EDNote: Regarding paragraph three below, I only remember the letter to
Katharine White expressing VN's disappointment over her rejection of
"The Vane Sisters"; in that letter, VN suggests that all his subsequent
works will have "real" story behind the surface narrative. Glory,
too, contains a hidden story.
-------- Original Message --------
Subject:
Re: [NABOKV-L] J Friedman to G Shimanovich on Keys
George, I'm afraid I don't understand your initial comment
about keys and Orwell or Dostoevsky. (I haven't read
Chernishevsky.) Orwell's /1984/ must have one of the most
obvious meanings of any of the world's great novels--is
there really a feeling of a key turning? And /Crime and
Punishment/ isn't far behind.
Your comparison is quite different from a remark of Nabokov's
on solutions and novels such as /1984/: "Why did I write any
of my books, after all? For the sake of pleasure, for the sake
of the difficulty. I have no social purpose, no moral message;
I've no general ideas to exploit, I just like composing riddles
with elegant solutions." [1962 BBC interview] Here the
solution is independent of the "social message" or contrasted
with it. And as riddles are fully solvable, this remark strongly
suggests that Nabokov intended his stories to be fully solvable.
I don't think it's a stretch at all to say that in Nabokov the
surface is secondary to what's hidden--as the above quotation
exemplifies. As for /Glory/, my mention of it is probably not
interesting, since I think I was quoting Nabokov and thus /his/
mention of it is interesting. However, I may be mistaken. I
haven't been able to find the quotation. Does anyone know what
I might have been thinking of? Something probably in a letter
like--From now on, all my books will have a hidden story under
the surface. (I doubt it's psychologically interesting that I mentioned
/Glory/, either, since I haven't read it.)
As for chess, I agree with what you say about over-the-board
games (finally, something I know something about!), but
Nabokov always compared his writing to problems, not games,
right? And in a problem, though the variants may have a
great deal of interest (I'm told), there must be one and
only one key.
Another example of Nabokov talking about solutions: doesn't he
say that "A Russian Beauty" has an unexpected solution? (And
does anyone know what it is? I couldn't even guess.)
So I'm not telling you to look at things the way Nabokov did
(obviously, given what I said about /1984/, and I wouldn't
tell anyone such a thing anyway, especially not someone better
read than I am). And I thank Stephen Blackwell for quoting
both Vladimir and Dmitri Nabokov on the subjects of apparent
clues that the author didn't consciously intend and enigmas
with no solution. That's something for me to keep in mind.
But I believe Carolyn is thinking about /Pale Fire/ with a
goal that makes sense, given the elder Nabokov's own statements.