“And so the password is-?”: Nabokov and the ethics of rereading

Abstract

Whalen argues that the necessity to reread Nabokov’s stories and novels is built into their narrative texture. The act of rereading uncovers and develops his empathic, ethical notion that beauty plus pity defines art. Yet despite Nabokov’s own well-documented statements regarding the importance of morality in art and the relationship of esthetics to ethics, and several critics having ventured beyond involution and reflexivity to explore issues of consciousness, morality, and metaphysics in his work, the misreading persists that Nabokov’s “fiction was neither moral, social, nor psychological but a sensuous exercise in style” (Morris Dickstein). By ranging over Nabokov’s oeuvre and providing close readings of selected passages, this chapter argues that attentive rereading, remembering, and reimagining can lead to compassion for both the animate and inanimate.