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Re: [NABOKOV-L] TOoL review
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Hafid Bouazza: ...I was not talking about delight in Nabokov's 'deliciously unlikable' character, but about the delight of a Nabokov changing style and manner, even matter. But to answer your question: Yes! I think it is possible to find pleasure and delight in an unlikeable character ...'Likeable' has nothing to do with it; how and when a character is able to 'screw' even less, as long as it is convincingly portrayed and that is a matter of style. Not a matter of likeability.
JM: So it seems that we are not in complete disagreement here, after all. As you said: "likeable has nothing to do with it" (my mistake when I selected this example, while trying to limit myself to quotes from the review). What I meant to say is that the fairy-tale enchantment, which had metamorphosed words into thriving living creatures (monstrous or nymphic), a basic component of Nabokov's apprehension of "aesthetic bliss", is insufficient to battle against dominant despair and self-dissolution which I found in TOoL. For me, if we compared Pale Fire's well-balanced powers of destruction and creation, with what the reader confronts in TOoL, we would only realize the incompleteness of the latter, because "destruction" prevails somewhat lamely. In TOoL Nabokov's former definition of Art and the aesthetics of bliss was inverted and, as I see it, he had no chance to write on, and provide a context for his overall "cancellation."
HA: I haven't said that we should follow the latest 'trend' - there is no question of trends here: we are discussing the last, unfinished novel of a great novelist. I just don't and never will understand why someone would like to judge a book on basis of what it doesn't give, instead of what it does indeed give. Why trying to find in one book what you have found in another already?
JM: That's my point, it is an unfinished novel. I'm not trying to find in it what I'd already found in Nabokov's other novels (they are sufficiently different bt themselves to warrant surprises and 'novelties' ), but I miss a "constancy of being", a personal referent which was never absent from the others and functioned as Nabokov's watermark (perhaps I could check later what Nabokov himself has written about his "watermark").
HA: There is no 'purported evolutionary theory': there is an evolution in Nabokov's work and any other real artist's work, because the artist grows old and evolves, just like your ordinary human being. And his/her style changes with him/her. So, if you don't read Nabokov chronologically (no need for the claws of inverted comma's here), how can you criticize Boyd's article - and unjustly harsh, at that too - which is all about chronology, about the evolution of Nabokov's style? I am afraid this discussion will end in a Pninian fashion: On Likeablity, Evolution and Screwing. So I greet thee.
JM: Mankind's thrust forward isn't always in agreement with its own chances of evolving. If there are thousands of now extinct species, why not mankind, too - and here by its own mismanagement of environment and resources?*
About the theme related to screwing/sex: VN's renderings, in TOoL, were far from revolutionary or original**, something that has never happened before (imho.)
Best greetings (with no ironic undertones)
...............................................
* *a catastrophic novel which has a cruel consistency but that may be enjoyed (with moderation) is Gore Vidal's "Messiah."
** - Adjectives fail me. Anyway, we would benefit from some "pruning" here (the claws indicate a vague quote from TOoL which I have no heart to copy now.)
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JM: So it seems that we are not in complete disagreement here, after all. As you said: "likeable has nothing to do with it" (my mistake when I selected this example, while trying to limit myself to quotes from the review). What I meant to say is that the fairy-tale enchantment, which had metamorphosed words into thriving living creatures (monstrous or nymphic), a basic component of Nabokov's apprehension of "aesthetic bliss", is insufficient to battle against dominant despair and self-dissolution which I found in TOoL. For me, if we compared Pale Fire's well-balanced powers of destruction and creation, with what the reader confronts in TOoL, we would only realize the incompleteness of the latter, because "destruction" prevails somewhat lamely. In TOoL Nabokov's former definition of Art and the aesthetics of bliss was inverted and, as I see it, he had no chance to write on, and provide a context for his overall "cancellation."
HA: I haven't said that we should follow the latest 'trend' - there is no question of trends here: we are discussing the last, unfinished novel of a great novelist. I just don't and never will understand why someone would like to judge a book on basis of what it doesn't give, instead of what it does indeed give. Why trying to find in one book what you have found in another already?
JM: That's my point, it is an unfinished novel. I'm not trying to find in it what I'd already found in Nabokov's other novels (they are sufficiently different bt themselves to warrant surprises and 'novelties' ), but I miss a "constancy of being", a personal referent which was never absent from the others and functioned as Nabokov's watermark (perhaps I could check later what Nabokov himself has written about his "watermark").
HA: There is no 'purported evolutionary theory': there is an evolution in Nabokov's work and any other real artist's work, because the artist grows old and evolves, just like your ordinary human being. And his/her style changes with him/her. So, if you don't read Nabokov chronologically (no need for the claws of inverted comma's here), how can you criticize Boyd's article - and unjustly harsh, at that too - which is all about chronology, about the evolution of Nabokov's style? I am afraid this discussion will end in a Pninian fashion: On Likeablity, Evolution and Screwing. So I greet thee.
JM: Mankind's thrust forward isn't always in agreement with its own chances of evolving. If there are thousands of now extinct species, why not mankind, too - and here by its own mismanagement of environment and resources?*
About the theme related to screwing/sex: VN's renderings, in TOoL, were far from revolutionary or original**, something that has never happened before (imho.)
Best greetings (with no ironic undertones)
...............................................
* *a catastrophic novel which has a cruel consistency but that may be enjoyed (with moderation) is Gore Vidal's "Messiah."
** - Adjectives fail me. Anyway, we would benefit from some "pruning" here (the claws indicate a vague quote from TOoL which I have no heart to copy now.)
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/