James Twiggs:one of VN's main interests is in finding a balance between "referential mania" [...] and the obtuseness of, say, the narrator of “The Vane Sisters”[...] The balance would be struck when one achieved a sane but intense awareness of the patterns in nature and in our lives. As for coincidence, regardless of its attraction [...] we have an obligation, surely, to resist being taken in [...] ... the truly important question about VN’s metaphysics--namely, how to reconcile his insistence on freedom with his seeming embrace of a view that would reduce us all to characters whose stories are being written by higher beings...cf. V.E Alexandrov "How can ethics exist in Nabokov's fated works."
JM: Many of the issues being discussed now in the VN-List are pretty well-argued in Alexandrov's article which Jim Twiggs indicated to the List.
A recent contradiction I found in J.Friedman's items about the otherworld and plexed artistry is dissolved, if one agrees with Alexandrov's theories.
As Alexandrov argues: "the same kinds of “coincidences”...can also be interpreted in a completely different way — as a literary model of fate, where the author stands in relation to the text in the way that God can be said to stand in relation to the “real” world. And it is precisely in connection with this issue that Nabokov’s discursive writings are particularly illuminating because they show that he saw life and nature outside of literature as characterized by the same kinds of features that also dominate the representation of life and nature within his fictional works[...] According to Alexandrov, "underlying Nabokov’s entire oeuvre is a sui generis, albeit tentative faith in a transcendent otherworld[...] One of the major forms of evidence for the otherworld’s existence is patterning of various kinds."
There is also an interesting reference to one of the words that have been recently brought up: "escape". He writes:
"some queer and beautiful force, which we call free will from want of a better expression, allows or at least appears to allow us to escape again and again from the laws of cause and effect [...] Nabokov’s ethics are intertwined with his conception of the otherworld’s relation to this world."
As I see it, for Alexandrov, in Nabokov, "escape" is granted as a "grace", it arrives "again and again" and it entails in a liberation from the ordinary chain of historic events. Indeed, the translation of "Otherworld" as "Hereafter" is deceiving: it suggests a neat beginning and a clear end, a perfect past. Nothing could be more distant from VN's views about human experience with the transcendent.
Thanks, Jim, for having remembered to mention how you enjoyed the inserted Freudian joke, together with a very inspiring message to all.