In another story, "The Fight," this frisson is spelled out quite bluntly, almost as if he is somewhat defiantly taking his artist's stance. In this story, the narrator observes a delicate young girl who watches helplessly while her father brutally beats her lover in a pointless fight. The girl collapses in tears and the narrator sensually imbibes her grief, kissing her bowed head and then departing with the grandiosity of a self-appointed angel. There is an indirect arrogance in the way Nabokov describes these aloof caresses and that tint of arrogance at its worst can make his work seem superficial. But much stronger, and deeper, is the expanded view at the end that respects the girl's sorrow but does not force us to attach to it, that does not stay stuck in a limited idea of compassion:
I neither know nor wish to know who was wrong and who was right in this affair. The story could have been given a different twist, and made to depict compassionately how a girl's happiness had been mortified for the sake of a copper coin, how Emma spent the whole night crying, and how, after falling asleep toward morning, she saw again, in her dreams, the frenzied face of her father as he pummeled her lover. Or perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled on this particular day, at this particular moment, in a unique and inimitable way.
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