Martin Amis split in two a novelist's life
and language ( "Language leads a double life – and so does the
novelist. You chat with family... Then you enter your study, where language
exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice...Writers
lead a double life. And they die doubly, too:... once when the body dies,
and once when the talent dies." One the one side,
he placed the novelist and his linguistic skills for
everyday communication and, on the other, the novelist and language
as "the stuff of patterned artifice." Amis equally halved his selection of six Nabokov
novels related to paedophilia: "Six fictions... two or perhaps three of
which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish
problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no
human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the
cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular
crime." According to
him, "Left to themselves, The
Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and
utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer
weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to
infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can
from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward
fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual
transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes
of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to
find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and
eternally hold to be unforgivable." Then he adds that, in
"fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not
moral but aesthetic. And I intend no innnuendo by pointing out that
Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous
intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud ..."
However, the initial division
presented by Amis, for all its clarity and objectivity, derives from
the structure of the
mechanism Freud encountered in every
perversion. Although we may identify the fetichist, the
pedophile, the sado-masochist, the exibitionist or the voyeur by their
distinct actions and fantasies, there is only one mechanism
which all of these behaviors share, according to Freud: a division of the
mind brought about by "disavowal" (Verleugnung).*
Should we accept Amis' neat separation,
we'd be admitting that art and perversion have a common matrix, one which
disregards the socializing promise inherent in language, to
elegantly expand a solipsistic universe and the novelist placed above good and
evil.
An artist's personal secrets, hidden
from biographers, has to be preserved from the thrust
of voyeuristic examiners but, at the same time, it is inevitable
that part of his fantasies and painful experiences seep,
unde theirr various guises, into his novels. Nabokov was
perfectly aware of this fact, since he once wrote that the "crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a
style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your
telephone number without giving something of yourself" (Cf. Gogol
) However, at the same time he also affirmed that his life
should never be mistaken for his work, since his
fictional characters were gargoyles and caryatids,
lying "outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral
façade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted
out." Must the readers accept this dividing line, one that isolates
the evil characters in his fiction, from that which inhabits his
non-fictional "inner self," and have done with it? Or shall
they recognize that something dangerous, either external or internal,
will keep on threatening the autor's sense of harmony and, in
some unfortunate circumstances, gain the upper hand? It's not true that "in fiction, of course, nobody ever gets
hurt," because after a novel is made public,
it no longer belongs to its creator: it depends of, and interacts
with spectators, readers, interpreters -and its poisonous,
pessimistic or inspiring communicative dimension is restored.
Nevertheless, even if an artist's emotions and experiences leave a mark in his work,
which points back at him, a separation, similar to the one Martin
Amis advanced, is fundamental in order to preserve the foundations of art
and the author's right to privacy - but it has to be another kind
of division, one which doesn't consider language as "leading a
double life."Martin Amis himself indicates how this other
division operates and his criteria
about how a well-succeeded work
of art may be isolated from a deformed production** are
very sound: " in fiction.....the flaw is not moral but
aesthetic," (and this he states twice: "The problem,
which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has
to do with the intimate malice of age..." ). We
clearly perceive that Amis is not judging Nabokov's wayward
fixity, but he's evaluating when this factor, examined from
an aesthetic perspective, starts to throw VN's overall
production out of balance. For example, when he states that "Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact
and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and
framed, with stupendous courage and cunning. And so matters might have
rested. But then came the meltdown of artistic self-possession..."
I also agree with Amis when he
mentions "the meltdown of artistic self-possession" in Nabokov's last
writings. Nevertheless, for me, this meltdown only started to take place
when Nabokov, ill and often feverish, began to take notes for
"Laura." In the fragments of Laura everything that, until then,
Nabokov had described concerning "aesthetic bliss" and art ("curiosity,
tenderness...") is absent, or reversed. There are no redeeming views to
indicate any shifts of perspective.
...............................................................
* In his other
works Freud examines the various kinds of refusal, negation,
denial, and on their subsequent splittings, in relation to
various other mental illness.
** "One commonsensical caveat persists, for
all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the
things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s
mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence –
insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three
novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that
incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original
of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on
the leviathan of his corpus.... Lolita, Pnin, Despair (1936; translated by the author in 1966), and
four or five short stories are immortal. King, Queen, Knave (1928, 1968),
Laughter in the Dark (1932, 1936), The Enchanter, The Eye (1930), Bend
Sinister (1947), Pale Fire (1962), and Transparent Things are
ferociously accomplished; and little Mary (1925), his first novel, is a
little beauty. Lectures on Literature (1980), Lectures on Russian
Literature (1981), and Lectures on Don Quixote (1983), together with
Strong Opinions (1973), constitute the shining record of a pre-eminent
artist-critic. And the Selected Letters (1989), the Nabokov-Wilson Letters
(1979), and that marshlight of an autobiography, Speak, Memory (1967), give
us a four-dimensional portrait of a delightful and honourable man. The
vice Nabokov most frequently reviled was “cruelty”. And his gentleness of
nature is most clearly seen in the loving attentiveness with which, in his
fiction, he writes about animals...They call it a “shimmer” – a glint, a
glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile
instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the
everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden
versts of longing and terror...Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a
horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism...
In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada
(1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in
unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young
girls."