Navokov and Roth, or What a Love Lost Means.

Last week was I reading for the fourth or fifth time Philip Rothʼs Goodbye, Columbus novel of 1959. For some reason, for me this is the best Roth wrote. Something is quite powerful in that novel that I relate to another one, Vladimir Nabokovʼs Mashenka of 1926. I will try to explain myself why this is so.

   Mashenka is about a lost love, as it is Goodbye, Columbus, but in Nabokov the lost love is recalled by memory while in Roth it is told as it was happening in the present. There is more poetry in Nabokov, and more metaphysics (the shadows of us humans as a parallel of those shadows characters are in a movie), while there is more humour in Roth. What interests me is the outcome in both novels: in Roth, the protagonist has an epiphany at the end and sees the truth: that he wanted to marry for money and she used him for sex. This is the exact reverse of what happens among the sexes, according to Evolutionary Psychology (and according to experience all around the world). He was, from the start, a servant of her. The hunter hunted. Brenda used Neil during the summer vacations to have sex, to have fun, and also to disturb her mother, whom she hates. In the novel, Mrs Patimkin does not treat Brenda fairly. Some kind of jealousy stands between them for Mr Patimkinʼs love. Is Brenda feeling some kind of Elektraʼs syndrome? I would say so, according to the text. If that is so, Neil acts as a kind of Orestes. The Patinkim family is not destroyed at the end by him, but is quite shocked. Elektra-Brenda goes to university and will marry (very probably, according to that golden ring we see her wearing during the last meeting with Neil) his former boyfriend Ferrari in the future. The name makes him the very ideal of a husband for her. 

   In Nabokovʼs Mashenka the plot is built around the protagonist knowing that his former love Mashenka is going to reunite with his present boyfriend in the same hostel in Berlin where our protagonist is leaving soon. He waits for her to arrive and plots to get Mashenkaʼs boyfriend drunk in his farewell party. He goes to the train station to reunite with his Mashenka, but he does something quite surprising: he has an epiphany right there, waiting for her at the train station. He then realises that his Mashenka belongs to the past, that she is not the same Mashenka whom he will meet now. The past is past. And so he goes and takes a train away from Berlin and Mashenka. There is no recovering the past for him. The past is only recoverable in our memory, not in our lives. 

    I seem to like Mashenka more because of that decision above all. It is a novel that, for me, stands in a better situation than does Lolita. It is more manly, less feminine, bolder, and ends looking to the present and the future with high spirits. In Lolita we see a love lost and the past floods the present of a destroyed Humbert. In Mashenka we see a love lost in the past, and the present is open and bright. It makes me smile. And gives me more than Lolita in terms of philosophical (moral) truth. The past stands in the past, and the present is what you have to live. Enjoy it. Embrace it. Love the present, and do not look back.

  In Goodbye, Columbus the past is full of Brenda for Neil. He has loved a stronger (richer, more socially powerful) woman and has been used for sex and pleasure. He stands in a more feminine situation, less secure of himself, more chased by guilt and insecurity. A man womanized. Neil does not know who Brenda is, and Brenda does not care who Neil might be. She does not believe Neil will belong to her world after the summer. Neil is her valet. He is that penis which has sprung on her forehead, as Brenda says at her brotherʼs weeding right up before the end. The only way to benefit from the past is the Mashenka lesson: be bold, take your train, and move on. It reminds me of Spinoza: do not regret the past, as it weakens you, it weakens your happiness. What you did was what you were. Now, look to the present. See the present. Love the present and enjoy the past for what it is, there at its own time and place, forever inscribed in time. Eternal, as Santayana would say. Happiness as joyful contemplation. Do not try to chain joy, as William Blake said. Let it fly and be free as it was and is now in your mind. Take your train. Yes, I love Mashenka more than I love Goodbye, Columbus. But I enjoy them both immensely. 

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Nota Bene. Mashenka can be acquired here. Goodbye, Columbus here.