Repressive Reality and the Eternal Soul in Vladimir Nabokov
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Cook 1 And Then, He Folds His Patterned Rug: Repressive Reality and the Eternal Soul in Vladimir Nabokov A Thesis Submitted to The Faculty of the School of Communication In Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in English By Elizabeth Kaye Cook 1 April 2012 Cook 2 Liberty University School of Communication Master of Arts in English _______________________________________________________________________ Thesis Chair Date Dr. Emily Heady _______________________________________________________________________ First Reader Date Dr. Chene Heady _______________________________________________________________________ Second Reader Date Dr. Matthew Towles Cook 3 Table of Contents Introduction …………………………………………………………………………………… 4 Chapter One: The Loud Amusement Park Outside Your Window …………………………… 13 Chapter Two: An Accumulation of Brilliant Convolutions; Remote, But Perfect …………… 40 Chapter Three: Socrates Must Increase ……………………………………………………….. 71 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………………….. 96 Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………………… 98 Cook 4 Introduction: Ever since he skyrocketed to literary infamy with the publication of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov has stood as one of the most intriguing authorial figures of the postmodern era-- publishing prose, poetry, and non-fiction in English, Russian, and French, translating literature into multiple languages (his own work as well as others’, the most famous being his years-long labor over Pushkin’s Onegin), and conducting interviews (almost entirely through correspondence) in a manner both irascible and charming. Sadly, the charges against Lolita as pornography, and Nabokov’s audacity in giving Humbert Humbert such a slippery, poetically- appealing veneer, have overshadowed the theme of his entire oeuvre: how to reconcile horror and hope, when superficial reality offers both ineffable beauty and senseless cruelty. Nabokov’s oeuvre confounds and divides critics for much the same reason as the troublesome union of spirit and flesh divides men into philosophies and creeds. An eternal soul is housed in cell and bone without intrinsically being those things, but the soul is burdened when the body is burdened, and leaps when the body leaps—as John did in his mother’s womb. Similarly, Nabokov’s writing brews an ineffable mixture of grief and wonder, frivolity and burden; like men confronting the mysterious alchemy of life, critics read Nabokov’s characters, individuals living and moving in a mysterious texture of reality that is parallel to the critics’ own, and respond with pleasure or disgust—reacting as they would to the whole weave of human history. A fictional setting is not a “real” setting (no matter how closely Shade’s university resembles Cornell), but being submerged in the world of another, whether that person exists in reality or not, creates understanding, which, in its turn, creates pity and love. However, with his fierce humor and keen eye for the ridiculous, Nabokov frequently strikes his critics as being both cruel and impenetrable. But as Nabokov tells an interviewer, “I Cook 5 am actually quite a mild old man . .these are just gargoyles outside” (Strong Opinions 19). Instead of being an author who delights in his characters’ failures or the confusion of his readers, Nabokov is more like a magician, playing tricks with scarves and cards to provide the unexpected delight of a story cleverly and movingly told—here is truth, now, disappearing into his sleeve, but unexpectedly present again, only in your suit pocket. However, this playfulness should not be confused with flippancy. Nabokov’s interest is in finding redemption, or a pattern of meaning within the crudely ordered material world. Human dignity is no less dignified for searching, as Nabokov writes, for coincidences of pattern, or “asides of the spirit” while crashing to impending and obvious death on the cobblestone courtyard below (Lectures on Literature 374). Like Alice, or Don Quixote, both characters in an alien world, Nabokov and his characters search reality like strangers would search; honestly (thus, cruelly, to many minds), and earnestly, attempting to decipher some meaning from the inexplicable, or catch a glimpse of eternity’s hem. Nabokov is not cruel, but he does privilege the quest to slip beyond the limitations of selfhood and the temporal world over his readers’ ease of understanding. As the “witty, magical, and altogether wise Pierre Delalande” (an author of Nabokov’s own invention) writes, “I know (je connais) a few (quelques) readers who will jump up, ruffling their hair” (Invitation 8). In this thesis, I will investigate how Nabokov uncovers these patterns of meaning in three different books: Pale Fire (1962), Speak, Memory (1966), and Invitation to a Beheading (translated in 1959).1 To avoid offending Nabokov’s ghost and suffering his spook’s revenge 1 All three books were published later in Nabokov’s career (although Invitation was originally published serially in Russian, in 1935). While Lolita is Nabokov’s most famous and critically analyzed work, it does not suit my time frame, nor do I want such a vastly controversial work to overshadow the others in my argument. Lolita is a complex and beautiful work, and its themes suit the themes of my argument; however, to write lengthily about the book, without devoting extensive space to defend it from charges of cruelty, pornography, or even from being a purely Cook 6 until the day of my death, I will use narrative theory, rather than, say, psychoanalytic, as my critical frame for seeing how Nabokov plots transcendence and hope for an otherworld into his writing, however obliquely. Each of the books in this thesis represent a variation on how to constellate hope in the otherworld2 (being, as Vera wrote, her husband’s main concern). In each work, Nabokov attempts to bring the frail, absurd, and marginalized to healing, and a permanent place in the pattern of eternity. Each of the books I address in this thesis represent an artistic variation, or a new mode with which to experience Nabokov’s attempt to express hope in a place after the death--the otherworld--wherein all the frail, absurd, and marginalized characters are bound back into a pattern of eternity, like the frayed threads of an ornate rug. Nabokov’s desire to upend the traditional interpretation of time and space by denying the former’s existence and the latter’s relevance, in combination with his fierce determination to represent characters either evil, grotesque, or pathetically comic, suggests, not inscrutability for inscrutability’s sake, but his desire to untangle the complicated threads of existence. Instead of denying the snarled knots’ presence in the first place, he carefully tugs the plotlines until they come loose from the impenetrable mess of history. Being inscrutable and being concerned with the strange and complicated are far different; Nabokov sees the world as a work of art that has fallen to shambles, or been overwhelmed by the chimeras of generalized existence: death, time, and space. As he writes in Strong Opinions, Nabokov sees reality as a “very subjective affair” with endless false bottoms and unreachable layers (10). Being inscrutable and being concerned with the strange and complicated are far different. When Nabokov writes that reality requires amoral work, would be to privilege a controversy over my purpose: to reveal how Nabokov searches out patterns of transcendence, healing, and immortality in the absurdity of reality. 2 As his wife, Véra, stated after her husband’s death, her husband’s main literary theme was the search for potustoronnost. Cook 7 specialization, arguing that a lily becomes more real to a botanist, and even more real to a botanist specializing in lilies (Strong Opinions 10-11), his work reflects this: his novels are complicated works of artistry, and thus each work, by imitating and analyzing the intertwined nature of transcendence and tragedy, makes Nabokov more of an expert in the business of life. Imitating Visible Nature, the consummate artist, he is able to move deeper into the complicated layers of existence. As his mother said, the temporal world will seem unreal in comparison to the next; by investigating art, Nabokov becomes more of an expert, and the art that he believes makes meaning of the earthly world becomes more real to him. Like Shade, Nabokov can write his way to “some faint hope” (63). For most of his life, Nabokov was already well-acquainted with the complicated reality of transience, marginalization, and displacement. Similarly, marginalization and loss are substantially real to most of his characters; the danger of the plot often centers on whether or not the characters can become experts in the signs of eternity. In Nabokov’s own life, patterning eternity and meaning usually meant finding moments of delight, or the “coincidence of pattern” (Speak, Memory 157). Even in the midst of fleeing Russia, mourning the loss of his first love, and the death of his father and brother, or even later—as Nabokov fled the Nazis with his wife and child—he continued studying butterflies and writing literature with unflagging dedication. In both these realms, he found “coincidence of pattern” in literature and perfectly artistic mimicry in butterflies—two activities that were, in contrast to the movements that threatened him, devoid of any clear utilitarian merit, and also vastly anti-Darwinian. Although Nabokov frequently claimed separation from any political movements of established religious creeds (Strong Opinions 18), he believed the world was too artistically and purposefully arranged for Darwinian evolution to explain its beginning and continued existence. Cook 8 Because he sensed the presence of an artistic pattern that an as-yet incomplete plot behind human history, Nabokov believed in a creator (or creators) that, while distant and inscrutable to those on earth, wove existence into an intricate, artistic purpose. The cruel nature of his characters’ environments is only the medium in which Nabokov’s mysterious puzzle of meaning is set; once free from limited time and space, the reader finds either an answer to the world’s absurdity, or the promise that one is eventually forthcoming.