Subject
Whimsical excerpts of TNR reviews: Updike, E.White,
Q.Anderson; M.Dickstein
Q.Anderson; M.Dickstein
From
Date
Body
Jim Twiggs continues to regale me with his special selection from voices of the past, most of them published in TNR. The present collection of reviews, which span from 1964 to 1995, illustrate how the critical appraisal of Nabokov's literary achievements has moved along with the times, while retaining several stable parameters concerning Art.
Nabokov's "metaphorical brilliance" (Updike) and how the "life of his work does in fact lie in his figures of speech "(Q.Anderson) is consistently praised, although referred to "a rather narrow field of vision" (Updike) or seen as a "very wide...horizontal range...But its scale is single." (Anderson), or as resulting from his "emotional range, at best narrow if deep and intense".
The battle between a trickster's art for art's sake is permanently set in contrast with modernistic naturalism and humanistic values. By extracting life and reality from his characters, Nabokov's plain "verbal adventures", "light anthropomorphic" (Anderson) or "grand Guignol" (Morris Dickstein) dangerously subdue any expression of compassion or of his engagement with the human community, the"interpenetration of humanity by language, language by humanity [...]an ordered life in common with others"(Anderson).
The reviewers seem to share the recommendation that a "truce with realism rather than abjuring it completely" should be established and they recognize a formula: the "melodramatic excess manipulated with a knowing leer of satiric superiority" (Dickstein). For Anderson Nabokov might have sustained his ability to write "in two fictional modes, giving now one, now the other, the ascendency" to avoid the pitfalls of pure artifice and preciousness. Nabokov's insistence on detail is examined by all of them, his aesthetics and the rich patterning of his writing.
Edmund White describes Nabokov's use of "defamiliarization" (a particular relation with the uncanny), and a "shared sympathy between Nabokov and the reader" - at the expense of his characters. Concerning Nabokov's early stories White sees them as "preening, almost automatically nostalgic...plagued by Nabokov's excesses..." For him, "Nabokov's art at its best thrives on halllucinatory evocations...childhood memories, love, certain exquisite experiences of nature and a few privileged moments of making or enjoying art."
Not one of the reviewers doubts Nabokov's genius, his superior literary achivements and the uniqueness of his fiction, but they seem to share a resentment with Nabokov's verbal games, as if they betrayed his allofness and social inconsequence. For me, in particular, it is fascinating to note how these four critics do not find another writer to set against or in parallel to Nabokov. Nabokov can only be set against himself, through the comparison established between his past and present works: he is his own standard. Readers, too, must find a measure of their own to relate to, love and inspect "the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant" edifice of writings (Updike, 1964).
Morris Dickstein's review of ADA, related to "the ready superlatives of commerce and publicity...joined with the exegetical talents of a new breed of critics", and to how "perversity is merely simulated in the incest-motif...sex reduced to friction...art as extinction" appears as a future recollection of a new book to be prepared for his characters to die in, TOoL, perhaps? For Dickstein, "Ada marks the betrayal of the Nabokov who wrote Lolita and Pnin, whose calculations kept touch with human feelings and predicaments, whose aestheticism could therefore issue in artistic and human wholeness. It is the hollow triumph of another Nabokov, the formal trickster, exotic pedant and language-gamester, the last and perhaps least of the great modernist writers." *
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* Excerpts and links to the four reviews:
1. THE DEFENSE : "Grandmaster Nabokov," (1964) by John Updike. http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/grandmaster-nabokov
excerpts: "One hesitates to call him an "American writer"... Say, rather, that Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship...His works are an edifice whose every corner rewards inspection... the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant thing....He writes prose the only way it should be written--that is, ecstatically. In the intensity of its intelligence and reflective joy, his fiction is unique... Melville and James do not, oddly, offer themselves for comparison. Yet our literature, that scraggly association of hermits, cranks, and exiles, is strange enough to include this arrogant immigrant; as an expatriate Nabokov is squarely in the native tradition."
"Very curiously, his oeuvre is growing at both ends: ....in his monumental translation of Onegin...this bridge whereby the genius of Pushkin is to cross after him into America. The translation itself, so laconic compared to the footnotes...ranks with Horace Gregory's Catullus and Richmond Lattimore's Iliad as superb, quirky, and definitive... and growing backwards, into the past, as English versions appear of those novels he wrote in Russian...under the pen name of "V. Sirin."
The Defense, originally Zashchita Luzhina, is the latest of these to be translated... Nabokov's characters live...loaded with bright color and twisted to fit abstract schemes but remain anatomically credible. The humanity that has come within Nabokov's rather narrow field of vision has been illuminated by a guarded but genuine compassion. His foreword, shameless and disdainful in his usual first-person style, specifies...the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero: ' Luzhin ... there is something in him that transcends.the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius'...The four chapters devoted to little Luzhin are pure gold, a fascinating extraction of the thread of genius from the tangle of a lonely boy's existence...By abruptly switching to Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its naive brightness so that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as a kind of heart..."
"On its level as a work-epic of chess (as Moby Dick is a work-epic of whaling) The Defense is splendidly shaped toward Luzhin's match with Turati...during the tournament in which Luzhin thinks himself into a nervous breakdown suspense mounts as to whether 'the limpidity and lightness of Luzhin's thought would prevail over the Italian's tumultuous fantasy.' Their game, a potential draw which is never completed, draws forth a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic ...we have no difficulty in feeling with Luzhin how the chess-images that have haunted the fringes of his existence now move into the center and render the real world phantasmal. The metaphors have reversed the terms. Chess imagery has infiltrated the book from all sides ... The Luzhin defense becomes abandonment of play -- suicide... However, I am not sure it perfectly works, this chess puzzle pieced out with human characters...One becomes conscious of rather aimless intricacies...I am unable to feel Luzhin's descent into an eternity of 'dark and pale squares' as anything but the foreordained outcome of a scheme that, however pretty, is less weighty than the human fictions it has conjured up.... I cannot see why the grandmaster is hopelessly blocked...by something outside the novel, perhaps by the lepidopterist's habit of killing what it loves; how remarkably few, after all, of Nabokov's characters do evade the mounting pin...."
2. DESPAIR - Quentin Anderson, June 4, 1966, on "Nabokov in Time."
excerpts: "Nabokov, describing the work of "V.Sirin"... in Conclusive Evidence, says, "the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech," and "his best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls." Despair, the sixth of the nine novels Nabokov wrote in Russian, is neatly bracketed by these remarks... Hermann is entranced by a fantasy ...[he] writes this book after having carried out the fantasy. He is waiting for the reviews of his work; that is, for the press reports of the murder to reach [him]...The reader is confronted by various shifts in perspective - the account given of the whole affair by Hermann's "memory" stands for the fullness of event, for "life," while his work of art, a fantasy which he had pursued in the common light of day, has the status of art in that it is a selection of events made to serve a chosen design. Finally, the account given by memory is the work of the art of the emigre Russian novelist to whom Hermann proposes to send his manuscript !"
"...The Eye, a novella, and The Defense resemble Despair in that their chief figures are condemned as is Hermann to spin a world out of their fatally repetitive inner resources... What we are given is theme and variations, and denied any sense of cumulation or growth. We get experience of the order of a child's memories, experience deprived of temporal dimension. Each of the rendered moments is like a separate raid on the continuum of life which brings back an observation that is rendered with the tang of immediacy and yet serves an exemplary use in the web Nabokov is weaving. The life of his work does in fact lie in his figures of speech. Nabokov's prose medium deserves a name...We might call it the "light anthropomorphic"... In this medium the interpenetration of humanity by language,language by humanity is, moment by moment, felt as complete. Its range, its horizontal range, is very wide...But its scale is single; it can only tell us what we do to words and they to us; it cannot tell us what men have done....one little vaudeville of the light anthropomorphic gives way to the next..."verbal adventures," to steal a Nabokov phrase... Everything that threatens the games...is fiercely attacked by Nabokov as if art were unsafe as long as anybody was generalizing about anything in any context. This is Nabokov's public role, and it is the only public role he permits his characters to assume...anyone who classifies anything except words and butterflies is scorned:. '...when a literature subsists on Life and Lives, it means it is dying.' ...Why shouldn't Nabokov have written in two fictional modes, giving now one, now the other, the ascendency? ...What we may call his naturalism is dominant in Nabokov's recorded memories of his childhood and youth in Conclusive Evidence...This interrelatedness, this sense of an ordered life in common with others does not of course recur in the Nabokov fiction ...the human glory of Krug, which is posed against a cruel and mindless society, represents a naturalism which gives way to a more sentimental strain in Nabokov's later work, in fact in the very next novel, Sebastian Knight. Nabokov's movement from a naturalism conditioned by the memory of community to a naturalism founded on a faith in our kinship with the order of nature... [the] belief that such an awareness of nature might afford this measure of human fulfillment lies about fifty years behind us in the European consciousness...."
"[F]igures, like Luzhin...nonetheless fail to respond to the first moral value of the Nabokovian universe, a respect for the singleness of others. Hermann's unforgivable spiritual vulgarity is the hunger for a resemblance that amounts to identity - something that can only be attributed to inanimate things, dead things... The text under your eye is like a brilliant musical score, but the continuity of the performance is supplied by the reader, who fills in the curve of imagined human action...It is possible to be very serious, enormously talented, highly witty, and nonetheless to trivialize what seems a proper outgrowth of Nabokov's career...[T]here remains one almost perfect work, Pnin....the book appears to be completely patterned, yet the narrator's scrupulous and tender attention supplies exactly that continuity of human concern that the other patterned works lack... [when he]tries to make language the vessel of our humanity, and supports in public the contention that art is its own excuse for being... His assertion of the self- sufficiency of art will come to seem increasingly unintelligible to a generation unaware of the hidden premise of his humanism...and verbal adventure has lost its invisible supporting warp of remembered human solidarity.
This, I take it, is the end, so often prematurely announced, of the romantic movement."
3. ADA Nabokov's Folly by Morris Dickstein, The New Republic Published: June 28, 1969 [ http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=77752a39-9ca5-4711-bfd2-9fc160649f20]
excerpts: "...Ada may become the most over-praised novel of the decade. The ready superlatives of commerce and publicity have joined with the exegetical talents of a new breed of critics to launch an instant masterpiece....Nabokov has always conceived of himself as a poet and fabulist rather than a novelist...Nabokov often denounced social and psychological realism and booby-trapped his books with alienation effects and distancing devices, yet his own best work, such as Lolita and Pnin, was done when he struck a truce with realism rather than abjuring it completely as he does in Ada. Ada takes place on a nowhere-world called Antiterra...The book's hero, future professor and novelist Van Veen, is a man who likes to walk on his hands...it is reality inverted by vision, a metaphor for the book as a whole. Van's unusual avocation, we are told, provides him with a rapture "akin to that of artistic revelation." The notion of the artist as verbal acrobat, which Nabokov takes all too seriously, is one key to his failure in Ada...Pale Fire is at least a unified stunt. Ada, however, abandons not only reality but artistic unity:..one of the most self-indulgent and self-caressing books ever written."
"Van is... burdened with a wide assortment of Nabokov's own crotchets (previously confined to prefaces and interviews, now defacing the text itself). Poor Ada, Van's only true love for over four decades, is forced by the author to spend her downy nymphet years as an entomologist. Why? Because Nabokov himself is one: the fictional masks (like Byron's) must be kept loose, the author must bestride the book as almost its only character...The secondary characters...are strictly Grand Guignol. Nowhere does the novel offer an alternative to the egregious styles it parodies but relies upon. The formula: melodramatic excess manipulated with a knowing leer of satiric superiority...Humbert Humbert's style of exaggeration, at once hilarious and controlled, replete with every nuance of personal and cultural decadence, here finds its unintended caricature...a style in search of a subject. Everything is reduced to physiological detail, but rendered in a coy, hothouse language...The pretentious metaphors and allusions don't conceal, indeed they are central to, the pornographic strategy. If Lolita was about a dirty old man then parts of Ada read as if they were written by one. It is not Nabokov himself that is at issue but the impoverishment of his writing...Nabokov's emotional range, at best narrow if deep and intense, has thoroughly collapsed."
"John Hollander once wrote that 'there is no clinical, sociological, or mythic seriousness in Lolita, but it flames with a tremendous perversity of an unexpected kind.' Perversity flares again with Kinbote in Pale Fire but it is merely simulated in the incest-motif of Ada...As sex is reduced to friction all behavior is reduced to gesture, aesthetic gesture, art. Art swallows and redeems everything. The lives of Van and Ada become a book...Van describes his narrative as "a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right." Experience into words, that is what art is about, but not all art sees itself as an "extinction" of experience or puts so much stress on getting the rhythm right..."
"...only occasionally does [Ada] advance from the bizarre to the profound...Ada marks the betrayal of the Nabokov who wrote Lolita and Pnin, whose calculations kept touch with human feelings and predicaments, whose aestheticism could therefore issue in artistic and human wholeness. It is the hollow triumph of that other Nabokov, the formal trickster, exotic pedant and language-gamester, the last and perhaps least of the great modernist writers."
4. THE STORIES: Very Pale Fire by Edmund White, The New Republic Published: November 20, 1995 [http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=8e7fe7f7-63be-45d7-ba41-ef523e022e40]
excerpts: "...At their worst, Nabokov's stories are built around a twist worthy of O. Henry. In Revenge, a mad professor, jealous on the slimmest (and as it turns out, misleading) evidence, kills his wife by putting her to bed with the "hastily cobbled skeleton of a hunchback" that he "had acquired abroad for the university museum." Those are the last words in the story--how nifty! A Matter of Chance tells of a couple of Russian emigrants, separated for years, whose reunion is thwarted by two cruel accidents...we do rub our palms together at the swell plot--if, that is, we happen to be science nerds, chess champions or idiots savants who may be savant about fate's dirty tricks but idiotic in what might appeal to an adult mind."
"In La Veneziana, Nabokov toys with the notion of entering a painting and... treats us to the perennially avant-garde reminder that art is not life but only artifice... And the story called The Vane Sisters ends with an acrostic....Details, of course, are at the heart of Nabokov's fiction...they function as the strong frame on which are cantilevered notations of color, sound, smell and touch, notations that are evocative but often static, especially when dwelled on at great length. In the earliest stories, we see his love of shimmering detail in its purest, least narrative form. In the appropriately titled Sounds, an early love affair in Russia is brushed in...a strange reversal of figure and ground is justified by a pantheistic pronouncement: "I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth."...In A Guide to Berlin, he puts this taste into a long perspective of time and nostalgia: I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times...One could almost say that Nabokov's art at its best thrives on hallucinatory evocations, that the only subjects that provide his work with the necessary intensity are childhood memories, love, certain exquisite experiences of nature and a few privileged moments of making or enjoying art...In Cloud, Castle, Lake, for instance, a melancholy Russian wins a pleasure trip at a charity ball and is forced to go to the country with a terrifying band of German merrymakers...Through Humbert's eyes American readers see their own country from an odd...satirical perspective. This defamiliarization (and the occasional shared sympathy between Nabokov and the reader at Humbert's expense) lend the descriptions of American folkways a joie de vivre absent from the earlier novels and stories...we could say that in his stories Nabokov doesn't invent details in order to realize a plot (as Aristotle proposed in the Poetics); the heavy-handed action in his writing is there to provide an occasion for the poetry...When Nabokov gave himself enough room to develop characters about whom he could care, his twin method of fashioning a nifty plot and loading it down with sensuous detail worked well. The novels, especially Lolita and Pale Fire, are as fine as anything written in this century, and at least one story, Spring in Fialta, transcends technique to become a memorable tale of lost love. It was written in 1936, when he was composing The Gift, his Russian masterpiece...Most of the stories, however, are plagued by Nabokov's excesses and redeemed by none of his virtues. They are preening, almost automatically nostalgic...Nabokov missed the chance to understand that what made Chekhov great was not his strained originality of language nor his armature of dangerous details and tricky plots, but rather the doctor-writer's nearly scientific precision of observation, an unparalleled freedom from moralizing and a weary but genuine compassion for failed humanity...In that one book [Lolita], Nabokov rivaled Chekhov and justified his entire enterprise. But his stories never attain this perfection, though they are at their best when they read like condensed, speeded-up novels."
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Nabokov's "metaphorical brilliance" (Updike) and how the "life of his work does in fact lie in his figures of speech "(Q.Anderson) is consistently praised, although referred to "a rather narrow field of vision" (Updike) or seen as a "very wide...horizontal range...But its scale is single." (Anderson), or as resulting from his "emotional range, at best narrow if deep and intense".
The battle between a trickster's art for art's sake is permanently set in contrast with modernistic naturalism and humanistic values. By extracting life and reality from his characters, Nabokov's plain "verbal adventures", "light anthropomorphic" (Anderson) or "grand Guignol" (Morris Dickstein) dangerously subdue any expression of compassion or of his engagement with the human community, the"interpenetration of humanity by language, language by humanity [...]an ordered life in common with others"(Anderson).
The reviewers seem to share the recommendation that a "truce with realism rather than abjuring it completely" should be established and they recognize a formula: the "melodramatic excess manipulated with a knowing leer of satiric superiority" (Dickstein). For Anderson Nabokov might have sustained his ability to write "in two fictional modes, giving now one, now the other, the ascendency" to avoid the pitfalls of pure artifice and preciousness. Nabokov's insistence on detail is examined by all of them, his aesthetics and the rich patterning of his writing.
Edmund White describes Nabokov's use of "defamiliarization" (a particular relation with the uncanny), and a "shared sympathy between Nabokov and the reader" - at the expense of his characters. Concerning Nabokov's early stories White sees them as "preening, almost automatically nostalgic...plagued by Nabokov's excesses..." For him, "Nabokov's art at its best thrives on halllucinatory evocations...childhood memories, love, certain exquisite experiences of nature and a few privileged moments of making or enjoying art."
Not one of the reviewers doubts Nabokov's genius, his superior literary achivements and the uniqueness of his fiction, but they seem to share a resentment with Nabokov's verbal games, as if they betrayed his allofness and social inconsequence. For me, in particular, it is fascinating to note how these four critics do not find another writer to set against or in parallel to Nabokov. Nabokov can only be set against himself, through the comparison established between his past and present works: he is his own standard. Readers, too, must find a measure of their own to relate to, love and inspect "the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant" edifice of writings (Updike, 1964).
Morris Dickstein's review of ADA, related to "the ready superlatives of commerce and publicity...joined with the exegetical talents of a new breed of critics", and to how "perversity is merely simulated in the incest-motif...sex reduced to friction...art as extinction" appears as a future recollection of a new book to be prepared for his characters to die in, TOoL, perhaps? For Dickstein, "Ada marks the betrayal of the Nabokov who wrote Lolita and Pnin, whose calculations kept touch with human feelings and predicaments, whose aestheticism could therefore issue in artistic and human wholeness. It is the hollow triumph of another Nabokov, the formal trickster, exotic pedant and language-gamester, the last and perhaps least of the great modernist writers." *
..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
* Excerpts and links to the four reviews:
1. THE DEFENSE : "Grandmaster Nabokov," (1964) by John Updike. http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/grandmaster-nabokov
excerpts: "One hesitates to call him an "American writer"... Say, rather, that Vladimir Nabokov distinctly seems to be the best writer of English prose at present holding American citizenship...His works are an edifice whose every corner rewards inspection... the peculiar hardness of a finished, fully meant thing....He writes prose the only way it should be written--that is, ecstatically. In the intensity of its intelligence and reflective joy, his fiction is unique... Melville and James do not, oddly, offer themselves for comparison. Yet our literature, that scraggly association of hermits, cranks, and exiles, is strange enough to include this arrogant immigrant; as an expatriate Nabokov is squarely in the native tradition."
"Very curiously, his oeuvre is growing at both ends: ....in his monumental translation of Onegin...this bridge whereby the genius of Pushkin is to cross after him into America. The translation itself, so laconic compared to the footnotes...ranks with Horace Gregory's Catullus and Richmond Lattimore's Iliad as superb, quirky, and definitive... and growing backwards, into the past, as English versions appear of those novels he wrote in Russian...under the pen name of "V. Sirin."
The Defense, originally Zashchita Luzhina, is the latest of these to be translated... Nabokov's characters live...loaded with bright color and twisted to fit abstract schemes but remain anatomically credible. The humanity that has come within Nabokov's rather narrow field of vision has been illuminated by a guarded but genuine compassion. His foreword, shameless and disdainful in his usual first-person style, specifies...the intricate immanence in plot and imagery of chess as a prevailing metaphor, and the weird lovableness of the virtually inert hero: ' Luzhin ... there is something in him that transcends.the coarseness of his gray flesh and the sterility of his recondite genius'...The four chapters devoted to little Luzhin are pure gold, a fascinating extraction of the thread of genius from the tangle of a lonely boy's existence...By abruptly switching to Luzhin as a chess-sodden adult, Nabokov islands the childhood, frames its naive brightness so that, superimposed upon the grown figure, it operates as a kind of heart..."
"On its level as a work-epic of chess (as Moby Dick is a work-epic of whaling) The Defense is splendidly shaped toward Luzhin's match with Turati...during the tournament in which Luzhin thinks himself into a nervous breakdown suspense mounts as to whether 'the limpidity and lightness of Luzhin's thought would prevail over the Italian's tumultuous fantasy.' Their game, a potential draw which is never completed, draws forth a display of metaphorical brilliance that turns pure thought heroic ...we have no difficulty in feeling with Luzhin how the chess-images that have haunted the fringes of his existence now move into the center and render the real world phantasmal. The metaphors have reversed the terms. Chess imagery has infiltrated the book from all sides ... The Luzhin defense becomes abandonment of play -- suicide... However, I am not sure it perfectly works, this chess puzzle pieced out with human characters...One becomes conscious of rather aimless intricacies...I am unable to feel Luzhin's descent into an eternity of 'dark and pale squares' as anything but the foreordained outcome of a scheme that, however pretty, is less weighty than the human fictions it has conjured up.... I cannot see why the grandmaster is hopelessly blocked...by something outside the novel, perhaps by the lepidopterist's habit of killing what it loves; how remarkably few, after all, of Nabokov's characters do evade the mounting pin...."
2. DESPAIR - Quentin Anderson, June 4, 1966, on "Nabokov in Time."
excerpts: "Nabokov, describing the work of "V.Sirin"... in Conclusive Evidence, says, "the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech," and "his best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls." Despair, the sixth of the nine novels Nabokov wrote in Russian, is neatly bracketed by these remarks... Hermann is entranced by a fantasy ...[he] writes this book after having carried out the fantasy. He is waiting for the reviews of his work; that is, for the press reports of the murder to reach [him]...The reader is confronted by various shifts in perspective - the account given of the whole affair by Hermann's "memory" stands for the fullness of event, for "life," while his work of art, a fantasy which he had pursued in the common light of day, has the status of art in that it is a selection of events made to serve a chosen design. Finally, the account given by memory is the work of the art of the emigre Russian novelist to whom Hermann proposes to send his manuscript !"
"...The Eye, a novella, and The Defense resemble Despair in that their chief figures are condemned as is Hermann to spin a world out of their fatally repetitive inner resources... What we are given is theme and variations, and denied any sense of cumulation or growth. We get experience of the order of a child's memories, experience deprived of temporal dimension. Each of the rendered moments is like a separate raid on the continuum of life which brings back an observation that is rendered with the tang of immediacy and yet serves an exemplary use in the web Nabokov is weaving. The life of his work does in fact lie in his figures of speech. Nabokov's prose medium deserves a name...We might call it the "light anthropomorphic"... In this medium the interpenetration of humanity by language,language by humanity is, moment by moment, felt as complete. Its range, its horizontal range, is very wide...But its scale is single; it can only tell us what we do to words and they to us; it cannot tell us what men have done....one little vaudeville of the light anthropomorphic gives way to the next..."verbal adventures," to steal a Nabokov phrase... Everything that threatens the games...is fiercely attacked by Nabokov as if art were unsafe as long as anybody was generalizing about anything in any context. This is Nabokov's public role, and it is the only public role he permits his characters to assume...anyone who classifies anything except words and butterflies is scorned:. '...when a literature subsists on Life and Lives, it means it is dying.' ...Why shouldn't Nabokov have written in two fictional modes, giving now one, now the other, the ascendency? ...What we may call his naturalism is dominant in Nabokov's recorded memories of his childhood and youth in Conclusive Evidence...This interrelatedness, this sense of an ordered life in common with others does not of course recur in the Nabokov fiction ...the human glory of Krug, which is posed against a cruel and mindless society, represents a naturalism which gives way to a more sentimental strain in Nabokov's later work, in fact in the very next novel, Sebastian Knight. Nabokov's movement from a naturalism conditioned by the memory of community to a naturalism founded on a faith in our kinship with the order of nature... [the] belief that such an awareness of nature might afford this measure of human fulfillment lies about fifty years behind us in the European consciousness...."
"[F]igures, like Luzhin...nonetheless fail to respond to the first moral value of the Nabokovian universe, a respect for the singleness of others. Hermann's unforgivable spiritual vulgarity is the hunger for a resemblance that amounts to identity - something that can only be attributed to inanimate things, dead things... The text under your eye is like a brilliant musical score, but the continuity of the performance is supplied by the reader, who fills in the curve of imagined human action...It is possible to be very serious, enormously talented, highly witty, and nonetheless to trivialize what seems a proper outgrowth of Nabokov's career...[T]here remains one almost perfect work, Pnin....the book appears to be completely patterned, yet the narrator's scrupulous and tender attention supplies exactly that continuity of human concern that the other patterned works lack... [when he]tries to make language the vessel of our humanity, and supports in public the contention that art is its own excuse for being... His assertion of the self- sufficiency of art will come to seem increasingly unintelligible to a generation unaware of the hidden premise of his humanism...and verbal adventure has lost its invisible supporting warp of remembered human solidarity.
This, I take it, is the end, so often prematurely announced, of the romantic movement."
3. ADA Nabokov's Folly by Morris Dickstein, The New Republic Published: June 28, 1969 [ http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=77752a39-9ca5-4711-bfd2-9fc160649f20]
excerpts: "...Ada may become the most over-praised novel of the decade. The ready superlatives of commerce and publicity have joined with the exegetical talents of a new breed of critics to launch an instant masterpiece....Nabokov has always conceived of himself as a poet and fabulist rather than a novelist...Nabokov often denounced social and psychological realism and booby-trapped his books with alienation effects and distancing devices, yet his own best work, such as Lolita and Pnin, was done when he struck a truce with realism rather than abjuring it completely as he does in Ada. Ada takes place on a nowhere-world called Antiterra...The book's hero, future professor and novelist Van Veen, is a man who likes to walk on his hands...it is reality inverted by vision, a metaphor for the book as a whole. Van's unusual avocation, we are told, provides him with a rapture "akin to that of artistic revelation." The notion of the artist as verbal acrobat, which Nabokov takes all too seriously, is one key to his failure in Ada...Pale Fire is at least a unified stunt. Ada, however, abandons not only reality but artistic unity:..one of the most self-indulgent and self-caressing books ever written."
"Van is... burdened with a wide assortment of Nabokov's own crotchets (previously confined to prefaces and interviews, now defacing the text itself). Poor Ada, Van's only true love for over four decades, is forced by the author to spend her downy nymphet years as an entomologist. Why? Because Nabokov himself is one: the fictional masks (like Byron's) must be kept loose, the author must bestride the book as almost its only character...The secondary characters...are strictly Grand Guignol. Nowhere does the novel offer an alternative to the egregious styles it parodies but relies upon. The formula: melodramatic excess manipulated with a knowing leer of satiric superiority...Humbert Humbert's style of exaggeration, at once hilarious and controlled, replete with every nuance of personal and cultural decadence, here finds its unintended caricature...a style in search of a subject. Everything is reduced to physiological detail, but rendered in a coy, hothouse language...The pretentious metaphors and allusions don't conceal, indeed they are central to, the pornographic strategy. If Lolita was about a dirty old man then parts of Ada read as if they were written by one. It is not Nabokov himself that is at issue but the impoverishment of his writing...Nabokov's emotional range, at best narrow if deep and intense, has thoroughly collapsed."
"John Hollander once wrote that 'there is no clinical, sociological, or mythic seriousness in Lolita, but it flames with a tremendous perversity of an unexpected kind.' Perversity flares again with Kinbote in Pale Fire but it is merely simulated in the incest-motif of Ada...As sex is reduced to friction all behavior is reduced to gesture, aesthetic gesture, art. Art swallows and redeems everything. The lives of Van and Ada become a book...Van describes his narrative as "a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind into extinction only by working on a succession of words until the rhythm is right." Experience into words, that is what art is about, but not all art sees itself as an "extinction" of experience or puts so much stress on getting the rhythm right..."
"...only occasionally does [Ada] advance from the bizarre to the profound...Ada marks the betrayal of the Nabokov who wrote Lolita and Pnin, whose calculations kept touch with human feelings and predicaments, whose aestheticism could therefore issue in artistic and human wholeness. It is the hollow triumph of that other Nabokov, the formal trickster, exotic pedant and language-gamester, the last and perhaps least of the great modernist writers."
4. THE STORIES: Very Pale Fire by Edmund White, The New Republic Published: November 20, 1995 [http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=8e7fe7f7-63be-45d7-ba41-ef523e022e40]
excerpts: "...At their worst, Nabokov's stories are built around a twist worthy of O. Henry. In Revenge, a mad professor, jealous on the slimmest (and as it turns out, misleading) evidence, kills his wife by putting her to bed with the "hastily cobbled skeleton of a hunchback" that he "had acquired abroad for the university museum." Those are the last words in the story--how nifty! A Matter of Chance tells of a couple of Russian emigrants, separated for years, whose reunion is thwarted by two cruel accidents...we do rub our palms together at the swell plot--if, that is, we happen to be science nerds, chess champions or idiots savants who may be savant about fate's dirty tricks but idiotic in what might appeal to an adult mind."
"In La Veneziana, Nabokov toys with the notion of entering a painting and... treats us to the perennially avant-garde reminder that art is not life but only artifice... And the story called The Vane Sisters ends with an acrostic....Details, of course, are at the heart of Nabokov's fiction...they function as the strong frame on which are cantilevered notations of color, sound, smell and touch, notations that are evocative but often static, especially when dwelled on at great length. In the earliest stories, we see his love of shimmering detail in its purest, least narrative form. In the appropriately titled Sounds, an early love affair in Russia is brushed in...a strange reversal of figure and ground is justified by a pantheistic pronouncement: "I realized that you had no power over me, that it was not you alone who were my lover but the entire earth."...In A Guide to Berlin, he puts this taste into a long perspective of time and nostalgia: I think that here lies the sense of literary creation: to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times...One could almost say that Nabokov's art at its best thrives on hallucinatory evocations, that the only subjects that provide his work with the necessary intensity are childhood memories, love, certain exquisite experiences of nature and a few privileged moments of making or enjoying art...In Cloud, Castle, Lake, for instance, a melancholy Russian wins a pleasure trip at a charity ball and is forced to go to the country with a terrifying band of German merrymakers...Through Humbert's eyes American readers see their own country from an odd...satirical perspective. This defamiliarization (and the occasional shared sympathy between Nabokov and the reader at Humbert's expense) lend the descriptions of American folkways a joie de vivre absent from the earlier novels and stories...we could say that in his stories Nabokov doesn't invent details in order to realize a plot (as Aristotle proposed in the Poetics); the heavy-handed action in his writing is there to provide an occasion for the poetry...When Nabokov gave himself enough room to develop characters about whom he could care, his twin method of fashioning a nifty plot and loading it down with sensuous detail worked well. The novels, especially Lolita and Pale Fire, are as fine as anything written in this century, and at least one story, Spring in Fialta, transcends technique to become a memorable tale of lost love. It was written in 1936, when he was composing The Gift, his Russian masterpiece...Most of the stories, however, are plagued by Nabokov's excesses and redeemed by none of his virtues. They are preening, almost automatically nostalgic...Nabokov missed the chance to understand that what made Chekhov great was not his strained originality of language nor his armature of dangerous details and tricky plots, but rather the doctor-writer's nearly scientific precision of observation, an unparalleled freedom from moralizing and a weary but genuine compassion for failed humanity...In that one book [Lolita], Nabokov rivaled Chekhov and justified his entire enterprise. But his stories never attain this perfection, though they are at their best when they read like condensed, speeded-up novels."
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