Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 81 Assoc. Prof. Griselda ABAZAJ 1 GOOD READERS AND GOOD WRITERS 2 Abstract This paper analyses the essay Good readers and good writers in the introduction of Lectures on Literature of the well-known writer Vladimir Nabokov, published in 1980. This book introduces us to Nabokov as a professor and as a good reader who gives his ideas on how someone should read literature. The essays collected in this book give an insight on the lectures Nabokov gave on European and Russian literature in America. However, my focus here is Nabokov s essay Good readers and good writers. I will elaborate on how his ideas on a good reader and a good writer reveal us a lot about his own way of writing literature and about the mystery of his literary structures. Nabokov s statements in Good readers and good writers become his artistic credo. Key words: readers, writers, lectures, literature, credo Vladimir Nabokov, the well-known writer of America, worked as a professor of European Literature at Wellesley College from 1941 to 1948. Later from 1948 to 1958 he was a professor of Russian Literature at Cornell University. His lectures were later published and turned into a book by Fredson Bowers, with the help of Nabokov s wife Vera. This collection titled Lectures on Literature provides us with insights on important writers and masterpieces but at the same time it reveals the artistic credo of a master like Vladimir Nabokov. My focus in this paper is the introductory essay of this collection written by Vladimir Nabokov which is titled Good readers and good writers. Vladimir Nabokov s ideas on what it takes to be a good reader or a good writer reveals a lot about his own aesthetics as well. In his essay Nabokov writes: 1 Department of Foreign Languages; Faculty of Education Aleksandër Moisiu University; e-mail: griselda_abazaj@yahoo.com 2 Paper presneted in 3 International Conference Foreign Languages in a Global World, Linguistics, Literature, Didactics Durres, June 2017
82 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 One evening at a remote provincial college through which I happened to be jogging on a protracted lecture tour, I suggested a little quiz - 10 definitions of a reader, and from these 10 the students had to choose four definitions that would combine to make a good reader. I have mislaid the list, but as far as I remember the definitions went something like this. Select four answers to the question what should a reader be to be a good reader: 1. The reader should belong to a book club. 2. The reader should identify himself or herself with the hero or heroine. 3. The reader should concentrate on the social-economic angle. 4. The reader should prefer a story with action and dialogue to one with none 5. The reader should have seen the book in a movie. 6. The reader should be a budding author. 7. The reader should have an imagination. 8. The reader should have a memory. 9. The reader should have a dictionary. 10. The reader should have some artistic sense. The students leaned heavily on emotional identification, action, and the social-economic or historical angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good reader is one who has imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense--which sense I propose to develop in myself and in others whenever I have the chance.if one begins with a readymade generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it. Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie. (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:2-3) Nabokov choses four of them. Fiction functions due to imagination. Memory on the other hand is important because a reader should rememberpreviously mentioned details or events on other pages in order to analyze a literary work. The dictionary,on the other hand, is important because in order to analyze a text one should understand its meaning.the artistic sense is important as well because in order to analyze and criticize a literary work one should have gone through the experience of reading many times because only in this way he develops the socalled literary competence and as therefore he also experiences artistic illumination.nabokov as a lepidopterist made precise observation on butterflies and he expected the ideal reader as someone who could use an impersonal imagination to experience what he called the artistic delight. The most important thing for Nabokov is the fact that in order to be a good reader one must pay attention to the details. One should improve himself and
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 83 read slowly and understand every word in fiction. The reader must be a chaser and find meaning in every image created while reading because no word written by a good writer should be taken for granted; it has a purpose. One should look at the world of a novel as if it was separate from the world we live inbecause primarily fiction is fiction and it creates a world of its own.a good reader should not prejudice a novel based on his experience of life. Before analyzing a novel, before giving our opinion, we should first read it and most important reread and reread it. Nabokov insisted that aa good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is always a rereader. (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:3). Nabokov invites the reader to have an open mind when he starts to read a novel. We should imaginatively divide the fictive world of the novel from the real world in order not to bring our preconceptions to it.great writers don t simply copy the world around them but they rather recreate it based on their experience. A good reader should not identify himself with the characters in a book otherwise the reader deviates for the path the good writer has provided for him by being misled. The world of a novel has no obvious connection with the worlds we already know (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:1) Nabokov later in the essay pays attention to the element of time which is important in reading, making a case for the value of rereading (Popova, 2013): Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book. (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:3-4).
84 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 Nabokov accepts the fact that he may even contradict himself sometimes and this adds to the idea that he plays chess with his reader and that things are not always clearly cut. The art of writing should imply the art of seeing the world as the potentiality of fiction. The material of this world may be real enough (as far as reality goes but does not exists at all as an accepted entirety: it is chaos, and to this chaos the author says go! allowing the world to flicker and to fuse. It is now recombined in its very atoms, not merely in its visible and superficial parts. The writer is the first man to mop it and to form the natural objects it contains. Those berries are edible. ( ) (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:2) Nabokov makes us believe that in fictioneverything can happen as the writer is the its God. Only he has the power to govern it. Nabokov focuses on imagination in his essay. He makes a distinction between the reader that only looks for the projection of himselfin a novel and the reader who identifies himself with a character in the book and this is the worst thing a reader can do. Nabokov warns us against what he calls emotional reading. There are events in a novel which make the reader think about his own experience or there are cases where the reader identifies himself with a character in a novel. This does not mean that we should not use imagination while reading a novel but the reader must know when and where to curb his imagination (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:4). Nabokov writes about the birth of literature. Literature was born on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him. (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:5).And the most important declaration in which Nabokov gives us a hint of the merging of a novel s world and our world is: Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism, is the art of literature. (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:5). He makes us understand that a novel is about discovering surprises and reinventing reality. Surely, this is only theory as he is talking to his students but there is evidence in his corpus that proves that Nabokov himself has influences of other previous well-known writers in his literary works. We can recall in this case Bloom s The Agony of Influence which means that the great writers owe a lot to great writers that came before them because they can not escape the experience created in their minds while reading them, and in a way or in another they imitate them and at the same time reinvent them, because based on the experience created, they try to bring forth new forms of writing. In conclusion, we may say that Nabokov carefully describes in Good readers and good writers the traits that make up a good reader and a good
Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 85 writer. The latter is the one who invents new worlds in fiction without being based on our world. Nabokov believes that the most crucial role of a writer is that of an enchanter and that a God who rules and is in control of the world he creates. Nabokov believed that there exist three types of writers: storytellers, teachers, and enchanters; Nabokov s favorite writer is the one who combines these but nevertheless it is the enchanter in him that predominates, and makes him a major writer (Bowers, Nabokov 1982:5) A good reader is one who frees himself out of every prejudice when he starts to read a book and one who maintains this status throughout the reading. This kind of reading will serve to this reader because it will bring him artistic enchantment by staying detached from personal feelings and at the same time experience aesthetic pleasure.
86 Interdisiplinary Journal of Research and Development, Vol. 4, no. 4, 2017 Bibliography: 1. Fredson Bowers, Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature, Harvest Edition, 1982 2. Maria Popova, Vladimir Nabokov, on what makes a good readerhttps://www. brainpickings.org/2013/01/21/nabokov-on-what-makes-a-good-reader/ 3. Joseph Frank, Ed.VladimirAleksandrov, Lectures on literature, The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, Garland Publishing Inc., New York and London, 1995 4. Ellen Pifer, Nabokov and the Novel, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980 5. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, New York: Harcourt, 1955