----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, May 12, 2008 7:30 PM
Subject: [NABOKOV-LIST] [SIGHTING] A sighting, a tease?
Dear List,
In his opening lecture on English Literature, Nabokov
says that "... great novels are great fairy tales”.
In SO he adds: “My greatest masterpieces of twentieth
century prose are, in this order: Joyce's Ulyssses; Kafka's Transformation;
Bilely's Petersburg; and the first half of Proust's fairy-tale In Search of Lost
Time.”
When I first came accross Ian McEwan's
description of two great novels as being "fairy-tales", I thought it
was only a coincidence. But when several pages later I encountered
another reference to fairy-tales and Kafka, in the context of literature
and art, I concluded that McEwan ("Saturday", 2005) had Nabokov in
his mind - although I couldn't understand what he might have intended with
these mentions.
chapter 2, third part: "Henry
read Anna Karenin and Madame Bovary [...]
these sophisticated fairy-tales."
chapter 3, second part: "John gave her Kafka's
Metamorphosis [...] this domestic
fairy-tale."
(I'm reading his novel in a translation, so I cannot
offer his exact words or the pages numbers.)
As an expert in insect metamorphosis I'm certain that
VN had good reason to to translate the title of Kafka's work as
"Transformation," thereby de-emphasizing an entomological suggestion
of programmed transformations, and indicating the kind of
metamorphosis that should be expected in Kafka's "fairy-tale".
And yet, I don't think Nabokov described Kafka's, Joyce's, Bilely's or Proust's
"fairy tales" in the sense of the kind of stories read to children at
bedtime.