What kind of truth are you after? Delightful question!  As a lawyer I would answer: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!  But then, Nabokov isn’t on the stand.  I think Nabokov was very respectful of memories, and somewhere said something (I wish I had your recall!) to the effect that the more one revisits a memory, the weaker it gets because it becomes associated with later matter.  That seems to be supported by psychological findings as well.  So it's quite possible that Nabokov reserved certain memories for himself, to keep them pristine.


  Anyway, my point is certainly not that Nabokov is a liar.  Quite the opposite.  He is a natural truth teller, I think, in disguise.  I would point to the exact book you did, RLSK, for proof of this assertion.  I think the truth teller and the author were supremely in charge and that Nabokov intentionally revealed more about himself in that fictional biography than in any other fiction. 


I am "after" same truth Nabokov is after:  the kind of truth that the real Goodmans find so hard to deliver! This gets into the book I’m writing, which is more history and biography than anything else.  Like Nabokov, I am no lover of Freud.  I’m not looking for his unconscious, and will take at face value all the genuine gems of biography he throws into his fiction. He did this quite a bit, I think, in his earlier books, but as you noted in one of your responses, by the time he got to Harlequins, he may have been far more circumspect.


It is a fair question to ask what the heck I meant by an unreliable author.  Maybe Goodman would be an example.  Nabokov’s point with Goodman was that there are lots of real authors who sound just like him.  Those real authors are all unreliable.  But I was actually just playing with words when I wrote that, to see if anyone might take it up with some brilliant segway. 


I’ve enjoyed this tete-a-tete very much.  Maybe we should continue it, if it should be continued, off-line? 


 
Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 15:42:36 -0300
From: jansy.nabokv-L@AETERN.US
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] [Thoughts] Art's higher level correction
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU

Frances Assa [to JM]: "I think this whole issue is supremely important with regard to Nabokov.  Memory is regularly a central subject.  When I read literature I am always wondering about the who the author is in order to feel that I really understand what the author wrote.  You seem to be saying that he, like all of us, distorts his memories, especially unhappy ones. This leads one to the conclusion that he was an unreliable author!  With so much talk of Wayne Booth's unreliable narrator, I wonder if anyone has tackled the rhetoric of the unreliable author.  In Nabokov's work, the author seems, generally, like God, hardly unreliable.  And in LATH in particular, if I remember correctly, even Vadim learns to visualize backward clearly.  Also I'm wondering if your observation of Nabokov's evasions of unhappy memories is generally shared by students of Nabokov.".
 
Jansy Mello: We depart from different starting points but yes ... Nabokov frequently invites and taunts his readers to discover some little detail about himself, as in a game of hide and seek. Nevertheless for me it's just a game and I try to abide by his rules. He knows that, like anyone else, he may inadvertently reveal a few things about himself [ "The crudest curriculum vitae crows and flaps its wings in a style peculiar to the undersigner. I doubt whether you can even give your telephone number without giving something of yourself" ] - but would this help us understand his creation? I believe, also, that Nabokov often tries to mislead his interviewers, like the real Sebastian Knight and his fake biographer, Mr.Goodman, and that, like anyone else's, his memory would play tricks on him. As I see it, this wouldn't turn him into an "unreliable author" (only into a deceiver, like Nature or a magician).
 
Perhaps I didn't understand what you meant by being an "unreliable author." Nabokov told Alfred Appel Jr (in a 1966 interview) that "the design of my novel is fixed in my imagination and every character follows the course I imagine for him. I am the perfect dictator in that private world insofar as I alone am responsible for its stability and truth. Whether I reproduce it as fully and faithfully as I would wish, is another question" and it's worth noting that, further on, he defines "creative imagination" as the result from a combination of "stored elements". .."with later recollections and inventions."*  Inventions are not lies**. Making mistakes isn't lying. Being unable to transform a vision into exact words, either. What kind of truth are you after?
 
........................................................................
* "I would say that imagination is a form of memory. Down, Plato, down, good dog. An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may use when combining it with later recollections and inventions..."
 
** - Well, sometimes they are! The inventive boy who cried "wolf" would be called liar by his companions . Cf. “Literature was not born the day when a boy crying "wolf, wolf" came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying "wolf, wolf" and there was no wolf behind him.” Lectures on Literature. Jacques Lacan thinks that a child's ability to lie marks his conquest of subjectivity (by stopping to believe that he is transparent in his parent's eyes and gaining control of his speech).  
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Google Search the archive Contact the Editors Visit "Nabokov Online Journal" Visit Zembla View Nabokv-L Policies Manage subscription options Visit AdaOnline View NSJ Ada Annotations Temporary L-Soft Search the archive

All private editorial communications are read by both co-editors.