Stan Kelly-Bootle: "I’m not sure if VN’s pun is
obvious to all readers?...Anglophone Chess players will know that ‘combination’
has a technical meaning beyond the everyday sense of ‘mixture/compound/amalgam.’
In chess, it’s a brilliantly unexpected sequence of moves, often involving
apparently suicidal material sacrifices... So VN’s statement that ‘a good
combination should always contain a certain element of deception’ is damned near
tautological for a Chess combination! So I find his ‘as in art’ rather
teasing...Whichever of the many meanings you attach to ‘deception,’ there are
clear differences between the sneaky deceptions of a Chess master, and those of
artists, free creative spirits (we hope) able to invent their own, seldom
publicly-enumerated, ‘rules.’..In Chess...however devious the play, we can later
examine the recorded moves, and mechanically check their legality (note, no
undetectable human deception here.) All problems puzzle, but not all that
puzzles us can be cast in the form of a ‘soluble’ problem..."
JM: Stan definitely crosses his Ts, but he
politely circumvented any pointed reference to those (like me) who might
ignore the meaning of "combination" and of "soluble," as intended by
Nabokov.* However, I don't know how rigorous Nabokov has been when he used the
word "deception," during the interview I've quoted, for he'd just finished
describing how the tall story had been born in the tall grass (SO), an idea
we also encounter in Good readers and good
writers, when he offers a valid combination that resolves
into great writing:
"Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that
arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of
propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in
butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles.
The writer of fiction only follows Nature’s lead./ Going back for a moment to
our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic
of art was in the shadow of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of
the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at
last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the
campfire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor./ There are three
points of view from which a writer can be considered: he may be considered as a
storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter. A major writer combines these
three—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—but it is the enchanter in him that
predominates and makes him a major writer."
(The main difference from his telling the story
in SO, and bringing it up in GRGW, is that in the latter he
introduces "the shadow," while mentioning the
invented wolf.)
I understand the meaning of artistic deceit, here, as
being related to "invention" (with "lying" thrown in to
bring out the conquest of subjectivity), and not necessarily indicating the
clever "unexpected sequence of moves." Nevertheless... would it
be possible, or inevitable, to deduce that Nabokov also intended to
stress a particular subjectivity at play in mimetism or to consider Nature as
being "inventive"? However, Stan's clarification helped me to
remember one possible example of "deceit" in music. J.S.Bach once started
a composition in, say, C Major and cleverly manoeuvered it to
unexpectedly end in D Major.
.............................................................................................................................................................
*When
I checked the name of who wrote "The Art of the Soluble" (my only
recollection and a rather vague one was of its author having been
born in Petrópolis, the city of my ancestors, and his comment about music,
something like "the first interpretation of Beethoven that one hears
is the one we usually apply as a standard for all the others, as
newly-hatched ducklings follow the first moving object they spot), I found
a quote related to Neo-Darwinism in which Medawar concludes that research is the
art of the soluble. So, it's not just a matter of adding water to wash
away a puzzle: "...Like other amateurs, Koestler finds it difficult to
understand why scientists seem so often to shirk the study of really fundamental
or challenging problems...He wonders why 'the genetics of behaviour' should
still be 'uncharted territory' and asks whether this may not be because the
framework of Neo-Darwinism is too rickety to support an inquiry. The real reason
is so much simpler: the problem is very, very difficult." Peter Medawar, from a
review of Arthur Koestler's "The Act of Creation" (New Statesman, 19 June 1964)
and republished in 'The Art of the Soluble' (1967)