Abstract of the
article by Diana Trilling on "Bend Sinister" (excerpts), dated June
14, 1947, recently posted by Maurice Bouchard:
"Author argues that
it is Nabokov's elaborate prose method that persuades his publishers that
"Bend Sinister" is so distinguished a work of fiction. Surely writing like
this is elaborate chicanery. It is not daring; it is merely
willful."
The Great American Novel, 13 April 2010,Michial
Farmer
"Writing qua writing doesn’t get any better than
Lolita, and it’s no surprise that one finds echoes of its distinctive tone all
through the English-language literature of the intervening decades.(I hear it
most strongly, to the point of impersonation, in John Updike’s A Month of
Sundays, but it’s there in everyone from Pynchon to Rushdie.)* ...With
this in mind, the Christian may have more to fear from the philosophical
implications of the novel than from any plot-level disgust over paedophilia..."
Humbert Humbert is " is in love with a material form that is by its
very definition ephemeral; one can be a nymphet for only so long before one
grows into one of the adult women that so disgust Humbert."...To love the
spiritual ideal through Dolores’s bodily reality, Humbert must discard Dolores
as a real individual."
JM: I selected different
paragraphs by two authors who'd been particularly affected
by Nabokov's verbal magic ("writing qua writing" and "writing like
this"), for both seem to consider such "writing" ( or "prose
method") dangerous and perverse, once it is practiced for the
sake of sound and beauty and unrelated to any traditional, social or
philosophical, novelistic message. Michial Farmer denies Nabokov's non post-modernist exploration of a
transcendental dimension which would implicate the author in
an abstract dimension of "pity, kindness, curiosity": he dismisses the
"plot-level paedophilia" as being less dangerous, than its spiritual
implications, to a good Christian.
By Nabokov's standards, plot is not the
most important element in a novel. He writes about this aspect very clearly
in his early biography of Gogol, or in S.O, when he describes the
pleasure he extracts from puzzles and clever games, those that are
demanded by the very rational-abstract structuring of
a plot**. I gather that, for him, the "plexed artistry" and patterns
he discerns in "life"are unrelated to the process of
construing a plot, with its contrived symmetries, cycles and
facile repetitions. It seems to me that, in a way, the cleverness of games
and his disregard for ordinary morality represent his attitude towards
vulgarity (philistinism and poshlost) in art. He'd be closer to the
unclement angry Christians who lash against the vendors in the forecourts
of the temple of "Art."
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*- The two sentences quoted below
are unrelated (the wording is different and so is the entire context), but
I hear an "echo," in Updike, of one of Nabokov's axial confessions in
Lolita, related to a fantasy about the
"hereafter."
Lolita, V.Nabokov: "Unless it can be
proven to me...that in the infinite run it does not matter a jot that a North
American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a
maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, then life is a
joke)..."
The Terrorist: p.39,Ch.2, John Updike:
(Joryleen) "Suppose none of it is true - suppose you die and there's nothing
there, nothing at all? What's the point of all this purity then?" [...] (Ahmad)
"If none of it is true,"..."then the world is too terrible to cherish, and I
would not regret leaving it."
**- Nabokov even describes "Lolita" as one of
his most abstract constructions!