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Fw: [NABOKV-L] The problem with Nabokov ...
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Sandy Klein sent (http://yovia.com/blogs/muse/2010/03/20/the-problem-with-nabokov/ The problem with Nabokov - by Martin Amis, The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009:)
Martin Amis split in two a novelist's life and language ( "Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family... Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice...Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too:... once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies." One the one side, he placed the novelist and his linguistic skills for everyday communication and, on the other, the novelist and language as "the stuff of patterned artifice." Amis equally halved his selection of six Nabokov novels related to paedophilia: "Six fictions... two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime." According to him, "Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable." Then he adds that, in "fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. And I intend no innnuendo by pointing out that Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud ..."
However, the initial division presented by Amis, for all its clarity and objectivity, derives from the structure of the mechanism Freud encountered in every perversion. Although we may identify the fetichist, the pedophile, the sado-masochist, the exibitionist or the voyeur by their distinct actions and fantasies, there is only one mechanism which all of these behaviors share, according to Freud: a division of the mind brought about by "disavowal" (Verleugnung).* Should we accept Amis' neat separation, we'd be admitting that art and perversion have a common matrix, one which disregards the socializing promise inherent in language, to elegantly expand a solipsistic universe and the novelist placed above good and evil.
An artist's personal secrets, hidden from biographers, has to be preserved from the thrust of voyeuristic examiners but, at the same time, it is inevitable that part of his fantasies and painful experiences seep, unde theirr various guises, into his novels. Nabokov was perfectly aware of this fact, since he once wrote that the "crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself" (Cf. Gogol ) However, at the same time he also affirmed that his life should never be mistaken for his work, since his fictional characters were gargoyles and caryatids, lying "outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out." Must the readers accept this dividing line, one that isolates the evil characters in his fiction, from that which inhabits his non-fictional "inner self," and have done with it? Or shall they recognize that something dangerous, either external or internal, will keep on threatening the autor's sense of harmony and, in some unfortunate circumstances, gain the upper hand? It's not true that "in fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt," because after a novel is made public, it no longer belongs to its creator: it depends of, and interacts with spectators, readers, interpreters -and its poisonous, pessimistic or inspiring communicative dimension is restored. Nevertheless, even if an artist's emotions and experiences leave a mark in his work, which points back at him, a separation, similar to the one Martin Amis advanced, is fundamental in order to preserve the foundations of art and the author's right to privacy - but it has to be another kind of division, one which doesn't consider language as "leading a double life."Martin Amis himself indicates how this other division operates and his criteria about how a well-succeeded work of art may be isolated from a deformed production** are very sound: " in fiction.....the flaw is not moral but aesthetic," (and this he states twice: "The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age..." ). We clearly perceive that Amis is not judging Nabokov's wayward fixity, but he's evaluating when this factor, examined from an aesthetic perspective, starts to throw VN's overall production out of balance. For example, when he states that "Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning. And so matters might have rested. But then came the meltdown of artistic self-possession..."
I also agree with Amis when he mentions "the meltdown of artistic self-possession" in Nabokov's last writings. Nevertheless, for me, this meltdown only started to take place when Nabokov, ill and often feverish, began to take notes for "Laura." In the fragments of Laura everything that, until then, Nabokov had described concerning "aesthetic bliss" and art ("curiosity, tenderness...") is absent, or reversed. There are no redeeming views to indicate any shifts of perspective.
...............................................................
* In his other works Freud examines the various kinds of refusal, negation, denial, and on their subsequent splittings, in relation to various other mental illness.
** "One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.... Lolita, Pnin, Despair (1936; translated by the author in 1966), and four or five short stories are immortal. King, Queen, Knave (1928, 1968), Laughter in the Dark (1932, 1936), The Enchanter, The Eye (1930), Bend Sinister (1947), Pale Fire (1962), and Transparent Things are ferociously accomplished; and little Mary (1925), his first novel, is a little beauty. Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), together with Strong Opinions (1973), constitute the shining record of a pre-eminent artist-critic. And the Selected Letters (1989), the Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), and that marshlight of an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1967), give us a four-dimensional portrait of a delightful and honourable man. The vice Nabokov most frequently reviled was “cruelty”. And his gentleness of nature is most clearly seen in the loving attentiveness with which, in his fiction, he writes about animals...They call it a “shimmer” – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror...Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism... In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls."
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Martin Amis split in two a novelist's life and language ( "Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family... Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice...Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too:... once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies." One the one side, he placed the novelist and his linguistic skills for everyday communication and, on the other, the novelist and language as "the stuff of patterned artifice." Amis equally halved his selection of six Nabokov novels related to paedophilia: "Six fictions... two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime." According to him, "Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable." Then he adds that, in "fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. And I intend no innnuendo by pointing out that Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud ..."
However, the initial division presented by Amis, for all its clarity and objectivity, derives from the structure of the mechanism Freud encountered in every perversion. Although we may identify the fetichist, the pedophile, the sado-masochist, the exibitionist or the voyeur by their distinct actions and fantasies, there is only one mechanism which all of these behaviors share, according to Freud: a division of the mind brought about by "disavowal" (Verleugnung).* Should we accept Amis' neat separation, we'd be admitting that art and perversion have a common matrix, one which disregards the socializing promise inherent in language, to elegantly expand a solipsistic universe and the novelist placed above good and evil.
An artist's personal secrets, hidden from biographers, has to be preserved from the thrust of voyeuristic examiners but, at the same time, it is inevitable that part of his fantasies and painful experiences seep, unde theirr various guises, into his novels. Nabokov was perfectly aware of this fact, since he once wrote that the "crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself" (Cf. Gogol ) However, at the same time he also affirmed that his life should never be mistaken for his work, since his fictional characters were gargoyles and caryatids, lying "outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out." Must the readers accept this dividing line, one that isolates the evil characters in his fiction, from that which inhabits his non-fictional "inner self," and have done with it? Or shall they recognize that something dangerous, either external or internal, will keep on threatening the autor's sense of harmony and, in some unfortunate circumstances, gain the upper hand? It's not true that "in fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt," because after a novel is made public, it no longer belongs to its creator: it depends of, and interacts with spectators, readers, interpreters -and its poisonous, pessimistic or inspiring communicative dimension is restored. Nevertheless, even if an artist's emotions and experiences leave a mark in his work, which points back at him, a separation, similar to the one Martin Amis advanced, is fundamental in order to preserve the foundations of art and the author's right to privacy - but it has to be another kind of division, one which doesn't consider language as "leading a double life."Martin Amis himself indicates how this other division operates and his criteria about how a well-succeeded work of art may be isolated from a deformed production** are very sound: " in fiction.....the flaw is not moral but aesthetic," (and this he states twice: "The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age..." ). We clearly perceive that Amis is not judging Nabokov's wayward fixity, but he's evaluating when this factor, examined from an aesthetic perspective, starts to throw VN's overall production out of balance. For example, when he states that "Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning. And so matters might have rested. But then came the meltdown of artistic self-possession..."
I also agree with Amis when he mentions "the meltdown of artistic self-possession" in Nabokov's last writings. Nevertheless, for me, this meltdown only started to take place when Nabokov, ill and often feverish, began to take notes for "Laura." In the fragments of Laura everything that, until then, Nabokov had described concerning "aesthetic bliss" and art ("curiosity, tenderness...") is absent, or reversed. There are no redeeming views to indicate any shifts of perspective.
...............................................................
* In his other works Freud examines the various kinds of refusal, negation, denial, and on their subsequent splittings, in relation to various other mental illness.
** "One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.... Lolita, Pnin, Despair (1936; translated by the author in 1966), and four or five short stories are immortal. King, Queen, Knave (1928, 1968), Laughter in the Dark (1932, 1936), The Enchanter, The Eye (1930), Bend Sinister (1947), Pale Fire (1962), and Transparent Things are ferociously accomplished; and little Mary (1925), his first novel, is a little beauty. Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), together with Strong Opinions (1973), constitute the shining record of a pre-eminent artist-critic. And the Selected Letters (1989), the Nabokov-Wilson Letters (1979), and that marshlight of an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1967), give us a four-dimensional portrait of a delightful and honourable man. The vice Nabokov most frequently reviled was “cruelty”. And his gentleness of nature is most clearly seen in the loving attentiveness with which, in his fiction, he writes about animals...They call it a “shimmer” – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror...Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism... In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls."
Search archive with Google:
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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/