Reconsider after Reading

I first attempted to make sense of James Wallenstein’s Fine By Me in Intro to Psych, sandwiched between a varsity beefcake and foreign cat-lady, one of those incongruous, elderly scholars that show up in my classes every so often. It was an uninspiring, inglorious setting and I am a green, relatively unread intern set to reflect on, in beefcake terms, “some really deep @*%t,” and I have no doubt the result can only be offensive, it probably already is. So let me issue a disclaimer of inadequacy, and apologize for the silly, maybe unhelpful way I would like to begin thinking about Wallenstein’s article, an eloquent and erudite piece about a brilliant mind, heady and likely to swallow me at any moment. During Psych lecture I had Geoff on the brain, and because this was Lecture Three: The Brain, I had Geoff’s brain on the brain. As Professor Knudson walked us through the anatomy of the nervous system, I began to think about the folded surface area of Geoff’s cortical lobes. I saw a swelling hippocampus, aggressively nudging the mysterious cerebellum. I saw the sensitive amygdala, especially nervous today and pulsing against the thalamus. I saw all these hyperactive and oddly personified cogs in the cranial confines that must be Dyer’s head, working together to pull at the fabric of time and space, pushing at the definitions of then and now, and reimagining the nature of art and artistic production.

Text is never separate from its context, and the historical moment of inception is every bit as important as the biography of its artist, and yet, Dyer’s writing does not just defy genre and category, it defies our standard notion of time in regards to artistic creation. In his article, Wallenstein explains Dyer’s conception of art as an act of creation reliant on previous artistic endeavor as its library, fodder and future all at once. I agree, art is always reacting to, critiquing and borrowing from its predecessors, but Dyer’s writing actively recognizes its part in this never-ending, universal dialectic, conscious of its self-reflexive relationship to what has come before it. An “organized synesthesia” and meta-layers of recognition within his writing itself lift art from our human timeline’s plotted sense of progression, as if his is a conversation between artists and art unaware of the passage of time. In many ways, Wallenstein references a sort of dissolution of temporality in Dyer’s work, works made possible by the relationship between the past and present but very good at leaving the distinction between the two blurry in its wake. Mark Twain once said about the ancient city of Varanasi, the languid destination for an ambiguous narrator in part two of Dyer’s newest novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” Dyer’s mystical setting, ancient but suspended in time, provides an appropriate stage for both his character and the story’s introspective treatment of art.

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The Original of Laura: An almost-novel we weren’t supposed to read.

In his article, Last Wishes, Leland de la Durantaye considers the controversial publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s final unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. While the article offers literary critique of the fragmented notes, Durantaye’s most provocative point concerns the ethics of their publication. While tracing the echo of Lolita and Ada in the repackaged scraps of Nabokov’s imagination, we are also forced to recognize that the painstaking writer and editor never wanted us to read the novel. The questionable circumstance of the book’s birth prompts a moral and philosophical reflection upon the nature of intellectual property; how much of The Original of Laura really belongs to the deceased Nabokov, or does it at all?

In a radio interview with Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s biographer, de la Durantaye admits that left to him, The Original of Laura would have burnt per Nabokov’s request, but at no point in his article does he impose some sweeping, moral verdict in regards to its publication. In fact, he almost undermines the contention of Dmitri Nabokov’s decision to publish his father’s work, claiming that the edited compilation of notes will neither tarnish the writer’s name nor bring new meaning to what he has written before. Tom Roberge comes to the same sort of unsatisfying conclusion in his article on The Original of Laura for Boldtype Magazine, writing, “dead men make no complaints.” While I do not share Dmitri’s “supernatural connection” with the shade of his father, nor do I envision some tormented, ghostly Nabokov wringing his hands beyond the grave, I still wish de la Durantaye had taken a subjective moment to say, “This is wrong.”  So why am I offended? As the daughter of an intellectual property rights attorney, I accept the legality of Dmitri’s inherited possession and his decision to publish.  And yet, I can’t help but feel that despite Nabokov’s inability to teach at Cornell or eat a ham sandwich, his creative undertakings are still his. Having said this, artistic creation is always at the mercy of whomever it comes into contact with – words inevitably lend themselves to gray areas and interpretative freedom. In writing something, you somehow relinquish control over both its meaning and its fate, and regardless of the “should” or “should nots,” nothing ever belongs to its artist alone. While I find the publication disquieting, I am also disturbed by the thought of such rich, if not polished, material sitting in a Swiss deposit box somewhere or burning into tiny particles of nothing. Perhaps The Original of Laura was no one but Nabokov’s to give, but it is now ours for the taking. Here it is, an author’s involuntary gift and our public domain, and the least we can do is read into a writer’s need to destroy drafts and his contemplation of intellectual effacement with the delicacy such a tantalizing parallel deserves.