Nabokov Émigré

"If he is capable of love we have to assume he is also capable of hate."
--Sam Robards, A.I.



I finished The Luzhin Defense today and instantly reset it to read again, because so many things are inextricably entwined here, and there is a kind of shared identity between a cripple who cannot reject what the state imposes on her without incurring more serious constraints and Luzhin's rather vacuous problems with identity due to loss of his homeland. The title character is just shy of being an idiot savant, just shy of mental retardation, almost the antithesis of Humbert. Nabokov's diegesis strategies please me more than those of Joyce, despite the structuralist strains of the Russian who is nowhere and everywhere, European, dislocated, and an incisive critic of the Eisenhower Era. I am mad at myself for banking myself at Ulysses, all the same, as I am rereading Homer in blank verse and three other texts for every allusion I am highlighting and tracking, but if I want to play as an independent scholar with one or two bylines, then I need some familiarity with the grandmaster and his nonchalance on accessibility.

I should be sympathetic to it, given how much I hate those who cannot think outside the box, and I am, but gimmicks are gimmicks, whether the year is 1904, or 2004. Mitchell's book could not exist without derivatives, like Calvino, but his genius is more dynamic than that of the poverty driven gentility of Joyce. Mitchell wants me to work, but also expects that I will enter the narrative. Joyce seems to thrive on dissonance and obscurity and I curse his grave, comparisons to Sterne be damned. My sympathy for Irish pathos is lacking, precisely because it was all for nothing, and history is also written by those with the best propagada tools. Everyone knows what the IRA was, but most of you would draw a blank on those Italian anarchists targeted before the modern unification of the Italian Pennisula