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The Nabokov Assignment: For more information on this project and Nabokov, click here. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5
Vasiliy Shishkov /
Ultima Thule / Solus Rex /
The Assistant
Producer / "That in Aleppo Once..." /
A Forgotten Poet / Time and Ebb
Vasiliy Shishkov, 1939 Excerpt
I write for the sake of concrete pleasure and publish my
writings for the sake of much less concrete money, and though the latter
point should imply, in one way or another, the existence of a consumer, it
always seems to me that the farther my published books, in the course of
their natural evolution, retreat from their self-contained source, the more
abstract and insignificant become the fortuitous events of their career. As
to the so-called Readers' Judgment, I feel, at that trial, not as the
defendant, but, at best, as a distant relative of one of the least important
witnesses. Analysis/Synthesis This 1939 offering of Nabokov's proves just how clever he thought he was: it resulted from an "innocent joke" he decided to play on one Mr. George Adamovich, a famous émigré critic. You see, this Adamovich didn't particularly like V.N.'s writing―any of it. To show his incompetence, Nabokov wrote a poem under a new pen name, "Vasiliy Shishkov," and published it in a review Adamovich was certain to read. And he loved it. He praised it to high heaven. Nabokov had him where he wanted him. Revealing the hoax would have to be done with consideration, though, and what better way than with a piece of fiction that describes this new character Shishkov and his relationship to Nabokov? That's exactly what this story does. The narrator, one Gospodin Nabokov, is accosted during the intermission of a literary review in Paris: the mysterious Vasiliy Shishkov, a poet, wants to share some of his writing. They meet the next day, and after an honesty test devised by Shishkov (he gives G.N. a book of terrible work first to ensure an appropriate response), the tattered notebook of poems is left with the narrator. Shishkov is trying to start a new publication and invites G.N. to an early meeting of collaborators, but everything seems to fall apart. Soon after the ethereal Shishkov disappears, leaving the narrator with the book of poems.
So Nabokov (not Gospodin, but Vladimir Vladimirovich)
publishes "Vasiliy Shishkov" and now Adamovich has to admit his
incompetence. What he admits in actuality is that Nabokov "was a
sufficiently skillful parodist to mimic genius," and Nabokov seemed
satisfied knowing that if he could mimic genius, then he could, in fact,
beckon it at will, thus proving his mastery. The whole thing sounds very
childish to me, however. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that
arrogance commingled with his art. Though I can't dispute his genius in
other arenas, I would humbly counter that in this instance, his ability to
pander to Adamovich's taste isn't exactly a display of genius, since every
five-year-old knows how to handle his or her parents sufficiently to receive
a new toy or breakfast cereal. Additional Links: More about the story here.
Ultima Thule, 1939 Excerpt
But when you died, when the early mornings and late
evenings became especially unbearable, then, with a pitiful, feverish
eagerness, the awareness of which would bring tears to my own eyes, I
would continue the work for which I knew no one would come, and for that
very reason that task seemed to me appropriate―its spectral, intangible
nature, the lack of aim or reward would lead me away to a realm akin to the
one in which, for me, you exist, my ghostly goal, my darling, such a darling
earthly creation, for which no one will ever come anywhere; and since
everything kept distracting me, fobbing upon me the paint of temporality
instead of the graphic design of eternity, tormenting me with your tracks on
the beach, with the stones on the beach, with your blue shadow on the
loathsome bright beach, I decided to return to our lodging in Paris and
settle down to work seriously. Ultima Thule, that island born in the
desolate, gray sea of my heartache for you, now attracted me as the home of
my least expressible thoughts. Analysis/Synthesis When I read this story it struck me as very unusual for a Nabokov story. The first few pages establish a relationship (or at least a yearning for one) between the narrator and his deceased wife. After that, though, we are introduced to this character Falter, a man who apparently went mad with the sudden knowledge of the "essence of things." I, too, would likely go mad if I were suddenly let on to the "essence of things," so I hardly fault Falter for so loudly proclaiming it (he screamed painfully loud as a result). But rather odd was V.N.'s storytelling here: the last eight pages are dialogue between the frustrated narrator and Falter, the former trying in vain to extract the "essence of things," hoping that it will give him some indication of whether or not he can forget ever communicating with his wife again. Falter doesn't reveal much (although he claims it was still too much), and the narrator leaves irritated: apparently he wasn't even remotely close with the questions he chose. With the structure of the story, I thought Nabokov would have been better off stretching it into a novel. Apparently, he had the same idea. "Ultima Thule," as it appears here, was actually the first chapter in a book that Nabokov, living in Paris, never finished. "Thule" is the first chapter, and the next story, "Solus Rex," was to be the second.
But Nabokov never finished the novel and, when he sat
down to write a note to the published versions of the stories, he couldn't
even remember all the details that had been floating in his head back in
1939. Sometimes I wonder where the dead ideas go, whether back to the
eternal collective from which they came, or to some unattainable place, the
idea being that we can never get them back again, never retrieve such wispy
and ephemeral strands of thought once pieced together by remarkably
complicated series of incomprehensible events. Maybe they never existed in
the first place. Additional Links: More about the story here.
Solus Rex, 1939 Excerpt
We are inclined to attribute to the immediate past (I
just had it in my hands, I put it right there, and now it's not there)
lineaments relating it to the unexpected present, which in fact is but a
bounder pluming himself on a purchased escutcheon. We, the slaves of linked
events, endeavor to close the gap with a spectral ring in the chain. As we
look back, we feel certain that the road we see behind us is the very one
that has brought us to the tomb or fountainhead near which we find
ourselves. Life's erratic leaps and lapses can be endured by the mind only
when signs of resilience and quagginess are discoverable in anterior events. Analysis/Synthesis I was born under a different name, different than the one I use today, but I shall not tell you either of them, for in addition to them being difficult to say (in your strange tongue), they are the only two textual links to my former life: the first name betrays my identity, while the second eternally reminds me of what I am running from, reminds me that the past is inexorably linked to the present through something thicker than the wispy strands of memory we like to think we can forget. Today there are no real kings. It's true that when I was born kings were on the wane, but there were still a few legitimate autocratic rulers: a pair here in name's sake only, a pair there in manner of rule but not in name, and an awe-inspiring few who were kings in name, kings in function, and kings to their people. We forget that when a king is a true king, the people living beneath his rule scarcely mind. Only when a king becomes a tyrant (or is slandered so by enough countrymen) does his rule seem oppressive to the masses. When I was born, our king was just on the verge of becoming a tyrant through a strange set of circumstances that shall probably never be charted or explained satisfactorily by an historian; an artist could do it, perhaps, but no one who takes reality's tale as the last word. The king's despotism came rather surprisingly to us, and by the time I was ready to leave home, our people were at the brink of rebellion. In fact, had I not met her (whose name I shall also have to withhold), I too would have been conscripted to wage war against our leaders and their cowardly army had not...
The end. There is no more story. What you've just read is
a chapter in a book I'll never finish. What do you think? Additional Links:
Read this
interview with Nabokov.
The Assistant Producer, 1943 Excerpt
When nowadays in some Russian household the gramophone is
put on, and I hear her canned contralto, it is with something of a shudder
that I recall the meretricious imitation she gave of reaching her vocal
climax, the anatomy of her mouth fully displayed in a last passionate cry,
her blue-black hair beautifully waved, her crossed hands pressed to the
beribboned medal on her bosom as she acknowledged the orgy of applause, her
broad dusky body rigid even when she bowed, crammed as it was into strong
silver satin which made her look like a matron of snow or a mermaid of
honor. Analysis/Synthesis Nabokov says that this story is based on actual events, a changing of the guard, so to speak, of the W.W. (the White army―opponents of the Red Army). It involves spies, secret agents, a famous singer and a hard-working young general. I saw quite a bit of potential in this story, but Nabokov failed to do anything drastically revolutionary. The plot is revealed through a series of vignettes that may as well be scenes in a melodramatic film. The language at times takes on this voice, too. But should we give Nabokov a break since this was the first story he ever wrote in English? In that regard, I'd give him a break if he misapplied a euphemism or missed an article before a noun. But, genius that he was, I don't forgive a lackluster performance when brilliance is so close at hand.
The problem (for me) results from the overall lack of
clarity. I like Nabokov's ending: the patron (you) walks outside for a
post-flick smoke and notices the posters for the film he has just seen
(read). In a sense, the narrator has assimilated the reader. But we're
dealing with film and literature, with real events and fiction: Nabokov
should have gone crazy with all of this material, not given it the hum-drum
treatment we see here. Not only do I not care about the characters within
the story, but I'm not engaged with the format since it fails to dazzle me
in any significant way. Again, the strong points all come in the field of
formalism: as the film grows more cliché, so too do Nabokov's descriptions.
This is clever, but the story could be better. I shall do my best some day,
and leave this here as a reminder of my pledge. Additional Links:
Read the story
here. Excerpt
Yet the pity of it. Curse your art, I am hideously
unhappy. She keeps on walking to and fro where the brown nets are spread to
dry on the hot stone slabs and the dappled light of the water plays on the
side of a moored fishing boat. Somewhere, somehow, I have made some fatal
mistake. There are tiny pale bits of broken fish scales glistening here and
there in the brown meshes. It may all end in Aleppo if I am not
careful. Spare me, V.: you would load your dice with an unbearable
implication if you took that for a title. Analysis/Synthesis A test of a novel or story's popularity in our time is quite simple: search for the title on the internet and see how many people want to sell you a quasi-academic paper on the subject. I'll blatantly tell you that this story is widely anthologized and widely known, but don't take my word for it: do the search. Granted, the title comes from a line in Shakespeare's Othello, so many results pertain to that fine piece of drama, but Nabokov gets his fair share of press. And deservedly so. This story is quite remarkable. In it, Nabokov shows, for the first time in English, a fine attention to detail with a relatively compact voice. His narrator wastes no time at all divulging the plot: this is done through a letter to "V." V. is an author, we're told, and it would be easy for us to assume it stands for "Vladimir," for this tale of infidelity and pain was ultimately told by Nabokov. But really it is a story about a story: classic Nabokov.
Most magical and memorable for me was the ethereal nature
of the narrator's unnamed young wife. At the outset we're told that he can
no longer remember her, her face and features, a result reinforced by his
jealousy and anger after he learns she abandoned him for another man. Later,
though, she changes her story as the narrator tries to grapple with the gory
details. By the end the narrator says that he sees their "mangled romance
engulfed in a deep valley of mist between the crags of two matter-of-fact
mountains." His wife's identity at this point is irrelevant: his pain and
incomprehension are all that remain. With the threat of murder and suicide
(the allusion to Othello), his situation is grounded, but we can by
no means judge the situation definitively. What we have then is an appeal
for clarification: "you may clarify things for me through the prism of your
art." Do we get it? The story is just has hazy as the letter, since after
all, they are one and the same. The reader is left no choice but to take up
the slack, sort through the valley of mist and find a clear solution to an
age-old problem. Thus engaged, we must inevitably fail (for this is an
unanswerable question), but at least we have been involved, implicated in
this giant human tragedy that Nabokov cleverly delineates. Additional Links:
Read the story
here.
A Forgotten Poet, 1944 Excerpt
A few minutes before the start, while the speakers were
still assembled in a committee room behind the stage, the door opened
gustily and there entered a sturdy old man, clad in a frock coat that had
seen―on his or on somebody else's shoulders―better times. Without paying
the slightest heed to the admonishments of a couple of ribbon-badged
university students who, in their capacity of attendants, were attempting to
restrain him, he proceeded with perfect dignity toward the committee, bowed,
and said, "I am Perov." Analysis/Synthesis Konstantin Perov was a poet. That he was forgotten is a fact that shouldn't be blamed entirely on those who actually forgot him, for he was the one to fake his own death. Now, most people find a good, healthy reason to fake their own death (I've faked mine twice; the person not completely dead will always come back to life), but good old Perov might have had us all beat. Even though he was quite young (a babe: twenty-four) he had in many ways reached the pinnacle of his literary career (Georgian Nights being a favorite), and, pigeon-holed as he was, I suspect he wanted a life of freedom rather than a life of servitude. An artist who is relied upon by the public is more a spokesman than a human. Nabokov's story only casually provides the reader with details of Perov's life; the main focus is his surprising rebirth. It is 1899 and the Society for the Advancement of Russian Literature has decided to dedicate a monument to the drowned poet. But he, our distinguished Perov, would rather have the money instead of a monument. Understand: he's not greedy or anything, just an old man whose farming hasn't been going as well as planned. The society declines his request because, despite his physical likeness to the surviving portrait of Perov, they dismiss any possibility that he could still be alive. Perov now is just a madman, an artist still in seek of a public without the compromise inherent in that relationship.
The story shows growth to me. Nabokov moves past his
common and usual themes, retaining, of course, the them of the double as a
topical device. The lasting message is that we are all forgotten and
remembered again; art shouldn't be a popularity contest. Additional Links: More about this story here.
Time and Ebb, 1944 Excerpt
I was in my seventh year when he and I, and the sweetest
grandmother a child has ever been blessed with, left Europe, where
indescribable tortures were being inflicted by a degenerate nation upon the
race to which I belong. A woman in Portugal gave me the hugest orange I had
ever seen. From the stern of the liner two small cannon covered its
portentously tortuous wake. A party of dolphins performed solemn
somersaults. My grandmother read me a tale about a mermaid who had acquired
a pair of feet. The inquisitive breeze would join in the reading and roughly
finger the pages so as to discover what was going to happen next. That is
about all I remember of the voyage. Analysis/Synthesis
I don't have any memories, only an imagination with a
fossil record. I could write a host of clichés regarding the difference
between the two―memory and imagination―dealing with fiction and art and
lies and misconceptions, but I vaguely recall (substrata IV) the world
already having quite enough of these. And before me is a book by―let me
see―one Vladimir Nabokov, and in it, in the story I have just turned to
("Time and Ebb"), I see lots of these false memories. I can't exactly
justify all of them, explain why it feels so good when we're lied to
(effectively), but it does. It feels good to think about the permanence of
memory. The act of reading someone else's memories or writing your own
activates a pleasure receptor square in the middle of your brain-soul. It's
an act of flirting with immortality, that fickle creature who always hangs
towards the rear of a party, isolated and alone not due to introversion so
much as a hesitancy to overcrowd his own personal space. Nabokov sometimes
didn't wait for immortality to beckon him over; instead the author tried to
create his own, through brilliance and mastery over language, and probably
because of some superiority complex or widespread egoism. But other times he
gets a bit lost in the ebb and flow of his self-importance, gets lost in the
language, and the ideas―the images. This is when I connect with Nabokov's
writing the most profoundly. I don't know what he's doing or what he set out to
do originally―if those two are the same―but I know it involves getting
lost, losing memories and merging the creative and recollective centers of
the brain. Somewhere in the recollective center of my own brain I seem
to think "recollective" is not a word. This doesn't trouble me nearly as
much as what I'm doing here, who I am, and why this book before me is open
to a story titled "Time and Ebb." Additional Links:
More about this story
here.
Conversation Piece,
1945, 1945 Excerpt
A few years later, when I was lecturing in Zurich, I was
suddenly arrested on a charge of smashing three mirrors in a
restaurant―a kind of triptych featuring my namesake drunk (the first
mirror), very drunk (the second), and roaring drunk (the third). Finally, in
1938, a French consul rudely refused to stamp my tattered sea-green Nansen
passport because, he said, I had entered the country once before without a
permit. In the fat dossier which was eventually produced, I caught a glimpse
of my namesake's face. He had a clipped mustache and a crew haircut, the
bastard. Analysis/Synthesis I have a curious story about Nabokov and our first and only meeting in Montreux, Switzerland. It was cold. That's all I really remember since I was three years old at the time. I remember taking an airplane over the Alps and my mother bouncing me on her knee to distract me from the turbulence so that I wouldn't become fearful and begin crying. I don't remember much of the ground in Switzerland, however. Once I went near a horse and he sneezed on me―all over me―and it set me into hysterics. But the extraordinary event that occurred never stuck in my memory, and neither of my parents were around to witness it even though my mother was unknowingly participating. The happenings reach my present cognizant state through a miraculous accident, a chance occurrence that no one is likely to believe or accept, but so be it. My father, like Nabokov's son, ironically, is an opera singer. A bad batch of oil ended his career in the 90s, unfortunately―(he'd been taking it to combat nodes on his larynx)―but then, in 1977, he was at the pinnacle, and had traveled to Switzerland to sing a duet with a beautiful but mediocre alto. Her plans changed, forcing her to fly out of Switzerland two days after we'd landed, so the record producer decided to do the recording right in the arched dining hall of the Palace, where we and Miss Schwartz―or maybe it was Simón―were staying due to a manager's mix up on our part, and a leaky roof on hers. The reel to reel sat next to two giant microphones, and was complete with levers and switches that would easily appeal to any three-year-old who could reach them. I should probably also mention that Nabokov lived in the Montreux Palace Hotel for the last sixteen years of his life, and while he usually dined in his room, he occasionally sat among the common visitors, looking for a chess opponent or characters to grace the pages of his novel in progress. This was the situation that fateful day―I think it was autumn, April or May, but I'm not sure. The singers sang and left to attend a party with the musicians who had, the day before, recorded the orchestral tracks for the record. My mother and I remained in the dining hall, and what happened next is the extraordinary bit. Wandering around the lush carpet of the room, I stumbled into one of the microphones and knocked it over, causing it to tumble onto an empty table near the window, she says. When she went to pick it up and to apologize to the elderly man whose table was directly adjacent to where it had landed, I ambled over the reel-to-reel, and began playing with the buttons I could reach. The lowest buttons, apparently, were REWIND and RECORD, for these, respectively, were the two I pushed. There is static after a deep intake of Schwartz's air, and then Nabokov saying, calmly, "Not American, Russian." "Russian?!" my mother says, "I never would have guessed that!" I can imagine Nabokov smiling demurely. "And what brings you here from Russia?" "From America, actually. Retirement brought me here. Old age, retirement and the Hairstreaks." "Hairstreaks?" "Butterflies." "Oh! My son...he loves...my son!" she yelled, at which point she quite clearly drops the microphone back on to the table and runs to find me. You can hear Nabokov chuckle. Véra comes soon and the two of them discuss something briefly, something personal. Nabokov, probably nodding toward the still-standing microphone, says, "I wonder about Dmitri." The two swap exchanges and the tape goes silent for a while. It seems Véra has left. Nabokov cheerfully greets a passing gentleman he seems to know well. Then, with no apparent interlocutor near him, Nabokov begins talking softly, just at the volume above a whisper. The first two words he says are "Doctor Shoe," and until today, I didn't understand who that was. He then talks about this story, "Conversation Piece, 1945," and explains how it is actually quite poorly constructed, and that the business about the double, the narrator's namesake, is superfluous. Nabokov continues along other lines, talking about his time at Harvard briefly, and the success of Lolita and how it changed his life. It sounds exactly like a questionless interview. Next you hear my mother scream my name. I must have pulled the plug from the machine at this point, for the tape then returns to the two opera singers back to their Bach, and Nabokov disappears completely. He would die a couple months later. I never suffered punishment for the tape blunder since Schwartz (or whatever her name was) had a wretched performance of La Traviata a few days after the botched session, and her career was abruptly ended. Everyone agreed not to ever replay the tape in an effort to save my father's reputation. It remained in a box in our attic until I retrieved it five years ago, twenty-three after it was initially recorded. I had trouble finding significance in the strange voice on the tape recorder, had trouble piecing together what had actually happened because I didn't remember any of it. I listened to the tape four times. And right before his wife arrives―directly after my mother walks away―Nabokov scrunches his cheeks up a bit, bares his teeth, and says the word "son" with my mother's New England accent.
My mother doesn't think it's Nabokov at all. My mother
thinks the man is a reporter who had just interviewed Nabokov, and who was
going over the answers given to all of his common, superficial questions. I
showed her a picture of Nabokov in his old age, and she's fairly certain
that the man didn't look like that, but then again, she didn't even remember
talking to him until I played her the tape. She remembers the airplane,
though. And the horse. Our memories, more often than not, are convergent and
rather dependent on each other for their survival. Nabokov escapes while the
inanities of everyday life, if they are ping-ponged back and forth between
two people enough times, survive. Additional Links:
Read the text of the story
here.
Signs and Symbols, 1945 Excerpt
For the fourth time in as many years they were confronted
with the problem of what birthday present to bring a young man who was
incurably deranged in his mind. He had no desires. Man-made objects were to
him either hives of evil, vibrant with a malignant activity that he alone
could perceive, or gross comforts for which no use could be found in his
abstract world. After eliminating a number of articles that might offend him
or frighten him (anything in the gadget line for instance was taboo), his
parents chose a dainty and innocent trifle: a basket with ten different
fruit jellies in ten little jars. Analysis/Synthesis I was walking down the street talking about this story yesterday. She said something about the boy, the deranged boy, but I said maybe that's not it at all. The boy is a metaphor, she said. I couldn't deny this; the boy is a metaphor. But the jellies could be a metaphor, too. And after all, the jellies are only as important as we make them. The story could pivot on the jellies, the boy, or something else entirely. What does the story pivot on? The parents, with gift in hand, are turned away from the mental institution which is housing their son because he has tried to commit suicide again. It would be too traumatic, they say. The parents go home and are rather depressed. The phone rings: wrong number. The mother is tense. The phone rings again: wrong number. The father thinks he's going to die. The phone rings again and the story ends. We don't know who is on the phone or what they want. Maybe it's a wrong number, maybe it's the hospital. She said it was about the boy, but we are all the boy, and Nabokov isn't writing to show us what we are, but what we haven't yet considered. Somewhere out there are our parents (real or otherwise), and somewhere out there are our jellies (real or otherwise). We walked by the copy store, by the gas station.
In the book, in red pen, it says, "Why jellies?" and I
suddenly think, "Why anything?" Additional Links:
Read the full text of this story
here.
First Love, 1948 Excerpt Among the trivial souvenirs acquired at Biarritz before leaving, my favorite was not the small bull of black stone and not the sonorous seashell but something which now seems almost symbolic―a meerschaum penholder with a tiny peephole of crystal in its ornamental part. One held it quite close to one's eye, screwing up the other, and when one had got rid of the shimmer of one's own lashes, a miraculous photographic view of the bay and of the line of cliffs ending in a lighthouse could be seen inside.
And now a delightful thing happens. The process of
re-creating that penholder and the microcosm in its eyelet stimulates my
memory to a last effort. I try again to recall the name of Colette's
dog―and, sure enough, along those remote beaches, over the glossy evening
sands of the past, where each footprint slowly fills up with sunset water,
here it comes, here it comes, echoing and vibrating: Floss, Floss, Floss! Analysis/Synthesis
Confusion. Additional Links:
Read the full text of the story
here. Scenes
from the Life of a Double Monster, c.1950 Excerpt
An ample black shepherd's cloak covered our shoulders,
and, as we squatted on the ground, all but our heads and Lloyd's hand was
concealed within its failing folds. The sun had just risen and the sharp
March air was like layer upon layer of semitransparent ice through which the
crooked Judas trees in rough bloom made blurry spots of purplish pink. The
long, low white house behind us, full of fat women and their foul-smelling
husbands, was fast asleep. We did not say anything; we did not even look at
each other; but, throwing his twig away, Lloyd put his right arm around my
shoulder, as he always did when he wished both of us to walk fast; and with
the edge of our common raiment trailing among dead weeds, while pebbles kept
running from under our feet, we made our way toward the alley of cypresses
that led down to the shore. Analysis/Synthesis 1. Nabokov and the double. It doesn't get any more Nabokovian than "the double." Here we have twins, Floyd and Lloyd, who are joined at the navel. We're reading the story which was presumably written while Lloyd was sitting right there, his head slightly averted to one side. The writing might have been interrupted by any number of things beyond the author's control: his brother's need to go to the bathroom, scratch his belly, or sneeze. 2. Much of this story is about the grandfather taking advantage of the two young boys, proffering them to an inquisitive public as long as they bring money. The twins simply show others a reflection of themselves, and for this they are deemed monsters. In a social system of oppression, we can expect to see this. 3. The maleness in this story is absurd. We have twice the testosterone, twice the absence of Woman. Floyd and Lloyd are the apotheosis of a patriarchal society, and Nabokov's keen eye once again allows him to make a prediction: it will all topple as a result of greed and ignorance. 4. The kidnapping at the end bothered me. Twenty years―what is that about? I cannot imagine being stuck to someone for such a long period of time. Time has a way of wearing things on you like that, and I just wouldn't have any part of it unless I had no other choice. There is that lady with a knife, though, who says she'll cut them apart and they cower from her. 5. Leave it to him to suggest that it is Woman who will destroy the twins' masculinity with her aptly-handled knife.
6. When we look in the mirror we have to decide whether
the monster we see is our reflection or our actual self. Does the
monster-hood arise in the act of seeing, or is it intrinsically there? Additional Links:
Read the full text of the story
here.
The Vane Sisters, 1951 Excerpt
Cynthia had a feeling that her dead sister was not
altogether pleased with her―had discovered by now that she and I had
conspired to break her romance; and so, in order to disarm her shade,
Cynthia reverted to a rather primitive type of sacrificial offering (tinged,
however, with something of Sybil's humor), and began to send to D.'s
business address, at deliberately unfixed dates, such trifles as snapshots
of Sybil's tomb in a poor light; cuttings of her own hair which was
indistinguishable from Sybil's; a New England sectional map with an inked-in
cross, midway between two chaste towns, to mark the spot where D. and Sybil
had stopped on October the twenty-third, in broad daylight, at a lenient
motel, in a pink and brown forest; and, twice, a stuffed skunk. Analysis/Synthesis This is One of Those stories, said Rog to his aunt May, whose real name is Mabel but who hits you with whatever's in her hand if you call her that. We were all sitting around talking about the story: it had just been read on the radio and though there was a slough of static at about the part where the librarian comes in and wows us with his tricks (at least I think that was what was happening), we had all listened carefully. Well May, she pumped her hair up in the back as if she were staring into a mirror readying herself for a date, and said, Do you think we can get it all by listening to it? which I think brings up an interesting point. Maybe there are aural authors and visual ones, ones who like the sounds of the words coming out (sounds that are subjective, of course), and ones who like the shapes of the words on the page, the layout, the swirls, the beauty of it to the eye (which are all subjective, of course). I never think of these things in the moment. Dusty cleared his throat a few times as if preparing to announce something grand; in reality he just summed up the story. [this is Dusty talking:] The Vane sisters. The Vanes. The narrator is jarred suddenly, serendipitously, when he runs into D. and hears that Cynthia is dead. This finding has a serious implication in his life due to the preternatural beliefs he may have unwillingly absorbed from Cynthia herself, beliefs we're not even made aware of until later in the story when it's Cybil's death they're brooding over. D. is married, of course, married and carrying on an affair with Cybil Vane, the younger Vane, the girl who happens to be in the French Lit class of the narrator... Mag cut him off and said she was tired of hearing the story in his rotten version. They argued for a minute and then Dusty hunched up his shoulders and said he just didn't care then. He didn't care if she didn't want to talk about. What did she want to talk about? She shrugged and said, Just not that. Then I was going to ask a question―I was thinking a bit about the last paragraph and why it sounded so haunting―but I didn't say anything. I wanted to say that I needed to read it myself because it was so haunting. But May surprised us. Do you remember the icicles in the beginning? she asked. We all sort of started nodding and remembered how they'd seemed out of place originally, how after the story really got going we couldn't help but wonder why the narrator had dwelt on them so long. Icicles. They're beautiful, I guess. I said as much. They're beautiful, I said.
Dusty and Mag argued a bit more, but Rog cut them both
off when he stole something Mag said and put it out there with his deep
voice. The icicles are supernatural, he said, and there was silence. We were
a bit haunted for a second and then felt melancholy. I looked around at the
faces in the dim light and wondered who was there in that room other than my
friends. Everyone had that look on their face―who else is here? And finally
Dusty let loose a laugh as if to say, 'Ol Nabokov is probably here in this
room and laughing at all of us. I thought of Joyce and that poor woman at
the end of "The Dubliners." I thought of her and grew sad even while I
laughed at that fool Nabokov for yanking us around all the time. I laughed
and laughed. Additional Links:
Read the full text of the story
here. NOTE While their correspondence was not always completely meaningful, the two authors, Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson did occasionally have something worthwhile to say on a philosophical or aesthetic level. Often Nabokov would send new material and ask for an opinion, and if I know anything about Wilson, it is that he was sometimes painfully honest. I don't always agree with his assessment of Nabokov's work (or other authors' for that matter), but wow, would he let it fly if he were asked! He writes, in the first line of a long letter in 1947, "I was rather disappointed in Bend Sinister [a Nabokov novel], about which I had had some doubts when I was reading the parts you showed me...." Wilson was not exactly enamored by Lolita, either. In addition to speaking and writing Russian with an above-average degree of fluency, Wilson shared Nabokov's love for literature, and occasionally broke the émigré author's own limited zone of appreciation by suggesting titles to read. They often mention their children and spouses, and quite frequently talk about money and publishing, but on the whole, I found it fascinating what these men said about writing. Each lets loose a few gems that would intrigue even the most casual admirer: "Remember," Nabokov writes, "while enjoying my Mashenka [Mary], that I wrote the book 21 years ago,―it was my first experience in prose. The girl really existed." Nabokov and Wilson had a falling out over politics and literature (especially the translation of Eugene Onegin), but eventually reconciled before their respective deaths. Authors, it seems, are real people, and sometimes it demystifies them just a bit (the necessary bit) when we come across their correspondence and see their human failings and successes. Lance,
1951 Excerpt
The name of the planet, presuming it has already received
one, is immaterial. At its most favorable opposition, it may very well be
separated from the earth by only as many miles as there are years between
last Friday and the rise of the Himalayas―a million times the reader's
average age. In the telescopic field of one's fancy, through the prism of
one's tears, any particularities it presents should be no more striking than
those of existing planets. A rosy globe, marbled with dusky blotches, it is
one of the countless objects diligently revolving in the infinite and
gratuitous awfulness of fluid space. Analysis/Synthesis "Lance" was an okay story. It kind of peters out, actually. I would rather remember "The Vane Sisters" as his last story. Maybe someone got the dates wrong. Who knows. I don't think Nabokov knew what this story was about. I don't know what it's about. Lancelot. Nabokov is trying to be clever and he comes across as confused. I wonder why he didn't write any other short stories for the rest of his life. Twenty-six more years he lived after this―and no more stories? Nabokov was a multi-lingual genius. He was a flawed human being, for sure, but he had something unique. I wonder about individuality and geniuses and what this all means. Nabokov could have written a good story about this. Here I am, Vladimir, writing you a story. The two of us are talking even though you're dead, and when someone listens to this conversation, the whole thing will become a story. Now I'm a character and you, once a human, are reduced or enhanced to/into a textual representation, your corpus―both the dusty leaves and your dusty body―now being something that communicates. That Lancelot guy goes away to another planet. That was pretty bold of you, Vladimir, but of course you did it in your own individual way. You always did that―took something and made it into your own thing. We all crave that, and I especially admire the way you did it, the strange poetry you made from pimples and napes, from colors dripping down walls.
You're gone and you've given way to a host of people who
read you and misunderstand you. I have hope in this system of
misunderstanding because I think you misunderstood what came before, too.
You took what was given to you and you destroyed it, picked it apart,
focused on the things you found beautiful while everyone else cringed. This
is what people are doing to your corpus; they pick it apart and focus on
things to make them beautiful. You might have found these things ugly,
Vladimir, but you're dead. You have no say. You've stepped away―off the
stage―so that we can struggle for another voice, for a unique individual to
rise from the crowd and take the torch. I can't promise anything grand right
now, for there are so many people yelling and screaming and running in every
direction imaginable, but I have this feeling―this gut feeling―that things
will settle down a bit, and we'll have a voice, a torch-bearer, a poet
laureate, a medium. It's all unfolding as you knew it would, but it's still
hard to make do with what you've left us. From "The Wood Sprite" to "Lance,"
there are so few words but so many ideas; we'll focus on the latter. Additional Links:
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here. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 - Page 4 - Page 5
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