Survey of American Literature

Handout Eleven

R. Bontil

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977)

Main Works: The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, 1941; Bend Sinister, 1947; Pnin, 1953; Lolita, 1955; Pale Fire, 1962; Speak, Memory!, 1967; Ada or Ardor: A family Chronicle, 1969; Transparent Things, 1972; Look at the Harlequins!, 1974.
If we look for literary works of art demonstrating the change from a modernist view of art and reality to a postmodernist one, there is hardly a writer who has provided better examples than Vladimir Nabokov. Although concrete fictions through and through, his novels quite clearly imply philosophical positions with a much wider claim and thus are perfectly suited for a discussion of the modernist versus postmodernist query. Thus The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) both affirms and parodies the modernist search for a true rendering of subjective reality, and Bend Sinister (1947) unmistakably demonstrates that the world of art is a better world. In Lolita (1955), the representation of reality becomes problematic both through subjective distortion and competing genre frames, and while this continues in Pale Fire (1953), here the epistemological scepticism for the first time turns ontological in the equation of a game of worlds with a game of words. In Ada (1969), we then have reached the joyous affirmation of the free play of the world in a clearly postmodern way (including the artistic upgrading of science-fiction conventions), in Transparent Things (1972), the demonstration of the constructedness of narrated reality, and in Look at the Harlequins! (1974), a parody of the return of the autobiographical writing that inevitably becomes self-parody. The fiction of V Nabokov has confounded those literary critics who would place his writing conveniently in one or other literary theory and current. By education and training, Nabokov was a formalist; that is, he was accustomed to making informed public comments on his novels in terms of explication de texte. Thus, an examination of his critical pronouncement would present him as a close reader. However, his statements of preference in authors, often reflected a taste for preModernist writers of the decidedly Romanticist type. To further complicate things, Nabokovs novels may be viewed as being modernist in terms of Nabokovs emphasis on authorial conceptualization and control and his concern for the accurate and correct reading of his works; and postmodernist in terms of his generic innovations, his use of parody to usurp the conventions of traditional forms, and his playful conception of himself as an authorial fiction. We consider that the key to understanding the Real Life of Vladimir Nabokov lies in his goal of transcending time and history. By conceiving of himself as a unique author who assimilated Russian, French, English, German and American influences and intellectual traditions, he was able to reflect a multitude of perspectives within his writing. More importantly, his efforts to circle back and translate his earlier work in Russian into English as the later work of an American writer, point toward a movement beyond postmodernism. Nabokovs power of imagination and capacity of evolving serial selves in his writing brings to mind the problem of intention as debated among traditional hermeneutics supported by intentionalists like Hirsh and Juhl and text-based interpretation associated with the New Criticism and Gadamerian hermeneutics. In Nabokovs case, it means that records of his intentions to be found in Introductions, Afterwords, Interviews, Essays, will have to be supplemented and elaborated by the critic, by developing and applying intention to the text concerned. It a truism already that in Nabokovs novels we can detect that involuted voice the anthropomorphic deity impersonated by me, as the structuring of his novels largely depends on the strategy of involution: the creator/ author is almost always behind or above his handicraft, as against the authorial voice who appears again and again in his novels. Still, Nabokovs novels seem to partake of something more than the involuted voice; there is an obvious relationship between selfknowledge and artistic creation, self-parody and identity that is revealed throughout his work. We can learn a lot from the way Nabokov describes his own life: A colored spiral in a small ball of glass, this is how I see my own life. The twenty years I spent in my native Russia (1899-1919) take care of the thetic arc. Twenty-one years of voluntary exile in England, Germany, and France (19191940) supply the obvious antithesis. The period spent in my adopted country (1940-1960) forms a synthesis and a new thesis. What followed was a not quite twenty-year period (1961-1977) in residence at the Palace Motel in Montreux, Switzerland. Each of these four periods is almost a separate, unique life, with its own feeling, tone and pace, linked together with a unifying consciousness, constantly making ornaments of accidents and possibilities. We consider that the factual and imaginative basis of Nabokovs work is exile, as he gives his own exile and memories to his main characters. The central characters of five of his English novels are migrs: Van and Ada of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Humbert Humbert of Lolita, Kinbote of Pale Fire, Pnin of Pnin, Sebastian and V of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Some escape the new regime through exile (Van, Kinbote, Pnin, Sebastian, V), others through mental displacement (Adam Krug, Hugh Person). The majority of Nabokovs characters share a common youth in old Russia, which confers special status to this place and the agents of growth: the parents and usually a woman. Hence, Russia and women intermingle in the characters memory: Pnin and Mira; Armande and Hugh; etc. Moreover, these characters see reflections of their Russian youth in the countries of their exile. 1

Survey of American Literature Handout Eleven R. Bontil We may even argue that there is a direct relation between the condition of exile and the development of narrative forms in Vladimir Nabokovs novels. Consequently, in such novels as The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Pnin, Ada; Pale Fire, we witness how the ruptures which exile produces, between past and present and between self and cultural other, increasingly interfere with the ability of narrative to achieve wholeness or a satisfying close. Time and change are more and more seen as a meaningless temptation to take refuge in fixed images of the past growth. The activities of reading and interpretation are mocked by the texts. And the self is increasingly isolated from Otherness; frustration dominates the erotics of the novels. All this is achieved through tropes of division: divided self, divided narration, divided narrative, and divided thematics. We also consider that the self-translated text is another instance of reinforcing the authorial presence within the world of representation, with several strong rhetorical implications on different levels. First, on the personal level of the writer, the reader will understand that the bilingual author does address issues of identification for he has attachments to more than one language and culture and possesses a seemingly contradictory status as both member of a given society and as foreigner. Second, the bilingual author produces a double text, each text being intended for a different audience and may be said to reflect the authors relation to that audience. Third, the act of self-translation acquires within the cohesion of the text, the most vivid physical manifestation of the iconic principle of language, i.e., entering the fictional world through the experience of reading/ re-reading/ self-translated text. Why, he has known enough of that here. Disgust, indeed! Elation, delight, a quickening of the imagination, a disinfection of the mind, togliwn ochnat divodiv (the daily surprise of awakening)!(Bend Sinister, p.35) No, said Krug. No. I am not up to it (ne do tovo) (Bend Sinister, p. 84) Thus, the experience of double-reading represents a strong factor of cohesion of the text, running counter the usual effect parentheses produce anti-mnemonic through dislocation from the context but it also gives emphasis or emotive heightening to the repeated meaning. The self-translated text provides a locus through which to perceive the intersection of literature, language, culture and identity. Nabokovs magical work is inseparable from its humour, as is the magic wand from a magician. His whole work seems to postulate that laughter is something let loose in our world that bespeaks a much richer but inarticulate truth about things than our little understandings can have within this world. The explanation Brian Boyd offers for this tremendous prodigy of humour in Nabokov (from the pun, the allusion and the real-life referent to character, situation and structure) is he wants to wean us from the habitual, he wants us to see the surprise everywhere in our world.(1997, p.38) This is also consonant with Nabokovs belief that his work has no moral in toe, that satire is a lesson, parody is a game and he admits to parody. This is so because his innermost belief is that games get closer to truth than lessons: that the surprise of the game or the imagination is more revealing than the strict sequence of the lesson or of logic. We are certainly in a predicament about ascribing a nation to this author and this is not out of false reverence but due to his spontaneous internationalism which keeps him from aligning with any country, past or present tradition. And all my Russian readers know that my old worlds Russian, British, German, French are just as fantastic and personal as my new one is. (On a Book Entitled Lolita: 315) Nonetheless, although Nabokov belongs to no tradition or country, his memory is rooted in his beloved pre-Revolutionary Russia, very much like his characters and narrators in all his books are fueled by memory, not only by reminiscences of experience, person, and place, but also by their close alignment to the literary past. In Nabokovs case, the antecedent literature of the great canonical writers of the past challenges his creativity. Unlike Harold Blooms obsession with the anxiety of influence, Nabokov honestly believes that originality emerges freely, not anxiously, from the stylization of the past, from a critique of, and reference to predecessors. Thus, Nabokovs whole work breathes the majestic air of the great Russians Gogol, Puskin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky as well as the Europeans he insightfully lectured on, first at Wellesley College and later, until the blessed success of Lolita (1958), at Cornell University Dante, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Wordsworth, Byron, Chateaubriand, Flaubert, Carroll, Proust, and Joyce. The authors constant effort to keep his reader in a referential tumult is the most noteworthy quality of his dazzling discourse, and the mark of his calculated inventiveness. His obstinate search for an aesthetically original product leads him to explosive possibilities within genres, forms, and thinking patterns. So, it is no wonder that such heavily allusive novels as his English novels invite work of the type that Carl Proffers Keys to Lolita, or Alfred Appel Jr.s much admired and discussed The Annotated Lolita (1970), or Charles Nicols Annotations and Queries, or Brian Boyds Annotations to Ada in The Nabokovian, deliver. When referring to Pale Fire (1962), Elizabeth Dipple says in her inciting study, The Unresolvable Plot (1988): Nabokov makes a point about the provenance of fiction in general, for it feeds on poetry, on academic tasks, on history, on the past, and on neurosis, and from this congeries comes an accomplished text. In the process of making this text, there are many twistings and perversions of other texts, and just as Shades poem is perverted to create Kinbotes story, so Nabokov suggests all readings of any text will be. To be a critic is to pervert; to be an artist is to excel at perversions. This is certainly true for all novels by Nabokov, since all of Nabokovs fictional places are lands of reflections that cannot be recovered accurately or unironically. They can only be reproduced parodically, within the solipsistic minds and hearts of over self-conscious, postmodern creations as: V in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Adam Krug in Bend Sinister (1947); Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), Kinbote in Pale Fire (1962), Van and Ada in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), Hugh Person in Transparent Things (1972) and the autobiographical narrator in Look at the Harlequins! (1974). Due to such qualities as reflexiveness, narrative mobility, and view of art as both enchantment and deception, Nabokov ranks with those romantic ironists who most successfully blend the lyric-romantic and parodic-romantic. For instance, irony in the much-anthologized beginning of Lolita, mocks the romantic impulse, romantic archetypes and the 2

Survey of American Literature romantic legacy while, paradoxically, investing these with new life.

Handout Eleven

R. Bontil

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. (Lolita: 3) Thus, Jean-Jacques Humberts tangle of thorns will be finally borne by the reader who will take pain in understanding Humbert Humberts proleptic tactic of defence which is at times based on the structural figure of displacement and incongruity. At its best, incongruity stems from the application of romantic rhetoric to circumstances alien to the concept, thus problematizing the relation between word and thing. Humberts problem is to defend his romanticism in a de-idealizing, debunking, demythologizing time says Th. R. Frosch (1982). The difficulty and brilliance of the novel comes from variation on two literary conventions: (1) the seductive effect of first-person narrative voice; (2) the compelling plot and theme convention of romantic love, endorsed by Humbert, and parodied by Nabokov. Humbert Humbert as first-person narrator begins by parodying his own role as antihero, undercutting the readers predictably valid responses. His style is both outrageously lyrical and outrageously jokey as he plays on the whole literary history of dubious antiheroes and duplicitous first person protagonists from the dual protagonist of Diderots Le Neveu de Rameau through Dostoevskys versions. The readers response is built into the narrative: Humbert mock apologizes for his fancy prose style, excusing his self-consciousness by noting I am writing under observation. Within the narrative, this is literal the whole of the novel is represented as Humberts retroactive account written in a cell with an observation window in a psychiatric ward of a prison. And figuratively, Humberts consciousness of being under the readers observation as well. The verbal conflation (psycho/the/rapist) is meant to suggest an underlying identity. The character adopts the moral convention of our age of suspicion (in Nathalie Sarrautes designation): that since corruption and duplicity are universal, the person who shamelessly confesses to the worst has a moral edge. Paranomasia is a plague with Nabokov, a contagious sickness in the world of words; stylistic distortions (e.g. endless word puzzles ranging from the more obvious cryptograms that Humbert deciphers in his cross-country pursuit of the chimerical Quilty, to the more subtle plays-upon words like Quiltys name a homophonic pun, this time Quil ty what a tongue twister. Nabokovs discourse is to a great extent parodic, because it represents a contestation of language(s) rather than a representation of reality. In Lolita the author parodies the Freudian case history; the hero as crucified victim; the borrowing of Poes poem Annabel Lee by Humbert for the substance and language of the passage in which he explains the origin of his nympholepsy, his first love, Annabel Lee. Humbert also borrows a few facts from Poes life to flesh out his own (i.e., both lost their mothers at the age of three) and the greatest joke of all is Humberts inversion of Poes sexual problem in his obsession with Lolita. Humbert mimics a number of famous authors in the course of his narrative, from Shakespeare to Flaubert. Lolita is all language: I only write like this, you know, / since I stopped sinning years ago (Pushkin, Eugen Onegin) It is a novel pretending to be a memoir with a foreword, full of reproduced or simulated texts: letters, poems, a class list, pages from magazines and reference books, shop signs, road signs, motel signs, excerpts from motel registers, fragments of a diary. We can rightly assert that Humbert is an exile, a self-made exile; a man who stands outside life without hope of reentry. His only redemption, as he so clearly perceives, is through ART, and quite consciously, in the telling of his tale, in the choice of his language and the selection of metaphors, he perverts the sordid relationship with Lolita and transforms her life and his into ART. Nabokov, even more than Humbert, is definitely writing under observation (Lolita p. 10) He feels being observed not so much by the readers or critics indiscreet, and only at times, competent eye, but mostly by the eye of the literary past, which sits in judgment over his creation. Thus, any work on Nabokovs encounter with literary tradition is doomed to remain incomplete. We can only be flattered when allowed to, of frustrated, -when excluded from, the great game of literary allusions his work proposes. We must also correctly understand Nabokovs declared anti-Freudianism in the context of his hatred for allegory and symbolism in general. Thomas Frosch (1982), when addressing the problem of allegory in Nabokovs work, says: Nabokov tries to create structures that defy interpretation and transcend the readers allegorism, Freudian or otherwise; like Mallarme, he dreams of literature that will be allegorical of itself.