Subject
Re: [SIGHTING] Martin Amis on Stalkers III
From
Date
Body
Michael Maar (Speak, Nabokov p.127-8)brings up what he designates as 'Field's Thesis' when he mentions Nabokov's expression of repulsion at Tatiana's "fat breast" in the commentaries to Eugene Onegin [Eugene Onegin, vol. II, 178]. Maar writes: "It's not for no reason that Field asks whether Nabokov actually liked women and answers: 'In his fiction, at least, by and large not'...Extending further Field's inquiry on whether Nabokov liked women, the critic observes that Field's answer was "only half true" and he proffers a selection of cruel bitches from VN's novels and he chooses Bend Sinister's Mariette as "the most monstrous member of the group," one that "certainly provides strong evidence for Field's thesis."
The initial third of Andrew Field's 1967 book on Nabokov contradicts, at this point, Maar's remark about Field's purported "thesis".
On p. 149 Andrew Field writes: "A critic once noted that Nabokov's unsympathetic female characters are all foreigners, chiefly Germans and Americans, while Russian women are almost always shown in a sympathetic and soft light by him. This, of course, is an inaccurate generalization - we have already seen Liza Bogolepov in Pnin - but one must grant a certain warmth and investment of creative emotion in most of his Russian heroines, and this - to paraphrase Nabokov - is probably his strongest link with classical nineteenth-century Russian literature. Another of his infrequent "negative" Russian women is the former wife of the narrator in the English story "That in Aleppo Once..."
I'll keep on the look-out for "pros and cons" (really?) on this matter.
In a former posting https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi.../wa?... I reconsider Kinbote's words ("...a personality consisting mainly of the shadows of its own prison bars") under the light of Kafka's little parables, before suggesting that "Lolita's 'caged artistic ape' and Humbert Humbert's prison bars give shape to the pedophile's tragic dimension, should we accept the hypothesis that Humbert Humbert's cage is his personality" and that we may look at Pale Fire's Hazel Shade standing outside the azure entrance of a bar with its neon-barred puddles (lines 397-400) to understand that this instance "serves to emphasize the hopelessness of her romantic situation and how emprisioned she feels by her 'Hazelhood'." Andrew Field's "Nabokov: His Life in Art", chp. 5, p.142 and 148 (1967) adds another dimension to the image of a "cage," when he stops at "Eden" while traversing Nabokov's short-story A Guidebook to Berlin. He notes that the "image of the zoo and the cage, both figurative and real, is one that is to be recurrent in Nabokov's prose and poetry." and adds that the "actual description of the zoo is not as fascinating as the narrator's perversely anti-romantic admiration of the zoo, which he sees as being as close to a model of heaven as man is capable of creating: 'It's just a pity that this is an artificial paradise, all in bars, but it's true that, were there no barriers, the lion would devour the doe'."
In another story, Music, it's the actual saloon and concert which are felt at first to be "a constricting prison where they were both held by sounds and had to sit opposite one another at a distance of six to eight meters" before Viktor Ivanovich understands that, instead of a prison, the situation represented "in reality unbelievable happiness, a magical glass bubble which had formed over and enclosed him and her, giving him the opportunity to breath as one with her."
Andrew Field concludes that "Nabokov understands the cage in much the same way as the poet Blok understood it - as the dual metaphor of artistic form and human fate."
I'm beginning to disagree about the validity of the more obvious conclusions that are obtainable when this comparative procedure is applied to some of Nabokov's metaphors and analogies. Like the impossibility of visualising Nabokov's (very unsubstantial) intervals, slits, fissures or cracks of light when they are related to life and to time. In Bend Sinister: "An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness," there's a non-barred shiny puddle that reflects the sky.set inside a wall black dampness. Cages, mirrors, puddles may kill those who are enticed into a "nether sky" (as it happens with the waxwing in Pale Fire, or serve to announce a death as it occurs to Hazel Shade), or they may serve as necessary illusions protected by the limits of a bubble of happiness, or as an epiphanic vision of life and more...
...a lot more to contrast, for example, with the lines from a Sirin poem ("Easter") published shortly after his father's assassination, quoted by Field on p.60:
Here we see a "radiant cloud, a brilliant roof in the distance like a mirror..." that holds up to the poet "a quivering call, a most sweet 'arise,' a great 'bloom' - then in this song, in this glitter, you do live!" (and I see also a symphonic collection of dead & living waxwing, Shade, Hazel, together with an illusion of infinity, happiness, pain, loss...)
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/