"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.... The writer of fiction only follows Nature's lead." -- Nabokov
In order for a reader to really appreciate a great novel, the reader needs to cultivate a mind capable of that appreciation: “the best temperament for a reader to have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic and the scientific one.” Such a temperament will provide a reader with the tools to appreciate the art of the author and to aid in the creation of the novel in the imagination.
A writer can approach his/her craft in three ways: “as a storyteller, as a teacher, and as an enchanter.” Obviously many readers turn to a storyteller for entertainment. And the laughter that accompanies a reading of Portnoy’s Complaint or shares the joy of Pnin’s new teeth are good examples. Teaching is also valuable, of course, as the reader learns much about puppet theater from Sabbath or about Middle Class American values from Humbert Humbert. But Nabokov is correct to really look for the enchanter in his authors: “it is here that we come to the really exciting part when we try to grasp the individual magic of his genius and to study the style, the imagery, the patter of his novels or poems.”
Nabokov looks to Ulysses as a great enchantment in his lectures. Reading Zuckerman Bound, you also see such enchantment. Roth gives us a simple story about a simple guy with regular ideas and ideals but where “the magic of art may be present in the very bones of the story.” Such magic is key to modern drama, I would argue. What is there in Death of a Salesman, Glenngary Glen Ross, or Fences that is anything other than ordinary? Yet the experience of these works is, like the life of poor Prufrock, moving in its mundanity.
The plays of Tennessee Williams work to highlight such a magic of art shared by author and viewer/reader as a creative act. The wave-like structure of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or the way tension builds like the construction of a brick wall in A Streetcar Named Desire can only work if the reader is willing and able to be enchanted. But perhaps the best example of such enchantment is when the reader is willing – eager, even – to understand the story of a pedophile “with a fancy prose style” in Lolita.
It is unarguable that Nabokov expects a great deal from readers. He demands attention, close reading, even a bit of detective work. And he repays these efforts with moments of powerful emotion (yes, emotion) – the great tingling at the top of the spine that signifies when all the mind is engaged in the magic of the art. Such a moment happens when reading Sophie’s Choice. Styron opens the book with Stingo, a narrator who, like Sabbath or Portnoy, spends an awful lot of time focused on masturbation. Getting into the novel, however, the reader finds Sophie, and her heartache is palpable. And finally, after the reader is well past Stingo’s crusty pillow, Styron hits the reader with Sophie arriving at the concentration camp, with her choice. And the reader’s world ends. Completely.
That is a perfect moment of art.
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