Subject
Hazel's unattractiveness; deaths in VN
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Jay Livingston,
It’s an interesting idea, Jay, but when you get to the end of it, you are right back at the beginning: Nabokov kills his characters — all writers do. Sometimes for structural reasons, as with Dickens — always on deadline, always plotting out the next couple of months and knowing how essential it is to keep the tension right, keep the action moving forward, and jettison whatever excess baggage is in the way. I always felt Dickens could have jettisoned Lil Nell (I use her gangster tag) at the very onset of her illness by having her shoved out a window or something, to spare the world a lot of cloying, morbid tedium.
Nabokov was much more of an artist and less of a wage slave than Dickens, and so Nabokov worked at a pace dictated by the piece, whatever it was — his translation of Eugene Onegin took something like eight years. He spent as much time on a novel as he needed to until it told precisely the story he had in mind. if you have not read his carefully organized and edited (by himself) book called Strong Opinions, you really ought to give it a try. In it VN explains that all his characters are under his absolute control and that he sees to it that they “work like galley slaves.”
So, yeah, VN kills them. But if we’re not studying VN, and instead studying his works, we have to take each work as it comes, accept the universe presented within it, and believe that the characters in it have at least as much autonomy, and as much buffeting, seduction, ill fate, strokes of luck, and blasts of catastrophe as do we all, and as do the people we meet everyday. It may not have all the comprehensive statistical data you ask for in your third paragraph, but it would let you enjoy the book for what it is — a gift designed and created just for you.
I apologize if any of the above is too rudimentary and remedial for you. I’m by no means a mastermind at any of this.
Andrew Brown
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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
It’s an interesting idea, Jay, but when you get to the end of it, you are right back at the beginning: Nabokov kills his characters — all writers do. Sometimes for structural reasons, as with Dickens — always on deadline, always plotting out the next couple of months and knowing how essential it is to keep the tension right, keep the action moving forward, and jettison whatever excess baggage is in the way. I always felt Dickens could have jettisoned Lil Nell (I use her gangster tag) at the very onset of her illness by having her shoved out a window or something, to spare the world a lot of cloying, morbid tedium.
Nabokov was much more of an artist and less of a wage slave than Dickens, and so Nabokov worked at a pace dictated by the piece, whatever it was — his translation of Eugene Onegin took something like eight years. He spent as much time on a novel as he needed to until it told precisely the story he had in mind. if you have not read his carefully organized and edited (by himself) book called Strong Opinions, you really ought to give it a try. In it VN explains that all his characters are under his absolute control and that he sees to it that they “work like galley slaves.”
So, yeah, VN kills them. But if we’re not studying VN, and instead studying his works, we have to take each work as it comes, accept the universe presented within it, and believe that the characters in it have at least as much autonomy, and as much buffeting, seduction, ill fate, strokes of luck, and blasts of catastrophe as do we all, and as do the people we meet everyday. It may not have all the comprehensive statistical data you ask for in your third paragraph, but it would let you enjoy the book for what it is — a gift designed and created just for you.
I apologize if any of the above is too rudimentary and remedial for you. I’m by no means a mastermind at any of this.
Andrew Brown
Search the archive: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/archives/nabokv-l.html
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