Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0000693, Sat, 26 Aug 1995 16:44:45 -0700

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VN:Dissertation Abstract (Walter)
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EDITORIAL NOTE: NABOKV-L would like to make available abstracts of recent
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From: Brian D. Walter <bdwalter@artsci.wustl.edu>

Abstract for VLADIMIR NABOKOV AND THE ART OF READING, Brian Walter's
dissertation, Dept. of English, Washington University, 1995, directed by
Naomi Lebowitz.

If, as he asserts, the writer's greatest creations are his readers, what
attributes does the figure of the reader acquire in Vladimir Nabokov's
work? Nabokov famously characterizes fiction as a chess-game between the
devious, playful author and the potentially frustrated reader. This image
of the author-reader relationship springs from Nabokov's obsession with
the reader's assumptions about the means and goals of reading, which his
work foregrounds in ways that emphasize -- often painfully, sometimes
scornfully -- the limitations those assumptions would impose upon the
artist. This narrative strategy ultimately equates incompetence in the
reader with a destructive lack of imagination. Faced with the
unimaginative, incompetent reader, the novel assumes the traits of a
contest between the individual vision and the communal edict, between the
personal and the impersonal, between the clearly subjective and the
apparently objective, with the author seeking to win the read over to his
position, to refashion his audience in his own image.

This constitutes the generosity of Nabokov's manipulative, baiting
relationship with the reader: the boon to the imagination, the sense of
necessary and welcome participation within the artistic design.
Nabokov's reader becomes a partner within the fiction, his or her
imaginative efforts the necessary complement of the author's. The games
with the reader, the recondite vocabulary, the forbidding narrative and
structural complexities -- the features of Nabokov's work that have earned
him both great praise as a master stylist and vocal criticism as a shallow
verbal trickster -- all constitute essential elements of his program to
instill the richest modes and methods of artistic sensitivity in his
audience, to develop in readers imaginative faculties of dimensions
sufficient to the task of appreciating the creative trials and triumphs of
the artist. What he writes of Gogol's The Overcoat applies to all
Nabokov's work: "Give me the creative reader; this is a tale for him."
NABOKOV AND THE ART OF READING shows how the writer fosters this necessary
creativity -- this morally expansive imagination -- in the reader.