Jim Twiggs:Banville's proposed
translation (in footnote 3 of his essay) of the German subtitle is The Lovely
Wicked World of Vladimir Nabokov. Google translates the phrase in question as
"the beautiful evil world," but I prefer Banville's
version.
JM:The word wicked, as I see it, has lost its
original "evil" meaning by having acquired a kind of "mischievous"
tonality...
Banville wrote that "the central
thesis of Speak, Nabokov is that the philosophical basis of Nabokov’s work is
Gnosticism, arrived at via a sympathetic reading of Schopenhauer: The classic
defining feature of [the] Gnostic view is the answer to the question of evil in
Creation. How can there be such monstrousness in the world if a good God created
it? The Gnostic answer is that there is not one Creator, but two…. The true God
is concealed in his realm of light. The affairs of the material world are
handled by the secondary Creator God, the Demiurge…. The Demiurge is powerful
and bars humanity’s way to its true purpose…. In Gnostic imagery he is the
jailer who holds us captive in the prison of matter…. Only the escape from the
prison of the body leads the soul into the otherworldly realm of light. At most,
sparks of this light are scattered in the material world,"thereby demanding
a more effective word in lieu of "wicked."
Actually, this is the first time I find a link
bt. Nabokov, Schopenhauer and the Gnostics. The way the argument is
presented brings to one's mind, immediately, Pnin's words, which Maar
quotes already in his preface: "no conscience, and
hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such
things as Mira's death were possible." Hoiwever, here I find the same
mystery as the one in the phrasing of Maar's title. After all, we expect
Pnin's conscience and consciousness to have subsisted, as much as we feel we
continue to hold on to our own, although the world outside can be evil,
indeed.
PS: I'd like to apologize to Philip Klop
because, when I read it again, I saw that my commentary seemed to jump over
his helpful information about the origin of the expression in German.("Die
Schöne Böse Welt refers to the German expression Die große böse Welt which means
something akin to "The big and dangerous world" or "The big and evil world". The
expression stems from children's literature and is used when a small child is
exposed to the overwhelmingly big outside world; thus stressing some sort of
clash between the small, good child in his safe home and the big, evil and
dangerous world awaiting him outside. )