"Ross Benjamin won an important award as the translator of Michael Maar's original book about Nabokov. I wonder, though, if he is not being considered more as Maar's ghost-writer into English...How many English readers are informed that the title of Maar's book is "Solus Rex: The Beautiful Malevolent World of Vladimir Nabokov" ? (my translation of it is controversial: what's the intended meaning of "Böse"? Angry?)..."

In Moria in Excelsis - http://moriainexcelsis.blogspot.com/ (Saturday, July 10, 2010 : how it's done:) we read:

"The most recent New York Review of Books has an essay by John Banville that purports to be a review of the newly-translated Speak, Nabokov by Michael Maar, but which is most successful in its evocation of just how it feels to be simultaneously put off by and in love with an author and his work.* It is also an extended exercise in how to write a review article – I give you its most stunning moment as proof:
‘What some deplore in Nabokov is the denial of imaginative maneuver, of that dreamy and delightful freedom of the reader to imagine through an author’s style and make a world of his or her own out of the materials the writer offers. The uncanny version of things that Nabokov presents us with is, for such unenchanted readers, a willful chloroforming and pinning down of that brightly fluttering spontaneity that is the essence of reality, or at least of that version of reality to be met with in prose fiction.’

I love a well-managed metaphor, don’t you? Here’s what I love even more: a lesser writer would have used the word ‘butterfly,’ would have made explicit reference to VN’s life-long lepidopterist-hobbyism, would have quoted the relevant passage from Lolita. Almost no pop-essay on the author fails to do just this. Banville, however, simply winks at the connoisseur while deploying a figure equally accessible, and equally moving, to the neophyte. Then he passes on without further remark. Pitch fucking perfect. And I love it.** " *Banville and I agree that Speak, Nabokov is an atrocious title, and we both prefer the German: Solus Rex: Die schöne böse Welt des Vladimir Nabokov. Irrelevantly, we agree also that not Lo, not Pale Fire, and certainly effing not Ada, but Pnin is VN's true masterwork. I like this man. I may have to read one of his books. **Yes, I think the blog is back for good now. We both needed some space. But I think we're patching things up.

JM: What I find strange in Maar's title and Banville's commentary about the "Medusa" theme is that although both mention Freud and his work "The Uncanny" (Das Unheimliche)*, they fail to mention Freud's "The Medusa head" (1922/1940, Das Medusenhaupt). Maar's conceptualization couldn't be more distant from Freud's remarks ( for Maar speaks of "harmony with the universe" and "pantheistic bliss'!!!) The quote from TOoL he selects from Maar and expands, adds another strange slant to his comments:
"What is most striking,” Maar writes, “is not even that Lolita has forerunners—it’s that she has successors.” ... “There is, there was, only one girl in my life, an object of terror and tenderness[...]…” Thus Phillip Wild, “Lecturer in Experimental Psychology, University of Ganglia,” stoutly confesses in The Original of Laura... And what about this passage, in which Wild in a dream encounters Aurora Lee, a revenant from Poe via Lolita?

"I lifted the hem of your dress—something I never had done in the past—and stroked, moulded, pinched ever so softly your pale prominent nates, while you stood perfectly still as if considering new possibilities of power and pleasure and interior decoration. At the height of your guarded ecstasy I thrust my cupped hand from behind between your consenting thighs and felt the sweat-stuck folds of a long scrotum and then, further in front, the droop of a short member."

From the wikipedia: "Freud argues that decapitation equals castration. The terror of Medusa is thus a terror of castration that is linked to the sight of something. Numerous analyses have made us familiar with the occasion for this: it occurs when a boy, who has hitherto been unwilling to believe the threat of castration, catches sight of the female genitals, probably those of an adult, surrounded by hair, and essentially those of his mother...If Medusa's head takes the place of a representation of the female genitals, or rather if it isolates their horrifying effects from the pleasure-giving ones, it may be recalled that displaying the genitals is familiar in other connections as an apotropaic act. What arouses horror in oneself will produce that same effect upon the enemy against whom one is seeking to defend oneself. We read in Rabelais of how the Devil took to flight when the woman showed her vulva."

* Banville writes in the NY Review of Books ("The Still Mysterious Enchanter"): "Freud, the Viennese quack, as Nabokov repeatedly characterized him, conceives of the uncanny as the bringing back in changed form of things already known: as the defamiliarization of the familiar. These revenants frighten us—or, as so often in the case of Nabokov, enchant us—by being both old and new. Nabokov’s singular prose style burnishes the commonplace world so that genies jump out of it, and the reader’s response depends on whether he is willing to be magicked away into a realm that he knows well and yet feels not quite at home in."..."The theme of the uncanny, of the sudden transfiguration of the familiar, is raised early on in Michael Maar’s Speak, Nabokov. Maar, one of the finest of the younger generation of German critics [...[is a literary detective who knows where very many bodies are buried."..."People in Nabokov’s work, particularly narrators, repeatedly stumble through the looking-glass of quotidian reality into a world where all that had been known is transformed in an instant of ecstatic divination or, on occasion, overpowering terror. In Speak, Nabokov, Maar designates this phenomenon the “medusa experience,” taking his lead from the 1935 story “Torpid Smoke” in which the central character, a dreamy young émigré living in Berlin, feels that “in the same way as the luminosity of the water and its every throb pass through a medusa, so everything traversed his inner being, and that sense of fluidity became transfigured into something like second sight.” In this version of it, Maar writes, “the medusa experience is one of harmony with the universe and pantheistic bliss.”

Search the archive	Contact the Editors	Visit "Nabokov Online Journal"
Visit Zembla	View Nabokv-L Policies	Manage subscription options

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.