Stephen Blackwell: "I agree with Anthony Stadlen's
larger point, which is that by 1948 it was impossible to make any assumptions
about the identity or reliability of any Nabokov narrator, no matter how
superficially ordinary or omniscient. In this particular case, this one
sentence*, I take the situation to be a variant of free-indirect discourse,
where "fault-finding" reflects the attitude of Mrs. Nameless... I think that
rather than specify that the narrator attributes moral agency to nature, one
might instead suggest that the narrator draws attention to the fact that
(nearly?) all human beings attribute such agency to nature..."
...............................................
* 2nd paragraph. Light does not
find fault. People, or God, find fault. To assert that light finds fault is to
fall into the Pathetic Fallacy. Therefore, if the boy is "deranged in his
mind" because he attributes moral agency to inanimate nature, so is the
narrator.
..............................................
Jansy Mello: Is
it now possible to make assumptions about the identity or reliability of
any VN narrator, even "Nabokov" himself?
On a Book
Entitled Lolita he writes: After doing my impersonation of suave John Ray, the character in Lolita who
pens the Foreword, any comments coming straight from me may strike one - may
strike me, in fact - as an impersonation of Vladimir
Nabokov talking about his own book. A few points, however, have to be discussed;
and the autobiographic device may induce mimic and model to
blend.... Often, while I read special texts written by
Nabokov, I'm reminded of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (
Pessoa=Person). Unlike VN Pessoa used various "heteronyms" (writerly
personas) for his different writing styles and views. [Cf. The
Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa, Penguin Classics, 2002].
Pessoa once wrote something roughly
translatable as: "the poet is a liar who lies with such skill
that the pain he then feigns expresses a pain that's real."
I think Nabokov might have achieved
similar effects through autobiographical and self-referential tactics,infinite
regress aso.
To attribute "moral agency to nature"
means to hold "animistic beliefs", I suppose. Nabokov often
deliberately employed personification, hyperboles, animism to engender
doubts about a metaphorical or a literal interpretation -
and yet, that the narrator or "Mrs.Nameless" were morally "fault finding"
in S&S has totally eluded
me.