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The essence of these worlds, their "inner weave," lies in their details. "One should notice and fondle details," he says. "There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected." The bulk of these lectures consists of rapt, minute scrutiny of such trifles. Nabokov does a virtual time-and-motion study of the daylong "dance of fate" between Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus in Joyce's Ulysses. He reads volumes into Flaubert's use of the word and in Madame Bovary. Under his microscope, the "flushed prism" of Proust's style reveals a particular rose-purple mauve as the precise color of time.
On the page, unenlivened by Nabokov's rich accent or his antic platform mannerisms, this methodical tracing of specifics could be slow going. Yet it never lapses into dry exegesis. Nabokov keeps stepping back for a longer view of his subject from some surprising angle. Dickens, he insists, is anything but sentimental in his treatment of children in Bleak House. Madame Bovary, that supposed landmark of realism, he finds to be a tissue of implausibilities (although he adds that they do not matter). Above all, he continually exhorts the reader to look for his own angles, to read "not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle." Of the three guises that he says any great writer assumes—storyteller, teacher, enchanter—he leaves no doubt about which he venerates.
Nabokov's faith in the transforming magic of an artist's style leads him to overrate the beautifully written blarney of Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. By the same token, he somewhat underrates Jane Austen, who, despite her "pert, precise and polished" prose, is so deeply rooted in the quotidian that he misses her enchantment. Yet he celebrates his own aesthetic, the "capacity to wonder at trifles," with an ardor that is irresistible. "These asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness," he maintains, "and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good."
This is nothing less than an artistic credo, a point that readers today can appreciate more readily than the students of Literature 311-312. The enormous success of Lolita in 1958, which freed Nabokov from teaching, made most people aware for the first time that he had practically a lifetime of such writing behind him. Had the students only known it, their professor was not only explaining Dickens or Flaubert or Kafka. With his quirky insights, his cunning traceries and meticulous diagrams, he was also charting the mind of another great novelist: himself. —By Christopher Porterfield