JM: Jim Twiggs praises Naiman’s “Nabokov,Perversely” in the sequence of his comments to “Nabokov/Playboy – smut.” Naiman’s emphasis on Shakespearean and Nabokovian verbal jokes keeps on puzzling me, unlike the rest of his scholarly trouvailles and humor. For example, when Naiman argues with too much zeal on a metaphorical “meaning of ‘life’, ” (or in the prefix “con”) for, as Stan affirms, it might be a “disservice to the master” when one “overly dwells on amusing but insignificant and short-lived tics and tricks.”  

For me, Nabokov didn’t feel hampered by a particular set of social values in relation to his fidelity to Art and the sustaining his artistic ethics, in contrast to what might have ruled his private life and behavior. Was Nabokov’s “smut” always like a tic, an irrepressive part of his fun and games, or did it serve him towards a wider artistic purpose, and which had nothing to do with his private life? What is the reality of art (as a representation of fancy, mind, mores, social costumes,aso).

I’m just at the beginning of “Sex in Elizabethan England” (Alan Haynes 1997, The History Press, 2010). It has already humbled me and my standard views about Shakespearean bawdy, Elizabethan sexual metaphors and their distinct artistic intentions.

How easily people lost their heads or were burned at the stake for a breach of morality and for verbalizing opinions - which might not even have been religiously heretic or politically intended. We’re much safer nowadays when we set up to discuss American H.S’s summer reading assignment of “Lolita”  or what were the novelists published by Playboy…

Haynes preface quotes Germaine Greer:”Nothing is more protean or more susceptible to cultural pressure…then human sexuality.” He adds that Greer has been “foucaulted” and freudianised into seeing sexuality as “a construct of the human imagination, which changes from time to time, like preferences for styles in food preparation, literature and clothes.”  Although he adopts this view with a grain of salt, he purports to show how “sexuality is as much a matter of images today as it was four hundred years ago…and the affectional consequences of biology and bio-chemistry are the area with which literature best deals.”  The whole idea of virtue and debauchery changes and, with it, vocabulary, word patterns, metaphors, games.

Haynes mentions Macbeth’s witches and “how the play famously begins with bearded women, manlike images of feminine power whom the lady of Glamis would ape…”(p.4). I was reminded of Lolita’s “bearded lady” of HH’s fantasies and fears, but stopped myself before stretching even more verbal strings and associations… The same occurred to me after reading about Playboy’s publication of “A Nursery Tale,” with pages filled with nude women to follow suit to Erwin’s masturbatory verbal harems -  when I remembered a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, when the list of Don Juan’s conquests was unfolded by Leporello and it consisted of dozens of mirrors, all of them turned towards the audience...

 

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Excerpts from former messages:

Stadlen[on SK’s article: Playboy often bills itself as America’s most intelligent smut magazine and Nabokov was certainly one of America’s most intelligent smut authors.]Did not Nabokov invite just this description by his bizarre collusion with Playboy? If "Lolita" is a truly moral work, what was he playing at? To Nabokovians it may betoken some kind of amused sophisticion, but does it not demonstrate a moral confusion?

 James Twiggs: Am I alone in being puzzled by Anthony Stadlen’s questions about VN and Playboy?... Unless we expect our writers to be paragons of a narrowly conceived, puritanical style of virtue, there is nothing bizarre in VN’s …association with Hefner and nothing unseemly in the choice of Playboy as publisher of a good many of VN’s works. It’s worth adding that Eric Naiman’s new book, Nabokov, Perversely, opens with an account of VN’s “A Nursery Story” as it appeared in the January 1974 issue of Playboy. After two pages, the story is interrupted by photos of 33 nude women. The plot of the story, whether by design or not, is thus echoed in the very format of the magazine…

Stan Kelly: Nabokov indulges in many forms of word play (puns, mis-allusions, rhyming-slang, acrostics, spoonerisms, anagrams) but they are served with donnish knowing winks, nudges (and even the occasional embarrassing smirk) aimed at his preferred target audience. But, this audience of creative re-readers really disserve the Master if they overly dwell on these amusing but insignificant and short-lived tics and tricks. Future generations will be as puzzled as we are today by Shakespeare’s dated verbal jokes!