After an execrable showing — one entry these past two months — we’re getting our sea legs once again. The title above refers to a question I was asked just yesterday by a young reader: “ . . . themes in one or more of your adventure stories appear reminiscent of scenic and/or structural elements in the Star Wars films; are you an appreciator?”

I responded that, yes, I am, though I can profess familiarity with only the best of the films, by which I mean the first three, beginning in 1977, when I was twenty-one, with “Episode IV: A New Hope.” I must have seen that movie, oh, three or four times while it was still in the theaters. From the parking lot afterwards, my Plymouth dipped on its squishy tires not unlike the Millennian Falcon, at least until the first traffic light. But the title resonates with any old number of things we envision for the coming year; thus, a new hope on many fronts.

I read a nifty bit in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature that I want to share. It’s in his introduction to discussion of Bleak House, which comes in the book as it must have come in his lecture sequence, just after his analysis of Mansfield Park, about whose author he has just admitted, “I am sure that some readers have a better ear for Miss Austen than I have.” He is much more in his element with Dickens. “In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.”

This is not the quote I want to share, but it’s probably good to pause here and reflect for a moment on the writer’s approach to literature, because it is very much summed up in the structural imagery he gives us. There is a physical delight, a geographical reality to the joy, that great literature gives us. There is the comfort of our haunches remaining in the chairs about the table where Mr. Dickens sits, telling us his story. Nabokov famously dismissed “great ideas” from his analysis of great novels. Ideas come and go, are timebound, anachronistic, ephemeral, inelegantly voiced by even the best artist. What remains when you take the nonsense away is the artistry of structure, the structure of artistry. And that is a physiological truth, as he explains in the bit I do want to share.

“All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.”

We often approach Nabokov, and certainly we do as students when we first are introduced to him, as cryptographers, bloodlessly connecting the dots of his plots and characters in order to “understand” the text. This was his game, to craft a surface shiny and exotic, a well-built box, which all too often as students we might decide was all there was to be discovered. He was a master at that. And may have been as cold a man himself as a box would be, though a box resounding with great humor.

But here, in his appreciation of writers’ masterworks, he folds himself into a burnished chair at the old table. He listens, objects, stares, laughs, and passes the port, hour upon hour, as his spine