Subject
Re: GLORY: Moon's homosexuality (fwd)
Date
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From: A BenAmos <abenam@essex.ac.uk>
I would like to thank Peter Kartsev for his detailed reaction to my
comments, and to offer some clarifications:
> The fact of his (Moon in _Glory_, AB) sexual preferences here
> is an artistic detail, not grounds for any classification.
It is exactly this literary detail that bothers me. Moon is presented
as opposed to Martin, yet there are some interesting parallels between
them. Martin rejects Moon's looking at Russia as a museum item under
glass, but he himself has a vision of Russia which is very private and
remote by Romanticism (see the intention to go there at the end of the
novel). As Linetskii points out in his _Anti-Bakhtin_ (in the chapter
"Nabokovskii Freid") Martin himself remembers Russia, when he arrives
to Switzerland, as it is seen throught painted glass in his family's
park. This similarity between the emigre and the non-Russian Slavist
who both treat Russia as an object of art fascinates me, and this
is why I feel that the introduction of Martin's rejection of him
as a homosexual diverts the attention from the more interesting
contrast - and the similarity, in which Martin doesn't want to
admit - to a stereotypical description. Why stereotypical? Because
it is stereotypical to assume that anybody would like to avoid a
person they admired and respecteed before because this person is a
homosexual.
> And it is not Nabokov who "unceremoniously dismisses" Moon, it
> is Martin who starts to avoid his tutor after the uncomfortable
> revelation. Martin's reasons are quite clear, I think, and while
> his attitude might not be PC, this is hardly a matter for
> literary analysis.
The PC factor is not the main problem here, but the fact that a
stereotypical reaction stands in the way of an interesting
relationship between a teacher and a student, when the teacher
instructs the student about his homeland, which is not the
teacher's homeland. It poses the question of the image of Russia
as opposed to the direct experience of it (although Moon was in
Russia before the Revolution), which I would have liked to see
developed.
As for the dismissal: if Martin stops meeting Moon it
is the protagonist's attitude towards this characters and not the
author's, but if the character disappears from the novel, as Moon
does after we discover he is a homosexual, it is a choice of the
author, and in that sense I may address the problem of his
dismissal. We must give credit to Nabokov that he was quite
conscious of his writing and if a character disappears from his
novel it is not because he forgot all about him.
> As for "a cheap way to avoid a serious discussion", Nabokov
> needed neither a cheap nor any other way for that; I do not
> believe he saw literature as a forum for "serious discussion" of
> whatever problems (understatement of the month?).
The term "discussion" may be misleading, what I meant is that an
interesting literary theme is introduced, and that I felt Nabokov
would have done better to explore the possibilities of a character
like Moon, (one of my favourite Nabokov characters, by the way,
and a very interesting one in terms of his attitude towards
Russia), than to have done with it on such uninteresting grounds
as his sexual indentity.
Anat Ben-Amos
Department of Literature
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
E-mail: abenam@essex.ac.uk
"But Martin in all honesty did not understand
why it was worse to be an expert in Russian letters
than a transportation engineer or a merchant." (Glory)
I would like to thank Peter Kartsev for his detailed reaction to my
comments, and to offer some clarifications:
> The fact of his (Moon in _Glory_, AB) sexual preferences here
> is an artistic detail, not grounds for any classification.
It is exactly this literary detail that bothers me. Moon is presented
as opposed to Martin, yet there are some interesting parallels between
them. Martin rejects Moon's looking at Russia as a museum item under
glass, but he himself has a vision of Russia which is very private and
remote by Romanticism (see the intention to go there at the end of the
novel). As Linetskii points out in his _Anti-Bakhtin_ (in the chapter
"Nabokovskii Freid") Martin himself remembers Russia, when he arrives
to Switzerland, as it is seen throught painted glass in his family's
park. This similarity between the emigre and the non-Russian Slavist
who both treat Russia as an object of art fascinates me, and this
is why I feel that the introduction of Martin's rejection of him
as a homosexual diverts the attention from the more interesting
contrast - and the similarity, in which Martin doesn't want to
admit - to a stereotypical description. Why stereotypical? Because
it is stereotypical to assume that anybody would like to avoid a
person they admired and respecteed before because this person is a
homosexual.
> And it is not Nabokov who "unceremoniously dismisses" Moon, it
> is Martin who starts to avoid his tutor after the uncomfortable
> revelation. Martin's reasons are quite clear, I think, and while
> his attitude might not be PC, this is hardly a matter for
> literary analysis.
The PC factor is not the main problem here, but the fact that a
stereotypical reaction stands in the way of an interesting
relationship between a teacher and a student, when the teacher
instructs the student about his homeland, which is not the
teacher's homeland. It poses the question of the image of Russia
as opposed to the direct experience of it (although Moon was in
Russia before the Revolution), which I would have liked to see
developed.
As for the dismissal: if Martin stops meeting Moon it
is the protagonist's attitude towards this characters and not the
author's, but if the character disappears from the novel, as Moon
does after we discover he is a homosexual, it is a choice of the
author, and in that sense I may address the problem of his
dismissal. We must give credit to Nabokov that he was quite
conscious of his writing and if a character disappears from his
novel it is not because he forgot all about him.
> As for "a cheap way to avoid a serious discussion", Nabokov
> needed neither a cheap nor any other way for that; I do not
> believe he saw literature as a forum for "serious discussion" of
> whatever problems (understatement of the month?).
The term "discussion" may be misleading, what I meant is that an
interesting literary theme is introduced, and that I felt Nabokov
would have done better to explore the possibilities of a character
like Moon, (one of my favourite Nabokov characters, by the way,
and a very interesting one in terms of his attitude towards
Russia), than to have done with it on such uninteresting grounds
as his sexual indentity.
Anat Ben-Amos
Department of Literature
University of Essex
Colchester CO4 3SQ
United Kingdom
E-mail: abenam@essex.ac.uk
"But Martin in all honesty did not understand
why it was worse to be an expert in Russian letters
than a transportation engineer or a merchant." (Glory)