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Nabokov: the Artist Against Caprice

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Nabokov: the Artist Against Caprice INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photo­ graph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the original text directly from the copy submitted. Thus, some dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from a computer printer. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyrighted material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are re­ produced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each oversize page is available as one exposure on a standard 35 mm slide or as a 17" x 23" black and white photographic print for an additional charge. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. 35 mm slides or 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. illAccessing the UMIWorld's Information since 1938 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA Order Number 88X6357 Nabokov: The artist against caprice Parker, Mary Elizabeth, Ph.D. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 1987 Copyright ©1987 by Parker, Mary Elizabeth. All rights reserved. U MI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 NABOKOV: THE ARTIST AGAINST CAPRICE by Mary Elizabeth Parker A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Greensboro 1987 Approved by Dissertation Advisor APPROVAL PAGE This dissertation has been approved by the following committee of the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Dissertation Adviser '"| f • ^ » Committee Members 6~ Date of Acceptance by Committee /2- /ftj Date of Final Oral Examination 11 ^c^198? by Mary Elizabeth Parker PARKER, MARY ELIZABETH, Ph.D. Nabokov: The Artist Against Caprice. (1987) Directed by Dr. Keith Cushman. 233 pp. This study examines the use of detachment in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov', a detachment that has earned Nabokov an undeserved reputation as an aesthete interested only in manipulating his characters within intriguing artistic patterns. I attempt to show that Nabokov's detachment is a device for provoking both his protagonists and his readers into shedding their complacency and assuming a perceptive1, engaged stance toward the world. His detachment imitates1, and thereby exposes', a power I call Caprice1, a whimsically destructive force at large in the world, as inexorable as the Fates1, yet never as predictable. Nabokov's weaker characters cannot decipher Caprice's patterns, and they become alienated ciphers, lost in madness or drifting on the periphery of life. His artist heroes, though-, are strong enough to insistently carve out their own moral niches within the chaos of an amoral world. The Nabokovian hero's artistic sense is grounded in a continual awareness of the beauties as well as the horrors of the phenomenal world; and he uses his imagination to highlight these beauties and transform the horrors. He controls the imaginative constructs with which he reshapes bis world. Much of my argument is an appreciation of, as well 23 a warning against', the seductions of Humbert Humbert, Nabokov's most compelling artist. I trace Nabokovian artists through four early plays and several novels, showing how the artist's moral and aesthetic sense is shaped by political exile and its relationship to emotional exile; and by emotional exile and its relationship to the traditional Romantic response. Finally, I show how "strange-making" details nestled within the mundane allow horror and sadness to insinuate themselves into the reader's consciousness even as he laughs at another of Caprice's tricks. The power of Nabokov's detachment lies in its paradoxical insistence upon an emotional response. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I could not have completed this work without the continued advice and encouragement of Dr. Keith Cushman, my dissertation adviser, and the help of Drs. Charles Davis, Walter Beale, Randolph Bulgin, and Joachim Baer, the members of my advisory committee. I would also like to thank Donald and Lynn Freeman, for the countless hours of practical and moral support they have given me. And I want to thank my brother, Thomas Parker. Without these last three, even the good advice of Dr. Cushman and my committee would not have sustained me. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page APPROVAL PAGE ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii CHAPTER I. THE DETACHED ARTIST: DISARMING CAPRICE. ... 1 II. TRANSCENDING POLITICS: RECLAIMING THE PAST IN IMAGERY 42 III. THEATRICALITY AND IMPERMANENCE: THE EXILE'S LIFE 73 IV. POSHLOST AND THE GROTESQUE: THE ART OF "MAKING STRANGE" 124 V. FRAGMENTATION: HUMBERT, THE FAILED ROMANTIC 176 CONCLUSION: THE EXISTENTIAL ARTIST: OBJECT AS ICON . 217 BIBLIOGRAPHY 228 iv 1 CHAPTER I THE DETACHED ARTIST: DISARMING CAPRICE Vladimir Nabokov's novels can make a reader uncomfortable, because his version of everyday reality has a habit of shading into illusion, which then becomes the new reality^ Yet both the original and the new realities may be suspect, because both have been created by a narrator whose foundation is not necessarily the reader's terra firma. Nabokov wrenches the reader from the tethers of his own world and forces him to dangle over a narrative landscape in which there are crevices between the painstakingly plotted pieces. These crevices are frightening, since they may become crevasses in an instant. Such manipulation of reality makes the reader wary, as he tries to define boundaries; and when he finds them difficult to delineate, he may respond defensively—but with a certain studied nonchalance, so as not to admit that the narrator has confused him. By striving to keep himself detached from the goings-on, the reader in effect adopts something like the narrator's intelligent, yet dispassionate, response. The reader responds to the artfulness of the situation, rather than to the effects of the situation upon the lives of the characters. The characters are reduced to mere pawns moved by a skillful 2 gamesman. When the reader sees the characters merely as intriguing shifts in the overall design, then the reader's response is aesthetic, rather than empathic. Nabokov has manipulated the reader just as effectively as he has manipulated his characters. Of course, any author manipulates both his characters and his reader. Yet, unlike formal realists among fiction writers, Nabokov arrogantly refuses even to bother with the accepted fictional pretense that all his characters are as "real" as the reader. If the reader is a creation of God, Nabokov's characters are not. As Nabokov makes abundantly clear—through ubiquitous intrusions by narrators who rarely give the reader the truth in easy-to-read format--the narrator is the only god, and he's not reliable. The power that these narrators seem to emulate is neither that of a benevolent God, nor the inexorable vengeance of Yahweh. It is more properly the power of a harlequin god I choose to call Caprice, a court jester who lacks any recognizable ethos. Caprice manipulates human lives, applying a sure instinct for the vulnerable spots in the human psyche. The manipulations of Caprice are amusing, and artistically satisfying, at the points where they diverge from the reader's reality; but these manipulations are frightening when they poke the reader's own soft spots with too rough a finger. Thus, it is not true that the reader 3 learns to read Nabokov with complete dispassion; rather, the reader sympathizes with a character when he feels that he himself is also the butt of Nabokov's cosmic bad joke. For the most part, though, the reader accepts the grotesqueries of the Nabokovian world, because they are tossed off so flippantly. This flippancy causes some readers to complain. While they admire Nabokov's virtuosity, and are awed by his lyricism, particularly where his works celebrate his nostalgia for Russia and his love of sensual detail, they suffer his sangfroid badly. Some believe that his archness overrides any sense of fair play or morality that an author might be expected to have. More charitable readers assert that Nabokov's work contains a humane message, although they concede that his insistence upon manipulative narrators does make the search for his humaneness exasperating. Julian Moynahan, for example, says that Nabokov is simply floundering in a moral and metaphysical quagmire when he insists . upon the omnipotence of anyone else's creative thought. Nabokov's great theme ... is that of married love. The connection is 1 For reviewers who emphasize Nabokov's flippancy and his lack of a recognizable ethos—perspectives based (except for Trilling's) largely upon their responses to Lolita—see Diana Trilling* The Nation 14 June 1957: 722; Orville Prescott, The New York Times 18 Aug. 1958: 17; Marcel Thiebaut, Review de Paris Aug. 1959: 143-152; and Kingsley Amis Spectator CIII, 6 Nov. 1959: 635-36. between loving and making free in a bond of two against the loneliness of exile, the imprisoning world, the irredeemable nature of time, the voidness [sic] of eternity. James M. Rambeau agrees that Nabokov's literary games can bog down the reader and keep him from progressing to an appreciation of Nabokov's "human concerns." He cautions that the intelligent reader must avoid the "quagmire" of / Nabokov's concern with creating his own too-precious reality, and must recognize "how small a part these games finally play in Nabokov's genuine appeal to his readers.
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