----- Original Message -----
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