PS: Commentary and queries related to Robert Alter's review:
Robert Alter agrees with Brian Boyd
concerning Nabokov's informed considerations on political
issues* and, therefore, he denies that Nabokov's writing is pure
escapism, as it's been asserted by a number of scholars (and encouraged by
Nabokov himself. Cf. Nabokov's letter to Vladislav Khodasevich, in
"defense of art as private expression"). Alter distinguishes between
the novels which reflect a satire of totalitarian regimes and human folly,
and those written after the author moved to America. And yet, can we conclude, from
Alter's exposition that, inspite of their socio-political theme,
Nabokov's Russian novels ( and "Bend Sinister"), were other than
the pleasure-seeking discharges, such as it takes place in catharsis
or through the expulsion of "evil" made to stand, like a
gargoyle, in the façade of a cathedral?
What both
writers, Alter and Boyd, fail to emphasize, while praising Nabokov's
concepts related to the importance of "consciousness," is that Nabokov
employs his classificatory powers and awareness mostly in
what concerns the biological field (including the human brain and
patterned behavior), in detriment of expressing psycho-social factors and
language, as they affect human life, except when he dwells in the
sphere of abnormal conduct. Nabokov's familiarity with the diminute kingdom of
insects and their environment allows him to inhabit a kind of parallel
world, one which others are able perceive but seldom do.
Perhaps Nabokov's conclusion that
every great novel is a "great fairy-tale," or his delight
with a nymphic realm's proximity to human "reality",
indicate that his way of seeing social and mental life includes
them in a chain of mutually connected, parallel worlds, that lie
outside the verbal domain. We learn from Alter that: "Nabokov assumed,
as Boyd implies, that reality was a kind of infinite regress of related but
unique entities — snowflakes and souls — endlessly and unpredictably linked with
each other through hidden patterns, layer after layer or level after level of
"reality" dimly glimmering behind the one we strive to see. That is why the
finely discriminated details in his fiction are repeatedly set in a barely
visible web of larger connective designs." Crossing from the microcosm
into the macrocosm by the recognition of life's "plexed
artistry" - which, as such, is unrelated to human laws,
prohibitions, desires, guilt? A kind of "O for a life of images rather than
of words?"**
......................................................................
*- "Nabokov is
an exemplary writer of the century precisely because his best work challenges
easy oppositions between the aesthetic and the political, between the aesthetic
and the moral. Brian Boyd's two-volume biography, it is now possible to get a
clear picture of Nabokov's relation to Russian political and cultural history,
and to the various currents of the European emigration...A good many readers,
put off by his archness and by the mandarin touches of his prose, have assumed
that Nabokov had no interest in reality, contenting himself with the admiration
of his own artifice. Boyd, on the contrary, argues for an essential connection
between the meticulous empiricism of Nabokov's activity as an entomologist and
his concerns as a writer: 'Nabokov accepted the world as real, so real that
there is always more and more to know — about the scales of a butterfly wing,
about a line of Pushkin'."
** - misquoting Keats in
a letter, dated November 22, 1817.