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labingiI have been reading a lot of Nabokov lately, and think I have enough now to fix on why--though he is very, very good--he will never be one of my favorites. What is most compelling for me about narrative is the emotional force of psychologically realistic characters' love for each other, and despite the dazzling variety of his works, Nabokov seems to eschew this mode. His stories repeatedly meditate on emotional distance. People love--but through a glass darkly. Their default state seems to be encasement within their own minds. This places Nabokov squarely in the 20th-century Modern/postmodern tradition: alienation, confusion, isolation, etc. It may be paradigmatic of 20th-century (literary) experience, but for me, it disregards so much of what is human.
Some examples...
Lolita is a brilliant book; it took me forever to get around to reading it, and I probably couldn't have chosen a better time to resonate with it than now, as I'm in the midst of an adoption process that calls on me to routinely read the life histories of abused children. It is an absolutely psychologically trenchant look at an abusive family, one which bestows great humanity and individuality on both the abusive parent and the abused child. This is a very refreshing change from our culture's default assumption that abusers are demons and children blank cherubic innocents, a stance that helps no one to actually cope with the complexity of real human relationships, abusive or otherwise.
The entire project of the book, however, demands emotional distance. Humbert Humbert's actions and accounting of his actions are predicated on this inability to empathize with Lolita as a human being (until the very end, a little bit). As for Lolita, we never see her POV. We see enough to get a strong sense of her characteristics, but her inner life and loves are always a blank. The story has to be this way, but the trade-off is lack of the force that comes of deep emotional interaction.
The Luzhin Defense is, again, a terrific book, an intriguing and atypical look into the mind of an idiot savant, who would be classed as mildly autistic today. I won't pretend to review how "realistic" the portrayal of his thoughts is, but it is consistent, intelligible, and very different from "normal" people's. That his almost entirely ordinary wife loves him, I believe. I even believe he loves her to the best of his ability. But again, his POV necessarily distances. He cannot see outside himself; he has almost no insight into others. His wife, while sympathetic and delineated with interesting details, is not deeply developed, so her POV does not give us much to hold on to. The effect of the story can perhaps best be symbolized by its avoidance of names: Luzhin and Mrs. Luzhin is all we get until the very end (and Mrs. Luzhin never gets a name). The text purposefully hides much of these people from us. It's interesting--but it erects very high walls around personal, emotional engagement.
I am currently part way through Pale Fire, and so I can't speak authoritatively about the entire text. It is a kind of love story, but it is a love story from the perspective of a crazy man whose affection for his "dear friend" consists almost entirely of his projecting the labyrinthine passages of his own mind onto someone whose own life was clearly very distanced from his. It is a largely solipsistic love based on misapprehension and self-centeredness. It is, in a sense, a love story of radical isolation--so radical as to be pathological dissociation from reality. Interesting: very. Emotionally compelling: not so far.
My several years' previous forays into Nabokov include Mary and Invitation to a Beheading, both of which are a bit dim in my memory. Mary is, I think, billed as a love story. I don't remember it, but I remember that I did not find it particularly moving--hence the lack of memory. Invitation to a Beheading I loved; it's a fantastic depiction of a man facing death. It is also very strongly single protagonist (almost single character) work, and thus, does not, by its nature, afford much chance to see how people affect each other. And so it goes.
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louderandlouder and I have recently been discussing Nabokov's contention that he always had control over his characters; indeed, if I am remembering right, he scorned those authors who claimed their characters had their own minds, did things of their own accord, etc. I tend to attribute to that attitude the emotional flatness I find within Nabokov's brilliance. To write people as entities whose emotional world wrenches your guts, you must see them as people, not just as complex mimetic exercises in exploring certain psychological premises. But if you let them be people, they will act as people: sometimes their motivations and personalities will spill off in directions you, as author, had not anticipated. This is not a failing; it is an aspect of artistic process. Nabokov was a great fan of Dostoevsky, to judge by the number of references in his books, but I wonder if he ever quite saw that Dostoevsky is just such a writer: one who writes people, who simply slips into their minds and lets them be who they are. Perhaps Nabokov was very well aware of this; perhaps he just didn't want to be that kind of writer, and that's fine. His literary achievement is outstanding. But for me, it misses the pinnacle. Or if I may badly butcher Le Guin: those who cannot stop controlling where controlling stops will not strike the essence of humanity.
Some examples...
Lolita is a brilliant book; it took me forever to get around to reading it, and I probably couldn't have chosen a better time to resonate with it than now, as I'm in the midst of an adoption process that calls on me to routinely read the life histories of abused children. It is an absolutely psychologically trenchant look at an abusive family, one which bestows great humanity and individuality on both the abusive parent and the abused child. This is a very refreshing change from our culture's default assumption that abusers are demons and children blank cherubic innocents, a stance that helps no one to actually cope with the complexity of real human relationships, abusive or otherwise.
The entire project of the book, however, demands emotional distance. Humbert Humbert's actions and accounting of his actions are predicated on this inability to empathize with Lolita as a human being (until the very end, a little bit). As for Lolita, we never see her POV. We see enough to get a strong sense of her characteristics, but her inner life and loves are always a blank. The story has to be this way, but the trade-off is lack of the force that comes of deep emotional interaction.
The Luzhin Defense is, again, a terrific book, an intriguing and atypical look into the mind of an idiot savant, who would be classed as mildly autistic today. I won't pretend to review how "realistic" the portrayal of his thoughts is, but it is consistent, intelligible, and very different from "normal" people's. That his almost entirely ordinary wife loves him, I believe. I even believe he loves her to the best of his ability. But again, his POV necessarily distances. He cannot see outside himself; he has almost no insight into others. His wife, while sympathetic and delineated with interesting details, is not deeply developed, so her POV does not give us much to hold on to. The effect of the story can perhaps best be symbolized by its avoidance of names: Luzhin and Mrs. Luzhin is all we get until the very end (and Mrs. Luzhin never gets a name). The text purposefully hides much of these people from us. It's interesting--but it erects very high walls around personal, emotional engagement.
I am currently part way through Pale Fire, and so I can't speak authoritatively about the entire text. It is a kind of love story, but it is a love story from the perspective of a crazy man whose affection for his "dear friend" consists almost entirely of his projecting the labyrinthine passages of his own mind onto someone whose own life was clearly very distanced from his. It is a largely solipsistic love based on misapprehension and self-centeredness. It is, in a sense, a love story of radical isolation--so radical as to be pathological dissociation from reality. Interesting: very. Emotionally compelling: not so far.
My several years' previous forays into Nabokov include Mary and Invitation to a Beheading, both of which are a bit dim in my memory. Mary is, I think, billed as a love story. I don't remember it, but I remember that I did not find it particularly moving--hence the lack of memory. Invitation to a Beheading I loved; it's a fantastic depiction of a man facing death. It is also very strongly single protagonist (almost single character) work, and thus, does not, by its nature, afford much chance to see how people affect each other. And so it goes.
louderandlouder and I have recently been discussing Nabokov's contention that he always had control over his characters; indeed, if I am remembering right, he scorned those authors who claimed their characters had their own minds, did things of their own accord, etc. I tend to attribute to that attitude the emotional flatness I find within Nabokov's brilliance. To write people as entities whose emotional world wrenches your guts, you must see them as people, not just as complex mimetic exercises in exploring certain psychological premises. But if you let them be people, they will act as people: sometimes their motivations and personalities will spill off in directions you, as author, had not anticipated. This is not a failing; it is an aspect of artistic process. Nabokov was a great fan of Dostoevsky, to judge by the number of references in his books, but I wonder if he ever quite saw that Dostoevsky is just such a writer: one who writes people, who simply slips into their minds and lets them be who they are. Perhaps Nabokov was very well aware of this; perhaps he just didn't want to be that kind of writer, and that's fine. His literary achievement is outstanding. But for me, it misses the pinnacle. Or if I may badly butcher Le Guin: those who cannot stop controlling where controlling stops will not strike the essence of humanity.
