought to train the mind to control and transcend the self," before concluding that "if Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild...so should we"?
Another famously pompous and ridiculous figure once said "to thine own self be true" (Polonius,Act I, scene iii of Hamlet) and I confess that I'm not afraid of accepting this kind of "ridiculousness" when I refuse to follow Nabokov's very post-post modern lead into sadism and nihilism.
I don't read Nabokov "chronologically" so I cannot evolve in line with this (purported) evolutionary theory.
(btw: I was not disappointed in Nabokov, as a writer.)
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JM: Brian Boyd does, in fact, explain how his "estimation of The Original of Laura has changed dramatically" and the manner in which his initial disappointment... was substituted by present enthusiasm for the novel's "strong beginning, a vivid middle, a wry end, and an already intricate design."
Boyd adds that, if the characters are unsympathetic, we can later discover that "the heroine Flora is deliciously unlikable, and her husband, the neurologist Philip Wild, is an unforgettable presence ...his brilliant brain trying to erase his feet."
In his understanding, "Nabokov's descriptions of sex here hilariously unappetizing, prodigiously unsatisfying emotionally and often physically comic in their painful shortcomings." For BB, "if there's little plot tension there's also headlong action from reckless Flora and comic inertia from Wild's repeated self-erasures." Boyd believes that although "Nabokov has focused on sex before, but never has he shown it so divorced from feeling" and that he "surely amuses and appalls us in a new way with the sexual activity he depicts."
Boyd also finds substitute pleasures, to its lack of suspense, in "the contrasts of helter-skelter narration and meditative stasis, and the puzzles of who has created, and who has obliterated, whom." Another point (the sixth) relates to "Philip Wild's obsession with willing his own death. Wild's quest is certainly singular. But many of us have wished to shed intense pain or discard excess weight. Wild wishes both. Many have sought to train the mind to control and transcend the self, through meditation, and Wild has not only the shape of the fattest Buddha but the same urge to reach nirvana (the text makes references to both) and to eliminate the self.."
B. Boyd believes that "Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild in his humiliation, and so should we... All of us might wish at times we could control our own death or restoration but Nabokov surely presents Wild's as exactly the wrong way to transcend death. Eliminating the self promises no worthwhile passage beyond life..."
JM: Hafid, do you mean to indicate that what Nabokov has inverted let no one break asunder? Are you suggesting that we must find pleasure and delight in a "deliciously unlikable" caricatural woman with her psychotic fatso of a husband, who can only screw her as pictured in an Italian comedy of the past?
Besides, why should "we, readers," follow the latest trend, find it shameful to be "old-fashioned" or submit to all sorts of adaptative psychologies that sympathetically indicate, for example, how "many of us have wished to shed intense pain" and "sought to train the mind to control and transcend the self," before concluding that "if Nabokov has some sympathy with Wild...so should we"?
Another famously pompous and ridiculous figure once said "to thine own self be true" (Polonius,Act I, scene iii of Hamlet) and I confess that I'm not afraid of accepting this kind of "ridiculousness" when I refuse to follow Nabokov's very post-post modern lead into sadism and nihilism.
I don't read Nabokov "chronologically" so I cannot evolve in line with this (purported) evolutionary theory.
(btw: I was not disappointed in Nabokov, as a writer.)
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/