"A Literary Dinner"

"A Literary Dinner" (152) is, as a whole, a sort of commentary. It opens with an invitation from a certain Dr. James's wife to the narrator to eat her husband. Knowing Nabokov's habit of creating puzzles in his writing, one can immediately make astute observations: the doctor is an educated, well-traveled man--the narrator finds this out when he "consumes" the doctor and relives his travels ("I ate--and in Egypt the sunsets were swell;/ The Russians were doing remarkably well"). It appears, though, that the doctor has trouble remembering who he met on these travels, and a few lines later, the narrator clues us in that "[the wife's] hobby was People, [the doctor's] hobby was Life," suggesting that the doctor's wife was more well-versed in social manners, while the doctor was best at observing the physical setting. The brain is said to be "nut-flavored" and "crisp," suggesting the narrator enjoys eating it; this organ, of course, is the one which has processed the bulk of the doctor's travels and is likely flavored very well with culture, figuratively speaking. The heart, however, "resembled a shiny brown date"--that is, it looks like a big raisin. This suggests that the heart has not been properly prepared and has simply shriveled up. The narrator does not seem to eat the heart, and he "stowed all the studs on the edge of [his] plate"--suggesting that there are other hard or metal components of the doctor's body which he does not eat.

The poorly prepared heart could suggest several things--that the doctor did not utilize it properly during his waking life; that it was overworked but not sincerely; that doctors simply do not possess the sort of passion that could properly "cook" a heart; what Nabokov means by this metaphor is not entirely clear, but the suggestion that the brain is well-used and the heart is not is there.

What strikes me as Nabokovian of this poem is the characters' focus on aesthetics and appearances--the doctor has read the "great book of the week," has travelled to many places and seems to appear "cultured"; the wife, in turn, is trying to preserve good manners while asking the narrator to devour her husband ("her face making room/for one of those pink introductory smiles"). As far as Lolita goes, this preservation and pumping up of image reflects, for me, the preoccupation with proper behavior in Charlotte, as well as Humbert's failure to maintain his image as a father figure. The (presumably) American preoccupation with being "cultured" and "European" (or just "eastern" in general) reminds me of the American fascination with Humbert as a foreigner in Lolita, as well. Finally, there is a blanketing feeling of needing to see through the obscenity and (in the poem's case) unreality of pseudo-cannibalism to discover the deeper commentary in the poetry--while in Lolita the reader must see through the tale of a child molester to garner any further understanding of the text as a piece of literature.