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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Nov 12, 1995 | In an interview, Vladimir Nabokov was once asked to comment on the popular authorial truism that one's fictional characters can sometimes "take over" and dictate to the author the course of a story. In his supercilious dismissal of this whimsical idea, Nabokov described his characters as "galley slaves" -- a comment exuding the playful, haughty spirit that drove (and still drives) some critics nuts. Such critics condemn Nabokov's authorial voice as elitist, inhuman and finally cruel. And that is an assessment his "slaves" might well agree with, subjected as they were to excruciating and ridiculous fates delineated in exquisite language and sparkling, albeit twisted, comic narratives.
To a reader with a defensive turn of mind who is waiting to be told how to live or to be shown the Truth in a piece of fiction, the ruthless and rigorous complexity of Nabokov's work may seem cruel simply because it does not offer either of these services. Some readers apparently interpret the very beauty of his prose as cruel -- and there is a hyper-refinement, an airy, curiously high-pitched quality to its beauty that can feel cruel simply because it throws the whole beastly, mundane, plodding corporeality of human beings into such grotesque relief. Through this Apollonian oeuvre there frolic countless tiny nymphets -- most famously, Lolita Haze, with her dim eyes and big, bright mouth, her narrow-shouldered, hipless, insouciant grace. And therein also stump Mrs. Haze and her 30-ish sisters, with their gross emotional needs, their dumpy legs, their ghastly hips and boobs, the unbeautiful human personified with a fastidious shudder.
What such critics forget is that a certain kind of detachment permits the most intense feeling, and that intense feeling is not always moral. It is this detached, aerial view that allows a wide range of feeling in all its unpredictable, oscillating movement. A sad person who is so involved with his sadness that he mistakes it for reality will have a hard time seeing himself as anything but sad. For him, the sadness is not a feeling that he experiences, it is him. Similarly a writer who is completely engaged with the emotionality of her characters -- or even her own point of view -- is in danger of writing from a very small, static and even self-righteous position.
Sometimes I write from the point of view of characters whom I would dislike as people, not as a perverse exercise, but because this cracks the story open and makes me see it in a way I would not see it naturally. Not being locked into one set of feelings which you run the risk of mistaking for the Truth, you have greater and more intense access to all feeling states, including those you would never choose to act out. Such an accepting and at times dispassionate approach to feeling allows for an understanding of both tenderness and cruelty. Alongside the refinement and the cruelty, an unspeakable tenderness permeates Nabokov's work -- even, in the end, for Mrs. Haze, who cannot, after all, help being who she is. Nabokov once remarked that art is "beauty plus pity," and in his fiction, beauty and pity rub together mightily.
