James Twiggs sends the link
to The Times Literary Supplement, December 4, 2009: "The burning
question."
Was Vladimir Nabokov's family right to publish
his last, unfinished manuscript?
by Stephen Abell*
JM: Related to "fragments",
there's an interesting confession by soon-to-be widowed Humbug,
Herbert, Hubert, Humbert after Charlotte Haze pries open a drawer and reads
his diary:
"It is all your hallucination. You are crazy,
Charlotte. The notes you found were fragments of a novel. Your name and hers
were put in by mere chance. Just because they came handy. Think it over. I
shall bring you a drink."
TOoL's Hubert is much older than Humbert; he is
also smelly and repulsive, although he'd been first presented as
a "charmer".
Apparently VN also hadn't decided
about "doublings" or "treblings". Flora reminds HHH of his little
daughter Daisy whereas her mother reminds him of his first wife.
Then we find Wild's own reminiscences
leading us from Flora to Aurora Lee. And there's Flora as Flaura, or Laura.
In other words, in the endless game of substitutions and mirrors, there is no
original to be found. Inspite of Nabokov's dismissal of Freud he is, in
TOoL, closely following the "Viennese quack"'s steps. Freud wrote that there is no original "love object" that
is later "lost" (except the mother's breast, related to a baby's
primordial "experience of satisfaction"), although "the finding of
the object is in fact a refinding" [Freud, S., "Three essays on the
theory of sexuality" (1905,p. 222)].
In the line of S.Abell's indication
about a "final postmodern gesture," it seems that
TOoL also re-enacts mankind's chief and unsolvable predicament
(S.Freud's theory) in our unending aspiration to find a soul-mate
and "encounter a (fantasized,non-existing) love object" , ie,
to retrieve at last the "original Laura" ( the novel's young
girl and Nabokov's - lost - novel about her).
..............................................................................
* Excerpts: "Books are made to be
read, not destroyed. And the work of epochal artists should be preserved and
made public. The burning question is not, in the end, much of a burning
question. However, it is important to make clear what has survived here: The
Original of Laura is not, as Dmitri Nabokov puts it in his introduction,
necessarily an “embryonic masterpiece”. It is not really, as the subtitle
suggests, “a novel in fragments”. It is an assembly of fragments of a
novel, notes towards a final text that was clearly some years away from
completion. It contains moments of expected brilliance, amid plenty of humdrum
early drafting [...] Flora’s life is connected, via a postmodern subplot
(imperfectly realized at the stage Nabokov left it), to a novel called “My
Laura”, and we are asked to consider “identifying her with an unwritten,
half-written, rewritten difficult book”...The reader might ignore this
metafictional mingling because the most striking thing about Flora is how much
she reminds us of Lolita: there is plenty of Lo in this “Flo”
[...] In this
context, the author’s wish for his book to be itself destroyed seems
thematically fitting, a final postmodern gesture, the natural conclusion to his
examination of the desire for obliteration. Nabokov once said, thinking of
Robert Louis Stevenson, that “sometimes the destinies of authors follow the
destinies of their books”. His final work, now that we have seen it, casts a
typically ironic light on this. Ironic or not, it remains a matter of unmixed
delight that The Original of Laura has survived its author’s intentions, and the
unforgiving fire. A book (even imperfect and unfinished) by Vladimir Nabokov
should, of course, be preserved and made public.