We Had to Burn Laura to Save Her

Sonny wants to burn Nabokov’s last book. When it comes to trashing great artists’ final achievements, I’m usually opposed on principle, even if it means permitting their heirs to cash in. But from what I’ve gathered about The Original of Laura — a book that appears to revisit Lolita in the dizzying, reality-mashing manner we’ve come to associate with Eco, Borges, and Lynch — the need to burn this book may have less to do with appeasing Nabokov’s ghost than cauterizing a cancerous growth on the Western mind that needs to be flash-sealed once and for all. We need to get over modern psychology. We need to re-become the sort of people for whom typical modern psychological problems do not occur, and, thus, people for whom a book such as Laura appears to be no longer holds much interest. We need to become bored with trips down the rabbit hole. We need to think of them more as contemptuously useless and dangerously distracting wank jobs, and less as engrossing glimpses into the minds of the modern geniuses who penetrated down to the abyss swirling at the heart of human existence.

Or so one could argue, anyway, and I’d like to hear that argument made without the anti-intellectual qualities it (and arguments like it) often carry. That argument, in fact, has a coup de grace waiting for it, waiting for someone to come along, take notice, and hoist it aloft: perhaps Nabokov realized he had plunged so deep into the rabbit hole that he discovered the horribly true meaning of a total waste of time? Perhaps The Original of Laura is a premonition of The Navidson Record, the story-within-a-story in House of Leaves that revealed the terrible infinity awaiting those who insist on adventuring into chasms. Perhaps The Original of Laura was a labyrinth Nabokov realized, once he was at its center, he did not want to have constructed at all. Perhaps he realized that he had constructed a labyrinth without a center, that he was the minotaur roaming the corridors, a creature which, after all, is only a myth. Maybe, for us, burning The Original of Laura is healing a chasm, closing a door — making true originality possible again. Maybe the only way to ensure Laura’s originality is to deny ourselves the knowledge of Nabokov’s iterations of her. How many copies should there be, after all, of a book about copies?

As one of Andrew Sullivan’s astute readers has noted, Nabokov has already shown what wound up being a touch of clairvoyance with Pale Fire. For his editorial son, and for the critical us, The Original of Laura would already at least be a pale copy of Pale Fire. Lolita, too, would be xeroxed into near-oblivion, or, if you like the reverse metaphor better, effaced beneath solid black pages of text upon text upon text. Inevitably, so would Laura, whoever ‘she’ is, and so would Nabokov, and, the longer we keep at this kind of routine, so would we.