(It's better to create than destroy what's unnecessary)

Friday, October 19, 2007

Nabokov on Joyce and Proust

Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), pg. 217:

One essential difference exists between the Proustian and the Joycean methods of approaching their characters. Joyce takes a complete and absolute character, od-known, Joyce-known, then breaks it up into fragments and scatters these fragments over the space-time of his book. The good rereader gathers these puzzle pieces and gradually puts them together. On the other hand, Proust contends that a character, a personality, is never known as an absolute but always as a comparative one. He does not chip it up but shows it as it exists through the notions about it of other characters. And he hopes, after having given a series of these prisms and shadows, to combine them into an artistic reality.

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