Some time in the past Sandy Klein sent a list with the names of the 50 greatest villains in literature: "It's perhaps the nature of grown-up literature that it doesn't all that often have villains, in the sense of coal-black embodiments of the principle of evil. And even when it does, it's not always so easy to tell who they are. Is God the baddie, or Satan? Ahab, or the white whale?...Yet even writers as subtle as Vladimir Nabokov have spiced their work with a fiend or two. So,  as number 34, we find "34 Clare Quilty from Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov, Enchanted hunter and sexual deviant Quilty stalks Humbert Humbert and his beloved like a malevolent ghost. He runs off with the beleaguered Lolita after posing as her uncle, but cruelly dumps her when she refuses to star in one of his home-made blue movies.  After him, Cruella de Vil from The Hundred and One Dalmatians -  and  Samuel Whiskers from The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, by Beatrix Potter ( the panel: Toby Clements, Christopher Howse, Jake Kerridge, Sam Leith, Tim Martin, Sinclair McKay, Andrew McKie, Sophie Missing, Tom Payne, Ceri Radford and Sameer Rahim; Complete article at following URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/09/20/bovillains120.xml ).
The list of villains seemed to be funny, at first. Then I felt a certain degree of discomfort. I know it is difficult to write anything new about about love, wine and roses but, here, we discover that "evil" is to be inserted in a work of fiction to "spice a work with a fiend or two".Quilty, followed by Samuel Whiskers' roly-poly kitten pudding, began to appear  in my eyes like a bidimensional Roger Rabbit courting tapdancing Shirley Temple. But I didn't check the URL to find who the other "baddies" were...
 
Today, one of S.Klein's contributions returns to the matter of TOOL at the Washington Post  http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/sep/26/literary-leaks-and-legacies/ : Literary leaks and legacies: Should we read unfinished works over the objection of their authors?: "We'll never know just what Mr. Nabokov would have said about his unfinished work being published...He was working on "The Original of Laura" during his final months; he said the novel was "completed in my mind," but he didn't live to get it all out on paper. He composed on small index cards and had handwritten 138 of them - about 30 manuscript pages. The perfectionist with exacting standards told his family to burn the cards on his death."       
 
In TRLSK there are observations that might suggest "burning" as the only option (New Directions, page 36):

The tool was there, it must now be put to use. My first duty after Sebastian's death was to go through his belongings. He had left everything to me and I had a letter from him instructing me to bum certain of his papers. It was so obscurely worded that at first I thought it might refer to rough drafts or discarded manuscripts, but I soon found out that, except for a few odd pages dispersed among other papers, he himself had destroyed them long ago, for he belonged to that rare type of writer who knows that nothing ought to remain except the perfect achievement: the printed book; that its actual existence is inconsistent with that of its spectre, the uncouth manuscript flaunting its imperfections like a revengeful ghost carrying its own head under its arm; and that for this reason the litter of the workshop, no matter its sentimental or commercial value, must never subsist. Curiously, though, there is something twisted in its logic that makes me doubt V.'s conclusions. It might be his affirmation that the "printed book is the perfect achievement" or, more to the point: that its actual existence in print is in stark contrast to its spectre (the imperfect manuscript).

 

The burning theme crops up often enough ( the story of Lolita's manuscript saved from the fire; John Shade's backyard "autos-de-fé" and Kinbote's appropriation of his manuscript and discards). Besides we find fictional commentators writing notes to fictional editors which, together with other "uncouth" corrections are printed to become an integral part of the book. We also have VN's own shoe-boxes loaded with index-cards which an interviewer is invited to examine and allowed to reproduce, in part.

What "abime" stares at us and what lies "inside/outside" a "finished" book?

In  TRLSK  we find a curious situation: V. constantly aludes to a book he is writing about his brother, but the reader doesn't have a chance to see it at all: all he is offered, in print, is a kind of diary standing for V's "perfect achievement". For example (ND, page 23) in chapter Two: 'Write that book, that beautiful book,' she cried as I was leaving, 'make it a fairy-tale with Sebastian for prince. The enchanted prince [...]We parted. It was raining hard and I felt ashamed and cross at having interrupted my second chapter to make this useless pilgrimage".

 

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