Walter
Miale: A work of art has no importance whatever
to society," Vladimir Nabokov insisted. "It is only
important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to
me." Nabokov managed to pull off what Joyce and others could only
muse about: to awaken from the nightmare of
history.
J.Aisenberg: What if it turns out
you're not playing chess with a concealed concealer but bouncing a
ball off a brick wall? Nabokov entertains this idea in his work with a
certain uneasiness, it lurks in his books, being routed and dismissed over and
over again, but always remaining as a distinct possibility, the dead thing at
the center of transparent colored rings.
Jansy Mello: Walter, your quote,
arriving during the discussion at the List about Nabokov's concept of
"species" and his emphasis on
(individual) "specimens" made me realize the irony of
VN's words on the unimportance of art to society and its
value to the individual.
Until now I'd always interpreted it as a kind of
defense of "ars gratia artis". It has now acquired an entirely new meaning
to me (as an individual).
J.Aisenberg, novelists don't need to be
consistent ( perhaps only their critics have to be). Is the sentece about
the "dead thing at the center" Nabokov's own? I usually felt (very
inconsistently and non-philosophically) that the center of a spinning
universe might be a reference to TS Eliot's lines in The Four Quartets and
not a "thing" at all.
Another sentence of VN's on "center" is to be
found in Pale Fire, Kinbote's commentary to lines 1-4: "The poem was begun at the dead center of the
year, a few minutes after midnight July 1".( I just realized that today is July
1)