Nabokovilia: Jenny Offill's "Dept. of Speculation"
I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.Quote spotted in these two James Woods New Yorker pieces:
Freud as a Fictional Character
I am quoting La Force about to quote Woods paraphrasing Nabokov:
As James Wood writes in his book How Fiction Works:
Nabokov used to say that he pushed his characters around like serfs or chess pieces—he had no time for metaphorical ignorance and impotence whereby authors like to say, “I don’t know what happened, by my character just got away from same and did his own thing.”
I have to suspect that even Nabokov would have had a hard time pushing Freud around.
(The rest at "Bossing Freud Around: Freud as a Fictional Character.")