-------- Original Message --------
"On top of this, your Nabo doesn't care about knowing whom this accent
belonged to. If it was a tortured prisonner it doesn't change a thing.
He
writes like a collector of butterflies: he catches a pretty insect,
knocks
it out with formalin, impales it on a needle. He proceeds the same with
words..."
Vlad the Insect Impaler ! this is more like him.
A.Makine seems to harbour the old outmoded idea that VN is a cold
insensitive and cruel aesthete; like many others before him, he meets
Mr
Goodman in his criticism of Sebastian Knight:
"SK was so [...] incapable of caring for their serious core that he
managed [...] to make fun of intimate emotions, rightly held sacred by
the
rest of humanity." (TRLSK ch2 p18 Vintage International).
But VN's narrative system aims precisely at denouncing moralizing
moralism
as too easy, over accommodating and, when all is said and done,
hypocritical. "Serious emotion" appears only when his parodies and
satires
have got rid of sham feeling and cleared the way for it: "As often was
the
way with Sebastian Knight (and with Nabokov his maker), he used parody
as
a kind of spring-board for leaping into the highest region of serious
emotion" (TRLSK ch10 p89)