Vladimir Nabokov is among my favorite writers. I love his complex word games, his layers wrapped in layers of self-reference, all of it delivered in gorgeous prose. He was better at writing in his second language than, I think, any of us could be at Russian.
But that masterful prose artist is, like James Joyce, always in danger of being devoured by critics. By which I mean people who give their lives meaning by deconstructing works of art that don’t need their help, academic sorts who get so caught up in out-clevering and out-egoing each other that they obscure brilliant, vibrant literature in layer upon layer of self-important nattering, making it seem less and less accessible to the unwashed.
I think Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a work of utter brilliance–it sits upon my “bookshelf of genius” beside Joyce and Melville, forming a sort of holy trinity. But reading the bloated self-congratulation of Ron Rosenbaum is almost enough to make me afraid to return to Pale Fire. This is the sort of thing that has relegated literature to its own shelf, well away from “popular fiction.”
Granted, Rosenbaum can be more interesting and (at least slightly) less self-important. Still, I rather wish Rosenbaum and his pals would go away to some Manhattan literary cocktail confab and lock the door behind themselves forever.
Now Rosenbaum is anticipating another Fire-storm. But is anyone going to care outside his rarefied circle?
In the course of writing about [The Original of Laura], I had changed my position on whether Nabokov’s burn order should be carried out at least twice—the whole thing was exhausting. Though I must admit that when it finally came out last fall, I was at least ambivalently pleased at ending up in the Laura acknowledgments, despite ultimately opposing publication. I spent a lot of time trying to get Dmitri Nabokov to make up his mind. I deserved to be acknowledged.
…
Brian Boyd originally shocked many readers by adopting the claim originally made by Andrew Field that the poet John Shade, author of “Pale Fire,” was actually the (fictional) author of the novel Pale Fire. This view, that Shade had made up his own mad annotator in Kinbote, who existed only in Shade’s imagination, at one point had so many adherents they were called “Shadeans.” (I’m still convinced by the argument Mary McCarthy made in her original brilliant review of Pale Fire—”A Bolt From the Blue” in a 1962 issue of the New Republic—that a deceptively minor character, a faculty colleague of Shade, one V. Botkin, is the “real” Kinbote.)
…
Now, in what appears to be another switch, Boyd seems—in the 30-page essay that accompanies Mo Cohen’s edition—to completely abandon his Hazel Shade’s shade theory of the poem’s authorship (such changes of mind are endemic to open-minded Nabokov scholars). And if he doesn’t name a substitute, he argues that the poem ought to be read for its own intrinsic merits and makes clear he believes Nabokov intended us to believe Shade, not his dead daughter, wrote the poem. Or rather, that Nabokov wrote the poem and it’s time to claim it for him.
…
That was the implicit thesis, the raison d’être of the numinous object that arrived at my home not long after my talk with Mo Cohen. Initially I was only supposed to be allowed to look at it for a week then return it, but then, through a comedy of errors, which I will describe shortly, I got to keep it: the mock-up of the forthcoming Gingko Press edition of “Pale Fire,” which presents the poem in a kind of magic box within a box. Review copies won’t be available for a few months but I like to preview what I think will be significant intellectual controversies. (Was I right that Paul Berman’s book would cause a brawl or what?)
Funny–I love Nabokov’s work. But I just don’t care about any of this. Read the poem in the novel, outside the novel, printed on leaves, written in the sky, whatever. Enjoy it instead of teeing off from it into a world of critical angst that leaves the thing itself behind.
This nonsense comes down to this one line from Rosenbaum: “I think the Gingko Press edition will provoke an important argument…”.
Important to whom?
It’s a wonder any of us survived this stuff (and worse–much worse) to get out of grad school.
UPDATE: Much worse, illustrated (read all of it if you can–the end of the quotation is worth it)–
Roof’s book excels at stating the problem, but finds working out the entanglements that ensue more difficult. She defines narrative not generically or structurally, but as “a set of ordering presumptions” which “constantly reproduces the phantom of a whole, articulated system, where even the concept of a system is a product of narrative, where the idea that there are such things as parts and wholes is already an effect of a narrative organizing” (p. xv). This articulation, in line with notions of language as a field or a system that successfully rejects the false divisions and categories of thought developed by earlier efforts at narratology, is itself the cause of difficulty for narratological argument, because it makes it hard to distinguish, as Roof would like to do, governing features of narrative that are more central or more telling than others. These features cannot be articulated outside the whole system, which makes it hard to claim for them precedence or motive power. The motive Roof would privilege is, as the title of the book and its many puns suggest, sexual: “how ideas of narrative and sexuality inform one another” in Western cultural understanding (p. xiv). Sex is now one standard interpretation of the motive power of narrative for which the closural marriage stands as shorthand. Roof asks what happens when we do not take for granted the traditional reproductive norm of sexuality as the model of narrative. When we challenge Freud’s and Peter Brooks’s assumptions about sexual and narrative process and teleology, she argues, we shift their dynamic models of narrative in useful ways. Against the traditional claim that perversion is resistance to heterosexual closure, Roof’s analysis assumes that narrative reproduction precedes and produces sexual reproduction: “The reproductive demand of the end of the story produces this normalcy rather than reproduction being the logical end to an inevitable–and irresistible–heterosexuality” (p. xxi). The demands of an all-encompassing ideological narrative produce the assumption of sexual normalcy which is then posited as their origin. Instead, Roof sees the need for a Barthesian emphasis on middles, on pleasure rather than utility in sex. Narrative is organized sex; bliss then is textual rather than narrative. …
Which is to say, I think, that modern critical scholars feel quite inferior to their scientific colleagues, and so employ a sheen of near-meaningless pseudoscientific terms to make their treading in tepid water seem like something really important.
What would happen if they were denied “texts”? Would they give up?
