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Literature was born not the day when a boy crying wolf, wolf came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. That the poor little fellow because he lied too often was finally eaten up by a real beast is quite incidental. But here is what is important. Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature.
Literature is invention. Fiction is fiction. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth. Every great writer is a great deceiver, but so is that arch-cheat Nature. Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction follows Nature's lead.
Going back for a moment to our wolf-crying woodland little woolly fellow, we may put it this way: the magic of art was in the shadows of the wolf that he deliberately invented, his dream of the wolf; then the story of his tricks made a good story. When he perished at last, the story told about him acquired a good lesson in the dark around the camp fire. But he was the little magician. He was the inventor.
Vladimir Nabokov: from "Good Readers and Good Writers" in Lectures on Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers, 1980
Canis lupus, seen before hunt, Quebec: photo by Peupleloup, 2004
Gray wolf (Canis lupus) laying in grass: photo by John and Karen Hollingsworth, 2002 (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
Dolon: detail from Attic red-figured lekythos, c. 460 BC: photo by Jastrow, 2006 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Canis lupus howling on glacial erratic at Little America Flats: photo by Jim Peaco, 2004 (U.S. National Park Service)
Gray wolf (Canis lupus) laying in grass: photo by John and Karen Hollingsworth, 2002 (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service)
Dolon: detail from Attic red-figured lekythos, c. 460 BC: photo by Jastrow, 2006 (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
Canis lupus howling on glacial erratic at Little America Flats: photo by Jim Peaco, 2004 (U.S. National Park Service)
"Nature always deceives. From the simple deception of propagation to the prodigiously sophisticated illusion of protective colors in butterflies or birds, there is in Nature a marvelous system of spells and wiles. The writer of fiction follows Nature's lead."
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot that can be made of and said about those three sentences.
For a long time, a touchstone book for me has been Guy Davenport's translation of Heraclitus's "fragments". One of them reads "Nature loves to hide", which really resonates.
"Good Readers and Good Writers" is a lovely, generous title.
Curtis,
ReplyDeleteYes, I love that phrase "spells and wiles", so pertinent to Nabokov's purpose here.
BTW, a word on context: it should be reminded that this essay is not a text Nabokov prepared for publication.
It was reconstructed by the editor, Fredson Bowers, from parts of Nabokov's untitled written-out opening lecture to his class in Literature 311-312 ("Selected English, Russian, French and German novels and short stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries"). This lecture was given before the exposition began of Mansfield Park, the first book of the semester.
This was the famous class Nabokov taught at Cornell from 1948 onward.
His insistence on the absolute divorce between art and reality is, one can only say, interesting, and certainly unapologetic.
The boy who cried wolf and so irritated everybody in the tribe sufficiently to cause them to allow him to perish, without undue concern... that is a figure of the artist with which it is not impossible to identify, at least a bit.
With Nabokov's level of genius, however, to assume in any way to identify would be arrogance pure and simple.
(Incidentally, in a late essay he spoke of employing himself, upon arrival in the US in 1940, in writing one hundred lectures on Russian literature and another one hundred lectures on great novelists from Austen to Joyce: "this kept me happy at Wellesley and Cornell for twenty academic years".)