For B.Boyd the reader needs to "forget
the tension of Lolita or the ecstatic, 'passionate pump-joy' release of
Ada; forget, above all, the romance of first love in Speak, Memory or in
Mary," to be able to grasp TOoL's innovative qualities: Nabokov's
feat, in TOoL, derives from his having inverted "what he values most,
but, as always, in a new way. He inverts love as a path to
self-transcendence ...Flora-as sterility goddess wiping the sperm off
her groin....Art becomes not a way to self-transcendence here but, rather,
the vengeful obliteration of others or the skulking effacement of the
tattletale self." Wild's "whole obsessive quest seems
an apotheosis of self and of stasis, a self-fixated and self-enclosed
attempt to circumvent the limits to the self that death
imposes"...If art "can offer a kind of immortality, a different
promise of transcending death..." the reader won't find it in TOoL:
"not here, not in this novel," as B.Boyd concludes. But he also
notes that "Nabokov has hidden under our noses the beating core of
tenderness in this apparently heartlessly hard novel: Flora as potential
Daisy, not as Lolita, is one of this novel's "secret
points," relating the paragraphs about the barber of Kasbeam, to
equally incidental Hubert H. Hubert and his pathos.
For Boyd, humankind has "evolved into
a storytelling species, and that the main reason we have done so is
because stories improve still further the social cognition..." and
that which "constitutes the distinctively
Nabokovian...may be most extraordinary not so much as prose but as
story...No one has taken this further than Nabokov does in his
last novel." As I see
it, there's no better example for Nabokov's ingenious shifts
of perspective, in TOoL, than to contrast the present storytelling
project with the one that had been entertained by the younger Nabokov,
in his biography of Gogol (NG:78), when he states that it is the
enchanter,
“more than the
yarn-spinner or the teacher" who interests him, or “the remarkable
phenomenon of mere forms of speech directly giving rise to live
creatures” in Gogol, and Shakespeare’s “verbal poetical
texture…immensely superior to the
structure of his plays as plays."
Perhaps Wilde's solipsism is contagious
to some of his unfortunate readers, since I have no intention to "forget,"
not even momentarily, Lolita, Ada, Machenka and Speak, Memory and be
ready to appreciate TOoL's novelties and improve my social-cognitive
abilities. My old fashioned passion remains faithful to Nabokov's
genius as an enchanter.