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THOUGHTS re: NYHT Interview: on gargoyles and flapping phone
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S.Blackwell points out "the probably deliberate irony of this interview's structure" ...Nabokov lists " no less than five unnoticed "plums" ....For SB " It looks to me like a case of crypsis...while simultaneously challenging the very notion of a "clear revelation" of anything, especially personality--he's not Kinbote, he's Botkine-- (like the "simple" and "sincere" pilloried in his lectures and interviews).
JM: VN was often, but not always, deliberately misleading. In the long run he expected, he desired that his readers would enjoy his jokes and decypher "something, but never freudian-minded" about him... I remember only two examples of conflicting remarks : in his biography of Gogol, he wrote that "The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself". Nevertheless, he insistently affirmed that his life was not to be mistaken for his work. He saw his characters as gargoyles and caryatids expelled to the outside of the cathedrals: "they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral façade - demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out".
Changing the subject: I happened to read again Borges's lecture on Coleridge. He not only asserted that for Coleridge, Shakespeare was a creative force similar to Spinoza's God as "natura naturans" but, cryptically including a mention to Francis Bacon and his theory that God first created Paradise, went on to deal with Coleridge's dream inside a dream in his poem Kubla-Khan...
I wonder how familiar VN would be with such a "paradaisical" theory ( Paradise and Ada's Shattal-tree placed before everything else after the attic explorations), or how closely he might have read Coleridge's oeuvre beside's the poet's scarce and glittering poems.
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