Dear List:
In an initiative that we hope will mark the start of a tradition
following Nabokov conferences, we would like to encourage continued
discussion of the presentations at "Transitional Nabokov." As the
first phase of that process, we will begin posting the abstracts from
the conference. We also ask those who attended the sessions to submit
questions for the presenters that they may not have managed to ask in
Oxford, or that occured to them afterwards (questions can come from
anybody who was present in the room for any particular paper). The
questions (or comments) will not appear on the list immediately, but
will be forwarded to the appropriate author, who will then respond to
the question. Questions and answers will be published together on the
list in a daily (at most) collection. We hope that this forum will
provide a welcome venue for further discussion of some of the newest
approaches to Nabokov's work.
The first several abstracts are attached below--intended to remind
listeners of the papers they heard and the questions they wished they
had asked. As more abstracts arrive (several presenters are currently
traveling), they will be posted as well.
~Stephen Blackwell, Co-Editor
‘The gift of being
remembered’: Speak, Memory and W.G.
Sebald’s Austerlitz
R.J.A. Kilbourn
Wilfrid Laurier University
As I argue elsewhere, Nabokov can be described as
the
‘tutelary deity’ of Sebald’s second pseudo-novel, The
Emigrants. In subsequent works like The Rings of Saturn
and Austerlitz,
Sebald extends and complicates his intertextual relation to Nabokov. In
this
paper I will elaborate on Sebald’s deliberate incorporation of specific
passages and images from Speak, Memory
in the narrative of his last (and most ‘genuine’) novel, Austerlitz
(2001), focusing primarily on the protagonist’s attempts
to recuperate mnemic representations of the mother he cannot remember
knowing.
‘Deliberate’ because I am drawing on my research in the Sebald Archive
in Marbach,
Germany, where, in Sebald’s own copy of Nabokov’s autobiography one can
see
marginal notations and other indications of the manner in which he
adapted and
‘translated’ certain scenes or elements into his own version of a fictional biography. As in The Emigrants,
Sebald’s tendency in
transposing Nabokov is to resignify the latter’s ‘redemption’ of
temporal
exile, emphasizing the contradictory and unresolvable dimension of
personal
memory. From this empirical basis I will extend my own reading of
Nabokov’s central
significance for Sebald, and the latter’s contribution to an oblique
‘redemption’
of the exiled Russian author’s reputation.
Nabokov’s Transition from Russian to English: Repudiation or Evolution?
Brian Boyd
Alexander Dolinin has recently offered a powerful reading of
Nabokov’s career, seeing his early years in terms of a creatively
combative engagement with the Russian literary tradition but his later
years, after his switch to English, as a disavowal of that former
engagement, a diminution of his own Russian achievement and a
“mythmaking” self-portrayal as “a born cosmopolitan” who “had always
stood apart from literary battles and discussions.” I will argue that
this is itself a myth. 1) The evidence shows that Nabokov did not
deprecate his own Russian work, and could be explicit about his
awareness of the magnitude of his Russian achievement. Although he
occasionally pointed out flaws in some of his Russian work, he did the
same for some of his English work, and even for the literary work he
held in greatest esteem, from Hamlet through Eugene Onegin and Madame
Bovary to Ulysses. 2) Far from underplaying his
engagement with Russian émigré literature and criticism, he
consistently stressed it. 3) He also consistently stressed his
Russianness, and was passionately concerned to have his Russian work
and what he valued in the Russian tradition read and appreciated by his
non-Russian audience. 4) Although in translating his Russian work into
English he substituted more recognizable non-Russian allusions for his
Anglophone readers, this reflected his practice in the opposite
direction, where he substituted Russian allusions for French or English
in translating Colas Breugnon, Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and Lolita into Russian.
Nabokov’s severity not only on literature he deemed
overrated and meretricious but on some of his own past work and on what
he thought the masterpieces of world literature can be explained not in
terms of a mythmaking repudiation of his Russianness but in terms of an
aspect of his thought that has not been sufficiently appreciated: his
strongly melioristic sense of cultural development that he imbibed in
part from his father and from late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century cultural thought.
Will Norman
Oxford
University
Abstract: Reading Nabokov alongside Adorno
This paper outlines an approach to Nabokov that
transgresses
on his own statements about his “indifference” to history and the
social. By
reading Bend Sinister (1947) alongside
Theodor Adorno’s theoretical work on mass culture, I wish to
historicise
Nabokov’s first American novel within the context of the intellectual
immigration of the late 1930s and early 1940s.
I begin by investigating how particular items of
popular
fiction are associated with the dominant hegemony of the totalitarian
regime in
Bend Sinister. This coincides with
Nabokov’s contention, in an unpublished lecture written soon after his
arrival
in America,
that “this country is facing a grave danger: the best seller.” In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
Theodor Adorno, who arrived in America
from Europe just a few years before Nabokov, makes the same connection
between
the mass culture of the United States
and the totalitarian regime he left behind in Europe.
Unlike Nabokov, however, Adorno is
skeptical about the
possibility of high modernist literary aesthetics resisting or
transcending the
threats to autonomy posed by mass culture. Bend
Sinister aligns Nabokov unexpectedly with the New Criticism of
Allen Tate (who
was responsible for getting it published) in its deployment of a
complex and
difficult modernist style as a form of resistance to political
populism. Adorno
however, insists on the codependence of mass culture and high art, and
goes on
to suggest that “absolute freedom in art, always limited to a
particular, comes
into contradiction with the perennial unfreedom of the whole.”
Reading Adorno alongside Nabokov
compels us to reevaluate
the formal innovation which we routinely associate with this writer; as
well as
the costs of Bend Sinister’s claim to
autonomy at its conclusion, when its author performs “a device never
before
attempted in literature.” Despite Nabokov’s “strong opinions,” we
cannot
separate Bend Sinister from its
cultural politics, or its form from history. Rather, the novel should
be
understood as a fraught response to
historically specific threats to aesthetic autonomy.
Abstract: Transitions
Between Science and Art, or That Other V.N.
Leland de la Durantaye
In
this essay I propose to discuss the deceptive transitions between
Nabokov’s views on science and art, between creativity in nature and
creativity in art. "All art is deceptive, and so is
nature,” he says in Strong Opinions
and when asked in another interview whether the deceptive elements in
his works are “for amusement or…serve another purpose” he answered: “Deception is practiced even more beautifully by
that other V.N., Visible Nature. A
useful purpose is assigned by science to animal mimicry, protective
patterns and shapes, yet their refinement transcends the crude purpose
of mere survival.” What is singular about
Nabokov’s emphasis on deception both here and elsewhere is its
playfulness, as well as its seriousness. For Nabokov, the deceiving
artist is not merely following his own playful whims, he is following
“that other V.N.” whose patterns he has learned to find and follow.
Nabokov
famously promised a “furious refutation” of Darwinian natural selection
and dismissed what he saw as the latter’s crudely utilitarian view of
nature as evidenced in his theories concerning animal mimicry. For Nabokov, “that other V.N.” created along
different lines and with different aims. I
propose to discuss Nabokov’s dismissal of Darwinian natural selection
in light of the transitions made between his scientific and artistic
views, with particular attention paid to conceptions of “crude utility”
and refined creation, and to the thematic patterning found in his
literary works. The goal of the study
would not merely be to show, as a number of critics have persuasively
done, that Nabokov’s scientific pursuits informed his literary ones and
shared with them a passionate attention to detail, but to show how his
aesthetic beliefs shaped his scientific ones, and vice versa, in more
fundamental fashion, and how they govern the transitions in Nabokov’s
work from non-fiction to fiction, life to literature.
“Fugitive Sense” in
Nabokov
Stephen H. Blackwell
University
of Tennessee
Throughout the 1930s, Nabokov’s
interest in his art’s
ability to capture fluidity and ambiguity grew increasingly acute, in
parallel
with his deepening expertise in lepidoptery and evolutionary theory. Beginning at least with The Eye,
his works embody in ever more sophisticated ways the
contingent and emergent side of artistic meaning. His
works, as has been widely noted, display a
deceptive surface narrative which turns out to be in small or large
degree a
camouflage for a more significant covert narrative encoded within it. The (at least) dual, “fugitive” meaning of
the same set of words, whose significance emerges during an extended
experience
through multiple readings, became the core feature of Nabokov’s
artistry in his
mature phase. While metamorphosis
has understandably been the preferred term for such
shifts between levels of meaning, another term serves the purpose and
specifics
of Nabokov’s art even better: evolution.
As an on-going process, evolution expresses the ever-changing
realizations of Nabokov’s works in the world of good readers.
The verbal
sign of this feature appeared in what Yurii Levin called “zero-person”
narration, the transitional voice used to conceal shifts between third-
and
first-person narrative in The Gift. Appropriately,
it also connects intimately
with Nabokov’s beloved lepidoptera. During
the late 1930s he toyed artistically with how species evolve (in
“Father’s
Butterflies”) and how evolution’s main field might jump from nature at
large to
consciousness; in his scientific work of the 1940s he came to
concentrate on
the fluid, synthetic, even mobile essence of species in nature. His area of concentration was the scope of
variety and the drift of change within species and genera.
Emerging from the same set of scientific
insights, his art too reflects the idea that “to adopt
[species] as logical realities in classification would be much
the same as conceiving a journey in terms of stopping places.” (Nabokov’s
Butterflies, 302). Every form
is transitional; life is
always in motion. After expanding briefly
upon this theoretical background, this paper examines how this
scientific
epistemology brings about in Nabokov a profound modesty that finds
subtle
expression in diverse spheres of his activity—lepidoptery, in chess
problems,
and in art. In this medley of
perspectives upon human efforts to perceive, know, and express truths
about the
world, Nabokov demonstrates his concern for the uneasy slippage between
the
desire for knowledge and the desire for power, control, and certainty. Special attention is paid to the elaboration
of this theme in Lolita, The Gift, Pnin, and The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight.