Changing my mind: occasional essays - By Zadie Smith Page 0,21

purpose in view”; in vorstog “the entire circle of time is conceived, which is another way of saying time ceases to exist.” But after this comes the second stage: vdokhnovenie (recapture). And it’s here that the actual writing gets done. In Nabokov’s experience, the two had quite different natures. Vorstog was “hot and brief.” Vdokhnovenie “cool and sustained.” In the first you lose yourself. In the second, you are doing the conscious work of construction. And while making the choices good writing requires, the Author exists, he circumscribes, he controls, he puts walls on either side of the playground. The reader, to read him properly, would do well to recognize the existence of these walls. The Author limits the possibility of the reader’s play.

In The Pleasure of the Text and “S/Z,” meanwhile, we find Barthes assigning this work of construction to readers themselves. Here a rather wonderful Barthesian distinction is made between the “readerly” and the “writerly” text. Readerly texts ask little or nothing of their readers; they are smooth and fixed in meaning and can be read passively (most magazine copy and bad genre writing is of this kind). By contrast, the writerly text openly displays its written-ness, demanding a great effort from its reader, a creative engagement. In a writerly text the reader, through reading, is actually reconstructing the act of writing, a thrilling idea with which Nabokov would sympathize, for that was the kind of active reader his own work required.25 But then Barthes imagines a further step: that by reading across the various “codes” he believed were inscribed in the writerly text (the linguistic, symbolic, social, historical, et cetera), a reader, in an active sense, constructs the text entirely anew with each reading. In this way Barthes reverses the hierarchy of the writer-reader dynamic. The reader becomes “no longer the consumer but the producer of text.”

Hard to know for sure what Nabokov would have made of that. My guess is he would have found it unhinged. He disliked literary theory in general. (“Every good reader has enjoyed a few good books in his life so why analyse the pleasures that both sides know?”) It’s probably for the best that he didn’t live to see the kind of post-Barthes (and post-Foucault) campus criticism that flowered on both sides of the pond during the eighties and nineties. Wild analogy; aggressive reading against the grain and across codes and discourses; a fondness for cultural codes over textual particulars. You remember the sort of thing:The Trans-gendered Suitor: Refractions of Darcy as Elizabeth’s True Sister in Pride and Prejudice:

Daisy, the Dollar, and Foucault’s Repressive Hypothesis: Portraits of Sexualised Capital in The Great Gatsby.

Please Sir Can I Have Some More: Bulimic Rejections of Self in Oliver Twist.

I’ve written a lot of essays like this. And found it a wonderful thing, to feel so free. The novel was mine to do with as I wished with, to read upside down, back to front or in entirely anachronistic terms. That kind of freedom makes writers of readers, liberating us from the passive and authoritarian reading styles we are taught in school (Hard Times = British education system in Victorian England). When we read instead in an active way we get to reinscribe dusty old novels into our own interests and concerns. There is a joy in getting someone to hand us their butterfly so we can spend twenty pages making the case for its being our giraffe.

But Nabokov believed in the butterfly qua butterfly. For this reason, when I first read his Lectures on Literature I was disappointed.26 Was this really Nabokov? The apparent analytic simplicity, the lengthy quoting without commentary. The obsession with (what seemed to me) utterly banal details: the shape of Gregor Samsa’s shell, a map of Dublin, the exact geographical location of Mansfield Park. And the questions he set his students! What color are Emma Bovary’s eyes? What kind of house was Bleak House? How many rooms are in there? You have to reset your brain, away from the overheated hustle of English departments, before you can see how beautiful those lectures are. How attentive. How particular. When it comes to rereading, Nabokov felt, “one should notice and fondle details.” These lectures are a marvelous, concrete example of that principle.

For Barthes, ideologically tied to a post-Marxist analysis, a bad reader was a consumer and an ideal one, a producer. For Nabokov, the reader is neither. Nabokov’s ideal reader is something resembling a butterfly collector, with an interest both empirical and