EDNote: Apologies for the delay in releasing this message from
Professor Couturier; a computer anomaly made it invisible in my inbox.
~SB
-------- Original Message --------
In his "American Scholar" article about The Original of Laura Brian
covers a
lot of interesting ground about his own involvement with Nabokov as a
scholar
and a friend of Vera; he also offers inspiring critical comments about
the
novel itself, and announces the publication of new Nabokov material we
all look
forward to. Though I have known him for almost twenty years and lived
close to
him when he was in Nice as visiting professor, I had never heard him
say so
much on his Nabokov research and his dealings with Vera and Dmitri.
Thank you
Brian!
There are still a few questions concerning TOOL which I would like to
address.
Despite his extended comment about the opening, I still think there is
nothing
really new here. Someone mentioned the opening of To the Lighthouse; I
think
the opening of My Dalloway makes even more sense: “Mrs. Dalloway said
she
would buy the flowers herself.” This is a piece of reported speech,
apparently,
like the opening of TOOL. It seems very straightforward: Mrs. Dalloway
is
telling her maid, Lucy, mentioned in the following sentence (“For Lucy
had her
work cut out for her”) that she will buy the flowers herself. But why
is it
that she is referred to as “Mrs. Dalloway” first and as “Clarissa
Dalloway” a
few lines later (“And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning –
fresh
as if issued to children on a beach”)? The opening sentence can in fact
be
interpreted in three different ways: as narrative discourse by an
omniscient
narrator for instance; as reported speech for “I will buy the flowers
myself”;
and as reported thought (or free indirect style, since the wording
would be the
same), the reflector being Lucy, in this case, which probably accounts
for the
switch from “Mrs Dalloway” here to “Clarissa Dalloway” a few lines
down. I
naturally favour this third interpretation which may suggest that Lucy
would
rather buy the flowers herself than do the cleaning and wait for her
mistress’s
return. She may have been hurt by Mrs. Dalloway’s abrupt declaration
which
might have suggested that she didn’t trust her. Nabokov never outdid
Virginia
Woolf in this kind of discursive game (see the samples of it I analyzed
in "La
Figure de l’auteur").
Brian’s explanations concerning the fact that no one spotted Nabokov in
the
quiz are interesting but not sufficient in my opinion. I have been a
translator
of Nabokov for over thirty years now and I never had to deal with a
text of his
so underdetermined poetically, though there are a few good passages of
course.
Had he had time to finish the novel, there is no doubt that he would
have
rewritten even the almost finished first chapter. In most of his other
novels,
Nabokov is indeed the perfect dictator, making sure that the reader
won’t
misuse his words and run away with his text. William Gass, one of his
great
admirers, stated the problem concerning determination (not only
foregrounding)
brilliantly: “when readers read as if the words on the page were only
fleeting
visual events, and not signs to be sung inside themselves – so that the
author’s voice is stilled – the author’s hand must reach out into the
space of
the page and put a print upon it that will be unmistakable,
uneradicable. With
lipstick, perhaps.” (Representation and Performance in Postmodern
Literature,
ed. by M. Couturier, Delta, 1983, p. 41). Nabokov didn’t have the time
and the
energy to achieve that in this case.
I wish, also, Brian had addressed the question of who invents whom. Who
is
Eric, who is Ivan Vaughan? Is “Aurora” another text, another book?...
Such are some of the questions Brian’s informative and challenging
article
prompted me to address. Perhaps we’ll continue this discussion in Kyoto
at the
end of the month.
Maurice Couturier