Subtitle: Burn, Nabokov, Burn!
The current discussion of what to do with Nabokov’s posthumous work, which he wanted burned (Tom Stoppard says to burn it. John Banville says save it), reminds me of a New Yorker piece from 2006 on James Joyce’s grandson and his battle with the literary critics pulling Joyce’s work apart.
These battles get to the very heart of what’s important, to me, about the books and writing I enjoy. There are aesthetic questions, familial ones, questions of authorial intent, and, to be honest, questions regarding genius and taste. It’s all there tangled in these questions: why we write, why we read, what we think of as art, and what we think of as trash (Uhh, how do you call your loverboy?) The cult of personality that fuels literary criticism sits center as well as the most personal aspects of these people. Joyce is defended as grandfather (Nabokov as father) while he’s simultaneously defended as the dominant 20th-century writer.
As the title suggests, it reminds me of Shakespeare’s will and his gift of his “second best bed” to his wife. I haven’t read the debates regarding what he meant, but I can’t help but read it as a joke. Wherever it was meant to lay, there we are again, dealing with Shakespeare the human, perhaps funny (maybe petty), a man who might not have spent all that much time with his wife, might have cheated on his wife, or not all, and attempting to reconcile him with Him.
But, really, it’s all Roland Barthes’s fault.
Filed under: art, books, joyce, nabokov, shakespeare, stoppard, writing
