EDNote [ responses to Schneider's "review"of
Lolita...] ... most readers here will agree that the review does
not reflect a very careful or deep reading of Lolita, and its superficiality
doesn't really earn it any attention on the list--unless we want to analyze it
as a pop-culture reflection of Nabokov's art...
JM: A possible perspective, but a
rather depressing one, to look at Schneider's review as some kind
of "pop-culture reflection". I applaud our Ed's decision when he states
that it's better to ignore it.
I was sorry for rustic Angus M'Diarmid ("an
uneducated highlander"), after I read the article
in N&Q which has been kindly forwarded by Roth.
VN (SO), in an interview with Appel, confessed
that he "detested regional literature full of quaint
old-timers and imitated pronunciation" while he criticized parts of
Finnegans Wake and its "dull mass of phony
folklore". There's nothing phony in M'Diarmid,
nor does his literary output represent an imitation of "regional
literature.": his "piebald style" and "fulness of heart" is genuine
enough..."like the torrents shooting impetuously from crag to crag, his
sentences, instead of flowing in a smooth and even tenor, overleap with noble
freedom the mounds and impediments of grammar, verbs, conjugations, and adverbs,
which give tameness and regularity to ordinary compositions."
Southey's fascinated interest, like VN's own, offered
me no hint about the total lack of "tenderness" that marks Mr.
J.D's notes, or the original editor's preface, which recurrently falls
back on M'Diarmid's "unparalleled sublimity" or
his "towering sublimity of the mountain bard"
(quoting Napoleon's famous words).
In VN's draft, M'Diarmid's incoherent
transactions could be "heard through the worst parts of
James Joyce".
In Pale Fire,
following a note by Kinbote on Shade's "crystal land", we find the
scholarly King planning to lecture on "Finnigan’s Wake as a monstrous extension
of Angus Mac-Diarmid’s "incoherent transactions" and of Southey’s Lingo-Grande
("Dear Stumparumper," etc.)".
It is
my impression that, if VN was
writing a parody to show his contempt through Kinbote, his
criticism was aimed at J.Joyce's FW, and never at the
innocent Highlander or at Southey's private literary games, both
mentioned in
passing.