Dear List,
I wanted to share with you some of my
impressions about the "Transitional Nabokov" Conference held last July
in Oxford. I'd like to invite the list members that were present to
send their opinions and arguments. Since I was unable to attend the
first day of presentations, my references to them shall be scant.
Besides, I can only offer a brief outline. Many imprecise notes will
need correction or additional comments.
The host at this "Two-Day International
Conference", Ron Bush ( a James Joyce scholar in Oxford) praised the
encounter discoursing about how the excess of explanatory annotations
about James Joyce, at present, hinders a more spontaneous exchange such
as he encountered while attending the "Transitional Nabokov"
presentations.
He understood that there were still many new
avenues open to scholarly exploration of Nabokov's oeuvre and expressed
his satisfaction with the young Nabokov scholars and students who are
now exploring new avenues to interpret and read Nabokov.
There was a polite but very open debate
between contrasting opinions held by Brian Boyd and Alexander Dolonin
on "Reading "Lolita" with a Russian Accent" ( Dolinin's text) and
"Nabokov as a Formerly Russian Writer: Transitions between Traditions"
( B.Boyd's). Sasha Dolinin suggested that
there might be an excess of reverence towards Nabokov's words which, in
effect, often went against the realization that VN could change his
mind and even say contradictory things, and that Brian Boyd, as the family's authorized biographer,
was not sufficiently independent of VN's statements. At that time
A.Bouazza called my attention to VN's own views about Russian and
English language and authors and offered me a quote: "My
fear of losing or corrupting, through alien influence, the only thing I
had salvaged from Russia – her language—became positively morbid and
considerably more harassing than the fear I was to experience two
decades later of my never being able to bring my English prose anywhere
close to the level of my Russian. ( SM 265)...Not once in my three
years of Cambridge –repeat: not once – did I visit the University
Library, or even bother to locate it (…), or find out if there existed
a college library where books might be borrowed for reading in one’s
digs (SM 268)" . Although it it difficult to imagine that at any time VN would
dismiss or diminish the importance of his written works in Russian,
these comments in SM certainly suggest VN's initial misgivings towards
English and the never denied fundamental importance of his mother
tongue.
One of the participants, Jane Grayson was once or twice
included in the debate between Shasha Dolinin and B. Boyd, but
although I remember her smiling assent, I don't know if she added
comments of her own. I'd like to remind the List that Grayson
wrote "Nabokov Translated: A Comparison of Nabokov's Russian and
English Prose" ( 1977) and in her book she observed that the
Russian émigré press frequently described the difficult conditions
under which younger émigré writers laboured. In their opinion these
writers could lose their links
with their literary tradition or cease to write in Russian..
Maurice Coutourier (Nice)
spoke about "The French Nabokov" and detailed his
modern post-structuralist reading and his understanding of certain
Nabokovian propositions, using the theories of Jacques Lacan. We had a very profitable opportunity to follow the
most recent advances in the study of VN's work. Susan E.Sweeney spoke about "Thinking about Impossible
Things in Nabokov", in a transitional paper that allowed us a glimpse
into her work in progress concerning her experience with two levels of
discourse in VN's writings, one explicit and the other implicit,
running along parallel lines and disclosing a novel way of achieving
a three-dimensional view of the text.
Lara Delage-Toriel, on "Bodies in
Translation: Deriving Meaning from Motion in Nabokov's works" dwelt on
fetichism ( Lolita as a fetish, i.e, art itself as a fetish). Unfortunately I was not able to hear Thomas Karshan
speak about "Nabokov's transition from Game towards Free Play" but he
explained to me his ideas about examining Nabokov using psychoanalytic
tools ( mainly Donald Winnicott's who also explored what he called
"play techniques and transitional space").
All those
that were present seemed to agree that the papers read at the
Conference were rich contributions and lament there was not sufficient
time for all the questions & answers about the more stimulating
points that were raised. I wish our EDs, both of whom
presented papers and presided over pannels, could offer to us abstracts of the papers and
encourage others to proceed with my inital, very incomplete,
introduction.