JM [to RSGwynn's
final words after comparing Burgess's Alex and VN's Humbert: "... perhaps
he realizes, on his own, that the means of his own personal exculpation are
totally withing his own hands (I'm speaking of the whole, 21-chapter novel).
It's a fascinating question: does H. H. find his own redemption (or is it given
to him)? I like think that somehow he has managed to find it through the
former, not the latter."]
Despite the wealth of information one
may glean when using statistical methods to count the frequency of
specific words in a novel, building timelines and flow diagrams
of intertwining subjects or plots, just as some scientists believe about
Maths, I believe that one can never reach the central kernel of any
literary "absolute truth."
Recently I got acquainted with Umberto
Eco's elaboration on cross-references and citations and with his ideas
about a "post-modern loss of innocence." It's probably something that
V.N could have grasped a lot sooner and applied in his novels, in a parodical
vein, and to the reader's expense (i.e, how is the reader to
disentangle the body of his allusions, bobolinks, references?). I
think that R.S.Gwynn's personal positioning is courageous in that he is
revealing a little about his likes and dislikes. We only need to
remember what VN once said about this issue, in his biography of Gogol, ch
4 part 3: "The simple line of images shall reveal the
identity of whoorders them as concisely as the docile numbers yielded their
treasure to Poe. The crudest curriculum vitae wings and beats its wings in the
stil that is peculiar to the subscriber. I doubt that you can even give your
phone number without giving something of yourself". The use readers can
make of such revelations may be, in turn, coherent or invasively
disrespectful (no wonder VN also warned against a certain kind of Freudians,
telling them to keep out...) Omniscient narration creates a distance
between the novel and the narrator. What about the commentators and critics, is
it valid to use it as a shield? At
present, the rarefied "universal omniscient
narrator" often appears in the guise of an "unreliable
narrator." It occurred to me that special schools of literary criticism
(some of them unjustly tagged as "psychoanalytic") must exist and that it's
formed by "universal omniscient readers," who know what an
author's unconscious intentions and innermost thoughts are and
feel that they must reveal them in the name of "truth".Knowing these dangers ( as I can only suppose he did), Nabokov
may have had his fun while taking protective measures.
Although it's possible, even desirable, to
spot the hidden identity of an authorial guiding-hand or
unconscious thought, even in novels with no intended social or
moral message, unless the plot is very tightly woven (as it's the case of
Agatha Christie's Jane Marple, in her fictional town of St.
Mary Mead seen as a microcosm that represents human
nature everywhere), this is an extremely hard task when we come to novelists,
like Vladimir Nabokov. Charles Kinbote seldom acted as an omniscient
narrator and, if I'm not mistaken, this only happens when he is
hallucinating and inventing Zembla. Otherwise he must stalk John Shade and
avoid Sybil when he needs to more information about his biographee.
Is it reasonable to suppose that CK is not only a satirical presentation about
lieterary commentators (such as VN, himself, operated in EO) but also an
authorial ploy to ridicule "omniscient commentators" (they must be as
deluded as CK)?