Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The gay Nabokov
BY
LEV GROSSMAN
(05/17/00)
Thank you so much for your vibrant rendition of the life of Sergei Nabokov. Very few pieces of journalism can make me forsake my morning caffeine. This incisive piece did.
As for Vladimir's homophobia, it would be interesting to get Edmund White's take on it because the novel Vladimir praised of White's is as overtly queer as you can get in a surreal manner.
-- Brandon Judell
Many years from now, we will doubtless recall one of the dirty little secrets of late 20th-century criticism: moral indignation.
I want to thank Lev Grossman for exposing yet another human foible of the past through the dim prism of identity politics. There is so much more to do, however. A special column dedicated to dead writers with secret flaws and bad characters would allow your readers to assess accurately whether or not we would have liked them as co-workers or dinner guests, which is, after all, the litmus test of all great art.
-- Tamara Griggs
If Vladimir Nabokov was indeed homophobic, so what? Why is this of consequence? He, like all of us, is a creature of his time and his environment. In that he was raised when and how he was raised and in the close company of a homosexual brother, it would have been unusual for him not to have developed ambiguous feelings about homosexuality. Art reflects the values of the society of its creation, at the time of its creation. Consider Twain's handling of American Indians in "Roughing It," Thomas Wolfe and the black man, or Hemingway and women. Is Grossman concerned that we will respond to Nabokov's quite rare use of gay men as symbols of artists that are not sufficiently serious about their work by concluding that all gay men are insufficiently serious artists?
Grossman's mention of the author's exclusion of reference to his homosexual brother in the body of his work is inaccurate. In "Speak, Memory" it is fairly clear that his brother was killed by the Nazis because he was gay. Also, in "The Gift," Nabokov's description of his emotional response to the Holocaust is strikingly touching. I remember having read "The Gift" before "Speak, Memory" and on reading "Speak, Memory" realizing the source of the emotion. Last, my impression of "Bend Sinister" is that it uses the totalitarian state as a way of getting at the ravages of aging; and suggests madness as the only available way of coping. To invoke any homophobic significance to this is a considerable stretch. Perhaps Nabokov is telling us that as we age, we will develop homosexual tendencies and this will lead us to a contented state of insanity?
-- Jim Owens
Not being a Nabokov scholar, I have no basis for doubting the various conclusions contained in Lev Grossman's excellent piece concerning Nabokov's homophobia. It hadn't struck me before, but the author doubtless does use the word "mincing" a lot; and perhaps he or -- what may be a somewhat different matter -- his narrator introduces homosexual characters with what Grossman calls "a nudge and a wink and a snigger."
And yet it seems a bit reductive to say that all Nabokov's gay characters are "two-dimensional at best," that they are all like the ballet dancers in "Mary" or Gaston Godin in "Lolita." In particular, the one Grossman refers to simply as "the egomaniacal narrator" of "Pale Fire," Charles Kinbote, emerges as considerably more than two-dimensional, though he may be at the same time "vain, silly ... shallow, intellectually trivial and ineffectual." Kinbote seems to me, among other things, a metaphorical double of Nabokov himself, the exile as homosexual, excluded or marginalized, an outsider looking in, and, as such, the object of the compassion of another Nabokov double, the poet John Shade, a man with his own considerable knowledge of exclusion. As Kinbote says toward the end of his last, mad, rambling footnote to Shade's poem "Pale Fire," "I may turn up yet, on another campus, as an old, happy, healthy, heterosexual Russian, a writer in exile, sans fame, sans future, sans audience, sans anything but his art."
-- Ron Macdonald
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