Subject
Fw: another Nabokov Sighting: Vincent Joiuve on "The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight"
Sebastian Knight"
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----- Original Message -----
From: Jansy Berndt de Souza Mello
To: D. Barton Johnson
Sent: Friday, August 22, 2003 4:42 PM
Subject: another Nabokov Sighting
Hello,
I´ve just come across another reference to Nabokov and, once again, by a French author.
His name is Vincent Jouve. The book: " La Lecture" ( 1993, Hachette Livre) and it concerns the study of the " methodology of reading".
Vincent Jouve differentiates " an innocent reading" from the "critical" and changes his vertex of examination no longer focusing on the relation between author and text but on the "aesthetics of reception" through the relation between text and reader.
When differentiating the "innocent" from the "critical reading" Vincet Jouve details the " semiology of reading" that substitutes the "theory of reception marked by the historical perspective".
"Innocent reading" refers to any first reading that follows the linear development of the story and its temporal progression, whereas "experienced" applies to the process of re-reading and then using a deeper knowledge of the text to decypher the first pages with the information yielded by the book´s later chapters.
As an example of the process of 'innocent reading' Jouve mentions Nabokov´s " The Real Life of Sebastian Knight" when the reader follows the narrator´s investigation about his half-brother life and learns that Sebastian´s life had been destroyed by a passionate involvement with a woman called Hélène von Graun. So, after the narrator tries to meet this lady and is received by Madame Lecerf, a friend of hers, the question that the reader will ask himself shall be whether the narrator will finally encounter Hèlène von Graun, or not.
To build up expectations and then avoid to answer them immediately would be a technique too widely used to serve an author such as Nabokov, who would also have tried to avoid the topos of contemporary novels where any expectation will necessarily be frustrated. Therefore Jouve points out how VN chose a third route by adjourning the satisfaction of the narrator´s confrontation with H. von Graun until his disappointment is complete and only then allow him to discover that H. von Graun is Madame Lecerf herself, thus establishing a game between reader and text entirely based on the linearity of the story. To V. Jouve the playful dimension of a text owes a lot to this kind of "innocent reading".
The book was written in French but I´m reading its translation into Portuguese. Since I´m only trying to report a " VN sighting", I´m abbreviating and taking the author´s arguments out of their context, besides other possible distortions. The author is not implying that VN should be read "innocently", but it seems to me that he is pointing out how one of the first pleasures of an innocent, consumerist reading arises from the emergence of the playful constructions of the author.
Jansy Mello