"Good Writers and Good Readers"

"What a scholar one might be if one knew well only some half a dozen books" -- Flaubert

It was just over a year ago that I first read Nabokov's introductory lecture "Good Writers and Good Readers" from his Lectures on Literature. This lecture was meant to be the first reading I completed for a directed reading in Modernism and Identity in 20th Century American Literature. I was also planning to post on it over a year ago. But then my health had other plans. Now, finally, I'm getting the posting up.

In this first lecture, Nabokov defines great readers and great writers:

• The great reader is a rereader. Because the first reading of a book must be linear, it is only on second or third reading that the writer really understands the structure of the work (and hence the genius of it).
• The mind is the only part of the reader that should come to bear on a book. Avoid bringing emotion or connection to your reading, but bring imagination. Disbelief must be suspended .
• Never identify with a character!: “this is the worst thing a reader can do.”
• “What should be established… is a harmonious balance between the reader’s mind and the author’s mind.”
• “Everything that is worthwhile is to some extent subjective.”

And what do I think of Nabokov’s reader? I agree with him, for the most part. Surely rereading a great work is important, and without a willing imagination, how could the reader ever appreciate the author’s art as creation. I also agree that bringing to much personal emotion to a book can damage one’s appreciation – how could the sexually molested girl ever read Lolita with an appreciation for its artistic prose? To be contrary, I do see value in identifying with a reader when that identification is part of what the author asks of the reader (such as in Salinger’s work – the identification with Franny is especially important to really understand how the conversation with Zooey works). However, only a masochistic reader would seek to identify with most of Roth’s characters, or with Nabokov’s own Pnin, Humbert Humbert, or Lolita herself.

What I find most valuable about Nabokov’s injunction for the reader is his insistence on the creative act as a joint act between the reader and the author. The basic rhetorical triangle suggests this approach, but many literary critics want to either divorce the work from the author or from the reader or, god-forbid, from both. Still, Nabokov is not suggesting that his biography is what matters when one reads Pnin; rather, the balance between the author and reader is one of the creative act of the mind. To really “get” a work, the reader must attempt to share in the author’s experience of creating it – to see “how it works” – something akin to an art student spending hours copying a Van Gogh to better understand the master’s brushstrokes.