The Burning Library by Edmund White

Author:Edmund White [White, Edmund]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76453-9
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

For Nabokov, such observations constitute news; one might even say they figure as scientific discovery. One sometimes feels that Nabokov the lepidopterist is not unlike Chekhov the doctor, and that like Chekhov Nabokov might have declared: ‘My familiarity with the natural sciences and the scientific method has always kept me on my guard; I have tried wherever possible to take scientific data into account, and where it has not been possible I have preferred not writing at all.’ To be sure, Nabokov once remarked that fiction began with fairy tales, but again one is reminded that, as Howard Moss has observed, ‘Chekhov’s stories tread the finest line between a newspaper account and a fairy tale.’

With Chekhov and Nabokov, observation constitutes an importation of something brand-new, something unprecedented into the realm of discourse. To all those critics who consider literature to be an entirely self-referential system, a grand tautology, I would submit that if their assertion is being made on an epistemological plane about the possibility of communication of any sort, then literature is certainly no more disabled than any other form of language (including criticism). But if the assertion is being made about literature in particular as distinct from language in general, then the assertion seems to me, quite simply, wrong, for surely literature, at least as practiced by Nabokov, is both descriptive and expressive, a new compilation of exact statements about the natural world and the self arranged into large fictional structures (mystery, suspense, plot) that re-create in the reader the very emotions that are being felt by the characters. In fact, the very old claim that fiction is a privileged form of communication because it falls between the disembodied or at least undramatized abstractions of philosophy and the random circumstantiality of history seems to me still true, not because fiction is a mirror to reality, a flawless reflection of it, but because the same convergence of pattern-making and sensation that creates perception functions in the writing and reading of fiction in much the same way as it functions in our experiencing of the real world. To be less vague about it, one could argue that in Pale Fire Kinbote’s paranoid glimpses of meaning everywhere fascinate us because we identify not with his character but with his process of gathering data and constructing and revising theories about what’s happening.

Love, like paranoia, is also an organizing obsession, an imposition of pattern on the atoms of experience. But Nabokov the realist, the scientific observer, is not content to treat the sentiments as either personal or cooperative delusions, nor does he view love as merely a literary exercise. In his treatment of love in particular, Nabokov points the way beyond parody and convention. At their best his characters act out of character, transcend their roles. The most sublime moment in Lolita, of course, occurs when Humbert sees the ‘hugely pregnant’ Lolita after searching for her for several years.

There she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands and her

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