Pynch:
Are you familiar with the
Paris Review Interview Series? Because we had four volumes' worth of interviews with writers in the house, I grew up reading them. If you don't know it already, I thought you might enjoy this low-key and charitable assessment of Joyce from an interview with Nabokov.
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Source)
Quote:
INTERVIEWER
As an admirer of Borges and Joyce you seem to share their pleasure in teasing the reader with tricks and puns and puzzles. What do you think the relationship should be between reader and author?
NABOKOV
I do not recollect any puns in Borges, but then I read him only in translation. Anyway, his delicate little tales and miniature Minotaurs have nothing in common with Joyce's great machines. Nor do I find many puzzles in that most lucid of novels, Ulysses. On the other hand, I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy, too easy, allegory.
INTERVIEWER
What have you learned from Joyce?
NABOKOV
Nothing.
INTERVIEWER
Oh, come.
NABOKOV
James Joyce has not influenced me in any manner whatsoever! My first brief contact with Ulysses was around 1920 at Cambridge University, when a friend, Peter Mrozovski, who had brought a copy from Paris, chanced to read to me, as he stomped up and down my digs, one or two spicy passages from Molly's monologue, which, entre nous soit dit, is the weakest chapter in the book. Only fifteen years later, when I was already well formed as a writer and reluctant to learn or unlearn anything, I read Ulysses and liked it enormously. I am indifferent to Finnegans Wake as I am to all regional literature written in dialect—even if it be the dialect of genius.
INTERVIEWER
Aren't you doing a book about James Joyce?
NABOKOV
But not only about him! What I intend to do is publish a number of twenty-page essays on several works—Ulysses, Madame Bovary, Kafka's Transformation, Don Quixote, and others—all based on my Cornell and Harvard lectures. I remember with delight tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.
INTERVIEWER
Gogol?
NABOKOV
I was careful not to learn anything from him. As a teacher, he is dubious and dangerous. . . .
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And then Nabokov goes on to praise
H. G. Wells.