Style Is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov by Leland de la Durantaye (PDF)

Description

How should we read Lolita? The beginning of an answer is that we should read it the way all great works deserve to be read: with attention and intelligence. But what sort of attention should we pay and what sort of intelligence should we apply to a work of art that recounts so much love, so much loss, so much thoughtlessness―and across which flashes something we might be tempted to call evil? To begin with, we should read with the attention and intelligence we call empathy. A point on which all readers can agree is that great literature offers us a lesson in empathy: it encourages us to feel with the strange and the familiar, the strong and the weak, the vulgar and the cultivated, the young and the old, the lover and the beloved. It urges us to see our own fates as connected to those of others, to link the starry sky we see above us with whatever moral laws we might sense within.―from Style is Matter”Some of my characters are, no doubt, pretty beastly, but I really don’t care, they are outside my inner self like the mournful monsters of a cathedral facade―demons placed there merely to show that they have been booted out.”―Vladimir Nabokov, Strong OpinionsWith this quote Leland de la Durantaye launches his elegant and incisive exploration of the ethics of art in the fiction of Vladimir Nabokov. Focusing on Lolita but also addressing other major works (especially Speak, Memory and Pale Fire), the author asks whether the work of this writer whom many find cruel contains a moral message and, if so, why that message is so artfully concealed. Style is Matter places Nabokov’s work once and for all into dialogue with some of the most basic issues concerning the ethics of writing and of reading itself.De la Durantaye argues that Humbert’s narrative confession artfully seduces the reader into complicity with his dark fantasies and even darker acts until the very end, where he expresses his bitter regret for what he has done. In this sense, Lolita becomes a study in the danger of art, the artist’s responsibility to the real world, and the perils and pitfalls of reading itself. In addition to Nabokov’s fictions, de la Durantaye also draws on his nonfiction writings to explore Nabokov’s belief that all genuine art is deceptive―as is nature itself. Through de la Durantaye’s deft and compelling writing, we see that Nabokov learned valuable lessons in mimicry and camouflage from the intricate patterns of the butterflies he adored.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Style is Matter is beautifully written, and it is a pleasure to read. While Leland de la Durantaye expresses a sufficient number of ‘strong opinions’ of his own that are likely to provoke debate, he has done a fine job of outlining how Nabokov’s art works, and why it resists facile interpretation. This book will serve as a useful reference point for future discussions of Lolita and Nabokov’s work as a whole.” ― Slavic Review”The centerpiece of this erudite, philosophically sophisticated study is Nabokov’s Lolita―most particularly, the moral issues intrinsic to its subject and structure and the hotly debated questions to which they give rise. In an effort to solve the ‘riddle’ of how to read this controversial novel, Durantaye also discusses relevant aspects of numerous other works of Nabokov’s fiction, from his earliest Russian novel, Mary, to the last one he completed in English, Look at the Harlequins! Cutting a broad swath through Nabokov’s oeuvre, the author at the same time digs deep, paying as much, if not more, attention to Nabokov’s statements and opinions about art-culled from the author’s abundant letters, interviews, essays, lectures, scholarly studies, and translation projects-as he does to the verbal texture, or style, of a specific novel, Lolita included.” ― Nabokov Studies”The focal point of Durantaye’s graceful and thoughtful book is Lolita, in particular the ambivalence―the uneasy mixture of empathy and antipathy―that most readers and critics feel toward the novel’s hero and narrator, Humbert Humbert. At once seducing readers through his rhetorical skill and repelling them through his vile behavior, Humbert raises in especially acute form the question of the interrelationship in Lolita of the aesthetic and the moral―a matter that has exercised Nabokov’s best critics, and not only of Lolita. Therefore, while using Lolita as a starting point and a touchstone, de la Durantaye looks to the whole body of Nabokov’s writing.” ― Nabokov Online Journal Review “The contagious spirit of Nabokov himself, a style that is the matter of his masterpiece Lolita, has infected and affected the wise author of this lively new interpretation of the book, which offers an indispensable look at the moral art of the Master.” — Donald Harington, author of With About the Author Leland de la Durantaye is Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He has written for the Boston Globe, Harvard Review, Rain Taxi, Bookforum, and the Village Voice. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I seldom read literary criticism, just because I’m lazy, and like the fiction itself more, but this book is that rare thing, a piece of criticism that enlightens rather than obscures. Although De La Durantaye is occasionally self-indulgent–spending a half-page too much on the title of Pale Fire, for example–most of the book is admirably direct and on-topic. Side issues, like Nabokov’s extreme dislike of Freudianism, are delightful extras. For readers who like Lolita, but feel uncomfortable about liking it; or for any devoted lover of V. Nabokov’s works, because De La Durantaye’s comments illuminate them all.

⭐have studied Nabokov extensively and was hoping this would add to the corpus of existing gems in the field of Nabokov studies (by which I include figures like Rorty and Andrews, but especially Kevin Ohi). Unfortunately despite two reads I could only find one thing that was sufficiently new or interesting to remark upon, namely De la Durantaye’s fresh reinterpretation of (if I remember his name rightly off the top of my head) Gerard de Vries’s interpretation of the ‘old poet’s’ lines in Lolita. De Vries made the shrewd observation that these lines were a paraphrastic summary of a passage from Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’, whilst Durantaye shows how this is not as straightforward as it may have seemed to De Vries. Nonetheless, if you’re serious about studying Nabokov this book does not provide sufficient new insight into Nabokov Studies. You’d be better off with David Andrews’s study of Aestheticism and Lolita, as well as the essays to be found in the Nabokov Studies journal that ran for a few years and many of the other writers that have worked in this field. Kevin Ohi’s analysis is excellent in his study of the erotic child (Innocence and Rapture). Rorty’s analysis is flawed but forms part of a great work (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity). Anyone starting out in Nabokov Studies may want to read through Lolita: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism edited by Christine Clegg. De La Durantaye’s work is certainly not boring, but I think apart from the novel insight I mentioned above, it’s a step back in the field rather than a step forward.

⭐I have studied Nabokov extensively and was hoping this would add to the corpus of existing gems in the field of Nabokov studies (by which I include figures like Rorty and Andrews, but especially Kevin Ohi). Unfortunately despite two reads I could only find one thing that was sufficiently new or interesting to remark upon, namely De la Durantaye’s fresh reinterpretation of (if I remember his name rightly off the top of my head) Gerard de Vries’s interpretation of the ‘old poet’s’ lines in Lolita. De Vries made the shrewd observation that these lines were a paraphrastic summary of a passage from Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’, whilst Durantaye shows how this is not as straightforward as it may have seemed to De Vries. Nonetheless, if you’re serious about studying Nabokov this book does not provide sufficient new insight into Nabokov Studies. You’d be better off with David Andrews’s study of Aestheticism and Lolita, as well as the essays to be found in the Nabokov Studies journal that ran for a few years and many of the other writers that have worked in this field. Kevin Ohi’s analysis is excellent in his study of the erotic child (Innocence and Rapture). Rorty’s analysis is flawed but forms part of a great work (Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity). Anyone starting out in Nabokov Studies may want to read through Lolita: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism edited by Christine Clegg. De La Durantaye’s work is certainly not boring, but I think apart from the novel insight I mentioned above, it’s a step back in the field rather than a step forward.

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