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Nabokov has the last laugh ...
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http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/721864.aspx
The Spectator
Nabokov has the last laugh
by LastManOnEarth 01/16/2008, 7:15 PM #
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Not only does the dilemma of what to do with Laura mirror, uncannily, the contents of his various works (particularly Pale Fire), but also seems to mirror his genius at allusions, hidden clues, indirection and ambiguity, and puzzles that permeate his work. One senses, when reading Nabokov, that there are still deeper layers of meaning, authorial jokes, sly winks and reversals and negations of surface meaning, and that each reading produces a different meaning and experience. Nabokov must have known the allure a forbidden, inaccessible manuscript would have to the scholars and literati, with their insatiable desire to dig deeper into his work looking for some final solution to the puzzle of his work.
Of course, Laura would only deepen, not clarify, the mystery; Nabokov's intentionally crafted ambiguities would guarantee that. And in a sense, Nabokov's work and the scholarship of his work have become fractal, and it doesn't matter whether scholars get their hands on Laura, its mere unread existence is enough to spark a level of analysis and sleuthing only moderately less than that if it were actually released, especially once the manuscript is finally consigned to flame.
Nabokov could not have missed the obvious moral questions his request would pose, and the brutal simplicity in which to frame the deep but unanswerable questions about the relationship between an author, his work and his readers, and the nature of "respect" for an artist.
The ultimate Nabokovian joke, of course, would be to simply imply its existence, without actually having to write it, and stipulate its destruction. Of course his wife and son would have to be in on the joke, but I wouldn't put it past him. In any case, just as he toyed with the reader throughout his body of work he is toying with us now, from beyond the grave, and it's hard to imagine that he didn't know what he was doing.
Dmitri, of course, is playing his part, translating this final "work", in time rather than linguistically. It is the perfect execution of his father's intent.
What should be done with the manuscript? As a reader, I want to read it, and I think that Nabokov's exceptional genius merits an exception to the normal moral calculus of dead mens' wishes. But then again, I'm not his son, who HAS had the benefit of reading it and for whom its wider dissemination would be a much more mixed bag.
Ideally, the manuscript will be lost, stolen or otherwise disappeared, and Dmitri stays mum on its contents until his death. Laura, or its counterfeit, or multiple Laura's could then surface, and Nabokovians would have an extended field day sorting through the texts, looking for clues as to authenticity and speculating whether the entire drama (and possibly multiple Laura's) was the work of the master himself (and searching for clues within and without the texts and previous works).
I wouldn't put it past him.
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