
I Too Dislike It
Vladimir Nabokov saw the beginnings of literature in a familiar idiom. He imagined a boy “running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels.” The child was shouting, reasonably and referentially enough, “Wolf, wolf.” But this alone was not literature. “Literature was born,” Nabokov says, “on the day when a boy came crying wolf, wolf and there was no wolf behind him.”
So literature is a kind of lying? Well, yes, among other things. The ideal definition was offered early in the game, long before the word literature was used by anyone. The formulation is so sly and full of