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Nabstract: Grayson (fwd)
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NABOKOV AT THE CROSSROADS OF MODERNISM AND POST-MODERNISM
CONFERENCE HELD IN NICE, 22-24 JUNE 1995
Abstract of paper delivered by Jane Grayson
Title: Nabokov and Perec
This comparison of Nabokov and Georges Perec was conceived as a
contribution to the debate on where Nabokov stands in 20th-century
literary history, and whether he is more appropriately classified as a
modernist or a post-modernist. The perspective offered by Perec's
writing does not give an answer to this question, but it does draw
attention to the watershed in Nabokov's work in the late 1930s.
Perec loved playing games with words and numbers and contriving
intriguingly complex narrative strategies and it is this importance
accorded to the ludic principle that first attracts comparison with
Nabokov. But these games and strategies often served as more than
brain-teasers; they posed philosophical problems and responded in Perec
to deep emotional needs, the very severity of the constraint working to
release inhibition. "La Disparition", the novel he wrote without the
letter "e", was conceived as a way out of writer's block, but it turned
into far more than that. The oblique, often misleading form of narrative
which Perec chose for his autobiography "W" was a way of coping with the
difficulty of speaking about his parents and coming to terms with their loss.
A comparison of "W", written when Perec was in his late 30s, with
"Speak, Memory" highlights the greater equilibrium and ease enjoyed by
the older writer in treatment of the same theme of loss. It is in the
1930s, when Nabokov was of the age of Perec, rather than the 1960s and
70s, that closer connections are to be found. There Nabokov can be seen
imposing upon himself some formidable narrative constraints when working
through aesthetic and personal problems. Viewed through "Perec" eyes the
formidable constraint posed by Nabokov's abandonment of Russian for
English as his writing language assumes particular significance. After
all, what is Perec's foregoing of one letter in comparison with the
liberating constraint of the deprivation of an entire alphabet!
CONFERENCE HELD IN NICE, 22-24 JUNE 1995
Abstract of paper delivered by Jane Grayson
Title: Nabokov and Perec
This comparison of Nabokov and Georges Perec was conceived as a
contribution to the debate on where Nabokov stands in 20th-century
literary history, and whether he is more appropriately classified as a
modernist or a post-modernist. The perspective offered by Perec's
writing does not give an answer to this question, but it does draw
attention to the watershed in Nabokov's work in the late 1930s.
Perec loved playing games with words and numbers and contriving
intriguingly complex narrative strategies and it is this importance
accorded to the ludic principle that first attracts comparison with
Nabokov. But these games and strategies often served as more than
brain-teasers; they posed philosophical problems and responded in Perec
to deep emotional needs, the very severity of the constraint working to
release inhibition. "La Disparition", the novel he wrote without the
letter "e", was conceived as a way out of writer's block, but it turned
into far more than that. The oblique, often misleading form of narrative
which Perec chose for his autobiography "W" was a way of coping with the
difficulty of speaking about his parents and coming to terms with their loss.
A comparison of "W", written when Perec was in his late 30s, with
"Speak, Memory" highlights the greater equilibrium and ease enjoyed by
the older writer in treatment of the same theme of loss. It is in the
1930s, when Nabokov was of the age of Perec, rather than the 1960s and
70s, that closer connections are to be found. There Nabokov can be seen
imposing upon himself some formidable narrative constraints when working
through aesthetic and personal problems. Viewed through "Perec" eyes the
formidable constraint posed by Nabokov's abandonment of Russian for
English as his writing language assumes particular significance. After
all, what is Perec's foregoing of one letter in comparison with the
liberating constraint of the deprivation of an entire alphabet!