"It is always a pleasure to have one's own privately formulated thoughts and intuitions about a writer confirmed by authority. Such was my experience in reading Boyd's exposition of
... the two opposite aspects of Nabokov's style that reveal two counterpoised tendencies in his thought
On the one hand he admits to 'an innate passion for independence.' He reveres the particularity of things, all that can break away from generalization and the blur of habit;....[The Russian Years, p. 8,9]On the other hand Nabokov prizes pattern and design, things united in new combinations rather than highlighted by isolation. He is entranced and puzzled by the chance harmonies of the moment, the complex artistry of mimicry in the natural world, the designs of time or fate, the patterns lurking within memory.
This latter fascination with what I have called 'dislocations' of
naturally occurring events, such as the sky-reflecting mirror being
carried across the real sky at the beginning of The Gift, is an element in the
Nabokovian signature. Another sort of 'dislocation' would be VN's fondness
for anagrams. This is not surrealistic subversion of order, although it may seem
to have a superficial resemblance to it; rather it is a search for
harmonies potentially present
in lived experience but accessible only
to the active imagination.
One might say that it is precisely the excision of particulars from their habit-encrusted, everyday context and their rearrangement into something 'rich and rare' that reveals and celebrates the individuality of things."
"goliard2"