Vladimir Nabokov
DON QUIXOTE
"Real Life" and Fiction
We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for
so-called "real life" in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction
of facts with the facts of fiction. Ladies and gentlemen, the five
books I shall discuss are fairy tales.
Don Quixote
is a fairy tale, so is
Bleak House,
so is
Dead Souls. Madame Bovary
and
Anna Karenin
are
supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would
not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such
is not likely to fit the world of the reader. On the other hand, what is
this vaunted "real life ," what are these solid "facts"? One is suspi–
cious of them when one sees biologists stalking each other with
loaded genes, or battling historians locked in each other's arms as
they roll in the dust of centuries . Whether or not his newspaper and
a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called
"real life" of the so-called average man, one thing is fortunately cer–
tain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a
tissue of statistics.
The notion of" real life, " then, is based on a system of generali–
ties, and it is only as generalities that the so-called "facts" of so–
called "real life" are in contact with a work of fiction . The less gen–
eral a work of fiction is, then, the less recognizable it is in terms of
"real life." Or to put it the other way around, the more vivid and
new details in a work of fiction, then the more it departs from so–
called "real life," since "real life" is the generalized epithet, the
average emotion, the advertised multitude, the commonsensical
world. I am deliberately plunging at once into rather icy waters,
which is inevitable if one wishes to break the ice. There is no use,
therefore, looking in these books for detailed factual representation
of so-called "real life." On the other hand, between certain generali-
Excerpted from
Lectures on Don Quixote
by Vladimir Nabokov. Copyright
©
1983 by
The Estate of Vladimir Nabokov. To be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich ,
Inc.lBruccoli C lark.
