Former posting: … “However, somewhere, V.N stated that his novels are not about how the characters interact, but how author and reader engage themselves in the process (and embrace on top of a mountain etc etc ). This leads me also to Ada’s lines ...when there are two chessboards and two minds playing the infinite variations obtainable in games with identical openings and ends, when I consider that, for me, VN’s novels are not closed but permanently open to interpretations by its various readers at various times. For Nabokov every novel might be both closed like a completed painting and, also, open because readers exist that give life to the painting they wander in and over it, as in a story that culminates in a ‘tableau vivant’.”
Present posting (JM): Whenever I associate one sentence by Nabokov to another one, from a different work, my “treacherous memory” has already worked over their more literal meaning and it registers simply my own interpretation of them. To avoid further distortions, here are the two quotes in their context:
“ The writer is the first man to map [a new world] and to name the objects it contains. Those berries are edible. That speckled creature that bolted across my path might be tamed. That lake between those trees will be called Lake Opal, or more artistically, Dishwater Lake. That mist is a mountain-and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever.” (LL)
“There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and ‘false overlappings’ between the two worlds were too numerous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events, not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness; and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world; that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains, at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development.” Ada I,ch3
My associations quite obviously distorted VN’s original meaning but, in spite of that, I still think these references serve to demonstrate the point I was trying to make concerning his ideas about “the future…your book.” (materially encased between two covers and ideally loose in the minds of his readers). However, it’s only fair to present the original ones in their context*.
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*- As VN noted, in LL (Good Readers and Good Writers): “So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the reader? It is impersonal imagination and artistic delight. What should be established, I think, is an artistic harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind. We ought to remain a little aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the same time we keenly enjoy—passionately enjoy, enjoy with tears and shivers—the inner weave of a given masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is of course impossible.” http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/goodre.html
I tried to find another related quote (namely, the full paragraph for “"In a first-rate piece of fiction, the real clash is not between the characters, but between the author and the world"), by using Google tools and got to an information which might be useful here (…perhaps not, I couldn’t access the work that was cited!):
“An interesting related topic to the difficulty of mingling souls in Nabokov’s fiction is Stephen Blackwell’s discussion of the “interpenetration of souls” that is the ideal “author-reader interaction,” an idea that Blackwell argues is shared by Nabokov and Iulii Aikhenvald.” (Blackwell 29-36). Footnote to ch.12, p.191 in “Nabokov’s Permanent Mystery: The Expression of Metaphysics in His Work” by David S. Rutledge, 2010.
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