This is the problem. Why does it bother the Shades so much
that their
> >daughter is
unattractive?
>
> Does it bother Sybil so
much? She sensibly urged John to "rejoice
> that she is innocent" and
not
> "overstress the
physical." (Walter Miale)
...
As I've said, although Sybil's reaction isn't as bad as
John's, it's still nonsense. (Jerry Friedman)
I've been writing a bit lately about this question of Hazel's
appearance and her fate, so I thought I'd toss out a summary of my
thoughts' direction. I am not "in the midst" of this section of my
work right now, so I don't have all the details right at hand, and
don't have time to seek them out. But for what it's worth:
I've been looking at it as a particular evolutionary problem,
perhaps as part of Nabokov's effort to find loopholes in Natural
Selection. Hazel is not able to attract a mate during her short
life--but what is a Darwinian failure can be a victory on other
Nabokovian levels. If we take seriously, as I think we must, VN's
claims for the special status of human consciousness and its mysterious
future (after life, and perhaps after Homo sapiens sapiens),
then the fact that Hazel has both very high intelligence and very high
"spiritual" sensitivity (I could have written "otherworldly" for
"spiritual") suggests that her sacrificed material survival and
procreation is not necessarily the most important point to be seen in
her death. We know that she returned from a "chateau" in tears, but we
do not, in fact, know that the ideas of romance and childbearing were
important to her. With the signs of a different kind of involvement in
life after her death, we can imagine that the death itself, although
devastating for the parents, is not something to be judged on a simple
scale of "life is good and death is bad." Death causes pain, but it
also causes a change in consciousness (whether we speak of those
deceased, or those left alive)--a "surprise", as VN calls it.
Did Hazel commit suicide, or did she take a chance--maybe the ice would
hold up?? (Shade "knows"--but can we be sure?) Hazel was an unusual
girl--"She'd . . .expressionless sit on her tumbled bed/ . . . and
moan/ murmuring dreadful words in monotone" (353-6: I have skipped
Shade's graphic depiction of H's physical defects here) If it is an
act of daring, her act is much like Martin's in Glory (at times
my favorite VN novel). But if her death is deliberate, then I would
relate it more to Luzhin's in The Defense, less to Sybil Vane's
in "The Vane Sisters". For an author who sought ways to suggest that
Natural Selection does not exhaust the potential of life, rejection of
the "struggle to survive" takes on a more subtle meaning. If, as Brian
Boyd has presented, she goes on to contribute to the creation of her
father's poem (and even if this participation occurs from within
his own mind, through memory of her) then her existence continues
on another, non-Darwinian plane. It is worth remembering that The
Death of Ivan Ilyich was one of Nabokov's two favorite Tolstoy
works.
Jay Livingston a moment ago suggested a census of "dead souls" in
Nabokov's works. I don't know if it's been done, but the idea has
occurred to me in the past--in slightly different form--and I think it
is an excellent suggestion. There are also various sorts of deaths:
"pseudo-deaths", false deaths, double-deaths, etc--one could make quite
a taxonomy.
Stephen Blackwell