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Dear List,
Stephen Blackwell offered us a
quotation from a letter written
by VN to Carl Proffer on the "keys" to Lolita.:
“Many
of the delightful combinations and clues, though quite acceptable,
never entered my head or are the result of an author’s intuition and
inspiration, not calculation and craft. Otherwise why
bother at all—in your case as well as mine.”.
I found a
paragraph by J.L Borges ( in "Textos Cautivos") intended as a comment
on the achievements of literary criticism that might add a special
poignancy to VN's words. Borges wrote:
" As for every man, the passage of time enriches the
artist's experience. Under the pressure of omissions and emphatic
presentations, of memory and oblivion, the artist combines some of
these elements to produce his work. Critics next laboriously unweave
his art-work to recover ( or make us believe they did) the disordered
reality that had motivated his creation. In other words, the critics
reconstitute a primordial chaos."
(Braulio
Tavares, Afterword to "Contos Fantásticos no Labirinto de Borges",
2005, Casa da Palavra, RJ)
Jansy