Dear List:        

 

I am fascinated by this ongoing discussion of the connection between Nabokov’s writing and his life, actual or fantasy.  But I confess I am too enormously ambivalent to be persuaded either way.

            Let me begin with Brian T’s quotation from Vargas-Llosa, “All stories are rooted in the lives of those who write them; experience is the source from which fiction flows”  (September 8).  But Joseph Aisenberg’s remarks (September 10) are also apt. I do not write fiction; I am an academic, but I discovered a long time ago that all academic scholarly writing is autobiography, however attenuated that autobiography might be, because the academics’ choices of what to do all that research for and writing on can only come from the writers’ deep interests—you might even call it our souls.

            But my other two main academic-literary interests show the dilemma.  Take Shakespeare.  Because a large proportion of his drama was persuasively about kings and higher nobility, Shakespeare criticism is bedeviled by  some people assuming he must therefore have been higher born, and therefore Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare but was Francis Bacon or the Earl of Oxford or Queen Elizabeth or . . .  And for the sonnets—don’t get me started.

            On the other hand, take Chaucer.  There is a surprisingly large number of rapes in Chaucer’s poetry, rapes that are not in his known sources, so he must have inserted them.  And Chaucer himself was accused of a rape (“raptus” in the original Latin).  The debate among Chaucer scholars over whether “raptus” meant rape or simply some form of abduction and whether Chaucer’s connections at court enabled him to buy his way out of it is irresolvable—I get the feeling that Chaucerians, like all of us, believe what they want to believe.

So for Nabokov I think the prime evidence is Chapter 7, Colette, in Speak Memory.   Could some of Nabokov’s fiction be a projection of the frustrated consummation of that childhood affair?  Is Nabokov’s animosity towards Freud a signal, like protesting too much?  In any case the connection between an author’s—anyone’s—fantasies (not just sexual fantasies) and the ensuing output is much too variable from person to person to be recoverable. There is a difference between fantasizing and acting out.  Let me end by splitting the quotation from Vargas-Llosa, before and after the semi-colon.  Writing is indeed “rooted in the lives who write them”; but experience is not necessarily “the source from which all fiction flows.”

 

Eric Hyman

Professor of English

Department of English

Butler 133

Fayetteville State University

1200 Murchison Road

Fayetteville, NC 28301-4252

(910) 672-1901

ehyman@uncfsu.edu