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[NABOKOV-L] [THOUGHTS] Alter on Boyd's RY, a personal commentary
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PS: Commentary and queries related to Robert Alter's review:
Robert Alter agrees with Brian Boyd concerning Nabokov's informed considerations on political issues* and, therefore, he denies that Nabokov's writing is pure escapism, as it's been asserted by a number of scholars (and encouraged by Nabokov himself. Cf. Nabokov's letter to Vladislav Khodasevich, in "defense of art as private expression"). Alter distinguishes between the novels which reflect a satire of totalitarian regimes and human folly, and those written after the author moved to America. And yet, can we conclude, from Alter's exposition that, inspite of their socio-political theme, Nabokov's Russian novels ( and "Bend Sinister"), were other than the pleasure-seeking discharges, such as it takes place in catharsis or through the expulsion of "evil" made to stand, like a gargoyle, in the façade of a cathedral?
What both writers, Alter and Boyd, fail to emphasize, while praising Nabokov's concepts related to the importance of "consciousness," is that Nabokov employs his classificatory powers and awareness mostly in what concerns the biological field (including the human brain and patterned behavior), in detriment of expressing psycho-social factors and language, as they affect human life, except when he dwells in the sphere of abnormal conduct. Nabokov's familiarity with the diminute kingdom of insects and their environment allows him to inhabit a kind of parallel world, one which others are able perceive but seldom do. Perhaps Nabokov's conclusion that every great novel is a "great fairy-tale," or his delight with a nymphic realm's proximity to human "reality", indicate that his way of seeing social and mental life includes them in a chain of mutually connected, parallel worlds, that lie outside the verbal domain. We learn from Alter that: "Nabokov assumed, as Boyd implies, that reality was a kind of infinite regress of related but unique entities - snowflakes and souls - endlessly and unpredictably linked with each other through hidden patterns, layer after layer or level after level of "reality" dimly glimmering behind the one we strive to see. That is why the finely discriminated details in his fiction are repeatedly set in a barely visible web of larger connective designs." Crossing from the microcosm into the macrocosm by the recognition of life's "plexed artistry" - which, as such, is unrelated to human laws, prohibitions, desires, guilt? A kind of "O for a life of images rather than of words?"**
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*- "Nabokov is an exemplary writer of the century precisely because his best work challenges easy oppositions between the aesthetic and the political, between the aesthetic and the moral. Brian Boyd's two-volume biography, it is now possible to get a clear picture of Nabokov's relation to Russian political and cultural history, and to the various currents of the European emigration...A good many readers, put off by his archness and by the mandarin touches of his prose, have assumed that Nabokov had no interest in reality, contenting himself with the admiration of his own artifice. Boyd, on the contrary, argues for an essential connection between the meticulous empiricism of Nabokov's activity as an entomologist and his concerns as a writer: 'Nabokov accepted the world as real, so real that there is always more and more to know - about the scales of a butterfly wing, about a line of Pushkin'."
** - misquoting Keats in a letter, dated November 22, 1817.
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Robert Alter agrees with Brian Boyd concerning Nabokov's informed considerations on political issues* and, therefore, he denies that Nabokov's writing is pure escapism, as it's been asserted by a number of scholars (and encouraged by Nabokov himself. Cf. Nabokov's letter to Vladislav Khodasevich, in "defense of art as private expression"). Alter distinguishes between the novels which reflect a satire of totalitarian regimes and human folly, and those written after the author moved to America. And yet, can we conclude, from Alter's exposition that, inspite of their socio-political theme, Nabokov's Russian novels ( and "Bend Sinister"), were other than the pleasure-seeking discharges, such as it takes place in catharsis or through the expulsion of "evil" made to stand, like a gargoyle, in the façade of a cathedral?
What both writers, Alter and Boyd, fail to emphasize, while praising Nabokov's concepts related to the importance of "consciousness," is that Nabokov employs his classificatory powers and awareness mostly in what concerns the biological field (including the human brain and patterned behavior), in detriment of expressing psycho-social factors and language, as they affect human life, except when he dwells in the sphere of abnormal conduct. Nabokov's familiarity with the diminute kingdom of insects and their environment allows him to inhabit a kind of parallel world, one which others are able perceive but seldom do. Perhaps Nabokov's conclusion that every great novel is a "great fairy-tale," or his delight with a nymphic realm's proximity to human "reality", indicate that his way of seeing social and mental life includes them in a chain of mutually connected, parallel worlds, that lie outside the verbal domain. We learn from Alter that: "Nabokov assumed, as Boyd implies, that reality was a kind of infinite regress of related but unique entities - snowflakes and souls - endlessly and unpredictably linked with each other through hidden patterns, layer after layer or level after level of "reality" dimly glimmering behind the one we strive to see. That is why the finely discriminated details in his fiction are repeatedly set in a barely visible web of larger connective designs." Crossing from the microcosm into the macrocosm by the recognition of life's "plexed artistry" - which, as such, is unrelated to human laws, prohibitions, desires, guilt? A kind of "O for a life of images rather than of words?"**
......................................................................
*- "Nabokov is an exemplary writer of the century precisely because his best work challenges easy oppositions between the aesthetic and the political, between the aesthetic and the moral. Brian Boyd's two-volume biography, it is now possible to get a clear picture of Nabokov's relation to Russian political and cultural history, and to the various currents of the European emigration...A good many readers, put off by his archness and by the mandarin touches of his prose, have assumed that Nabokov had no interest in reality, contenting himself with the admiration of his own artifice. Boyd, on the contrary, argues for an essential connection between the meticulous empiricism of Nabokov's activity as an entomologist and his concerns as a writer: 'Nabokov accepted the world as real, so real that there is always more and more to know - about the scales of a butterfly wing, about a line of Pushkin'."
** - misquoting Keats in a letter, dated November 22, 1817.
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/